Saturday, January 05, 2008
Hyplet -- embeddable business cards and flyers
Don't want to bother with html or Photoshop? This might be for you.
Multi-outlet Powramid -- whack on those adapters
No more awkwardness with AC adapters on conventional power bars/strips.
Dapper -- get feeds from sites without RSS
Dapper offers a lot more customization, letting you choose which sections of a site should be delivered to your reader, a custom iCalendar or iGoogle page, and many more options.
Boron nanotubes could outperform carbon, especially in electronic applications
But how readily accessible is the stuff?
Some Zoroastrianism history -- how idolatry became a problem
Predates, thus helps mold, many religions with ideas of overcoming nature.
The real story behind the ephedrine ban?
Now that isn't a whole lot of money. But Tucker argues that lobbying by Boehringer-Ingelheim went up dramatically at about the same time the pseudoephedrine ban -- also known as the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 -- was placed as a rider in the Patriot Act reauthorization. Coincidence?
Argument for leaving immigration completely open
This controversy, like the debate over slavery, like the debate over abortion, and like all other controversies over simple moral issues, is and should be a debate between extremists, not a case for middle-of-the-roader rhetoric or halfway-house solutions... It is inexcusable that even one undocumented worker should have to live in fear of emergency workers, neighbors, or her boss, simply because she failed to get a signed permission slip from the federal government before she set out to make a living.
Ways to avoid wasting heat while cooking
It turns out that the most time-consuming part of the process is not the movement of boiling heat to the center of each small bean or noodle, which takes only a few minutes, but the movement of moisture, which can take hours. Grains and dry legumes therefore cook much faster if they have been soaked. However heretical it may sound to soak dried pasta, doing so can cut its cooking time by two-thirds — and eliminates the problem of dry noodles getting stuck to each other as they slide into the pot.
Trulia Hindsight -- map of property development through time
The thing starts from 1868 and covers many parts of the U.S.
Male monkeys, like humans, need to pay for sex
Rather than flowers, dinner or (longer term) housing security, these macaques pay with grooming.
Accounting basics for a freelancer
I didn't know you weren't supposed to use personal bank accounts for business purchases.
How ID theft victim chased down the perp
The only other time Lodrick, a 41-year-old creative consultant, had seen that particular coat was on a security camera photo that her bank, Wells Fargo, showed her of the woman who had stolen her identity.
Racial mortality gaps
I show that quality of the clinics or doctors is not the underlying reason for racial differences in black and white mortality....Differences in patient self-management trigger a racial mortality gap even when access and treatment are equalized.
Cocaine vaccine
A very real treatment in the works to stop cocaine addiction: attach inactivated cocaine to the outside of inactivated cholera proteins -- the immune system is then primed.
How Denmark kicked its foreign oil habit
Being 99% dependent on foreign oil back in '73 forced them to change things around.
More stuff on Chinese discovering Americas first
I kind of thought this was old news, but I hadn't heard of some translations from Europeans encountering Chinese people in the Americas. Still controversial evidently.
L.A. homicide rate close to low set in 1970
Before we start believing any backpatting, we must consider lead levels.
BootVis for XP -- shorten your boot time
Analyze your boot or resume time from button press, start trimming.
Fog shower
Just a design, but 2L for a 5-minute shower, rather than the 26L for conventional showerheads.
The small community of the genetically rare
Too readily lumped into autism, technology is teasing out those with deletions or duplications in their DNA.
Few of these mutations were inherited in the traditional sense, and the affected children are typically the only family member with the disorder. So, many parents are searching out strangers struck by the same genetic lightning bolt... Sometimes what they find is unsettling. But in the emerging communities of the genetically rare, more often it is sustaining.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Anti-Americanism around before there was an America
Supposedly born in Paris among its intellectuals, it's an old world -- blood, tradition -- elitism, looking down at appreciation of the common. Coming into power, America is seen as the Beverly Hillbillies.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Gethuman -- get a human when dialing an 800 number
A database tabulating the appropriate response to a navigation menu to get a bloody human being to talk to.
PowerOff -- a PC shutdown utility
Scheduled and/or remote of various kinds of sleep/shutdown, even for wakeup.
Polynesians in the Americas before the Spaniards?
From the Archaeological Institute of America's top ten for 2007:
Scholars have long assumed the Spaniards first introduced chickens to the New World along with horses, pigs, and cattle. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in oceangoing canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe's "Age of Discovery."There's also a story about historical cuneiform corroboration of a lower-ranked name found in the Bible.