Shared Google Reader Items, 4/14/2009

Darnit, it took me a week to get back to my shared items from Google Reader again. Here goes...

Science:

• Bacon cures hangovers. Thank you once again, science! Is there anything you can't do?
• Scientists in Australia have apparently found a way to stop the body from attacking (and rejecting) organ transplants. This might be even cooler than the bacon thing.
• I found it utterly unsurprising that chimps have to take their lady friends out to dinner to get laid.
• If you ever find yourself back in time, it would be useful to have this sheet. He promises to fix the H-2-zero typo in the next printing, too.

Technology:

• Slashdot points us to a tutorial on putting together a multitouch "Surface PC" for far less than the $10k Microsoft wants for theirs. I have to find some money to try this...
• My iFriend David comes up with cool ideas on his blog, and then people actually make them. That is cool.
• This almost makes me want a cat.
• It's getting close. Soon something will happen with 3d printers to revolutionize the world. This is a step in that direction.

Entertainment:

• My former coworker Amanda has a new collection of short stories out. Her previous books have been awesome, so I highly recommend this one. Whoot, I just noticed she has Kindle editions now. Very nice.
• Woody Harrelson defended himself after attacking a photographer by claiming that he thought the photographer was a zombie. I blame McCarron.
• Disney reuses dances. I'm not terribly surprised, but at least a little.

The Internets:

• Google has fully integrated search-by-color into image search. Neat!
• InfoChimps is a cool website. Go vote for them.
• Microsoft did something cool. Their live search can now solve algebra equations. So far it looks like it can only handle single-variable equalities, but it's still cool.
• Amazon has almost 800 free mp3s available from their library. It's a clever trick. I'm probably going to buy at least one album based on a very good sample I downloaded.

Politics:

• This has been all over the place in the almost-week since I originally shared it, but, in case you haven't seen it, the ad by the National Organization for Marriage about big bad scary gay marriage is unintentionally hilarious.
• Gov. Paterson of New York is going to introduce a same-sex marriage bill. It's about time, New York. Iowa beat you? Seriously??

Awesome:

• PG&E is going to get power beamed down from solar panels in space. I don't know how efficient or real it is, but the idea is awesome. And, if it works, it could even be useful.

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

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/7/2009

Holy crap, I posted shared items from Google Reader just yesterday, and here I am posting again! Woohoo!

Atheism:

• Every year, more and more people call themselves non-religious. Don't worry, we don't bite.

Green:

• I can't decide what I think about the GM/Segway PUMA.

Politics and Government:

• Yesterday I noted that Sweden's parliament had legalized gay marriage, and I pined for that sort of thing happening in America. Today, that sort of thing happened in America. Kudos, Vermont.
• Dammit, Obama administration. Stop it. Just stop it.

The Internets:

• iTunes went live with their "tiered pricing" today, which turned out to be more of a price increase than a price restructuring. Big surprise there.

Science (and Food):

• Want a better boiled egg? Try science.

Wow, that's it. These are really short when I do them daily. I should try this more often.

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

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/6/2009

Last time I posted my shared items from Google Reader, I said that maybe I'd get on a daily schedule. Oops.

Science:

• There may be a link between autism and vinyl floors. This is only an initial finding, but at least people switching from PVC floors won't doom their kids (and other kids) to die of measles.
• However, the correlation might not mean anything. Take, for example, this strong correlation between US highway fatalities and lemon imports from Mexico.
• What can happen when poorly characterized correlations are misidentified as causes: As of last week, Jenny McCarthy and other anti-vaxxers have killed 150 people.
• Looking to cut unhealthy foods out of your diet? It may be a bad idea to go to restaurants with healthy options, then. A new study found that having salad as an option for a side made people more likely to order a side of fries. Or for the more evil spin on that: If any of you own or plan to some day open a restaurant, take note. Put something cheap-but-healthy in the "extras" areas of your menus, and people are more likely to order one of those extras. I wonder if it'd also apply to other extras. Maybe we'll start seeing things that are actually useful in supermarket checkouts, to trick us into buying more candy bars.
• Want to boost your willpower? Lifehacker (and a Case Western study) says to brush your teeth with the wrong hand. Apparently this is also supposed to help you avoid Alzheimer's.
• Bad Astronomy included an announcement of a cool contest today: create a stick-figure cartoon that can be used to educate people about a false argument. Cool.
• I love this video of the Sun's surface. I mean, think about it for a minute. That's the surface of the Sun. When you watch that video, you're seeing the structure of that surface. People 100 years ago didn't even know if the surface of the Sun had structure, and now we can watch videos of it. Neat.

The Internets:

• PageZipper is a neat bookmarklet for stitching together long pages. It's particularly useful for The Big Picture. Now to learn user script coding, so I can make it auto-run for The Big Picture.
• I find it funny but unsurprising how many versions of the story about internet surfing increasing productivity showed up in various Google Reader shared lists.
• Worried that you might have the Conficker virus? Check this page to find out. I love how simple and clever that site is.
• If you use Gmail, I highly recommend turning on Search Autocomplete in Gmail Labs. I can't think of a downside to it, and the upside is that it can teach you some neat search tricks. For example, type "has" after you turn it on.
• I shared a story about Google being in late-stage talks to acquire Twitter, but it now has an update saying it's not true. Darn, I thought that could be interesting.
• The Associated Press is going to try to stop web aggregators from using their stories. In other words, the AP doesn't want anybody to read their stories. I'm going to try to avoid doing so going forward. Pssst, AP: try to find a model that works, rather than trying to sue the model that people want out of existence.
• Lifehacker pointed me to a cool pair of bookmarklets to tag things to read later and then pull one off your list. A friend pointed me to one that does the same sorta thing, but allows you to read the stuff you put on your list from other devices (or, I just noticed, by pulling them into an aggregator as an RSS feed). I need to search around each to find which I actually recommend, but for the moment Instapaper wins just because Lifehacker's recommendation got smashed into oblivion by click-throughs, and this is the sorta thing that might continue to tax a server.

Geek Culture:

• Thinkgeek made an awesome Tauntaun sleeping bag as an April Fools' prank. Now demand is so high that they might actually make it. Please please please please please. Also, please sell it in adult sizes.
• Two geeks in New Jersey made fools out of a lot of people with a simple UFO hoax. Strong work.

Politics and Government:

• Sweden's Parliament voted last Wednesday to allow same-sex marriage (226 to 22). That's like Congress voting to allow it. That's awesome, I wish we could get to that point.
• But hey, at least Iowa's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Iowa. It's a start. According to 538, it might even survive.
• The US government will launch Data.gov in late May to provide a clearing house of government data. Very, very cool.
• I love Obama. "I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Green:

• Lifehacker had a video about a great trick to light things like workshops in sunny places: 2-liter bottles with water and a bit of bleach. Brilliant.
• Off-shore windpower might exceed US electricity demand. Holy crap. Let's get that figured out.

Technology:

• T-Mobile is going to launch an Android-powered tablet. I hope it's going to be actual touchscreen, like a G1 or iPhone, not stylus-based... but it'll be interesting to see how they solve screen-scratching potential in something as large as a laptop if that's the case.

Awesome:

• Sure, I could have put this in the Science block, but it really needed its own tag: a robot made a scientific discovery all by itself. To be clear, this wasn't a group of scientists deciding what the robot should investigate and using the device to test their hypothesis. The robot was given a pool of data, and software to analyze that data in order to make its own hypothesis. It then designed experiments to test that hypothesis, carried them out, and analyzed the results. That is unbelievably awesome. I, for one, welcome our new robot scientist overlords.

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

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/31/2009

It's only been a weekend and a day since my last update of shared items from Google Reader. Maybe I can get back to a daily schedule!

Education:

• Lifehacker ran through the Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education. Many of them are very specific, but there's definitely some cool stuff out there.
• Campus computer labs are dying, morphing instead into wifi hotspots. As a former nearly-full-time resident of the CCLI at MTU, that's a little sad. I'm not sure we would have all ended up there for a wifi hotspot.
• Toddlers can't plan for the future much, even when told to do so; they need negative reinforcement showing them why such planning is necessary. In other words, they aren't ignoring your warnings because they're obstinate, it's because their brains don't work that way. Well, not just because they're obstinate.

Atheism:

• This sign at Beryl Baptist Church pretty much says it all. I did the link that way hoping to push Pharyngula up in searches for "Baptist church," because that would be both funny and useful.
• The UN is calling religion a pussy again, claiming it can't survive people making fun of it. Poor religion. So useless, so ridiculous, so unnecessary. I'm sorry, though; I'll continue to call a spade a spade, and a religion a harmful, steaming pile of bullshit.

Politics:

• Gates says no quick end to "don't ask, don't tell." Liberals see no quick end to thinking maybe keeping a Bush appointee was a bad idea.

Science:

• Playing certain types of videogames (specifically first-person shooters) improves vision. Damn. I generally hate those things.

Technology:

• My mecha is one step closer. Honda has developed my control system for it.

The Internets:

• Ah, browser user scripts. Is there anything you can't do? Lifehacker gave me two new things you can do: auto-hide message labels in gmail (for screens where they don't fit as well), and fix the mess that is the new Facebook. Don't believe it when Lifehacker says those things are "Firefox only." I think IE is the only browser left that doesn't support them, as long as you're using the beta Chrome 2... and even IE 8.1 is rumored to support them.

Random:

• Thanks to a camera phone, the end of the rainbow has been found and photographed. I'm pretty sure that SUV ran over the leprechaun and scattered his gold.

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

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/27/2009

It's been a busy couple weeks since my last shared items from Google Reader update. Sorry I took so long!

Science:

• Obama ended the ban on stem-cell research funding. Things that are stupid about the idiots who are against stem-cell funding:
  
  1. The things being used for research are blobs of cells. They're less human than a patch of dry skin that flakes off.
  2. The blobs of cells are incinerated when they aren't used in research. How is incinerating these blobs of cells less bad than using them to learn?
  3. The assholes love to point out that embryonic stem cells haven't shown as much promise as other types of stem cells... ya know, the types of stem cells that have received government funding for research. If embryonic stem cells are so great, why can't researchers learn things from them when the research isn't being done, huh??? Answer that!
• A chimp at a Swedish zoo hoarded rocks to later throw at people. In other words, the chimp planned for future events. That is very cool.
• These photos of undersea eruptions near Tonga are awesome, moreso after the confirmation that this event wasn't associated with a tsunami or anything.

Politics:

• Obama ordered his administration to consult with AG Holder before using the content of Bush signing statements (ie, to ignore them unless Holder says otherwise). Mostly awesome news, although he signaled that he might use them himself.
• Diebold admitted that its voting software had a flaw: it failed to record deletion of ballots. Um, that's a pretty big flaw.

Education:

• Students who listen to podcasts of lectures outperform students who attend lectures.
• Woohoo! The Texas board of education didn't ammend the science standards to include "strengths and weaknesses" garbage about evolution (an attempt to set natural selection apart as a weak theory, rather than one of the strongest). Hurray, science education survives in Texas!
• Er, survived in Texas. Six hours later, an ammendment to require teachers to tell their students that there are different estimates for the age of the Universe passed 11-3. Ok, technically there are different estimates, but they result in an age of 13.7 +/- 0.12 billion years. The young-Earth creationists on the board think that +/- 0.12 billion is close enough to the +/- 13.7 billion (to three sig figs) that they believe, and want to make sure students have room to think that their nonsense is backed by science.
• In better news, YouTube and a site called Academic Earth have each put together directories of the various educational videos available online. YouTube's offering contains over 200 full courses. Very interesting.

Technology:

• Sometimes I think Scott Adams is watching me.
• Research for my mecha is almost complete: UT-Dallas scientists have created nanotube-based artificial muscles, and European researchers are making microchips that physically mimic brains (I assume this will be useful for the complex control systems that my mecha will require).

Astronomy:

• I want to believe Space Bat survived his trip, and will return one day to save us from Mothra or something.
• The entire Cosmos series is now on Hulu. This needs to get hugely popular, inspiring someone to make a series somewhere near as awesome.

The Interwebs:

• You can filter google image searches by color by adding "&imgcolor=COLORNAME" (such as "&imgcolor=green") to the end of an image search. Neat!
• User scripts work in the beta (or dev) version of Chrome. I now have subfolder-labels in my gmail inbox. Woot!

Business:

• Peter Bregman at the Harvard Business blog says small businesses will win in this economy. I hope he's right.
• On a related note, a BusinessWeek column from 2000 wondering how Google will possibly ever make money (particularly since it's focused purely on search, not on the lucrative portal market like competitors [never heard of them] and [oh yeah, remember altavista?].

Psychology:

• Zenhabits had some good tips for beating procrastination. #7 is best: "Put something you dread more at the top of your to-do list — you’ll put off doing that by doing the other things on your list." I've been using it (combined with Gmail Tasks), and it works like a charm. Well, better than a charm, since charms don't work.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below (or on Reader if you use it, with the cool new comment feature).