Today in world news about poppies: The public have been urged to cancel planned visits to the Tower of London to visit the sea of red poppies placed in memory of Britain’s war dead because the site is becoming overcrowded. via Don’t visit the poppies at the Tower of London, public told – Telegraph. Read more →
US watchdog questions billions spent on ending Afghan poppy production | Circa News
A recent news item on Circa follows up on the (in)effectiveness of spending to eradicate poppy agriculture in Aphganistan. Billions spent and growth has expanded. “In past years, surges in opium poppy cultivation have been met by a coordinated response from the U.S. government and coalition partners… The recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question the long-term effectiveness… Read more →
The New Heroin Epidemic – The Atlantic
Special report from The Atlantic: More recently, heroin has taken root here after authorities cracked down on unscrupulous doctors who were overprescribing pain meds, sending addicts searching elsewhere for a similar high. In West Virginia, heroin-overdose deaths have tripled over the past five years, while prescription-painkiller deaths have dipped slightly. There were many contributing factors, not the least of which… Read more →
US heroin overdose deaths more than double in two years | The Rundown | PBS NewsHour
keeping an eye on statistics, and potential popular understanding of the metaphor we are using in Sow/Reap: Deaths caused by heroin overdoses more than doubled between 2010 to 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. In a report released Friday, a study conducted in 28 states across the U.S. showed heroin overdoses increasing from 1,779 in 2010 to… Read more →
FLIR One gives your iPhone infrared Predator vision | Ars Technica
a case for iPhone 5 and 5S provide two cameras, one a “long-wave” infra red and the other an RGB. It remains to be seen if the data from this sensor package can be captured and channeled for use by an app, or if it is an expensive novelty. FLIR One gives your iPhone infrared Predator vision | Ars… Read more →
Art and Museum Attention Span
Theres no right answer; but there is some evidence of what most people do in practice, much of it quoted by Elkins in a 2010 essay on the Huffington Post. In summary, if museum-goers are eating oranges, theyre eating them bloody fast. The Louvre says that the average visitor looks at the Mona Lisa for 15 seconds. New Yorks Metropolitan… Read more →
An Unreal Decision
But really, that was just one symptom of a larger problem. The real issue was that Unity seems to have been built for very small development teams. While Republic Sniper isn’t a huge project, we have seven regular project members and a number of other contributors. There are upsides to Unity’s approach: It allows tiny teams to create things that… Read more →
A Chart That Says the War on Drugs Isn’t Working – The Wire
Groff, who made the chart for his new documentary on the drug war The 1315 Project, says that it shows the costly war on drugs simply isn’t working. A note: The numbers on this chart alone don’t add up to $1.5 trillion, which represents a more inclusive count of drug control spending, with prison costs and state level costs determined… Read more →
Inst-Inst adds a workshop on Kinect2
After yesterday’s announcements from GamesCon in Europe that led reporters to believe that the Kinect2 is being abandoned by Microsoft, the organizers of Inst-Inst today announced the addition of a workshop for installation artists covering the Kinect2 to be led by MS insiders. Hey Folks, We’re pleased to let you know we’ve added another workshop to INST-INT. This is a… Read more →
Kinect is dead via Polygon
via Polygon, news that Microsoft is unbundling the Kinect2 from the XBoxOne, and the projection that the device is dead in the marketplace. I surmise that the device died when MS announced it would be a mandatory, always on, always online device. It has been rumored to have the capacity to track our bloodflow and so it felt engineered for… Read more →