A great, amazing, completely worth it TED talk by Mark Bittman on what we eat and why we need to change. Definitely watch it.
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20% off Britax stuff @ Amazon
Just a heads up for folks looking for Britax gear for their baby. Amazon is running a 20% off sale through May 31. Just use code BRITAX20 at checkout.
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On Referers
Yes, I know it’s spelled "referrer." However, the authors of the HTTP spec apparently did not; they spelled it without the second r.
A silly mistake? Sure, but consider this: how many bytes-on-the-wire have been saved by this little spelling mistake?
Do I have a point? Nope. I just think it’s cool.
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Mapping the Front
If you’re not familiar with it, the Western Front was a major line of battle between France and Germany during World War I. It was effectively a stalemate, with the line never moving much during the duration of the war, but a huge number of people died along it.
Mandy sent me a link to some amazing maps with various bits of data from the War. The one shown above is a segment of a map overlaying exhumed bodies on top of what’s a mostly standard map.
It’s a sad display, but a wonderful expression of multi-variate data display. Tufte would be proud I think.
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Hafnium gone in ~10 years?
I got an ad in my email today from NewEgg advertising the new 45nm, Hafnium-based processors from Intel. I’d never heard of Hafnium before, so I pulled up Wikipedia to see what the scoop is. It’s in the same family as Titanium, is closely related to Zirconium, and oh, by the way, we’re probably going to run out of it in around 10 years unless new supplies appear.
I wonder if this affects Intel at all? Ten years is a fairly long time in the CPU world and I would guess their usage of Hafnium in the transistor is astonishingly small, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of it laying around. According to Wikipedia, it’s rather hard to process out of Zirconium and it’s mostly used by the nuclear power industry in control rods.
Well, it’s just one chemist’s prediction based on incomplete data, so nothing to really get in a tizzy over. The other predictions from the report are equally interesting though. Here’s the breakdown:
| Element | Time to run out, years | Main Source |
|---|---|---|
| Antimony | 15-20 | China |
| Hafnium | ~10 | Australia |
| Indium | 5-10 | Canada |
| Platinum | 15 | South Africa |
| Silver | 15-20 | Poland |
| Tantalum | 20-30 | Australia |
| Zinc | 20-30 | China, USA |
Interesting stuff.