In Case You Missed It…Assorted Oddities from Around the Web

What’s on the Menu at Shooters? Guns, Food, and Jesus!

The open carry invite at Shooters Grill in Rifle, CO

The open carry invite at Shooters Grill in Rifle, CO

Shooters Grill of Rifle, Colorado is encouraging patrons to carry guns while dining. Says owner Lauren Boebert, “This country was founded on our freedom. People can come in carrying their gun, and they can pray over their food.” The restaurant also promotes Christian values, with reminders of Boebert’s faith posted prominently throughout.

Mrs. Boebert calls the decision to open the restaurant “a leap of faith,” undertaken as a backup plan in case her husband’s job in the local oil fields didn’t work out. The two opened the 55-seat restaurant in 2013. It now has sixteen employees.

The Shooters name wasn’t chosen intentionally to coincide with the policy on guns. and Boebert didn’t originally plan to use the business to promote Second Amendment rights. But she says she’s “always carried.” Within a few days of opening, she started carrying on the job and her employees asked if they could do the same. Customers did likewise. One day Boerbert arrived at work to see a homemade sign notifying patrons that guns were welcome on the premises. She doesn’t know who posted the sign, but Boebert says they “did me a favor,” and she ultimately replaced the homemade sign with a printed one.

Shooters is now looking to hire. An ad is posted on their Facebook page.

Now You Too Can Be a Jedi Master

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWu9TFJjHaM

Thalmic Labs of Canada is introducing a wearable tech armband that allows control of electronic devices through hand and arm gestures. The company shipped an initial “alpha” batch of its Myo armbands to developers last December, but attracted millions of potential customers in February this year when it posted the demo video above.

The Myo works via electromyography (EMG) – a means of recording electrical activity in muscles. The band measures electrical signals in arm and hand muscles, detecting gestures before they’re even made.

Thalmic co-founder Aaron Grant says it’s not clear yet how practical Myo will be for controlling complex electronics like computers, but due to intense developer interest sees a promising future for applications in real-time control of games, home automation, and small devices. The company originally received interest from over 10,000 developers.

Both consumer and developer versions of the Myo are now available for pre-order. Each is priced at $149.

Are Prehistoric Monster Sharks Still Swimming Our Oceans? Probably Not.

Shark sizes

The prehistoric Megalodon shark is one of the largest vertebrate predators in history. With 7-inch teeth and measuring up to 54 feet long, the monster sharks were three times the size of current Great Whites. They lived from around 28 million to 1.6 million years ago, when they were wiped out during the Pleistocene extinction.

While some people aren’t so sure about that last part, there’s no direct evidence to support the possibility that Megalodons may still be with us. As reported in a June 27 I F***ing Love Science post, a 1942 photograph of what might have been an enormous shark next to a submarine was proved to be a fake. Other sketches and eyewitness accounts are unverified. And while examples of the Coelacanth, a 15-foot species of fish previously thought to be extinct, have been caught and spotted, there’s no correlation to Megalodons. Some say the monster sharks could be living in great ocean depths, but fossil evidence shows they preferred shallower waters heavily populated by their prey. Finally, the I F***ing Love Science post says if Megalodons were still swimming about, we’d have evidence of bite marks on whales and other likely prey.

So, sorry folks. As cool as the notion of living monster sharks might me, it’s probably not a possibility.

Will the Government Kill Google Maps?

Apple Maps

The Grow America Act, a proposed bill for modernizing roads and updating safety regulations, gives the federal government new powers to regulate all in-car GPS devices and mobile phone mapping apps.

While the U.S. government already sets guidelines for GPS systems and map software, a June 24 Free the Future report says they’re now attempting to regulate the criteria and parameters of apps “like Google Maps, Waze, or Apple Maps.” According to the report:

The Grow America Act lets the Department of Transportation tell a specific software company or developer what type of functionality they need to disable, or even require an approval process for applications involving maps with the department. If this occurs, Google may have to stop providing their mapping service due to the slowness or ignorance of a government bureaucracy.

The report describes proposed regulations as “a harmful precedent for the software development and innovation that created the mobile phones we use every day to get around in the first place.”



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