Fun fact for you: JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
Me Want
Supine Reading Glasses These are the glasses that allow you to read while lying supine in bed, eliminating the need to crane your neck. The lightweight glasses employ two optical-quality glass prisms that bend your vision 90º providing easy reading from a recumbent position. Equally useful while lounging outdoors on a hammock, chaise, or on the beach. Includes a hard … Read More
It’s an iPad
Contrary to rumors that Apple was going to announce the iPhone being available for Verizon, they instead just announced their new coolest thingee…. the iPad. Think of an iPhone that's half the size of a laptop. .5 inches thin, 1.5 pounds, 9.7 inch IPS touchscreen display. 10 hours of battery life, runs all iphone apps, has 16, 32 or … Read More
Google Beats Out Blog
The American Dialect Society (ADS) has named google – the verb – as its Word of the Decade. According to the ADS, the verb google (meaning to "search the Internet") won out over "blog", which, according to Grant Barrett, the chair of the ADS's New Word Committee, "just sounds ugly." Tweet was named the top word of the year for … Read More
The Data Decade
I think historians will look back at the 2000s and call it The Data Decade, and here's why: –Percentage of U.S. households with a broadband connection in 2000: 6.3% –Percentage of U.S. households with a broadband connection in 2008: 63% –Number of e-mails sent per day in 2000: 12 billion –Number of e-mails sent per day in 2009: 247 billion … Read More
The Future Is Now
Ezra Klein reports: Two interesting holiday facts from Amazon: The Kindle was their most-gifted item ever and electronic books outsold physical books on Christmas Day.
Good Year For The Leonids
We're passing through the Leonid meteor shower, and the moon is new (meaning, there's not much of it there), so you should be able to see a lot this year. Some background: The Leonid meteors are debris shed into space by Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which swings through the inner solar system at intervals of 33.25 years, looping around the sun then … Read More
What You Look At When You Look At This Blog
The Feng-GUI heatmap is a composition of several algorithms from neuro-science studies of Natural Vision Processing, Computational Attention, eye-tracking sessions, perception and cognition of humans. Or in English: "What people are looking at?" This artificial intelligence service simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals. It generates a heatmap – from dark blue through green to … Read More
Baby Einstein? Not So Much
Via Heather: Disney is offering a refund to buyers of its ubiquitous “Baby Einstein” videos, which did not, as promised, turn babies into wunderkinds. Apparently, all those puppets, bright colors, and songs were what we had feared all along—a mind-numbing way to occupy infants. This news has rocked the parenting world, which had embraced the videos as a miraculous child-rearing … Read More
You Really Don’t Know Clouds At All
This phenomenon seen over Moscow last week isn't an alien spaceship, or some secret military weapon: It's this… a circular cloud gap (or punch-hole cloud) made bright by the setting sun.
Look Up Tonight
The Dracoid meteor shower peaks tonight, as well as tomorrow night, and the 9th. The annual Perseid meteor shower is bigger, but the Dracoid meteor shower is no slouch. What's more, unlike the Perseid, it tends to peak in the evening hours (as opposed to the morning hours). Also, Dracoid meteors are slower, so you tend to catch them with … Read More
2009 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
It's Nobel prize time, which means that it is Ig Nobel prize time as well. The "Journal of Improbable Research" has announced its winners of the esteemed Ig Nobels, given to research which delves into the ignored, irrelevant, or obvious. This year's winners: MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the … Read More
Project Icarus
Attach a GPS enabled cellphone and a camera to a helium balloon and what happens? Okay, Project Icarus, devised by MIT students, involved a little bit more than that, but it was still decidedly low-tech. The whole contraption cost $148 for everything — the balloon, the helium, the cellphone, the GPS tracking software, etc. The launch was September 2. The balloon reach … Read More
Bob Dylan As A GPS Voice?
Bad idea. First of all, I can't understand a word the dude says. Second of all, I'm going to rather intolerant of the "how many roads must a man…." and "no direction home" quips. But whatever. That said, here's a partial list of celebrity GPS voices already available: Mr. T, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Hopper, Burt Reynolds, Gary Busey, Curt Schilling, … Read More