Clipmarks | skwirlinator's Pops

Must.. Not.. Fall.. Asleep..

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:02:47 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman
clipper's remarks: But big sis is such a comfy pillow

Clip Source: www.break.com

[Video]

Clifftop communities

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:22:11 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: deputy-dog.com

living on the edge: 2 stunningly scary clifftop communities

B- membrane: The computer of tomorrow

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:40:00 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Wow!

Clip Source: www.odditycentral.com

The computer of tomorrow

Conceived by Korean designer Won-Seok-Lee, the “B-membrane” is one of the most interesting PC prototypes I’ve ever seen.

The B-membrane looks nothing like a conventional computer, more like a spaceship or space station, but it is indeed a PC, able to project an image of your desktop on any surface you can point its omni-directional projector at, thus rendering even the slimmest LCD monitor useless. It also has a membrane keyboard and mouse that appear only when you need them too, and an optical drive.

The B-membrane isn’t useless even when it is shut-down, its smart projector turns it into an ambient light-effects system to spice up the look of your crib.

Tags: pc, computer, lcd, monitor, projection, desktop, invention, pioneer, korea, won-seok-lee

Solar System Dented, Not Round

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:07:16 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: The "bottom" of the egg is flattened by a permanent clash of particles, as the outbound solar wind smashes into atomic debris hurtling in from interstellar space, the scientists theorize.
Voyager 2 also crossed the "termination shock" several times within the space of a single day, showing that the boundary is in perpetual flux, like the ebb-and-flow of a tide.

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

July 2, 2008 -- Millions of textbooks depicting our solar system as spherical have got it all wrong, according to studies of data sent back from deep space by NASA's venerable probe, Voyager 2.

The sun's zone of influence -- called the heliosphere -- turns out to be seriously asymmetrical, not round, they say.

Launched in 1977 on a historic trek of the outer planets, Voyager 2 has now crossed the turbulent boundary, known as the "termination shock," where the heliosphere yields to interstellar space.

Its twin probe Voyager 1, crossed the same threshold four years earlier at a different spot some one billion miles farther from the sun.

This difference proves that the heliosphere is not even close to perfectly round, but is oblong, like an egg, according to the studies, released by the British journal Nature on Wednesday.

Tags: astronomy, is, for, stars

30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:03:45 GMT

clipped by: missjackson

Clip Source: www.environmentalgraffiti.com

By Tom Davie and Chris Ingham Brooke

400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite

A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.

Guinea-Bissau

Garden City, Kansas, USA

Akpatok Island, Canada

Aleutian Clouds, North America

Mayn River, Siberia, Russia

Bolivian Deforestation

Anti-Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Ocean Sands, Bahamas

Lake Carnegie, Australia

Chilean Volcanoes

Clip Source: www.environmentalgraffiti.com

Coahuila, Mexico

The Everglades, Florida, USA

Ganges River Delta, (Bangladesh & India)

Ghadamis River, Libya

Baffin Bay, Greenland

Konari, Iran

Iraqi Military emplacement

Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

Dasht-e Kavir, Iran

Lena River, Russia

Clip Source: www.environmentalgraffiti.com

MacDonnell Mountains, Australia

Malaspina Glacier, Alaska, USA

The Optimist, Kalahari Desert, Namibia

Parana River, Brazil

Richat Structure, Mauritiana

The Great Sandy Desert, Australia

The Great Sandy Scars, Australia

Terkezi Oasis, Chad

Volga Delta, Russia

Karman Vortices

13 Strange Last Requests

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:55:42 GMT

clipped by: carrerinyes
clipper's remarks: Some funny ones at the site!

Clip Source: www.cracked.com

13 Last Requests That Prove It's OK to Laugh at Dead People

Fredric Baur Gets Canned

Back in the '60s, Baur was the man who finally got sick of chips being all willy-nilly in big disorganized bags, and invented the Pringles tube we all know, love and store our weed in. A few weeks ago Mr. Baur captured a nation's attention and journalistic integrity when he made his family jam his remains into one of his pillars of delicious.

It's unclear if he wanted his remains to stay fresh longer than leading dead body or just wanted to render the slogan "Once you pop, you can't stop" creepy instead of vaguely obscene. But what we really want to know is if everybody in the food packaging industry does it that way? Is there some guy out there who had himself frozen into a Push Pop? Or compressed into a can of aerosol cheese?

Mark Gruenwald Gets Immortalized in Print (literally)

Dr. Harold West Declines Vampirism

John Bowman Packs a Lunch

Jeremy Bentham Performs a Wax Haunting

A Giant Solar Tower Could Power the Future

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:10:31 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: On a sunny day, the air at the top of the tower would be 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), whereas the air in the greenhouse could reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius). As this hot air escapes up the tower at 34 mph (15 meters per second), it spins 32 turbines that generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.

Even with all this power, the solar tower is less than one tenth as efficient as solar cells in converting the sun's energy into electricity.

The advantage for a solar tower is that its materials are much less expensive.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

A new energy concept called a solar tower could generate enough electricity for 200,000 homes.

Looking like a giant smokestack, it would release no noxious fumes — just sun-heated air.

Demonstrated more than 20 years ago, the basic design calls for solar collectors to warm the air near Earth's surface and then channel it up the tall central tower. Turbines placed at the bottom make electricity from the updraft.

EnviroMission has designed a kilometer-high solar tower (0.62 miles) and is now looking at possible sites in the southwestern United States.

The solar tower is an updated version of a solar chimney — a centuries-old technique for providing ventilation to a home by creating a natural updraft from sun-heated air.

The optimum configuration is an 800- to 1,000-meter tower (twice the height of the Empire State Building) surrounded by a greenhouse canopy 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) in radius on the ground.

Tags: energy, solar energy, renewable energy

Unintelligent Design

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:14:29 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.

When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.

Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),

Tags: evolution, creationism, intelligent design

U Wound them, and honor them 4 getting wounded!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:30:22 GMT

clipped by: mugofcoffee
clipper's remarks: Does it make any sense to you?

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

U.S. President Bush shakes hands after awarding a Purple Heart medal to U.S. Marine Corps Pfc. Jacob Brittain, of Frankfort, Tn, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, July 3, 2008.

REUTERS/Eric Draper/the White House

10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:57:23 GMT

clipped by: righthand

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency

Printed on July 3, 2008

warrantless wiretapping;

Valerie Plame; Scooter Libby's sentence commuted;

Bush believes Rafael Palmeiro is innocent;

soldiers face neglect at Walter Reed;

signing statements;

the Kyoto treaty ripped up;

; loyalty oaths;

the fake turkey;

a staged teleconference with troops

staged FEMA press conference,

extraordinary rendition,

support for junk science;

endorsement of neo-creationist "intelligent design";

inaction against global warming;

record oil prices;

record budget deficits;

record trade deficits;

two recessions;

no-bid contracts;

bin Laden still at large;

the Federal Marriage Amendment;

stem cell research vetoed;

waterboarding ban vetoed

"Last throes";

"Old Europe";

"It's hard work";

"Bring it on";

"Yo, Blair!";

"I'm the decider"

"I'm the commander guy"

"I'm a war president";

"This is the guy who tried to kill my dad"

"Let the Eagle Soar"

John Bolton

Kenny Boy

"So?"

Blair talks Bush out of bombing al-Jazeera

John Roberts

Sam Alit

Tags: bush, president

Washington Short Term Medical Insurance

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:48:01 GMT

clipped by: briangruss
clipper's remarks: Short term medical insurance is a great way to keep continuous health insurance in place so that when you qualify for group insurance, you won't have to have a pre-existing condition waiting period.

Clip Source: www.mywahealthinsurance.com

In between jobs? Need short term medical insurance, until you qualify for other health insurance? This is your best option for short term medical insurance.

Assurant Health
Assurant Health Short Term Medical insurance covers you for as little as 30 days, and up to 365 days. There is many plans to choose from, from catastrophic to full coverage.

Tags: washington short term medical insurance, washingon short term health insurance

For martial arts lovers...

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:11:13 GMT

clipped by: adosuzano

Clip Source: www.japantoday.com

Unarmed Fighting Techniques of the Samurai

With his captivating employment of metaphor and allusion, the author follows on from his bestselling works “The Way of the Ninja” and “Advanced Stick Fighting” to guide the reader through an array of techniques passed down through the lineages of the great masters. Armed with these techniques, the practitioner will be able to evade or receive an attack even from an opponent wielding a sword, then to punch, kick, and finally to lock or control the body of his opponent.

Tags: martial

Buried Seed Vault Opens in Arctic

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:38:01 GMT

clipped by: XsarA

Clip Source: dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com

After several years of planning and digging, the world has its first secure, deep-frozen repository for backup supplies of seeds from hundreds of thousands of plant varieties that underpin agriculture. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built into a frigid mountainside in Norway’s northernmost archipelago, deep in the Arctic.

There are something like 1,400 seed banks around the world

this agricultural archive is eroding under forces including war, storms, scant money or bad management, particularly in the world’s poorest or most turbulent places. A Fort Knox has been needed, many experts said. Now they have it.

Rafal Oblinski Images

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:56:46 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.tendreams.org

32 Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:08:21 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: More at site, plus a short blurb about each novel.

Clip Source: howtosplitanatom.com

32 Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read

Foundation - Isaac Asimov

The Time Machine - H.G. Wells

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

Animal Farm - George Orwell

War Of The Worlds - H.G. Wells

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

The Minority Report - Philip K. Dick

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

Accelerando - Charles Stross

I Robot - Isaac Asimov

Stranger In A Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

The Giver - Lois Lowry

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea - Jules Verne

Ringworld - Larry Niven

More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon

Spook Country - William Gibson

Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow

Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Dune - Frank Herbert

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

1984 - George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Andromeda Strain - Michael Crichton