Plurib.us

"What's up with Viral marketing?  Snakes on a Plane vs HIV"
- Questions that lead to questions -
scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/200...

Related:
scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscien...
scienceblogs.com/evolgen/2006/0...

Del.icio.us just got a swanky new home page.  I dig the page thumbnails.

del.icio.us/

Little girls play The Sims.  A horrifying truth.
telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.j...

Wait, huh?  We can take pictures of atoms?
aip.org/png/2006/264.h...

Apparently we can, but only of the tips of incredibly sharp needles.
materials.ox.ac.uk/fim/whatisfim....
About the tip:
sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/...

Dead dog, turned freak tumor species, lives in alive dogs.  Gross.  But interesting reading on evolution.  (There are a million ways to write this 'headline'.)
scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/08/0...

Map of sea birds' migration patterns across the Pacific.  They fly in a gigantic figure-8 spanning the whole ocean.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/n...

Mesmerizing and pretty light beam motion can't-figure-out-how-it-works art/gifs/experiment (?)
tochka.jp/pikapika/2006/...

All our astronomical distances may be off by 15%, as a recent study updates the 'hubble constant'.  Forget everything you learned in grade school.

spaceref.com/news/viewpr.ht...

Neat edited (digestible) 15-year timeline of the web
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technolog...

(Plurib.us started in the middle of an apparent dead zone between Nov 2001 and Dec 2002.)

Record industry will have a hard time winning a court case if they can't prove you were the one who illegally downloaded music.  Seems obvious to me, but apparently this is new.  (I think it's that they dropped the case, and this sets a precedent.)

theregister.co.uk/2006/08/03/ind...

The sweet story of a UK movie theater making its own Coke.

"Unfortunately none of us had any scientific knowledge whatsoever, and it's quite a scientific process," says Rich. "We spent half our time running out to get ingredients that we didn't have, and we kept having to go round to the local post office to weigh things on their parcel scales."

guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,...

Google is going to host Open Source projects (a la SourceForge).  The service seems to be headed up by a veteran to Open Source, now Google employee.

newsforge.com/article.pl?sid...

Google sitemaps told me we were coming in #1 for a search for Krista.  (Liars.)  Then the thought occured to me to look up names in Google trends.  I give you the 5 most recent plurib.us posters in Google trends (one could write long essays about this data, I'm sure):

google.com/trends?q=eric%...

When I was a child, the appearance of poultry on the dinner table always sparked a battle for the wishbone. The three of us kids had to have a preliminary round of bickering to determine the two wishbone-contestants.

Now, a company is Lucky-Break plastic wishbones!  If we'd had these back then, we could have replaced our bickering with a preliminary round of faux-wishbone playoffs.

Vegetarians take note: NO FOWL — NO FOUL. They're totally unreal! LUCKY BREAK™ WISHBONES are entirely guilt-free!

luckybreakwishbone.com/

Mira: The Wonderful Star,
as observed by the Chandra Observatory:
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060722....

The Saturn orbiter Cassini just captured very detailed radar images of Titan, revealing a very interesting terrain:
saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-rel...

This is what I'm talking about.  Opera on the Nintendo DS (in Japanese):
youtube.com/watch?v=RbSq-t...

Results for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are out!  In short, the award is for the worst possible sentence which could be used to start a book.  Two entries:

A single sparkling tear fell from Little Mary's cheek onto the sidewalk, then slid into the storm drain, there to join in its course the mighty waters of the Los Angeles River and, eventually, Long Beach Harbor, with its state-of-the-art container-freight processing facilities.

Todd languished there, neck deep in the pumpkin-hued Amargosa Desert sand like a long forgotten cupcake in an Easy Bake Oven gone hellishly amok, and it finally made sense . . . "ooohhhh, DEATH Valley."

sjsu.edu/depts/english/...

World Jump Day: it's totally going to work.
worldjumpday.org/

Passing some time on Peter's protopage... I think I want one of these: a both incredibly useful, and incredibly not useful tool.
kk.org/cooltools/arch...

If we all scrape some money together, we could book a big-name band for our next event.  Seriously, we could have Hanson for $5,000.

tobinder.com/rockpop.htm

An enlightened observation about free time (couldn't be more true).
mattcutts.com/blog/things-i-...

Brilliant visualization of the size of the earth.
royalsapien.com/pop1/

Also, morning sickness might just be the body's way of avoiding toxic foods...?
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/51...

I thought the infamous French 'iTunes law' was bad for Apple, etc.  This article states that it became practically the opposite by the time the law passed.  Hey.
trends.newsforge.com/trends/06/07/0...

Also, Microsoft and the European Union are still not seeing eye-to-eye.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/...

Less relatedly, just when I learn I can export PhotoShop files from The GIMP, I find that privilege may go away.  Silly Adobe.
software.newsforge.com/software/06/06...

(New page setup released today.  Hope everyone likes it.)

Holy Cats!  For ages, I've wanted a pronunciation guide for the names of authors--if there is a way to mispronounce a name, I have mispronounced it.  As it turns out, the Library of Congress has such a guide!
loc.gov/nls/other/sayh...

Thanks, ask.metafilter.com !

For those of you who missed the World Cup final today (France v. Italy,) we at Plurib.us feel that its our public service to tell you about the game.  After 90 minutes, it was a 1-1 tie.  In the 2nd half of overtime, soon-retiring French star Zinedine Zidane FREAKING HEADBUTTED Italian defender Marco Materazzi RIGHT IN THE CHEST.
video.google.com/videoplay?doci...

After some confusion (the head ref didn't see the assult, and an assistant ref had to set him straight,) Zidane was sent off of his final World Cup match (he's retiring after the World Cup,) and Italy won by penalty kicks.  Way to be remembered as a jerk, Zidane. 

In related YouTube news, the attacked player has previously made a name for himself by playing cheaply:
youtube.com/watch?v=dlaqsO...

(Thanks, Italy: I believed in you ever since '94.  Why'd my hero have to wank that PK against Brazil?)

British Parliament is so much fun to watch, it's almost like a spectator sport.  Like other sports, it makes more sense if you know the rules.  Thank you, BBC!

Members may not eat or drink in the chamber. One exception to this is the chancellor who may have an alcoholic drink while delivering the Budget statement.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politi...

You know it had to happen.  Google is now a "word".
latimes.com/news/nationwor...

So as to delay my actual work on  this site today, here's some random other thing, suggested by Amanda on the message board:

plurib.us/map

A MixMap of plurib.us visitors.  I think it works--but I might get rid of it if it doesn't.

My study of amateur electronics began and ended with a Radio Shack 120-in-1 components-on-a-board project-kit.  Specifically, it ended with the transistors.  I never really figured out what they did or how they worked. (Although, I soon learned that if you ran 9 volts through one in a particular way, it would explode with a loud bang.)

If you know how a lightbulb works, and sort of understand what a capacitor does, then this page will probably help you understand transistors.

amasci.com/amateur/transi...