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As one possible example, see Ken Shirriff's teardowns of a cheap USB power adapter: http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...

And an Apple adapter: http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-...

If you'd like to read a community actually interacting with him rather than hellbanning him under the rug, check out this Metafilter thread: http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

Long, but worth the read.

Very much so (ammonia content, for one). See any IPA brewed with a large proportion of Simcoe hops as well.

Oh man, I can't believe the school (I grew up in Port Townsend) both offered a Joint Stool From A Tree course earlier this year and didn't get enough signups for it: http://www.ptwoodschool.com/joint_stool_from_a_tree.html

I would absolutely love to do that. The book is a great read -- the basic premise is that you can build furniture from green wood in such a way that the drying of the wood will lock your joints and strengthen the stool: http://www.lostartpress.com/Make_a_Joint_Stool_from_a_Tree_p...

If you find this article interesting, it's also worth finding and flipping through D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic "On Growth and Form". A copy is available at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/ongrowthform00thom

If you enjoy these, you should check out some of the installation pieces by Olafur Eliasson. His oeuvre is more about playing with/exploiting perception -- one of my favorite pieces was a part of his exhibit at the Chicago MCA in summer 2009, which was a dark room with a central illuminated waterfall. The combination of a single reference point coupled with a totally matte darkness at the periphery meant that every step someone took that wasn't directly towards the waterfall resulted in them reflexively extending their hands to avoid a (possible) collision. Really exceptional stuff.

Exactly correct. A great quote I heard once is "asking a scientist when they'll find a cure for cancer is like asking a mathematician when they'll find a solution for equations."

Years ago, a classmate of mine built a rig out of a receipt printer and one of those old handheld scanners to provide an "air gap", though it never really worked (sort of an art project at the time). Might be time to revive the idea...

May have been EckBox: http://eckbox.sourceforge.net/

We built the hardware back in college and played around with it a bit... back when people had CRTs.

Side note -- in case you're curious about the origin of the RSS logo: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/2004/09/26/2004-09-26-... (5th item down).

Interesting, I didn't know that! I've always liked the pins-down configuration on my Macbook since in order to release the connector, the clip is on top (that is, I don't have to lift the laptop/etc in order to remove the cable). Connector orientation stuff is fascinating (my favorite being the upside-down configuration of power outlets in new buildings, apparently so that if a plug is partially pulled out, a straight metal object falling atop won't sit on live pins).

And they're even better for hard-boiling, as the shell is more easily removed.

Those are the Catalan-Mersenne numbers, and it is unknown whether c_5 is prime: http://oeis.org/A007013

This is certainly not a "minimum viable kitchen" by any stretch, but it is a reasonable list of equipment necessary to make a certain type of recipe (from-scratch French-inspired New American cooking that involves baked components).

Personally, the single piece of equipment that I would recommend to the home chef* would be a good pressure cooker. Vegetables, stews, beans, and grains cook better and much, much faster, and the stocks you can make in a pressure cooker will blow away stovetop stocks.

*: I would consider a home chef to be someone who wants to spend time cooking. I know many people who don't and I don't grudge them that -- but for me, cooking is a true hobby (as in, something where I negatively value my own time -- the longer it takes, the more satisfaction I derive from it).

There was a post about his operating system on Metafilter and he showed up and answered questions (in addition to some rambling). Really fascinating read: http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

> Backscatter doesn't pose any health risk to travelers.

But we really don't know that, because no studies have been done using this equipment. In addition to concerns that the radiation, while lower in total than that absorbed during a flight, is absorbed over a much smaller volume of tissue, adequate validation that the machines can't break in dangerous ways hasn't been performed (and even the most basic detection mechanisms for failure such as having the operators wear dosimeters have been neglected or banned outright). It violates every principle of radiation safety.

> This set now includes all possible bit strings of infinite length since the way these are iteratively generated includes all possibilities.

That's not correct -- in fact, it contains no infinite bit strings at all (to prove this to yourself, ask at what position the first infinite string appears).

MEMS barometers are commonly used for relative altimetry (e.g. stair climb calculations on activity trackers, etc).

I'd also be curious to see what changes the restaurant sees as a result of this policy. I know that if a good eatery successfully incentivized people away from phone usage, I'd be more inclined to go there, even at a slightly increased cost -- similarly, when I lived in Seattle, there were a few coffeeshops that started turning off wi-fi on the weekends and saw an uptick in business (hard to say whether it was from more turnover, a different kind of customer, or publicity from the act itself).

Not really -- they're objecting to having invested in the early stages of a company in good faith that the company would keep its promises. If they wanted dirt-cheap shared hosting, there were plenty of other ways to get it, even at the time (1and1's three-year free deal comes to mind). Most of the people I know who still use their lifetime accounts use them for hosting small static sites, e-mail, et cetera, with the specific goal of "not having to think about hosting".

That's what they were buying. And they're getting screwed out of it.

> Apple has never produced a new product category. They take the innovations that came before and throw money and Steve Jobs/Jonny Ives taste at it.

Right -- or like we always say here on HN, it's not ideas that count, it's execution.

Yup, I did a few projects on equivalents of AC back in the day. That's just my favorite "appeal to intuition" one (my favorite "appeal to intuition" against AC is: the identity function is the sum of two periodic functions (though this is a consequence and not equivalent)).

Equivalence breakdown in alternate systems is a wonderful topic. I've been trying for a couple years now to figure out how to get back into set theory now that I'm out of academia. Maybe later this summer...

That's absolutely correct -- trichotomy for arbitrary cardinals (any two cardinals are cardinal-size-comparable) requires AC, but SB doesn't require AC. Trichotomy for the cardinal numbers of well-ordered sets (e.g. ordinals) doesn't require AC.

It's a little irrelevant to this thread... but as long as I'm quoting non-proofs that require lots of extra machinery, I'll give my favorite appeal-to-intuition equivalent of choice: the product of non-empty sets is non-empty (any point in the product of a collection of non-empty sets is a choice function on those sets).

True, though this "proof" assumes a large amount of additional mathematical machinery in addition to SB (I learned it as Cantor-Schröder–Bernstein originally... I wonder where the inconsistency in the naming comes from). It's not so much a formal set-theoretic proof (of course it could be made so) as a quick demonstration that has a stronger pull on mathematical intuition than the standard proof (and is demonstrating an otherwise provable thing).

Ah, I gotcha. Yeah, the question as posed is straightforward, though there's some fun stuff (fixed points of ordinal exponentiation, inaccessibles, etc) floating around in the same neighborhood.

It's sort of interesting -- there's also no largest natural number, but we can talk about the size of their cardinality. You can't do that with all of the "infinities" since the collection of ordinals doesn't form an ordinal (Burali-Forti) and you can't form the set of all cardinals.

There are the same number of whole numbers as there are fractions/rational numbers (my favorite quick proof -- every whole number is a rational number (itself over 1). Map each n/m in lowest terms to 2^n*3^m for an injection of rationals into the integers (by the fundamental theorem of arithmetic)).

Many sockets have little bent-wire brackets that pop into those holes when the plug is fully inserted in order to help hold it in place.

Relatedly, there was an in-channel-command bug in Twitter in 2010 that would allow you to force anyone to follow you by tweeting "accept [username]". It was discovered accidentally by a fan of a band named "Accept" tweeting "accept pwnz": http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/twitocalypse-heavy-metal/

Nagel's book is a wonderful exposition (three-page-long footnotes aside). In addition to these two, I might recommend Torkel Franzén's book "Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse". Some of the content is fairly technical but not inaccessible by any means. If you're interested in the corner cases of how incompleteness theorems can be applied, it's a terrific resource.