The New $100 Bill
December 25th, 2012
The US government has come out with a new design for the $100 bill, one that incorporates even more security features. There’s a blue strip woven into the bill with bells that turn into “100”s as you move the bill one direction, and moving bells/100s as you shift the bill in another direction. The bill also has an inkwell with a bell inside that changes color as you move the bill, such that it seems to appear and disappear. Really fancy stuff.
The new bills have not been officially released. This is because there is a production problem that didn’t show up in the test phase. Some of the bills have creases in them and are unusable. They only discovered this after printing a billion of the new notes, which (at this time) will all have to be manually checked before being released. They’re trying to find a way to automate the checking process, for obvious reasons.
And on a side note, have you ever wondered how many $100 bills are printed each year? In the last fiscal year (October 1st, 2011 to September 30th, 2012) the US government printed 3 billion of them.
Thanks to Josh for this topic and the links.
Link #1 (the new 100): http://www.newmoney.gov/…
Link #2 (creases; video): http://www.newmoney.gov/media/…
Atari’s famous video game 
Some showings of the first Hobbit movie will be displayed at 48 FPS (frames per second), which is twice the speed of standard films. The author of the linked article says the difference is noticeable and can be distracting enough to take away from the film. On a side note, I’ve always wondered why I could immediately determine if a television show was a soap opera. Turns out the answer is that they use a different frame rate. Wonder if that’s also true for those older BBC shows, which can also be identified at a glance.
I get these calls periodically. They claim to be from account services and offer to lower my credit card rates. They sound pretty legitimate, and at first I thought they might actually be from my bank, but I don’t have any active credit cards. I’ve pressed “1” to ask them to quit calling me, but they tend to hang up. They also hang up when I tell them that I don’t have any credit cards. So now I ask them how they can live with themselves, knowing that they scam people. They usually hang up after that as well. The action being taken by the government has not had any apparent effect on the calls, but I can hope.
The linked article gives a breakdown on tech gear that may seem like a good deal but which should probably be avoided. In many cases it’s possible to get a much better item for just a little more money.
3D printers have been called a “disruptive technology”, and I’m not the only one who thinks they’ll 
According to the linked article, there is a serious problem with counterfeit (and defective) flash drives and memory cards, and many times they’re indistinguishable from the real thing. Occasionally they are even sold unknowingly by reputable retailers! The best we can do is to avoid purchasing them online, especially from eBay. Of course, buying them online directly from the manufacturer is not an issue.
With the election coming up on Tuesday, the linked article discusses the changes made in the wake of the problems with the 2000 presidential election. To summarize: computerized voting machines are actually worse than the paper ballots that failed so dramatically in 2000.
I guess the best way to describe cliodynamics is to say that it applies statistical methods to human society and history, in an effort to find patterns that can be generalized to predict future trends and events. The difficult part is determining which factors should be considered, as human societal behavior doesn’t lend itself to straightforward analysis.
The linked article answers common questions about Windows 8, which is being released on Friday, and also discusses some of the features and major changes we’ll see.