How to solve world hunger with pizza
The idea of a universal food synthesizer sounds like something straight out of the Jetsons or Star Trek, but thanks to a $125,000 grant from NASA, a 3-D food printer may become a reality.
Anjan Contractor, a senior mechanical engineer at Systems and Materials Research Corporation, is already working on bringing the idea to fruition.
NASA’s interested because storing the various ingredients as a power greatly extends their shelf life for lengthy travel through space, but Contractor wants to keep all of the recipes open source, so the general public could eventually benefit as well.
So how will the pizza be made?
Pizza will be one of the first items printed because of its natural layers of ingredients. First, a layer of dough will be printed and baked at the same time using a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. A layer of tomato base will follow — made of powder, water and oil — then a protein layer will top the pizza.
Read more over at the Daily Dish.
Photo: Cheryl A. Guerrero / Glendale News Press
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.
Stanley Kubrick (via prahkalasalives)
The physicist Richard Feynman was perhaps an even more legendary genius than von Neumann, and he was certainly endowed with a world-class brain — but he also loved having fun, and we can all be grateful that he particularly enjoyed revealing the tricks of the trade he used to make life easier for himself. No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available. His autobiographical books, ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’ and ‘What Do You Care What Other People Think?’, should be on the required reading list of every aspiring thinker, since they have many hints about how to tame the toughest problems — and even how to dazzle and audience with fakery when nothing better comes to mind. Inspired by the wealth of useful observations in his book, and his candour in revealing how his mind worked I decided to try my own hand at a similar project, less autobiographical and with the ambitious goal of persuading you to think about these topics my way.
Daniel Dennett. 2013.
(Title: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.)
fuckyeahsnarkydavid-griffiths:
“Evidently you can’t get the angular momentum to point perfectly along the z direction. At first, this sounds absurd. “Why can’t I just pick my axes so that z points along the direction of the angular momentum vector?” Well, to do this you would have to know all three components simultaneously, and the uncertainty priinciple says that’s impossible”
—David J. Griffiths Intro to Quantum Mechanics 2nd Ed. page 165
A poet once said, ‘The whole universe is in a glass of wine.’ We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!
Richard P. Feynman (via kerryquotesquotes)
Paladin: I’ll just ask the local guard, you know, show some lawful good solidarity.
*Rolls a 1*
DM: You mug the guard.
(via outofcontextdnd)
(Source: cas-play)
The quicker we all realize that we’ve been taught how to live life by people that were operating on the momentum of an ignorant past the quicker we can move to a global ethic of community that doesn’t value invented borders or the monopolization of natural resources, but rather the goal of a happier more loving humanity.
Joe Rogan (via sirmitchell)
Does anyone know if it would be faster to randomly download 60 books by writing a program to -wget from Project Gutenberg or to shift though a page of links with a d20?
