eggtea.com

Don't be an individual.

2009-12-07T22:16:04Z

I favorited a YouTube video: A speech given at the Paideia Senior Dinner a few days before graduation. www.Nickkocher.com www.BriTANicK.com

Lemon Demon - "Eighth Wonder"

2009-12-07T20:04:55Z

I favorited a YouTube video: MP3: http://tinyurl.com/EighthW http://www.lemondemon.com Lettering artwork by Ming Doyle!: http://youtube.com/mingdoyle Special thanks to Ryan Murphy! Lyrics: Extra clever earthbound spirit Ghost in the form of a mongoose And I have hands and I have feet I'll never die, I am a freak Hello, I'm here, I'm living in the wall I know, I might be small but I am a freak Thou wilt never know what I am I am the fifth dimension and I will split the atom And if you see me, you're paralyzed Pillar of salt, you're mummified Hello, I'm here, I'm living in the wall I know, I might be small but I am the eighth wonder And I was born 1852 And I was born in India And I shall haunt like the Buggane With such weird noise and clanking chains Hello, I'm here, I'm living in the wall I know, I might be small but I am a freak I say "vanished" to underground Jim, let me go, I watch like hell And I have hands, and I have feet I'll never die, I am a freak Hello, I'm here, I'm living in the wall I know, I might be small, but I am the eighth wonder Eighth wonder of the world You'll never get to see What in the name of god can I be?

Gay Men Have Bigger + Thicker Dicks

2009-12-05T02:46:21Z

Research says erect gay penises are bigger

Uncovered Kinsey Report data show homosexual members have hetero ones by a head.

BY HANK HYENA

Nov. 4, 1999

Six inches is the average length of a male erection, right? More or less? More (6.32 inches) if you’re gay, apparently. And less (5.99) if you’re straight. Stiff homosexual organs are one-third of an inch longer, claims an article titled “The Relation Between Sexual Orientation and Penile Size” in the June Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The phallus findings are based on archived data from 5,122 measurements of men’s schlongs obtained by the Kinsey Report from 1938-1963.

But isn’t it penile chubbiness that matters more in sexual pleasure? Heteros lose this contest, too. The straight circumference is 4.80 inches, while gays wield a stout 4.95. Dr. Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in Ontario, Canada and Dr. Scott Hershberger of California State University-Long Beach co-authored the recent study, which is part of a larger study on the origins of sexual orientation and behavior.

Reached by phone at his Ontario office, Bogaert generously answered my most probing questions about the penile research.

Why on Earth would gay guys be heavier hung?

“It might have something to do with prenatal hormones that affect the structure and size of genitalia and certain structures of the brain that ultimately affect sexual orientation,” Bogaert said. “If so, this would lend support to theories that believe there are biological factors affecting sexual orientation.”

Did Kinsey researchers actually measure the arched staffs of their subjects?

“No,” the Canadian admitted. “The subjects reported themselves, either by mailing their measurements in, or by reporting their size to an interviewer.”

Men lie about their dimensions, Bogaert acknowledged, but in his opinion, this doesn’t explain the data. “The size discrepancy might have to do with ‘reporting bias’ if gay men are more likely to exaggerate the size of their penis. But we don’t think that’s the explanation. There’s evidence that heterosexuals are as likely to exaggerate as homosexuals.”

As for plans to reenact the original study with excited, contemporary wieners, Bogaert was doubtful.

“I probably won’t do additional research in this area,” he said. “I have other projects, and besides, it’s too expensive.”

Oddly enough, this astounding and controversial discovery has been kept zippered up by the majority of media. Queer columnist Dan Savage commented on it in one of his September columns and the Evening Standard, the London newspaper, noted it on Aug. 24, but generally, it looks like gay vs. straight cock size is a topic that the prudish press finds way too big to handle.

That’s why the story reared its head here, where the whole world is naked.
http://salon.com/health/sex/urge/world/1999/11/04/size/index.html

Balancing the Risks of Open Government

2009-12-06T18:25:23Z

After attending the Gartner Symposium in Sydney, I have read a number of press articles that make reference to some of the topics I covered there.

An article on Computerworld captured my point about the need of a conscious loss of control to make government 2.0 initiatives successful.

Another article on GovernmentNews picked on the risks of open government. Quoting what I said in a press conference, the journalist wrote:

Governments should be more cautious about the data they place in the public domain […] governments had hurried to open up data sets with little regard to the outcomes and value that ‘mashed up’ products offered the public sector. […]

Who’s looking at whether these mashups are bringing value or not? Someone mashes them. It’s good from a public perspective but who will take action?” […]

Think about the consequences of the data they’re putting out there. The more data you publish the more risk you create […].

One could argue that these articles somewhat contradict each other, but actually they both are accurate reports (although with some added emphasis). As I wrote in an earlier post, government 2.0 is something that needs to be tackled, although it is fraught with risks. It is not that government organizations have a choice; the train has already left the station and, although different government domains in different jurisdictions will be affected at different times, this is something that pretty much any government organization will have to come to terms with sooner or later.

Once more, the real issue is striking the right balance between different aspects of government 2.0 (something I have also mentioned in a previous post). In the picture below I have drawn in black the “traditional” information flows that are associated to government 2.0: data from government to people and engagement from people to government. I have drawn in red the reverse flows, i,.e. data that is created by communities and used by government, and government employees being engaged on externally sourced communities.

The black lines are those where government can exercise (some) degree of control. These include the various data.gov, all web 2.0 thrills and frills on government web sites as well as government pages on Facebook or accounts on Twitter.

The red lines are those where governments have to let go, have to empower their employees to act as connection agents with external communities. By its nature, this looks like the riskiest part, although – I would argue – is also the most important.

However, and that’s the point made in the second article, one should not think that publishing data is risk free. As I also said in my previous post, “if something goes wrong because data is not accurate or up-to-date or just because it gets mashed up the wrong way or even maliciously, government will be held accountable”.

I need to be clear on this. Open government data will do more good than bad, and the incidents that will occur on the way to transparency will be far outweighed by the value that this data create. This being said, it will take effort to make sure that data is used (see my point about the doubtful relevance of mashup contests) and that the occasional drawbacks of transparency are appreciated and properly managed.

MIT-based team wins DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge, demonstrates power of social networks (and cold hard cash)

2009-12-07T04:06:00Z

DARPA would have you believe that it's the brilliance of modern day social networks that led an MIT-based team to win its red balloon challenge this weekend, and while there's no doubt that the presence of the internet assisted in the locating of ten randomly placed floating objects, we're crediting the bright minds at the university for their strategy of soliciting team mates. The challenge was constructed in order to "see whether social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter should be seen as credible sources of information," not to mention investigate new ways to react to various threats that need instant attention. Less than nine hours after the contest began, MIT's team had deflated the hopes of around 4,000 other teams by finding all ten, though it's hard to say exactly how many members were out looking. You see -- MIT established a website that promised hundreds, even thousands of dollars to individuals who sent in the correct coordinates of balloons, noting that the $40,000 in prize money would be graciously distributed should their efforts lead to a win. DARPA may call it a triumph of the information superhighway; we're calling it victory in numbers.

Continue reading MIT-based team wins DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge, demonstrates power of social networks (and cold hard cash)

MIT-based team wins DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge, demonstrates power of social networks (and cold hard cash) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Slashdot | DARPA | Email this | Comments

Google EMEA Engineering Hub, in Zürich

2009-12-02T10:58:16Z

Have you heard about the Zooglers? Hm? These are actually the lucky pepople that work at Google EMEA Engineering Hub, in Zürich. An inspiring and contemporary space, where a team of Zooglers were part of the design process and created a special identity for each room inside the building.

The Camenzind Evolution were the architects behind the main ideias and concept. They made a survey with all people, and they decided to reduce their own workspaces in order to gain a funny and relax enviroment focused on the common and meeting areas. A team of local Zooglers were teamed up as a comitee to represent the entire office and present the ideias to the architects.

The diversity of all the spaces provides a great range of emotional and visual experiences. A lot of colors, textures, materials, activities, quick connections between floors, and other crazy sttuffs create a unique and at the same time very different place. You can check out more about that on the pictures bellow and realize why Google is a place where everyone would like to work at!

Photographs: Camenzind Evolution

"The resulting design is a distinctive, diverse, light and flexible workspace, wich has been specifically developed to stimulate and support the Googlers in their challenging and innovative work" - Camenzind Evolution

"This building is a 'city' and like in every city there are areas where people live and communal areas where people can meet with a network of roads and connections between them." - Camenzind Evolution

About the author

I'm from Brazil, co-founder of Zee with Fabio. Nowadays I like to play with Fireworks, Photoshop and improve my skills in CSS. If you wanna request some posts, please feel free to contact me or follow on Twitter.

{submitted}

2009-12-07T04:58:49Z

{submitted}

Betty Boop - "Betty in Blunderland" (1934)

2009-12-07T08:20:15Z

I favorited a YouTube video: Produced by Max Fleischer. Directed by Dave Fleischer. Animation by Roland Crandall and Tom Johnson. In one of the last of the pre-Hays Code surreal Betty Boop cartoons, Betty finds herself wandering through the looking glass into Alice's wonderland. This cartoon, like many other Betty Boop shorts, is now in the public domain. Presented with a representation of what the original Paramount titles would have looked like.

"Teardrops on My Telephone" -- Hunx and His Punx

2009-12-07T08:09:22Z

I favorited a YouTube video: A music video for Hunx and His Punx, directed by Justin Kelly. Cinematography by David Kavanaugh. Lights by Ben Leon and Jerry Lee. Giant pink phone by Annie Danger.

T-Mobile Should Focus On The Geeks

2009-12-04T20:31:24Z

Saschasegan of PCMag is one of my favorite twitter contacts and I came across an article written yesterday discussing Open Source and what intrigued me were the closing paragraphs. He’s made no bones about being celebratory over T-Mobile’s Even More/Even More Plus plans and the way T-Mobile has attempted to change the rate plan game in the wireless industry. The reason to bring this forward is Sascha’s notion of how T-Mobile should “flirt with the geeks to boost its profile, attracting developers and creative types.” As I read through that, I thought that’s a terrific idea, why wouldn’t T-Mobile want to attract those individuals who influence opinion based on the apps and products they develop? The geeks and creative types shape the industry these days with App Stores being all the rage, so why wouldn’t T-Mobile want to put some muscle behind this?

To support his claim, Sascha offers evidence in the form of the N900 and its T-Mobile based AWS 3G bands. Claiming T-Mobile should sell unsubsidized N900’s to move further move away from the current, loathed carrier model. T-Mobile would continue to differentiate itself as a carrier thinking outside the box. T-Mobile needs a “leg up” and while their new plan offerings certainly hope to give them a boost, attracting a more data friendly customer would serve to give them a much needed push for their public relations. Phone Geeks shout from the roof tops and the more yelling the better, magenta needs it.

PCMag

SyFy's "Alice" - Warning: May Contain Your Next British Obsession [Review]

2009-12-03T23:18:41Z

This weekend Syfy is taking a trip through a very modern looking glass, complete with romance, casinos and lots of fighting. So is this Wonderland worth revisiting? Check out our spoiler free Alice review.

We were sent an extremely early edit of the film, so I'm not making a final judgment on the two-day mini movie until it airs, but what I did watch I got a excited about.

Here's the premise: Alice is a no-nonsense commitment-phobe and karate instructor. So yeah she kicks ass, and a lot, for better or worse. Strong armed Alice falls for one of her students who sneaks her some sort of magical ring and is promptly kidnapped. Alice follows her boytoy through the looking glass and is transported to Wonderland. But Wonderland has changed. It's now a dirty world that looks strangely like Vancouver. Alice soon learns that the Queen of Hearts is kidnapping humans and imprisoning them in her casino, siphoning off their happy emotions and selling them to the inhabitants of Wonderland. Thus making her beloved, for providing the quick fix, as well as rich.

Alice meets the Hatter in one of these emotion dens and the two strike a deal to go and save her boyfriend, who has presumably been kidnapped by the Queen for emotion harvesting. If I tell you more we'll get into spoiler territory, but there are plenty more twists and turns. It also gets pretty heavy with the family issues and inner love turmoil for poor Alice. In fact it really reminded me of a shorter and less in-depth version of the TV movie The 10th Kingdom, which I adored. So even coming close to that is a good thing.

Plus the cast is just bafflingly great. Tim Curry plays the Dodo, Kathy Bates is the Queen of Hearts, Harry Dean Stanton is the Caterpillar, and Colm Meaney is the King of Hearts. Those names alone are worth tuning in for. You won't want to miss watch Tim Curry walk around with his stomach forward, Dodo-style. Sure, I could mention that Curry really pushes the level of running and screaming that I can take from him, and that Kathy Bates seemed like she was sporting dead face for most of the movie, but they're are small issues.

But the real standout was Andrew Lee Potts' Hatter. Call me a sucker for British heroes who wear funny suits and like to throw their weight around, but I couldn't rip my eyes off of the Hatter when he was on screen. Almost to the detriment of Alice. Potts is familiar with the scifi world, having starred in the BBC's Primeval, but he really hits his stride here. And while I was watching him on a version that needed copious edits and tweaks, I still really enjoyed watching him try to elevate the story and dialogue he was handed. Yes, making the Hatter a cute hipster is a little eye rolling, but he made it work. Potts really attempted to sell some of his totally implausible actions he was taken in by the script. You heard it here first: If Matt Smith the new Doctor crashes and burns, certainly wouldn't be any worse off with Potts. But that's just hopeful projecting on my part.

So the bottom line: I'm tuning in. I'm anxious to see what the home of Matt Frewer's dimwitted White Knight looks like, as it's merely described as a chessboard forest kingdom. Along with the flying jetski-like flamingo sky cars, and the Queen's casino once the FX are all finished. Plus I wouldn't miss the opportunity to watch Andrew Lee Potts make me reassess my staunch views on men who wear guyliner.

Even though some of the story did feel a bit pushed here and there, and the plot was in an eternal loop of running to the casino and escaping, then running back, and escaping, the characters, settings, costumes and actors make this worth your time. And for those of you worried it's a Tim Burton rip, fear not: This contemporary Wonderland has a strange feel all on it's own.

Here's the trailer:

The first part begins December 6th, 8 PM.

Man "wins" World of Warcraft

2009-12-03T16:33:13Z

A Taiwanese World of Warcraft player has "completed" the game, having scored all 986 achievements. To accomplish this remarkable feat, he "killed 390,895 creatures, accumulated 7,255,538,878 points of damage, completed 5,906 quests (that's 14.62 quests per day, apparently), raided 405 dungeons and hugged 11 players." Man 'finishes' World of Warcraft (via /.)

World record: 0.01mm nano-snowman

2009-12-04T18:34:51Z

You're looking at the tiniest snowman ever built. Well, it looks like a snowman, but this minuscule model — about a fifth the width of a human hair — is not made out of snow. It's constructed of two tiny tin beads that are usually used to calibrate an electron microscope, and welded together with platinum.

It's built by David Cox, a nanotech expert at the Quantum Detection Group of Britain's National Physical Laboratory. He's accustomed to working with such astonishingly small objects, and used his nano-particle manipulation tools to demonstrate the astonishing accuracy of his work.

He bathed the snowman in blue light to give us this entertaining, snow-blown image. The remarkable flourish of his smiling snowman is its little happy face, carved into the top orb using a focused ion beam. That's no small feat.

Daily Mail, via Gizmo Watch

Coffin Shaped Cigarette Packaging

2009-12-03T13:32:07Z

Coffin Shaped Cigarette Packaging by R.J. Reynolds. Brilliant!

The Evolution of the Hipster 2000-2009

2009-12-03T22:40:32Z

The November 2009 issue of Paste Magazine takes a look at The Evolution of the Hipster 2000-2009 (here’s a larger version).

via Caroline McCarthy

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid, subscribe via RSS, Email, Twitter & Facebook.

Harvard and MIT researchers working to simulate the visual cortex to give computers true sight

2009-12-04T14:29:00Z

It sounds like a daunting task, but some researchers at Harvard and MIT have banded together to basically "reverse engineer" the human brain's ability to process visual data into usable information. However, instead of testing one processing model at a time, they're using a screening technique borrowed from molecular biology to test a range of thousands of models up against particular object recognition tasks. To get the computational juice to accomplish this feat, they've been relying heavily on GPUs, saying the off-the-shelf parallel computing setup they've got gives them hundred-fold speed improvements over conventional methods. So far they claim their results are besting "state-of-the-art computer vision systems" (which, if iPhoto's skills are any indication, wouldn't take much), and they hope to not only improve tasks such as face recognition, object recognition and gesture tracking, but also to apply their knowledge back into a better understanding of the brain's mysterious machinations. A delicious cycle! There's a video overview of their approach after the break.

[Thanks, David]

Continue reading Harvard and MIT researchers working to simulate the visual cortex to give computers true sight

Harvard and MIT researchers working to simulate the visual cortex to give computers true sight originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | PhysOrg | Email this | Comments

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them [Design]

2009-12-03T21:08:23Z

What do The Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible 3, Mr & Mrs Smith, Children of Men, and Agent Cody Banks 2 have in common? Absurd, futuristic, and totally fake software interfaces, designed in part by one man: Mark Coleran.

Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is a different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that a machine is powerful; that a villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers borders on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus. Here's a gallery of some of the most famous interfaces; see how many you recognize.

Coleran's UIs are a mix of proudly retro and boldly new, mingling compact pixel art, wireframes and the solid, militaristic reds, blues and blacks of software from the 80s with touch-free gesture systems and overelaborate visualizations. It's the kind of stuff you take for granted in action and sci-fi films, but rounded up in one place, it's a strangely impressive, almost cohesive view of the future of software, as designed by someone with no contraints. [Mark Coleran via Metafilter]

Earth 2100 (2009)

2009-11-13T11:02:46Z

No summary yet

Chow Hon Lam.

2009-12-04T01:46:12Z

via grenka666
видеть больше >> Link

Political Science: The Psychological Differences in the U.S.'s Red-Blue Divide

2009-12-02T13:00:00Z

Humans are, by nature, tribal and never more so than in politics. In the culture wars we all know the tribal stereotypes of what liberals think of conservatives: Conservatives are a bunch of Hummer-driving, meat-eating, gun-toting, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white-thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally hypocritical blowhards. And what conservatives think of liberals: Liberals are a bunch of hybrid-driving, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, whale-saving, sandal-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, namby-pamby bed wetters.

Like many other stereotypes, each of these contains an element of truth that reflects an emphasis on different moral values. Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychologist at the University of Virginia, explains such stereotypes in terms of his Moral Foundations Theory (see www.moralfoundations.org ), which he developed “to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes.” Haidt proposes that the foundations of our sense of right and wrong rest within “five innate and universally available psychological systems” that might be summarized as follows:

[More]

eggtea.com

Don't be an individual.

Lemon Demon - "Eighth Wonder"

Gay Men Have Bigger + Thicker Dicks

Research says erect gay penises are bigger

Balancing the Risks of Open Government

MIT-based team wins DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge, demonstrates power of social networks (and cold hard cash)

Google EMEA Engineering Hub, in Zürich

Have you heard about the Zooglers? Hm? These are actually the lucky pepople that work at Google EMEA Engineering Hub, in Zürich. An inspiring and contemporary space, where a team of Zooglers were part of the design process and created a special identity for each room inside the building.

About the author

Sponsored Links:

{submitted}

Betty Boop - "Betty in Blunderland" (1934)

"Teardrops on My Telephone" -- Hunx and His Punx

T-Mobile Should Focus On The Geeks

Related Posts:

SyFy's "Alice" - Warning: May Contain Your Next British Obsession [Review]

Man "wins" World of Warcraft

World record: 0.01mm nano-snowman

Coffin Shaped Cigarette Packaging

The Evolution of the Hipster 2000-2009

Harvard and MIT researchers working to simulate the visual cortex to give computers true sight

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them [Design]

Earth 2100 (2009)

Chow Hon Lam.

Political Science: The Psychological Differences in the U.S.'s Red-Blue Divide