04/29/08

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww. (link)

Warning: this is probably the most depressing thing you'll read all day (or even all week): An Austrian engineer has confessed to fathering seven children by raping his own daughter and keeping them captive in the cellar, Austrian police said today. ...

Swedish scientists have found a correlation between people with high scores on intelligence tests and those with the ability to keep a regular rhythm. (link)

To be honest, I was a little disappointed in Standard Operating Procedure...but the fault is my own, not the film's. My expectation was that the film would start with the photos of Abu Ghraib & misdeeds of the lower ranking soldiers and then move ...

A short (too short, perhaps) interview with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab. It got really weird when you said, "If I'm a Buick and I'm made of parts, am I alive?" And he said, "Well, some people would say a Buick is alive." A recent R ...

philgyford : David Weiss: Metacognitive Miscalibration - Thinking things are easy when you don't know enough to tell. "There's a great difference between 50 years of experience and 1 years worth of experience repeated 50 times." (via Daring ...

philgyford : 2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky - Or watch Clay give that "how do they find the time?" talk in person on this video. Worth it; he's an awesome speaker. (via Daring Fireballl) Tags : clayshirky herecomeseverybody media television top ...

factoryjoe : Techmeme: OAuth 1.0, OpenID 2.0 and up next: DiSo (Chris Messina/ FactoryCity) - TechMeme's first mention of DiSo! ;) Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: oauth, diso, techmeme, openid

philgyford : Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All - New York Times - A paper rebuts the Easterlin paradox (that above a certain level money doesn't make one happier). (via Kevin Kelly) Tags : davidleonhardt easterlin easterlinparadox economics ha ...

philgyford : Soundamus - new and upcoming music releases from the artists you listen to - Looks at your Last.fm playlist and tells you when new music by your listened-to artists is released. Could do with some kind of threshold, but still very useful ...

I could really use a couple of these...

good talk slides

I like the use of RSS and Yahoo Pipes

"Yahoo has been accelerating its open activities of late..."

this reminds me of my diet plan...

The Sorting Algorithm Demo (495)

Easy Photo Wall on a Shoestringwire Budget » Curbly | DIY Design Community « Keywords: photos, home, decoration, wall (226)

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide (221)

Grand Theft Auto IV Review: Apparently GTA IV is pretty good. This is worth reading at length. I won't beat around the bush: Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest game to come out for the Xbox 360 so far. I say that without reservation and witho ...

Why I love working with family people: Jeff Mackey over at 37 Signals claims the 20-something with no life is a “crutch” for startups. If you need a bunch of them to survive, your idea sucks. That's why I like working with the fami ...

A woman whose friend adorns her own house with trite adages seeks advice from Slate's advice columnist, Prudence, after receiving one of the signs as a gift.

Google researchers are claiming that a newly developed approach to visual search may do for image searching what PageRank did for text search. "The research paper, "PageRank for Product Image Search," is focused on a subset of the images that the gia ...

Simon (S2) writes to mention that Europe's second Galileo navigation satellite reached orbit this past weekend. Galileo is promising to offer several technological advances in comparison to the US-based GPS system but no longer promises to be a guara ...

Betsy Carroll writes "The Stanford research group on virtual teams discusses how one's avatar appears in virtual worlds has an affect on real life behavior in an NPR interview. The researcher they speak with focuses on the concept of vicarious reinfo ...

John Resig is reporting on his blog that a recent trip to Tokyo opened up some very interesting JavaScript projects to him that haven't met with widespread popularity outside of Japan yet. "One project, in particular, really caught my eye. It's calle ...

NetworkWorld is reporting that a new exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum is featuring some of the military's more prominent UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). In addition to the vehicles themselves a large number of supporting te ...

MIT's Technology Review is reporting that a new input device, designed for soldiers, may soon be making an appearance. The "RallyPoint", a glove designed to allow soldiers to easily interact with wearable systems via sensors, could allow soldiers a f ...

The government began depositing tax rebate checks in thousands of bank accounts on Monday as the stimulus program aimed at giving the ailing economy a jump-start got under way early.

Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Barack Obama on Monday for opposing proposals to suspend federal gas taxes this summer, a plan she and Republican John McCain have endorsed. Obama didn't take the bait. He ignored Clinton and focused on McCain.

The children locked in the basement never saw the light of day for years. A retired electrician has confessed to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering seven children with her in a windowless cell sealed by an electronic keyless-entry sy ...

The top executives at Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. haven't held any recent discussions to break an impasse that threatens to turn Microsoft's 3-month-old takeover bid into a slugfest.

Warner Bros. says it's launching two Web sites to capture new ad revenue and a younger generation of viewers.

The government began depositing tax rebate checks in thousands of bank accounts on Monday as the stimulus program aimed at giving the ailing economy a jump-start got under way early.

Reuters - Indulging in chocolate during pregnancy could help ward off a serious complication known as preeclampsia, new research suggests.

A top Iranian judiciary official warned Monday against the "destructive" cultural and social consequences of importing Barbie dolls and other Western toys.

A newlywed couple spent the night in separate jail cells — she in her wedding gown — after police said they brawled with each other, then members of another wedding party, at a suburban Pittsburgh hotel.

WILMINGTON, North Carolina (Reuters) - With his shirt-sleeves rolled up, Democrat Barack Obama unveiled signs of a new campaigning style on Monday as he sought to win over elusive working-class voters who have largely backed his opponent, Hillary Cli ...

Nintendo redefined the relationship between man and games console with the creation of the Wiimote, and continued to riff on that successful theme. Ever since the Wii came out, Wii crossbows, guns, wheels, golf clubs, baseball bats, tenni ...

An Austrian has confessed to imprisoning his daughter in a cellar and fathering her seven children, police say.

I’m delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere: Cory Doctorow:Clay’s book makes sense of the way that groups are using the ...

How's the weather where you are? It's chilly and rainy here, which is kind of disheartening after eight days or so of sunny and warm. Summer is almost, but not quite here and it seems to be delaying itself for some reason and that's making us a bit g ...

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww. (link)

Continuing the series of portrayals of technology from the VHS era, here's another contribution from Martin Brewer, who brought us the first episode of The Net. This is another BBC Two show, an episode of Horizon from 1993 on "The Electronic Frontie ...

"Hey-ay pony, that's the wrong noise you're making..." A vintage MadTV performance of Corky and the Juice Pigs ^ parodying REM, back when they were ripe for it. Some prefer The Only Gay Eskimo. More on Corky. Don't get me wrong, I love REM, I just ...

Charting the Uncanny Valley [2 3 4 5 6 7] is a thorough explanation of Masahiro Mori's hypothesis. Of course, if you're short on time, there's always 30 Rock. [Previously]

Steve Gisselbrecht writes about his experiments taking chocolate from beans to bars at home. One of the main barriers for the home chocolatier is the lack of home conching machines. Steve also has a write-up on tempering chocolate, which is the ste ...

Influenced by the Modernist documentarian André Kertész, with references to the hard-edged, black-and-white works of Weegee and Diane Arbus, this self-taught photographer captured raw and intimate images, and transformed urban scenes into ...

Euro hits $1.596.While more than a little distressing for those of us who like to travel to Europe and consume some of their elitist export products, it's probably otherwise a good thing for the US economy as it'll prop up our exports. Hopefully.

It's depressing that this Congress really is incapable of doing the right thing. The Senate proclaimed a fierce bipartisan resolve two weeks ago to help American homeowners in danger of foreclosure. But while a bill that senators approved last week w ...

Something Awful eschews humor in this week's Comedy Goldmine for gibbering madness. "I know you were coming here expecting to laugh at the Comedy Goldmine this week. Well, you're screwed....

"It's the Bizaro Ethel Merman." "She's like a garbage bag full of fighting Muppets back from the dentist." "It's like the little exorcist girl stung by bees." "The first time...

A short film in which a Paris Hilton-esque socialite is revealed to be the architect of her own loopy attempts at notoriety, and who will go as far as she...

I've heard Rev Wright compared to Al Sharpton, after his clowning answers to questions at the National Press Club early today. I wondered, then I realized that while he can be a very sincere even profound philosopher, he may end up being more like th ...

Om Malik writes about SwitchABit, BetaWorks, Twittergram, John Borthwick and myself. — — I have a meeting to go to, I'll write a blog post about SwitchABit when I get back. — — Short version: Excited! — —

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The next podcast is up. Today we talked about why we're doing a podcast in the first place, took some questions/ suggestions from listeners, and got into a fight over whether programmers should learn C. Guess which side I took. There are some improv ...

What is stackoverflow.com? Nothing, yet. But here's the concept: Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. Instead, they happily program ...

a former reporter is scooping other brewers and the trade publications, and both are angry  

using remote CAPTCHA solvers run by the spammers  

fake palindromes, updated daily  

scanlation of a wistful Croation comic about a bookstore with every book in the world, except one  

transcript of Clay Shirky's excellent keynote from the Web 2.0 Expo; watch it instead  

also, John wrote about another project porting the Ruby virtual machine to JS  

the best explanation I've seen  

Jody says that in the "annals of bad interfaces" this one is the champion. Link...

Two years ago, Hanson Robotics' incredible Philip K. Dick robot head went missing. David Hanson had left it in the overhead bin on an America West airplane and it hasn't been seen since. Hanson sued the airlines but the case was recently dismissed. T ...

Famed NYC-based prankster/ billboard artist Ron English recently took his brilliant brand of witty culture jamming to the Los Angeles area. Our pals at Hi-Fructose have the photographic evidence of the shenanigans. Link Previously on BB: �� New Ron ...

In January, my company Digital Garage invested in Twitter and announced plans to work together with Twitter to create a Japanese version of the service. That service just went live. It's still part of the main Twitter service, but the UI will be in ...

It's hard to find fault in any Xterra owner who takes it upon themselves to paint their rear hatch with the controls of a Game Boy...if they do it right. We'd love to be the types not make fun of people who try really hard at something and kind of mi ...

This is by no means the most scientific of measurements, but GTA IV for both Xbox 360 and PS3 is currently being outsold on Amazon by Wii Fit, Mario Kart Wii and the Wii Wheel. Things to keep in mind: the Nintendo games are each single platform (effe ...

Red, yellow and blue cars are on their way in a hurry to the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

AFP

I previously admired this horizontal eco dishwasher concept by Marie-Christine Lacasse & Marie Claude Savard, seen at the University of Quebec in Montreal Design Grad Show, but only had the video. I am particularly fascinated by it because I use ...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was first used in the United Kingdom to measure their war-time production. Since the whole economy was geared up to wage war, it was a fair measure of how much the system was turning over. While the second world war has ...