Clipmarks | Mohir's clips

Awesome Sidewalk Art

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:56:22 GMT

clipped by: CyanSmoker

Clip Source: moronland.net

Awesome Sidewalk Art

A collection of perspective images drawn on sidewalks. Truly incredible what can be accomplished with a bit of chalk.

Tags: art

The 70 coolest FREE applications in existence

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:47:08 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.seopher.com

The 70 coolest free applications in existence

At the end of August I created a list of the 40 coolest free applications around which proved quite popular. As with all lists of this type the wisdom of the crowds brought forward numerous other suggestions that I'd overlooked for one reason or another - so here is the revised list.

As with the original list, the purpose is to collate some of the best free applications (and sometimes online services) that can be found on the Internet. I spend a lot of time on the Internet (through my work as a web developer) so it's always worth pooling a decent list of resources to those who are more fortunate to have time away from computers. See below for a brief list of what's covered:

Image, Image Editing and Graphics

Office

Web and web development

Development Applications (IDE's)

Operating Systems

Video Playback

Audio

Anti-Virus and Security

Downloading and Download Managers

Remote Access

Tags: software, internet, windows, free, freeware

10 Minutes Of Staring at Boobs Daily Prolongs Man's Life by 5 Years...

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:00:37 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: "Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation. There's no question: Gazing at large breasts makes men healthier. Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack in half." said Weatherby, who even recommended that men aged over 40 should spend at least 10 minutes daily admiring breasts sized "D-cup" or larger.

She said that this was as healthy as going to the gym for 30 minutes daily and prolonged a man's life by five years.

Clip Source: news.softpedia.com

10 Minutes Of Staring at Boobs Daily Prolongs Man's Life by 5 Years...

A German research published in New England Journal of Medicine said that men staring at women's breasts in fact prolong their lives with years.

"Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female such as Baywatch actress Pamela Lee is equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out," said author Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist.

The team led by Weatherby was made up of researchers at three hospitals in Frankfurt, Germany, and found this results after monitoring for 5 years the health of 200 male subjects, half of whom were asked to look at busty females daily, while the other half had to abstain from doing so.

For five years, the boob oglers presented a lower blood pressure, slower resting pulse rates and decreased risk of coronary artery disease.

Tags: man, health

Ants have a sense of their own mortality

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:00:25 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Ants have a sense of their own mortality

WORKER ants accurately gauge their life expectancy, regardless of their actual age, and take on riskier tasks as they feel their days ebbing away.

In social insects such as ants, bees and wasps, workers change tasks depending on their age. Older workers do the relatively risky foraging outside the nest, while younger ones engage in safer maintenance tasks within it. By extending the workers' average life span, this fine-tuning helps to maximise the fitness of the colony. However, no one knew whether the division of labour in ants was activated by age-related physiological changes or through some other mechanism.

To find out, Dawid Moron and his colleagues at Jagiellonian University in Poland set up 11 lab-based colonies of the ant Myrmica scabrinodis, made up of young worker ants. Within each colony, half of the ants had their life expectancy artificially reduced, either by exposure to carbon dioxide, which acidifies their ...

Tags: ants, biology, mortality

Ten Minutes Of Talking Improves Memory And Test Performance

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:33:02 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: good excuse to keep on talking

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Ten Minutes Of Talking Improves Memory And Test Performance

ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2007) — Spending just 10 minutes talking to another person can help improve your memory and your performance on tests, according to a University of Michigan study to be published in the February 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

"In our study, socializing was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance," said Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and a lead author of the study with ISR psychologist Eugene Burnstein and psychologist Piotr Winkielman from the University of California, San Diego.

In the article, Ybarra, Burnstein and colleagues report on findings from two types of studies they conducted on the relationship between social interactions and mental functioning.

the findings suggest that visiting with a friend or neighbor may be just as helpful in staying sharp

Tags: memory, brain

Honey I Left It On The Toast

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:58:33 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: I know it is a bit stupid,
but isn't it cool?

Clip Source: www.yankodesign.com

Nothing gets your morning going like a cup of joe and a piece of toast slathered in your favorite spread. Of course, it can also be the time of day when things are hectic to start. Kids running around, people in and out, everyone trying to remind everyone else about the super important soccer meet after school. Next time, put it on toast.

This toaster by Sasha Tseng incorporates a little message board where one can read quick notes. The message also gets “toasted” into the toast itself so it gives new meaning to “read while you eat”.

Of course if I had it my way, I’d use it as a scathing reminder to friends suffering from hangovers. Yes, this piece of toast will help settle your stomach buy not without first reading my warnings about binge drinking.

Tags: technology, gadgets, kitchen

Big Chunk Of The Universe Is Missing -- Again

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:02:35 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Big Chunk Of The Universe Is Missing -- Again

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2007) — Not only has a large chunk of the universe thought to have been found in 2002 apparently gone missing again but it is taking some friends with it, according to new research at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The new calculations might leave the mass of the universe as much as ten to 20 percent lighter than previously calculated.

The same UAH group that found what was theorized to be a significant fraction of the "missing mass" that binds together the universe has discovered that some x-rays thought to come from intergalactic clouds of "warm" gas are instead probably caused by lightweight electrons.

If the source of so much x-ray energy is tiny electrons instead of hefty atoms, it is as if billions of lights thought to come from billions of aircraft carriers were found instead to come from billions of extremely bright fireflies.

Tags: universe, astronomy, astrophysics

Photo Tampering Throughout History

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:58:48 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: see rest of photos in original page,
linked to my previous post:
Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/D516F80D-C71B-4B53-BB9C-77EA80B8C919/

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Photography lost its innocence not long after it was born. As early as the 1860s photos were already being manipulated—only a few decades after Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first photograph in 1826. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images has proliferated. Here, I have collected some examples of tampering throughout photography's over 180-year history.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Circa 1860:
This nearly iconic portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln's head and the body of Southern politician, John Calhoun. Putting the date of this photo into context, note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1884.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Circa 1865:

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Soviet premier, Joseph Stalin, routinely airbrushed his enemies out of images.

Tags: photography, fake, history

The Existential Void

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:32:33 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.ponderabout.com

The Existential Void

Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) was
the founder of a school of psychotherapy called
Logotherapy

the two key assumptions of Logotherapy are:

1) life has meaning, and 2) finding that meaning
is the primary motivating force in one’s life

lacking this sense of meaning: it is difficult to
cope with the demands and stresses of life;

and eventually one may enter a state Frankl and
his followers have called - existential frustration,
existential vacuum, or the existential void

the existential void is characterized by
directionlessness, paralyzing hopelessness
and a pervading sense of emptiness

do you sometimes sense the existential void?

and if you do, do you wonder about its source -

what’s missing?, what is it you really want?
what would give life meaning?

is it sex, love, family, acknowledgment,
acceptance, purpose, enlightenment, God . . .
or something else?

this question is one of the handful of questions
worth a good, long PonderAbout

Tags: psychology, void, meaning of life

Top 10 mind mapping tools

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:08:35 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: en.onsoftware.com

Mind maps - also known as concept maps - are visual diagrams used to represent ideas and tasks relating to a given topic. They come in especially handy when you need to generate and manage ideas for a work project, because having a visual representation of all available concepts helps you organize the necessary workflow in a more optimized way.

Check out this list with the best mind mapping software apps out there.

MindManager - capture ideas from several sources and create mind maps with them

MindGenius - easy, intuitive mindmapping tool for everyone

FreeMind - a mind map tool based on Java

MindPad - create colorful, complete mind maps

Visual Mind - mind map tool with a flexible graphic interface

NovaMind - conduct brainstorming sessions and create mindmaps with their outcome

CMapTools - free mindmapping tool with exporting capabilities

Cayra - an open-source mind map program with basic functionalities

ConceptDrawMindmap - professional tool to create concept maps

Mindomo

Tags: software, mind, mind maos

Huge hidden biomass lives deep beneath the oceans

Sun, 25 May 2008 18:02:34 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: They found simple organisms known as prokaryotes in every sample. Prokaryotes are organisms that often have just one cell. Their peculiarity is that, unlike any other form of life, their DNA is not neatly packed into a nucleus.

Clip Source: environment.newscientist.com

It's the basement apartment like no other. Life has been found 1.6 kilometres beneath the sea floor, at temperatures reaching 100 °C.

The discovery marks the deepest living cells ever to be found beneath the sea floor. Bacteria have been found deeper underneath the continents, but there they are rare. In comparison, the rocks beneath the sea appear to be teeming with life.

John Parkes, a geobiologist at the University of Cardiff, UK, hopes his team's discovery might one day help find life on other planets. He says it might even redefine what we understand as life, and, bizarrely, what we understand by "age".

Parkes has been hunting for deep life for over 20 years. Recently, he and his colleagues examined samples of a mud core extracted from between 860 metres and 1626 metres beneath the sea floor off the coast of Newfoundland.

Tags: life, sea, ocean

Schizophrenia: The Curse That's Almost a Blessing

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:57:25 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: A recent study may have found what kind of process goes awry in schizophrenic brains. Researchers found that DISC1 regulates the migration of new neurons in the adult brain. When the levels of DISC1 were reduced in mice during adult neurogenesis, the newborn neurons sped up and overshot their intended targets within the hippocampus, When the neurons finally reached their destinations, they forged an unusual number of connections with neighboring cells, a series of events that might give rise to the abnormal—and quite crippling—brain functions associated with schizophrenia, according to Hongjun Song, a Johns Hopkins neurologist who also worked on the study. It is possible, Song says, that further research will lead to a drug that treats schizophrenia by restoring normal neurogenesis.

So what evolutionary advantage could schizophrenia-related genes bring to people who have some of the genes but not the disease? For now, this remains one of the many open questions.

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

Schizophrenia: The Curse That's Almost a Blessing

The disease may be the twisted flipside of an evolutionary boost.

For years, scientists struggled to identify an adaptive advantage that might explain schizophrenia’s persistence. Researchers from various disciplines volleyed ideas back and forth. Some argued that the genes implicated in the disease promoted creativity; others believed that schizophrenics were frustrated cult leaders—unorthodox thinkers constitutionally “engineered” to lead segments of humanity to break off from the herd, but who lacked the charisma to effect much change. None of the theories gained much traction.

Tags: psychology, brain, schizophrenia, evolution

Iran: You Suck At Photoshop.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:11:57 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: Here's the caption on the NYT illustration above:
In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange).

Clip Source: www.boingboing.net

Or perhaps the headline of this post should read, "American media: you suck at fact-checking."

Iran's state-run media agency has been accused before of having digitally manipulated images released to foreign media. This week, as word spread of purported missile tests in Iran, the validity of an image of four missiles shooting into the sky turned out to be photoshopped -- but not before a bunch of big news organizations printed it as legit.

Agence France-Presse said that it obtained the image from the Web site of Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, on Wednesday. But there was no sign of it there later in the day. Today, The Associated Press distributed what appeared to be a nearly identical photo from the same source, but without the fourth missile.

This morning, Agence France-Presse retracted the image as “apparently digitally altered.”

Tags: photoshop, photography, photo manipulation

Bacteria of the Living Dead

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:23:47 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

Halloween Science: Bacteria of the Living Dead

Chop up their DNA and the buggers still keep comin' back to life.

A team of scientists melted five samples of ice from Antarctica in hopes of reviving the oldest known frozen bacteria—millions of years older than any previously brought to life. And, in fact, the bacteria, ranging in age from 100,000 to a stunning 8 million years old, came groaning back in the culture flask. The younger the bacteria, the more quickly the resurrection occurred. It took the younger bacteria just seven days to reproduce; the oldest samples took up to 10 times as long.

The finding could have a profound effect on microbial life (see “The Last Hidden Place on Earth,” page 44). As Antarctic ice melts, the bacteria frozen inside may revive and be taken up by microbes in the ocean, says Paul Falkowski, a Rutgers University biologist who directed the bacteria project.

Tags: bacteria, biology, evolution, global warming

New Brain Cells Listen Before They Talk

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:59:39 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: could be a good feature to learn from our brain cells

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

New Brain Cells Listen Before They Talk

ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2007) — Newly created neurons in adults rely on signals from distant brain regions to regulate their maturation and survival before they can communicate with existing neighboring cells--a finding that has important implications for the use of adult neural stem cells to replace brain cells lost by trauma or neurodegeneration, Yale School of Medicine researchers report in The Journal of Neuroscience.

In fact, certain important synaptic connections--the circuitry that allows the brain cells to talk to each other--do not appear until 21 days after the birth of the new cells, according to Charles Greer, professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology, and senior author of the study, In the meantime, other areas of the brain provide information to the new cells, preventing them from disturbing ongoing functions until the cells are mature.

Tags: brain, neurons, stem cells