Author: coutinho

By Alan Henry, Lifehacker – June 07, 2012 at 07:00AM

Cooking pasta isn’t rocket science, but cooking pasta well is definitely an acquired skill—one that takes a little guidance. We’ve shown you the right way to cook pasta and how to match your pasta with the right sauce: now let’s set you straight on how to properly sauce your pasta once it’s cooked.

In all fairness, “right” is such a subjective term that it’s impossible to apply universally, but the method in the Chow video at the top of this post is guaranteed to get you a hot, evenly sauced, and totally delicious plate of pasta for dinner every time you do it. No more “red water” at the bottom of your plate of pasta, no more cold and sticky pasta with searingly hot sauce on top, and no more pasta drowning in a bowl of soupy sauce.

The trick is to move the pasta right out of the hot water into the pot with the sauce, instead of draining away all of the water and letting the pasta sit around while you work on the sauce. Add the hot, starchy pasta right to the sauce and cook it for about a minute so everything’s hot and well combined. Then the magic touch: a little pasta water to make that sauce stick to the pasta nicely. After that, turn off the heat and add your oil, butter, cheese, and/or herbs before serving (and adding more cheese, if you like!)

Chef Andrew Carmellini is a little less forgiving than I would be towards other pasta saucing methods (for example, I love the cold water/frying pan method), but he definitely has some good tips. Check out the video above or at the link below and let us know what some of your favorite pasta prep methods are in the comments.

How to Sauce Pasta with Andrew Carmellini | Chow

By Casey Chan, Gizmodo – June 06, 2012 at 06:20PM

Killing animals ain’t pretty but if we eat them, we should face the reality of how it happens. Michael Ruhlman did just that, he went inside Schmidt Family Farms and was shown how the chickens you eat are killed, bled, de-feathered and processed before they hit the market. More »

By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo – June 06, 2012 at 04:26PM

Not only this image wins the internet for the most amazing image of the Venus transit, but to me it’s also one of the most impressive images in the history of astronomy and space exploration. The scale and the feeling left me in awe. More »

By Andrew Tarantola, Gizmodo – June 06, 2012 at 03:40PM

Dr. Charles A. Leale, a young army surgeon on leave for the evening, was the first physician to reach President Lincoln’s side at Ford’s Theater and the first to prognosticate the President’s demise, “His wound is mortal. It is impossible for him to recover.” More »

By Dane Carlson, Business Opportunities Weblog – June 06, 2012 at 12:08PM

Jon Muskin, writing on Inventor Digest, explains that there’s no such thing as a provisional patent, and other mistakes contests make on Shark Tank:

Contestants frequently make the same mistake which annoys me every time. The sharks commonly ask the contestants whether they have a patent on their invention. The contestant frequently replies with, “I have a provisional patent.” To my surprise, the sharks (who are generally very business savvy) typically accept this answer and move on. However, if I were a shark on the show I would immediately respond with “I’m out.” All inventors should know that there is no such thing as a provisional patent.

There is such a thing as a provisional patent application. However, a provisional patent application is never examined and basically serves a “placeholder” for a forthcoming non-provisional application. Anyone can file a provisional application on anything they want and state they have a provisional application. For example, someone can go out and file a provisional application on the same light bulb that Edison invented in 1879 and claim they have a “provisional patent application” on the light bulb. But of course, any forthcoming non-provisional application would be rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and hence the provisional application in this case is completely worthless.

By Jamie Condliffe, Gizmodo – June 06, 2012 at 11:20AM

Gas stove tops are amazing to cook on: instant, controllable and capable of getting super-hot. A shame, then, that a new study shows that apartments with gas have nitrous dioxide levels three times higher than the sides of busy highways. Nitrous oxide, by the way, is toxic by inhalation. More »

By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – June 06, 2012 at 09:28AM

Venus passed in front of the Sun yesterday for the last time until 2117. The transit took almost seven hours but this NASA video shows it in under a minute.

Tags: astronomy   NASA   science   space   Sun   Venus   video

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – June 05, 2012 at 06:29PM

Last year, we wrote about a ridiculous bit of javascript coding on the website for Vibram (makers of the famed “five finger” shoes) in Italy — in which if you merely right-clicked on an image, you were accused of trying to illegally copy their images. I was thinking about this recently, as I actually bought a pair of Vibrams. Last Thursday, upon receiving the Vibrams, I mentioned them online, and a DC-lobbyist, who follows me on Twitter, suggested my purchase was hypocritical, since he claimed Vibram was a strong supporter of intellectual property enforcement — and pointed me to this Vibram ad, which shows a raised “middle toe” on one of their shoes as “a message to anyone thinking about infringing on any of our 200+ patents and trademarks.”

It turns out that this ad is from 2010, and apparently the company’s attitude has evolved quite a lot in the past two years. With somewhat amazing timing, the very day that my shoes arrived, the BBC put out an article in which Vibram’s CEO, Tony Post, explains that focusing on IP enforcement is a waste of time — and that the better solution is to build a much stronger relationship with customers — basically the same thing we’ve argued for over a decade now:

“Candidly, you have to realise that intellectual property only gets you so far,” says Mr Post. “At the end of the day it’s really about your relationship with the consumer.”

What the company realized was that focusing on lobbying and enforcement just wasn’t effective. Instead, educating customers on the difference between real and fake Vibrams, and showing why they’d want to buy the real ones (i.e., giving them a “reason to buy”) was much more effective. The company put up a page showing customers how to spot a fake, and saw that it worked.

Vibram offered vouchers to customers who had unwittingly bought fake Five Fingers, so that they could buy the real product at cost price.

The company also put up a page on its website alerting customers, enlisted the help of bloggers and asked fans of its Facebook page to get the word out.

Within a year, the deluge of complaints from customers who had bought fake products slowed to a trickle.

Amusingly, the article quotes Susan Scafidi, a professor who is well known for her support of ratcheting up intellectual property laws on fashion/clothing, suggesting that Vibram speaking out and connecting with its customers on this issue was a mistake: “It was a risky move, according to Ms Scafidi, who says that a company associating its name – however tangentially – with counterfeit goods could damage its brand.” Beyond the fact that she was empirically wrong about this, that makes no sense. Being open and honest with fans, and explaining why they’d want to support the company whose product they like (and why counterfeit products are inferior quality) seems like a smart strategy. It’s hard to see how that could “damage the brand” at all. In fact, it seems almost guaranteed to do the opposite, as it appears to have done here.

While the company still does seem to be interested in some legislative changes (and is taking legal action against a competitor), it certainly seems like a case where a company has realized that there are better ways to deal with these issues than just using intellectual property law.

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By Dane Carlson, Business Opportunities Weblog – June 05, 2012 at 02:54PM

How do you build a desk suspended by balloons?

A company called Twisted Image finally started production in February. Their job was to fabricate permanent hot air balloons strong enough to carry the weight of the desk. A new type of rubber composite was used to make balloons that were genuinely air-tight and would never degrade, and Caltech were called upon to supply a Heluim/Hydrogen hybrid gas with an atomic weight 150 times lighter than Helium alone.

Ribbons reinforced with Carbo-Titanium (and in pretty colours) were used to secure the table top to the balloons, tied off on an aerospace grade titanium cleat.

By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – June 03, 2012 at 07:55PM

I kinda hafta link to this, don’t I? From the NY Times Magazine, 32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow…the actual or spiritual successor to their Year in Ideas issue.

The electric light was a failure.

Invented by the British chemist Humphry Davy in the early 1800s, it spent nearly 80 years being passed from one initially hopeful researcher to another, like some not-quite-housebroken puppy. In 1879, Thomas Edison finally figured out how to make an incandescent light bulb that people would buy. But that didn’t mean the technology immediately became successful. It took another 40 years, into the 1920s, for electric utilities to become stable, profitable businesses. And even then, success happened only because the utilities created other reasons to consume electricity. They invented the electric toaster and the electric curling iron and found lots of uses for electric motors. They built Coney Island. They installed electric streetcar lines in any place large enough to call itself a town. All of this, these frivolous gadgets and pleasurable diversions, gave us the light bulb.

Tags: lists