Saturday, March 7, 2009

Introducing the Celtics' new dancing phenom

Introducing the Celtics' new dancing phenom: "The Boston Celtics have a new Garden JumboTron legend, and he's only seven-years-old.

Internet, meet dancin' in the aisles superstar Daylon Trotman; Daylon"

Eee PC-in-a-Keyboard Coming Soon


Eee PC-in-a-Keyboard Coming Soon: "If you can fit a whole computer, keyboard and screen into a tiny, fold-up 7' box, why not squeeze one into a keyboard? And while you're there, what about adding a little touchscreen in the space normally inhabited by the number pad?

What's that? Asus did it already? By jove, it did! Look at that! The Eee PC Keyboard is a netbook stuffed inside a keyboard: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB RAM and either an 8GB or a 16GB solid state drive for storage. The touch screen is a five-incher and can be used for navigation and display. Should you feel the need for something a little larger, you can hook the Eee up to a monitor via VGA and HDMI or, in the case of the more expensive model, the display can be connected wirelessly.

The Eees will be available in May, for $400 and $600. One more thing: Is it just us, or does everything come with an Eee brand on it these days? It's certainly helping out the alphabet's second vowel, although as the English language's most popular letter, it doesn't really need it."

Wonderful Wine Cellars For Any Room in Your House


Wonderful Wine Cellars For Any Room in Your House: "Ever want a wine cellar but don’t have the space or money to build one? The Spiral Cellars design/build firm will dig a hole right in whatever room you want your cellar in and haul the dirt right out the front door. In the remaining void they infill a highly functionally and visually dazzling spiral-staircase"

Alcoholic Monkeys

Bad Paintings of Barack Obama


badpaintingsofbarackobama.com

A Musical Afterlife Planned for “Ghost”

A Musical Afterlife Planned for “Ghost”: "Illustrating Karl Marx’s lesser-known maxim that history repeats itself first as a chick flick and second as a stage musical, the 1990 romance “Ghost” will become the latest cinematic weepie to be translated to the stage. The creative team of “Ghost: The Musical” announced that they would be adapting the supernatural film, in which Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore famously got frisky around a pottery wheel, for a production to open in London’s West End in 2010."

This man has made 6310 youtube videos of himself smoking pipes

Celebrity Jeopardy: Saturday Night Live

Female athlete was really a man


Female athlete was really a man: "Ananova:
Female athlete was really a man

A Chinese woman athlete who won dozens of medals has thrown most of them away after learning she is really a man."

Friday, March 6, 2009

James Randi Speaks: Carl Sagan

Doctors Find Link Between Optimism and Lower Risk for Heart Disease, Early Death


Pollyanna Will Outlive Everyone: "If a chipper person in your life is annoying you, maybe you should brace yourself for that person outliving you in the long haul, according to findings of a new study.

A study of 100,000 women presented at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting Thursday found a strong correlation between optimism and a person's risk for cancer-related death, heart disease and early death.

Researchers surveyed the personality traits of middle-age women in 1994 as part of the Women's Health Initiative study run by the National Institutes of Health."

Winchester Little Cigars TV Commercial

A Tribute to Discontinued Cereals


A Tribute to Discontinued Cereals: "Breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Or so you’ve been told. I grew up in what I christen the golden age of breakfast cereal, with a large variety of sugar laced options to choose from. And choose I did. I was a fan of many cereals, and I guess I should be thankful for parents who didn’t limit my options. Any mixture of sugar, grain, and corn was fair game and the more marshmallows the better! Just as long as it tasted good (or sometimes even if it didn’t)."

It's All in How You Ask the Question

12 TERRIBLE CELEBRITY BANDS


12 TERRIBLE CELEBRITY BANDS: "With Joaquin Phoenix pursuing a mushroom-induced musical career, we thought that we would take a moment to point out the missteps taken by those before him. These vanity projects should serve as a warning to any actor who has rock and roll dreams to stick with their dayjob. And a reminder to all of us that fame makes people crazy."

Thursday, March 5, 2009

A Talking Grandfather’s Clock


A Talking Grandfather’s Clock: "A GRANDFATHER clock that has gone modern with a vengeance, which” chimes and talks the hours, reminds you that it is eight o’clock — time to go to school, picks up broadcast music, plays the latest record hits—-which in fact seems to have everything but a soul, has recently been built by Joseph Pinto. The clock contains the usual clock machinery, a loud speaker, a radio receiving set, phonograph and records."

Internet-Observatory to Provide Movie-like Window on Universe


Internet-Observatory to Provide Movie-like Window on Universe: "'LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. The 8.4-metre LSST telescope and the 3-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity — the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe.'

Bill Gates -Microsoft co-founder."

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

10 Historically Inaccurate Movies

10 Historically Inaccurate Movies: "Something about the words 'based on a true story' flashing across the screen has the ability to capture a viewer's attention unlike anything else. History is full of noteworthy people and events that are just ripe for the screenwriter's picking and often result in hugely successful movies. However, try as they might, filmmakers who attempt to portray anything about the past very seldom satisfy their harshest critics. And we're not talking about Roger Ebert. Professional film reviewers are tame compared to the wrath of nit-picking historians.

One could theorize that there is a purpose to taking creative license with history. After all, historical events and people aren't known for being simple, clear-cut or morally unambiguous. A film allows us to boil down history into something more easily digestible and ethically black and white. Other times, filmmakers want to make a point about a modern issue or ignite wartime patriotism by invoking analogous events of the past, even if that means bending details."

Stop Teaching Handwriting


Stop Teaching Handwriting: "This is absurd: I am a college professor and a freelance writer, and the only time I pick up a pen is to sign a credit-card receipt. Let’s stop brutalizing our kids with years of drills on the proper formation of a cursive capital “S”—handwriting is a historical blip in the long history of writing technologies, and it’s time to consign to the trash heap this artificial way of making letters, along with clay tablets, smoke signals, and other arcane technologies.

Many will find this argument hard to swallow because we cling to handwriting out of a romantic sense that script expresses identity. But only since the invention of the printing press has handwriting been considered a mark of self expression. Medieval monks first worried that the invention of printing would be the ruin of books, as presses were more idiosyncratic and prone to human error than manuscripts produced in scriptoriums. And the monks never conceived of handwriting as a sign of identity: For them, script was formulaic, not self-expressive. That concept did not appear until the early 18th century. Still later came the notion that personality and individuality could be deduced by analyzing handwriting. All the while, print became widely available, and handwriting lost its primacy as a vehicle of mass communication."

Review: Amazon Kindle for iPhone

Review: Amazon Kindle for iPhone | iLounge: "Conceptually, and given the recent high-profile launch of its second-generation Kindle hardware, this is only a little short of stunning. It suggests that Amazon is more concerned with selling books and popularizing the proprietary Kindle eBook format than selling its own hardware—at least for now. And it makes more sense when you consider that Amazon is one of the leading sellers of iPods, as well; whether you’re using an iPod touch, an iPhone, or a Kindle device, all roads can now lead to the Kindle book format."

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The 59 Best Breakfast Places in America


US Restaurants with Best Breakfast - Esquire: "Our unranked, incomplete, and unimpeachable list of the best breakfasts across the country. No brunch allowed. Does your favorite joint make it?
Plus: Dishes chefs make in the morning, the ultimate pantry, and our all-you-can-eat guide to breakfast"

Pink dolphin appears in US lake


Pink dolphin appears in US lake - Telegraph: "Charter boat captain Erik Rue, 42, photographed the animal, which is actually an albino, when he began studying it after the mammal first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern USA.

Capt Rue originally saw the dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins, with one appearing to be its mother which never left its side.

He said: 'I just happened to see a little pod of dolphins, and I noticed one that was a little lighter.

'It was absolutely stunningly pink."

Can sleep deprivation be the cause of mental illness?

You would normally put Louise’s erratic behaviour down to a case of extreme forgetfullness due to lack of sleep, rather than a sign of mental illness, but a recent article in the New Scientist now raises the possibility that insomnia could actually cause mental illness.

read more | digg story

Monday, March 2, 2009

Hudson River Plane Landing Reconstructed

7 Pointless and Crazy Science Experiments


7 Pointless and Crazy Science Experiments - Neatorama: "Have you every read about some new science experiment or research study that just seems… well, stupid? If you’ve ever gotten to the point where you’ve wondered what other bogus things they’ll pay people to learn about, you’re in luck. Here’s 7 of the most ridiculous studies ever:"

10 Features That Will Make Twitter Better


10 Features That Will Make Twitter Better: "Twitter’s popularity has skyrocketed in the recent months. Usage statistics states that most people who use Twitter interact with the application via the web rather than a third-party client such as TweetDeck or twitterfeed.

Twitter’s web interface is simple and intuitive but lacks a few features that can make it much better. In this article, you’ll read about 10 excellent user interface features that can enhance the Twitter web experience."

Books and Music That Make You Dumb

Books and Music That Make You Dumb - Digits - WSJ.com: "Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, the database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries."

With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic), Booksthatmakeyoudumb.com and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.com, Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Bloopers - Late Night with Conan O'Brien

The Stories Behind 10 Weird College Mascots


The Stories Behind 10 Weird College Mascots

Why Hair Goes Gray

Why Hair Goes Gray: "Scientists may have figured out why hair turns gray, and their finding may open the door to new anti-graying strategies.

New research shows that hair turns gray as a result of a chemical chain reaction that causes hair to bleach itself from the inside out.

The process starts when there is a dip in levels of an enzyme called catalase. That catalase shortfall means that the hydrogen peroxide that naturally occurs in hair can't be broken down. So hydrogen peroxide builds up in the hair, and because other enzymes that would repair hydrogen peroxide's damage are also in short supply, the hair goes gray."

Bird of Paradise

I Love My Job!

I Love My Job!: "Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job.

As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool."

13 Unsolved scientific puzzles


13 Unsolved scientific puzzles - Times Online: "Author Michael Books has investigated some of the most puzzling anomalies of modern science, those intractrable problems that refuse to conform to the theories. Here he counts down the 13 strangest."

People, Places & Things That Changed Their Names


9 People, Places & Things That Changed Their Names: "When much-reviled security firm Blackwater changed its name to Xe last week, it wasn’t just cleverly attempting to squash criticism by tossing out a name nobody would know how to pronounce. (Although that idea was probably a foreseen fringe benefit of the switch.) It was just joining in on a long tradition of corporations, places, and people opting to pick up a catchier, less tainted, or more unique name. Here are nine other famous entities that changed their names; you might not even recognize them by their original monikers."

What’s a Hulu? The Origins of 8 High-Tech Names


What’s a Hulu? The Origins of 8 High-Tech Names: "You know the names, but do you know where those names came from? Here are the stories behind the naming of TiVo, BlackBerry and more – including what they were almost called."

Adios to Paul Harvey and, Good Day

Adios to Paul Harvey and, Good Day: "Radio legend Paul Harvey has passed away. From his web site.

Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mr. Harvey began his radio career in 1933 at KVOO-AM, Tulsa, while he was still in high school. Later, while attending the University of Tulsa, he continued working at KVOO as an announcer, then as a program director.

Paul Harvey reached audiences way beyond the windy city in 1951, when he began his coast-to-coast “News and Comment” on the ABC Radio Networks. On May 10, 1976, Mr. Harvey began another series of programs on the ABC Radio Networks entitled “The Rest of the Story”, which delve into the forgotten or little known facts behind stories of famous people and events."

Today, Paul Harvey “News and Comment” and “The Rest of the Story” can be heard every Monday through Saturday. Paul Harvey News is the largest one-man network in the world, consisting of over 1200 radio stations, 400 Armed Forces Network stations that broadcast around the world, and 300 newspapers.

Paul Harvey’s reach continues to broaden in the 21st Century, as “News and Comment” is streamed on the world wide web twice a day.

Mr. Harvey is married to the former Lynne Cooper of St. Louis. They have one son, Paul Jr.

One of the great voices of an age almost forgotten. He shall most certainly be missed. Good day, Sir.