Airlines Won't Block 'Porn' on In-Flight Internet Access

At long last, Internet access is finally becoming consistently available on flights around the country (and the world). While most technophiles like us are completely jazzed at the prospect of surfing while jet-setting, other folks aren't so sure. As you can see from the above video, many parents and other porn-averse folks are concerned that mile-high-Wi-Fi will just open the door to some shady fliers surfing illicit porn sites as they cross the country. They might be right -- US Air is indicating it won't filter 'Net access, but will instead rely on its stewardesses to maintain the peace and handle any complaints.



This, too, has people up in arms, particularly the stewardesses who say they already have enough to do without having to worry about looking for smut (it sure is a long way from the days of 'Coffee, Tea, or Me.'). But we're inclined to think this is being blown way out of proportion. People have been watching R-rated DVDs and videos on laptops mid-flight for years now and we haven't exactly heard a flood of complaints yet.

What do you think? Should in-flight Internet be censored?

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Is Your Gas Pump Ripping You Off?

This CBS News investigation started with a simple question: When you fill up, are you getting every drop of gas you pay for?

It's up to each state to make sure you're not getting ripped off at the pump. To see if you are, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian and the investigative team turned to three reporters at CBS stations to see what they could find.

Mark Greenblatt of KHOU in Houston reports that for the first time ever, the state of Texas is suing a company that runs a chain of gas stations - accusing it of deliberately shorting consumers. The company denies any wrongdoing, but they are not alone. Last year the state found nearly 2,000 pumps at other gas stations that were cheating drivers.

The industry says about 90 percent of pumps pass inspection, and some even deliver a bit more than you pay for.

ut a two-month CBS News investigation raises serious questions about whether states even know if drivers are being cheated. CBS News uncovered huge gaps in how pumps are inspected nationwide, including:

• Inspection standards that vary wildly from state to state.

• A surprising lack of inspectors - only 600 or so nationwide.

As Frank Vascellaro from WCCO-TV in Minneapolis reports, Minnesota doesn't inspect gas pumps annually. There aren't enough inspectors to do it. Of the pumps they were able to inspect this year, 11 percent had problems. The state says stations have to fix them, but only a quarter are ever reinspected. And even though the state can charge operators ripping you off with a crime, that's never happened in Minnesota.

Overall, the investigation uncovered a pattern of inspection that was, literally, all over the map.

Michigan, for example, inspects only after complaints. New Hampshire and Arkansas allow gas stations to hire their own testers, while Tennessee and Florida rely on "statistical sampling."

"Some states are doing very well, others are struggling," said Henry Oppermann, the former head of the Department of Commerce division that sets guidelines for state inspections. "When the inspection period would get beyond, let's say, a year and a half, I think that's really going beyond what regulatory oversight should be."

In fact, CBS News found 17 states allow pumps to go more than a year and a half without inspection.

Among the worst: Arizona, at every three years. Maine's inspections are up to every four years. Same with Texas. One pump CBS News found in Fort Worth, Texas, was last inspected in 2003, when gas was $1.56 a gallon.

Speaking with Oppermann, Keteyian said: "I gotta tell you something, I don't have a great deal of confidence right now ... that I am actually getting what I am paying for."

"When there's a lack of oversight, there's a potential - a greater potential for abuse," Oppermann said. And even when pumps are regularly inspected, that's no guarantee.

Anna Werner at KPIX in San Francisco found that in California, 94 percent of pumps pass inspection. But consumers can still be cheated. That's because pumps can pass even when they dispense a little less than what the pump says. It's a margin of error the law allows.

So a high-volume station that routinely sells a little less than a gallon could rake in around $50,000 a year extra - for gas you never get.

"Shame on them!" one driver said. "That's all I can say, shame on them."

Is it time for Congress to look at this as a national issue?

"It would be beneficial to have a national coordination of efforts," Oppermann said.

Not likely. When CBS News tried to find out the last time Congress looked into the problem, but came up empty. Fact is: it never has.

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Scientists discover why flies are so hard to swat

Over the past two decades, Michael Dickinson has been interviewed by reporters hundreds of times about his research on the biomechanics of insect flight. One question from the press has always dogged him: Why are flies so hard to swat?

"Now I can finally answer," says Dickinson, the Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Using high-resolution, high-speed digital imaging of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) faced with a looming swatter, Dickinson and graduate student Gwyneth Card have determined the secret to a fly's evasive maneuvering. Long before the fly leaps, its tiny brain calculates the location of the impending threat, comes up with an escape plan, and places its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way in the opposite direction. All of this action takes place within about 100 milliseconds after the fly first spots the swatter."This illustrates how rapidly the fly's brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response," Dickinson says.

For example, the videos showed that if the descending swatter--actually, a 14-centimeter-diameter black disk, dropping at a 50-degree angle toward a fly standing at the center of a small platform--comes from in front of the fly, the fly moves its middle legs forward and leans back, then raises and extends its legs to push off backward. When the threat comes from the back, however, the fly (which has a nearly 360-degree field of view and can see behind itself) moves its middle legs a tiny bit backwards. With a threat from the side, the fly keeps its middle legs stationary, but leans its whole body in the opposite direction before it jumps.

"We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat," Dickinson says. "When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly's body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting. Our experiments showed that the fly somehow 'knows' whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture. This means that the fly must integrate visual information from its eyes, which tell it where the threat is approaching from, with mechanosensory information from its legs, which tells it how to move to reach the proper preflight pose."

The results offer new insight into the fly nervous system, and suggest that within the fly brain there is a map in which the position of the looming threat "is transformed into an appropriate pattern of leg and body motion prior to take off," Dickinson says. "This is a rather sophisticated sensory-to-motor transformation and the search is on to find the place in the brain where this happens," he says.

Dickinson's research also suggests an optimal method for actually swatting a fly. "It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter," he says.

The paper, "Visually Mediated Motor Planning in the Escape Response of Drosophila," will be published August 28 in the journal Current Biology.

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[physorg]

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Who Owns the Moon?

Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?

A NASA working group hosted a discussion this week to ask: Who owns the moon? The answer, of course, is no one. The Outer Space Treaty, the international law signed by more than 100 countries, states that the moon and other celestial bodies are the province of all mankind. No doubt that would irk all of the people throughout the ages, like monks from the Middle Ages, who have tried to claim the moon was theirs.

But ownership is different from property rights. People who rent apartments, for example, don't own where they live, but they still hold rights. So with all of the upcoming missions to visit the moon and beyond, space industry thought leaders are seriously asking themselves how to deal with a potential land rush, cowboy-style.

"This is a very relevant discussion right now. We've got this wave of new lunar missions from around the world," said William Marshall, a scientist in the small-spacecraft office at NASA, but who spoke this week at an event hosted by NASA's CoLab, a collaborative public-private working group. He was speaking from his personal interest and not on behalf of the agency.

To be sure, the United States aims to send astronauts back to the moon by as early as 2015, in a mission that would include a long-term settlement. China and Israel, among others, are also working on lunar projects. And for the first time, several private groups are building spacecraft to land on the moon in an attempt to win millions of dollars in the Google Lunar X Prize. Some participants say that they plan to gain some property rights in the mission.

One of those people is Steve Durst, a director on the board of the International Lunar Observatory (ILO) and owner of the Space Age Publishing Co. He's linked to one of the Google Lunar competitors, Odyssey Moon, and he said during the talk that he hopes to scratch out his initials on one of the legs of a lunar rover and "claim his acre."

His group has calculated that there are about 10 billion acres on the moon, not counting crater slopes. Given that there are about 6.7 billion people on Earth, it aligns nicely with the idea of "I want my acre," he said.

The question is, he said: "How do you get activity going if the moon is owned by everyone at the same time?"

Durst has helped start the ILO in Hawaii to eventually put an astrophysical observatory on the moon that will generate power, communicate, and act as a property rights agent, he said. Durst gave a talk in China last week and he jokingly said that he skipped over the part about property rights.

Ultimately, he thinks it's about balancing the common good and free enterprise. "I'm happy to deed over half of my acre to a common acre pool. I see this as a way of reconciling a right of individual ownership and the idea that the moon belongs to the whole Earth."

The question of lunar rights also hit home when someone from Russia bought part of the Russian rover and then subsequently claimed that he owns a bit of lunar surface under its foot, according to Marshall. Land rights could also get tricky when it comes to coveted areas of the moon with "peaks of eternal light" that could be more valuable for research, he said.

"It's much easier to solve this problem by thinking it through and thinking through what would most benefit the best interest of humanity … rather than doing it once it's a mess," Marshall said.

So, he said, it comes down to assigning rights in the best interest of humanity, including ensuring no monopolies and no military installations.

Entities can apply for space in geostational orbit and receive a slot on a first come, first served basis, according to Marshall. That's an interesting model, he said, because it does that without granting ownership and allows access by less prosperous nations.

"In conclusion: Who owns on the moon? No one. Who should own the moon? No one. Does this stop property rights? No. The best way forward is probably some sort of property licensing body like how it works in geo," he said.

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[msn]

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City-In-a-Pyramid Could House a Million Dubaians, Power Itself

A particularly optimistic design firm in Dubai called Timelinks has proposed designs for the Ziggurat, a complete city to be layered inside of a massive pyramid that could serve as home for a million people at a time. Timelinks is currently seeking patents for a variety of technologies that would make such a building possible, including a three axis public transportation system that would run residents up, through and across the pyramid. They've also claimed that with a hybrid wind, solar and steam power the Ziggurat would be able to meet its own power needs, and that there would be enough room to allow for some minor agriculture in designated "green spaces." Before you just write this off as another wacky internet design concept, consider the absurdly ostentatious structures that Dubai has already built, and the fact that unlike the hyperluxurious ego-boosters currently under construction, the Ziggurat might be a viable housing solution for people who don't have a natural resource-infused trust fund.

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[gizmodo]

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Does my name affect how much spam I get?

Apparently it could - at least according to research by Richard Clayton, a security expert from Cambridge University's computer lab.

Most of us tend to assume that spammers focus on the right-hand side of our email addresses - the part after the @. That's why big companies and webmail services have to filter out so much junk email: a spammer can try it on with zillions of potential victims in one swoop, simply by throwing everything they've got at any @hotmail.com address.

However, it turns out that spammers could be more subtle creatures than we give them credit for. A paper presented by Clayton at CEAS 2008, the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam held last week at a Microsoft research facility in California, suggests that the text to the left of the @ also makes a serious difference to how much spam you're likely to receive. Analysing email traffic logs from Demon Internet, one of Britain's biggest ISPs, Clayton saw a marked difference between people's spam load depending on their names: specifically, those with names higher up the alphabet were more likely to get spammed than those closer to the bottom.

According to his statistics, someone called Alison may expect around 35% of the email she receives to be spam, while Zadie may only get around 20% - even if both use the same email provider.

The reason? As Clayton explains on his team's blog, he believes it is the result of so-called "Rumplestiltskin" attacks, where spammers run through entire dictionaries, guessing at names and sending millions of emails to try and find accounts belonging to real people. It seems that most spammers start their journeys at the beginning of the alphabet but peter out before they reach the end.

There is, he says, a genuine statistical divide between what he calls "aardvarks" - those high up the alphabetical food chain - and "zebras" - who graze at the bottom of the dictionary. For those weary of it, he even suggests changing species - or at least picking your username more carefully.

So are Anna and Andrew doomed to a life of spam-filled inboxes and email bankruptcy, while their friends Zach and Zoe live it up free of spam?

Not quite. The internet's scammers, phishers and other guttersnipes are still more likely to hit people who broadcast their email address on the web; and, of course, there are still a few special cases.

After all, Bill Gates - who famously revealed a few years ago that he received up to 4m junk emails every single day - may have a name that comes near the top of the Aardvark ratings - but given his prominence, it's unlikely that the Microsoft mogul could empty his spam folder simply by switching from Bill to William.

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[guardian]

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Back to School: 10 Great Web Apps for College Students

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Taking Notes

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote's clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.

You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

The Google Notebook is one of Google's lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it's a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook.

One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a research project in a group, for example, you can easily share your research with your whole group.

Online Office Suites

3) Google and 4) Zoho

Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are probably the single most often used tool among college students, and while none of the online offerings can yet beat Microsoft Office (which, for students, now only costs around $60 for the Ultimate Edition), the online office suites from Google and Zoho do have some distinct advantages. Office obviously has a lot more features, but not only are both Google Apps and Zoho free, they also allow easier sharing of documents and working on projects collaboratively.

And while the online tools to create presentations are still a bit crude compared to Powerpoint or Keynote, they are both worthy contenders, especially if you don't feel the need to add lots of fancy transitions to your presentations.

If we had to choose between Google's and Zoho's offering, our vote would probably go to Google, as the Google apps have a slightly more organized and professional feel to them, which, in the end, is going to make it easier to focus on the content of your documents.

Bibliography

5) Zotero

The standard tool for doing extensive bibliographies in academia is Endnote. While that is a great tool if you are writing a dissertation, Zotero is a great choice for less extensive research projects - and it's free. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so it is not technically a web app, but in its next version, the developers are promising the ability to synch your bibliographies to a web version of the tool, so that your books and notes will become available everywhere.

For now, Zotero lives in the status bar of Firefox, and it pops up a little icon in your URL bar every time it recognizes a compatible website. Zotero already supports the databases of a huge amount of libraries worldwide, as well as a lot of standard academic databases such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, InfoTrac, PubMed, or ScienceDirect. Besides curating your citations, you can also add notes, tag items, or add attachments (like pdf files of articles). Once you are done, Zotero will create a bibliography for you in most standard formats, including APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

6) EasyBib

If you just need to create a short bibliography, Zotero might be more than you need. EasyBib will just help you to quickly create a bibliography entry in MLA format - a favorite among literature teachers. It can also handle the APA format, but you will have to subscribe to the pro version of EasyBib.

If you really hate figuring out where to put a comma and where to put a semicolon in your APA style bibliography entries, those $7.99 a year for the pro version might just turn out to be a bargain.

Also, if you only need a quick bibliography entry for a book, check out OttoBib, where you just have to enter the ISBN number and it will give you a fully formatted citation.

Staying Organized

7) Google Calendar

There are lots of great online calendars out there, including 30 Boxes and Yahoo's calendar app, but our favorite is the Google Calendar, simply because it is dead easy to use, integrates nicely with GMail, allows for importing and exporting your calendar, and lets you publish a site with your free/busy information with the click of a button, so that your friends know not to bother you while you are cramming for that test.

8) Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.

Picking the Right Class

9) Rate My Professors

As much as teachers don't like sites like these, Professor Performance and Rate my Professors can be useful tools when you decide which class you want to take. While almost every university makes you rate your professor at the end of the semester, schools never make this data public, so whenever you get a choice between professors, you really have no idea who the better teacher is. We like Rate My Professors a bit more than Professor Performance, simply because its search is a lot easier and the site is a bit more up-to-date. The site now also features a Facebook application.

Keeping in Touch

10) Meebo

As much as your teachers would like to think so, college isn't just about classes, papers, and long ours in the library. If you want to stay in touch with your friends no matter what computer you are on, Meebo is a great universal IM client that lives on the web. It supports, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk, as well as Meebo's own IM architecture.

What are we missing?

Are there other tools you use in school that we missed here? Let us know in the comments.

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Why is Greenland covered in ice?

Only changes in carbon dioxide levels are able to explain the transition from the mostly ice-free Greenland of three million years ago, to the ice-covered Greenland of today.

There have been many reports in the media about the effects of global warming on the Greenland ice-sheet, but there is still great uncertainty as to why there is an ice-sheet there at all.

Reporting today (28 August) in the journal Nature, scientists at the University of Bristol and the University of Leeds show that only changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide are able to explain the transition from the mostly ice-free Greenland of three million years ago, to the ice-covered Greenland of today.

Understanding why the ice formed on Greenland three million years ago will help understand the possible response of the ice sheet to future climate change.

Dr Dan Lunt from the University of Bristol and funded by the British Antarctic Survey, explained: "Evidence shows that around three million years ago there was an increase in the amount of rock and debris deposited on the ocean floor around Greenland. These rocks could not have got there until icebergs started to form and could transport them, indicating that large amounts of ice on Greenland only began to form about three million years ago.

"Prior to that, Greenland was largely ice-free and probably covered in grass and forest. Furthermore, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were relatively high. So the question we wanted to answer was why did Greenland become covered in an ice-sheet?"

There are several competing theories, ranging from changes in ocean circulation, the increasing height of the Rocky Mountains, changes in the Earth's orbit, and natural changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Using state-of-the-art computer climate and ice-sheet models, Lunt and colleagues decided to test which, if any, of these theories was the most credible.

While the results suggest that climatic shifts associated with changes in ocean circulation and tectonic uplift did affect the amount of ice cover, and that the ice waxed and waned with changes in the Earth's orbit, none of these changes were large enough to contribute significantly to the long-term growth of the Greenland ice sheet.

Instead, the new research suggests that the dominant cause of the Greenland glaciation was the fall from high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to levels closer to that of pre-industrial times. Today concentrations are approaching the levels that existed while Greenland was mostly ice-free.

Dr Alan Haywood from the University of Leeds added: "So why did elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations fall to levels similar to the pre-industrial era? That is the million dollar question which researchers will no doubt be trying to answer during the next few years."

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[eurekalert]

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Magenta Is Not A Color

A beam of white light is made up of all the colors in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one color that is notable by its absence (click here to check). Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?

Here’s an experiment you can try: stare at the pink circle below for about one minute, then look over at the blank white space next to the image. What do you see? You should see an afterimage. What color is it?

You should have seen a green afterimage, but why is this significant?

The afterimage always shows the color that is complementary to the color of the image. Complementary colors are those that are exact opposites in the way the eye perceives them.

It is a common misconception that red is complementary to green. However, if you try the same experiment as above with a red image, you will see a turquoise afterimage, since red is actually complementary to turquoise. Similarly, orange is complementary to blue, and yellow to violet.

All the colors in the light spectrum have complements that exist within the spectrum – except green. There seems to be some kind of imbalance. What is going on? Is green somehow being discriminated against?

The light spectrum consists of a range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation (check this too). Red light has the longest wavelength; violet the shortest. The colors in between have wavelengths between those of red and violet light.

When our eyes see colors, they are actually detecting the different wavelengths of the light hitting the retina. Colors are distinguished by their wavelengths, and the brain processes this information and produces a visual display that we experience as color.

This means that colors only really exist within the brain – light is indeed travelling from objects to our eyes, and each object may well be transmitting/reflecting a different set of wavelengths of light; but what essentially defines a ‘color’ as opposed to a ‘wavelength’ is created within the brain.

If the eye receives light of more than one wavelength, the color generated in the brain is formed from the sum of the input responses on the retina. For example, if red light and green light enter the eye at the same time, the resulting colr produced in the brain is yellow, the color halfway between red and green in the spectrum.

So what does the brain do when our eyes detect wavelengths from both ends of the light spectrum at once (i.e. red and violet light)? Generally speaking, it has two options for interpreting the input data:

a) Sum the input responses to produce a color halfway between red and violet in the spectrum (which would in this case produce green – not a very representative color of a red and violet mix)
b) Invent a new color halfway between red and violet

Magenta is the evidence that the brain takes option b – it has apparently constructed a color to bridge the gap between red and violet, because such a color does not exist in the light spectrum. Magenta has no wavelength attributed to it, unlike all the other spectrum colors.

The light spectrum has a color missing because it does not feel the need to ‘close the loop’ in the way that our brains do. We need color to make sense of the world, but equally we need to make sense of color; even if that means taking opposite ends of the spectrum and bringing them together.

Well, now we've got that sorted out, explain this: stare at the dot in the middle of the image below - you should see all the colors melt away.

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[NullHypothesis]

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Boy Banned from Playing Baseball For Being Too Good

Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player -- too good, it turns out.

The right-hander has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.

Officials for the three-year-old league, which has eight teams and about 100 players, said they will disband Jericho's team, redistributing its players among other squads, and offered to refund $50 sign-up fees to anyone who asks for it. They say Jericho's coach, Wilfred Vidro, has resigned.

But Vidro says he didn't quit and the team refuses to disband. Players and parents held a protest at the league's field on Saturday urging the league to let Jericho pitch.

"He's never hurt any one," Vidro said. "He's on target all the time. How can you punish a kid for being too good?"

The controversy bothers Jericho, who says he misses pitching.

"I feel sad," he said. "I feel like it's all my fault nobody could play."

Jericho's coach and parents say the boy is being unfairly targeted because he turned down an invitation to join the defending league champion, which is sponsored by an employer of one of the league's administrators.

Jericho instead joined a team sponsored by Will Power Fitness. The team was 8-0 and on its way to the playoffs when Jericho was banned from pitching.

"I think it's discouraging when you're telling a 9-year-old you're too good at something," said his mother, Nicole Scott. "The whole objective in life is to find something you're good at and stick with it. I'd rather he spend all his time on the baseball field than idolizing someone standing on the street corner."

League attorney Peter Noble says the only factor in banning Jericho from the mound is his pitches are just too fast.

"He is a very skilled player, a very hard thrower," Noble said. "There are a lot of beginners. This is not a high-powered league. This is a developmental league whose main purpose is to promote the sport."

Noble acknowledged that Jericho had not beaned any batters in the co-ed league of 8- to 10-year-olds, but say parents expressed safety concerns.

"Facing that kind of speed" is frightening for beginning players, Noble said.

League officials say they first told Vidro that the boy could not pitch after a game on Aug. 13. Jericho played second base the next game on Aug. 16. But when he took the mound Wednesday, the other team walked off and a forfeit was called.

League officials say Jericho's mother became irate, threatening them and vowing to get the league shut down.

"I have never seen behavior of a parent like the behavior Jericho's mother exhibited Wednesday night," Noble said.

Scott denies threatening any one, but said she did call the police.

League officials suggested that Jericho play other positions, or pitch against older players or in a different league.

Local attorney John Williams was planning to meet with Jericho's parents Monday to discuss legal options.

"You don't have to be learned in the law to know in your heart that it's wrong," he said. "Now you have to be punished because you excel at something?"

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[sportsillustrated]

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Introducing Ubiquity

An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

It Doesn’t Have to be This Way

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time.

Enter Ubiquity

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
  
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
  
• Extend the browser functionality easily.
  
  

Learn more about Ubiquity and the capabilities that it could provide for users and developers.

The Initial Prototype

As part of this announcement, we’re also releasing an early experimental prototype to demonstrate some of the concepts of Ubiquity and the possibilities that it opens up. This release is meant as a illustration of a concept and mainly focuses on the platform. The next release will explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.

Install the prototype and you’ll be presented with a tutorial to get you started.

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  
• Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license.

This is the goal of what kinds of language-based services Ubiquity hopes to inspire people to create:

This is a screenshot of Ubiquity’s current map functionality:



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Japanese woman gives birth to her own grandchild

In a “miracle” that has stunned one of the world’s fastest-aging societies, a 61-year old Japanese woman has given birth to her own grandchild, sparking renewed calls for the entire process of surrogacy to be banned in Japan.

The unnamed woman, who is now thought to hold the record as the oldest Japanese woman ever to give birth successfully, undertook the controversial treatment at the Suwa Maternity Clinic – an institution that has already sparked fierce debate over the rights and wrongs of surrogate motherhood.

Despite the evident joy and relief of both mother and daughter, there remains a strong vein of disapproval over surrogacy in Japan: there is currently no legislation specifically outlawing the practice, but a panel convened by the government earlier in the year recommended an outright ban. It went further, demanding punishments for everyone involved in the surrogacy except the mother herself.

Yesterday’s successful treatment involved the woman having her daughter’s already fertilized egg implanted in her womb. The entire family is understood to have agreed to undergo the process, despite its difficulties, because the woman’s daughter was born without ovaries and unlike many young women in Japan, was keen to have children.

Doctors at the clinic suggested that while the woman may be the oldest to have successfully borne her own grandchild at Suwa, she is far from the first. The clinic has so far created four other mother-grandmothers, all of them at least 55 years old.

The doctor who runs the clinic, Yahiro Netsu, has been an ardent campaigner for surrogacy, sat on the panel that met earlier in the year, and insists that the process of using mothers to carry their own daughters’ babies to full term has not generated any serious problems. The panel concluded at the time that the “physical and mental burdens” imposed by surrogacy, along with the supposedly complex legal questions of parentage, made it undesirable.

Dr Netsu argued that surrogacy should be an available treatment to all women with severe fertility issues.

The birth at Suwa comes as the Japanese government is only just beginning to acknowledge the enormity of its fertility and birthrate crisis. Analysts speak of a “demographic timebomb” that will explode as the population ages beyond the economy’s ability to support itself, but many believe that the pain has already begun.

The government, meanwhile, is rapidly running out of ideas for how to reverse the trend. It has dawdled on birthrate policy for many years, and been forced to watch as the fertility rate – the average number of babies born to each woman of child-bearing age in Japan – has sunk to around 1.32. In parts of Tokyo, it has even dropped below 0.99.

In sharp decline for nearly 35 years, Japan’s birthrate has held below the critical replacement level of 2.1 children per couple since 1974. Strong social and political resistance to immigration mean that Japan’s population crisis has not been cushioned – as it has elsewhere in the developed world - by successive waves of newcomers.

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12 Things You Don’t Know About Car Insurance That Could Cost You

What you don’t know about your car insurance policy could be draining your wallet right now. Insure.com, Inc. has revealed 12 factors that may be costing you money.

1. You’ll pay for your friend’s bad driving

If your friend borrows your car and crashes it, you’ll have to file a claim with your insurance company. You’ll have to pay any deductible that applies and your rates could go up as a result of your claim, especially if you have made other recent claims.

2. Your personal property in your car isn’t covered by your auto insurance

Stolen or damaged items like compact discs aren’t covered by your car insurance.

3. You may be entitled to payment for sales tax and registration fees for a new car

Most states require insurers to pay sales taxes on total loss settlements. Some states require the insurer to pay it at the time of loss while other states require it to be paid only if you purchase a replacement vehicle within a certain time period. Make your request for a sales tax reimbursement no matter where you live.

4. You may be entitled to a diminished value claim in some states

Diminished value is based on the idea that any car that has been in an accident, regardless of how well the repairs are done, is worth less than the exact same car that hasn’t been in an accident. However, most states allow car insurers to use policy language that officially disallows diminished value claims.

There’s one way you may be entitled to a diminished value claim: If someone else hits you and you make a damage claim on that person’s insurance. That’s called a third-party claim and it’s possible to get diminished value damages as a third party.

5. You may be able to “stack” your coverage

Stacking uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage means you can collect payment more than once within the same auto policy or across two auto policies. There are two scenarios for stacking: First, if you have multiple cars, you can collect the limit of your UM/UIM policy to cover full payment for damages. Second, if you have more than one policy with UM/UIM coverage, you can make a claim under each policy until all your damages are recovered. Check the language of your policy.

6. Making a claim could increase your car insurance rates, but by how much?

When an insurance company decides to raise your premiums because you make a claim, it doesn’t follow any hard and fast rules; many factors are involved. For example, if you make a claim and have a birthday before renewal time, your birthday might bump you into a higher risk category along with the claim.

Some insurance companies have “accident forgiveness” guidelines. When you buy or renew your policy, ask how to qualify for accident forgiveness.

7. If you don’t drive much, “usage-based” car insurance could save you money

“Usage-based” car insurance allows you to buy coverage based on how much you actually drive. If you don’t drive much, this can save you up to 60 percent on your insurance. Progressive is the first insurance company to offer “pay-as-you-drive” policies through its MyRate program. Your mileage will be measured by a wireless device installed in a car port.

If your insurance company doesn’t offer usage-based coverage, inquire about “low-mileage discounts.”

8. Your credit history may affect your car insurance premium

Car insurers believe that your credit history is an indicator of whether you are going to make a claim, and price your insurance policy accordingly where states allow it.

9. You must officially cancel your insurance policy when you switch insurers

You can cancel your coverage at any time by notifying the company in writing of your intended date of termination. Most consumers assume that if they decide to terminate the policy at the end of the coverage period, they can simply ignore the bill. Insurance companies don’t see it that way. They will send you another bill for the next premium payment, and when you don’t pay it, the company can cancel you for nonpayment, which goes on your credit record.

10. You can wait to add your teenager to your policy until he or she is licensed

In most cases, insurance companies don’t require you to add your teenager to your policy until the teen has his or her driver’s license. The exception may be if you are in a high-risk insurance pool; you may then have to add your child when they receive their permit.

11. Paying in installments will usually increase your overall bill

“Fractional premium” fees are usually charged when you divide your annual premium payment into installments rather than pay for a year of coverage all at once. It can be as little as a few dollars per payment, but the more you break it down, the more it adds up. When you apply for the policy, ask what the fees are for paying in installments. If you can, pay your annual premium all at once.

12. Your car model affects your premium, but by how much?

Auto insurers have a premium-rating system for every car model, usually based on “Vehicle Series Ratings” (VSRs) received from the Insurance Services Office (ISO). This rating indicates how comparatively expensive your vehicle should be to insure. Factors include susceptibility to theft and typical claims losses for the vehicle.

If you are shopping for a new car, contact your insurance company and ask about the premium difference among the cars you are considering.

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The Psychology of Happiness: 13 Steps to a Better Life

We think we know what will make us happy, but we don’t. Many of us believe that money will make us happy, but it won’t. Except for the very poor, money cannot buy happiness. Instead of dreaming of vast wealth, we should dream of close friends and healthy bodies and meaningful work.

The psychology of happiness
Several years ago, James Montier, a “global equity strategist”, took a break from investing in order to publish a brief overview of existing research into the psychology of happiness [PDF]. Montier learned that happiness comprises three components:

• About 50% of individual happiness comes from a genetic set point. That is, we’re each predisposed to a certain level of happiness. Some of us are just naturally more inclined to be cheery than others.
• About 10% of our happiness is due to our circumstances. Our age, race, gender, personal history, and, yes, wealth, only make up about one-tenth of our happiness.
• The remaining 40% of an individual’s happiness seems to be derived from intentional activity, from “discrete actions or practices that people can choose to do”.

If we have no control over our genetic “happy point”, and if we have little control over our circumstances, then it makes sense to focus on those things that we can do to make ourselves happy. According to Montier’s paper, these activities include sex, exercise, sleep, and close relationships.

What does not bring happiness? Money, and the pursuit of happiness for its own sake. “A vast array of individuals seriously over-rate the importance of money in making themselves, and others, happy,” Montier writes. “Study after study from psychology shows that money doesn’t equal happiness.”

The happiness paradox
Writing in The Washington Post last June, Shankar Vedantam described recent research into this subject. If the United States is generally wealthier than it was thirty or forty years ago, then why aren’t people happier? Economist Richard Easterlin of the University of Southern California believes that part of the problem is the hedonic treadmill: once we reach a certain level of wealth, we want more. We’re never satisfied. From Vedantam’s article:

Easterlin attributes the phenomenon of happiness levels not keeping pace with economic gains to the fact that people’s desires and expectations change along with their material fortunes. Where an American in 1970 may have once dreamed about owning a house, he or she might now dream of owning two. Where people once dreamed of buying a new car, they now dream of buying a luxury model.

“People are wedded to the idea that more money will bring them more happiness,” Easterlin said. “When they think of the effects of more money, they are failing to factor in the fact that when they get more money they are going to want even more money. When they get more money, they are going to want a bigger house. They never have enough money, but what they do is sacrifice their family life and health to get more money.”

The irony is that health and the quality of personal relationships are among the most potent predictors of whether people report they are happy — and they are often the two things people sacrifice in their pursuit of greater wealth.

Why aren’t rich people happier? Perhaps it’s because many of them are workaholics, because they’re more focused on money than on the things that would bring them joy. A brief companion piece to The Washington Post story notes that researchers have found that “being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.”

In general, rich people aren’t much happier than those of us in the middle class. Yes, money can buy happiness if it elevates you from poverty, but beyond that the benefits are minimal. So why do so many people believe that money will make things better?

Stumbling on happiness
In 2006, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert published Stumbling on Happiness, a book about our inability to predict what will really make us happy. The following is a 22-minute video of a presentation Gilbert made at TED 2004, in which he compresses his ideas into bite-sized chunks:

Gilbert says that because humans can plan for the future, we naturally want to structure our lives in such a way that we are happy, both now and later. But how do we know what will make us happy? We don’t. In fact, we’re surprisingly bad at predicting what will bring us joy. Gilbert asks:

Which future would you prefer? One in which you win the lottery? Or one in which you become paraplegic? Which would make you happier? [...] A year after losing their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.

The problem is impact bias, the tendency to overestimate the “hedonic impact” of future events. Put another way, the things that we think will make us happy usually don’t make us as happy as we think they will. Winning the lottery isn’t a panacea. Having an affair with your hot new co-worker won’t be as thrilling as you imagine. And losing a leg isn’t the end of the world.

It turns out that humans are able to synthesize happiness. Many people look outside themselves for fulfillment; they expect to find it in things, or in relationships, or in large bank accounts. But true happiness comes from within. True happiness comes when we learn to be content with what we have.

13 steps to a better life
What does all this mean to you? If money won’t bring you happiness, what will? How can you stop making yourself miserable and start learning to love life? According to my research, these are the thirteen actions most likely to encourage happiness:

1. Don’t compare yourself to others. Financially, physically, and socially, comparing yourself to others is a trap. You will always have friends who have more money than you do, who can run faster than you can, who are more successful in their careers. Focus on your own life, on your own goals.
2. Foster close relationships. People with five or more close friends are more apt to describe themselves as happy than those with fewer.
3. Have sex. Sex, especially with someone you love, is consistently ranked as a top source of happiness. A long-term loving partnership goes hand-in-hand with this.
4. Get regular exercise. There’s a strong tie between physical health and happiness. Anyone who has experienced a prolonged injury or illness knows just how emotionally devastating it can be. Eat right, exercise, and take care of our body. (And read Get Fit Slowly!)
5. Obtain adequate sleep. Good sleep is an essential component of good health. When you’re not well-rested, your body and your mind do not operate at peak capacity. Your mood suffers. (Read more in my brief guide to better sleep.)
6. Set and pursue goals. I believe that the road to wealth is paved with goals. More than that, the road to happiness is paved with goals. Continued self-improvement makes life more fulfilling.
7. Find meaningful work. There are some who argue a job is just a job. I believe that fulfilling work is more than that — it’s a vocation. It can take decades to find the work you were meant to do. But when you find it, it can bring added meaning to your life.
8. Join a group. Those who are members of a group, like a church congregation, experience greater happiness. But the group doesn’t have to be religious. Join a book group. Meet others for a Saturday morning bike ride. Sit in at the knitting circle down at the yarn shop.
9. Don’t dwell on the past. I know a guy who beats himself up over mistakes he’s made before. Rather than concentrate on the present (or, better yet, on the future), he lets the past eat away at his happiness. Focus on the now.
10. Embrace routine. Research shows that although we believe we want variety and choice, we’re actually happier with limited options. It’s not that we want no choice at all, just that we don’t want to be overwhelmed. Routines help limit choices. They’re comfortable and familiar and, used judiciously, they can make us happy.
11. Practice moderation. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. It’s okay to indulge yourself on occasion — just don’t let it get out of control. Addictions and compulsions can ruin lives.
12. Be grateful. It’s no accident that so many self-help books encourage readers to practice gratitude. When we regularly take time to be thankful for the things we have, we appreciate them more. We’re less likely to take them for granted, and less likely to become jealous of others.
13. Help others. Over and over again, studies have shown that altruism is one of the best ways to boost your happiness. Sure, volunteering at the local homeless shelter helps, but so too does just being nice in daily life.

Remember: True wealth is not about money. True wealth is about relationships, about good health, and about continued self-improvement.

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10 People with Unbelievable Medical Conditions

1. The Woman Who has 200 Orgasms every day

UK's Sarah Carmen, 24, is a 200-a-day orgasm girl who gets good, good, GOOD vibrations from almost anything. She suffers from Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), which increases blood flow to the sex organs. "Sometimes I have so much sex to try to calm myself down I get bored of it. And men I sleep with don't seem to make as much effort because I climax so easily."

She believes her condition was brought on by the pills. "Within a few weeks I just began to get more and more aroused more and more of the time and I just kept having endless orgasms. It started off in bed where sex sessions would last for hours and my boyfriend would be stunned at how many times I would orgasm. Then it would happen after sex. I'd be thinking about what we'd done in bed and I'd start feeling a bit flushed, then I'd become aroused and climax. In six months I was having 150 orgasms a day—and it has been as many as 200."

She and her boyfriend split— and new partners struggle to keep up with her sex demands. "Often, I'll want to wear myself out by having as many orgasms as I can so they stop and I can get some peace," she said.

2. The Man Who Can't Get Fat

Mr Perry, 59, can eat whatever he likes - including unlimited pies, burgers and desserts - and never get fat. He cannot put on weight because of a condition called lipodystrophy that makes his body rapidly burn fat.

He used to be a chubby child, but at age 12 the fat dropped off "almost over night". He initially tried to eat more to gain weight, but it had no effect. Mr Perry, of Ilford in Essex, endured a decade of tests before the illness was diagnosed. It finally emerged that his body produces six times the normal level of insulin. Doctors have admitted that the condition would be a "slimmer's dream".

3. The Man Who Doesn't Feel Cold

Dutchman Wim Hof, also known as the Iceman, is the man that swam under ice, and stood in bins filled with ice. He climbed the Mt. Blanc in shorts in the icy cold, harvested world records and always stands for new challenges.

Scientists can't really explain it, but the 48-year-old Dutchman is able to withstand, and even thrive, in temperatures that could be fatal to the average person.

4. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep: stayed awake 24 hours a day for years

Rhett Lamb is often cranky like any other 3-year-old toddler, but there’s one thing that makes him completely different: he has a rare medical condition in which he can’t sleep a wink.

Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.

After a number of conflicting opinions, Shannon and David Lamb finally learned what was wrong with their child: Doctors diagnosed Rhett with an extremely rare condition called chiari malformation.

"The brain literally is squeezed into the spinal column. What happens is you get compression, squeezing, strangulating of the brain stem, which has all the vital functions that control sleep, speech, our cranial nerves, our circulatory system, even our breathing system," Savard said.

5. The Girl Who is Allergic to Water

Teenager Ashleigh Morris can't go swimming, soak in a hot bath or enjoy a shower after a stressful day's work - she's allergic to water. Even sweating brings the 19-year-old out in a painful rash.

Ashleigh, from Melbourne, Australia, is allergic to water of any temperature, a condition she's lived with since she was 14. She suffers from an extremely rare skin disorder called Aquagenic Urticaria - so unusual that only a handful of cases are documented worldwide.

6. The Woman Who Can’t Forget

That's the story of AJ, an extraordinary 40-year-old married woman who remembers everything.

McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events. If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she’ll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.

The 40-year-old woman, who was given the code name AJ to protect her privacy, is so unusual that UCI coined a name for her condition in a recent issue of the journal Neurocase: hyperthymestic syndrome.

7. The Girl Who Eats Only Tic Tacs

Meet Natalie Cooper, a 17-year-old teenager who has a mystery illness that makes her sick every time she eats anything. Well, almost anything. She can eat one thing that doesn’t make her sick: Tic tac mint!

For reasons that doctors are unable to explain, Tic tacs are the only thing she can stomach, meaning she has to get the rest of her sustenance from a specially formulated feed through a tube.

8. The Musician Who Can't Stop Hiccupping

Chris Sands, 24, from Lincoln, hiccups as often as every two seconds - and sometimes even when he is asleep. He has tried a variety of cures, including hypnosis and yoga, but nothing has worked. Mr Sands thinks his problem stems from an acid reflux condition caused by a damaged valve in his stomach. "If the acid levels are severe enough they are going to do keyhole surgery and grab part of my stomach and wrap it around the valve to tighten it," he said.

Mr Sands, who is a backing singer in the group Ebullient, said the condition has hampered his career as he has only been able to perform four times. In the next couple of weeks --as of the day of the report--, doctors at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre will put a tube into his stomach to monitor acid levels and decide if keyhole surgery is possible.

9. The Girl That Collapses Every Time She Laughs

Kay Underwood, 20, has cataplexy, which means that almost any sort of strong emotion triggers a dramatic weakening of her muscles. Exhilaration, anger, fear, surprise, awe and even embarrassment can also cause sufferers to suddenly collapse on the spot.

Kay, of Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire (UK), who was diagnosed with the condition five years ago, once collapsed more than 40 times in a single day. She said: "People find it very odd when it happens, and it isn't always easy to cope with strangers' reactions. "

Like most cataplexy sufferers, Ms Underwood is also battling narcolepsy - a condition that makes her drop off to sleep without warning. Narcolepsy affects around 30,000 people in the UK and about 70 per cent of them also have cataplexy.

The Woman Who is Allergic to Modern Technology

For most people talking on a mobile phone, cooking dinner in the microwave or driving in a car is simply part of modern living in 21st century Britain. But completing any such tasks is impossible for Debbie Bird - because she is allergic to Cell Phones and Microwaves.

The 39-year-old is so sensitive to the electromagnetic field (emf) or 'smog' created by computers, mobile phones, microwave ovens and even some cars, that she develops a painful skin rash and her eyelids swell to three times their size if she goes near them. As a consequence, Mrs Bird, a health spa manager, has transformed her home into an EMF-free zone to try and stay healthy. 'I can no longer do things that I used to take for granted,' Mrs Bird said. "My day-to-day life has been seriously affected by EMF".

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10 Homes that Defy Gravity

1. Wozoco Apartments (Amsterdam-Osdorp, Netherlands)

A zoning law and blueprint flub were the inspiration for this apartment complex. Dutch housing regulations require apartment construction to provide a certain amount of daylight to their tenants–but MVRDV architects forgot to plan for that. Their solution? To hang thirteen of the 100 units off the north facade of the block. The ingenious design saves ground floor space and allows enough sunlight to enter the east or west facade.

2. Floating Castle (Ukraine)

Supported by a single cantilever --and quite discussed at Panoramio, this mysterious levitating farm house belongs in a sci-fi flick. It’s claimed to be an old bunker for the overload of mineral fertilizers but we’re sure there’s a better back story... alien architects probably had a hand in it.

3. Habitat 67 (Montreal, Canada)

Apartments connect and stack like Lego blocks in Montreal's Habitat 67. Without a traditional vertical construction, the apartments have the open space that most urban residences lack, including a separate patio for each apartment.

4. Free Spirit Spheres (British Columbia, Canada)

Free Spirit Spheres can be hung from the trees as shown, making a tree house. They can also be hung from any other solid objects or placed in cradles on the ground. There are four attachment points on the top of each sphere and another four anchor points on the bottom. Each of the attachment points is strong enough to carry the weight of the entire sphere and contents.

The spheres are made of two laminations of wood strips over laminated wood frames. The outside surface is then finished and covered with a clear fibreglass. The result is a beautiful and very tough skin. The skin is waterproof and strong enough to take the impacts that come with life in a dynamic environment such as the forest.

5. Cube House (Rotterdam, Netherlands)

Living in a tilted house is much easier than it looks—just ask the people living in these the Kijk-Kubus homes. Architect Piet Blom tipped a conventional house forty-five degrees and rested it upon a hexagon-shaped pole so that three sides face down and the other three face the sky. Each of the cube houses accommodates three floors: a living space including a kitchen, study and bathroom, the middle floor houses bedrooms and the top is the pyramid room that can act like an attic or viewing deck. These houses are quite expensive, but you can satisfy your curiosity by visiting the museum show house.

6. Gangster's House (Archangelsk, Russia)

One-time Russian gangster Nikolai Sutyagin’s home is certainly unusual. The eccentric former convict’s seemingly accidental 15-year project begun in 1992 stands 13 floors, 144 feet high. He claims he was only intending to build a two-story house - larger than those of his neighbours to reflect his position as the city’s richest man.

7. Mushroom House (Cincinnati, Ohio)

So disparate in materials and shapes this hodgepodge house looks like its been welded and glued together. But this is no hobo-construction, it was designed by the professor of architecture and interior design at the University of Cincinnati, Terry Brown, and was recently on the market for an estimated $400K.

8. Upside-Down House (Syzmbark, Poland)

This upside down design seems totally nonsensical–but that is exactly the message the Polish philanthropist and designer, Daniel Czapiewski, was trying to send. The unstable and backward construction was built as a social commentary on Poland’s former Communist era. The monument is worth a trip be it for a lesson in history or balance.

9. Pod House (New Rochelle, New York)

We assumed this oddball home was UFO-inspired, but it turns out the weed Queen Anne’s lace is where it got it's roots. Its thin stems support pods with interconnecting walkways.

Heliotrope Rotating House (Freiburg, Germany)

Green to the extreme, Architect Rolf Disch built a solar powered home that rotates towards the warm sun in the winter and rotates back toward its well-insulated rear in the summer. A house that spins in circles doesn’t sound too stable to us, but for the environment it is worth the risk.

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Top Five Bizarre Accidents

In recent years, people around the world have injured themselves in some rather surprising ways. This list is what I consider the top five strangest accidents that people have had.

Bouncy Castle Blown Away With People inside It

A 5-year-old girl and her 22-month-old sister were inside a bouncy castle in Sahuarita, Arizona, when strong winds lifted the castle up into the air and carried it away.

The ride had been rented by the girls' parents. Apparently they had been warned of possible dangers of high winds on the release form they signed, but had never actually read the paperwork when they signed it.

The girls suffered only minor injuries.

Man Ties Himself to Scaffolding Then Throws It to the Ground

For safety, whilst working on the 4th floor of the county jail annex, a 24-year-old construction worker tied himself to a piece of scaffolding. He later forgot that he was attached to the scaffolding, and threw it towards the ground. He was pulled down by the piece of scaffolding, causing him to land on top of it, piercing both his legs.

Teacher Tells Students to Tape Him to Wall

As part of a school fund-raising event, a physics teacher told his students to duct tape him to a wall. However, since duct tape doesn't “breathe”, the teacher overheated and lost consciousness. He later said, "I had some fantastic dreams while I was out." Doctors advised that the teacher would have died if the students hadn't acted promptly and removed the tape.

Man Shoots Himself in the Shoulder Twice

In 2001, a Pennsylvania man was curious to find out what it would feel like to be hit by a bullet, so he shot himself in the shoulder with a gun! An ambulance raced to his house, for what was actually the second time, to treat his new gunshot wound. Explaining why he had shot himself on two separate occasions, the man said, “I wanted to see if it hurt as much as it did the first time."

Man Mistakes Sharks for Dolphins

On a Florida beach in 1999, a man was fishing with his friends when he saw fins moving around in the water. “Dolphins!” he excitedly thought, before jumping into the water to swim with them. However, the fins turned out to belong to sharks. His friends managed to fish him out of the water, and he was treated at hospital for shark bites.

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Scientists identify a protein that promotes the burning of body fat

Scientists have found a protein that can promote the burning of body fat – a discovery that could lead to new ways to tackle obesity.

Mice injected with a protein called BMP7 increased their production of "good" brown fat cells, while keeping their levels of the normal white fat cells constant.

Fat is a crucial part of the body's regulation of metabolism and body temperature. There are two types of fat cell with different functions: the well-known white fat cells, which store energy and contribute to obesity, and lesser-known brown fat cells that burn calories to generate body heat.

Though people are born with a good supply of brown fat cells, these are usually lost after infancy. Reintroducing brown fat could therefore increase the amount of energy a person burns.

In their experiments, Yu-Hua Tseng's team at the Joslin Diabetes Centre at Harvard Medical School looked at the factors that determine the amounts of different types of fat cell in the body. They identified a protein called BMP7 which promotes the creation of brown fat. Without it, the amount of brown fat in mice ran low.

When the protein was administered artificially, it boosted the amount of brown fat and left the white fat unchanged. The results are published today in Nature.

"As we learn more about the controls of brown fat development, medical interventions to increase energy expenditure by brown fat inducing agents, such as BMP7, may provide hope to these individuals in losing weight and preventing the metabolic disorders associated with obesity," said Tseng.

A separate study led by Bruce Spiegelman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Massachusetts found that brown fat cells can be made from the same precursor tissue that normally produces muscle cells.

Spiegelman found that a molecular switch called PRDM16 regulates the creation of brown fat from immature muscle cells. Turning off the switch in the lab converted brown fat in mice into muscle cells.

Both studies are published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

"Brown fat can increase energy expenditure and protect against obesity," Spiegelman writes. "The epidemic of obesity, closely associated with increases in diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, cancer and other disorders, has propelled a major interest in adipose cells and tissues."

The next step, he says, is to find specific drugs and techniques that could help the body make more brown fat cells or else genetically engineer white fat cells to turn brown.

In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Barbara Cannon and Jan Nedergaard, both biologists at Stockholm University, said: "Insights into the developmental origin of brown fat cells are of particular interest because of the ability of these cells to burn fat. But, as is often the case in science, new questions follow new insights."

They add that a thorough understanding the function and creation of brown fat cells could take us closer to the "ultimate goal of promoting the brown fat lineage as a potential way of counteracting obesity."

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[guardian]

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5 Really Weird Things About Water

Water, good ol' H₂O, seems like a pretty simple substance to you and me. But in reality, water - the foundation of life and most common of liquid - is really weird and scientists actually don't completely understand how water works.

Here are 5 really weird things about water:

1. Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water

Take two pails of water; fill one with hot water and the other one with cold water, and put them in the freezer. The hot one would be frozen before the cold one. But wait, you say, that's counterintuitive: wouldn't the hot water have to cool down to the temperature of the cold water before proceeding to freezing temperature, whereas the cold one has "less to go" before freezing?

In 1963, a Tanzanian high-school student named Erasto B. Mpemba was freezing hot ice cream mix in a cooking class when he noticed that a hot mix actually froze faster than a cold mix. When he asked his teacher about this phenomenon, his teacher ridiculed him by saying "All I can say is that is Mpemba's physics and not universal physics."

Thankfully, Mpemba didn't back down - he convinced a physics professor to conduct an experiment which eventually confirmed his observations: in certain conditions, hot water indeed freezes before cold water*.

Actually, Mpemba was in good company. The phenomenon of hot water freezing first, now called the "Mpemba effect" was noted by none other than Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes.

But how do scientists explain this strange phenomenon? It turns out that no one really knows but there are several possible explanations, including differences in supercooling (see below), evaporation, frost formation, convection, and effects of dissolved gasses between the hot and cold water.

*In reality - of course - it's much more complex than that: hot water freezes first (it forms ice at a higher temperature than cold water), whereas cold water freezes faster (it takes less time to reach the supercooled state from which it forms ice) - see discussion on our previous blog post about this topic.

2. Supercooling and "Instant" Ice

Everybody knows that when you cool water to 0 °C (32 °F) it forms ice ... except that in some cases it doesn't! You can actually chill very pure water past its freezing point (at standard pressure, no cheating!) without it ever becoming solid.

Scientist know a lot about supercooling: it turns out that ice crystals need nucleation points to start forming. These nucleation points could be anything from gas bubbles to impurities to the rough surface of the container. Without these things, water would continue to be a "supercooled" liquid well below its freezing point.

When nucleation is triggered, then a supercooled water would "instantly" turn into ice, as this very cool video clip by Phil Medina of MrSciGuy shows:

Note: Similarly, superheated water remains liquid even when heated past its boiling point.

3. Glassy Water

Quick: how many phases of water are there? If you answer three (liquid, gas, and solid) you'd be wrong. There are at least 5 different phases of liquid water and 14 different phases (that scientists have found so far) of ice.

Remember the supercooling we talked about before? Well, it turns out that no matter what you do, at -38 °C even the purest supercooled water spontaneously turns into ice (with a little audible "bang" no less). But what happens if you continue to lower the temperature? Well, at -120 °C something strange starts to happen: the water becomes ultraviscous, or thick like molasses. And below -135 °C, it becomes "glassy water," a solid with no crystal structure. (Source)

4. Quantum Properties of Water

At a molecular level, water is even weirder. In 1995, a neutron scattering experiment got a weird result: physicists found that when neutrons were aimed at water molecules, they "saw" 25% fewer hydrogen protons than expected.

Long story short, at the level of attoseconds (10^-18 seconds) there is a weird quantum effect going on and the chemical formula for water isn't H₂O. It's actually H_1.5O! (Source)

5. Does Water Have Memory?

In the alternative medicine of homeopathy, a dilute solution of a compound can is purported to have healing effects, even if the dilution factor is so large that statistically there isn't a single molecule of anything in it except for water. Homeopathy proponents explain this paradox with a concept called "water memory" where water molecules "remember" what particles were once dissolved in it.

This made no sense to Madeleine Ennis, a pharmacologist and professor at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Ennis, who also happened to be a vocal critic of homeopathy, devised an experiment to disprove "water memory" once and for all - but discovered that her result was the exact opposite!

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains skeptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry. (Source)

So far, other scientists failed to reproduce Ennis' experimental findings (throughout, Ennis herself was skeptical of the result's interpretation that water has a "memory" but maintained that the phenomenon she saw was real).

See also Jacques Benveniste's Nature controversy | Louise Rey's thermoluminescence study

More recently, a team of scientists at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Max Born Institute in Germany, studying water dynamics using fancy multi-dimensional nonlinear infrared spectroscopy did find that water have a memory of sorts - in form of hydrogen bond network amongst water molecules. Problem for homeopathy was, this effect lasted only 50 femtoseconds (5 x 10^-14 seconds)!

Bonus: Ice Spikes

photo: SnowCrystals

Ice spikes are, well, spikes that grow out of ice cube trays. They look like stalagmites found in caves, and you can make 'em yourself using distilled water. Kenneth G. Libbrecht of SnowCrystals explains:

How do Ice Spikes Form?

Ice spikes grow as the water in an ice cube tray turns to ice. The water first freezes on the top surface, around the edges of what will become the ice cube. The ice slowly freezes in from the edges, until just a small hole is left unfrozen in the surface. At the same time, while the surface is freezing, more ice starts to form around the sides of the cube.

Since ice expands as it freezes, the ice freezing below the surface starts to push water up through the hole in the surface ice (see diagram). If the conditions are just right, then water will be forced out of the hole in the ice and it will freeze into an ice spike, a bit like lava pouring out of a hole in the ground to makes a volcano. But water does not flow down the sides of a thin spike, so in that way it is different from a volcano. Rather, the water freezes around the rim of the tube, and thus adds to its length. The spike can continue growing taller until all the water freezes, cutting off the supply, or until the tube freezes shut. The tallest spike we've seen growing in an ordinary ice cube tray was 56mm (2.2in) long. (Source)

Bonus 2: Make Instant Snow with Boiling Water

What do you get when you throw boiling water to the air in subzero weather? Instant snow. Interestingly, it only works with boiling hot water:

[YouTube clip]

---

These aren't the only things weird about water. We didn't talk about how water density changes with temperature (ice, for instance, is less dense than water so it floats - a key property of water that made life possible in the oceans and lakes). Nor did we talk about the weirdly strong surface tension of water, ordered clustering of liquid water, and so on. If you are interested, check out the Anomalous Properties of Water article by Martin Chaplin

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100 Million Green Facts You Didn’t Know About Junk Mail

100 Million Trees Are Cut Each Year to Generate Junk Mail

A report by ForestEthics, the nonprofit environmental organization whose mission is to protect endangered forests, has made a very startling revelation: that there are 100 million green reasons why junk mail are an annoying intrusion.

Not that the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year are irksome enough or that the emissions of junk mail are equal to those of over nine million cars or 51 million tons of greenhouse gases.

The group estimates that every year, more than 100 million trees are cut down to make junk mail - the equivalent of clear-cutting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months!

According to the report (PDF), those trees come from endangered forests like Canada’s Boreal, the forests of the Southeastern United States, Indonesia and northern Europe, as well as smaller areas of rare or disappearing forest ecosystems in the Western United States, Brazil, Chile, and Russia.

In the Boreal alone, the equivalent of over 220,000 acres of forest are destroyed every year to make junk mail in the United States. ForestEthics statistics show that US junk mail makes up almost 10% of all the timber harvested in the Canadian Boreal, by volume as well as by
harvest area.

The report which attempts to assess junk mail effects on global warming features a myth and fact section that debunks alleged misinformation spread in the wake of ForestEthics’ Do Not Mail campaign.

Jim Ford, the report’s author, said: “Junk mail has implications for climate change that start in the forest, continue through paper production, printing and distribution, and end with recycling or landfilling.”

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Pepperoni Hot Pockets Recalled For Containing Plastic

What's that tasty new flavor in your Hot Pocket? Maybe it's plastic! Nestlé is recalling over 200,000 pounds of Hot Pockets after some pieces of what they suspect is a testing device turned up in the product.

The recall is for 54-ounce, 12-pack cartons of Hot Pockets Pepperoni Pizza with the following printed on the sides of each carton: “8157544614D,” “EST 7721A” and “BEST BEFORE JAN2010.”

If you have some of the recalled product, spit out that plastic and call Nestlé Consumer Services Center at 1-800-350-5016.

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[consumerist]

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The Pit of Life and Death

Just outside Butte, Montana lies a pit of greenish poison a mile and a half wide and over a third of a mile deep. It hasn't always been so - it was once a thriving copper mine appropriately dubbed “The Richest Hill in the World.” Over a billion tons of copper ore, silver, gold, and other metals were extracted from the rock of southwestern Montana, making the mining town of Butte one of the richest communities in the country, as well as feeding America’s industrial might for nearly a hundred years.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the Anaconda Mining Company was in charge of virtually all the mining operations. When running underground mines became too costly in the 1950’s, Anaconda switched to the drastic but effective methods of “mountaintop removal” and open pit mining. Huge amounts of copper were needed to satisfy the growing demand for radios, televisions, telephones, automobiles, computers, and all the other equipment of America’s post-war boom. As more and more rock was excavated, groundwater began to seep into the pit, and pumps had to be installed to keep it from slowly flooding.

By 1983, the hill was so exhausted that the Anaconda Mining Company was no longer able to extract minerals in profitable amounts. They packed up all the equipment that they could move, shut down the water pumps, and moved on to more lucrative scraps of Earth. Without the pumps, rain and groundwater gradually began to collect in the pit, leaching out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

In 1995, an analytic chemist named William Chatham saw something unusual in the allegedly lifeless lake: a small clump of green slime floating on the water's surface. He snagged a sample and brought it to biologist Grant Mitman at the nearby Montana Tech campus of the University of Montana, where Mitman found to his amazement that the goop was a mass of single-celled algae. He called in fellow Tech faculty Andrea and Don Stierle, experts in the biochemistry of microorganisms. The Stierles had recently been trekking about the northwest, looking for cancer-fighting compounds in local fungi with great success. Coincidentally, the Stierles’ funding had just run out, and they needed a new project. They leapt at the opportunity to study these bizarre organisms.

After examining the slime under a microscope, the researchers identified it as Euglena mutabilis, a protozoan which has the remarkable ability of being able to survive in the toxic waters of the Berkeley Pit by altering its local environment to something more hospitable. Through photosynthesis, it increases the oxygen level in the water, which causes dissolved metals to oxidize and precipitate out. In addition, it pulls iron out of the water and sequesters it inside of itself. This makes it a classic example of an extremophile. Extremophiles are organisms that can tolerate and even thrive in environments that will destroy most other living things. Some can even repair their own damaged DNA, a trait which makes them extremely interesting to cancer researchers. The Stierles reasoned that where there’s one extremophile, there may be others – most likely blown in by the wind. Given their previous successes with strange microorganisms, the researchers believed that the Berkeley Pit and its fledgling extremophile population could produce some medically useful chemicals.

The Stierles were so intrigued by the possibilities that they started work even before securing funding. A squadron of expert researchers was recruited from the undergrads at Montana Tech, and even from a local high school. They collected water samples, isolated microorganisms, and cultured them. The team eventually identified over 160 different species, but they lacked the equipment needed to isolate the interesting chemicals from the microorganisms. Shlepping around western Montana, the Stierles begged and borrowed time at other facilities while they doggedly processed the cultured organisms. Their tenacity led to the discovery of a number of promising chemicals. Three of these, berkeleydione, berkeleytrione, and Berkeley acid, came from species of the fungus Penicillium that had never been seen before, and were therefore named after the Berkeley Pit.

The next step was to see what effect these chemicals had, if any, on other living cells. Thanks to modern biochemical assay techniques, dozens of chemicals can be tested against one organism– or one chemical against dozens of organisms– in a single pass. For reasons that are not entirely clear, many compounds which attack cancer cells are also harmful to brine shrimp, therefore most modern assay tests include the brine shrimp lethality test as a standard procedure. The Stierles exposed swarms of tiny crustacean volunteers to the Berkeley Pit chemicals, and to their delight, five of the chemicals showed anti-cancer properties. Further tests revealed that berkeleydione helped slow the growth of a type of lung cancer cell, and Berkeley acid went after ovarian cancer cells. All five were passed along to the National Cancer Institute for further study.

Other researchers are looking into the Pit as well - not for cancer-fighters or other drugs, but simply for ways to help clean the place up. In 1995, a flock of migrating snow geese stopped at the massive pond for a rest, and at least 342 of them died there. Authorities now use firecrackers and loudspeakers to scare away migrating waterfowl, but there have been a few smaller die-offs nonetheless. Also, on certain mornings, a sinister mist creeps out of the Pit and wraps its tentacles around the streets of Butte. Citizens are understandably anxious about this potentially poisonous fog of doom. The water level is rising at a rate of several inches a month, and if unchecked it will spill over into the area’s groundwater in twenty years. That danger has earned the area the dubious distinction of being one of the EPA’s largest Superfund sites. Normally such water is treated by adding lime to the water to reduce the acidity and remove much of the metal, however the Berkeley Pit is so saturated with undesirables that this process would produce tons of toxic sludge every day. Other methods are safer, but are prohibitively expensive. Currently, the EPA's plan is to focus on containment.

Grant Mitman believes that the best way to clean up the Pit is to use the algae that already live there. E. Mutabilis, for one, tends to grow in clumps. These clumps clean up their neighborhoods enough for other extremophiles to move in. These organisms would collect the metals within their own cells, and upon dying they would sink to the bottom and drag the metals with them. To Mitman, it’s all a matter of finding the right mix of extremophiles for a self-sustaining algal colony. Once the right mix is found, there are many other mine-contaminated waters awaiting treatment that could use a similar biology-based cleanup.

With metals concentrated at the bottom, and cleaner water at the top, the Pit could conceivably be reopened. The bottom sludge could be collected and processed for its ever-more-valuable metal content, and the water could be used for industry or agriculture. While it might not be safe to drink, the water could still be worth a quarter million dollars a year in a water-hungry West. In the meantime, the Pit has become a popular tourist attraction. There's a small museum and gift shop located well above the water level. A number of National Historic Landmarks related to mining are in the area, which has prompted some people to call for the creation of a National Park centered on the Pit. With luck, what was once the Richest Hill in the World could eventually provide riches of a different sort.

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[damninteresting]

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Face transplant 'double success'

Successful results from two more face transplants will speed progress towards similar operations in other countries, say experts.

The Lancet journal reported operations involving a bear attack victim in China, and a French patient with a massive facial tumour had taken place.

The Chinese patient was given not just the lip, nose, skin and muscle from a donor, but even some facial bone.

Specialists in London are working towards the UK's first transplant.

Frenchwoman Isabel Dinoire became the world's first face transplant patient in 2005 after being savaged by a pet dog. She described the results of the operation as a "miracle".

The latest operations were just as complex, but involved different challenges for French and Chinese surgeons.

The first operation took place in April 2006. The patient was a farmer from a remote village in Yunnan province in China, who had been attacked by a bear 18 months earlier, leaving a huge section of tissue missing from the right side of his face.

The operation, at Xijing Hospital in Xi'an City, used the face of a 25-year-old man who had died in a traffic accident.

Despite immune-suppressing treatment, the patient had to battle his body's attempt to reject the new tissue on three occasions.

His doctors said they now believed that face transplantation was a viable long-term option.

The second operation, carried out in Paris in January 2007, involved a 29-year-old man disfigured by a neurofibroma, a massive tumour growing on his facial nerves.

Its removal was timed to coincide with a face transplant, and a year later, doctors again declared the operation a success.

The patient told them that previously he had been considered a "monster", but now felt like an anonymous person in the crowd.

The procedure, they said, had moved "from ethical debate to surgical reality".

Moving forward

In the UK, surgeons at the Royal Free Hospital in London are making preparations to carry out the operation if the right combination of patient and donor becomes available.

Professor Iain Hutchison, a consultant oral and maxillofacial surgeon at Barts and the London Hospital, and founder of the "Saving Faces" charity, said that the twin successes would offer more encouragement for surgical teams considering carrying out their own operations.

He said: "This takes a step forward in two ways - firstly the use of bone as well as skin - and next is carrying out this operation on someone with a benign tumour.

"There will always be limitations to this - the main one would be a societal constraint - a lack of suitable donors.

"However, there is certainly demand for this, with the major area being for people with facial burns."

Roger Green, president of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons, said: "This particular surgery is a way of giving back a life to a patient who has been horribly scarred by burns, trauma or a tumour.

"However, we must acknowledge the long-term medical risks, such as transplant rejection and the need for life-long medication, associated with the procedure. There is also the potential of psychological impact following such a transplant."

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Top 5 Free Programs to Clean Up Your Computer

Most of us don’t keep our computer as clean as it should be. I’m not talking about the exterior (although I’m sure that could be cleaned as well). I’m talking about cleaning up your hard drive and getting rid of all the unneeded junk that everyone accumulates over the years. You might have anything from partial installs to some nice malware or spyware. Either way, it slows you and your computer down. The following programs will help you keep your computer clean and running fast.

Defraggler

10.5 gigs of fragmented files, I’m glad I wrote this article. Defraggler is an application that will replace the default Windows defragging options. Defraggler is great, because it is extremely light weight and works much faster than defragging in Windows. It also allows you to pick and choose the files you want to defrag. This can make defragging painless and much quicker.

nCleaner

nCleaner is the Swiss Army Knife of this list. It allows you to clean your system, find unneeded junk, tweak your settings and manage your startup. In the past, I had a few programs that did all of the things that are included in this program, but I only need nCleaner now. It’s extremely easy to use, because it is very clear about what settings are recommended and what settings are not. Cleaning programs can often be intimidating or unclear about what they are changing, but nCleaner makes sure to be clear about the changes it is making on your computer.

AVG Free

AVG Free is often regarded as the best free anti-virus software available. It offers basic anti-virus and anti-spyware protection for your computer. The protection is basic, but if you know your way around the Internet and know what to avoid, it should provide sufficient protection.

Spybot-Search & Destroy

Spyware is a problem for most computer users, and the thought of something trying to collect as much personal information as possible from my computer is more than enough to scare me. Spybot S&D is one of the best tools to remove all of that spyware and make your computer more private and run faster.

Ad-Aware 2008

Ad-Aware does for malware what Spybot does for spyware. It will clean up and remove any malicious software that the other programs may miss. Ad-Aware rounds out my list of programs you need to get all of that stuff on your hard drive trying to slow you down.

Using all of these programs together will help keep your computer running fast for years to come. Are there any other programs you use to clean up your computer?

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How your printer tricks you into buying ink and toner when you don't need it

Take That, Stupid Printer!

I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints—until one day last year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty. It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment, when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did it really need new toner—or was my printer lying to me?

To find out, I did what I normally do when I'm trying to save $60: I Googled. Eventually I came upon a note on FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser. This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out.

Brother isn't the only company whose printers quit while they've still got life in them. Because the industry operates on a classic razor-and-blades business model—the printer itself isn't pricy, but ink and toner refills cost an exorbitant amount—printer manufacturers have a huge incentive to get you to replace your cartridges quickly. One way they do so is through technology: Rather than printing ever-fainter pages, many brands of printers—like my Brother—are outfitted with sensors or software that try to predict when they'll run out of ink. Often, though, the printer's guess is off; all over the Web, people report that their printers die before their time.

Enter OppressedPrinterUser. Indeed, instructions for fooling different laser printers into thinking you've installed a new cartridge are easy to come by. People are even trying to sell such advice on eBay. If you're at all skilled at searching the Web, you can probably find out how to do it for free, though. Just Google some combination of your printer's model number and the words toner, override, cheap, and perhaps lying bastards.

Similar search terms led me to find that many Hewlett-Packard printers can be brought back to life by digging deep into their onboard menus and pressing certain combinations of buttons. (HP buries these commands in the darkest recesses of its instruction manuals—see Page 163 of this PDF.) Some Canon models seem to respond well to shutting the printer off for a while; apparently, this resets the system's status indicator. If you can't find specific instructions for your model, there are some catchall methods: Try removing your toner cartridge and leaving the toner bay open for 15 or 20 seconds—the printer's software might take that as a cue that you've installed a new cartridge. Vigorously shaking a laser toner cartridge also gets good results; it breaks up clumps of ink and bathes the internal sensor in toner.

These tricks generally apply to laser printers. It's more difficult to find ways to override ink-level sensors in an inkjet printer, and, at least according to printer manufactures, doing so is more dangerous. I was able to dig up instructions for getting around HP inkjets' shut-off, and one blogger found that coloring in his Brother inkjet cartridge with a Sharpie got it to print again. But I had no luck for Epson, Lexmark, Canon, and many other brands of inkjets. There are two reasons manufacturers make it more difficult for you to keep printing after your inkjet thinks it's out of ink. First, using an inkjet cartridge that's actually empty could overheat your printer's permanent print head, leaving you with a useless hunk of plastic. Second, the economics of the inkjet business are even more punishing than those of the laser business, with manufacturers making much more on ink supplies than they do on printers.

Inkjet makers have a lot riding on your regular purchases of ink—and they go to great lengths to protect that market. In 2003, the British consumer magazine Which? found that inkjet printers ask for a refill long before their cartridges actually go dry. After overriding internal warnings, a researcher was able to print 38 percent more pages on an Epson printer that had claimed it didn't have a drop left. Lawyers in California and New York filed a class-action lawsuit against Epson; the company denied any wrongdoing, but it settled the suit in 2006, giving customers a $45 credit. A similar suit is pending against Hewlett-Packard.

There's also a long-standing war between printer makers and third-party cartridge companies that sell cheap knockoff ink packs. In 2003, Lexmark claimed that a company that managed to reverse-engineer the software embedded in its printer cartridges was violating copyright law. Opponents of overbearing copyright protections were alarmed at Lexmark's reach; copyright protections have traditionally covered intellectual property like music and movies, not physical property like printer cartridges. A federal appeals court dismissed Lexmark's case, but manufacturers have recently been successful in using patent law to close down third-party cartridge companies.

In the long run, though, the printer companies' strong line against cartridge makers seems destined to fail. Buying ink and toner is an enormous drag. Having to do it often, and at terribly steep prices, breeds resentment—made all the worse by my printer's lying ways. Some companies are realizing this. When Kodak introduced a new line of printers last year, it emphasized its low ink costs. Kodak claims that its cartridges last twice as long as those of other printers and sell for just $10 to $15 each, a fraction of the price of other companies' ink. When my Brother finally runs dry, perhaps I won't replace the toner—I'll replace the printer.

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Using a Poison to Turn Sunlight into Food

Bacteria from a hot spring in California conduct photosynthesis with arsenic--and suggest a process that might have predated typical photosynthesis

Arsenic, a deadly poison, kills by blocking the ability of cells to produce and consume energy. Yet, some red and green slime mats in briny hot springs in Mono Lake, Calif., use the potent compound rather than water to carry energy during photosynthesis (the process used by bacteria and plants that converts sunlight into food) new research in Science reveals.

The newly discovered microbes steal two electrons from the arsenic in the spring water, turning it into so-called arsenate, and use the energy to transform carbon dioxide into food. This only happens in the presence of light, which provides the energy to initiate the process, according to microbiologist Ronald Oremland of the U.S. Geological Survey, who led the discovery.

These are not the only bacteria that use poison to make food: They are from the genus Ectothiorhodospira, which largely relies on another poison, toxic hydrogen sulfide, for the same purpose. By analyzing the genetic material of the microbe, the researchers have also determined that this is a primitive process, going back at least three billion years, according to Oremland. That could mean that arsenic-based photosynthesis predates the oxygen-producing variety that enables life as we know it.

Not everyone agrees. "I don't think this is an ancient organism that predated most purple bacteria but something that evolved after purple sulfur bacteria already existed," says molecular biologist Donald Bryant of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who reviewed the paper for Science, speaking of the new bacteria's ancient relativesthat are thought to have evolved earlier. "It is an interesting case in which nature has taken something that is normally quite toxic and made good use of it for growth."

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Totally Fake Restaurant Wins Wine Spectator Award of Excellence

Hey, did you know that with Microsoft Word, $250 and maybe a foreign language dictionary -- your lemonade stand can get a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence? That's what one enterprising fellow set out to prove.

Dr. Vino says:

[Robin] Goldstein, the author of The Wine Trials has a posting up on his new website describing how he invented a restaurant name, Osteria l’Intrepido, a riff on “fearless.” Then he typed up a menu (”a fun amalgamation of somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes”) and then put together a wine list, and submitted both to Wine Spectator–along with the $250 fee. The list was approved and given an Award of Excellence.

The best part is that Mr. Goldstein included "the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past 20 years."

"I didn’t have any empirical evidence of the quality of the restaurants other than my own impressions,” he said. “I wanted to see what the standards of the Awards of Excellence were. The results speak for themselves."

Dr. Vino also notes that in a Times article from 2003, a reporter estimated that Wine Spectator was bringing in $625,275 from the award each year-- and that was when the application fee was only $175.

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Worst Captchas of All Time

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Spray-On Condoms: Still a Hard Sell

Edison had his lightbulb, Ford had his Model T, and Jan Vinzenz Krause has his spray-on condom. Inspired by the mechanics of a drive-through car wash, the German sexual-health educator designed a custom-fitting male contraceptive using liquid latex and some materials from a hardware store. "I felt a little like MacGyver," he says of building the contraption.

U.S. condom sales have been increasing steadily over the years, according to Packaged Facts, a division of Market Research Group, and they are expected to top $444 million annually by 2010. But usage among teens appears to have leveled off, with 61.5% of sexually active high schoolers surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2007 reporting that they had used a condom during their most recent intercourse, down from 62.8% in 2005 and 63% in 2003. Access to condoms is one issue; inclination to use them is another. Which helps explain why companies are constantly looking for ways to improve the standard product — vibrating, warming, climax-delaying, even glow-in-the-dark condoms are all available on drugstore shelves.

Offering a wide variety of condom options is not only a smart business move, it's good for public health. When used properly, condoms don't just act as contraceptives; they also prevent the spread of most sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. That means sexual-health educators, public health officials and condom brand CEOs alike are interested in finding ways to make condoms more appealing, especially to young people.

As a teenager, Krause, now 30, had trouble finding the right size condom, which set him on a quest to aid other similarly befuddled young men. In 2001 he developed an online condom adviser, which provides printable measuring tapes and instructions to help men determine which condom, out of all the brands available in Germany, will fit the best. According to Krause, more than 300,000 people have used the free service.

The site's popularity put Krause in touch with students and sex-ed teachers across Germany, who expressed a common frustration. "They told me, 'Mr. Krause, I don't understand why the industry doesn't develop a condom which fits you perfectly,' " he says.

Hence his idea for a spray-on condom. The prototype, which began testing last year, consists of a hard plastic tube with nozzles that spray liquid latex from all directions, much like the water jets in the tunnel of a car wash. According to Krause, there are numerous advantages to his spray-on condom. "The condom fits 100% perfectly, so the safety is much higher than a standard condom's, and it feels more natural."

But there are some stumbling blocks. The men who tested the spray-on condom had a few hesitations, Krause says. Some were "a little bit afraid to use the tube" and would only try it on their fingers. Others worried that the mechanism, which hisses as it sprays, might ruin the mood.

But the most serious problem with the design — which is what has kept the product off the market thus far — is that the latex takes too long to dry. Liquid latex currently takes two to three minutes to vulcanize, making it impractical. "For people to buy it," Krause says, "it needs to be ready in five to 10 seconds."

That has kept the spray-on condom on hold indefinitely until a faster-drying latex comes along. Meanwhile, Krause is tackling the size problem by preparing to launch a line of condoms in six sizes, instead of the usual one or two. They should be available in Europe starting in September and in the U.S. possibly as early as 2010.

"Having condoms in different sizes we think is a good and smart idea," says David Johnson, group product manager of Trojan Brand Condoms. Trojan's parent company, Church and Dwight, makes nearly 8 out of 10 condoms sold in the U.S. But different-size condoms introduce their own problems: namely, men aren't very eager to buy a small size. Trojan's Magnum line, whose condoms are 15% bigger than regular ones, accounts for 13% of the U.S. market. But when the company introduced a smaller condom several years ago, it had to discontinue it.

Krause says men are reluctant to go to a drugstore cashier with a box of small-size condoms — for obvious reasons. His solution: he plans to sell his new line of different-size condoms online. "Men on the Web," he says, "they are very honest."

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Vertigro - Gas, Diesel, Biofuel production from algae

Grow mass amounts of algae and produce 20,000+ gallons of bio-fuel on one acre. With the amount of farm space of 1/10 the size of New Mexico we could produce enough fuel to fill the United States' need for oil.



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Antidepressants May Lower Driving Skills

Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft May Make Driving Harder

People taking drugs to treat depression drive worse than other people, according to a new report.Depressed people on antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft have even more trouble concentrating and reacting behind the wheel, researchers from the University of North Dakota said. A team of psychologists had 60 people take a driving test in a simulator.

Thirty-one of the participants were taking at least one type of antidepressant while 29 control group members were taking no medications, with the exception of birth-control pills."Individuals taking antidepressants should be aware of the possible cognitive effects as (they) may affect performance in social, academic and work settings, as well as driving abilities," the researchers wrote. "However, it appears that mood is correlated with cognitive performance, more so than medication use."A news release about the research said that antidepressant use in the U.S. tripled in the decade before 2004, and now one in 10 women takes one.The study about driving was released at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association

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Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games

'Emily' will set a new precedent for photo-realistic characters in video games and films, says her creator, Image Metrics

Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.

Emily - the woman in the above animation - was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.

She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

Researchers at a Californian company which makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood films started with a video of an employee talking. They then broke down down the facial movements down into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a 'control system'.

The team at Image Metrics - which produced the animation for the Grand Theft Auto computer game - then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a model. The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.

"Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real," Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said.

"The subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry - for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. Those types of imperfections aren't that significant but they are what makes people look real."

Previous methods for animating faces have involved putting dots on a face and observing the way the dots move, but Image Metrics analyses facial movements at the level of individual pixels in a video, meaning that the subtlest variations - such as the way the skin creases around the eyes, can be tracked.

"There's always been control systems for different facial movements, but say in the past you had a dial for controlling whether an eye was open or closed, and in one frame you set the eye at 3/4 open, the next 1/2 open etc. This is like achieving that degree of control with much finer movements.

"For instance, you could be controlling the movement in the top 3-4mm of the right side of the smile," Mr Starkenburg said.

For many years now, animators have come up against a barrier known as "uncanny valley", which refers to how, as a computer-generated face approaches human likeness, it begins take on a corpse-like appearance similar to that in some horror films.

As a result, computer game animators have purposely simplified their creations so that the players realise immediately that the figures are not real.

"There came a point where animators were trying to create a face and there was a theory of diminishing returns," said Raja Koduri, chief technlology officer in graphics at AMD, the chip-maker.

AMD last week released a new chip with a billion transistors that will be able to show off creations such as Emily by allowing a much greater number of computations per second. "If you're trying to process the graphics in a photo-realistic animation, in real-time, there's a lot of computation involved," said Mr Koduri.

He said that AMD's new chip - the Radeon HD 4870 X2 - was able to process 2.4 teraflops of information per second, meaning it had a capability similar to a computer that - only 12 years ago - would have filled a room. AMD's chip fits inside a standard PC.

But he said that the line between what was real and what was rendered would not be blurred completely until 2020.

There have been several advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI) in recent years. One project at the University of Southern California involves placing an actor inside a giant metallic orb which fires more than 3,000 lights from a range of different angles - and with different degrees of intensity - at the actor while he or she is are being filmed performing an action.

The image captured by the camera can then be transported into another piece of film and the lighting effect (on the actor) chosen according to the ambient lighting in the scene.

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Pandora On the Verge of Closing Shop

The Battle of Music

Founder Tim Westergren has stated that the service is approaching a "pull-the-plug kind of decision" for the service. Why is this happening? Last year, web radio giants were hit with outrageously ridiculous fees by a federal panel for every song that would be played on their stations. This caused a lot of services to either shutdown, or go through what Pandora has been experiencing for the past year. In doing so, it seems the financial problems the music industry has set out to create in order to win the constant battle between rights, piracy, and copyrighted music, are working.

Last Stand, Last Chance

Pandora's founder is waiting for a ray of light in a fight being led by Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.). Berman is attempting to arrange a few last-minute deals between web radio stations and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and record companies that would reduce the the recent fees. However, Westergren isn't going to hold his breath for too long, stating that, "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money." We don't blame you Tim.

What Will You Do?

There are plenty of petitions floating around the web to help the cause, but the law is the law and petitions may not help matters in this situation. We'd be saddened to see Pandora close its doors. While services like Last.FM aren't showing any of the same signs, we wonder if the same fate may be in the not-so-distant future for our other favorite music services. If it is, what will you do?

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High Tech Fountain Makes Things Out Of Water!

This is an awesome fountain that can make words and dolphins and rings and lightning bolts and all kinds of other awesome designs using water. It's really pretty cool and its worth a watch.



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Working Robot Controlled by Human Brain

Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.

Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

“The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain,” said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot’s principle architects.

Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs,” he said.

Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation “Wall-E”, Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.

Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.

This “multi-electrode array” (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.

Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit — it communicates with its “body” via a Bluetooth radio link.

The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.

From the very start, the neurons get busy. “Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,” said Warwick.

“Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity” similar to what happens in a normal rat — or human — brain, he added.

Advances like these are why I think superior artificial intelligence will be built in the next decade or two.

How many of you expected to see this happening in 2008?

If you didn’t see a robot with a biological brain coming, then why even bother to hold on to the idea that superior AI won’t be possible for hundreds of years?

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Fox News cuts American child for thanking Russian troops

{Typically I like to stay far away from politics on this site, but I believe everyone should know the truth about the Russian/Georgian conflict...}

A 12-year-old American girl visiting relatives during the conflict in South Ossetia has thanked Russian soldiers for saving her from the Georgian attack. However, America's Fox News attempted to cut her and her aunt off air.



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Woah. Neo's Passport in the Matrix Expired on 9/11/2001

Note: The Original Matrix movie was filmed before 9/11/01

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The World's Most Insane Intersections [PICS]

Western drivers are understandably confounded and rightfully annoyed, when faced with such traffic-routing masterpieces as these: (see the whole list of them in Wikipedia here).


Tom Moreland Interchange, intersection of Interstate 85 and Interstate 285, Atlanta, Georgia, USA



The Central Motorway Junction - New Zealand State Highways 1 and 16, Auckland, New Zealand.




(image credit: Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

They are called the "Malfunction Junctions", or "Spaghetti Intersections", and they are located almost in every major city in the West. You can find the streets that end nowhere, streets that strangely allow traffic in both direction (without providing proper lanes), streets that change names more often than a communist Cold War spies.







Wonders of image manipulation:



but this junction in Moscow wins the "Arrrrgh!" contest:
To make a left turn from Rosanov Street to the adjacent Khoroshev Street, you will have to embark on quite a journey:
follow the arrows on the picture



According to the Russian auto forums, this is not a unique occasion. Perhaps one day they will discover a junction so confusing and bizarre that it will curl upon itself in the fourth dimension and come out say... in Israel.

However in Israel some intersections are just as interesting:
For example, here is how you make a turn at Nesharim to Highway 6:
Going West:



Going East:

These directions are helpfully provided on the official Highway 6 web page. But if you are an "experienced driver" and never ask for directions, you may be out of luck :)




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8 Essential Skills They Didn’t Teach You In School

Lately, I’ve been simultaneously using less and less of what I learned in school while discovering more and more skills that are vital to success which were never even offered in school!

If I were to be 100% honest, probably the most valuable skill I learned in college was how to talk to girls (certainly a vital skill for happiness and success, but not what I was there to learn).

The economics classes? Nope, mostly academic mumbo-jumbo that is entirely useless to all but a handful of policy makers. The computer science classes? Hmm, maybe about 10% of that I’ve used, but it’s nothing I couldn’t have picked up with a couple good books, which I routinely do now. The history, English, philosophy, and physics? Aside from giving me a general understanding of the world and making me sound smart at cocktail parties, I can’t think of anything in there that I really use on a day to day basis.

Much of college gave me a bad taste for education. It made learning a real drag. I got through it to get the degree, but it wasn’t until after school that my education really began.

So what are the top skills that should be taught to every man, woman, and child who enters our education system? I’m glad you asked…

How to make people like you and network

For a skill so essential to success that affects every area of your life (from dating, to family, to work) it’s amazing how little people know about this. I can hear you saying…”I thought some people were just born with it and the rest of us were out of luck! You mean it’s something you can study?” Well, yes!

There is great power in knowing you can reach out to your network whenever you have a problem to solve, to be able to reach key influencers at conferences and meetings, to make an impression on audiences, to project confidence and trustworthiness, and to make friends with other successful people.

The shy folks lurking in the corners at cocktails parties will never reach their full potential as human beings because our school system didn’t place enough value on “being social”. President Bush didn’t get the best grades at Princeton, but boy did he know how to network, and look where that got him.

Required reading: How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships.

How to speed read and the power of audio books

Yes, speed reading and speed comprehension is real. The nominal investment of time it takes to learn pays off in spades for the rest of your life. After all, how would your life be different if you were able to read an extra book each week?

The same goes with audio books. If you spend an hour per day in the car learning instead of cursing at other drivers or listening to Britney Spears, you will have attended the equivalent of an entire semester course. Every major book today comes out on audio book, and you can read (listen to) them all without taking any additional time out of your day. Why wouldn’t you?

Looking at all the “required reading” links in this article might seem a little overwhelming, but I was able to listen to them all on audio books while driving around town. It was actually fun.

Required reading: The Psychology of Achievement by Brian Tracey

How to set goals and manage time

Want to know how to get anything done in life? Our school system doesn’t feel that this is worth teaching apparently, but call me crazy, I think it’s important (I’m probably preaching to the choir on LifeHack.org, but still).

The research that has come out lately is groundbreaking…everything from eliminating multi-tasking, using blocks of uninterrupted time where phone and email are off, prioritized to-do lists, urgent but unimportant vs. non-urgent but important tasks, etc.

If you have ever found yourself being busy all day only to wonder what you accomplished at the end of it, then you need to learn this stuff. Understanding productivity will give you such an advantage over other people it’s hardly even fair.

Required reading: Getting Things Done, Eat That Frog, No B.S. Time Management For Entrepreneurs

How to read a financial statement

Robert Kiyosaki is fond of saying that the rich teach their children how to read financial statements and the poor do not. He is right. Schools have never been very good at teaching people how to get rich, probably in no small part because professors are generally poor and wouldn’t know how to teach it.

Yet with 95% of our population retiring at or below the poverty level, the economy in the dumps, and many people losing their homes to foreclosure, I bet plenty of Americans wish their school system had been a little more focused on money. After leaving college my friends could tell you the symbolic meaning behind the Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales, but they couldn’t tell you the difference between a balance sheet and income statement. Nice job school system!

Required reading: Cash Flow Quadrant, or this blog article

How to negotiate, use contracts, and not get taken advantage of

If you want to accomplish anything of significance you’re going to have to work with other people. Whether its contractors, outsourcing, employees, etc…there is a certain art to structuring good contracts with these people, knowing how to find good talent, measuring results, knowing how to fire them, and not getting completely taken for a ride in the process. School teaches you none of this and most people have to learn it from the school of hard knocks by literally get taken advantage of several times.

Required reading: I haven’t seen many in this area but one that comes to mind is Donald Trumps The Art Of The Deal

How to save and invest

Again, people are never taught how to build wealth, which is why we have a nation in credit card debt. Moreover, they are never taught the power of passive income streams and how to really break free from the rat race of working 9-to-5. There is a whole body of literature on this topic which is never even touched upon in traditional education.

Required reading: The Richest Man In Babylon, The Millionaire Next Door, or Ben Franklin’s The Way To Wealth

How to be successful in life

Sounds sort of broad, doesn’t it? Yet some people have devoted a lifetime to understanding what makes people happy and successful. There are the big three: health, wealth, and relationships. People need to find what they really want to do with their life (something few of us ever really think about). We need to figure out how to do scary things that would be good for us, break bad habits, how to let go of bad things in the past, etc. There is a lot to learn here!

Required reading: What To Say When You Talk To Yourself, When I Say No I Feel Guilty, Think and Grow Rich, The Way Of The Superior Man (Ladies maybe you can recommend a relationship book for women in the comments)

How to spread an idea and basic marketing

Finally, I’ll just say that the basics of marketing are something everyone should understand. Even if you don’t think you’re in marketing, you’re in marketing. If you have an idea at work, or want to get a raise, or want to convince your kids to go see a movie then there is something applicable from the marketing world. Even just picking out a good headline for something you’re writing so that it will actually get read requires some basic marketing skills.

Required reading: Dan Kennedy’s The Ultimate Sales Letter, CopyBlogger, The Psychology of Influence

Conclusion

Until the school system comes around, I suppose its up to each of us to take care of our own education. That means reading, finding mentors, audio books, going to conferences, and of course blogs are a great resource.

What did you miss out on in school that you wish you’d learned? Or if you’re an educator do you feel there is a mismatch between what is taught and what’s important? Leave a comment below!

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How to Set Up a Home Server

Before You Start - Alternatives

Setting up a home server can be a lot of fun and a great learning experience. But, depending on what you want to use it for and how good your connection to the Internet is, a home server may not be the best alternative. If your aim is serving web pages reliably or otherwise delivering information outside your home to friends or customers, it makes more sense to put the server into "The Cloud" - in other words, in a commercial data center. This saves you the worry and hassle of keeping it running or dealing with interruptions to your home's power, cable or DSL service. "Cloud Computing," or renting just as much of a server as you need on an hourly or monthly basis, is becoming quite popular for web companies or growing businesses, but the rates are inexpensive enough that you should consider it as an alternative to a home server. There are many cloud computing companies, ranging from Amazon Web Services which requires that you learn their command line interface to initiate a new server, to ENKI which offers personal support for getting you up and running. This isn't the place to go into detail, but you can learn more by Googling "Cloud Computing."

What you'll need

To build your own server, you need just a few components, some or all of which you may well have already:

• A computer
• A broadband network connection
• A network router, with Ethernet (CAT5) cable
• A monitor and keyboard (just for the first few steps)
• A CD/DVD drive/burner will be handy if you plan to use the server for media.

The computer

A server doesn't have to be particularly powerful. eBay runs on mega-thousand-dollar Sun computers, and Google uses thousands of machines to power its search. But for personal use, a server needs considerably less horsepower than your average desktop computer. While other computers busy themselves with complex tasks like despeckling photographs and calculating missile trajectories, your home server has a much simpler task: receiving requests for data and then sending that data as requested. Your server won't use much processing power, especially without a graphical interface to worry about. A machine with 64MB of RAM and a 300MHz processor can make a perfectly good server; with slightly more robust specs, it can handle almost anything you'll throw at it.

An old machine can be turned into a server with minimal effort. You may already have a perfect machine for the job sitting in your attic. Or a relative or a friend might want to get rid of her older desktop; or you may well be able to pick up a suitable model cheap or free from a swap meet, a classified ad, or online equivalents like freecycle.org and craigslist.org. Alternately, you can buy a new machine to use as your server. Each approach has its advantages.

The reasons you might not want to use an old machine include:

Old hardware can be unreliable. Sometimes replacing bad RAM or putting in a new heatsink will fix the problem, but sometimes a computer just crashes every few hours, regardless of what operating system is installed. Time to donate or recycle it.

Space is an issue. If the old machine is in a big tower case and you are in a small apartment, you might want to get it a new case -- or you might want to buy a new server that's one tenth the size.

You want it quiet. Computers get hot, so fans are installed to keep them cool. Fans are loud, even the ones marketed as "whisper-quiet." You might not notice that so much in an office setting, but when a server is left running 24 hours a day (as they should be), it becomes rather irritating to live with in close quarters. If you're going to be sharing a living space with your server, you may want to invest in a fanless machine.

You don't have an old computer on hand, and you live in a place where finding cheap, used hardware is difficult or expensive.

If any of the above apply, you can skip to the section titled Buying a server.

Repurposing a used computer

If you go the way of turning an older machine into a server, congratulations. If it's a particularly geriatric model, you might have a little work ahead of you to get it ready for its new assignment. Upgrading a couple of its parts will make it a powerhouse for years to come. You can find plenty of support, if you have questions about what connector goes where, on hardware-nerd sites like tomshardware.com and arstechnica.com. Or, if messing with wires and chips is too daunting, your local computer shop should do it for a minimal fee.

Architecture

What sort of computer you use -- i386, PowerPC, Gameboy -- matters surprisingly little. Linux and BSD, the preferable server operating systems, run on just about any architecture you care to install them on. The official list of chips on which Debian can run includes Intel x86, Motorola 680xx, Sun Sparc, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, HP PA, Intel 64-bit, and S/390 processors, with more in the testing phase. That covers the vast majority of consumer computers ever made. Buy a notebook (the paper kind) and label it My Server. Write down all the model numbers and details of the hardware you set up.

Memory

RAM is cheap these days, and more is generally better.

Storage

The hard drive is the heart of the server. If everything else dies, you can pull out the hard drive and put it in another (comparable) machine, and pick up right where you left off. Depending on how many slots your computer is built with, you might want to have one hard drive or a few. Bigger is better.

Hard drives continuously drop in price. Start fresh with a new one. If you're disposing of an old drive and replacing it with a new one, don't forget to securely delete any private information before you put it in the trash.

The innards of a hard drive spin around thousands of times per second, so it's very likely that the hard drive will be the first component of your server to fail, though you can generally count on a new drive for a few good years at least. Proper backup procedures are crucial; for now, if you have room in your server and in your budget, you may want to slot in a second or even third hard drive. Keeping secondary copies of data in another place -- even if that's just a second drive right next to the first one -- is the way to safeguard your data against hard drive failure.

Cooling

Since the server's going to be running all the time, you need to make sure it doesn't overheat. The machine you have might already be fine in that department, or it might not. If it crashes unexpectedly, or exhibits weird, unpredictable behavior, it may be getting too hot. There's software you can install to monitor the machine's temperature as it runs, and even set it up to e-mail you automatically if it's creeping into the danger zone on a hot day.

You can splurge on a wide variety of methods to keep the CPU and power supply cool, involving air, water, liquid nitrogen, and so on. You also may want to look into underclocking your processor. That makes it run slower (which is fine for a server, remember) but also cooler. If you're handy with solder, there are dozens of underclocking tutorials online for your particular chip type. Generally, though, setting up good airflow through the box is sufficient for most home servers, with some quality fans sensibly arranged to pull air in at one end of the case, direct it over the hot components, and push it out the other. Larger fans tend to be quieter than smaller models, all else being equal. If you're living with the server, you will want quiet fans, the quietest you can get.

Network

The server's also going to need an Ethernet card (also known as a network interface card, or NIC), and one that works with your chosen operating system. You can't go wrong with most cards (especially older models), but you'll definitely want to check the model number on linux-drivers.org or elsewhere on the web before buying a new one. Big brands like 3Com and D-Link are generally a good, reliable bet.

Buying a server

Alternately, you could buy a server. There are plenty of up-to-date guides on the web. You can use a standard desktop computers, which contain powerful, expensive, and hot Intel and AMD-brand chips. That's fine, but brands like Shuttle or Biostar, built on the mini-ITX or nano-ITX specification are smaller, cheaper, and cooler. These can fit in cigar boxes and run silently without fans, on low power. Complete systems using these chipsets can be bought from a variety of specialty retailers, including idotpc.com and mini-itx.com. You shouldn't have to spend more than a couple of hundred dollars for a serviceable system.

The Connection

Apart from that, any sort of connection will do. Super speed is not important (unless you're planning to stream videos to dozens of users). If you have a connection already (probably you do) you can continue to use it as normal. Just keep your server connected to the router. A static IP is not necessary, nor is a business-class connection.

Your choice of providers will vary depending on your area. If you have a choice, pick a provider that offers good, reliable speeds and makes its customers happy. Ask around, or search the web for the phrase "[provider] sucks" if you want to hear the worst. Some providers have very restrictive policies and prefer their users not to do things like build servers; others, like the excellent sonic.net, are thrilled to have adventurous users. The choice between cable, DSL, fiber, satellite, and so on is less important; after trying an assortment, you won't notice a significant difference unless you're streaming video or high-quality audio.

The Router

Get a reliable router. It can be wireless, if you want to connect other computers to it wirelessly, but plan on using a real old-fashioned cable between it and the server. A router is a pretty standard commodity these days; some may have extra features, but it's the basics, not the extras, that count. Again, looking at what other shoppers have liked, on a site like newegg.com, can be an excellent guideline.

The Monitor and Keyboard

If you have an old spare desktop, you may have a spare monitor and keyboard to go with it. Or you can use your current computer, if you're not using a laptop, and willing to switch back and forth while you get things set up. You'll only need these until you get your server up and running. A monitor and keyboard are very handy to have tucked away somewhere for future debugging and upgrading of the server, though.

Power

If you live in an area prone to power surges, rolling brownouts, or the like, or even if you don't, some sort of intermediary between your machine and the AC socket is a good idea. This can be as simple as a $10 surge suppressor (not just an extension cord) or an elaborate power conditioner with hours of battery backup.

Everything in Its Place

After your box is upgraded, you'll need to find a home for it. You'll want to keep a few practical considerations in mind.

• Don't place it next to a heater, or in a sunbeam. Don't place it by an open window. Dust is a server's enemy too, so don't keep it under the bed.

• Don't let people trip over the cords, or let pets chew on them.

• With proper attention to cooling, your server should be quite quiet, but some people are sensitive to even the faintest hum. Especially if your server is not the noiseless variety, you might want it in a less-trafficked area. The website Silent PC Review has advice and hardware recommendations for avoiding the noise.

• Putting it in a little closet is good, as long as there's enough airflow that the thing won't overheat. Make sure to place it on a hard surface so as not to block the air intakes, leave a few inches of space around it on all sides, and don't pile stuff on top of it.

• Theft is another concern: keeping a shiny server right by the front door might not be the best idea.

• A lot of your placement concerns may be dictated by your internet connection, since the server needs to be within a cord's reach of that. If you use a wireless router to share the connection with the rest of the house, that ought to be centrally located, and the server plugged directly into it, wherever it is.

• It'll also need to be plugged into an electric outlet.

• If you're going to be doing stuff like ripping CDs with the server, you'll want it conveniently placed for feeding discs in.

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Fake ID that's sure to work every time... Guaranteed!! (pic)

When you look like this, its kind of hard to imagine why you’d need an ID at all. Even if you took off your sheet, nobody could prove it isn’t you. Lesson to all underage drinkers, a fake ID like this is sure to work, though you will also have to dress like Fatima here.



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[via ryanyeah]

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The Truth About Plastic

If you know where to find a good plastic-free shampoo, can you tell Jeanne Haegele? Last September, the 28-year-old Chicago resident resolved to cut plastics out of her life. The marketing coordinator was concerned about what the chemicals leaching out of some common types of plastic might be doing to her body. She was also worried about the damage all the plastic refuse was doing to the environment. So she hopped on her bike and rode to the nearest grocery store to see what she could find that didn't include plastic. "I went in and barely bought anything," Haegele says. She did purchase some canned food and a carton of milk--only to discover later that both containers were lined with plastic resin. "Plastic," she says, "just seemed like it was in everything."

She's right. Back when Dustin Hoffman received the most famous one-word piece of career advice in cinema history, plastic was well on its way to becoming a staple of American life. The U.S. produced 28 million tons of plastic waste in 2005--27 million tons of which ended up in landfills. Our food and water come wrapped in plastic. It's used in our phones and our computers, the cars we drive and the planes we ride in. But the infinitely adaptable substance has its dark side. Environmentalists fret about the petroleum needed to make it. Parents worry about the possibility of toxic chemicals making their way from household plastic into children's bloodstreams. Which means Haegele isn't the only person trying to cut plastic out of her life--she isn't even the only one blogging about this kind of endeavor. But those who've tried know it's far from easy to go plastic-free. "These things are so ubiquitous that it is practically impossible to avoid coming into contact with them," says Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri.

Vom Saal is a prominent member of a group of researchers who have raised worrisome questions in recent years about the safety of some common types of plastics. We think of plastic as essentially inert; after all, it takes hundreds of years for a plastic bottle to degrade in a landfill. But as plastic ages or is exposed to heat or stress, it can release trace amounts of some of its ingredients. Of particular concern these days are bisphenol-a (BPA), used to strengthen some plastics, and phthalates, used to soften others. Each ingredient is a part of hundreds of household items; BPA is in everything from baby bottles to can linings (to protect against E. coli and botulism), while phthalates are found in children's toys as well as vinyl shower curtains. And those chemicals can get inside us through the food, water and bits of dust we consume or even by being absorbed through our skin. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 92% of Americans age 6 or older test positive for BPA--a sign of just how common the chemical is in our plastic universe.

Scientists like vom Saal argue that BPA and phthalates are different from other environmental toxins like lead and mercury in that these plastic ingredients are endocrine disrupters, which mimic hormones. Estrogen and other hormones in relatively tiny amounts can cause vast changes, so some researchers worry that BPA and phthalates could do the same, especially in young children. Animal studies on BPA found that low-dose exposure, particularly during pregnancy, may be associated with a variety of ills, including cancer and reproductive problems. Some human studies on phthalates linked exposure to declining sperm quality in adult males, while other work has found that early puberty in girls may be associated with the chemicals.

Does that mean even today's minuscule exposure levels are too much? The science is still murky, and human studies are few and far from definitive. So while Canada and the Democratic Republic of Wal-Mart are moving to ban BPA in baby bottles, the Food and Drug Administration maintains that BPA products pose no danger, as does the European Union. Even so, scientists like Mel Suffet, a professor of environmental-health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, say avoiding certain kinds of plastics is simply being better safe than sorry.

As researchers continue to examine plastic's impact on our bodies, there's no doubt that cutting down on the material will help the environment. Plastic makes up nearly 12% of our trash, up from 1% in 1960. You can literally see the result 1,000 miles (1,600 km) west of San Francisco in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris twice the size of Texas. The rising cost of petroleum may get plastic manufacturers to come up with incentives for recycling; current rates stand at less than 6% in the U.S. But the best way to reduce your plastic impact on the earth is simply to use less.

Here's how. You can avoid plastic bottles and toys labeled with the numbers 3 or 7, which often contain BPA or phthalates, and steer clear of vinyl shower curtains and canned foods--especially those with acidic contents like tomatoes. Vom Saal counsels that the cautious should also avoid heating plastic in microwaves. But get rid of the stuff altogether? "It's hard to go all the way," says Haegele, who, 10 months into her experiment, is leading a mostly plastic-free life. Although she still uses a plastic toothbrush, she's experimented with her own toothpaste (made of baking soda, cinnamon and vodka; for the recipe, go to her blog, lifelessplastic.blogspot.com She has used vinegar for conditioner and is searching for a decent shampoo that doesn't come in a plastic bottle. She has tried soaplike bars of shampoo, but they make her hair feel sticky. Plus, they sometimes come wrapped in--you guessed it--plastic.

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10 Diet Crazes That Are Overhyped, Unhealthy or Just Don't Work!

There are all kinds of diets out there. Some are good, some are bad, and some are just plain ugly. Almost everyone seems to have fallen for the diet hype in some way, and people are counting carbs, avoiding fats, drinking protein shakes, and doing all sorts of crazy things to lose weight and keep it off. While there are a lot of silly diet options out there, the 10 below are the worst of the worst!:

1. Diets that focus only on a specific food group or item.

"Eat only cabbage soup"lose weight and feel great!" Yeah. You might want to stay away from that one. Ditto for a diet where you can only eat peanut butter, grapefruit, or or any other single food group. If a diet takes an entire food group away from you, it's probably not a good choice.

2. The restrictive diet with the 'cheat day.'

With this diet, you can eat all you want one - and only one - day a week. The rest of the week, you essentially have to eat like a bird. Sure. That's good for you. Just get your body used to a state of malnutrition for six days and then load it full of fat, carbs and calories. We doubt your stomach would appreciate that, and your heart probably isn't thanking you, either.

3. The Vegan diet.

We know, there are a lot of vegans out there, and many of them are actually quite healthy. That's because they've learned how to do it right. They know what to eat and what supplements to take to get their nutrition. People who do it as a fad don't bother to do their research on it, so they just end up eating salad, fruit, nuts and nothing else. Remember about needing all the food groups? You can't be a vegan without research. Not healthy.

4. The "Detox" diet.

That's a crazy one. Liver and colon flushes, hormone injections, and more. No, thanks. Your body is already set up to cleanse itself and balance itself. It doesn't need all those things. All they'll do is make you feel sick because you just ate/drank/or had an enema of something very unpleasant. If you feel sick and you can't eat you might actually lose a couple pounds, but that's definitely not the way to do it.

5. Any diets that claim to have "miracle" foods or ingredients.

No one food group can give you weight loss, and neither can one specific food – remember? It's the whole 'one food group' thing again!

6. Fasting or severely low-calorie diets.

These sound great. If you don't eat, you'll lose weight. True to a point, but your metabolism will also slow down because you're not taking in a lot of calories. Metabolic rate doesn't speed up as fast as it slows down, so when you start to eat normally again, you'll gain weight faster and easier than you did before. That kinda defeats the purpose, don't you think?

7. Any diet that sounds too good to be true.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. No diet out there has a special food or a special secret that can suddenly make you skinny. It doesn't exist, no matter how much they tell you it does. They're trying to sell you something. We are not.

8. Diets designed for a specific number of days.

The three-day weight loss plan or the 10-days until you're skinny plan or anything like that are just fads. They won't work for you, or for anyone else. That doesn't mean that you won't lose weight, but you won't keep it off. You can't stay on those kinds of diets because they're so unhealthy, so the weight just comes right back.

9. Any diet that belongs to a celebrity.

Do you really think they're endorsing that diet plan for free? If someone paid you enough, wouldn't you say the diet worked, too?

10. Any diet where they send you the food

Any diet company that sends you food (and quite likely supplements as well) and/or say you don't need to do any exercise... Now you won't even get any exercise walking around the grocery store to buy the fattening food that you used to eat!

If you want to lose weight, it's very simple.

You have to eat less, and you have to eat healthier. Put down the cheese doodles and find something that's actually good for you. And for goodness sakes, get off the couch!

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BigDog- The Most Advanced Robot on Earth

BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary.Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.

In separate trials, BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load.

BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with the goal of creating robots that have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).

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Invisibility materials can speed up web by ten per cent

A new kind of light-warping material could boost the speed of the internet at least ten fold by, strangely enough, slowing bits of it down.

The possibility is raised by the development by a Californian team of two artificial composite materials, called metamaterials, which attracted a huge amount of publicity for the way they could pave the way to invisibility cloaks.

But a more direct application of these materials could be in fiber optic networks where applying the brakes to light could enable engineers to route information much more efficiently and quickly than conventional electronics.

And these metamaterials could also mark an advance in quantum computing, named after the strange quantum properties of matter at the atomic level, that could enhance the power of computers millions of times beyond anything available today.

Fiber optic communications have vast capacities because each frequency of light sent bouncing down an optical fiber can carry a separate channel of information.

At major interconnection points, where billions of parcels of information from myriad phone calls arrive simultaneously, these metamaterials could be used to slow, divert and allow through information, working in the same way as traffic congestion calming schemes do on motorways, when a reduction in the speed limit can lead to a swifter overall flow of traffic.

The ability to slow the light to separate these channels could be a tremendous force for telecommunications because conventional electronics that do this cap the possible speed of the fiber optic cable, comments Dr Chris Stevens from the department of engineering sciences at the University of Oxford.

While light can operate at a frequency of around one terahertz, one million million cycles per second, conventional electronics struggle to cope with more than a few gigahertz, that is a few thousand million cycles per second.

Using metamaterials that can cope with these higher frequenices could regulate the flow of information through the web to ensure that too much information does not arrive simultaneously. giving the web a higher information capacity.

They could also store light, which would enable much higher amounts to be handled than electronic chips, and without the efficiency draining steps of having to convert information stored on particles of light (photons) to that stored with electricity (electrons).

Thus these metamaterials represent a revolution in broadband computing and memory storage.

"In general, metamaterials can be designed for many interesting applications beyond this work, such as slow light in optical communications", the Telegraph is told by Prof Xiang Zhang, the University of California researcher who announces two new metamaterials to manipulate light, one today in the journal Nature and a second in tomorrow's issue of Science.

However, he stresses that " our work at this point is concentrated on manipulating light beams at a small scale and bending them at our desire which enables technologies for imaging at molecular scale and building even smaller computer circuits."

Prof Ortwin Hess of the University of Surrey has done theoretical work to show how light can be slowed down "in a controlled way" so that a beam of sunlight can travel at a leisurely stroll, be brought close to a standstill, and thus even stored for later use in the form of a rainbow in a metamaterial.

"I am excited about the realization of the material by the Berkeley team since this is precisely the kind of material with very much the right properties that we have assumed in our earlier work."

His studies predict an increase in operating capacity of 1,000 per cent over the use of conventional electronics by exploiting light's broad spectrum to lay down lots of different information simultaneously in the first "optical capacitor."

This ability to store light will conceivably provide a powerful new tool to control optical information, even harness the quantum properties of atoms, and so exploit the possibilities of quantum computers that, in theory, will be able solve problems millions of times faster than current machines.

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First USB 3.0 demos at IDF next week?

Intel today sent out a press release stating that its “Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB” is now available. This move not only clears some confusion over claims that Intel may be withholding USB 3.0 specifications, but also indicates that we should be able to see first USB 3.0 demonstrations at next week’s IDF in San Francisco.

Intel’s xHCI debuts with USB 3.0 and provides hardware component designers, system builders and device driver developers with a description of the hardware/software interface between system software and the host controller hardware for USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 (previous versions are not supported).
According to Intel, the xHCI draft specification provides a standardized method for USB 3.0 host controllers to communicate with the USB 3.0 software stack and is being made available under RAND-Z (royalty free) licensing terms to all USB 3.0 Promoter Group and contributor companies that sign an xHCI contributor agreement.

A revised xHCI 0.95 specification is planned to be made available in the fourth quarter of this year.

The release of the spec follows claims that Intel could be engaging in unfair business practices by withholding the spec and the company’s subsequent confirmations that the host controller standards would be made available in the second half of 2008 royalty-free - “free, gratis, unpaid, zero dollars, free of charge, at no cost, on the house.”

While Intel has kept its promise, the implications of the announcement are that the USB 3.0 technology is virtually finalized and product development can get into full gear. The timing of the announcement is a sign that USB 3.0 demonstrations could take place at Intel’s fall developer forum, which will open its doors on August 19. Commercial products are not expected to be released until late 2009.

When maxed out USB 3.0, will offer ten times the bandwidth of USB 2.0 – 4.8 Gb/s, which translates into a massive bandwidth of 600 MB/s.

Also noteworthy about Intel’s announcement is the fact that it got AMD to supply a quote for its press release. “The future of computing and consumer devices is increasingly visual and bandwidth intensive,” said Phil Eisler, AMD corporate vice president and general manager of the Chipset Business Unit. “Lifestyles filled with HD media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform. AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification.”

Yes, it is one of those quotes you can easily live without. But read between the lines and the simple fact that AMD is quoted in an Intel press release should be indication enough that USB 3.0 is off to a good start. We also heard that Nvidia has signed the USB 3.0 agreement.

Two weeks ago, the IEEE said that it has approved the IEEE 1394-2008 specification, which increases the interface bandwidth of IEEE1394, also known as Firewire and i.Link, to 3.2 Gb/s.

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Top 10 Cell Phone Etiquette Rules People Still Break

Do we really still need to talk about this? You’d think with over a decade of experience under our belts along with our inherent delusions of hyper sophistication that we’d have figured things out by now. But the sad truth remains: cell-phone douche-baggery is worse than ever! In terms of maturity levels, many of us rank amongst toddlers, interrupting anyone and anything with our loud nonsense, our little fingers obsessively pushing buttons with what’s left of our attention spans constantly distracted by various bells, whistles, and bright colors on tiny screens. This ridiculous need to be in touch with all people at all times is getting out of hand, and while we think we are staying more connected with each other, we are in fact treating those closest to us like China treated the Mongols. We’re building giant walls people! The following are basic cell phone rules of etiquette which people still can’t seem to follow. In fact, they should be called “How to use your common sense and remain polite in a human society.” Read them, learn them, and absorb them into your system as you would the vitamins from a mango smoothie.

1. Talking too loudly.

“YES! FOR THE LOVE OF BABY JESUS, WE CAN HEAR YOU NOW!” For some bizarre reason people feel the need to raise their voices while on their phones. I think we’ve come far enough, technologically speaking, to trust the phone’s microphone to adequately amplify and carry your voice. Your mouth couldn’t physically be any closer to the microphone, so unless you’re talking into it from a Captain Kirk distance or calling in an airstrike while under heavy machine gun fire, there’s no need to yell. Hell, even Kirk never raised his voice and he was communicating with an alcoholic Scotsman on a space ship!

Note: There are attention-seekers out there who speak loudly on purpose to “show off” recent accomplishments and victories to impress surrounding strangers. Do not hate on them too much, they were probably adopted and are cursed to constantly seek approval from anyone within earshot.

2. Holding inappropriate conversations in public.

No one needs to hear how wasted you were last night, or what color your boyfriend’s boxers were on the night the two of you, um, “played Scrabble.” Keep your personal conversations personal. If you don’t want people to see you crying in line at the bank or while ordering a stuffed-crust pizza, refrain from having emotional conversations in public. Offer to call the person back, step outside, or find a quiet place where you can openly and unabashedly describe your new foot fungus.

3. Rudely interrupting conversations.

Have you ever felt the only way to maintain a conversation with the person right in front of you is to give them a call? Ever arrive at the climax of a hilarious story, only to have the momentum ruined by “Sorry, I gotta take this”? Why is the disembodied voice of someone else more important than the flesh and blood standing before you? It’s very frustrating to stand around waiting while your “friend,” date, or family member gets into a phone conversation on your time. When this happens, I recommend simply walking away. Even when you’re sitting in a restaurant, if your date would rather chat with someone else, then you should get up and leave immediately to find someone else. Or, as I mentioned earlier, call them on their other line. “Hey, how’s it going? How’s your sea bass? Isn’t the wine delicious?” If you can’t beat ‘em, call ‘em.

4. Checking your phone at the movies.

Movie theatre announcements and people who are quick to “shhhh” have done a decent job of reducing reducing cell phone rings over the years. But people are still checking their calls and text messaging rfiends, silently, but equally annoyingly. There’s a reason why we spend an arm and a leg to watch movies in the theatre. When the lights go out and the screen lights up, we try to forget our everyday troubles and we submerse ourselves into whatever the hell world we bought tickets for. We escape. But when out of the corner of our eyes we see someone’s entire face light up while they check their phone messages, we’re yanked right back to reality and are reminded of how many jerks per square foot there are in the world. Turn your phones off, have a little consideration for the people around you. The world won’t stop spinning if you’re unavailable for 2 hours. “But what if there’s an emergency?” The odds of an actual emergency occurring are astronomical. Besides, if there was an emergency, it already happened. You already weren’t there, and chances are the people who could actually do anything about it, already have.

5. Texting while driving.

Somebody please get the “Darwin Awards” on the phone. Of course, if you’re driving when you do, make sure you’re on hands free or have pulled over before you start explaining how there are people who send texts while behind the wheel of a vehicle. According to a Harvard University study, cell phones cause over 200 deaths and half a million injuries each year. And that’s with eyes on the road! Laws are in place to make sure people aren’t talking on their phones, and yet people are typing?!?! (I very rarely use the double question mark with the double exclamation point at the end of sentences, but this is ridiculous) I would love to see the tombstone: Was LOL when he WCTTFW (Went crashing through the freaking windshield) Anyone caught texting while driving should be stripped of their driving license forever.

6. Texting while talking.

You ever have someone try to listen to your story while text messaging someone else? You want to give them points for making the effort as they clumsily insert “oh yeahs” and “un huhs” at all the wrong moments, cutting you off mid-sentence with a “no way” as they furiously thumb type in your face, but at the same time you want to volleyball spike their phone to the ground for being unbelievably rude. A third option is tell better stories.

7. Texting small talk.

Does our friendship mean nothing? Have we become so lazy and disinterested in each other’s lives that we’re asking people to sum up their days with a text? “How r u?” “What’s up?” “What’s new?” These arbitrary questions are annoying enough when asked in person, but at least we have the ability to fire back equally insignificant responses in one second or less. But expecting people to waste their time typing “not bad, u?” or “same sh*t” or heaven forbid “let me tell you about my day” is about as lame and pointless as your appendix.

8. Loud and annoying ringtones.

I was riding the bus to work one morning, when out of nowhere the silence was shattered with screaming. It was the type of scream a frat boy lets out when a serial killer is in the process of gutting him with a fountain pen. I just about had a cardiac arrest and many of the people on the bus jumped out of their seats. It was only when the repetitive screaming suddenly tripled in volume that we all discovered the culprit: a cell phone. Some jerk pulled the phone out of his pocket, embarrassed at how loud it was, and accidentally dropped it on the bus floor. The joke now on him, the whole bus watched in amusement as this dude’s face grew redder and redder, scrambling to pick up and silence the screams coming from his phone. While there are far too many stupid ringtones out there to mention here, the story makes the point: turn down your stupid ringtone! No one thinks you’re clever, or funny, or musically savvy when you’re little pocket jukebox interrupts their thoughts. That guy on the bus probably thought his scream-tone was hysterical, but the looks on everyone else’s face read loud and clear: “What a douche bag!”

9. Disturbing live performances.

Comedy shows, concerts, plays etc…Nothing boils my blood more than having art ruined by a ringing cell phone. I nearly gave a security guard a standing ovation when he grabbed a gentleman by the collar and escorted him out of a Cirque du Soleil show for having his cell phone go off during a particularly dangerous acrobatic stunt. You ruin someone’s comedy act or interrupt an actor on stage, in turn spoiling the experience for everyone around you who’s spent their hard earned money on a night out, and you’re an arrogant douche-monkey who should be put in the corner with the rest of the 5 year olds. But when you disturb a performer who’s very life depends on needle-point focus and concentration, you should be put in jail.

10. Location location location

There are countless locations where “taking the call” is inappropriate and extremely annoying to those around you. The first two off the top of my head as the most frustrating are in libraries, and fast food restaurant lines. One of the last places on earth, aside from an empty church or your own bathroom, where people can go to read, think, and study in silence, is under attack by people who refuse to disconnect from the outside world. Does the word SSSSHHHHH mean nothing to you? Take the call outside, before someone throws “War and Peace” or Stephen King’s “It” at your head.

While ordering food, there’s no need to explain how annoying a phone call can be for both the restaurant staff and for the customers in line behind you. Check out how one Subway restaurant dealt with this problem. Again, if people are going to act like children we need to treat them like children. Well played Subway, well played.

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How to Tell When Leftovers Go Bad

Scientists Answer the Age-Old Question of When It's Time to Toss That Food

To toss or not to toss: Exactly when leftovers become trash has fueled arguments of couples, roommates and co-workers since the dawn of the refrigeration.

Does moldy bread go in the trash, or just get a trim around the green spot? Can Sunday's leftovers be Friday's meal? What about that day-old ground beef?

While scientists have developed methods to detect spoilage -- for example, sensors that go off when milk changes consistency or a polymer to detect bacteria growth in meat -- until these are available on a mass scale, food science and safety experts have some tips.

Deadly and Invisible

First tip: slimy, stinky, spotty or chunky changes in food don't mean very much in terms of safety.

"It may not taste good, that doesn't mean it's going to make you sick," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia in Griffin.

Doyle said there's a difference between what food scientists call spoilage bacteria and pathogens.

Spoilage bacteria make themselves known by way of slimy films on lunch meat, soggy edges on vegetables or in stinky chicken. But "there's a big difference between spoilage and what's going to make you sick," Doyle said. "Often spoilage bacteria will outgrow the harmful bacteria and protect [the food]."

The pathogens that do make you sick are odorless, colorless and invisible. The consumers sickened in the e-coli contaminated beef recalled from Whole Foods this month likely could not smell, see or taste the bacteria. Salmonella is invisible, too. "Even if you put it under the microscope, you couldn't tell it's salmonella [bacteria]," Doyle said.

Catherine Donnelly, professor of nutrition and food sciences at the University of Vermont in Burlington, said, "That's the problem: it's that you really can't tell."

But that doesn't mean Donnelly and other food safety experts think consumers are simply at the mercy of farms and slaughter houses.

It's Getting Hot in There

Because consumers can't use the looks-OK, smells-OK, is-OK mantra for safety, Donnelly has some other advice. "Do you know the temperature of your refrigerator? Most people don't," Donnelly said.

For leftover food to be safe, it must be kept in what Donnelly calls the rule of four: no more than four days at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or 4 degrees centigrade. (Freezing fresh food at zero degree Fahrenheit will keep it safe indefinitely.)

"About 25 percent of the refrigerators in the country are operating at a temperature that can make food unsafe," says Donnelly, citing a study commissioned by the Federal Transit Administration. "Here we're using the refrigerator as a food safety device and most people have no clue, no idea what temperature it should be."

Temperature can slow or stop bacterial growth of either the pathogens or the spoilage variety. Forty degrees Fahrenheit buys people three days for safety with raw chicken and ground beef, three days with cuts of beef and lamb and four days for leftovers.

Allowing anything to go above the cold 40 degrees along the way from store to frying pan can make the difference between illness and safety.

"If it's contaminated and then you further abuse it temperature-wise, then you're at risk," Donnelly said. "In heat, low levels of contamination can just go really wild."

That means not leaving groceries in a hot car for hours during other errands. It also means changing doggy bag habits.

"Bacterial growth is time, or temperature," said Eileen Dykes of the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline.

Dykes recommends a time limit of two hours between meal to fridge transport, which is not always enough time "if you go to a restaurant and then get a doggy bag, and then go to a movie."

Ignoring Smells, or Avoiding Fights

Watching a thermometer in the fridge and counting days on the calendar does far better for home food safety than searching for funny smells or sites of mold. But that doesn't mean those disgusting signs are useless.

Without a thermometer or a clue about the time since purchase, Donnelly says those signs of spoilage can help.

"Depend on those spoilage clues," Donnelly said. "Because it can mean that something else has been growing there."

But mold is a different story. Most mold that grows on bread or fruits isn't toxic, according to M. A. Cousin, a food microbiology and mold expert at Purdue University.

"But if somebody is allergic to mold, and you would inhale those molds, it may give them an adverse reaction," Cousin said.

Otherwise, the allergy-free consumer can just cut a few inches past the mold and the allergy-free consumer will be fine.

"You have to realize that everyone's perception of spoilage is not the same because all of us have different senses; we don't have the same taste, smell, or even see it the same way," Cousin said. "That's why two people don't always agree -- some people would eat it, other people won't."

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[via abc]

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McDonald's Charges More With Less Than A "Full" Cup Of Ice

Reader Greg had his first run in with the notorious "no ice" fee, something we've been hearing about more and more lately. This time the culprit was McDonald's and they got around the "Ok, fine. I'll just have one cube of ice" tactic with a sign that specified a "FULL" cup of ice. Clever, McDonald's. Very. Clever.

Greg says:

So I decided on my lunch break from work I wanted some Mc Donald's.... I went into this new store for the first time and well.... here's my email to Mc Donald's corporate....

I visited this store for the first time. I placed my regular order and when I said "and a Sweet Tea with no ice" I got met with resistance from the cashier and manager. The cashier called over her manager and they spoke in spanish, not english like I was speaking. The manager then said it was $1.69 for the sweet tea even though right above her head it say $1. She claimed it was because I didn't want ice. I stated at every other restaurant I have never been charged 69 cents for "having it my way" without ice. She then pointed to a sign hung on the wall that stated " $1 Sweet Tea with ice only otherwise regular price". First, I never knew Sweet Tea had any other price than $1 and the big sign behind didn't show that. So I then said "Ok, I'll take ice in my drink, 1 ice cube will be enough." She then said it has to be totally full of ice, and then pointed to a different sign that said "$1 Sweet Tea with FULL cup of ice only. Otherwise regular price. No Refills."

For as long as I have been buying food at Mc Donald's I have never been charged for not taking ice. Thats like charging me 50 cents because I don't want mustard on my burger.
Is this normal practice? Is this a new rule about sweet tea? If so I am very disappointed in Mc Donald's and your marketing strategies.

PS. I also do have photos of the two signs they used as proof to try to charge me more money.

I am yet to hear back from Mc Donald's and doubt they will say or do anything in regards to this, but I think its getting a little outrageous how these companies can just start adding fees and surcharges for something as simple as no ice.... Its not like an employee has to stand there with two forks and manually grab the ice out of my cup, just don't put it in to begin with.... shouldn't they give me a discount for not having to spend the time to put the ice in the cup...?

Oh, no, Greg. Don't you see? You're not paying the fee for "convenience," you're just a dirty scammer who was trying to get a tiny amount of "Sweet Tea" for free. McDonald's is on to your little game. You'll take your ice and like it! Oh, wait. Have you tried asking for your ice "on the side?"

In any case, Greg says that the two signs were tucked away in non-obvious locations. He says the one pictured here was "behind the work area of the employees on a side wall at about 7 feet high" nowhere near the menu. Sneaky.

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[via consumerist]

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Top 5 Most Inspirational Videos on YouTube

Sometimes we all can use a little inspiration. I thought I’d share some of my favorite inspirational videos with you, hoping that it’ll help pick you up today.

Play these as needed. Warning: you might be inspired to greatness, so use with caution.

1. Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Watched by over 6 million viewers, this video of a Carnegie Mellon professor who is dying of pancreatic cancer contains more inspiration and wisdom than almost anything else you can watch online. Watch it!

2. A Father’s Amazing Love

Unless you’re a cold-hearted bastard (and none of you who read this blog are, I know), you will get teary-eyed watching this video. You can’t help it. There is no more powerful demonstration of a father’s love than this.

3. Steve Jobs’s Stanford Commencement Speech

I admit, I’m a Steve Jobs fanboy — the guy invented the Mac, the iPod, and Pixar for goodness sake! He’s also a minimalist, like me, and in this speech he shows the power of pursuing your dreams, something I fervently believe in. And Steve, if by any chance you happen to read this blog, drop me a line! (I know, not much of a chance, but I had to give it a shot.) Correction: Steve didn’t invent Pixar, as one reader pointed out. He probably didn’t invent the iPod either, but he did lead both to prominence.

4. Will Smith - Running & Reading (The Key to Life)

Will Smith is right on in this speech. As an avid runner and reader myself, I’ve noticed these same phenomena have changed my life, and I recommend both to anyone I talk to.

5. Free Hugs Campaign

I’m a big fan of the Free Hugs campaign. Such a simple yet profound and revolutionary idea — offer free hugs to strangers and change their lives in small ways. I love it.

Have a favorite inspirational video? Share in the comments!

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[via zenhabits]

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Chinese Rower Forgets to Show Up for Race

Among the excuses for failing to bring home a medal in your particular Olympic sport, Chinese rower Zhang Liang has the most embarrassing. Juliet Macur of the New York Times reports Zhang thought he was in a different heat, and no one from the Chinese team made a point to correct him.

Wei Di, the director of China's water sports programs, said that Zhang had thought he was in the third heat of the single, but was actually entered in the second.

"This shows we still have some problems in team organization," Wei told Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

Ya think? Even worse, Zhang's mistake cost him two medal chances -- he didn't show up for the singles race, which means he didn't qualify for the doubles race, which screwed his partner.

This would be a lot more funny if you didn't feel so bad for Zhang, who might fear more than teammate taunting from this episode. I'm not saying the Chinese Olympic federation is made up of frightening thugs or anything, but someone should probably keep a GPS tracker on Zhang. Just in case.

I'm trying to think of a worse cause for losing a potential medal. The chicken pox seems far from noble. But actively cheating by way of steroids, by virtue of its dishonor, probably wins. We'll give Zhang a bronze here, so he doesn't return home empty-handed.

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[via fanhouse]

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Scientists stop the ageing process

Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time, a study released today says.

Published in today's online edition of Nature Medicine, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host animal was younger.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ's cells.

As people age their cells become less efficient at getting rid of damaged protein resulting in a build-up of toxic material that is especially pronounced in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative disorders.

The researchers say the findings suggest that therapies for boosting protein clearance might help stave off some of the declines in function that accompanies old age.

In experiments, livers in genetically modified mice 22 to 26 months old, the equivalent of octogenarians in human years, cleaned blood as efficiently as those in animals a quarter their age.

By contrast, the livers of normal mice in a control group began to fail.

The benefits of restoring the cleaning mechanisms found inside all cells could extend far beyond a single organ, says Cuervo.

"Our findings are particularly relevant for neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's," she says.

'Misbehaving proteins'

"Many of these diseases are due to 'misbehaving' or damaged proteins that accumulate in neurons. By preventing this decline in protein clearance, we may be able to keep these people free of symptoms for a longer time."

If the body's ability to dispose of cell debris within the cell were enhanced across a wider range of tissues, she says, it could extend life as well.

In healthy organisms, a surveillance system inside cells called chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) locates, digests and destroys damaged proteins.

Specialised molecules, the "chaperones", ferry the harmful material to membrane-bound sacs of enzymes within the cells known as lysosomes.

Once the cargo has been "docked", a receptor molecule transfers the protein into the sac, where it is rapidly digested.

With age, these receptors stop working as well, resulting in a dangerous build-up of faulty proteins that has been linked, in the liver, to insulin resistance as well as the inability to metabolise sugar, fats or alcohol.

The same breakdown of the cell's cleaning machinery can also impair the liver's ability to remove the toxic build-up of drugs at a stage in life when medication is often part of daily diet.

In genetically modified mice, Cuervo compensated for the loss of the receptors in the animals by adding extra copies.

"That was enough to maintain a clean liver and to prove that if you keep your cells clean they work better," she says.

Settles debate

The study goes a long way towards settling a sharp debate in the field of ageing research.

Leading Australian ageing researcher David le Couteur, Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Sydney, says the paper is a major breakthrough.

"She has single-handedly shown that lysosome function is a crucial part of the ageing process," he says.

Cuervo has also shown, he says, the critical role the lysosomal receptor molecules play in keeping the liver clean of damaged proteins.

While her paper does not show increased survival rates among the mice, le Couteur, who has advised her recently on the research, says Cuervo does have data on improved survival rates which she intends to publish.

He also says she is now working with pharmaceutical companies to identify drugs that will turn the receptors on, or make them more active.

Cuervo believes maintaining efficient protein clearance may improve longevity and function in all the body's tissues.

It is also possible that the same kind of "cellular clearance" can be achieved through diet, she says.

Research over the past decade has shown that restricted calorie intake in animals, including mammals, significantly enhances longevity.

"My ideal intervention in the future would be a better diet rather than a pill," she says.

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[via abc]

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11 Things We Hate About iTunes

iPod and iPhone owners know that Apple's iTunes is the dominant software for managing digital media. But some aspects of iTunes drives us nuts.

We all use iTunes. It's our gateway to millions of song downloads, thousands of TV shows and movies, that killer new App Store, and a terrific selection of podcasts. Without it, our iPods and iPhones would be empty, lonely, and sad.

But, oh, does iTunes drive us crazy sometimes. It lacks obvious features, hobbles others, and does things that are just plain dumb. In some cases, Apple's decision-making is to blame, not iTunes itself, but the latter is the conduit through which those bad decisions trickle.

We've rounded up 11 of these annoyances, all of which Apple could fix in about 5 minutes. In the meantime, we've listed workarounds for many of them--because, let's face it, much as we hate iTunes sometimes, we're stuck with it.

1. Wildly Inefficient Updates

Kudos to Apple for releasing frequent updates to iTunes, fixing bugs, and adding features along the way. But big-time demerits for forcing us to download and reinstall the entire program for every little update. And bundling QuickTime, too, whether it's new or not. Yo, Apple, ever heard of a patch? Some folks are still using dial-up, you know.

2. DRM (Boo!)

iTunes gave us the 99-cent song download, thus paving the way for honest people to buy music at a fair price. So why does the iTunes Store still employ digital rights management (DRM) for the majority of songs in its library? Blaming the record labels no longer holds water: AmazonMP3 and Rhapsody are among a growing number of services selling DRM-free MP3s from all the major labels, not just EMI. At least iTunes no longer charges extra for the latter's "iTunes Plus" selections, but why hasn't Apple given DRM the heave-ho once and for all? At least customers have alternatives now.

3. No Monitoring of Music Folders

Apple seems unwilling to acknowledge that people get music from sources other than iTunes. How else to explain the software's inability to monitor folders and automatically add new music to the library? Sure, any songs ripped from CDs or purchased from the iTunes Store get added, but that's it. If you rip discs with a different program or buy music from other stores, you'll have to import them manually. Geez, even the Microsoft Zune software monitors folders.

Fortunately, solutions are available. iTunes Folder Watch, a free utility for Windows (sorry, Mac faithful), monitors designated folders, then automatically adds any newly discovered music to your iTunes library. And if you buy music from AmazonMP3 or the Rhapsody MP3 Store, those stores' download utilities will automatically add new purchases to your iTunes collection--no intervention required.

4. 'Pushing' of Other Programs by iTunes Installer

Earlier this year, Apple hopped aboard the crapware train by adding its new-for-Windows Safari browser to its Software Update tool--which tends to appear whenever there's a new version of iTunes. Anyone accustomed to clicking OK without looking too closely would end up installing Safari, which was selected for download by default. At least now the browser is relegated to a "New Software" category--but it's still automatically queued up for download unless you clear the check box.

Meanwhile, any Windows user who installed iTunes 7.7 (the version that introduced the App Store) will find a surprise in Windows' Control Panel: a MobileMe service Preferences icon. It lands there whether you're a MobileMe subscriber or not, and whether you want it or not.

5. No Subscription Service--Still

If you're going to keep clinging to DRM, Apple, how about giving us a music-subscription service to go with it? You know, the kind offered by Napster, Rhapsody, and Zune Marketplace. For 15 bucks a month, a Zune Pass lets us buy unlimited (but not unrestricted) downloads that we can pack into our high-capacity iPods. It's an unbeatable way to discover new music--and the more music we discover, the more music we're likely to purchase.

6. 'Neglected' Podcasts Stop Downloading

iTunes is like a strict schoolmarm: If you don't listen to your subscribed podcasts on a frequent and regular basis, the program stops downloading new episodes. Say, shouldn't that be our decision? Does Apple think we're low on hard-drive space or something? We've got gigs to spare, so keep the podcasts coming. That's why we subscribed to them, after all. Unfortunately, iTunes has no setting that can override this dictatorial action. Guess we better keep our regular appointments with "The Onion Radio News" and the "Car Talk" guys.

7. The Mystery Check Box

Next to every single item in your library--songs, TV shows, podcasts, and so on--there's a little check box. It's been there as long as we can remember, but if the iTunes help function explains its purpose, that entry is really hard to find. Do you uncheck items to stop them from syncing? Check items that you want in a playlist? What's up with the box?!

Actually, it's pretty simple: Unchecked items don't get played when you're listening to your library or a playlist. Likewise, unchecked items don't get synced to your iPod if you enable the "Sync only checked songs and videos" option in the device's Summary menu. Handy options, right? So why all the secrecy?

8. NBC Shows--Bring Them Back!

Come on, Apple, make nice with NBC already. New seasons of "Chuck," "Heroes", and "30 Rock " are right around the corner, and we're just itching to watch them on our iPods and iPhones. Bet you can't even remember what the fight was about. Oh, right, money. Seems like both sides were making quite a lot of it, and now both of you are getting nothing. Wouldn't something be better? Swallow your pride and get NBC back on board in time for September. We've got money for "Office" burning a hole in our pockets.

9. Weak Dockable Player Controls (Updated)

Here we are, seven versions into iTunes, and the player still doesn't have decent dockable controls. The iTunes toolbar (accessible by right-clicking the Windows taskbar, the choosing Toolbars, iTunes) offers only the most basic player functions, and doesn't even show you which track is currently playing. As for the Mini Player, it can't actually dock anywhere: At best you can configure it to stay on top of other applications if you venture deep enough into the program's settings menu (look near the bottom of the Advanced tab). What we really want is a dockable iTunes toolbar with volume, seek, play/pause, and other controls, and an optional song-info ticker. Firefox and Internet Explorer users can get that kind of goodness from the FoxyTunes extension, which adds customizable iTunes controls to the browsers.

10. Rotten at Exporting Playlists

Want to use your carefully crafted, years-in-the-making playlists with another program or a non-iPod player? Sorry: They're locked up like gold bars at Fort Knox. While most music managers employ the industry-standard M3U format for playlists, iTunes marches to the beat of its own proprietary-format drummer. Yes, you can export an iTunes playlist, but only for importing it back into iTunes again.

Thankfully, developers have come to the rescue. Eric Daugherty's iTunes Export turns any iTunes playlist into an M3U file, and iTunes Sync makes it possible to sync your song library and playlists with a variety of non-iPod players. Best of all, both utilities are free (thank you, developers!).

11. No E-Books

On the subject of e-books on iTunes, Steve Jobs famously declared that "people don't read books anymore." (Guess they listen to them, though, as audiobooks have been a staple on iTunes for years.) Admittedly, smallish iPod screens don't lend themselves well to reading on the go, but the iPhone and iPod Touch are perfect for the job. Heck, they could easily challenge the Amazon Kindle for e-book supremacy, as their sharp, roomy touch screens let you turn pages by swiping a finger--just like in a real book.

For now, book lovers can get their fix from eReader, a free iPhone/Touch app connected to eReader and Fictionwise bookstores. But iTunes and e-books seem like such a natural fit. Maybe together, they could encourage people to read more.

Three Things We Love About iTunes

Some features of iTunes we really like. They include:

1. Dynamic Search in the iTunes Store

The iTunes Store's search box is dynamic: Start typing, and results immediately appear below. You can find HBO's series "Flight of the Conchords," for instance, by typing just the first three letters. Very handy. We'd love it if iTunes Library searches worked the same way.

2. Free Stuff

Every week, the iTunes Store offers a new free song and, more often than not, one or more free TV shows. You'll even find the occasional free audiobook. To browse the weekly giveaways, head to the "FREE on iTunes" section at the bottom of the main store page.

3. Smart Playlists

A "smart" playlist is one built in iTunes on one or more selected criteria, like genre, rating, even bit rate and play count. For example: The 25 least-recently played punk songs released between 1982 and 1989, where the album rating is at least four stars. Think we'll call this playlist "New old punk."

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[via pcworld]

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Aussies crack cancer secret

AUSTRALIAN scientists are hoping to cure leukaemia, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis after their breakthrough discovery of how to stop killer blood cells growing.

The team has unlocked the secrets behind the protein which controls the way the blood cancer cells spread when it is damaged - and have found a way to stop its deadly process.

Work is now starting to design a drug to prevent the damaged proteins operating, effectively stopping the cancer as well as asthma and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.

After spending a decade uncovering the structure of the receptor protein, which sits on the surface of white blood cells, lead researcher Professor Michael Parker, of Melbourne's St Vincent's Institute, said scientists could now build a drug to attach itself to the protein and stop it sending messages into the cells telling them to multiply unchecked.

"If we can stop the signal for the proliferation of uncontrolled growth of the cells then we can stop the leukaemia in its tracks," he said.

Working with molecular biologists at Adelaide's Hanson Institute, the Melbourne scientists used X-ray and synchrotron imaging to build an image of the structure of the protein for the first time, hoping to find a way to block its process.

The GM-CSF hormone - which controls the production of blood cells in the body - works by attaching itself to the receptor proteins, which then send a message into white blood cells telling them to multiply.

When damaged, the protein's messages cause an over-production of cells or cells which persist too long, resulting in diseases such as leukaemia as well as some inflammatory conditions.

The major breakthrough came when the researchers realised the proteins linked together to form networks on the surface of white blood cells after being activated by the hormone, and that by stopping the networks forming they could also stop the growth.

Liam Heudebourck, who was diagnosed with asthma four years ago, was yesterday hopeful about the discovery.

The Camden seven-year-old was admitted to hospital in March after suffering a major attack.

"If scientists found a cure or something that could help not to have his puffer every day, that would be great," his mother, Belinda English said.

While the drug development phase has only just begun, Professor Parker said it would be easier to target a protein on the surface of the cell rather than trying to come up with a molecule to break its way into the center of the cell.

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[via news.au]

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Don’t Put Too Much Faith in High-Tech Passports

Two European researchers have found a way to defeat the chips being placed in passports to eliminate fraud. It’s another reminder never to place blind faith in technology.

Adam Laurie and Jeroen van Beek, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showed the Business Technology Blog how to capture and change information stored on chips included in new passports from many countries. The chips–based on a technology called RFID, for radio frequency identification–are intended to improve border security. Instead of just relying on the photograph and other information printed in a passport, such chips store a digital photograph of the traveler and more extensive personal information that a border official can match to what’s printed.

Laurie showed us his son’s British passport, in which he embedded a chip that displays Osama Bin Laden’s photograph. The passports have a key needed to access the electronic information, but it is taken from information found in the passport like the date of birth. Laurie was able in about four hours to decipher the key and use an RFID scanner to steal the digital information from a passport contained in a sealed envelope.

We’re not drawing attention to this story to raise an alarm about passports. The technique is pretty complicated, involving sophisticated software and know-how. It’s a sure bet that the chips make it significantly harder to make counterfeit passports. But would anyone be foolish enough to suggest that the new technology makes passport security infallible?

Turns out the British government would. When 3,000 blank passports were stolen there two weeks ago, the passport office said that “the stolen documents could not be used by thieves because of their hi-tech embedded chip security features,” the BBC reports.

Comments like this make Laurie furious. He’s spent much of the last year going back and forth with the British government about just what exactly is and isn’t secure with the new passports.
“Every time they’ve said something is infallible we’ve proved them wrong,” he tells us.
When people place 100% trust in technology, they run the risk of making serious mistakes.

We’ve written in the past about computer errors that result in negative bank balances greater than the national debt or ludicrous energy bills. Laurie is worried that blind faith in the passport system could result in more serious problems, including false arrests.

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[via wsj]

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'7 Sins' Wine Glasses

These red wine glasses are based on the 7 deadly sins. Each glass encapsulates a sin, which is revealed through the ritual of drinking.










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50 Simple Driving Techniques that Will Increase Your Gas Mileage

"Hypermiling" is the term for altering your driving habits in order to get the most miles per gallon of gas. Let's face it, gas prices are outrageous and the economy as a whole is being affected. If you are having trouble making ends meet and want to get the most out of your gas money, follow the 50 hypermiling tips below.

Before You Drive

There are a few things you can do before you start your drive that will aid your hypermiling. Follow the tips below.

1. Consider a Stick Shift - So few young adults even know how to drive a stick shift these days. However, a manual car allows you to shift more efficiently for hypermiling.
2. Trade in Your Whale - If you are driving a huge, gas-guzzling beast, then you should consider something smaller and more fuel efficient.
3. Lighten Your Load - Remove any heavy items from your car, particularly items in your trunk. This excess weight will slow you down and waist more energy.
4. Remove Luggage Racks - Anything on your roof will cause wind resistance, including the metal racks.
5. Keep Your Tank Half-Full - By keeping your tank full at all times, you are always carrying around extra weight. Sometimes, you can reduce 50-100 pounds by avoiding a full tank.
6. Comparison Shop - No, don't drive around town looking for the best prices. That wastes gas! Instead use an online guide to the cheapest fuel in your area.
7. Choose Gas Wisely - The cheapest gas may not be your best option for saving money. Conduct some research to determine what the proper grade is for your vehicle.
8. Fuel Up Early - It is believed that when you fuel up your car during the coolest part of the day, this prevents expansion and you will ultimately purchase more gas for your money.
9. Plan Your Route - Be smart in your driving by making a plan to avoid high-traffic, congested areas, as well as areas with a large fluctuation in speed limits.
10. Don't Top Off - By overfilling your gas tank, you may cause gas to spill out, thus losing more money.
11. Tune Up - Routine tune-ups and oil changes may help to prevent major engine and transmission issues that can affect your gas mileage.
12. Change Air Filter - When was the last time you changed out your air filter? This can greatly affect your gas mileage.
13. Check the Tires - Proper tire pressure can help you drive more effectively and save gas by preventing undo strain on your engine.
14. Save Fuel Receipts - By tracking your fuel consumption, you will learn what techniques works best for getting the most gas mileage.
15. Consider a Fuel Economy Monitor - Believe it or not, there are high-tech gadgets available that effectively track your fuel usage. Some people even build their own. Knowledge is power when hypermiling and every little bit helps.

General Driving Tips

These hypermiling tips are useful for any driving situation, regardless of location or weather.

16. Leave Early - In order to prevent both speeding and traffic, you should leave for your trip with plenty of time to spare. If you have normal office hours, try to beat morning traffic by an hour.
17. Drive Steady - Try to keep your car at a consistent speed. Unnecessary acceleration and late braking is both dangerous and fuel inefficient.
18. Pretend You're on a Bike - When you are bicycling, you coast down hills and conserve as much energy as you can while going uphill. Accelerate your car as if you are riding a bicycle.
19. Avoid 4-Wheel Drive - This function, although handy for getting you out of tough jams, uses a lot of gas. Try to avoid using 4-wheel drive as much as possible.
20. Avoid Aggression - Do not drive angry and do not try to keep up with those who are speeding. As a hypermiler, you must adopt a calculating, zen attitude about driving and leave the emotion at home.
21. Do Not "Rev" - Never "rev" your engine if you can help it. This just expends unnecessary gas.
22. Avoid Drive-Thrus - Avoiding these will improve your waistline and your bottom line. Drive-thrus require a lot of idling from your car. Just park and go into the restaurant if you must have fast food.
23. Keep Your Hands and Feet Still - The more you weave in and out of traffic or move your foot back and forth between the accelerator and brake, the more gas you waste.
24. Use Only the Right Foot - You should have learned this in Driver's Ed, but some people use both feet to pedal. This can cause you to hit the brake and accelerator at the same time, wasting gas.
25. Drive Barefoot - While you are technically not supposed to do this, some hypermilers feel it helps them to finely tune their car's braking and accelerating.
26. Ride the Wind - If you can find a good tailwind to plan your trip around, let the wind work to your advantage. Do not, however, tailgate a larger vehicle (also known as "drafting").
27. Keep it Under 40 - Whenever, possible, that is. Driving over 40 miles per hour pits your car against gas-guzzling wind resistance.
28. Turn of the A/C - While this isn't practical in some areas, turning off the air conditioner can save gas. If it is hot outside, try turning it off for only a few minutes at a time.
29. Avoid Rocky Roads - If you find yourself on a rocky road, you may be wasting gas. Seek out the smoothest surface possible to drive on.
30. Use Overdrive - If you have an automatic vehicle, that is.
31. Mind Your Fuel Cap - Many people lose gas from evaporation because their fuel caps are loose or missing.

City Driving

32. Keep Moving - While this isn't always advisable or safe, you should try to keep your car in constant motion while driving around the city. Avoid areas where you know there are lot of stop signs and traffic lights.
33. Pay Attention to Light Changes - You may wish to slow down for a red light ahead of time so that by the time you reach the car behind you, the light turns green and you don't have to stop completely. Do not do this if it holds anyone up behind you, of course.
34. Reduce Idle Time - If you must leave your car idling for several seconds or more, you can put your car in neutral and turn off the engine. This can be a bit dangerous in certain situations, however.

Highway Driving

35. Find a Slow Buddy - Amazingly, driving below or at the speed limit can sometimes get you run over on the highway. Find someone else who is driving as slow as you and get behind his or her car (at a safe distance, of course).
36. Do Not Speed - Not only will this save you money on citations, you will get more miles per gallon at 55 miles per hour than you will at 70 miles per hour.
37. Keep Your Windows Up - This reduces wind resistance and makes your car more aerodynamic.
38. Turn Off Your Lights - Granted, you should only do this when it is safe, but it can save gas on the highway.
39. Close the Sunroof - Yes, the weather might be beautiful, but high gas prices are not. Keep the sunroof closed at high speeds.
40. Set Cruise Control - Although this function can actually waste gas on hills, it is very useful for those of us with a naturally lead foot. If you can't keep yourself under a certain speed and you are on a somewhat flat road, set the cruise control.

Parking

Yes, even the way you park can affect your gas mileage. Below are few easy tips to follow.

41. Park Backwards - In other words, you should park so that you can drive away in the forward position, thus eliminating the need to use the reverse gear.
42. Park in the Shade - Parking in the shade keeps the inside of the car cooler and makes it easier to keep the air conditioning off. In older vehicles, parking in the shade will also reduce gas evaporation.
43. Time Your Departure - Do not start up your engine again until you have the opportunity to pull out and drive. Otherwise, you will idle.
44. Park Far Away - How much gas are you wasting at the mall or grocery store while driving around, searching for the closest spot? Just park the car and walk it -- you know you could use the exercise anyway.
45. Adjust While Parked - Don't wait until you start your engine to put on your seatbelt and adjust the seat and mirrors. This wastes unneeded gas.

Bad Weather

Driving conditions change during bad weather and so must your hypermiling techniques.

46. Avoid Driving in the Snow - Snowy roads are not only dangerous, they cause heavy resistance and will affect your fuel economy.
47. Use Snow Tires Wisely - If bad weather calls for snow tires and you have to travel, be safe and use them. However, be sure to remove them promptly when the weather clears.
48. Remove Ice from Car - Ice is heavy and can accumulate on your car quickly. Knock off any icicles in order to prevent more drag.
49. Don't Warm Up - Most cars today can start and drive in cold weather immediately. Therefore, you should just bundle up and leave rather than idling in the driveway until the car is warm.
50. Postpone Cold Trips - When your engine and tires are cold, they lose fuel efficiency. If you can help it, avoid trips in the cold.

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How Marijuana Works. Curious?

Rumour has it that marijuana has some pretty interesting effects on the human brain, but how could plant smoke affect our physiology? Well, it's all to do with a case of mistaken identity. Logan Wright goes in search of cells that get duped by dope into having a high old time.

Known variously as marijuana, ganja, cannabis, pot, jays, joints and Mary Jane, the product derived from the cannabis plant is undoubtedly the most popular illicit recreational drug in the world; hence its countless pet names. It can be taken in a variety of creative ways including smoking, eating and drinking, even has incarnations in gum or brownies form.

THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol if you prefer, is a compound within the cannabis plant that, like nicotine or caffeine, may have evolved to ward off herbivores. Its strong psychoactive properties, however, have proven rather seductive to the international drugs scene.

Once it reaches the bloodstream, THC takes only a few seconds to reach the brain, where it passes itself off as a neurotransmitter - the chemicals which carry messages between neurons in the brain. THC is shaped much like a neurotransmitter called anandamide, which means it can sneak itself into the brain’s anandamide receptor proteins and start to cause mischief. With THC’s spanner in the works, some of the brain’s normal functions really begin to waver.

The receptor proteins are located primarily in three areas of the brain: the hippocampus, responsible for short term memory; the cerebellum, an area controlling coordination; and the basal ganglia, which manages unconscious muscle movement. These are the functions that are altered by THC’s presence, which is why a marijuana user will typically experience impaired coordination, memory lapses, paranoia and altered perception, as well as feeling their heart quicken.

One thing scientists do not thoroughly understand is how THC interacts with dopamine, the chemical that is well known for generating feelings of pleasure and motivation. It’s thought that when THC activates receptor proteins a signal is sent to nearby dopamine terminals in the brain. These then begin to produce inordinate amounts of dopamine, triggering that contented feeling known to so many politicians.

The health effects of marijuana are hotly contested. There is good evidence that it is effective a treating the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and is used by many people as a treatment for a variety of ills and aches.

However, although it’s generally accepted to be safer than heroine or cocaine, marijuana may have several potential long term effects, which are less helpful. The drug has been linked to an increased incidence of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. It is also referred to as a “gateway drug” because many marijuana users move from it to more dangerous drugs in search of a more powerful experiencer. For those particularly enamored with the drug’s effects, however, there is consolation: some believe that marijuana use may lead to an eventual perma-high.

Cannabis trivia:
Archaeologists have reported that marijuana was one of the first plants cultivated by humans. It was being used 10,000 years ago for linen, paper, and garments. In China and India, it was being smoked as early as 2700 BC.

The Ancient Greek historian Herodotus mentions that Scythian tribes used to pile cannabis leaves on to bonfires during wild festivals.

George Washington, the first US president, grew cannabis, declaring "Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.

"In Vietnam, where cannabis grows wild and free, people rarely smoke it themselves. Instead they feed it to their pigs, who get the serious munchies. The result is that the farmers produce some very fat, and very chilled out, pigs.

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9 Cities Destroyed by the Olympics

9. Athens, Greece
Year: Summer, 2004
Collateral damage: City´s dogs confused, possibly dead
An enormous stray dog population threatened to make Athens look bad during the Olympics, but reports ahead of the games that 15,000 dogs would be poisoned made it look even worse. A war in the press followed, with city officials claiming that rounded-up dogs would be taken to shelters and then suspiciously released where they were found after the Games, while animal groups argued that doggie death squads were on the prowl. Either way, they were tough times for our four-legged friends, who just wanted some baklava crumbs and a belly rub.

8. Lillehammer, Norway
Year: Winter, 1994
Collateral damage: Tonya Harding, the Tonya Harding sex tape, FOX´s Celebrity Boxing
These Olympic Games burned more than Lillehammer—pretty much the whole world felt it. The reason: a trashy blonde figure skater named Tonya Harding. While the infamous Nancy Kerrigan clubbing (arranged by Harding´s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly) took place a month before the Games, the ensuing scandal dominated the Olympics. In the years that followed, we´ve been subject to arrests, a televised bout versus Clinton alleged F-buddy Paula Jones, and a leaked Harding-Gillooly sex tape. Our brains—and boners—have never recovered.

7. Beijing, China
Year: Summer, 2008
Collateral damage: Men forbidden from acting like men
As red-blooded American men, we enjoy hocking the occasional loog or dropping the periodic F-bomb, and we´re certain red-blooded/governed Chinese men do too. However, that conflicts with China´s new commitment to pretend etiquette, so a huge campaign is underway to clean up Beijing´s act in advance of this summer´s Games. Public spitting now draws a fine equal to a day´s pay, and the same has been recommended for cursing. What´s next, no more student protests?!

6. Atlanta, Georgia
Collateral damage: One fan dead, 111 injured, one hero´s reputation ruined
Richard Jewell was a big jolly security guard with a sweet mustache when he was thrust into the spotlight following a pipe bomb explosion that killed one and injured 111. Initially branded a hero for warning authorities about the suspicious backpack and evacuating Centennial Olympic Park, Jewell was made a prime suspect by the media, who were relentless. The New York Post even called him a "fat, failed former sheriff´s deputy." He was cleared by the FBI, but spent the rest of his life—he died in August 2007—clearing his name through libel suits against various outlets. That´s a lot to put up with just to live in a city full of strip clubs and homemade pecan pie. Wait, no it isn´t.

5. Olympia, Greece
Year: 776 B.C.
Collateral damage: Misshapen Greek penises
Ever tried running completely naked or, say, wrestling another man while you were both skin-bare? (Wait, don´t answer that.) Participants in early Olympics had a dubious idea for curbing all the flopping knobs and incidental sword fights that mark any great nude athletic competition. That idea was the Kynodesme, a leather strip tied from the foreskin to either a belt or the base of the, um, man javelin. Was it protective? Not in the least. Did it set Greeks on an evolutionary path of deformed dingalings? Probably.

4. Mexico City, Mexico
Year: Summer, 1968
Collateral damage: Possibly hundreds of lives, democracy
Long before the U.S. government made hunting Mexicans fashionable, their own government pioneered it. After agent provocateurs planted in a plaza of pro-democracy demonstrators busted off some starter rounds, army troops went loco, opening fire on anything wearing a weedy mustache. Depending on who you believe, anywhere between 20 and 320 people were shot to death, but the government didn´t bother investigating the incident for nearly 30 years. (Hey, that´s still faster than Mexico´s 4x400 relay team.)