Clipmarks | mndst's Pops

Atlas of the Real World

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:08:51 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Land area

The Atlas of the Real World uses software to depict the nations of the world, not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a range of subjects. Here, we select a series of travel- and news-related maps.

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Wealth in the year 1

The size of each territory shows the GDP, adjusted for local purchasing power, of the equivalent territory in 1 AD. The Americas appear small, partly because fewer people lived there in year 1 AD.

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Wealth in the year 1900

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Projected wealth in the year 2015

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Housing prices

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

HIV prevalence

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Alcohol consumption

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Nuclear weapons

2002

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Armed forces at war 1945-2004

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

War deaths 1945-2002

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Increase in emissions of carbon dioxide

Between 1980 and 2000, nearly three-quarters of all territories saw an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, with China, the United States and India leading the way.

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Decrease in emissions of carbon dioxide

1980 and 2000

How Randomness Rules Our World and Why We Cannot See It

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:34:52 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: ” Embrace the random. Find the pattern. Know the difference."...

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Although our intuitions can be useful in dealing with other people and social relationships (which evolved as common and important for a social primate species such as ours when we were struggling to survive in the harsh environs of the Paleolithic), they are misleading when it comes to such probabilistic problems as gambling.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Extraordinary events do not always require extraordinary causes. Given enough time, they can happen by chance. Knowing this, Mlodinow says, “we can improve our skill at decision making and tame some of the biases that lead us to make poor judgments and poor choices ... and we can learn to judge decisions by the spectrum of potential outcomes they might have produced rather than by the particular result that actually occurred.” Embrace the random. Find the pattern. Know the difference.

How to Look Good

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:23:56 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: blog.modernmechanix.com

Tags: modern mechanics

Emotional robots in the spotlight

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:52:51 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Robots displaying emotional responses, is one of the greatest challenges not only of robotics, but also in understanding ourselves. What exactly makes us emotionally engaged? Is emotional behavior corresponds to real emotions? What are real emotions anyway?

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

[Video]

Heart Robot has a beating heart, a breathing belly, and sensors that respond to movement, noise and touch. Cuddle him, and he seems to soak up the affection. His limbs become limp, his eyelids lower, his breathing relaxes, and his heart beat slows down.

But if he is given a violent shake, or shouted at, he gets upset. He flinches, his hands clench, his breathing and heart rate speed up, and his eyes widen.

Heart Robot, created by scientists at the University of the West of England in Bristol, was designed to explore how humans react to a machine that appears to show feelings.

Clip Source: blogs.fayobserver.com

It’s interesting to see people’s responses. I tend to have as much of an uncanny valley experience as the average person. I just recognize it when it happens.

(The Uncanny Valley is a phenomenon in which, the closer to human an artificial being gets, it actually becomes more strange and repulsive to an actual human.)

It seems to be a hard threshold to cross, but that isn’t stopping scientists and animators from trying

Tags: robotics, man machine interaction

The investigation of laughter is belatedly becoming a science..:-)

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 06:19:49 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: In 1923 a theoretical tome listed 88 different theories of humour, few of which seemed to acknowledge that it is supposed to be enjoyable. The theories can be divided into three main types:

Clip Source: www.moreintelligentlife.com

The study of laughter has entered mainstream psychology. Anthony Gottlieb reads the reports--and a new book on the history of jokes--and finds much to chuckle

Recent studies of twins, they reported, suggested that there may be a genetic explanation for some differences between British and American styles of humou

The real news is that the investigation of humour is belatedly becoming a science. After millennia of untested speculation by armchair thinkers, moves are afoot to bring the study of laughter into the mainstream of experimental psychology.

"The Psychology of Humor",

suggest that on average people laugh 17.5 times per day. And a good sense of humour tends to be one of the most highly rated traits when people choose their friends, lovers or spouses. So psychologists have every reason to take humour seriously.

Clip Source: wwnorton.com

Clip Source: www.moreintelligentlife.com

One popular field of research is the effect of humour on health

then it should be associated with longevity

McCain backdrop - Walter Reed School Middle School not Medical Center

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:54:16 GMT

clipped by: Kelika

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

It was an unexpected burst of glory, and the 1,600 students at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood were basking in it Friday.

None of the youngsters knew for certain why a 50-foot-wide image of the front of their school was projected Thursday night behind Sen. John McCain as he accepted the Republican Party presidential nomination. But there were plenty of theories.

Sixth-grader Joshua Popue offered the explanation most commonly being floated Friday both at the Irvine Avenue campus and in political circles: Somebody in the McCain campaign mistook Walter Reed Middle School for the military's troubled Walter Reed Army Medical Center when preparing the Republicans' high-tech video background wall.

"McCain messed up. He was talking about Walter Reed hospital, and he used our picture by mistake," said 11-year-old Joshua.

Skyla Swafford, 12, took a more charitable view.

"They picked us because our school is one of the nicer schools in the city. They keep it clean and sanitary,"

Fear Is The Cheapest Room In The House

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:01:22 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.earthlight.org

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.’ Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: ‘People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.’

To give into despair is to succumb to fear, the ultimate source of all human violence.

A vibrant and functional democracy depends on the honest dissemination of information. The corporate media, in its rightward drift and easy compliance to political power, is failing the general populace

Don’t let consumption define who we are. True peace is to see ourselves as citizens, not simply consumers.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable." If we commit ourselves to creating peaceful change by not giving into despair and a culture of fear, we practice the spiritual ecology of peace.

Shaking things up on Clipmarks.com

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:55:57 GMT

clipped by: egoldstein
clipper's remarks: Please read the entire post by clicking the source link before reacting.

Clip Source: clipmarks.wordpress.com

Unfortunately, we have recently become increasingly concerned that the site has become overly antagonistic and inappropriately controlled by a disproportionately loud group of users. In all honesty, we no longer feel that the processes of our site are producing a unique, high quality blend of content. Instead, the magical blending of diverse topics on the Clipmarks home page has seemed to dissolve into a battleground for extremely hostile politically oriented users who are overwhelming the rest of the site. Because of this we are working on making some fundamental changes to the way the Clipmarks site works. We will do our best to make changes that improve the site and will continue to iterate until we are comfortable that it is just right.

Tags: clipmarks

50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:17:51 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses. Fifty billion suns, that's 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as "ridiculously stupidly big" and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Scientists have determined the mass of the largest things that could possibly exist in our universe, and they don't appear in the Oprah studio audience.

New results have placed an upper limit on the current size of black holes - and at fifty billion suns it's pretty damn big. That's a hundred thousand tredagrams, and you'll never get the chance to use that word in relation to anything else.

While there's theoretically no upper limit on how big a black hole can be, there are hard limits on how big they could have become by now. The universe has only existed for a finite amount of time, and even the most voracious black hole can only suck in matter at a certain rate. The bigger the black hole, the bigger the gravitational field and the faster it can pull in matter - but that same huge gravitational gradient means that the same matter can release huge amounts of radiation as it falls, blasting other matter further away.

Tags: astronomy, cosmology

St Paul kid, busted on way home from bank

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:05:54 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: "Get on your stomach or I'm gonna tase you!"

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

"Yeah, you know -- I was just arrested."

John

was walking home from the bank a few blocks away when he spotted what he thought was a police riot club

I checked it out but it ended up being a broomstick." He put it down and kept walking, when suddenly he was surrounded by police officers

'Get on your stomach or I'm gonna tase you!'

He asked them what he had done, but they wouldn't say

"No, they didn't read me my Miranda rights at all. ... They cuffed me, and when I complained to one one guy about the cuffs being too tight, he was like, 'Oh yeah? Well, let me tighten that up for you.'"

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

"They tried to get me to admit to some involvement ...

John was put back in his cell. He was never told how long they might hold him

They were like, 'You probably shouldn't go outside, because if the same cops see you they're not gonna be happy.

A woman

said, "this city I live in has so much egg on its face. I'm embarrassed to say I live here. It's just tragic."

It's like we don't have rights. Like we don't

live here

Tags: st paul, rnc, human rights

Futurese- English in 3000 AD

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:13:57 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: So how far will another thousand years take it?

Clip Source: www.xibalba.demon.co.uk

Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world. Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. Ho hum. But apart from that... what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time? For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:

Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú taéce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelaérede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ...

We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly...

Tags: language, future

20 Years - One Owner

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:22:20 GMT

clipped by: BartendingBear
clipper's remarks: Nice picture essay.

Clip Source: myfunnycoolpics.blogspot.com

The Battle of Words

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:16:26 GMT

clipped by: katsteevns
clipper's remarks: (cont.)Unfortunately, Adolf Hitler understood the power of speech, the power of propaganda and the power of the “big lie.” Physical power was paramount since he believed, “is not right that matters, but victory.” However, physical strength is not sufficient to consummate the revolution. It must be escorted, heralded by its honor guard: the power of speech. How did Hitler know this? Why did it ultimately fail?

Clip Source: shiurtimes.com

The Battle of Words

By Rabbi Pinchas Kantrowitz 31 July 2008

Those who study the background to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust may be aware how much of an emphasis Adolph Hitler (yimach shmo v’zicro–may his name and memory be erased), put on speech. In his inciting, yet seminal work, Mein Kampf, he writes:

“The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.
All great movements are… volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred …by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses.” (Mein Kampf, Ch. 3)

He writes elsewhere in the book, “the great masses of the people…will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” (Ibid, Ch. 10). Additionally, W. L. Shirer, in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes: “the victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.” (Ch. 16)

The bigges World Body painting Festival - Beautiful!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:11:31 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: freshpics.blogspot.com

World Body Painting Festival 2008 in South Korea

Daegu in South Korea is playing host to the World Bodypainting Festival, it's the largest bodypainting event on the planet.

The main festival is held every year in Seeboden, Austria, but expanded into Asia for the first time this year with a bonus exhibition. It lasts until 31 August.

The World Bodypainting Festival is the biggest annual event of the body painting culture and community. The festival is the first of its kind in the world and has become the “Mecca of Bodypainting”. It draws over a hundred artists and models, and thousands of visitors, from all over the world every year.

[Video]

Wired.com Readers' Best Geek Tattoos

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:25:08 GMT

clipped by: Fast T friend

Clip Source: www.wired.com

From DNA to 80 digits (and counting) of pi, Wired.com readers take their geek tattoos pretty seriously.

We asked you to flash your decorated flesh, and you obliged with pictures of some pretty wild skin art. Now it's time for the rest of the world to bask in your dermatological commitment to geekery.

Click through the gallery to see more ink inspired by science, computers and other geek obsessions.

"Comes to show it's that easy to reboot and start over.”

Tags: tattoo, geek, art

Clipmarks | mndst's Pops

Atlas of the Real World

Land area

International immigrants

Tourist destinations

Net incoming tourism

Aircraft travel

Rail travel

Mopeds and motorcycles

Wealth in the year 1

Wealth in the year 1900

Projected wealth in the year 2015

Housing prices

HIV prevalence

Alcohol consumption

Nuclear weapons

Armed forces at war 1945-2004

War deaths 1945-2002

Increase in emissions of carbon dioxide

Decrease in emissions of carbon dioxide

How Randomness Rules Our World and Why We Cannot See It

How to Look Good

Emotional robots in the spotlight

The investigation of laughter is belatedly becoming a science..:-)

McCain backdrop - Walter Reed School Middle School not Medical Center

Fear Is The Cheapest Room In The House

Shaking things up on Clipmarks.com

50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe

St Paul kid, busted on way home from bank

Futurese- English in 3000 AD

20 Years - One Owner

The Battle of Words

The Battle of Words

By Rabbi Pinchas Kantrowitz 31 July 2008

The bigges World Body painting Festival - Beautiful!

World Body Painting Festival 2008 in South Korea

Wired.com Readers' Best Geek Tattoos