Shared Google Reader Items, 3/2/2009

Here are my shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Science:

• Synthetic life is neat. It will help us understand how biology works, and also offers an alternative version of biotechnology that has a much lower chance of, for example, crossbreeding with bugs in the wild. Neat stuff if we can get it to work.
• A webcomic called cowbirds in love realized something I'd never thought about: Mad scientists aren't really scientists, are they?
• A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that weight loss and relapse rates on any of several diets were identical, regardless of what the particular diet targetted. In other words, it comes down to the First Law diet: eat fewer calories than you use, and you lose weight.
• Doctors are not scientists, and often don't really understand the process. That's why it's awesome that the stim bill includes $1 billion to investigate comparative effectiveness of different treatments for the same conditions, in a bid to increase both efficiency and effectiveness of medical treatments.
• Speaking of efficiency and effectiveness of medical treatments, Merck has launched an open-source pharmaceutical initiative. Awesome.

Technology:

• Penn State and Virginia Commonwealth U researchers have found a new trick for producing hydrogen gas that sounds very, very interesting. This could potentially be a world-changer. From what I gather, it sounds a whole lot like seems-free-but-isn't-technically-I-guess energy, which makes me skeptical, but goddam does it sound interesting.
• To go along with that potential alternative energy neatness, solar panels have reached $1 a Watt.

Digital Rights:

• Amazon agreed to pull text-to-speech from the Kindle 2 on a per-book basis. I want to find a way to easily check whether a given book has pulled those rights, so I can choose to not buy from such an idiot.

Entertainment:

• Apparently Netflix's new "watch now" player sucks, and they kinda sorta trick you into using it. Watch out for a tricksy beta opt-in.

Random:

• RIP, Paul Harvey.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/17/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Digital Rights:

• Facebook swears we own our stuff we put on Facebook. I agree, but it's nice for them to say so before the lawsuits.
• Inspired by all this Facebook insanity, Lifehacker points us to privacy settings every Facebook user should know.

The Internets:

• NBC now has HD episodes available for download. Neat.

Technology:

• Universal chargers are (slowly) coming to cell phones. When I mentioned this plan a week and a half ago, the article I referenced said cell phone companies were against the idea. So I'm going to assume me blogging about it made it happen.

Science:

• It turns out men really do objectify women when the women are dressed subjectively. We knew that, but we were trying to keep that information to ourselves.

Politics:

• Burris didn't talk to any of Blago's people only talked to his brother, but not about money when they talked about money Burris wasn't able to raise any. Jeez, isn't that close enough to what he originally said? Why's everyone down on Burris?

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/16/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Art:

• Lifehacker has a write-up of a tool to create a color palette from any image. Useful.

Science:

• A sea sponge extract is showing promise for killing drug-resistant bacteria (or, technically, for making drug-resistant bacteria no longer drug-resistant). Good stuff.
• A large fireball appeared in the sky over Austin Sunday morning, and I missed it. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy is keeping us posted on what's known about it. He doesn't think it has anything to do with the satellites that collided.
• I had a lot of trouble deciding which category to put this one in. For the first time, as part of the $787 billion stimulus bill, the US is going to fund a comparison of the effectiveness of different treatments for the same medical conditions. Holy crap, we're going to use science to figure out where to put future money!
• Australia has virtually eliminated measles, save for some cases brought in by foreign visitors. Awesome.
• If you know anyone who's trying to learn general chemistry, some coworkers and I are trying to make that easier. If you have any chemistry questions you'd like answered, post them in the comments over there, and we'll try to get an answer.
• Again, is this politics, or is it science? I'm happy that it's hard to decide where to put it.

Politics:

• FiveThirtyEight has an informative write-up on the "Two Progressivisms." Can you guess which camp I'd put myself in?
• Global-warming denial has nothing to do with science, so it was easier to categorize FiveThirtyEight's slamdown of the myth that scientists thought the world was cooling in the 70s. I'd seen the myth a billion times in various fora, but I didn't realize the amount of BS involved in it.

Digital Rights:

• Facebook has troubling new terms of service. I hope this was unintentional, and they come up with a cleaner version.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/11/2009

It's technically 2/12 now, but close enough. Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Politics:

• Americans might get reminders about the fact that people actually die in Iraq. It's nice that it's finally happening, but I think people are already starting to understand that.
• Twitter is great for political organization. The tweets calling for volunteers as needed during this election cycle were great. It turns out Twitter is even more useful when Republicans learn how to use it.

Technology:

• This story about a wearable tech demo at TED makes me happy. It's almost the future!
• A pair of satellites collided today in orbit. This could be a big problem. We don't know yet. I'll be watching this story closely.

Random:

• Get your forever stamps now. The price of stamps is going to go up again soon.

Digital Rights:

• Dammit, Authors' Guild. Stop being stupid. Text-to-speech is not a "performance" of your work.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.