Every Baseball Is Rubbed with This Special Mud Before It Gets Used [Video]

By Casey Chan Oct 16, 2011 4:00 PM 25,742 39

Baseball, America's past past time, is a pretty quirky game with quirkier players and quirkiest traditions. Chew tobacco! Sunflower seeds! Rally caps! Seventh Inning Stretch! And even a "special mud" that gets rubbed onto every single baseball in the major and minor leagues. Huh?

The mud is called Lena Blackburne Original Baseball Rubbing Mud and it comes from a secret spot in South Jersey off the Delaware River. Jim Bintliff, who owns Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, skims the top inch layer on the muddy riverbanks for collection and then puts the mud through screens to refine it before packaging it, aging it and shipping it to all the baseball teams in the MLB. Bintliff says the texture of his special mud is like chocolate pudding. Tasty.

The mud is applied because new baseballs are much too slick for pitchers to grip properly. Baseball ended up using Lena Blackburne's special mud because its fine-grain sediments properties added grip without scratching the leather and messing up a ball's trajectory. The tradition of manually rubbing this special mud into balls started in the 1950's and continues to this day. [NewsWorks]

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How Chicago Purifies One Million Gallons of Water Every Minute [Video]

How do you slake the thirst of 5.5 million Chicagoans spread throughout the country's third largest city and 118 surrounding suburbs? You treat one billion gallons of water a day at the world's largest water treatment plant.

Opened in 1968, the James W. Jardine Water Purification Plant provides virtually all of Chicago's potable water, though the smaller South Water Purification Plant also helps provide for the south end of the city. The process begins 2.5 miles off shore at massive in-flow points called cribs. Each crib pulls water from 20 feet below the surface down a 168-foot vertical shaft to tubes cut from the bedrock which flow back to the shore. Once it reaches the plant, fish and other large debris are filtered out using a rotating screen and the water is pumped 25 feet up to begin the gravity-powered treatment process.

The water is first chemically treated with chlorine to kill microbes and activated carbon to remove objectionable tastes and odors, then fluoride is added for healthier teeth, and finally aluminum sulfate about an hour into the process to increase the stickiness of microscopic solids which then adhere to each other, creating floc. Large paddles—floculators—assist with the mixing of alum and water. One of the very last chemicals added, polyphosphate, is used to coat the inside of Chicago's pipes, preventing the lead in old plumbing from leaching into the water supply. The water is then pumped into settling tanks where the floc sinks to the bottom. This sedimentation phase eliminates roughly 90 percent of the particulate matter from the water.

The water is then filtered in one of 96 swimming pool-sized tanks filled with a layer of coarse gravel under an upper layer of fine sand—together these layers effectively filter much of the remaining floc and debris from the water. The entire process from crib to filtration takes eight hours. From here, the water is pumped through 4,000 miles of pipe for consumption by the Chicago area's 5.5 million residents.

[Me Magazine - Algor - Water Purification Wiki - Jardine Water Purification Plant Wiki]

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Vocre for iPhone: I Can Suddenly Understand Every Word You're Saying [IPhone Apps]

English is my first tongue, but my family doesn't have a whole lot of native speakers. So, sadly, I'll often find myself at family functions nodding politely at French jokes aimed my way. Which makes Vocre a godsend for those many awkward family situations.

Vocre is a voice-recognition app that makes it easier for two people to have a conversation across a language barrier. Kinda like having a UN translator in your hand. Plus it's powered by Nuance—which Apple recently bought—so you know it's capable. The app will prompt you to pick a gender and the languages you want translated. Then you just flip the phone and speak. You'll see what you said onscreen and can retry if it doesn't get things right. You can then hand your phone off to your otherwise unintelligible friend, and they'll get the translation both in text and in the voice of whichever gender you picked. And so on and so forth until you're done chatting. Right now you can translate between English, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, German, and Japanese. Pretty awesome.

It's amazing how accurate it is between statements. So long as you're not mumbling and talking at a reasonable pace, it'll pick up what you're saying even against the din of a crowded office. And it's pretty quick, too. It demonstrates that voice-recognition apps should be seeing more play, despite Apple's being slow to the party up to now.

But! The app is not without a learning curve. The UI could use some work in that swiveling the phone around between phrases caused some frustration while testing it, though the developers definitely want to upgrade to on-the-fly translations. And every single translation costs a credit. Which wouldn't be a big deal, except that one buck gives you ten credits. And those credits can go quick in any conversation. So you'll be spending much more than a dollar to get the most mileage out of it.

The Best

Fast, accurate translation

The Worst

Expensive, UI needs work

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How a Despicable Computer Consultant Terrorized More than 100 People by Watching Their Every Move [Crime]

It's one thing to have some sort of "noble purpose" when you grab nudie pics from a person's computer. Extorting people for them and making money off their identities is quite another. That's what 32-year-old Luis Mijangos did, and it's completely vile.

Working out of Santa Ana, the paraplegic Mijangos made about $1000 a week consulting and building websites. Not too shabby. However, he could make up to $3000 a day hacking into people's computers, rooting through their financial data, and causing an unholy mess with people's lives. But it wasn't just the money. He would infect their webcams and microphones, giving him behind the scenes access to people's private activities, and allowing him to blackmail and torture them. According to ComputerWorld:

One victim, a juvenile identified by prosecutors only as S.G., sent Mijangos pornographic photos after he hacked into her computer and tricked her over instant message into believing he was her boyfriend. Mijangos then threatened to post the photos online if she didn't send him more pictures.

Sick. Mijangos went above and beyond what the average identity thief would do and turned it into a twisted game for kiddie porn. He has since gotten six years in prison for his crimes. [ComputerWorld]

Update: I've struck out the paraplegic bit up top. My apologies to those of you who were offended by the mention of Mijangos being a paraplegic. It was added in the interest of completeness, not to be sensational or hurtful. I'll work on the context time.

Image Credit: spaxiax/Shutterstock

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Lawsuit Claims Microsoft Is Tracking Every Windows Phone Even if You Opt Out [Microsoft]

Microsoft is tracking your Windows Phone, and there's nothing you can do about it. A lawsuit filed in Seattle is claiming that Windows Phone's camera app tracks your location and sends it to Microsoft, even if you opt out. We contacted Microsoft and they refused to comment.

Earlier this year, when the Internet was losing its mind about Apple storing your location data on a hidden file on the iPhone 4, Microsoft told us that it only stores your last known location as a single data point that it erases as soon as it stores a new one. Which is probably true! But tracking your users after they've specifically opted out of the service is pretty serious, and we're still waiting on a straight answer from Microsoft on this mess. [Reuters via BGR]

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