June 27, 2006 | |
Top 5 Myths About America | |
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Matrix like effects by student |
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Buffett-Gates merger creates $60bn charity giant |
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Visions dawned on Monday of a new golden age of philanthropy with Bill Gates atop a mammoth $60-billion charity machine, with a global punch to rival world aid bodies and even governments.
Investment guru Warren Buffett's $31-billion donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will double the size of Gates' fund and make it by far the world's largest charitable foundation. The gift, born from Berkshire Hathaway tycoon Buffett's decision to hand over 85% of his estimated $44 billion wealth, represented the biggest to single philanthrophic giveway to date, analysts said. It came weeks after Gates signalled he would soon give up daily duties as head of Microsoft in favour of his foundation, famous for work in the developing world including on HIV/Aids and for United States education initiatives. |
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What Women Can't Do |
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The Evolution of a Programmer |
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June 22, 2006 | |
MIT Transport Design Summit Strives for 500 MPG | |
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The goal of the Vehicle Design Summit being held this summer is to make “serious effort to revolutionize the design process for alternative transportation technology.” The focus will be broken into the integration of: hydrogen fuel cells, photovoltaics, biofuels, and human power.
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Robots: From Servants to Friends to... Lovers?? |
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Moral questions are raised: Would sex between a human and a robot be considered actual sex or a form of masturbation? Do we need to protect robots from rape and sexual abuse? is it moral to create robots for deviant sexual urges (child robots for pedophiles, or robots that crave physical abuse for S&M)?
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Do they know their religion? |
Nearly one-third of self-professed Christians believe that it was Jesus, not Moses, who parted the Red Sea. Only one percent of Jews make the same mistake. |
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Music Videos |
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GarageBand changing the face of music creation |
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GarageBand is bringing music to the masses in a way that is very easy... “You feel that you are in a creative mode right away. There are always people that want higher-quality recording, but the basic fundamentals need to be delivered in a simple package and that's what GarageBand does.
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First Molecular Proof That Some Aspects of Aging Are Out of Our Control |
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A study provides the first direct evidence that the molecular machinery of our cells providing function to our tissues and organs spins irreversibly out of control as we age.
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Printable Robots |
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June 21, 2006 | |
Quote of the Day | |
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. ~ George Bernard Shaw | |
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ZFS: Ten reasons to reformat your hard drives |
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The much anticipated release of the new ZFS filesystem in Solaris 10 will revolutionize the way system administrators (and executives) think about and work with filesystems. Breaking free of the traditional volume or partition architecture, ZFS combines scalability and flexibility while providing a simple command interface. Coined by Sun as the "last word in filesystems," ZFS is already being ported to several Linux distributions and Mac OSX. Designed to have at least a 30 year shelf life, this filesystem will make waves with its upcoming release in Solaris 10. We've been playing with ZFS for several months and have written some recipes about its basic administration. Here are ten reasons why you'll want to reformat all of your systems and use ZFS.
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Buzz Aldrin punches accuser |
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Music Video |
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New Uses for Old Hard Drives |
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Fighting Microsoft's piracy check |
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The company is forging ahead with a program, Windows Genuine Advantage, tied to its free software downloads and updates, that checks whether the Windows installation on a PC is pirated. But some people, including some who say they own a legitimately acquired copy of Windows, have challenged the need for such validation.
Most of their criticism is directed at the way Microsoft's antipiracy technology, Windows Genuine Advantage, interacts with a PC. Recently, the software maker was lambasted over its WGA Notifications tool, which it pushes out as a "high priority" update alongside security fixes. There have also been complaints about the tool collecting information from PCs and causing system troubles. |
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'Nokia Open' phone |
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June 19, 2006 | |
Google Maps Nighttime! | |
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Quote of the Day |
"Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves." ~ Carl Sagan "Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy." ~ Isaac Newton |
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'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Details Increasing Danger and Hardship |
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The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."
This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government." |
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Anything Into Oil!!! |
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The smell is a mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct fecal note. It comes from the worst stuff in the world—turkey slaughterhouse waste. Rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines, and lungs swollen with putrid gases have been trucked here from a local Butterball packager and dumped into an 80-foot-long hopper with a sickening glorp. In about 20 minutes, the awful mess disappears into the workings of the thermal conversion process plant in Carthage, Missouri.
Two hours later a much cleaner truck—an oil carrier—pulls up to the other end of the plant, and the driver attaches a hose to the truck's intake valve. One hundred fifty barrels of fuel oil, worth $12,600 wholesale, gush into the truck, headed for an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oils to upgrade the stock. Three tanker trucks arrive here on peak production days, loading up with 500 barrels of oil made from 270 tons of turkey guts and 20 tons of pig fat. Most of what cannot be converted into fuel oil becomes high-grade fertilizer; the rest is water clean enough to discharge into a municipal wastewater system. |
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Green tea and the ‘Asian Paradox’ |
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There is a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease and cancer in Asia where people smoke heavily, which may be accounted for by high consumption of tea, particularly green tea, according to a review article published by a Yale School of Medicine researcher.
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Project Alky |
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June 16, 2006 | |
Park that car! | |
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How to encrypt your email |
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Now more than ever, you might want to encrypt your email to protect it from prying eyes. Not only do we have government snoops mining vast amounts of data on the net and an ever-increasing number of companies monitoring their employees' email, but phishing and other email scams increase by the day.
Encrypt today! |
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June 15, 2006 | |
New DivX decoder sharpens and enhances any DivX video | |
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DivX for Windows 6.2.5 has just been released and includes a new sharpening feature that can make your videos come to life with fine details and a sharp, well-defined picture, enhancing any existing DivX video. Not only this, but the new decoder is also much faster leading to lower CPU use and/or better quality playback.
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15% of the fuel in your gas tank actually moves the car, 85% wasted |
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Only about 15% of the energy from the fuel you put in your tank gets used to move your car down the road or run useful accessories, such as air conditioning. The rest of the energy is lost to engine and driveline inefficiencies and idling.
And also who killed the electric car? |
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Photos of Apple's iPod City |
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A pair of photos published earlier this week by the UK's Mail on Sunday appear to portray substandard work environments within Chinese manufacturing facilities that build versions of Apple Computer's popular iPod digital music players.
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Female Brains React Surprisingly Fast to Erotic Images |
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Previous research indicated men are more aroused by erotic images than women.
But that is not the case. |
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Airplane Travel By Night May Change the Earth's Climate |
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At certain altitudes, aircraft produce contrails - the vapor wake caused when water in the chilly atmosphere is condensed by the plane's hot exhaust. These contrails have a surprisingly big but also complex effect on the climate.
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Teen Sex Orgy is a bad bad thing! |
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The FCC smashed all its previous records a few weeks ago when it leveled a three million dollar fine against a batch of CBS television stations for a Teen Sex Orgy scene in the show Without A Trace. So, what does a three million dollar Teen Sex Orgy look like? Funny you should ask. I happen to have one - the very one - right here! [download video, 2 meg wmv file]
Now before you dive right in, don't forget that it's only OK to look at this video if you're outraged by it. If you're titillated by it then it's illegal. And even if you are outraged, it's only OK to watch it if you're outraged in the exact right way. But, assuming that you do get outraged in the exact right way, then it's perfectly acceptable to watch this clip over and over and over again in all of it's delectable decadence. How else to explain that the only place I could find this clip was on the website of the well known Anti-Teen Sex Orgy group, The Parent's Television Council, at the bottom of a detailed summary of all the hot teen sex acts which must never be permitted onto the nation's airwaves! [Link to the PTC page.] Bear in mind that within the context of this Without A Trace episode, the Teen Sex Orgy in question was a bad thing. Someone died, and kids got grounded and stuff. Don't you see? CBS was trying to show that Teen Sex Orgies have a dark side, too. But the stations got fined three million bucks anyway. And then the PTC (the lead censorship lobbying group in the country) offers the same clip for download, again showing the Teen Sex Orgy to be a bad thing, but this time, using the clip to urge people to prevent others from watching it. So keep that clear as you watch the Teen Sex Orgy. Yes, it is bad. It is very bad. But more important than that, it is so bad that others must not be permitted to see it. Keep that in mind as you watch it again and again, writing down every hot teen sex act in minute detail. |
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June 14, 2006 | |
A lotta nerves!!! | |
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June 13, 2006 | |
One man's memorial to Hitler | |
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"Hitler did nothing.
"When the war happened, he tried everything diplomatic--everything. "The soldiers of the Third Reich never stole anything. I fought next to them. They were good men. Never times were they bad. "Not one person was gassed to death in the Third Reich." This is what Ted Junker of Millard believes. Junker says he was born in 1919 in Germany and fought as a German Waffen-Schutzstaffel (SS) officer during World War II. For 60 years he has mulled over what he remembers happening during those years. And in the years since he has come to see those events as totally opposite from how they are commonly told. I guess the Holocaust is all a big hoax to win support for the Jewish conspiracy. | |
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Why Brazilian football players have no last name |
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The World Cup kicked off on Friday, and defending champ Brazil will take the field against Croatia on Tuesday*. The South American squad features FIFA World Player of the Year Ronaldinho, along with stars like Ronaldo, Cafu, and Fred. Why do so many Brazilian soccer players go by one name?
That's the Brazilian convention. Nicknames and first names are used in all settings, no matter the gravity. Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is known to all by his nickname, Lula. Clergymen, doctors, and other professionals are frequently known by an informal name. The phone book for the town of Claudio even lists inhabitants by their nicknames rather than their surnames. |
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Transparent Screens |
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Dry Ice Blasting |
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Dry ice blasting uses compressed air to shoot dry ice pellets to clean in a way similar to sandblasting, but with some major differences. It can clean heavy duty machinery, yet can be gentle enough to clean books. It doesn't require as much disassembly so less down time is needed.
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Jet Bug |
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Covers of Hara Kiri |
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The Great No-ID Airport Challenge |
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Jim Harper left his hotel early Thursday at 5:30 a.m. to give himself more than two hours to clear security at San Francisco International Airport. It wasn't that he was worried the security line would be long, but because he accepted a dare from civil liberties rabble-rouser John Gilmore to test whether he could actually fly without showing identification.
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Rendr |
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Google Earth 4 Beta Released |
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A new UI. The most obvious change is a new and, we think, simpler user interface. Also, for the first time, we support "textured" 3D buildings, meaning the bricks look like real bricks, the glass like real glass, and overall, the world looks more like, well, the real world. Everything is more realistic. Check it out.
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Smart paper may put lightweight spies in the skies |
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Paper aeroplanes could fly by flapping their wings thanks to smart paper that bends when bathed in an electric field. The material raises the prospect of swarms of tiny lightweight aircraft carrying sensors that act as the eyes and ears of a surveillance network.
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June 12, 2006 | |
Women told 'drink less' ... | |
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A police chief sparks controversy today by suggesting the number of rapes in Scotland could be substantially reduced if women drank less.
Neil Richardson, assistant chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, bases his claim on new research which identified victims' alcohol consumption as significant in a third of attacks. The senior officer said "a lot" of the 1,100 rapes a year could be prevented "by people not allowing themselves to be in a vulnerable position". Richardson - who stressed he was not blaming women - spoke out after a study of more than 120 rapes revealed alcohol intake was a major factor in 40 cases. | |
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Mathematically Generated ... |
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The pictures on this page (NSFW, kind of) are created entirely from mathematical algorithms. Any beauty or obscenity you find in them is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Freaky!
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Allofmp3.com Now Selling The 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time |
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Allofmp3.com has just put together the most significant albums recorded over the previous millenium. Now you can download the 500 greatest albums of all time at a fraction of the cost!
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Unsolvable math problems |
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June 07, 2006 | |
Optical llusion - Spanish Castle | |
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Brin says Google compromised principles |
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Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.
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How to Stop Smoking: Simply Don't Plan On It |
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Microsoft vs. Google: Who's greener? |
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As Google and Microsoft battle for the hearts and minds of Internet users, a new question has cropped up: Which one can better save planet Earth?
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It's no game at Apple |
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It doesn't take long to find a litany of negative comments on the Internet about how Apple's most affordable consumer systems are just not up to serious gaming. Rather than complain, this should be taken as an outward sign of Apple's most serious branding intentions...
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June 06, 2006 | |
Ten Reasons why you don't need a ... | |
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Why we need a siesta after dinner |
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Small increases in blood glucose after a meal switch off brain cells that promote wakefulness - perhaps to force us to relax and conserve energy.
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Amazing facts |
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The hardest bone to break in the human body is not the femur, but rather the small bone in the inner ear known as the anvil.
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Who's really running Google? |
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Google hardly has a classic corporate command structure. Instead, Google executives seem to carry themselves with all the authority of an overindulgent parent, constantly worrying about what employees think.
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Google SpreadSheet Visual tour |
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June 05, 2006 | |
Quote of the Day | |
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte | |
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Northern Lights |
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June 02, 2006 | |
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective A**holes | |
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Firefox extensions |
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10 ways to spot a liar |
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You’re an agent showing a buyer a home and get all the answers that indicate the prospect is really interested in the property. But no offer is made. What happened? Maybe the buyer was a liar. Here are some clues to help you tell.
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Can you help me discover more music that I'll like? |
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Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.
We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you. |
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Legal... |
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Mona Lisa 'speaks' |
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The Mona Lisa's smile may always remain a mystery, but it is now possible to hear what her voice would have sounded like, thanks to a Japanese acoustics expert.
Dr Matsumi Suzuki, who generally uses his skills to help with criminal investigations, measured the face and hands of Leonardo da Vinci's famous 16th century portrait to estimate her height and create a model of her skull. "Once we have that, we can create a voice very similar to that of the person concerned," Suzuki told Reuters in an interview at his Tokyo office last week. "We have recreated the voices of a lot of famous people that were very close to the real thing and have been used in film dubbing." The chart of any individual's voice, known as a voice print, is unique to that person and Suzuki says he believes he has achieved 90 percent accuracy in recreating the quality of the enigmatic woman's speaking tone. "I am the Mona Lisa. My true identity is shrouded in mystery," the portrait proclaims on a Web site at http://promotion.msn.co.jp/davinci/voice.htm |
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An introduction to 'The Wall' |
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Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' is arguably one of the most intriguing and imaginative albums in the history of rock music. Since its release in 1979, and the subsequent movie of 1982, the Wall has become synonymous with, if not the very definition of, the term "concept album."
Aureally explosive on record and visually explosive on the screen, the Wall traces the life of the fictional protagoinst, Pink Floyd, from his boyhood days in war-torn England to his self-imposed isolation as a world-renownedrock star, leading to a climax that is as questionably cathartic as it is destructive. |
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A woman's 10 sex commandments |
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Batwoman hero returns as lesbian |
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Comic book heroine Batwoman is to make a comeback as a "lipstick lesbian" who moonlights as a crime fighter, a DC Comics spokesman has confirmed.
Batwoman - real name Kathy Kane - will appear in 52, a year-long DC Comics publication that began this month. In her latest incarnation, she is a rich socialite who has a romantic history with another 52 character, ex-police detective Renee Montoya. 52 will be published in the UK as a graphic novel by Titan Books in 2007. |
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Soy Sauce flavor -- Putting the 'scream' into 'we all scream for ice cream' |
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Soy sauce, used in a wide variety of Japanese culinary dishes, is said to be "the flavor of Japan."
But the dubious choice to add soy sauce to milk and sugar and pack it in a punnet has made the condiment a standout pick to headline the Wackiest World of Japanese Ice Cream and possibly soy, er, soiled the reputation of ice cream as we know it forever. |
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new species found: cave dwellers isolated for millions of years |
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Scientists in Israel have discovered eight new species of sightless critters living in a cave that has been closed from the rest of the world. Unfortunately, they look more like scorpions than Sanrio characters.
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How to delete a shortcut in Windows Vista |
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Three-armed boy to have surgery |
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A baby boy born with two left arms is set to undergo surgery to remove one of them in Shanghai.
However, the team at the Shanghai Children's Medical Center are unsure how best to proceed, and have yet to set a date for the operation. Neither arm is fully functional and tests have so far been unable to determine which was more developed. The boy, Jie-jie, cries when either of his left arms is touched, but smiles and responds normally to other stimuli. |
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Cyclops kitten no hoax |
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A photo of a one-eyed kitten named Cy drew more than a little scepticism when it turned up on various websites, but medical authorities have a name for the bizarre condition.
"Holoprosencephaly" causes facial deformities, according to the US National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke. In the worst cases, a single eye is located where the nose should be, according to the institute's Web site. Traci Allen says the kitten she named Cy, short for Cyclops, was born on December 28 with the single eye and no nose. |
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100 photographs... |
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Cop named world champ doughnut eater |
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Three minutes. Thirteen doughnuts. Think you could chow down that many morning morsels in that little time?
Walworth County Jail Training Sgt. Howard Sawyers didn't think he could, either, but he did. In doing so, he earned the title of world champion doughnut-eating cop. "The secret for eating doughnuts is dunking them in water," said Sawyers, who finished third in the competition last year. "You do a semi-circle of water cups half to three-quarters full. You rip 'em, you dunk them and you shove. And you do that as fast as you can for three minutes." Who else could be a champ doughnut eater than a cop? |
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