MetaFilter posts by stbalbach.
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Google Translate Toolkit is a new webapp from Google to help translate webpages. Video demonstration (1:30s). It has built-in support for Wikipedia and Jay Walsh thinks it "may change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages".1
posted on Jun-9-09 at 12:22 PM
The Wikimedia Commons Picture(s) of the Year 2008.
posted on Jun-2-09 at 6:32 PM
Last year we discussed a recently discovered 10-second audio recording from 1860 that was thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice, a girl or woman singing the 18th century French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune”. Turns out, it was being played too fast - slow it down and it's the voice of the inventor himself. As well, a number of other recordings have been found, pushing back the oldest recording to 1857. Hear it all on NPR (5-min).
posted on Jun-1-09 at 4:34 PM
The Other Global Warming. Waste heat (second law of thermodynamics) over the next 300 years could add 3 degrees of warming.
posted on May-29-09 at 6:51 AM
Wait For Me (3 Minute Documentary)
posted on May-26-09 at 3:33 PM
MIT has completed the most comprehensive computer climate model to date to project how much warming will occur in the 21st century. The biggest unknown is not nature, but human actions to address the problem. To illustrate the results of 400 simulations they use a roulette wheel display - which wheel is spun and where the ball stops no one knows.
posted on May-20-09 at 10:35 AM
Recent research has shown Neanderthals were sophisticated and fearless hunters, successfully killing a large variety of dangerous game. But as far as humans were concerned, Neanderthals may have possibly been tasty main courses themselves, perhaps one reason for their, uh, "disappearance". Yet humans didn't always sit atop the food pyramid - the oldest human hair has been discovered - inside fossilized 200,000 year old hyena dung.
posted on May-17-09 at 2:31 PM
If you follow the 210+ reasons why the Roman Empire "fell", you might be interested in this 60-min interview with author Adrian Goldsworthy about his recent book How Rome Fell. The interview includes a number of fascinating discussions about the nature of writing popular history, his theory on why Rome "fell", and why analogies between modern countries and Rome's fate have it all wrong. Goldsworthy also did introductions for the Rome series which can be watched here/here. ( via New Books in History)
posted on May-2-09 at 7:39 AM
Public Collectors is an eclectic archive of off-line and on-line collections to which anyone can contribute. It is "founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible."
posted on Apr-27-09 at 6:03 AM
Space-based Solar Power beamed down to earth sounds pretty far out, but the technology is further along than many suppose, the sun never sets in space, and space is a Saudi Arabia of unlimited energy for the nation with the technology to harness it. PG&E (California) in conjunction with SolarEn has announced a 200MW space solar project to be up by 2016.
posted on Apr-20-09 at 3:38 PM
4,500 additional pages omitted from Flaubert's 500-page Madame Bovary have been released online (in French). "The site – www.bovary.fr – contains not only the published text and images of the barely legible manuscripts but interactive controls which allow the reader to re-instate passages corrected or cut by Flaubert or his publishers." It took "between three and 10 hours to decipher a single page of Flaubert's writing," done mostly by volunteers from around the world.
posted on Apr-19-09 at 6:35 AM
General Motors Corp. and Segway announced a new vehicle prototype today "that could change the way we move around in cities." Project P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) is an electrically powered, two-seat vehicle with two wheels. Photo gallery. Video 1, Video 2, Video 3.
posted on Apr-7-09 at 6:24 PM
Mechanical Icon is a new project by Marshall Poe (previously). It will eventually be 200 short Ken-Burns-like video meditations on famous photographs from history. The first six-minute "Introduction" in particular is very good.
posted on Mar-26-09 at 4:49 PM
Internet Archive - probably the single largest depository of Open Source content (and the Wayback Machine) - has transitioned its data center from racks of Linux machines to a Sun MD, basically a 3 petabyte data center housed in a liquid cooled shipping container, currently sitting in Sun's Santa Clara campus court yard. Sun and IA have put together an interesting interactive tour of how it works and what it looks like.
posted on Mar-25-09 at 3:52 PM
The Technorati Attention Index. The 50 web sites blogs link to the most. #1: YouTube. #2. NYT etc.. updated monthly.
posted on Mar-11-09 at 11:48 AM
Cologne City Archive is a six-story building containing 26 kilometers of shelves, 65,000+ documents dating from 922 AD, 104,000 maps, 50,000 posters, 500,000 photographs and 780 estates and collections, including Irmgard Keun, Hans Mayer and Jacques Offenbach. Considered a state of the art institution when built in 1971 and copied around the world, the building simply collapsed on Tuesday, destroying most everything. [1],[2](via)
posted on Mar-5-09 at 6:37 AM
In the name of transparency, all the Fed’s stimulus-spending data will be posted at a new government site, Recovery.gov - more than a minor victory for the democracy, it could be a stimulus in and of itself - databases released in machine-readable formats - like RSS, XML, and KML—spawn new business and grease the wheels of the economy.
posted on Feb-18-09 at 9:08 PM
In 2000, the Spanish Pyrenean Ibex (a type of mountain goat) went extinct. In early 2009 it was brought back to life, the first time an extinct species has been "successfully" cloned. The newborn bucardo died of respiratory failure minutes after birth, setting a second extinction record.
posted on Feb-15-09 at 6:04 PM
Tragedy of the anti-commons is the opposite of tragedy of the commons - it's when too many owners create grid-lock, nothing can get accomplished. It exists everywhere from copyright law, tech patents, music industry, airport runway expansion, medicine, etc.. it is pervasive across all aspects of modern capitalist societies. The concept was coined by Professor Michael Heller who published a book in 2008 called The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. In an excellent Authors@Google video, Michael Heller explains what it is and how it undermines capitalism, in particular over the past 30 years with increased privatization.
posted on Feb-10-09 at 8:27 AM
Hints to Travellers served as the Royal Geographical Societies unofficial bible, used by late 19th and early 20th century British explorers such as Shackleton, Scott, Richard Burton, Col. Perry Fawcett and other legends who carried it into the field as a practical state of the art manual of gentlemanly exploration. Indiana Jones no doubt has his own copy too. Don't leave home without it!
posted on Feb-3-09 at 5:51 AM
John Updike died, have you read his books? Who has time where there are a 1000 novels to read yet! James Delingpole argues that it is impossible - and unnecessary - to grapple with every 'must read' of the literary canon.
posted on Jan-31-09 at 8:40 AM
1000 novels worth reading [about], from the Guardian. Part of its ongoing 1000 series: 1000 albums, 1000 films, 1000 artworks. More than a list, it includes sub-articles and paragraph long write-ups of each.
posted on Jan-22-09 at 1:57 PM
The US Senate Sunday in an unusual session passed 66-12 the largest land protection bill in 25 years. It is an "omnibus" containing hundreds of bills that have been in the works for years. For a list of all the projects and new lands protected..
posted on Jan-11-09 at 6:46 PM
Worried about antibiotics in your beef? Organic vegetables (and pirated honey) may be no better. 90% of animal antibiotics are excreted as dung which is then used as fertilizer. The amounts are smaller but cumulative, particularly in potatoes, lettuce.
posted on Jan-9-09 at 8:37 AM
A perfect space storm, which happens about every century, like the one that occurred in 1859, could cause "catastrophic social and economic disruptions", according to a new study by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA. "Potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply and so on," the report states. Outages could take months to fix, the researchers say. Banks might close, and trade with other countries might halt. The next peak in solar activity is expected around 2012.
posted on Jan-7-09 at 8:31 AM
Each December, the United States National Film Preservation Board chooses up to 25 films they deem worthy of taking special action to preserve in the Library of Congress. It’s a new year, and that means 25 more films are welcomed in the vault of the National Film Registry. Three of the 2008 picks can be viewed on Internet Archive as well as nearly 40 picks from years past.
posted on Jan-6-09 at 7:46 AM
New Yorker fiction 2008. Annotated list of short fiction from the past year. "As perhaps the most high-profile venue for short fiction in the world, taking stock of the New Yorker's year in fiction is a worthwhile exercise for writers and readers alike."
posted on Jan-5-09 at 7:38 AM
5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year from FlowingData. Perhaps related, a new advertisement for MINI that uses augmented reality (AR).
posted on Dec-23-08 at 7:21 AM
Arctic Melt update: Scientists now have unambiguous evidence that the theorized phenomenon known as "polar amplification" has in fact been occurring for the past 5 years. It was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years. "We're in a vicious positive feedback loop."
posted on Dec-18-08 at 10:57 AM
David Horvitz discovers several pages of his writing in this year's Dave Eggers-edited Best American Nonrequired Reading. He was not told that his work (pulled from his website) would be appearing in the book. Now he is peeved and has made several demands, "this is not a joke". (see the long Dec. 9 entry).via
posted on Dec-14-08 at 8:45 AM
Mike O'Connor, owner of Bird Watcher's General Store in MA, writes a column "Ask the Bird Folks", for The Cape Codder newspaper. Five of O'Connor's short but humorously enlightening pieces were chosen by Steven Pinker to be included in the 2004 edition of the Best American Science and Nature writing. Those five can be read here: [1],[2],[3],[4],[5]. The full set of articles here. He started in 2001 and is sort of a "Car Talk" of bird watching.
posted on Dec-13-08 at 8:23 AM
Fiction in Translation: How to Find the Year's Best.
posted on Dec-6-08 at 4:17 PM
Synthetic CDO's are complex little known financial instruments (insurance contracts) that are on the brink of triggering "the most colossal rights issue in the history of the world, all at once .. mandatory." If, out of a list of several hundred major companies, any nine go bankrupt, the CDO's are in default, which would mean a mass transfer of cash (real money) from unsuspecting investors around the world goes into the banking system. How much? Nobody knows, but it’s many trillions. Banks will be flush with cash, perhaps ending the credit crisis, while many investors (individuals, charities, municipalities) will be wiped out. Alternatively, the triggering of default on the trillions of synthetic CDOs could be a disaster that tips the world from recession into depression. Nobody knows, but it won’t be a small event. Thus far the count is six: three Icelandic banks, Countrywide, Lehman and Bear Stearns.
posted on Dec-1-08 at 7:54 PM
In 1972 the Club of Rome published the famous book Limits to Growth that predicted exponential growth would eventually lead to economic and environmental collapse. It was criticized by economists and largely ignored by politicians. Now Graham Turner at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia has compared the book's predictions with data from the intervening years. According to Turner (PDF report) changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of collapse in the 21st century. According to the book, the path we have taken will cause decreasing resource availability and an escalating cost of extraction that triggers a slowdown of industry, which eventually results in economic collapse some time after 2020.(via; previously; previously)
posted on Nov-23-08 at 10:15 AM
Europeana is the new EU digital library. It gives multilingual access to two million digitized books and other items of cultural and historical significance held in over 1,000 institutions in the 27 EU states. There will be 10 million by 2010. Soon after its launch the website froze, its servers overwhelmed by over "10 million hits an hour".
posted on Nov-20-08 at 5:36 AM
Obama's win is a racial milestone in world history, but beneath the surface a white backlash is festering in the US, spurring hate crimes around the country and an uptick in recruitment among white supremacists, according to the The Southern Poverty Law Center.
posted on Nov-17-08 at 11:09 AM
Novels are 'better at explaining world's problems than reports'. According to the study "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge" (HTML or PDF), people should read best-selling novels like The Kite Runner and The White Tiger rather than academic reports if they really want to understand global issues, such as poverty, migration and other issues.
posted on Nov-13-08 at 3:21 PM
The British Cartoon Archive holds more than 130,000 original editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. The collection of original artwork dates back to 1904. The Independent reviews nine of the finest.
posted on Nov-9-08 at 3:56 PM
Read this column before you die.
posted on Nov-2-08 at 7:38 PM
North Korea's Kim suffers 'serious' setback from stroke. When Will North Korea Collapse? Should it happen, US, South Korean, and Chinese troops could charge into North Korea to secure its nuclear facilities-and confront each other, says RAND corp and others. However it is "far from certain that the regime would collapse like a puffball", and even John Bolton thinks The World Shouldn't Fear The Collapse of North Korea . But it's all probably a mugs game, In ’97, U.S. Panel Said North Korea Could Collapse in 5 Years, and in 2004 Talk was Swirling of a North Korean Regime Collapse.
posted on Oct-29-08 at 8:07 AM
Remember Abu Nidal? The "Bin Laden" of the 70s and 80s, he mysteriously committed suicide in Baghdad on the eve of the 2003 invasion. New documents have come to light suggesting Nidal was working for the USA "trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida."
posted on Oct-27-08 at 7:08 AM
With election season in the US, it's probably hard to get a less than Gung-ho picture of the war in Afghanistan, but this Spiegel Online article paints a dark picture. "Pessimism about the situation has never been so high." High level NATO commanders are using phrases like "Doomed to Fail," "We are trapped," "repeating the same mistakes as the Soviets", military victory "neither feasible nor supportable," "downward spiral." For some it is so dark the only beacon of light would be peace talks with the Taliban.
posted on Oct-21-08 at 1:36 PM
Aravind Adiga, a 33 year-old first-time author from India, won the Man Booker Prize yesterday with his novel The White Tiger. It's a story about the underclass of India which he found "similar to black Americans, with a sense of humour you would associate with the Jewish population in the ghettos". The prize selection was very heated and "brought all of the male judges to tears" over the winner and one other work (unnamed). Some critics find it a "left field" choice. The complete review. Excerpts.
posted on Oct-16-08 at 9:39 AM
The Dow went up today.. don't watch the Dow. Here’s the number that really captures the financial crisis [TED spread].
posted on Oct-13-08 at 8:51 PM
A $3million dollar, 3-year project by IBM to create a virtual tour of China's Forbidden City was released Friday. It is a large download, but there is support for Mac, Linux and Windows. Unlike most virtual tourist projects, this one seems to foreground actual human beings, and not just artifacts (architecture, art). It is based on gaming software but with an emphasis on historical authenticity and "a sense of decorum", meaning "you can't run and you can't fly," in the Forbidden City.
posted on Oct-12-08 at 8:38 PM
MIT report debunks China energy myth. A detailed analysis of powerplants in China by MIT researchers debunks the widespread notion that outmoded energy technology or the utter absence of government regulation is to blame for that country's notorious air-pollution problems.
posted on Oct-9-08 at 10:44 AM
According to the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS, by the Institute For the Future) - a simulation based on "the worlds’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game" - by the year 2042 AD there is a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats” which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm homo sapiens ability to survive. Spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”[[press release]]. The game runs from Oct.8 to Nov. 6, players wanted.
posted on Oct-8-08 at 6:16 AM
Remember the Fifties? For a certain generation, who could forget those golden innocent days as depicted in shows like Happy Days, Grease and the band Sha Na Na. But it turns out that vision of the 50's is mostly fantasy and never existed, largely invented by a group of Columbia U students around 1969.
posted on Oct-3-08 at 9:50 PM
What caused the Viking Age? It has long been a source of, er, conflict among Nordic scholars. A new study ($ub-only) suggests the Viking Age was triggered by a shortage of women (lack of).
posted on Sep-29-08 at 8:36 PM
Slow Food Nation '08 was a four-day conference with a panel of food luminaries (Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, ..) to discuss the future of food in America. Sessions included The World Food Crisis (1:13), Climate Change and Food (1:20), Building a new food system (1:22), and more (streaming video, MP3 download, transcripts).
posted on Sep-26-08 at 10:13 AM
posted on Jun-9-09 at 12:22 PM
The Wikimedia Commons Picture(s) of the Year 2008.
posted on Jun-2-09 at 6:32 PM
Last year we discussed a recently discovered 10-second audio recording from 1860 that was thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice, a girl or woman singing the 18th century French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune”. Turns out, it was being played too fast - slow it down and it's the voice of the inventor himself. As well, a number of other recordings have been found, pushing back the oldest recording to 1857. Hear it all on NPR (5-min).
posted on Jun-1-09 at 4:34 PM
The Other Global Warming. Waste heat (second law of thermodynamics) over the next 300 years could add 3 degrees of warming.
posted on May-29-09 at 6:51 AM
Wait For Me (3 Minute Documentary)
posted on May-26-09 at 3:33 PM
MIT has completed the most comprehensive computer climate model to date to project how much warming will occur in the 21st century. The biggest unknown is not nature, but human actions to address the problem. To illustrate the results of 400 simulations they use a roulette wheel display - which wheel is spun and where the ball stops no one knows.
posted on May-20-09 at 10:35 AM
Recent research has shown Neanderthals were sophisticated and fearless hunters, successfully killing a large variety of dangerous game. But as far as humans were concerned, Neanderthals may have possibly been tasty main courses themselves, perhaps one reason for their, uh, "disappearance". Yet humans didn't always sit atop the food pyramid - the oldest human hair has been discovered - inside fossilized 200,000 year old hyena dung.
posted on May-17-09 at 2:31 PM
If you follow the 210+ reasons why the Roman Empire "fell", you might be interested in this 60-min interview with author Adrian Goldsworthy about his recent book How Rome Fell. The interview includes a number of fascinating discussions about the nature of writing popular history, his theory on why Rome "fell", and why analogies between modern countries and Rome's fate have it all wrong. Goldsworthy also did introductions for the Rome series which can be watched here/here. ( via New Books in History)
posted on May-2-09 at 7:39 AM
Public Collectors is an eclectic archive of off-line and on-line collections to which anyone can contribute. It is "founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible."
posted on Apr-27-09 at 6:03 AM
Space-based Solar Power beamed down to earth sounds pretty far out, but the technology is further along than many suppose, the sun never sets in space, and space is a Saudi Arabia of unlimited energy for the nation with the technology to harness it. PG&E (California) in conjunction with SolarEn has announced a 200MW space solar project to be up by 2016.
posted on Apr-20-09 at 3:38 PM
4,500 additional pages omitted from Flaubert's 500-page Madame Bovary have been released online (in French). "The site – www.bovary.fr – contains not only the published text and images of the barely legible manuscripts but interactive controls which allow the reader to re-instate passages corrected or cut by Flaubert or his publishers." It took "between three and 10 hours to decipher a single page of Flaubert's writing," done mostly by volunteers from around the world.
posted on Apr-19-09 at 6:35 AM
General Motors Corp. and Segway announced a new vehicle prototype today "that could change the way we move around in cities." Project P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) is an electrically powered, two-seat vehicle with two wheels. Photo gallery. Video 1, Video 2, Video 3.
posted on Apr-7-09 at 6:24 PM
Mechanical Icon is a new project by Marshall Poe (previously). It will eventually be 200 short Ken-Burns-like video meditations on famous photographs from history. The first six-minute "Introduction" in particular is very good.
posted on Mar-26-09 at 4:49 PM
Internet Archive - probably the single largest depository of Open Source content (and the Wayback Machine) - has transitioned its data center from racks of Linux machines to a Sun MD, basically a 3 petabyte data center housed in a liquid cooled shipping container, currently sitting in Sun's Santa Clara campus court yard. Sun and IA have put together an interesting interactive tour of how it works and what it looks like.
posted on Mar-25-09 at 3:52 PM
The Technorati Attention Index. The 50 web sites blogs link to the most. #1: YouTube. #2. NYT etc.. updated monthly.
posted on Mar-11-09 at 11:48 AM
Cologne City Archive is a six-story building containing 26 kilometers of shelves, 65,000+ documents dating from 922 AD, 104,000 maps, 50,000 posters, 500,000 photographs and 780 estates and collections, including Irmgard Keun, Hans Mayer and Jacques Offenbach. Considered a state of the art institution when built in 1971 and copied around the world, the building simply collapsed on Tuesday, destroying most everything. [1],[2](via)
posted on Mar-5-09 at 6:37 AM
In the name of transparency, all the Fed’s stimulus-spending data will be posted at a new government site, Recovery.gov - more than a minor victory for the democracy, it could be a stimulus in and of itself - databases released in machine-readable formats - like RSS, XML, and KML—spawn new business and grease the wheels of the economy.
posted on Feb-18-09 at 9:08 PM
In 2000, the Spanish Pyrenean Ibex (a type of mountain goat) went extinct. In early 2009 it was brought back to life, the first time an extinct species has been "successfully" cloned. The newborn bucardo died of respiratory failure minutes after birth, setting a second extinction record.
posted on Feb-15-09 at 6:04 PM
Tragedy of the anti-commons is the opposite of tragedy of the commons - it's when too many owners create grid-lock, nothing can get accomplished. It exists everywhere from copyright law, tech patents, music industry, airport runway expansion, medicine, etc.. it is pervasive across all aspects of modern capitalist societies. The concept was coined by Professor Michael Heller who published a book in 2008 called The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. In an excellent Authors@Google video, Michael Heller explains what it is and how it undermines capitalism, in particular over the past 30 years with increased privatization.
posted on Feb-10-09 at 8:27 AM
Hints to Travellers served as the Royal Geographical Societies unofficial bible, used by late 19th and early 20th century British explorers such as Shackleton, Scott, Richard Burton, Col. Perry Fawcett and other legends who carried it into the field as a practical state of the art manual of gentlemanly exploration. Indiana Jones no doubt has his own copy too. Don't leave home without it!
posted on Feb-3-09 at 5:51 AM
John Updike died, have you read his books? Who has time where there are a 1000 novels to read yet! James Delingpole argues that it is impossible - and unnecessary - to grapple with every 'must read' of the literary canon.
posted on Jan-31-09 at 8:40 AM
1000 novels worth reading [about], from the Guardian. Part of its ongoing 1000 series: 1000 albums, 1000 films, 1000 artworks. More than a list, it includes sub-articles and paragraph long write-ups of each.
posted on Jan-22-09 at 1:57 PM
The US Senate Sunday in an unusual session passed 66-12 the largest land protection bill in 25 years. It is an "omnibus" containing hundreds of bills that have been in the works for years. For a list of all the projects and new lands protected..
posted on Jan-11-09 at 6:46 PM
Worried about antibiotics in your beef? Organic vegetables (and pirated honey) may be no better. 90% of animal antibiotics are excreted as dung which is then used as fertilizer. The amounts are smaller but cumulative, particularly in potatoes, lettuce.
posted on Jan-9-09 at 8:37 AM
A perfect space storm, which happens about every century, like the one that occurred in 1859, could cause "catastrophic social and economic disruptions", according to a new study by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA. "Potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply and so on," the report states. Outages could take months to fix, the researchers say. Banks might close, and trade with other countries might halt. The next peak in solar activity is expected around 2012.
posted on Jan-7-09 at 8:31 AM
Each December, the United States National Film Preservation Board chooses up to 25 films they deem worthy of taking special action to preserve in the Library of Congress. It’s a new year, and that means 25 more films are welcomed in the vault of the National Film Registry. Three of the 2008 picks can be viewed on Internet Archive as well as nearly 40 picks from years past.
posted on Jan-6-09 at 7:46 AM
New Yorker fiction 2008. Annotated list of short fiction from the past year. "As perhaps the most high-profile venue for short fiction in the world, taking stock of the New Yorker's year in fiction is a worthwhile exercise for writers and readers alike."
posted on Jan-5-09 at 7:38 AM
5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year from FlowingData. Perhaps related, a new advertisement for MINI that uses augmented reality (AR).
posted on Dec-23-08 at 7:21 AM
Arctic Melt update: Scientists now have unambiguous evidence that the theorized phenomenon known as "polar amplification" has in fact been occurring for the past 5 years. It was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years. "We're in a vicious positive feedback loop."
posted on Dec-18-08 at 10:57 AM
David Horvitz discovers several pages of his writing in this year's Dave Eggers-edited Best American Nonrequired Reading. He was not told that his work (pulled from his website) would be appearing in the book. Now he is peeved and has made several demands, "this is not a joke". (see the long Dec. 9 entry).via
posted on Dec-14-08 at 8:45 AM
Mike O'Connor, owner of Bird Watcher's General Store in MA, writes a column "Ask the Bird Folks", for The Cape Codder newspaper. Five of O'Connor's short but humorously enlightening pieces were chosen by Steven Pinker to be included in the 2004 edition of the Best American Science and Nature writing. Those five can be read here: [1],[2],[3],[4],[5]. The full set of articles here. He started in 2001 and is sort of a "Car Talk" of bird watching.
posted on Dec-13-08 at 8:23 AM
Fiction in Translation: How to Find the Year's Best.
posted on Dec-6-08 at 4:17 PM
Synthetic CDO's are complex little known financial instruments (insurance contracts) that are on the brink of triggering "the most colossal rights issue in the history of the world, all at once .. mandatory." If, out of a list of several hundred major companies, any nine go bankrupt, the CDO's are in default, which would mean a mass transfer of cash (real money) from unsuspecting investors around the world goes into the banking system. How much? Nobody knows, but it’s many trillions. Banks will be flush with cash, perhaps ending the credit crisis, while many investors (individuals, charities, municipalities) will be wiped out. Alternatively, the triggering of default on the trillions of synthetic CDOs could be a disaster that tips the world from recession into depression. Nobody knows, but it won’t be a small event. Thus far the count is six: three Icelandic banks, Countrywide, Lehman and Bear Stearns.
posted on Dec-1-08 at 7:54 PM
In 1972 the Club of Rome published the famous book Limits to Growth that predicted exponential growth would eventually lead to economic and environmental collapse. It was criticized by economists and largely ignored by politicians. Now Graham Turner at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia has compared the book's predictions with data from the intervening years. According to Turner (PDF report) changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of collapse in the 21st century. According to the book, the path we have taken will cause decreasing resource availability and an escalating cost of extraction that triggers a slowdown of industry, which eventually results in economic collapse some time after 2020.(via; previously; previously)
posted on Nov-23-08 at 10:15 AM
Europeana is the new EU digital library. It gives multilingual access to two million digitized books and other items of cultural and historical significance held in over 1,000 institutions in the 27 EU states. There will be 10 million by 2010. Soon after its launch the website froze, its servers overwhelmed by over "10 million hits an hour".
posted on Nov-20-08 at 5:36 AM
Obama's win is a racial milestone in world history, but beneath the surface a white backlash is festering in the US, spurring hate crimes around the country and an uptick in recruitment among white supremacists, according to the The Southern Poverty Law Center.
posted on Nov-17-08 at 11:09 AM
Novels are 'better at explaining world's problems than reports'. According to the study "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge" (HTML or PDF), people should read best-selling novels like The Kite Runner and The White Tiger rather than academic reports if they really want to understand global issues, such as poverty, migration and other issues.
posted on Nov-13-08 at 3:21 PM
The British Cartoon Archive holds more than 130,000 original editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. The collection of original artwork dates back to 1904. The Independent reviews nine of the finest.
posted on Nov-9-08 at 3:56 PM
Read this column before you die.
posted on Nov-2-08 at 7:38 PM
North Korea's Kim suffers 'serious' setback from stroke. When Will North Korea Collapse? Should it happen, US, South Korean, and Chinese troops could charge into North Korea to secure its nuclear facilities-and confront each other, says RAND corp and others. However it is "far from certain that the regime would collapse like a puffball", and even John Bolton thinks The World Shouldn't Fear The Collapse of North Korea . But it's all probably a mugs game, In ’97, U.S. Panel Said North Korea Could Collapse in 5 Years, and in 2004 Talk was Swirling of a North Korean Regime Collapse.
posted on Oct-29-08 at 8:07 AM
Remember Abu Nidal? The "Bin Laden" of the 70s and 80s, he mysteriously committed suicide in Baghdad on the eve of the 2003 invasion. New documents have come to light suggesting Nidal was working for the USA "trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida."
posted on Oct-27-08 at 7:08 AM
With election season in the US, it's probably hard to get a less than Gung-ho picture of the war in Afghanistan, but this Spiegel Online article paints a dark picture. "Pessimism about the situation has never been so high." High level NATO commanders are using phrases like "Doomed to Fail," "We are trapped," "repeating the same mistakes as the Soviets", military victory "neither feasible nor supportable," "downward spiral." For some it is so dark the only beacon of light would be peace talks with the Taliban.
posted on Oct-21-08 at 1:36 PM
Aravind Adiga, a 33 year-old first-time author from India, won the Man Booker Prize yesterday with his novel The White Tiger. It's a story about the underclass of India which he found "similar to black Americans, with a sense of humour you would associate with the Jewish population in the ghettos". The prize selection was very heated and "brought all of the male judges to tears" over the winner and one other work (unnamed). Some critics find it a "left field" choice. The complete review. Excerpts.
posted on Oct-16-08 at 9:39 AM
The Dow went up today.. don't watch the Dow. Here’s the number that really captures the financial crisis [TED spread].
posted on Oct-13-08 at 8:51 PM
A $3million dollar, 3-year project by IBM to create a virtual tour of China's Forbidden City was released Friday. It is a large download, but there is support for Mac, Linux and Windows. Unlike most virtual tourist projects, this one seems to foreground actual human beings, and not just artifacts (architecture, art). It is based on gaming software but with an emphasis on historical authenticity and "a sense of decorum", meaning "you can't run and you can't fly," in the Forbidden City.
posted on Oct-12-08 at 8:38 PM
MIT report debunks China energy myth. A detailed analysis of powerplants in China by MIT researchers debunks the widespread notion that outmoded energy technology or the utter absence of government regulation is to blame for that country's notorious air-pollution problems.
posted on Oct-9-08 at 10:44 AM
According to the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS, by the Institute For the Future) - a simulation based on "the worlds’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game" - by the year 2042 AD there is a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats” which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm homo sapiens ability to survive. Spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”[[press release]]. The game runs from Oct.8 to Nov. 6, players wanted.
posted on Oct-8-08 at 6:16 AM
Remember the Fifties? For a certain generation, who could forget those golden innocent days as depicted in shows like Happy Days, Grease and the band Sha Na Na. But it turns out that vision of the 50's is mostly fantasy and never existed, largely invented by a group of Columbia U students around 1969.
posted on Oct-3-08 at 9:50 PM
What caused the Viking Age? It has long been a source of, er, conflict among Nordic scholars. A new study ($ub-only) suggests the Viking Age was triggered by a shortage of women (lack of).
posted on Sep-29-08 at 8:36 PM
Slow Food Nation '08 was a four-day conference with a panel of food luminaries (Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, ..) to discuss the future of food in America. Sessions included The World Food Crisis (1:13), Climate Change and Food (1:20), Building a new food system (1:22), and more (streaming video, MP3 download, transcripts).
posted on Sep-26-08 at 10:13 AM
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