Author: Robert

See the original posting on Boing Boing

Eco chef Tom Hunt says the secret to eating well and cheap is to buy food in season and buy it in bulk. In this Guardian article, Hunt reveals his weekly and monthly lists, along with ovo-lacto vegetarian recipes such as “Porridge with roasted rhubarb, hazelnuts and molasses” and “Spiced rice, roasted broccoli, carrot and peanut salad.” The photos of the dishes look tasty.

From The Guardian:

Affordability is a key element of what a sustainable diet looks like. I call my approach Root to Fruit eating. It is a philosophy that aims to make it easier for people to cook good food, blending a little chef’s knowhow with academic research, and making it applicable to home cooks and professionals alike. My shopping list comes in at just over £18 a week – cheaper than the average national weekly spend per person of £24. Over a year, that’s a saving of about £300 while still enjoying top-quality food (I buy everything from my local independent health-food shop or market, or organic items from the supermarket. Of course, if you need to bring the cost of your shopping down further, buy non-organic). I’m a vegetarian, so there is no meat on my shopping list, and eating less meat is certainly a good way of keeping costs down. However, if you are buying meat, opt for cheaper cuts of higher-welfare animals.

Image: YouTube

See the original posting on Boing Boing

Attention, comrades! A newsflash has this moment arrived. Engineers working with the Ground X-Vehicle Technologies program have improved the survivability and mobility of combat vehicles by reinventing the wheel. [via Task and Purpose]

The high-tech Reconfigurable Wheel-Track (RWT) upgrades “transition from a round wheel to a triangular track and back again while the vehicle is on the move” — in short, allowing Humvees to transform into tracked vehicles on the fly.

See the original posting on Boing Boing

Facebook is good for more than just keeping tabs on your high school friends. In fact, the platform has become an invaluable tool for marketers and entrepreneurs building their brands online. So, whether you’re looking to launch your own venture or climb the ladder in your current operation, the Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing Mastery Course can show you how to leverage Facebook to reach audiences, generate conversions, and build a presence online. It’s available in the Boing Boing Store today for $9.99.

Boasting more than 100 lectures across 11 hours of training, this collection is designed to show you the ropes with optimizing your ads on one of today’s most important digital mediums. You’ll discover how to create ads focused on increasing conversions, find new customers, and grow your page’s following and engagement.

Work toward pushing your business in the black with help from the Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing Mastery Course, available in the Boing Boing Store for $9.99.

See the original posting on Boing Boing

The good news: it’s all ours. The bad news: there’s nothing to stop us. A new model of civilization, arrived by taking the Drake equation and plugging in models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, predicts that humanity is the only advanced one in observable space.

As Dr. Sanberg told Universe Today via email:

“One can answer [the Fermi Paradox] by saying intelligence is very rare, but then it needs to be tremendously rare. Another possibility is that intelligence doesn’t last very long, but it is enough that one civilization survives for it to become visible. Attempts at explaining it by having all intelligences acting in the same way (staying quiet, avoiding contact with us, transcending) fail since they require every individual belonging to every society in every civilization to behave in the same way, the strongest sociological claim ever. Claiming long-range settlement or communication are impossible requires assuming a surprisingly low technology ceiling. Whatever the answer is, it more or less has to be strange.”

Photo: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

See the original posting on Boing Boing

Stalin was an incredibly devoted father; Saddam Hussein was fantastically charming; Hitler was a streetfighters who risked his personal safety in the fray; and a surprising number of dictators, monsters and autocrats have careers in the arts, and are described by their childhood friends are not exceptionally cruel or sociopathic.
(more…)

See the original posting on Boing Boing

Tomek R?kawek, irritated by ads on the radio, created an app that mutes them. Radio Adblock uses digital signal processing to detect distinctive audio patterns that signal the beginning and end of breaks. (via Hacker News)

I also prepared a simple standalone version of the analyzer, that connects to the Trójka stream on its own (without an external ffmpeg) and plays the result using javax.sound. The whole thing is a single JAR file and contains a basic start/stop UI. It can be downloaded here: radioblock.jar. If you feel uneasy about running a foreign JAR on your machine (like you should do), all the sources can be found on my GitHub. Apparently, it works 🙂

https://soundcloud.com/tomek-r-kawek/commercial-block-muted

To make it work universally, perhaps DSP could detect the use of extreme waveform compression. This makes ads sound as loud as possible without increasing the signal volume, and is a technique that advertisers and radio stations supposedly use to skirt the regulations that forbid them from doing just that. It would also have the bonus of silencing shitty pop songs.