~learn all the things

“A 384-bit key I can factor on my laptop in 24 hours,” he says. “The 512-bit keys I can factor in about 72 hours using Amazon Web Services for $75. And I did do a number of those. Then there are the 768-bit keys. Those are not factorable by a normal person like me with my resources alone. But the government of Iran probably could, or a large group with sufficient computing resources could pull it off.”

Data centers consume up to 1.5 percent of all the world’s electricity.

[...] the dispenser can produce as many grades as it wants from as few as two underground tanks, as long as one tank contains the highest grade of octane available at that station and the other contains the lowest. The grades are blended together at the pump -- not unlike the way you'd blend gin and vermouth to make a martini -- producing a kind of octane cocktail. The precise proportion in which the grades are blended determines the octane of the gas that enters the customer's tank.

Scientists were soon hurling fortified tumblers off their nine-story facility and bombarding the glass, known internally as 0317, with frozen chickens. It could be bent and twisted to an extraordinary degree before fracturing, and it could withstand 100,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. (Normal glass can weather about 7,000.)

Blue Raspberry

Imaging at a trillion frames per second

According to the UK car site Recombu, drivers can switch the radio on and off with a wink of an eye, turn the volume of the stereo up or down with a tilt of the head to the left or right and tap the steering wheel to skip to the next song or radio station. The system will also increase or decrease the temperature of the climate control when the driver raises or lowers a hand above the gear-shift knob, and even place a phone call on a connected Bluetooth phone when the driver simply makes the universal pinky-and-thumb “on the phone” gesture while saying the name of a contact in the phone’s address book.

There's no better way to understand LinkedIn's quiet savvy, in the midst of Facebook's noisy clatter, than to compare the two sites' financial efficiency. With ComScore Web-usage data and public financial filings, it's now possible to figure out how much revenue the two rivals collect for every hour that each user spends on the site. LinkedIn's tally: $1.30. Facebook's: a measly 6.2 cents. One could argue that it's better to have a small slice of something massive than a big slice of something smaller. But the numbers above are further skewed by a simple fact: Facebook, which derives 85% of its revenue from advertising, makes money only when you're on Facebook. Once you sign up for LinkedIn, the social network monetizes your information, not your time. Mark Zuckerberg can crow about how his users spend, on average, 6.35 hours per month on Facebook versus 18 minutes for LinkedIn. But Facebook users may click on only one of every 2,000 ads. Ask yourself which model seems more sustainable.

There are other technical challenges in launching a scramjet missile from a fighter jet instead of a sub-orbital rocket or a B-52, though. It’ll still need to have air-breathing engines that compresses the air around the missile into a supersonic mixture of oxygen and fuel — absent a turbine. But it will also need to be small enough to be carried by a jet fighter while carrying the necessary advanced navigation controls, precision guidance tools and sophisticated sensors, plus the warhead. The service will also still have to find the right mixture of composite materials like titanium and tungsten (among others) to hold up under the enormous heat generated by Mach 5, Mach 6 and even faster flight.

Here is the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River.

Are dark webdesigns an energy saving alternative to a snow white Google? The theory is websites with black backgrounds save energy, based on the assumption that a monitor requires more power to display a white screen than black. Is this a blatant green washing ploy by Blackle.com, or an earnest energy saving tweak for a search tool we use every day? To find out, PCSTATS hooked up an Extech Power Analyzer to a 19" CRT and a 19" LCD and measured power draw — turns out there is a not insignificant difference ...

It's a little more complicated than this, but basically, clouds look gray when they block sunlight. The thicker the cloud, the more light it blocks.

Speculation aside, here’s what we know so far.  When Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reached Challenger Deep (deepest point in the ocean - 10,902 meters beneath the surface) in 1960, most of their 20 minutes of bottom time was spent waiting for the silt to settle and worrying about the crack in their submersible’s window.  Their sole observation of biological activity was  “some type of flatfish…about one foot long and six inches across,” a description that some scientists now attribute to a sea cucumber.

We are all familiar with the internal combustion engines that we have in our cars. They are remarkably reliable but not very efficient, turning only 15% to 20% of the gasoline they burn into motion. The rest of the energy in the gasoline is lost as waste heat.