"Spider Goats" Produce Super Strong Fibers Stronger Than Steel And Kevlar

Listening to Coast to Coast AM radio show they brought up a very intersting subject that I have never heard of but sounds extremely fascinating.  We all are familiar with spider webs, created by silk spun by the spider in a web pattern to catch and trap bugs and insects.  It may not seem like it but the silk that spiders create is very very strong, in fact it is stronger than steel pound for pound.  This material would be very beneficial if only we could harvest the silk.  After all how hard would it be to "milk" a bunch of spiders in order to extract enough silk to do anything with.

So how can we get enough of these super strong fibers that make up the spiders silk to actually do something with?  Well one way is to take the spiders out if the equation.  How?  Well that is where this topic gets really strange.  Apparently scientists have been able to isolate the DNA of the spider that creates the super strong silk and inject it into goats.  The goats then produce milk like any other goat, except now the milk contains similar fibers compared to those in spider silk.  In fact the goats can actually create fibers that are even stronger than the spiders silk!  These fibers can be extracted from the milk and be spun together into fabric.  As you would expect, like the spiders silk, this fabric is super strong.  In fact it is so string that it is stronger than Kevlar and can stop a bullet just like a Kevlar lined bullet proof vest, but the material that comes from the "spider goats" is so strong that much less material is needed.  This means that the super strong spider goat material can be made into a garment about as thick as a regular t-shirt  that could stop a bullet as well as a thick Kevlar vest like what police and armed forces personnel use.  And all the while these genetically altered goats go on to live a mostly normal life and don't seem to be hurt or in pain or anything like that.  The one problem that they did mention however is that these goats are all sterile after this procedure and can't have offspring, so every new generation of spider goats needs to be implanted with the spider DNA.

I think that this is absolutely amazing that people have actually figured out how to do something so incredible like this that it actually sounds like science fiction.  What else can be created in this manner?  What other applications could this super strong fiber be used for?  Only time will tell but I think that there will only be more incredible breakthroughs in the future, things that we can't even fathom being possible. 

Completely Redesigned New Mac Pro Cylindrical Computer

Once again apple has redesigned the Mac Pro.  Usually Apple computers are pretty revolutionary, but this is even more drastic of a change than normal.  There is nothing on the new Mac Pro that is like any other computer in the world.  The case alone is unlike any other computer, being a black cylinder about 10 inches high and 6 inches in diameter with a hole in the middle for cooling.

There's no doubt this new model is stunning.  Even if you don't like the look of it you still have to admit that it is very creative.  The CPU and GPUs are all connected thermally to the middle piece of aluminum that acts as one big heat sink for the entire unit. The specs are pretty amazing too, Apple claim that it can edit 4k video and render effects in the background with no performance degradation thanks to its available 12 cores.  

But with the new design they had to drop a lot of typical computer parts.  There is no optical drive and the storage is flash based.  There is no room for expansion via PCI cards or new hard drive so you'd better be sure to buy the system you want that will be able to fit your needs for the long run because you can't just pop in a new hard drive more ram and a new video card.

Since Steve Jobs died the company has taken a drastic turn.  I'm not sure that they will be able to continue what he started, but time will tell.  I'm hoping so.

Amazon's New Product Category: Add-On Items

Amazon has recently started classifying certain smaller and cheaper products as "Add-On Items." These are items that are inexpensive and not cost efficient to ship individually so Amazon will now only ship add-on items with other items if the total cost is over $25. If your order is less than $25 they won't ship any items that are marked as add-ons. On one hand I could see how this could save the company money and if they save money they can offer lower prices and better products and services. However this is also frustrating for customers who don't understand and don't like this new policy.

Personally I think this is a good idea in theory but I don't like it how it is right now. I think that they should offer a discount if you ship with other items or even charge a premium for shipping add-on items individually. I was searching for a cable that was about $5 and was marked as an add-on item. I tried to checkout but when I was in my shopping cart I couldn't understand why there was no way for me to check out yet. It seriously took me about 20 minutes of going back and fourth, trying different items, different browsers, I even tried using another computer! Then I finally actually read what it said for add-on items. Since this cable was so cheap I couldn't even order it by itself. I either had to order $20 worth of more crap or buy a more expensive cable! This is pretty frustrating when you spend a while finding the best item at the best price and then finding out you can't even buy it. I wish they would just let me buy it and even charge me a little more for shipping and handling. It's almost like a teaser price saying "this product is cheap - so cheap you can't even buy it!" If they just offered the option to buy it on its own and pay a little more I would have bought it already. But since they don't allow me to I will look for a better deal elsewhere. I might end up buying from Amazon but I doubt it after this. I might think twice about buying from Amazon next time because of this. And I am an Amazon affiliate so I don't like talking negatively about them, but when I see something I will comment how I feel about it no matter what. It just goes to show that any thing that looks too good to be true, usually is. Any time you are shopping, either online or in a store, always look out for deals that are too good and prices that are too low. Most times there is either fine print that you need to know about or the product is inferior. Amazon is a great retailler and most of their products and deals are the best anywhere, but this is one thing that I do not like about Amazon.

Blog Comments For Backlinks No Longer Provide Link Juice, Most Blogs Using NoFollow For Comment Links

A few years ago when SEO just started to become very competitive most people were scrambling to get as many links to their sites as possible. They didn't care about the quality of the links, if there was relevant content on the page, anchor text, page rank of the linking domain, etc. But now things have changed, no longer do people want as many links as possible. Many SEOers believe that too many bad quality links actually do harm to your site's SERP results. And since Google has started the "NoFollow" tag which means that the spider doesn't follow the link or give you any credit for it. One of the easiest and quickest ways to get some fast back links was to comment on people's blogs and use links in the body of your comment and for your name. But now most blogs automatically use the NoFollow tag on any links in the comments section making this practice pretty much futile. There are still a few blogs out there that pass on their link juice to links left in the comments section but for the most part the only good a comment link will do is if somebody reading that blog clicks on your link. Some search engines count these links, and of course nobody knows exactly what is in the search engine's algorithms but most people in the SEO field seem to agree that NoFollow links don't count for anything in the top three search engines - Yahoo, Bing, and of course good old Google. So next time you see an offer for 10,000 backlinks from blog comments for $10 you know that it isn't even worth that. The better way to get quality links and real organic traffic is to take your time to get high quality links. Submit press releases to attract links and articles from real people, not automated scripts. Create useful articles that are relavent to your site and the site you post it on. Post good answers to people's questions in forums and other sites. Submit to high quality web directories like DMOZ. Create a real blog with lots of good content for your site with news and info about your products or services. Don't spam the entire web just to get a few crappy links. It won't help and many people claim it could actually harm your SERP rankings. So just like they taught you in school - don't follow the crowd, just say NO!

Mt. Gox Is Not Down: How To Access Mt. Gox Without 503 Error

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about how I could not access the Mt. Gox online bitcoin exchange site. Every time I tried to go to the Mt. Gox online homepage it would redirect me to a 503 error page that read 'Service Temporarily Available' so of course I thought that the site was down. At first I thought it was only a temporary service disruption due to upgrades or high traffic loads. I tried a dozen or so times within a few minutes at first but I still got the same error each time so I decided to try again later. The next day I tried again a few times and still got the 503 error every single time, I thought that something else was going on besides a simple hardware upgrade or software update. I speculated there was a problem because Mt. Gox was being attacked by malicious hackers with a DDoS attack.

I don't know for sure but I don't think that that was the cause of the error. This was a few days ago that I first encountered the error. I have checked it a few times since then and still got the error page every time. That is when I tried a few things to see if the Mt. Gox site was definitely down or not. I finally figured out that if you type in exactly http://mtgox.com (not www.mtgox.com, http://www.mtgox.com, or mtgox.com) that the home page loaded immediately. I have no idea why this is but if you enter the www prefix or if your browser adds the www when you type in only mtgox.com. The only thing I can think of is that there is a problem with the www subdomain or the server that the www subdomain points to. So there you have it, if you are trying to access Mt. Gox and it gives you the same 503 error try entering http://mtgox.com and it should work fine.

How Much Does It Cost To Leave Your Computer On?

As an avid computer user I have multiple computers and usually I leave at least one on around the clock. Today I heard somebody claim that leaving a computer on 24/7 will cost $600 for an entire year, which equals $50 each month, just by leaving your computer running constantly. I tried to argue this claim but they stuck to their guns and claimed that they knew it to be true. So I tried to calculate the power usage and cost myself.

Of course all computers use different amounts of power and the price of electricity differs depending on where you live and your local electric company, so we will use averages to reach a estimated conclusion. Most desktops use at maximum about 400-500 watts of power for the computer itself and monitor. Other equipment such as printers, routers, modems, etc. all use extra power too, but no more than a few watts each so they aren't too big of a deal. Laptops are designed to use much less power than desktops so that they can have maximum battery life. Many components in a laptop are smaller and use less power, such as the fans and hard drives. Also the processor, video processor, ram, bus, and other components also use much less power, and modern laptops employ advanced power management techniques, such as lowering the screen brightness and slowing down or turning off components when not in use like the hard drive, processor, screen, networking chips, etc. Because of the power saving features, most laptops use less electricity, usually about 75-100 watts for the entire system. So in order to find out how much it costs we need to know how much power costs. Again this varies from state to state and city to city. The state with the lowest electricity cost is Washington at 8.66 cents per kilowatt, and the most expensive electricity is in Hawaii, where it costs 37.11 cents per kilowatt hour. The average price for electricty in the US is 12.40 cents/kwh. What exactly is a kilowatt hour? A kilowatt is the amount of electricity that would be consumed by something that uses 1000 watts over the period of an hour. So if a computer uses 400 watts that would be equal to 0.4 kwh each hour. In a day the cost would be $1.19 for the computer at maximum power, and over the course of a month it would cost $35.71, and $428 for the entire year. Of course most computers are not running at maximum capacity all the time. If the screen and other components such as the fans and hard drive are set to go to sleep after no activity for a while it would probably average about half of the maximum power so this price would drop to about $17.80 a month. In a year it would amount to $214. Many people these days have laptop computers for their only computer, and as previously mentioned they use a lot less power than regular desktop computers. At an average of 75 watts with power saving settings, it would cost $6.69 a month and $80.28 a year.

So most full sized computers use about $215 worth of electricity a year and most laptops would cost $80 per year. So where did the $500 figure come from? If a computer uses a full 500 watts around the clock and the price of power is still 12.4 cents per kwh, it would end up costing $535 per year. I would imagine that whoever came up with this calculation thought that the 500 watts that some high end computers use is being used consistently over the entire time the computer is on. But that is not true at all, many high end gaming PCs are rated for 500 watts or more but that is the maximum amount of power that can be drawn at one time. A lot of these high end computers have components that drawn whole lot more electricity than a standard consumer PC. Many gaming computers have more than a few very large powerful fans, as well as multiple graphics cards that could use 75 watts each, 1 or more hard drives that spin at speeds up to 10,000 rpms, a central processor that uses 50-100 watts alone, and other extras like lights and liquid cooling systems. But the maximum power is only used when the computer is under full load such as playing a very graphics intensive game, and still the amount of power is always going to less than the maximum amount the power supply puts out, otherwise ther wouldn't be enough power and the computer would crash. Even high end computers use less than maximum power most of the time. If you aren't playing a game the graphics cards use way less than their max. If you aren't using the processor to 100% capacity it uses less power as well. And if the hard drive hasn't been accessed in a while it is turned off to save power as well. And when the CPU and other components are not at full capacity they produce much less heat which means that the fans don't have to go as fast and can run at a lower speed or even be turned off if the temperature is low enough. So even a high end PC, such as those used for gaming, don't use their full amount of power around the clock. Even a top of the line machine with a 600-700 watt power supply and all the top components would use about half of that amount of power on average. So it would take a computer with a power supply rated over 500 watts and components that add up to 500 watts total working at 100% efficiency 24 hours a day 7 days a week to end up costing more than $500. Which backs up my first claim that the figure stated is an exaggeration and that it usually costs much less for an average computer to be left on all the time and being actively used for many hours each and every day. If you don't use your computer that much, say only a dozen or so hours a week, then your computer won't cost an arm and a leg to run, even if you leave it on all the time. So in conclusion it does cost money to leave your computer on all the time but it really matters how much you actively use it. If you run programs in the background, like constantly downloading files or streaming or sharing files with other systems or devices then it would use much more power, but most of us do not. And even if you do leave programs running that use the hard drive and networking devices, the CPU probably won't be running at peak and other components like the fans, graphics chips, and monitor will be using less than their maximum amount of power consumption. Of course turning off your computer will use no power and therefore cost you nothing, but leaving it on won't likely break the bank either.

Breaking Bad on DVD

When Breaking Bad first started airing on TV I watched all episodes the first day they aired.  I watched every episode in the first 2 or 3 seasons but I started to get a little bored and thought that the story line was getting a little too far out there and far fetched.  

But I recently got a few seasons of the show on DVD and started watching and I think I like it now more than ever.  The story is a little outlandish but of you watch it for what it is you can enjoy it.  Of course it is highly unlikely that a high school teacher would become a drug kingpin but it is fun to watch nonetheless.  If you have never seen it then I recommend checking it out.  Bryan Cranston is a great actor and makes the show very believable for what it is.  Some of the other characters are a little out there but he holds the show together.  So pick up a season or five of Breaking Bad and be prepared to sit in front of the TV for a while.