04/29/12
04/29/12
Famous Atheists (agnostics is more likely)
In case you don’t recognize some of them this is who they are: Mark Twain, Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, Keira Knightley, Stephen Hawking, Bill Maher, John Lennon, Ricky Gervais, Julianne Moore, Keanu Reeves, Bill Shatner, Johnny Depp, Janeane Garofalo, James Cameron, Billy Joel, Jack Nicholson, John Malkovich, Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Richard Branson, Sir Ian McKellan, Albert Einstein, Brad Pitt, Daniel Radcliffe, Jodie Foster, Hugh Laurie, Lance Armstrong, George Carlin, Morgan Freeman, Fred Armisen, Angelina Jolie, Gene Wilder (I think?), Penn Jillette, Teller, Dylan Moran, Patton Oswalt, Seth Green, Norm MacDonald, Eddie Izzard, Cillian Murphy, Jeremy Clarkson, and George Clooney.
via Nag on the Lake
04/27/12
A Chart Comparing Cloud Storage – Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud
Cloud storage services are cropping up left and right, all enticing their customers with a few gigabytes of storage that sync seemingly anywhere, with any device. We’ve collected some details on the most popular services, including Google Drive, to compare them.
via ars technica
04/27/12
04/27/12
Ethan W and Piano Man
Ethan, a six year old on the autism spectrum plays a Billy Joel favorite.
04/24/12
Inflation – Are We Getting Used To Being Fat?
The Economist suggest that the average British size 14 pair of women’s trousers is now more than four inches wider at the waist than it was in the 1970s. In other words, today’s size 14 is really what used to be labelled a size 18; a size 10 is really a size 14. (American sizing is different, but the trend is largely the same.) Fashion firms seem to think that women are more likely to spend if they can happily squeeze into a smaller label size. But when three out of four American adults and three out of five Britons are overweight, the danger is that size inflation reduces women’s incentive to eat less. Meanwhile, food-portion inflation has also made it harder to fight the flab. Pizzas now come in regular, large and very large. Starbucks coffees are Tall, Grande, Venti or (soon) Trenta. “Small” seems to be a forbidden word.
via The Economist
04/24/12
04/23/12
How Google Searches the Entire Web in Half a Second
It only takes half a second for Google to return a search based on keywords you type in, but there’s a whole lot more happening behind the scenes to give you the results you need. Google on Monday launched a video that explains the science behind how the massive search engine actually works.
via Mashable
04/23/12
MIT Students Hack Building, Play Tetris
Every year, students at MIT pull a prank to show their engineering prowess. This weekend, they achieved what previous classes have only dreamed about: they turned Building 54 in to a giant Tetris Game. I saw it myself driving along the Charles River Saturday night. The building is tall and narrow with lots of little windows all in a perfect grid. Usually the windows are dark in the evening. But Saturday night, those windows were lit up in all different colors. I had to look twice, but yes, the lights were moving from top to bottom. What was going on? Then one of the kids in the car yelled, “It’s Tetris.” Of course it was. And the next words out of my mouth were, “It must be a hack!” Indeed.
via Discover
04/23/12
Watch Etna Erupt Live
To return to our regularly scheduled program (and to wash some of the bad taste in my mouth over the “debate” on earthquake/eruption predictions), here is what Etna is doing right now (2:20 PM eastern time on April 23, 2012):
If you want to watch Etna do its thing for the sixth time this year, check out the bevy of webcams fromRadio Studio 7, INGV Catania and Etna Walk. Hard to miss a moment of the action with all these webcams … better act quick, though. These paroxysm usually only last a few hours at the most!
via Wired