Wall Street Journal:

Starbucks isn’t an Olympic sponsor and is therefore forbidden to have an official presence here. But after Mr. Glinton, a journalist for NPR, trailed the mystery cup for several hundred feet, its owner told him that he was out of luck. It came from the”Office,” she said – the Olympic broadcasting center where NBC has its own secret Starbucks.

The best line of the piece had to be from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review sports columnist Dejan Kovacevic who carries around an empty Starbucks cup and pours other coffee into it. He said, “It’s a status symbol,” he explains. “It shows I’m not some kind of lowlife.”

If you believe that, you’re still some kind of lowlife.

Many thanks to MacPaw for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. If you’re looking for some more disk space or just want a cleaner Mac, MacPaw has a fresh utility that you should check out; it’s called CleanMyMac 2.

CleanMyMac 2 helps you clean out unwanted apps, data, and gigabytes of junk on your Mac. It’s a powerful cleaning app that’s beautifully designed to make cleaning and organizing your Mac as simple as can be. With CleanMyMac 2, you can manage widgets and extensions, fix broken apps, drastically reduce your iPhoto Library, and clean out old, neglected files that waste disk space.

And, thanks to its Safety Database, you can rest easy knowing that CleanMyMac 2 is 100% safe to use. The Safety Database is a gigantic collection of rules and exceptions for cleaning up and uninstalling nearly anything on your Mac! It has over 5 years of data and is updated regularly. With CleanMyMac 2 and its Safety Database, your Mac is in good hands.

So, why put off getting yourself a faster, cleaner Mac? Download CleanMyMac 2 right now to see how easy cleaning your Mac can be!

I’m a huge fan of Olympic hockey. The rink size and rule changes make the game more exciting, allow for better skating and passing. I also think the scoring is better, with 3 points for a regulation win, 2 points for an OT win, and 1 point for an OT loss.

Opinion aside, I’ve been scratching my head trying to understand the rules for moving from round to round. The linked site lays all that out nicely.

From the SlickLogin site:

We started SlickLogin because security measures had become overly complicated and annoying.

Our friends thought we were insane, but we knew we could do better. So we set out to improve security while still making it simple for people to log in.

Today we’re announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a company that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way. Google was the first company to offer 2-step verification to everyone, for free – and they’re working on some great ideas that will make the internet safer for everyone. We couldn`t be more excited to join their efforts.

From the linked article:

The idea behind SlickLogin was, at the very least, quite novel: to verify a user’s identity and log them in, a website would play a uniquely generated, nearly-silent sound through your computer’s speakers. An app running on your phone would pick up the sound, analyze it, and send the signal back to the site’s server confirming that you are who you say you are — or, at least, someone who has that person’s phone.

I think this is an interesting idea, but I struggle with the details. If Apple does not change their mechanics (and why would they?), a user would have to take their phone out of their pocket, fire it up, and take some action to get the phone to listen to the sound played by the web site. That sounds like a non-starter to me.

And if Google goes it alone, building SlickLogin support into the OS, they’ll still have a hard sell getting web sites to adopt a system that is unavailable to half the phones in the world.

Still, this technology is compelling. It’ll be interesting to see Google’s next move here.

A little slanted, perhaps, but still a very interesting read. Interesting take on the timing of Tim Cook’s hiring in 1998. No argument that Apple has been better in the Tim Cook era.

The Atlantic:

Recently I watched the four-episode original BBC House of Cards series from 1990. It’s on Netflix too, and, seriously, if you are interested in either politics or satire, this is not to be missed.

As a Canadian, I usually love the British originals of American shows better but the comparisons between both of these very good adaptations of the book is interesting.

Phys.org:

Ten questions about physical and biological science were on the quiz, and the average score—6.5 correct—was barely a passing grade.

Just 74 percent of respondents knew that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

One in three respondents said science should get more funding from the government.

Apparently, so should science education.

Bored Panda

There are many biological theories behind why women live longer than men, but we’re sure that behavior like that in these pictures isn’t helping.

There’s an amazing amount of The Stupid going on here.

As the music industry races toward a future of digital streams and smartphone apps, its latest crisis centers on a regulatory plan that has been in place since “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was a hit.

Since 1941, Ascap and BMI, the two giant licensing organizations that dominate music publishing, have been governed by consent decrees with the Justice Department. These agreements were made to guarantee fair royalty rates for songwriters and for the radio stations, television networks and even restaurants and retail shops that play their music.

But with the industry struggling to make money from digital music, this system has come under attack. The streaming service Pandora is squaring off against Ascap in a closely watched trial over royalty payments. Big music publishers like Sony/ATV and Universal are calling on the government to overhaul the system, and technology companies are accusing the publishers of trying to skirt federal rules meant to protect them.

The outcome could reshape the finances of a large part of the industry.

Another potential game changer for an already disrupted market.

The installation of 65 iBeacons at Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego’s Petco Park, home of the Padres, will be followed by similar work at more than a dozen and a half other MLB stadiums, the league said. The plan is to have more than 20 ballparks in total equipped with the technology by Opening Day in late March. The Padres host the Dodgers on Opening Night on March 30.

I’m really looking forward to giving these iBeacons a try.

These games have hidden unused pieces of text, never intended to be seen during gameplay, because developers have voices too. These include things like programmer shout-outs, messages aimed at hackers trawling through the game data, and the furious ranting of overworked, underpaid coders doing crunch-time.

This is a pretty good list. 423 games. How many of these do you remember?

This theremin was implemented using the Web Audio API. Tried to play the Star Trek theme. I think I won’t quit my day job.

A lot of fun!

The Stop Bad Patents web site is a resource to learn about patent trolls and patent abuse. Worth a look.

The Hemingway app is what Word could be if it had a more informative, tunable interface. You type in some text, and you get feedback on things like run-on sentences, word misuse, much more. The interface allows you to turn on and off checks for hard to read sentences, adverb overuse, passive voice misuse, and more.

This is the tip of the iceberg as to what might be done with an interface like this. Helpful to professional writers, but could be an incredible boon to writing students. I would love to see technology like this built into Safari.

UPDATE: Reader Jim “The Beard” Dalrymple pointed me to this post which runs Hemingway’s actual writing through the Hemingway app. Pretty funny.

Ben Thompson nailed this one.

Globally, cousin marriages are still going strong, with an estimated 10% of all marriages in the world being between cousins, and has high as 50% in some regions of the world.

I had no idea!

Khoi Vinh, the former Design Director at NYTimes.com, posted two new logos he’s been working on. I always find it interesting to see what people like Khoi come up with.

The analyst’s comments about docking stations etc. are asinine and Rene Ritchie agrees. The future of computing is going to be about us, and not as much about the device we carry. The device to make this all work could be as small as a pin, but more powerful than anything on the market today. Rene sums it up nicely in the last sentence.

Evil.

Some people are about to have the chance to get very rich.

Twitter, the microblogging service whose shares have more than doubled since its November initial public offering, will give insiders the first chance to sell their stock tomorrow.

No insiders sold in Twitter’s IPO, meaning none have been able to profit yet from the run-up in the stock price. Twitter, which debuted Nov. 6 at $26, closed at $56.47 at yesterday’s close in New York. They touched an intraday record of $74.73 on Dec. 26.

Twitter’s biggest shareholders include co-Founder Evan Williams, who has about a 10 percent stake, and Rizvi Traverse Management LLC, which along with its affiliates held an almost 16 percent stake after the IPO. Other shareholders include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher.

What happened to Facebook when their insider lockups expired?

In 2012, Facebook Inc.’s shares dropped to record lows amid the rival social network’s larger share-lockup expirations.

Remember that building in London that was melting cars because of its unfortunately curved shape and position with respect to the morning sun? They called it the Fryscraper.

Now Google has a similar issue, a massive solar energy project with mirrors concentrating solar energy, heating the air to 1000+ degrees Fahrenheit (about 537 Centigrade).

Seems birds that fly in the path of the beam are being incinerated.

The $2.2 billion solar farm, which spans over five square miles of federal land southwest of Las Vegas, includes three towers as tall as 40-story buildings. Nearly 350,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect sunlight onto boilers atop the towers, creating steam that drives power generators.

The owners of the project— NRG Energy Inc., Google Inc. and BrightSource Energy Inc., the company that developed the “tower power” solar technology—call the plant a major feat of engineering that can light up about 140,000 homes a year.

But the birds, what about the birds?

Regulators said they anticipated that some birds would be killed once the Ivanpah plant started operating, but that they didn’t expect so many to die during the plant’s construction and testing. The dead birds included a peregrine falcon, a grebe, two hawks, four nighthawks and a variety of warblers and sparrows. State and federal regulators are overseeing a two-year study of the facility’s effects on birds.

You have to love smart people.

This is a great, insightful take on the stresses faced by indie developers.

Dong Nguyen is a young guy. He wrote a game for fun, put it out there, and found himself at the target end of a massive wave of attention, much of it negative. I can’t stress enough how insanely terrifying this can be, and he wasn’t ready.

[Via iOS Dev Weekly]

iMore has a lot of great how-tos on its site. I didn’t expect this one, but Allyson Kazmucha wrote up a piece if you want some help.