This American Life’s finest hours (8)
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Jon Udell (83)
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Jon Udell (83)
3 days, 3 hours
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Back in May, This American Life aired a widely-acclaimed show on the mortgage crisis. In The Giant Pool of Money, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson pepper their analysis with dialogue from a cast of characters including: Richard Campbell, ex-Marine, behind on his mortgage: “At one point, my son had $7,000 in a CD and I had to break it. That really hurt.” Clarence Nathan, who got a $540K second mortgage while working 3 part time ...
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Ken Kennedy said:
Powerful. FTA: "Repeat: “Someone, and we still don’t know who.” Excuse me? The future of our economy depends on subtle language inserted into the bailout bill, we can’t point to who wrote it, or when, and reporters have to receive anonymous tips to learn about it? "
Web Therapy: Lisa Kudrow's smart new web comedy series (9)
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Richard Metzger (59)
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Boing Boing (6676)
3 days, 9 hours
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I'm really sick and tired of these online series that use the first personal confessional --like Lonelygirl15 and the totally awful Gemini Division with Rosario Dawson -- in service of the hokey dramatic trope of overly expository webcam monologues. In the case of Lonelygirl15's fictional over-sharing protagonist, Bree, I suppose it was creatively justified, but with NBC's Gemini Division, it just feels forced, crammed down for the medium and much better suited for radio! There ...
Pneumatic clock from 1940 (6)
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Cory Doctorow (2746)
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Boing Boing (6676)
3 days, 23 hours
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Watchismo's got the news on Puja's 1940 Thermo-Pneumatic Clock -- a time-keeping apparatus like no other: "At the lower left, shielded by a translucent housing, is a carbon rod resistance that heats the colored alcohol in the glass vessel just above it. This causes some of the alcohol to vaporize, the pressure pushing the liquid up the connecting pipe to the vessel at top right. As the latter gets heavier the wheel bearing the four ...
NeuroSky and Square Enix Set to Demo Mind-Controlled Gaming (9)
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Joseph L. Flatley (166)
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Engadget (5215)
5 days, 7 hours
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Filed under: Gaming The last time we saw NeuroSky's MindSet brainwave-controlled gaming headset, the company was partnering with Sega -- now the peripheral-maker has teamed with Square Enix to produce what we hope will be a "mind-blowing" (groan) demo at this year's Tokyo Game Show. If you'll recall, NeuroSky has been pushing its unique brand of mind-controlled gaming since way back in 2005, but it appears the technology has become increasingly attractive to notable game-makers ...
Imagine you are predicting the weather with the Weems Stormglass (2)
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Rob Beschizza (229)
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Boing Boing Gadgets (559)
6 days, 3 hours
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The Weems Stormglass, it is called. Not some steampunk confection, this strange little device, invented more than two centuries ago, is said to predict the weather by the forms taken by its mineral-heavy liquid. Spreading crystal ferns indicate storms, while a clear phial means it will remain calm. In all weather, you pay $149.99 for it. "No-one knows quite how it works," says crapvendor Signals. "But it does."
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Dave said:
Cool! Wonder how it works!???
Sharpest photo of Jupiter from Earth (14)
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David Pescovitz (1069)
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Boing Boing (6676)
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This is the sharpest "whole Jupiter" photo ever taken from Earth. It was snapped with a telescope using special adaptive optics to reduce fuzz. From National Geographic: Captured using a new computer-assisted process and a 27-foot (8.2-meter) telescope in Chile, the result is sharp enough to show features as small as 180 miles (300 kilometers) across... Adaptive optics, (UC Berkeley/SETI Institute astronomer Franck) Marchis said, adjusts for distortions caused by the Earth's atmosphere, "providing images ...
defaultapp (3)
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Mouse Gestures Redox 2.0.3 (1)
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Meme tracking with Twitter and Timeline (4)
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Jon Udell (83)
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Jon Udell (83)
6 days, 14 hours
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Social networks are Petri dishes in which we can watch memes emerge and spread by imitation. Three years ago, I traced the effect of a powerful one created by the ACLU: a fictional screencast about a dystopian future in which identity and privacy have gone horribly wrong. What I found when I looked at the data was that, although forward thinkers and actors in the realm of digital identity had only recently become aware of ...
Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects (3)
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Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog (49)
6 days, 18 hours
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Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects by Alessandro Warth and Alan Kay, 2008. The state of an imperative program -— e.g., the values stored in global and local variables, objects’ instance variables, and arrays—changes as its statements are executed. These changes, or side effects, are visible globally: when one part of the program modifies an object, every other part that holds a reference to the same object (either directly or indirectly) is also affected. ...
Woodgrain II (1)
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Daring Fireball (1449) permalink
New command-line tool from Keith Alperin: you give it a filename extension, defaultapp tells you which app will open it by default. ★Recently Updated Add-ons :: Firefox Add-ons (19) permalink
Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard...Shared by Jeff Daly (53)Contribute commentAbstruse Goose (145) permalink
It’s always the simple things that get me. OK, maybe you don’t find that equation as fascinating as I do. But I also get distracted by shiny objects and Wheel of Fortune.Shared by Ahsan Navid Hussain (499) ani625 (93) Arijit Das (524) Benjamin (556) Creeva (88) Daniele (20) David Alvarez (67) Deborah Petersen (999) Hasan Saleem (171) Jeff Daly (53) Joe Cooper (35) Joh Rogers (32) liamvictor (104) Lyndon Antcliff (759) Michael Mior (79) nervioso (72) Nick (22) Pramod (104) rony john (425) timothyt (100) Yvette (25) Zak M. (804)Contribute commentiPhone Wallpapers! 320x480 Pool (2) permalink
Alex Hopkins has added a photo to the pool: Pizza Express TabletopShared by Jeff Daly (53)Contribute comment
