Hardware Hacking
The word 'hacker' is often quite misused -- it has come to represent people who write viruses and worms -- but before the age of computers, there were hackers around -- people who just liked taking things apart to see how they work, and sometimes, to make new things from the parts they collected. Now you too can put your inquisitive mind to use -- try Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty. It contains many, many tasks for idle hands -- and speaking of idle hands -- Kevin Mitnick had this to say about the book: "If I had this book 10 years ago, the FBI would never have found me!"
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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