October 2009
31 posts
Toyota, who’s Prius is easy on the environment to drive but horrible on it to make, has engineered a new type of flower to help shoulder some of the damage their factories are spitting out.
The sage derivative’s leaves have unique characteristics that absorb harmful gases, while the gardenia’s leaves create water vapour in the air, reducing the surface temperature of the...
"It's brains."
keyholez:
Traditional society choked this [the flourishing of open homosexuality] down — some more progressive parts of it did, anyway — by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity.
Um. What the fuck else are you going to attribute same-sex love to? Or different-sex love (how weird (gross) does that sound!), for that matter? This has nothing to...
“I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction:...”
– David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University (Does the Brain Like E-Books? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com) (via obsoletethebook)
Blinks became synchronized when watching a film of another person, but not when watching landscapes or listening to stories. Interestingly, blinks seems to be controlled so they occur at the start and end of meaning actions. This is from the study abstract:
Synchronized blinks occurred during scenes that required less attention such as at the conclusion of an action, during the absence of the...
So, that thing about the LHC and the time travel...
Is basically on all Tumblrs ever (mine included). Just observing that the consensus around these parts is that it’s pretty important.
“Mr. Berners-Lee smiled and admitted he might make one change — a small one. He...”
– New York Times, “The Web’s Inventor Regrets One Small Thing” (via derrinyet)
But…isn’t that a ridiculously arrogant thing to say? “Yeah, my shit’s basically perfect. Except for that one extra character and all the hardship it caused. Other than that though.” I mean, if...
“A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the...”
–
Essay - The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate - NYTimes.com (via davemorin / mikehudack)
“…otherwise distinguished…”
(via katiebakes)
Unless the terrorists get to it first! However, the most likely explanation is that this is all just an elaborate promotional effort for the final...
Internet : Web :: Mobile Network : Mobile Mesh
So, a big part of the evolution from the Internet (physical network of computers) to the Web (abstract network existing “on top of” the physical network) as the place where the action is was that people had to get used to the idea of activity happening on or over their computers or systems that they didn’t have control over. TBL (in what I guess is my favorite blog post ever)...
"Mollusc-driven architecture"
Concerned with the environmental and revenue impacts of leaks during oil drilling, StatOil sought an innovative and automated way to detect leaks. They wanted to replace a manual process that included deep sea drivers. StatOil’s innovation, they attached RFID tags to the shells of blue mussels. When the blue mussels sense an oil leak, they close which prompts the RFID tags to emit closure...
A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.
Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds
[BBC via B. Sterling]
