My Digest

August 6, 2009 at 9:18 pm | Posted in Lifescape | 1 Comment
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Location: Silt, Colorado, USA Watson, top, was named for a beloved childhood cat and Miss Piglet named because of her fondness of food (once she was strong enough to eat on her own). Piglet was the runt of a feral litter and too weak to be interested in food. My daughter, Molly, insisted she nurse from a bottle and within days the little girl was a regular chow-hound. From a feral litter of four
The Daily Kitten 1 hour ago
2 And you thought there were a lot of questionable costumes at Comi-Con. [Warning: scantily clad women on the linked page] The Worst Homemade Star Wars Costumes [Thanks, Katie W!] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!
MAKE Magazine 3 hours ago
18 Boing Boing reader Travis emailed me this photo, along with the following: I found this odd tombstone in Walla Walla, Washington. I liked getting high and strolling through the graveyard cuz there were a lot of really old masonic tombs. But this is just….the weirdest one I’ve ever seen. Maybe I missed something and someone on boingboing might have a clue? UPDATE: More photos here. There are
Boing Boing 21 hours ago

thinkers

In remembrance of the mass destruction of life and property due to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 64 years ago today, The Big Picture presents a typically excellent selection of photos. Tags: atomicbomb   hiroshima   Japan   photography   war   World War II
kottke.org remaindered links by jason@kottke.org 1 hour ago
Former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) is a newly infamous scofflaw who now faces spending decades in prison after a federal jury Wednesday convicted him of 11 counts of racketeering, solicitation of bribery and money laundering.An ironic footnote: Lawyers and law firms are by far Jefferson’s largest campaign donors during his now ruined congressional career, which began in 1990 when he became
Center for Responsive Politics – News by Dave Levinthal 1 hour ago
I’m not going to recap the whole debate but here are a few comments:1. This is one of the better arguments for health care reform.  I don’t know how widespread or significant the practice is, but something should be done to stop it.  Even if it covers only a small fraction of total medical expenditures, it is a significant moral wrong.2. I am not convinced by the arguments that reputation
Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen 1 hour ago
7 The Gompertz Law of human mortality is fascinating: What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of
kottke.org remaindered links by jason@kottke.org 19 hours ago

news

Colonials seek knowhow from advanced mother country In normal times, amazing new military technology is developed in the USA and Blighty trails far behind, either reinventing American wheels or simply importing them. But today the process is reversed in a small way, as the Pentagon’s bleeding-edge research bureau has decided to try out British-made tech which is already going into action with UK f
The Register 21 min
Modern-day paddle steamer Leccy Tech  Many drivers baulk at the thought of driving during the MET Office’s warnings of treacherous road conditions. So a team of designers has dreamt up a concept leccy car able to power its way across pretty much any surface, including water.…
The Register 50 min
Don’t lose your details: That’s our job Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is warning users of its online filing system that they need to keep their log-in details as safe as they would a PIN for a cash card.… Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work
The Register 57 min
3 The first swine flu vaccines are likely to be licensed for use in September, the World Health Organization announces.

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Lifehacker by Gina Trapani 9 hours ago keep as unreadsemantic metadatapreviewcopy link
29 recommendations

Tonight, Googler Mihai Parparita announces that Google Reader now sends realtime updates to FriendFeed when you share items using the PubSubHubbub protocol.

Huh-wha? you ask. Yeah, I know. It’s no Google Wave. But that’s what makes this exciting. This kind of small Pushbutton implementation is how real web pages will easily use existing technology to notify one another of new updates. The Google Reader/FriendFeed integration is just the first tiny step in what will be a broad deployment of realtime-enabled sites. These sites and services will let one another know when they have new data to share without the sucky inefficiencies of polling. Check out how fast FriendFeed updates when you share an item in Google Reader in the video above.

In short, it’s almost zero latency.

I’ve been lurking on the PubSubHubbub mailing list for a few weeks now. I’ve enabled pinging to Google’s open hub on Smarterware’s feed. (XML nerds, note the rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com" attributes in my Atom.) This means posts from here should show up in realtime on both FriendFeed and, according to this demo video, Google Reader, though my tests show GReader isn’t working right now. To enable PubSubHubbub pinging on your feed, you just need to check a box over in FeedBurner. Here’s a helpful howto on doing that. For more, check out Google’s own post on the subject, What’s all the hubbub about PubSubHubbub? and Dave Winer’s breakdown.

This is just the beginning of what might be done with publishers (like you) pushing new updates/tweets/blog posts/whatevers to your subscribers in under a second via a hub or cloud. We’re talking about real-time cloud computing that doesn’t depend upon centralized servers or technology owned by one company. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

There’s no doubt in my mind that Anil Dash has a crystal ball stowed away somewhere at his place back in NYC. While his piece on the Pushbutton web almost two weeks ago was inspiring in concept, it’s exhilarating to see it come to fruition.

(Seriously, if you haven’t read his piece, GO THERE NOW: The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real.)

Smarterware is Lifehacker editor emeritus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the latest from Smarterware, be sure to subscribe to the Smarterware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarterware feature here on Lifehacker.



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fun

video Dear D-Bags who wear sticker hats: http://tinyurl.com/lty3my Vanessa Hudgens Photos Leaked: http://tinyurl.com/ldp639 Paula Abdul Leaving Idol: http://tinyurl.com/mshtzr Chinese Kill Web Addict: http://tinyurl.com/m4un8m Clinton brings home 2 asians: http://tinyurl.com/nxc29v Baby Throwing in India [Video]: http://tinyurl.com/lulbce Contact Phil: http://PhillyD.tv/contact-phil Send Schtuff to: P
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today by rss@youtube.com (sxephil) 14 hours ago
2 Onion Radio News – with Doyle Redland
The Onion 15 hours ago
video http://footylounge.com/films/index.php A compilation highlighting the strengths of Alberto Aquilani Liverpool have agreed a fee with Roma for midfielder Alberto Aquilani. The 25-year-old has been earmarked by Rafa Benitez as a direct replacement for Xabi Alonso, who is poised to tie up his move to Real Madrid. The fee for Aquilani is thought to be around £20m. Author: milankakabaro
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today by rss@youtube.com (milankakabarosfilms) 20 hours ago
video Here’s my attempt at an AI for the Mario AI Competition ( http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009 ). You can see the path it plans to go as a red line, which updates when it detects new obstacles at the right screen border. It uses only information visible on screen. I’ve included a slow-motion part in the middle where it gets hairy for Mario. 🙂 For the technical inclined: It uses a sel
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today by rss@youtube.com (robinba2342364) 23 hours ago

science

Advances in ecology increasingly reveal that conventional agricultural practices have detrimental effects on the landscape ecology, creating problems for long-term sustainability of crops. Ecologists are exploring how our agricultural practices can take lessons from natural environments.
ScienceDaily Headlines 8:30 AM PST
The ability of gray squirrels to learn from observing others is highlighted in a new study. The research shows how squirrels can quickly learn from watching their peers, particularly if it relates to stealing food. The research adds to growing evidence that animals are primed to learn quickly about what is most important to their survival and that they learn by observing others. It is the first st
ScienceDaily Headlines 5:30 AM PST
The adult lower digestive tract can be stimulated to add neurons to the intestinal system, according to new mouse research. The study shows that drugs similar to the neurotransmitter serotonin increase the production of new neurons in the gut. This is the first research to confirm that an adult intestine can generate neurons in the enteric nervous system, the network of neurons in the gut’s wall t
ScienceDaily Headlines 5:30 AM PST
Editor’s Note: Scuba instructor and underwater videographer Drew Wheeler   is traveling on board the Algalita Marine Research Foundation’s 50-foot Ocean Research Vessel, Alguita , on a two-month voyage to sample and study portions of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Subtropical Gyre (aka “Pacific garbage patch” ). Wheeler and the rest of the Alguita crew le

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Zoology

Aim Invasive alien species are a growing threat to biodiversity, and identifying the mechanisms that enable these species to establish viable populations in their new environment is paramount for management of the problems they pose. Using an unusually large number of both failed and successful documented introductions of parakeets (Aves: Psittacidae) in Europe, we test two of the major hypotheses
Journal of Biogeography by Diederik Strubbe, Erik Matthysen 8 hours ago
Aim Ecogeographical ‘rules’, large-scale patterns in ecological variables across geographical space, can provide important insights into the mechanisms of evolution and ecological assembly. However, interactions between rules could obscure both the observation of large-scale patterns and their interpretation. Here, we examine a system of three variables interrelated by ecogeographical rules [ndash
Journal of Biogeography by Alison G. Boyer, Jean-Luc E. Cartron, James H. Brown 8 hours ago
Aim Environmental niche models that utilize presence-only data have been increasingly employed to model species distributions and test ecological and evolutionary predictions. The ideal method for evaluating the accuracy of a niche model is to train a model with one dataset and then test model predictions against an independent dataset. However, a truly independent dataset is often not available,
Journal of Biogeography by Samuel D. Veloz 8 hours ago
Aim Our aim was to investigate how the average life span of canopy leaves might be used to predict the geographical distribution of natural forests at large geographical scales, and to explore the link between leaf characteristics and ecosystem functioning. We examine whether there is a general relationship between canopy mean leaf life span and climate (i.e. temperature and precipitation) that ca
Journal of Biogeography by Lin Zhang, Tianxiang Luo, Huazhong Zhu, Christopher Daly, Kunmei Deng 8 hours ago

geeky

Instructables user 5VOLTSGC shares with us his project for a bicycle dog walker. It keeps the dog at a distance from the wheels and pedals, and has a breakaway pin to prevent doggie-induced falls, should your pup decide to stop when you’re riding down a hill. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects |
MAKE Magazine by Becky Stern 1 min
Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice.org developers have posted prototype screenshots and demonstrations, and while the toolbar content and look could likely change, the commenters are not apparently happy with the very Microsoft-Office-like “ribbon.” Some argue the look doesn’t play well on non-Windows systems, and others say it’s just another learning curve for the noble-intentioned, but often disadvant
Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy 29 min
22 video Tonight, Googler Mihai Parparita announces that Google Reader now sends realtime updates to FriendFeed when you share items using the PubSubHubbub protocol. Huh-wha? you ask. Yeah, I know. It’s no Google Wave. But that’s what makes this exciting. This kind of small Pushbutton implementation is how real web pages will easily use existing technology to notify one another of new updates. The Google R
Lifehacker by Gina Trapani 9 hours ago
39 You already pay your bills online and get electronic statements, but there are even more ways you can stop killing innocent trees and wasting time and money dealing with paper. It’s time we went paperless. Reduce Unnecessary Postal Mail Junk mail and catalogs are two of the biggest sources of annoying and unwanted paper. Instead of contacting every company who sends you a catalog or piece of mail
Lifehacker by Gina Trapani 23 hours ago

technology

9 Twitter has been down for about 40 minutes now (since about 6 am California time), and counting. No word on their status blog about the outage at all (Update: they now say “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”). Update 2: It’s a denial of service attack. Twitter’s status update says: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will upda
TechCrunch by Michael Arrington 1 hour ago
12 WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF) back in April.  It identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value. Topping the list were Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which came in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report showed
TechCrunch by Robin Wauters 5 hours ago
12 Now, there may not be a whole lot to this one — it’s simply a measuring cup with a backlit LCD on the handle that tells you the exact volume of the liquid you’re measuring — but it’s a step forward in the culinary world, where it still feels like it’s 1917 a lot of the time. The Smart Measure — which started out as a concept on Yanko Design and has been picked up for distribution by kitchen gia
Engadget by Laura June 6 hours ago
48 At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, one of the most interesting things that was demoed was PubSubHubbub, a new protocol made by a few Googlers in their spare time to improve the speed at which Atom and RSS items travel around the web. As expected, they have a big player on their side now: Google Reader. The Reader team notes today that it has begun the adoption of PubSubHubbub, star
TechCrunch by MG Siegler 17 hours ago

video

I first heard the audio in this clip when I was on Hugh Hewitt’s show yesterday, but I didn’t see the video until later in the evening. […] Read the rest »
Hot Air TV by tips@hotair.com (Hot Air Network, LLC) 3 hours ago
video Teddy Thursday presents an edition of his radio show, in the world of Automata created by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. http://www.penny-acrade.com Transcript written by Jerry Holkins. Used without permission. (please don’t kill me) Author: BaneLu Keywords: penny arcade penny-arcade automata teddy thursday Added: August 5, 2009
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today by rss@youtube.com (BaneLu) 1 day ago
video Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com. Author: TheYoungTurks Keywords: cash for clunkers young turks cenk uygur republican senators john mccain congress cars economy environment jim demint popular polls filibuster block senate house billions Added: August 4, 2009
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today by rss@youtube.com (TheYoungTurks) 1 day ago

small-business

Bare Necessities – Jockey Sale: 25% off + free shipping offerThis is your last chance to take advantage of huge savings at the Bare Necessities Jockey Sale. Save 25% on all of your favorite necessary undergarment essentials. Shop for bras, panties, tanks, shapewear and more for her as well as briefs, boxers, undershirts and more for him. Hurry as this fabulous sale ends tomorrow 08/07/2009. All Jo
Bargainist 8:46 PM PST
I’m going to admit something kind of geeky. I really like favicons. They’re fun. They’re a great branding tool. And they’re something simple that small business owners can do to spice up their sites and even increase usability for users. If you don’t know what a favicon is, let me offer some assistance: Favicons are the mini, 16×16 pixel graphics that represent your Web site up in the address ba
Small Business Trends by Lisa Barone 2 hours ago
3 This is the biggest disconnect I know of.It happens all the time in B2B sales, in service marketing, in getting along with your boss and even in hiring someone.One side thinks they have figured out a solution. They spend a long time talking about the solution, architecting it, refining it, pricing it, pitching it, delivering it. The other side ends up not liking what they get. The disconnect: the
Seth’s Blog by Seth Godin 5 hours ago
3 Whether the goal is a lead, a product sale, a coupon download or a newsletter sign up, each page of your website should fulfill that purpose. Focusing on the Purpose of Your Website If you don’t know the primary goal of your website or you have a variety of goals, objectives and ideals for your website than you may be suffering from what I like to call, “MPNS” or “Multi-Purpose No Success” syndrom
Small Business Trends by Chris Finken 19 hours ago
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