Clipmarks | m_a_d_d_i_'s clips

The Art of Protozoa

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:29:09 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: amazing!

In this image entitled "Protozoa in Real Time," created in a college biology class, one can see the dynamic, energetic life that abounds in a drop of pond water.

The image was submitted as part of the 2007 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, an effort jointly administered by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. Winners from the SciViz challenges can be seen at: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/index.jsp.

Tags: art, science, water, protozoa

Paul Keating mouths off

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:37:48 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_
clipper's remarks: Now wouldn't Keating liven things up amongst all the political correctness and personality-less pollies we're putting up with during this election campaign..

Clip Source: www.webcity.com.au

On Prime Minister (formerly Opposition Leader), John Howard (right):

"The little desiccated coconut is under pressure and he is attacking anything he can get his hands on"

"He is the greatest job and investment destroyer since the bubonic plague."

"He has more hide than a team of elephants."

On Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello:

"He has now been treasurer for 11 years. The old coconut is still there araldited to the seat. The treasurer works on the smart quips but when it comes to staring down the prime minister in his office he always leaves disappointed. He never gets the sword out."

On Wilson "Iron Bar" Tuckey (Liberal politician):

"You boxhead you wouldn't know. You are flat out counting past ten."

On Former Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson:

(His performance) is like being flogged with a warm lettuce.

Clip Source: www.webcity.com.au

To a Uni student protesting about fees:

"Go and get a job!"

Clip Source: www.webcity.com.au

"The Opposition crowd could not raffle a chook in a pub"

Tags: politics, australia, keating. howard, costello

Marx's alienation caused by skin disease?

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:22:02 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_

Clip Source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au

KARL MARX suffered from a skin disease that can cause severe psychological effects such as self-loathing and alienation, says a British dermatologist.

Hidradenitis suppurativa is a disease of the apocrine sweat glands, found in the armpits and the groin.

The illness also contributed to Marx's poverty, Professor Shuster says. "This new diagnosis is not just important in terms of historical accuracy," he said. "The skin is an organ of communication, which is why its disorders produce so much psychological distress, with depression of self-image, mood and wellbeing, and with self-loathing and disgust.

"In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem. This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."

Tags: karl marx, marx, skin, illnesses

Only way to survive: Do what you love?

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:13:29 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

COMMENCEMENT speakers have long offered graduating seniors the same warm and gooey career advice: Do what you love.

And graduates have long responded the same way: They've listened carefully, nodded earnestly, and gone out and become accountants. No surprise. On every day except graduation day, young people are taught that their futures depend not on following their bliss, but on mastering dutiful (and less lovable) abilities like crunching numbers and following rules.

But this year is different.

"Do what you love" is no longer a soft-hearted sentiment. It is also a hard-headed strategy.

So accountants lose work to TurboTax. And lawyers lose work to legal Web sites that offer uncontested divorces for $249 and articles of incorporation for the price of a pizza. To cope, we'll have to rely on what's harder to replicate in the 1's and 0's of computer code - inventiveness, empathy and seeing the big picture - which also happen to be the components of satisfying work.

Tags: career, jobs, economy

Structured Procrastination

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:08:05 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_
clipper's remarks: "Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to just cheer up,". So why fight it, work with it instead

Clip Source: www.structuredprocrastination.com

This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing.

However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation

Tags: procrastionation, organization, life skills

Time May Not Exist

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:06:12 GMT

clipped by: lifecyce1898

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

Newsflash: Time May Not Exist

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

Tags: time

The World in only 7 Pictures

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:11:46 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: www.tocforme.com

The World in only 7 Pictures

Tokyo Water Park in Japan

Only in Hawaii

Only in India

Only in Mexico

Only in Texas

Only in Thailand

And last but not least...

Only in America

Tags: world, people, picture, humor

Climber gets cold feet

Wed, 30 May 2007 23:57:17 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_

Clip Source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au

NEPAL: Freezing toes have forced a Dutchman to abandon his bid to conquer Mount Everest while wearing shorts.

"Iceman" Wim Hof, who claims to have special abilities to withstand the cold, broke the altitude record for scantily clad climbing, his spokesman said.

"He set a new world record by going up to 7400m in his shorts. He had trouble with his toes, that's why he had to stop. They were almost frozen."

Tags: wierd, mountain climbing, everest

Quantum leap of faith

Wed, 30 May 2007 23:52:28 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_
clipper's remarks: Read the rest of the article for an interesting explanation of why the universe seems "designed" for life

Clip Source: theaustralian.news.com.au

THE origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science.

Life, it seems, is balanced on a knife-edge. Changing some of the values by even a scintilla would prove lethal. The fact that the universe comes with just the right set of values to permit life looks like a fix.

"A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics,"

In other words, it smacks of intelligent design.

So what is going on?

Optimists claim that one day theoretical physicists will come up with a unified theory that will explain all the laws just as we observe them, including their fortuitously bio-friendly parameters.

I believe we will never achieve a satisfactory and complete scientific account for why the universe is the way it is as long as we cling to Platonism: externally imposed, absolute and perfect mathematical laws.

The alternative is a scenario in which the laws emerge over time with the universe, laws and universe affecting each other in a feedback loop

Tags: science, physics, big bang, universe, string theory, universal laws, quantum

How likely are you to die as a result of ....? Odds of Dying

Fri, 25 May 2007 22:39:02 GMT

clipped by: sohil

Clip Source: www.nsc.org

Tags: odds, math, statistics, death, heart, disease, cancer, interesting

25yr detour after catching the wrong bus

Sun, 13 May 2007 10:20:25 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_

Clip Source: news.scotsman.com

A 76-year-old Malay Muslim woman from southern Thailand who got on the wrong bus 25 years ago and ended up living at the other end of the country has been reunited with her family,

nable to speak, read or write Thai, Jaeyaena Beuraheng boarded a bus in Malaysia thinking it was bound for Narathiwat

she ended up 1,200 km (750 miles) to the north in Bangkok. Her predicament grew worse when she boarded a bus she thought was heading south only to end up in Chiang Mai, another 700 km to the north

She eked out a living as a beggar for five years before being arrested in 1987 and put into a centre for homeless people in a nearby province, where she has remained ever since.

She was finally reunited with her eight children -- who were told she had been run over by a train -- after three students from Narathiwat came to work at the centre and spoke to her.

"It was only when the students in Muslim clothes visited her and she started chatting to them that we realised she wasn't mute,"

Tags: wierd, thailand, missing persons, mistakes

Are books just for reading? my God, see these pictures

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 11:08:27 GMT

clipped by: mugofcoffee
clipper's remarks: all these above are made from the books...just can't believe it!

Clip Source: www.funforever.net

Tags: book art, books, pictures, book, interesting, cool, web site.

How the world really shapes up

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:54:41 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_

Clip Source: strangemaps.wordpress.com

This map is part of a series of cartograms in which the actual geography is distorted in order to demonstrate information about the countries shown. In this case, the point made is that of population, with each country’s size ‘weighted’ to reflect the size of its population.

Tags: map, world, globe, comparison, countries

Wordbuilding: the clomping foot of nerdism?

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:38:49 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_

Clip Source: uzwi.wordpress.com

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

Tags: fiction, fantasy, writing, scifi, books, world building, storytelling

Creator's copyright overridden by Broadcast Treaty?

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:32:24 GMT

clipped by: m_a_d_d_i_
clipper's remarks: For a treaty which, from what I can gather, seems to have been on the table for some time, I wonder why we haven't heard much about it

Clip Source: www.boingboing.net

The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal to let broadcasters (and "webcasters" -- people who host files and make them available to the Internet) claim a copyright to the stuff that they transmit. Broadcasters get this special right even if the stuff they're sending around is in the public domain, or Creative Commons licensed, or not copyrightable (like CSPAN's broadcasts of Congress). Fair use doesn't apply to this right.

What this means is that a handful of corporations are going to be able to claim copyrights over billions of works they didn't create -- works that they've done nothing to improve, works they've done nothing for except electromagnetically modulating them.

What this means is that these corporations are going to be able to trump the rights of actual creators. If you put a Creative Commons license on your video that allows your fans to share it, the "broadcaster" -- or the person who transmits it over the Web -- can override your wishes and tell your fans that they can't.