UrtheCast's Ultra HD video camera installed on the ISS [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.urthecast.com/spacewalk

<comment><USER2> I got curious about how a company had done a deal to put a camera on ISS and sell the pictures for profit so I started Googling. It looks like they basically did a deal with RSC Energia and the Russian Federal Space Agency. However, what's far more interesting is what I found out about how UrtheCast raised the money to make this happen.

UrtheCast started out as a privately-held (i.e. pre-IPO) startup company called Earth Video Camera Inc (EVC). EVC raised C$4.5m in 2012 but the bulk of its funding came last year when it completed a reverse takeover of a publicly- traded company called Longford Energy.

Longford used to be an oil and gas exploration firm but in 2012 it sold its sole remaining asset (a 40% share of an oilfield in Iraq) and ended up with a pile of cash ($25m) but no operating business or significant assets. Instead of returning the cash to the shareholders (which would presumably have incurred dividend taxes), Longford's management decided to pursue "acquisition opportunities"[1]. However, a couple of hedge funds got involved and convinced the other Longford shareholders that they'd do a better job than the existing management team who were duly fired and replaced with the hedge funds' team[2].

Six months later, EVC and Longford announced[3] the reverse takeover, which was duly completed in June last year - Longford "acquired" EVC by issuing shares in Longford to UrtheCast's shareholders. Normally, that sort of deal involves a larger company acquiring a smaller one but, in this case, EVC was valued at nearly three times Longford, so EVC shareholders ended up owning three quarters of Longford. The EVC management team took over running the combined company and changed the company name to UrtheCast. The $25m effectively became an investment in UrtheCast by Longford's original shareholders.

Reverse IPOs (where the company that wants to IPO is "acquired" by a shell company that already has a public listing) like this aren't unusual (it's a way of bypassing all the hassle that usually accompanies an IPO) but it's the first time I've heard of it being combined with what amounts to an investment round.

[1]: [http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/12/longford- energy...](http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/12/longford-energy- facing-shareholder-battle-over-dividend-cancellation/)

[2]: [http://business.financialpost.com/2012/08/13/longford- energy...](http://business.financialpost.com/2012/08/13/longford-energys-new- team-takes-over/)

[3]: [http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1138175/urthecast-to- complet...](http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1138175/urthecast-to-complete- reverse-take-over-with-longford-energy-inc)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the research and writeup. That was really fascinating.

As a shareholder, I wonder how I'd feel. It's not exactly what I signed up for, but then again it's probably giving my investment a second lease on life.

<comment><USER2> Well, the deal was approved by a majority of Longford's shareholders: [http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1183707/longford-energy- inc-...](http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1183707/longford-energy-inc- shareholders-approve-urthecast-transaction)

Also, as Longford was a publicly-traded company, so shareholders could simply sell their shares on the open market if they didn't like the plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's an interview from a couple years ago with one of the founders of Urthecast about the cameras, the partnerships, and the business model: [http://www.sensorsandsystems.com/dialog/interviews/27327-urt...](http://www.sensorsandsystems.com/dialog/interviews/27327-urthecast- promises-a-live-video-feed-of-earth-from-space.html)

It's a great interview if you are looking for details on the technical details of the project. Here's a sample:

      GT: There are two cameras. One is a classic, push-broom,
      medium-resolution, four-band imager. It is built for space
      with our partner Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).
      They had this camera available, it could be built
      relatively inexpensively, it isn't particularly large, and
      it is made for space, so it became a good fit. At the
      altitude at which the space station flies it gives you a
      5.5 meter pixel size on the ground or ground sampling
      distance (GSD).

      The other thing that made this project possible is that
      RSC Energia and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, had
      already decided to experiment with a camera on the ISS.
      They had defined the experiment, rolled it all up, and
      obtained the approval of all the partners, but had not
      decided what the camera would be. So, when we came along,
      they loved the idea, and they already had, essentially, a
      programmatic way to enable it immediately. They had also
      developed a very high accuracy pointing platform that can
      point to plus or minus 175 degrees in each of two axes,
      which means that you can steer it to track a point on the
      ground. You can also flip it up and look at space targets.
      Once this project got traction with them — and they liked
      it a lot — they had a competition to decide who would get
      to use their pointing platform. We participated and they
      decided to give the platform to our project. We are very
      happy about that. That's what enabled the video cam.

      We are typically able to track a spot on the ground for a
      minute and a half and take video or images. To make it
      work and get good resolution you need to have that kind of
      pointing system. To build it from scratch would have been
      quite expensive. The video camera has an aperture of 32
      centimeters, so it is essentially an astronomy telescope.
      It was built by an American company and over the past year
      has been ruggedized, so that it is suitable for space. The
      manufacturer already had the parts for this telescope
      because they built one for another customer and had some
      spare parts that we were able to buy right away. We were
      able to put it on a test stand to check it for vibration
      and work out whether it was possible to make it suitable
      for space, which we confirmed last summer. So, very
      quickly that gave us a telescope of the right size and
      performance and at the right price point for our project.

      As for the detector, we are are using a commercial 18
      MegaPixel detector from a professional grade DSLR camera
      that we have radiation tested to ensure it will work in
      space. The camera electronics is built by RAL, who are
      leveraging their extensive know-how and technology they
      have developed for the numerous other optical instruments
      they built for space. There is nothing really special
      about the technology, other than that we couldn't do a
      NASA-style development costing many tens of millions of
      dollars. It is a commercial project and it has to be
      affordable.

</comment><comment><USER5> While watching the stream, I was surprised to hear the translator mention a GoPro camera. Sure enough, each of the cosmonauts has one strapped to his forearm. That's pretty cool to see consumer-grade technology attached to a spacewalk.

Via G+[1]:

International Space Station Expedition 38 Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) began a planned 6-hour spacewalk from the Earth-facing Pirs Docking Compartment at 9 a.m. EST.

Kotov is performing his sixth spacewalk. This is Ryazanskiy's third spacewalk. Both cosmonauts are wearing Russian Orlan suits with blue stripes. Their suits are equipped with NASA helmet cameras to provide close-up views of the work they are performing outside the station. Kotov's helmet camera displays the number 18, and Ryazanskiy's displays the number 20. The duo also will be wearing a GoPro cameras on their forearms. Kotov will have a single strip of yellow tape around his GoPro camera, and Ryazanskiy will have two strips on his camera.

This is the 178th spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance.

The spacewalking duo's task is to attempt again to install a pair of high fidelity cameras on a platform attached to the Zvezda Service Module as part of a commercial arrangement between Roscosmos and a Canadian company to downlink Earth observation imagery. During their previous spacewalk on Dec. 27, Russian flight controllers were unable to receive telemetry from the cameras and instructed the spacewalking cosmonauts to bring the cameras back inside the Russian airlock. While outside the orbiting complex, Kotov and Ryazanskiy also plan to retrieve an experiment package housed on Zvezda's hull.

Flight controllers at the Mission Control Center in Korolev, outside of Moscow, are providing primary support for the spacewalk and coordinating with Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA Television is providing live coverage of the spacewalk at [http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv](http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv)

[1] [https://plus.google.com/+NASA/posts/YJ1i1L2nvY8](https://plus.google.com/+NASA/posts/YJ1i1L2nvY8)

</comment><comment><USER6> I know this is very much offtopic, but at first read I thought this said "UrethraCast" \- which might be of use in the medical industry, I suppose.

<comment><USER7> I read it as "UrTheCat" which I thought was a cat meme website like ICanHazCheezeburger. Why are they live streaming a camera install...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here you can find more about the installation. It's happening right now.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-cosmonauts-to- make-2nd-a...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-cosmonauts-to-make-2nd- attempt-to-install-15m-high-definition-cameras-on-iss/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I really hope it is going to be a first-person view from an astronaut. _First person view!_

Commentator mentioned the installed camera could be used by subscribers.

More details:

[http://mashable.com/2013/12/04/international-space- station-c...](http://mashable.com/2013/12/04/international-space-station- camera/)

[http://www.urthecast.com/features#coverage](http://www.urthecast.com/features#coverage)

 _So if the feed is free on Urthecast 's website, how does the company expect to make money? With a premium service, of course. Corporate clients might want the cameras pointed at a prospective mining site; the UN has already inked a deal with the company to help document disasters._

</comment><comment><USER10> It's surprisingly interesting seeing the astronauts working from first person view and hearing their communication. Reminds me a lot of the beginning scenes of Gravity, goes to show how well that movie was shot.

They mentioned they are now about 30 minutes into a 6 hour space walk.

</comment><comment><USER11> They are currently over Hongkong/South East Asia, where it is night time.

Too bad, the background with earth lit up would have been awesome ...

Edit: In about 15 minutes, they are expecting orbital sunrise. That would be great !!!

<comment><USER12> Don't worry, the ISS gets a sunrise every 90 minutes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious what the life expectancy of this imager will be. My understanding is that run-of-the-mill DSLRs get about 4-6 months before high speed particles turn the sensor into a grid of random noise.

<comment><USER8> The cameras are space tested, are builded by RAL similar life expectance as a satellite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is absolutely fascinating. I can't wait to see the imagery but at least from the samples (even though they state its a simulation) will it be any more interesting that what we see from google's satellite imagery?

Also, when will the camera be operational and online so we can watch? I can't find any information on their actual website about this.

<comment><USER14> if you want something "more interesting that what we see from google's satellite imagery" then swtich to bing's map and select bird-view. They did the imagery using airplanes. It is much better for detail then any satelite imagery.

back on topic, this is worthless for this... remember that the space station only goes over the same path every time. ...i think you would only get images of the equator or something.

<comment><USER15> The space station orbit is inclined at 51 degrees so the ground track goes as far north as London and almost all the way to the southern tip of South- America. The earth also rotates roughly 23 degrees per orbit, so eventually it passes within 10-15 degrees of most places between 60 and -60 degrees latitude.

<comment><USER13> Which sadly misses (according to their map) where I live.

<comment><USER4> True, not very good coverage, although you might have some: [http://www.heavens- above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&la...](http://www.heavens- above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=60.1733&lng=24.941&loc=Helsinki&alt=3&tz=EET)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The NASA TV stream seems to be preferable - same video but with commentary and background:

[http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/](http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/)

</comment><comment><USER17> This sounds really cool, I don't know how I did not hear about this so far.

Any word on what the cost of getting a camera up to the space station (and getting it installed) actually is?

<comment><USER8> You can check it out in this article, [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/silico...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/silicon- valleys-new-spy-satellites/282580/) basically free for urthecast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome. Imagine if we had a HD camera on every gps satellite and were capable of creating a full 3D texture of the earth in real time.

<comment><USER19> Well, keep in mind that GPS satellites are about 50 times further from the surface of the Earth than the ISS.

<comment><USER18> Oh sure, I wouldn't expect anything on the level of a google earth. But imagine something like a 16384x8192 live texture of planet, updated every minute or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any commentary on the business plan for this company? Outside of the free options, are they targeting media groups that might want on demand imagery of evolving news events? It seems like you can pay for the right to have a 30 second ability to direct and capture from the camera? Is it exclusive? e.g. "Here's MSNBC's exclusive footage of the evolving protests in the Ukraine, captured from the ISS..."

I always marvel at businesses like this because of the number of barriers they had to get over to literally launch. Build an app and put it on the Play store....or build a space-ready high resolution camera and coordinate its launch and deployment on the ISS?

As one light aside, the mission control person sounds like Téa Leoni in Deep Impact.

<comment><USER21> I've talked with them about their business, and seen their pitch, so I'll chime in a bit.

> are they targeting media groups that might want on demand imagery of > evolving news events?

That is exactly one of their business plans. Whether it is exclusive or not depends on the details of the contract, but I don't think it will be exclusive for the most part.

Another part of their business is to provide detailed data on a specific area of land. In a single pass, because they have a continuous video as they pass along, they can construct the 3D geometries of any buildings/structure in that area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone got the specs of the camera?

<comment><USER8> 2 Cameras: \- HRC ultra-definition video around 7k . Ground resolution 1m. (1m on the grown = 1px on the video) shoots videos of 60-90s over targeted areas.

\- MRC push-broom camera 4 band sensor. Ground resolution 5m. (5m on the grown = 1px on the image) Static image strips of with RGBNIR. Almost continuous capturing everything under the ISS.

How both cameras work animation. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOA665uz4jo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOA665uz4jo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> First camera is installed and working. Now they're working on the second.</comment>


The Bugs Are Winning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/superbugs-are-winning-antibiotics/ <comment><USER2> Counterpoint: A recent Kurzgesagt video suggests that we may be able to deploy bacteriophages (bacteria-attacking viruses) to combat superbugs. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg)

Note: I'm not a doctor/biologist/etc., so I cannot comment on the details of this claim (e.g. how far away we are from a widely deployed phage-based treatment).

<comment><USER3> Bacteriophages were used instead of antibiotics in the Soviet Union, and are still used today in Georgia.

<comment><USER4> My extremely limited understanding is that a given bacteriophage only attacks a very specific strain, and thus that you would need to constantly evolve them to fight new strains. While perhaps not useless, that doesn't sound like a replacement for antibiotics.

<comment><USER5> Given how medicine works in the US, that's not a problem, but an opportunity.

US Medicine is for profit, and the money is in reoccuring treatment, not cures. So a never ending battle of cat-and-mouse is the type of R&D phramas would love.

A potential future scenario:

Keep going to your doctor to get a Rx for the latest strain or pay a monthly fee to a Bacteriophage-As-A-Service SV tech company to get the latest delivered right to your door you use in conjunction with a smartphone app.

The latter of which would have operated illegally until sufficiently large enough to hire insider DC lobbyists to gut the FDA.

<comment><USER3> And yet phage therapy's been successfully used under communism but not capitalism. This is because it's cheap, low tech, and there are no economic barriers to market entry.

<comment><USER6> You forgot to mention the scale. It does not easily scale as the required laboratory space to handle even a few hundred phage strains is enormous.

Please provide numbers of patients treated with phages, time to treat one and efficacy numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how these bacteria can /remain/ resistant against older antibiotics. If they mutate really fast, should not the resistance against, say penicillin, vanish after a few years when they are not exposed to the medicine?

So could we not "renew" some antibiotics by simply not using them for 5 to 10 years?

<comment><USER8> It depends on how the resistance works. Some forms of resistance require active effort by the bacterium (for example efflux pumps), and you would expect that in the absence of an antibiotic they would tend to be lost by natural selection. But other forms of resistance are just minor mutations stopping the antibiotic from binding or whatever, and these probably would remain at least in some fraction of the bacterial population as they are more or less neutral.

<comment><USER9> The human immune system can deal with a huge range of things just fine. So, the metabolic weight from antibiotic resistance is inherently useful for Humans.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria do kill people, but most often as secondary infections due to a compromised immune system. Further, even if the primary infection has near total resistance suppressing secondary infections is still extremely useful.

<comment><USER10> Are you saying the adaptations bacteria make to become resistant to antibiotics causes them to be easier targets for the immune system? Do you have a link I could read more about this?

<comment><USER9> Yes, but not always, and not necessarily for long.

"While the cost of resistance is highly variable, such resistance mutations or genes often come with a fitness cost that _reduces the rate of bacterial proliferation_ (Dahlberg & Chao, 2003; Melnyk et al, 2015)." [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371735/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371735/)

"The success of resistant mutants critically depends on rapid counterbalancing of the decreased fitness by acquiring compensatory mutations (Levin et al, 1997; Marciano et al, 2007), which in most cases restore normal growth while preserving resistance to the antibiotics (Marcusson et al, 2009). The number and variety of compensatory mutations required to successfully compensate fitness cost varies with organism (Palmer & Kishony, 2013, 2014; Cheng et al, 2014) and the particular environmental conditions under which compensation occurs (Testerman et al, 2006; Hoffman et al, 2010; Toprak et al, 2012; Lindsey et al, 2013)."

Basically, resistance become extremely important so anything that works get's adapted. But, after that point the search for mutations that reduce cost shows up. The second stage also depends on continuous exposure to antibiotics as reverting the mutation in a population is relatively simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Norway seems to have a particularly enlightened approach to antibiotics.

In particular not using antibiotics as a growth stimulant (common on farms), reserving certain antibiotics for human use, and training doctors and vets on their use.

More info at: [https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/norways-battle- against...](https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/norways-battle-against- antimicrobial-resistance-in-the-agricultural-sector/id2554750/)

Same site mentioned Germany users 50x more antibiotics in their meat preparation than Norway.

[https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/norway-takes-the- lead-...](https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/norway-takes-the-lead-on- antibiotic-resistance/id2561185/)

Related article on fighting "super bugs" like MSRA: [http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/jan/03/norways-mrsa- so...](http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/jan/03/norways-mrsa-solution/#/0)

</comment><comment><USER12> Restricting the use of antibiotics in farm animals needs to happen ASAP.

<comment><USER13> Unlikely that China would comply though, and they are a major contributor to the rising Super Bug problem because of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The wikipedia page about antibiotics resistance ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance)) adds some interesting points on why we are falling behind on the race for the discovery of new antibiotics. The TLDR is it's currently not economically convenient for big pharmaceutical companies to invest in antibiotics research but several measures have been taken in order to make it better and, hopefully, will allow us to catch up on the race.

</comment><comment><USER15> I Heard something controversial on the radio the other day. Don't finish your antibiotic course. Stop when you feel better.

The rational was: Bacteria becoming resistant due to a treatment has only ever been proven for a handful of conditions( TB , HIV syphilis, and so on). The other bacteria are ether resistant or they aren't prolonging the treatment does not encourage a resistant mutation.

By prolonging your treatment with antibiotics you create an environment in which antibiotic resistant bacteria, both the good and bad kind, can replicate easier. Due to Horizontal gene transfer good bacteria can transfer their antibiotic resistance to bad bacteria.

This advice is in stark contradiction to the Fleming quote.

I heard it on the radio and can't remember the sources, but it makes sense to my non medical mind.

*edit added sources.

Found the journal entry if anyone cares : [https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418](https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418)

Article about journal entry : [https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/27/health/antibiotics- course...](https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/27/health/antibiotics-course- advice-study/index.html)

<comment><USER16> Very bad advice- you should either finish the entire course or not take antibiotics at all, otherwise you're gonna help the superbugs along.

<comment><USER17> Meat production is orders of magnitude more effective at producing antibiotic resistant strains.</comment></comment></comment>


Google 'bro culture' led to violence, sexual harassment, lawsuit alleges - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/23/google-bro-culture-led-to-violence-sexual-harassment-against-female-engineer-lawsuit-alleges/ <comment><USER2> Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that a company with almost 100k employees could not possibly have a single unified "culture." At that size, the "culture" you feel on a day-to-day basis is mostly a function of your manager, the specific team you are on, the office you're in, the floor you're on, etc., than the company you work for.

<comment> the-dude I have only just read the Damore legal filing : Google is much crazier than I had imagined. Keep in mind this is not the regular 100k company : it is a highly networked company with its own 'Facebook'.

No conservative views allowed.

<comment><USER3> There are no conservative views in that memo, but just mere observations. Then we watched mob justice in effect, people, some furious some frightened, make wrong decisions and act in rage. Hopefully one day the peoples of the modern world will succeed at growing up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I only skimmed the article, so sorry if I'm mistaken, but it's weird that under such conditions she remained there from 2008 to 2016. Other than that, if even some of these claims are true, then this is not merely sexual misconduct, there's something broken about the company's way of working, and the kind of people it tends to hire. Most of these probably qualify as sexual harassment, but also are very childish, immature kind of behaviours. Work must be serious and professional, it doesn't work otherwise, and more so as the scale of the company grows. Throwing things at coworkers or putting whiskey in their drinks for a prank? What's Google, a kindergarten?

<comment><USER4> >but also are very childish, immature kind of behaviours

the tech industry and many other sectors of the 'knowledge economy' actively push for this. By removing rules and management from the workplace in an attempt to muddle people's work and private lifes they are bringing inappropriate behaviour into the workplace.

This ranges from general lack of oversight to 'clique building' to even drinking at work, and people who are in a minority have a hard time fitting in in that environment because it often turns into an informal boys club.

The same thing can be seen in open source communities where testosterone charged rants on mailing lists seem to be encouraged rather than discouraged.

<comment><USER3> The "work is fun" way of working has diminishing returns, working professionally and for less amount of time is the way to go. And sack the adults with an adolescent's brain already. The fun part of the work can only be the actual satisfactory stuff you're doing, not fucking around like 90's music videos (but then again in an organisation with upwards of a hundred thousand people, how much value can an individual produce?).

I believe having people of different genders share the same workspace is very important. If a given department has too few or no people from one gender, their space should be merged with one that has some. Add to that a healthy amount of professionalism and formalism, that's a healthy workspace. In places where one gender is dominant or the only one, thing can easily get from a bit too comfy to disgusting (and that holds for women as much as men really).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My several year stint with high tech finance (HFT and asset management) illustrated just how much of a "boys' game" it was. I was never aware of physical aggression, but there was absolutely a hedonistic power-driven male culture.

Also, as an American, I was shocked at what was apparently "allowed" in Dutch culture. They don't suffer from the severity (and frequency?) of lawsuits as in the US, so there are few things you cannot say out loud to or in front of colleagues. Or at least that was my experience.

OTOH, I know that more than one of the women who made up a very small minority at the company appeared to trade their charms for benefits. Not saying this is good or right, but it did seem there was an exchange of sorts.

<comment> the-dude I agree we are not sugar coating much : but what was your beef ?

<comment><USER5> My beef is with the mentality that often goes along with money. For some reasons, people making a lot or handling a lot of money often act superior - above the law, above the rest of society, and basically above anyone else who is not in their "echelon". And since most companies, esp finance and tech are largely run by men, it ends up promoting power and dominance over others - especially women they desire.

You can look at the current state of global wealth and politics to see the superiority complex and the above-the-law behavior.

So when dotcom happened, and when it had its resurgence in the Google era, this bro-culture developed partly due to the money and exclusivity that went with being a west coast "engineer".

As for Dutch behavior in the office, it's definitely more entertaining and amusing. But I would not want to be an attractive AND brainy woman in fintech. Their actual achievements would be inseparable from their looks, perhaps in the way that a decent rich person has difficulty knowing if the friends circling around are friends for good reasons or for potential financial benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the claims are true, I hope she gets tens of millions of dollars as compensation. The alleged incidents were not only sexual harassment they were also egregious psychological harassment.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Lee is seeking unspecified damages in excess of $25,000

This sounds a bit odd to me. I've definitely heard of much bigger settlements than this for just a single incident, not something that went on for 8 years. I'm not a fan of the sue-happy culture in this country, and TBH 25000 sounds more like it ought to be the right ballpark. But standard legal practice is to have another zero there at the end, isn't it? I guess there are multiple possible interpretations for this number, some charitable, others less so.

<comment><USER6> I think it just means the author is saying the amount is > $25k

That could very well be 25 million. Correct me if I'm mistaken.

<comment><USER7> I read it as: somewhere in the $25k-$30k range. If they (the reporter) know it's >=$25M, then why wouldn't they say that? It makes for a better story the more money is involved...

<comment><USER8> Probably because some legal procedure or regulation has a limit of $25K and treats lawsuits under and over it differently. So if you don't want to disclose the actual amount, you still will have to disclose the fact it goes into pile A and not pile B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh god…

</comment><comment><USER10> 'Cause I use Ad blocker, I am not entitled to read the piece.</comment>


Replaying Elasticsearch Slowlogs with Logstash and JMeter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sematext.com/2015/06/23/replaying-elasticsearch-slowlogs-logstash-jmeter/

<comment><USER2> VERY thorough and juicy, thanks.</comment>


Do Linkwheeled Angela & Paul backlinks really work? - <AUTHOR> http://uphype.com/hype/create-225-linkwheeled-angela-and-paul-profile-backlink-with-pr-4-9-authority-sites-3-urls-and-3-key

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know if this stuff is really effective for SEO and PR?</comment>


The purpose of NaN Boxing - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/185406/what-is-the-purpose-of-nan-boxing <comment><USER2> NaN-boxing is morally equivalent to using tagged unions to represent values of any type. It optimizes for fast floating-point operations, and for allowing a larger amount of meaningful values to be represented in 64 bits.

Most tagged-union approaches use some sort of punning so that at least one type of value is directly meaningful, without any bit manipulation. For example, some Common Lisp implementations will choose their tag bits for Cons cells such that NIL is represented with all zeros. Since NIL is the only falsey value and everything else is truthy, this means that any bit-pattern can be used directly for testing conditionals, with the correct semantics.

NaN-boxing is choosing a different type of punning for the tags, to optimize a different use case. First, all bit-patterns can be used directly as 64-bit floats with technically correct semantics--anything that's NaN-boxed is actually not a floating-point number. I'm given to understand that modern architectures are slow to mix float and bit ops, so it's nice that you don't need to mask your tags off of your float before operating on them.

Second, (double-precision) floats are usually the only type that require the full 64 bits to have meaning. In many applications, 50ish bits is 'good enough' for ints and pointers (with some extra ops to handle overflow), but floats are mandated by a standard and don't scale down gracefully. A tagged union wouldn't be able to contain a 64-bit float directly without spilling into an extra machine word. Unless, of course, the tags are punned to be part of the float value itself. And that's exactly what NaN-boxing is.

</comment><comment><USER3> In Racket, they use the alignment of the memory blocks:

* The even integer numbers are pointers.

* The odd integers represent fixnums (small integers) (n <\---> 2*n+1).

With this representation the calculations with fixnums are quite fast because they don't need unboxing.

<comment><USER4> It probably isn't relevant to most people anymore, but misaligned memory access on certain architectures (e.g. Sparc) incurs a penalty.

<comment><USER5> The tagging scheme mentioned above accounts for that. Objects are stored at aligned addresses, which leaves a couple or three bits available for signifying integers and other data types. On architectures that trap on unaligned accesses, you can actually use the trap to avoid an explicit type check if you're expecting a pointer and someone passes an integer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _I'm not really sure I understood the utility of this technique, that I see as an hack (it relies on the hardware not caring on the value of the mantissa in a NaN) but coming from a Java background I'm not used to the roughness of C._

The use of "signalling NaNs" is supported by IEEE 754. It may be a hack, but it's a hack that's in the standard.

</comment><comment><USER7> luajit was the first implementation I've seen, but it's author Mike Pall said soemewhere that this was an old technique, or more like that it could've been known before. I remember reading aome lisp paper from th 90s where sifferent encoding techniques/boxings were mentioned, and one of them was it (I thnink).

<comment><USER8> I first read about it on wingolog.org, and IIRC there was mention of an implementation of Guile using it. I think that supports your paper as evidence. Very cool technique, but I would rather give preference to integers and pointers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> v8 doesn't use this technique - the use SMI.

Read also [http://wingolog.org/archives/2011/05/18/value- representation...](http://wingolog.org/archives/2011/05/18/value- representation-in-javascript-implementations)</comment>


Rotating cube with separate worlds within each side - happy-go-lucky https://codepen.io/bali_balo/pen/yJOmgv <comment><AUTHOR> Thats pretty cool.</comment>


404 Error Pages - <AUTHOR> http://slodive.com/inspiration/showcase/404-error/

<comment><USER2> The article presents "25 Mind Boggling 404 Error Pages" and states that error pages were not given much attention in the early days of the internet. But just giving error pages a fancy design doesn't make them useful for visitors. A better idea is displaying a site map.

At first the 404 page of swift.fm mentioned in the article looked interesting: "Oh no, you hit an unknown page - but don't worry, we'll try to get you back in the game." But the picture graphic below the text is not actually clickable, I have expected that the picture tries to pick up the visitor approximately at the point where he might have been lost and guide him to the next step in some logical sequence of pages. Some navigation links are below the fold on the page and need scrolling to be visible.</comment>


Beautiful sci-fi GIFs - <AUTHOR> http://carlburton.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of Mark Ferrari's 8-bit palette shifting animations: [http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/](http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/)

</comment><comment> V-2 Made me think of the classic game "Another World". Similar aesthetics - minimalist, but very atmospheric

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful! GIFs really are a medium of their own.

Can anyone recommend other artists working with GIFs like this? I can recommend Davidope [0] and Bees & Bombs [1] for their work. Trippy and geometric :)

[0] [http://dvdp.tumblr.com/](http://dvdp.tumblr.com/)

[1] [http://beesandbombs.tumblr.com/](http://beesandbombs.tumblr.com/)

<comment><USER4> Japanese Pixel Art GIFs [http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/](http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/)

Somehow these little clips of everyday life convey a massive amount of atmosphere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many of these appeared in Margaret Atwood's piece "It's Not Climate Change -- It's Everything Change." [https://medium.com/matter/it-s-not-climate-change- it-s-every...](https://medium.com/matter/it-s-not-climate-change-it-s- everything-change-8fd9aa671804#.ywov0dwjr) (2015)

</comment><comment><USER6> Very nice visuals, but I wouldn't advise loading the page in a low spec PC with a slow internet connection. It should be considered a browser benchmark :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to have such wallpapers on my laptop. But I haven't found a good way to do so.

<comment><USER8> Ironically this was trivial in windows xp, but they took the ability out.

<comment><USER7> I think it was Vista that had the dreamscenes.

<comment><USER9> 95 through XP had active desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Digital Blasphemy has some great work too:

[http://digitalblasphemy.com/seeall.shtml?y=2016&t=0&w=&h=&r=...](http://digitalblasphemy.com/seeall.shtml?y=2016&t=0&w=&h=&r=1&f=0)

<comment><USER11> That's quite a blast from the past! I was totally into Digital Blasphemy wallpapers back in 90's, didn't know there are _still_ new ones being created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These are lovely, and made me think of another Tumblr with beautiful animated GIFs (one for the cinema lovers out there): [http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/](http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Sci-fi? A bunch of these are just from the latest season of Serial.

<comment><USER14> Which Serial?

<comment><USER15> The podcast: [https://serialpodcast.org/season- two/artwork](https://serialpodcast.org/season-two/artwork)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is verry funny!! [http://nodejsreactions.tumblr.com](http://nodejsreactions.tumblr.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> Almost all these look monochrome. It gives me the feeling of reading 3D graphics tutorials before the textures are applied.

</comment><comment><USER18> The whole blog of his is full of beauty- this dystopian surrealism in love with the alien that made HalfLife2 great.

</comment><comment><USER19> What software is he using?

<comment><USER20> Apparently it's Cinema 4D: [https://serialpodcast.org/posts/2016/04/how-the- art-comes-to...](https://serialpodcast.org/posts/2016/04/how-the-art-comes- together)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> also check out: beeple, gmunk, andy gilmore

</comment><comment><USER22> Very beautiful</comment>