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 E Canada Now | Wii Fit Transforms Your Living Room in a Gym eFluxMedia - By Anne Shaw Nintendo has come up with another hit for its already enormously successful console. Wii Fit is the game that hopes to change public perception that video games are one of the things to be accounted for the growing numbers of overweight ... 'Wii Fit' will definitely get you moving In stores this week: Wii Fit, Haze, Age of Conan |
 TopNews | It Won’t Be Long Before We Get Our Hands On Firefox 3.0 eFluxMedia - By Dee Chisamera Mozilla launched Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1on Friday, and although still in testing, and with more work required, it looks pretty good for the next generation of browsers. Why I called Mozilla’s change to the Firefox install process “sneaky” Mozilla releases release candidate 1 of Firefox 3 |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 Canada.com | Investigating the Mysteries of Mars Space.com - By Andrea Thompson With the dozens of orbiters, landers and rovers that scientists have sent to Mars, you would think we'd have a good handle on just what makes our planetary neighbor tick. An Icy Dig in Search of Signs of Life on Mars There Must Be More To Mars Than Ice And Dust |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 The Tech Herald | Study Predicts Fewer but More Powerful Hurricanes eFluxMedia - By Max Brenn A study published by meteorologist Tom Knutson reveals that global warming could cause the number of hurricanes to get smaller by the end of the century. Fewer, But More Intense Hurricanes Late This Century Study says global warming not worsening hurricanes |
 VentureBeat | Apple wants over-the-air music downloads for 3G iPhone Apple Insider - By Sam Oliver Apple is in talks some of the major music labels over a deal that would allow next-generation iPhone owners to purchase music tracks directly from the handset over cellular wireless networks, according to the New York Times. Apple Wants More Mobile Music From Labels Apple pushes for ringbacks, 3G music sales? |
There has been a severe loss of confidence in e-counting. The experience of its use in the Scottish Parliament and local government elections revealed a fundamental lack of transparency. The checks and balances of a manual system must be retained. Candidates and observers must have access to ballot papers in order to ensure that procedures are followed correctly and that recounts can be asked for. Until these problems are resolved, we do not support the use of e-counting for future elections.Link (Thanks, Glyn!)
This looks like a triumph of the laser-cutter's art to me. I like that it's real wood and not particle board. Seems like it'd be sturdy stuff.
Link
(Thanks, Jaap!)
 ZDNet | AMD launches 'console-like' PC hardware plan CVG Online - AMD is attempting to make determining system requirements easier for mainstream PC gamers, with the launch of a new label titled AMD Play! AMD GAME! Attempts To Simplify PC Gaming, Fails AMD - The Perfect Gaming PC Shopping Advisor |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 eFluxMedia | Sony: Oz PS3 Outsold 360 By 45% During Q1 Next Generation - By Tom Ivan SCE Australia managing director Michael Ephraim says that the PlayStation 3 far outsold Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in Australia during the first quarter of 2008. Xbox 360 First Gaming System to Reach 10 Million in US Console Sales Xbox 360 Outsells Original Xbox |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 The Tech Herald | Look, officer: No hands! (How to talk on cell phone and drive ... San Jose Mercury News - Beginning July 1, you must use a hands-free device with your cell phone while driving. Here are some options to consider, from headsets to speaker systems, from Bluetooth wireless to hard-wired. Aliph launches smaller Jawbone Bluetooth headset Aliph Offers You Jawbone 2 |
 CTV.ca | Polar Bear Ruling to Bring Tsunami of Lawsuits: Kevin Hassett Bloomberg - May 19 (Bloomberg) -- As expected, the US Department of the Interior added the polar bear to the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act last week. Video: Polar Bears On Thin Ice (CBS News)  Comment by Dr. Peter Ewins Director of Species Conservation , WWF-Canada |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 dBTechno | Facebook CEO Wants to Talk With Google on Friend Connect PC World - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to sit down with Google and work out the privacy issues that caused Facebook to block Google's Friend Connect last week, he said Monday. Where Portals and Social Networks Collide After Google calls Facebook’s bluff, Zuckerberg says “let’s see if ... |
There's going to be one other New York event, a free reading at a midtown bookstore, that I'll be announcing in the next day or so. I hope I see you at one or both events!
Link, Link to tour scheduleOn May 25 join Cory Doctorow to celebrate the premiere of LITTLE BROTHER, his New York Times Best Selling Young Adult Fiction debut! Cory will present an all-ages reading & Q&A to benefit the First Amendment legal work of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund!
Addressing internet and government security, censorship, and civil liberties in a post-9/11 atmosphere, LITTLE BROTHER tackles timely issues while telling a smart, funny, and jam-packed-with-pop culture story...
Proceeds from this event will benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The CBLDF provides legal defense on behalf of artists, retailers, and librarians facing criminal and civil prosecution for First Amendment related actions. The Fund also fights unconstitutional legislation that threatens First Amendment rights. Most recently, the CBLDF won a three year legal battle in Georgia, where Gordon Lee, a retailer, faced up to two years in prison for allegedly distributing a comic book containing drawings of Picasso in the nude to a minor. All charges were dismissed, but only after more than three years and $100,000 of CBLDF resources were spent to prove Lee's innocence..
1780: In the midst of the Revolutionary War, darkness descends on New England at midday. Many people think Judgment Day is at hand. It will be remembered as New England's Dark Day.
Diaries of the preceding days mention smoky air and a red sun at morning and evening. Around noon this day, an early darkness fell: Birds sang their evening songs, farm animals returned to their roosts and barns, and humans were bewildered.
Some went to church, many sought the solace of the tavern, and more than a few nearer the edges of the darkened area commented on the strange beauty of the preternatural half-light. One person noted that clean silver had the color of brass.
It was darkest in northeastern Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire and southwestern Maine, but it got dusky through most of New England and as far away as New York. At Morristown, New Jersey, Gen. George Washington noted it in his diary.
In the darkest area, people had to take their midday meals by candlelight. A Massachusetts resident noted, "In some places, the darkness was so great that persons could not see to read common print in the open air." In New Hampshire, wrote one person, "A sheet of white paper held within a few inches of the eyes was equally invisible with the blackest velvet."
At Hartford, Col. Abraham Davenport opposed adjourning the Connecticut legislature, thus: "The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause of an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty."
When it was time for night to fall, the full moon failed to bring light. Even areas that had seen a pale sun in the day could see no moon at all. No moon, no stars: It was the darkest night anyone had seen. Some people could not sleep and waited through the long hours to see if the sun would ever rise again. They witnessed its return the morning of May 20. Many observed the anniversary a year later as a day of fasting and prayer.
Professor Samuel Williams of Harvard gathered reports from throughout the affected areas to seek an explanation. A town farther north had reported "a black scum like ashes" on rainwater collected in tubs. A Boston observer noted the air smelled like a "malt-house or coal-kiln." Williams noted that rain in Cambridge fell "thick and dark and sooty" and tasted and smelled like the "black ash of burnt leaves."
As if from a forest fire to the north? Without railroad or telegraph, people would not know: No news could come sooner than delivered on horseback, assuming the wildfire was even near any European settlements in the vast wilderness.
But we know today that the darkness had moved southwest at about 25 mph. And we know that forest fires in Canada in 1881, 1950 and 2002 each cast a pall of smoke over the northeastern United States.
A definitive answer came in 2007. In the International Journal of Wildland Fire, Erin R. McMurry of the University of Missouri forestry department and co-authors combined written accounts with fire-scar evidence from Algonquin Provincial Park in eastern Ontario to document a massive wildfire in the spring of 1780 as the "likely source of the infamous Dark Day of 1780."
Source: The Weather Doctor
: For the past two weeks we've asked you to go on a color fast for our black-and-white photo contest, with enlightening results. We now permit you to gorge on the entire visible spectrum once again, but first check out the fruits of your abstinence. These 10 photos are the highest-ranking black and whites among Wired.com readers. Whiffleboy won the contest with his photo "A Bit Spotty," at left. Whiffleboy will be receiving a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.
Since we had so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice Black-and-White Photo Gallery.
Our next twice-monthly photo contest is water. Show us your best homage to life's elixir. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
A Bit Spotty
Submitted by Whiffleboy
Photographer's comment:
"A self-portrait in a stairwell."
: Straw Dogs
Submitted by Jason Flett
Photographer's comment:
"Taken in drought-affected area of Victoria, Australia."
: Man In the Fog
Submitted by David Gordon
Photographer's comment:
"A man walks the Golden Gate Bridge through the fog."
: Running Through
Submitted by Harrison
Photographer's comment:
"Taken back in February. The bus didn't show up for another 30 minutes."
: Wicked Path
Submitted by Shawn Kresal
Photographer's comment:
"Taken in Yosemite after an unusual rain-filled winter loosened once-still stones and slicked paths."
: Girl, Unafraid
Submitted by Neil Bernhart
Photographer's comment:
"This girl was playing around at dusk with the incoming waves."
: Cape Fear
Submitted by Vilhjalmur Ingi Vilhjalmsson
Photographer's comment:
"Canon EOS 40D + Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6. Two exposures combined together to create a high-dynamic-range image (hdr) then converted to blue/black sepia."
: Pitty
Submitted by Charline Messa
Photographer's comment:
"Canon EOS 400D. Sigma Lenses 70-200mm f/2.8. This picture was taken in a rock festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, promoted by a radio station with lots of famous Brazilian bands. But in my point of view this moment was unique, the stage was all covered with smoke, her hair was flying with the wind and her face was so quiet and peaceful behind all that noise, I had to take a shot and document that moment."
: Silhouette
Submitted by Andrew Scharlott
Photographer's comment:
"Lizard inside a frosted-glass light fixture outside a hotel in Kauai, Hawaii."
: Hidden?
Submitted by bushn
Photographer's comment:
"Black & white macro of pill bug in defense mode."
Sometimes, a game is so ridiculously complicated it just begs you to throw it away.
That's how I felt after an hour of playing The World Ends With You, the hot new role-playing game for the Nintendo DS. In TWEWY, you're a classic Square Enix hero: a surly teenager who comes complete with mysterious secrets, a broken emotional life and spiky anime hair. Everyone gasps in astonishment a lot, and you're thrust unwillingly into a cosmic conflict with creepy monsters.
It's the "conflict" part that drove me crazy. TWEWY offers a combat system that is incredibly innovative and brilliant -- but also impossibly, annoyingly convoluted. It defied me to hurl my DS against the wall.
And yet I didn't. I actually wound up loving the game. And therein lies a very interesting lesson, which suggests that even in our age of superaccessible, EZ-games like Wii Sports and Guitar Hero and Bejeweled, there are rich delights to be had in videogames that are more complicated than a moon landing.
First off, let me explain just how bonkers this game is. In TWEWY, you fight in a cooperative duo, with one fighter on the top screen of the DS and one on the bottom. But here's the thing: You control both fights simultaneously.
You start off fighting on the bottom screen, where you execute attacks in several DS-unique moves -- swiping the stylus to perform a "slash," dragging it to produce a trailer of fire or hurl objects telekinetically, and tapping it to summon lightning or bullets. (Sometimes you also blow or shout into the DS microphone.) Meanwhile, on the top, it's a Dance Dance Revolution thing: You follow button-pushing sequences to initiate attacks.
To make things even more obtuse, you're trying to coordinate the actions of the two fighters. If you pull off a really good combo with one, a glowing green orb will float over to the other fighter -- giving him or her a power-up. Pull off a combo with that player, and the orb floats back to the first fighter. Keep it up, and your power grows to thermonuclear proportions.
But this means that your attention is not only flitting from screen to screen -- it's shifting from one control scheme to another. Gamers are familiar with the sense of flow that comes from repeatedly working with a single tool. Here, it's like the game is actually trying to disrupt that flow.
Oh, and yeah, I almost forgot: There's this nutty three-card monte game going on in the uppermost portion of the top screen. If you execute the attack at the right instant, it'll uncover one of the cards and release yet another power-up. Now you have to zip your eyes up to the very top of the screen every few seconds in addition to everything else.
"Oh, come on," I muttered after about 15 minutes of this. Seriously, TWEWY felt like some sort of information-age joke -- a grim metaphor for interruption-plagued office work. I couldn't keep pace. As the enemies piled on, I'd completely lose track of what was going on, and my team would either die or limp away from a battle.
Now, Square Enix clearly realized the madness it was unleashing on its audience. Thankfully, the developers offered a way to opt out: You can let the top team member fight on autopilot. Needless to say, I quickly opted for autopilot, heaving a sigh of relief.
Yet here's the interesting thing: I kept on getting lured back into the embrace of the dual-control system. Why? Partly for tactical reasons. I discovered that the autopilot AI is a good fighter, but not a superb one. If you use it, you won't achieve really spectacular, ground-pounding combo attacks. If you want to bring in the really big guns, you have to roll up your sleeves and wrestle with both screens.
At that point, it becomes a matter of pride. You're handed a really hard-to-control race car, and you've been dared to drive it. Sure, you're going to crash it at first -- but just imagine how much fun it'll be when you're in control.
Oddly, that's precisely what started to happen. I learned to control the game. Maybe I'd ambiently absorbed some dual-screen strategy from hours of watching the AI fight. Or possibly my nervous system went into a Darwinian panic and rapidly evolved some fresh muscle-memory wetware.
Either way, I suddenly hit my stride after a few hours of playing The World Ends With You. My brain began to shift effortlessly from screen to screen. I entered a new flow state, where the stylus-swiping and the button-mashing stopped fighting for control of my prefrontal cortex and became one elegant, ninjalike motion in the serene pool of my mind. Presto! I pulled off my first spectacularly long-chained sequence of attacks, unlocking one of those intergalactic, superultra-anime-death combos for which Square Enix is famous. When the dust settled, I stood amongst the seared remains of my enemies and basked in the angelic glow of a level-up.
Let me tell you -- it felt excellent. It's fun to excel in any game, of course. But when you excel in a game with such an aggressively challenging control system, it's more than success: It's like you've grown a third eye. I felt like some cocaine-jacked Wall Street trader, surfing my multiscreened Bloomberg terminal while reducing the U.S. economy to a cinder with millisecond subprime-mortgage gambits. I think I went about 40 minutes without blinking.
All of which brings me back to the Wii, Guitar Hero and the idea that simple control systems are the way of the future for videogames. Obviously, on one level it's true that there are tons of people who are turned off by complexity in gameplay mechanics. The huge success of the Wiimote and simple, casual games attests to that.
But there will always be a particular joy that comes from a game that asks you to rise above yourself. It's a steep hill, but there's a promised land on the other side. The World Ends With You is a game that kicks your ass, and then invites you to kick back.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
: Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our black-and-white photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.
Our next twice-monthly photo contest is water. Show us your best homage to life's elixir. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
The Chosen One
Submitted by Julio Rojas
Photographer's comment:
"Two boys walking down the nave of the Santiago de Compostela cathedral."
: Fish!
Submitted by dosyoyas
Photographer's comment:
"Dry fish in Macau."
: Smoke Man
Submitted by Vincos
Photographer's comment:
"A man that seems made of his own smoke."
: Spiral Staircase at the Vatican Museum
Submitted by Top Lertpanyavit
Photographer's comment:
"Took this in the late afternoon as people slowly streamed out of the museum. Long exposure to add motion."
: Eye Patch
Submitted by Thorsten Wulff
Photographer's comment:
"NYC, 1987"
: Commute/co-mute
Submitted by Jesper Sidhu
Photographer's comment:
"Early mornings and the commute to work, we are all going in the same direction, to do the same thing. Nothing is ever spoken, yet there is a mute and mutual connection.
Leica M2 Canon: 50mm, 1.8 Ilford, XP2 Walz yellow filter.
: Vote for Pedro
Submitted by Kerrigan Swan-Garcia
Photographer's comment:
"Meet Pedro: my niece's Chihuahua.“
: Checkerboard Lady
Submitted by Alberto Aleman
Photographer's comment:
"Shot on a rainy afternoon, outside the Terracotta Soldiers' Tomb, in Xi'an, China. 1/100s, focal length: 34.0mm, f/11.0, ISO: 800."
: Building Blocks
Submitted by Brian Sharland
Photographer's comment:
"A photo I made of the Rockefeller Center in New York. Post-processing included black-and-white conversion and heavy contrast."
: Luc(as) de Groot
Submitted by Thorsten Wulff
Photographer's comment:
"Type designer Luc(as) de Groot in Berlin, Germany. He loves kerning."
For this week's contest you'll have to use your lens like a straw and slurp up every last drop of your subject: water.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best water photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Bring us a cold, sweaty canteen of talent when we're thirsty in the desert of taste. Send us down the slip 'n' slide of spectacle in the backyard of spunk. We want to be drenched, sopping and soiled with your righteous imagery. If we don't need to towel off after viewing your photo, you've done something wrong.
The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800-1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.
We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!
Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation, and Black and White.
Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your water photo.
(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?
If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.
With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities "with diverse social, political, and legal systems."
"Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world," Thiel said in a statement.
It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn't playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the first step toward establishing deep-water city-states, or what it calls "seasteads" -- homesteads on the high seas.
Within the pantheon of would-be utopian communities, there's a particularly rich history of people trying to live outside the nation-state paradigm out in the ocean. The most ambitious was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which aimed at nothing less than the colonization of the universe. There was also Las Vegas millionaire Michael Oliver's attempt to create a new island country, the Republic of Minerva, by dredging the shallow waters near Tonga. And the Freedom Ship was to be a mile-long portable country costing about $10 billion to construct.
None of these projects has succeeded, a fact that The Seasteading Institute's founders, Google's Patri Friedman and the semi-retired Wayne Gramlich, are keenly aware of throughout the 300-page book they've written about seasteading.
Instead of starting with a grand scheme worthy of a James Bond villain, the Institute is bringing an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic city-states.
"There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," said Joe Lonsdale, the institute's chairman and a principal at Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.
The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a "spar platform."
This schematic illustrates the ballasting system that Wayne Gramlich imagines would keep the seastead from tipping over. The amount of water in the ballasts could be raised or lowered to move the seastead up and down.
In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top.
The spar design helps offshore platforms better withstand the onslaught of powerful ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure that is exposed to their energy.
"You have very little cross-sectional interaction with waves [with] the spar design," Gramlich said.
The primary living space, about 300 square feet per person, would be inside the tube, but the duo envisions the top platform holding buildings, gardens, solar panels, wind turbines and (of course) satellites for internet access.
To some extent, they believe the outfittings for the seastead will be dependent on the business model, say aquaculture or tourism, that will support it and the number of people aboard.
"We're not trying to pick the one strategy because we think there will be multiple people who want one for multiple reasons," Gramlich said.
Dan Donovan, a long-time spokesman for Dominion, an energy company that operated Gulf of Mexico-based gas rigs, including Devils Tower, the world's deepest spar structure, said the group's plan wasn't too far-fetched. His company's off-shore rigs, which are much larger than the institute's planned seasteads, provided long-term housing for its workers.
"They were sort of like mobile homes. We could move them from one place to another," Donovan said. "People did live on them."
But even the institute members admit that their plans aren't far enough along to stand up to rigorous engineering scrutiny. Some engineers, Gramlich said, have been skeptical of their plan, particularly their desire to do it on the cheap.
"We have some legitimate doubting Thomases out there," Gramlich said.
But if the idea turns out to be just crazy enough that it works, Friedman, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, envisions transforming the way that government functions.
"My dad and grandfather were happy arguing their ideas and were happy influencing people through the world of ideas," Friedman said. "I see a real need for people to go out and do something and show by example."
True to his libertarian leanings, Friedman looks at the situation in market terms: the institute's modular spar platforms, he argues, would allow for the creation of far cheaper new countries out on the high-seas, driving innovation.
"Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," he said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."
Friedman estimates that it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a seastead for a few thousand people. With costs that low, Friedman can see constellations of cities springing up, giving people a variety of governmental choices. If misguided policies arose, citizens could simply motor to a new nation.
"You can change your government without having to leave your house," he said.
Of course, one major role of government is to provide security, which would seem to be an issue on the open sea. But Friedman's not worried about defense beyond simple firearms because he thinks pirates will lack the financial incentive to attack the seasteads.
"More sophisticated pirates will take entire container ships that have tens of millions of dollars of cargo and 10 crew [members]," he said. "On a seastead, there's a much different crew-to-movable assets ratio."
In fact, his only worry is that a government will try to come calling and force their jurisdiction upon them. Toward that end, they are planning to fly a "flag of convenience" from a country that sells them, like Panama, to provide them with protection from national navies.
"If you're not flying a flag … any country can do whatever they want to you," he said.
Even if their big idea doesn't end up panning out, their story should live on in internet lore for confirming the dream that two guys with a blog and a love of Ayn Rand can land half a million dollars to pursue their dream, no matter how off-kilter or off-grid it might seem.
"Everything changed when we got the funding," Friedman said. "Before that, it was two guys with some ideas writing a book and blogging about their ideas.... Now that we've got some funding, it's something I plan to make a full-time job out of."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program student Drew Burrows, 28, engineered a "virtual girlfriend," and showed her off at a recent Tisch School of the Arts show:
It's simple to behold — a single mattress, tucked into a dark, curtained back room of the showcase space. On it: a lithe brunette. She's perfectly quiet, but once you sit or lie down, she responds to your every move. Lie on your back, she snuggles up right next to you in a log position. Curl up in the fetal position, she spoons. The only hitch: She's 2-D. "Yeah, you can't feel the girl. That's the thing," Burrows explained as he demonstrated his invention, an "infrared sensitive" light projection (meaning it reacts, and the projected woman moves, based on an infrared sensor) called INBED. "Still, it's so nice if you're tired and worn out to have someone to curl up with."Link (thanks, Jessica Coen, image courtesy Drew Burrows)
A visualization of the purported marketshare of various online social networking services. It's super interesting, but incomplete: I wonder where the data on China is? Click for larger size. From Le Monde, via Azeem Azar on twitter, via Tim O'Reilly's blog. (thanks Jolon Bankey!)
hover bacon
tux
bra
salt
mints
cups
coffee
vodka
previously on web zen:
bacon zen
Link, Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)
Link, illustration courtesy NYRM. (via Ned Sublette)Ben Scott had better things to do than listen to a bunch of little magazines rant about their unreasonable postage bills. As the policy director of Free Press, a group that specialized in fighting media concentration, he and 10 co-workers in Washington were wrapped up in defending internet accessibility. But in late February 2007, Scott’s phone started buzzing with accusations from panicked publishers of small-circulation magazines. The United States Postal Service, they said, was hammering the last nail in the coffin of independent publishing.
Periodicals with circulations of fewer than 250,000 (some with much fewer—even in the hundreds) had just discovered that the rates they paid the USPS for postage were about to skyrocket, and they had only eight business days to dispute the proposed increase. While these independent publishers had expected the rates to rise, they believed it would be by about 12 percent, which had been the USPS’ own suggestion. However, during an arduous 10 months of hearings on postal rates in 2006, during which the small-magazine community was conspicuously absent, the stakes changed dramatically.
Instead of a simple markup, the entire rate system was overhauled, imposing a cost-based structure on a branch of government originally established to provide a public good, one that the Founding Fathers deemed vital to our democratic society. The Postal System was built on the premise of promoting the free flow of ideas by giving preferential treatment to their most common method of conveyance: the printed pages of periodicals.
Of particular concern to Free Press was the discovery that the biggest force behind the formula by which rates were to be increased was none other than Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the United States, which had been working overtime to influence the outcome of the hearings.
Link, Link to Wasted Food blog (via Core77)
You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.
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