Clipmarks | ericskiff's Comments

Who is on Amplify?

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:40:32 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: I'd like to connect with you on Amplify if you're on it. I can't seem to figure out how to do it directly at Amplify (unless I stumble upon people on my own through its home page). So go ahead and add your Amplify page in the comments, here is mine: http://arif.amplify.com/

Clip Source: amplify.com

Tags: amplify, clipmarks, blogs

Are Hugs the New Handshakes?

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:55:08 GMT

clipped by: chestnut501
clipper's remarks: The Hugger in Chief May Be a Good Indicator

Clip Source: www.time.com

If White House etiquette is any indication, you should be getting a random hug soon. The Obama family was always cuddly on the campaign trail, and last month the President bestowed no fewer than nine hugs on senior male staffers at a single meeting.

The Hugger in Chief didn't start the trend. At work and at school, even on first introductions--at least among the latest inhabitants of The Real World--the hug is gaining ground on the handshake

THE FULL FRONTAL Total body contact, heart-to-heart embrace and firm squeeze. For parents, children and good friends

THE ASS-OUT HUG Nothing touches below the shoulders. Reserved for the office, bad dates and references to Vince Vaughn

THE HIP-HOP HUG A.k.a. the man hug and the hetero hug. Shake with right hand and hug with left, two slaps on the back

What TV news anchors do during commercial breaks

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 05:59:32 GMT

clipped by: Lexica

Clip Source: featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

WGN-TV weekend anchors Robert Jordan and Jackie Bange do a little dance number each Saturday and Sunday night during their telecast's first commercial break. Word is that it started out as a short 10-second dance, but now they have choreographed it into the full 2:40 of the break.

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Clip Source: featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

Jordan — The first segment of the show is the death and destruction thing, the murders and the fires and the really horrid stories. You come out of that first segment and it’s pretty tense. That loosens us up a little bit. The rest of the show generally isn’t as intense as that first segment. Coming out of that, sometimes we’ll look at each other and whew, that was pretty rough. It breaks the tension and loosens us up for the rest of the program.

It kind of started with the Three Stooges. Jackie used to always poke at me with the two fingers, like Moe, and I would always put my hand up to block her. And that was our move. And it took off from that.

Tags: video, funny, dance

World's largest pavement art

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:55:52 GMT

clipped by: drgreenfingers

Clip Source: www.ananova.com

World's largest pavement art

More than 2,000 children have created the world's biggest piece of pavement art.

The youngsters drew the 7,000 yard train using 10,000 boxes of chalk in Cluj, Transylvania, Romania.

The world record, which they set last year, has been confirmed by the World Records Academy.

The drawing started as a school game but gradually grew as teachers and other pupils started to join in.

"We didn't mean to break a record. We just kept going until we ran out of pavement. Thank goodness the rain kept off," said one organiser.

Obama better be good

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:06:52 GMT

clipped by: tayoulevy

Clip Source: www.cynical-c.com

Yesterday was a historic day. On January 20th, 2009, Barack H. Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America - the first African-American ever to hold the office of U.S. Commander-in-Chief. The event was witnessed by well over one million attendees in chilly Washington D.C., and by many millions more through coverage on television and the Internet. Collected here are photographs of the event, the participants, and some of the witnesses around the world. (48 photos total)

The Claim: Eye Color Can Have an Effect on Vision

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:39:03 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

The Claim: Eye Color Can Have an Effect on Vision

Can the color of your eyes affect more than just your dating life?

It is well known that people with lighter eyes tend to be more sensitive to light, a result of having less pigment in the iris to protect them from sunlight. That can place them at a greater risk of macular degeneration and other eye-related problems. But whether that extends to vision is not clear.

If there are any differences, they seem to be subtle. There is little or no evidence that darker eye color means greater visual acuity, but one theory holds that it does produce better reaction times.

Studies have examined this by looking at sports performance

found that dark-eyed people performed better at “reactive-type tasks,” like hitting balls, playing defense in a football game and boxing

But people with light eyes did better at “self-paced tasks,” like hitting a golf ball, throwing baseballs or bowling.

How a checkout girl called Anna Sam bagged a best-seller

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:59:03 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

How a checkout girl called Anna Sam bagged a best-seller

After eight years enduring the vile behaviour of her supermarket customers, Anna Sam took revenge by revealing all in a book.

By Celia Walden
Last Updated: 10:48PM GMT 19 Jan 2009

If you don't work hard at school, you'll end up a like that lady behind the counter.'' It was a slight that Anna Sam heard over and over during her time as a supermarket checkout girl. "Everyone I ever worked with would be confronted at some time or another by a mother threatening her child with that right in front of us," says 29-year-old Sam. Her "career" as a checkout girl lasted eight years. Eight years of lifting 800 kilos of goods a day; scanning 700-800 articles per hour; asking 200 times a day: "Do you have a loyalty card?","Could you remove your card please?" (250 times)

Paradoxically, the same technology Sam blames for eroding our humanity is what has made it possible for her message to reach such a wide audience.

Brits Eat Their Lawns

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:18:24 GMT

clipped by: rentstrike

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

The nation's landscape is changing before our eyes. Record numbers of people are preparing to dig up their manicured lawns and privet hedges. Even the most modish gardens are sporting freshly dug vegetable beds, sapling fruit trees and nascent compost heaps.

Fruit and vegetable seed sellers last week reported record sales, with many saying that they cannot keep up with a sudden rise in demand. Meanwhile, the landscape gardening industry is in crisis, with many firms laying off staff.

In March the Royal Horticultural Society will unveil the latest stage in its "Grow Your Own" campaign, this time turning its attention to fruit-growing. The campaign, which aims to show people that they don't need acres of space to begin growing, and that gardening can reduce the amount of money spent on food, claims to have inspired half a million people to start cultivating fruits and vegetables.

The world's resources are limited and people want to do their bit.

Old calendars never really go out of date.

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:25:57 GMT

clipped by: JediKnut
clipper's remarks: Great article! So helpful... Just the other day I was doing some cleaning in my room & came across a calendar from 1998 which I couldn't get myself to throw away... & now I can re-use it!

Go to the link to see the full article & read more about this!

Clip Source: www.wisebread.com

Old calendars never really go out of date.

This little fact was big news to me. I was casually flicking through a magazine at work when something caught my eye; it was buried in the bottom corner of one page and stated that you can use old calendars in the years to come. And this year, there are a bunch of great old dates to choose from.

As some of you may already know, there are a limited number of combinations for calendars – 14 to be exact (half account for years with 365 days, the other half for leap years). Big deal? Probably not, but here’s why it excites me.

They don’t make 2009 Calendars for most of those shows and movies now. Why would they? But, they certainly did back in the day. And with the advent of eBay and Craigslist, you can pick up a piece of the past for the same price as a modern calendar (or a lot less in some cases) and proudly display it on your wall as a functioning 2009 calendar.

Anyway, here’s a list of old calendar years that will work in 2009:

Tags: calendar, year, reuse

Ubuntu, create something that is stylish and stunning

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:14:53 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: he notion of a strong Linux-based competitor to Windows and, to a lesser extent, Apple’s Mac OS X has been an enduring dream of advocates of open-source software. They champion the idea that software that can be freely altered by the masses can prove cheaper and better than proprietary code produced by stodgy corporations. Try as they might, however, Linux zealots have failed in their quest to make Linux mainstream on desktop and notebook computers. The often quirky software remains in the realm of geeks, not grandmothers.

With Ubuntu, the devotees believe, things might finally be different.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows

In December, hundreds of these controversial software developers gathered for one week at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. They came from all over the world, sporting many of the usual signs of software mercenaries: jeans, ponytails, unruly facial hair and bloodshot eyes.

All the fuss at the meeting centered on something called Ubuntu and a man named Mark Shuttleworth, the charismatic 35-year-old billionaire from South Africa who functions as the spiritual and financial leader of this coding clan.

Created just over four years ago, Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-too) has emerged as the fastest-growing and most celebrated version of the Linux operating system, which competes with Windows primarily through its low, low price: $0.

More than 10 million people are estimated to run Ubuntu today

If we’re successful, we would fundamentally change the operating system market

Linux is free

there is still money to be made for businesses

Tags: open source, ubuntu

I Feel Golden

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:53:14 GMT

clipped by: paularpa

Clip Source: www.core77.com

Gotham's New LED Streetlamp Plan

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:18:59 GMT

clipped by: Communicator

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Big City, Brighter Lights: Gotham's New LED Streetlamp Plan

After half a century of walking their dogs under the same old streetlamps, New Yorkers are ready for a new age of enlightenment. Gotham's own Office for Visual Interaction won an international competition to design a replacement. Its inspiration: LED headlights. "We took the same idea and made it vertical," OVI's Enrique Peiniger says. The new lamppost's 4-to 6-foot head boasts up to 100 LEDs with multiple lenses that can be configured to dial in specific lighting "footprints" of uniform brightness. For New York, the coverage patterns will be tailored for three distinct situations—park, street corner, and mid-block.

Clip Source: googleads.g.doubleclick.net

Clip Source: www.wired.com

LEDs last twice as long as the current high—pressure sodium bulbs. Oh, and they burn 30 percent less energy. Plus, the fixture's modular design makes it easy to swap out chips as LED technology improves.

if tests go well next year, the lamps will soon start lighting up the city that never sleeps.

Majel Roddenberry, 'First Lady of Star Trek,' dies

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:02:43 GMT

clipped by: wiccantexan

Clip Source: hosted.ap.org

Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the widow of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry, has died. She was 76. Roddenberry, an actress who appeared in numerous "Star Trek" TV shows and movies, died Thursday of leukemia at her home in Bel-Air, Calif., her representative said.

At Roddenberry's side were family friends and her only son, Eugene Roddenberry Jr. Gene Roddenberry died in 1991.

Her romance with Roddenberry earned her the title "The First Lady of Star Trek." A fixture in the "Star Trek" franchise, her roles included Nurse Christine Chapel in the original "Star Trek," Lwaxana Troi in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and the voice of the USS Enterprise computer in almost every spin-off of the 1966 cult series. She recently reprised the voice role in the upcoming "Star Trek" film directed by J.J. Abrams.

Tags: star trek, tv, television, actor

How To Cook Bacon Correctly

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:08:36 GMT

clipped by: BartendingBear
clipper's remarks: Really!

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Art Exhibit as Swap Meet: “Have a Painting? Leave a Painting. Need a Painting? Take a Painting”

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:35:37 GMT

clipped by: chris_flores

Clip Source: blog.art21.org

Art Exhibit as Swap Meet: “Have a Painting? Leave a Painting. Need a Painting? Take a Painting”

I used to live in a loft building in Brooklyn where all the tenants spontaneously created a “giving shelf” where we would leave things for one another (art, books, appliances) so the idea of art barter spoke to me immediately.