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My second "clipiversary"

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:56:32 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Yes, it's been 2 years today. Thanks for everything, guys...

Time runs so fast and somebody should definitely do something about it; like bribing the sun and convince it for slowing down the earth’s orbital voyage around it. When I was browsing the new clips at Clipmarks this morning, I suddenly noticed that date on my profile: “Joined: 11/10/2005″. Yes, today it’s been exactly 2 years since I joined Clipmarks, which means 730 great days, 104 wonderful weeks or 24 months full of clipping, sharing and fun.

As I often mention it here on this modest blog or elsewhere, Clipmarks has been a very special thing in my online life. Now while I am browsing more than 1700 clips I posted (and many more others, posted by fellow clippers) I can’t help thinking “What if there had not been a site like this, what if Clipmarks never existed?”

So thanks again Clipmarks, for these great 2 years; and thanks to all clippers who have been making this “infotainment” experience a very special one. I am proud of being a part of this great community.

Tags: clipmarks

21 Ways to Make Someone's Day

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:51:34 GMT

clipped by: alanocu

Clip Source: www.iwillchangeyourlife.com

What this simple act of kindness made me realize is that often it doesn’t take much to make someone else’s day.

1. Remember a birthday

People always love it when you remember their birthday.

2. Stand up for someone

Show them some support by standing up for them.

3. Ping

consider “pinging” a friend by sending a quick email or text message

4. Listen

Sometimes people just need to vent.

5. Tell a joke

“the most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”

6. Buy a friend lunch

taking them out to lunch is a great way to catch up

7. Lend a good book

I know this makes my day

8. Compliment

Everybody loves to receive a sincere compliment

9. Buy a small gift

This shows that you have been thinking about the person

10. Babysit

even for just an hour!

11. Give chocolate

12. Believe in friend

Many people struggle with confidence.

13. Show your love

give your partner a massage

14. Smile

15. Share a happy memory

16. Compile a music CD

17. Cook a meal

19. Say thank you

20. Donate to a charity

21. Give someone a dizzy wizzy

Tags: kindness, appreciation, thoughtfulness

Crazy Unusual Photography

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:29:54 GMT

clipped by: axelsenzon
clipper's remarks: aged barbie is so strange

Clip Source: ziza.ru

Tags: bizarre, interesting, pics, art, photoshop, market trend

Why America Will Survive George W. Bush

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:53:01 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

Otto von Bismarck saw how American blunders led to American power and allegedly said that God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America.

Walter Russell Mead (of the Council on Foreign Relations) puts Bush's 8-year stint in the White House into proper perspective.

America's foreign policy has been short-sighted and often self-defeating from the get-go, alternately collaborative, passive, and interventionist. And, yet, miraculously, we always come out ahead.

With the unstoppable rise of a global capitalist economy, Mead makes the case that America, for all its past and current faults, will continue to be the inevitable leader of this new international buoyancy. Not even our latest mistakes (unprecedented though they may be) can derail such a powerful incentive that is the modern American world trade system.

Which means, more than ever, we're literally all in this together.

Clip Source: www.tnr.com

Failing Upward

Nothing in the field of international affairs is as scandalous and as perplexing as the fact of American power. From Revolutionary times to the present, virtually all observers foreign and domestic have agreed that Americans don't do foreign policy well.

Moralistic, uninformed, unsubtle, alternately isolationist and hyperactive, hamstrung by a clumsy constitutional process and a public that oscillates between fatuous idealism and ignorant bellicosity, U.S. foreign policy has been shocking the world for more than 200 years.

And, worse still, we win. For two centuries, the United States has astounded critics with its bad foreign policy--and, for two centuries, the United States has steadily risen to an unprecedented level of power and influence in the international system.

The spectacle is often surreal. The United States seems to wander nearsightedly but relatively unscathed past one hazard after another

like a version of the chronically oblivious cartoon character Mr. Magoo.

Tags: america, usa, bush, foreign policy, world, history, war, empire, trade, economy

Say Goodbye to Pixelated Images!

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:55:31 GMT

clipped by: Perkalicious11
clipper's remarks: This is awesome!! check out the comparisons!

Clip Source: vectormagic.stanford.edu

What is this site?

This site converts bitmap images to vector art - it's an online auto-tracer.

Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you.

Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated.

Share results | More...

Fileformats supported

Input:

JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF

Output:

EPS, SVG, PNG

Samples

Security/Privacy

Your images are kept securely on our servers. Only you and the people you choose have access to them.

Tags: images, photo, pixel, vectorization, shrink, enlarge, logo, image

The Meaning Of America

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 15:05:24 GMT

clipped by: debbyski
clipper's remarks: I've watched it happen over the years since hate radio and its multimillionaire mavens first gave voice and increasing political clout to resentment, intolerance, bitterness, anger, frustration over broken dreams, and unfulfilled entitlement. We've turned mean. We've been encouraged to go onto knee-jerk, scorched-earth attack mode by politicians, activists, and media brokers who gained influence and financial reaffirmation. The loudest and most dominant voices don't urge us to find root causes of problems and their solutions, or to reach for true understanding. All we are told, and all we know anymore, is hitting, and hitting harder, and hurting deeper, killing, demonizing, punishing, mocking, name-calling, eviscerating, marginalizing, threatening, intimidating, bullying, bombing, and war-making.

Clip Source: www.opednews.com

I think maybe it's time to start asking the following question: What have we come to?

At issue here is whether we, as a nation, are okay with torture.

Do we even care? Do we care that torture doesn't reliably work - that the victim is liable to say anything he or she thinks the torturers want to hear just to make the suffering stop? Do we even care if, say, that victim might even be innocent, might have nothing whatsoever to do with the suspicions and suspects we have in mind? Do we care what that says about us as a nation, as a people?

Is this where we should be, as Americans in the 21st Century? Is that how we are? Seems unnecessarily and uncharacteristically mean to me. But, hey, maybe we ARE meaner people now.

Truly we are NOT who we used to be.

To me, it seems rather un-American to find torture acceptable.

If that's where we are, then the terrorists won. They wanted to change us, even pervert us and the way we lived and the way we were, and they did.

Tags: thank, you, so, much, for, my, nightmare

Why Your Decisions are Always Right

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:56:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Why are humans so good at fooling themselves? now thats a question!

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Life is full of choices, sometimes too many choices.

Should you buy the SUV or the gas-saving hybrid car? Should you have the artery-clogging cheeseburger or the lean turkey sandwich? Sometimes we make the "right" choices, but other times we make the choices of fools. Oddly enough, those foolish choices don’t usually bother us for long. Instead, they are quickly rationalized until the guilt goes away.

Why are humans so good at fooling themselves?

Our brains, then, weren't so much designed to make choices as to pretend, no matter what, that we made the right choices. The goal seems to be mental peace; as we all know too well, the time from bad choice to righteousness is very uncomfortable and so the sooner we justify our decisions, the better.

This kind of shilly-shallying is, in fact, so prevalent in human behavior that it must have some evolutionary basis. That is, it must be advantageous. Embarrassing and annoying, but advantageous. How?

Tags: life, choices, evolution, peace, mind, rationalization, brain

Brain can tell real memories from false ones

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:07:36 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Brain can tell real memories from false ones

Absolutely certain you've seen that person's face before? Now there is a tool to help you weed out the real memories from the false ones. Roberto Cabeza at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and Hogkeun Kim at Daegu University in South Korea asked 11 volunteers to view 82 related-word lists, each with a theme - like "farm animals".

Immediately afterwards, they were given more lists and asked which ones they had seen before and how confident they were about their answer. All of this was done inside an MRI scanner, which measures brain activity.

They found that when volunteers confidently remembered true memories, there was more activation in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) - a region of the brain known for storage and consolidation of long-term memory. When volunteers were confident but wrong, they were more likely to activate the frontal parietal network - implicated in familiarity and gist

Tags: brain, memory

Tracing Slang To Ireland

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:47:40 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Growing up Irish in Queens and on Long Island, Daniel Cassidy was nicknamed Glom.

Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.”

Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch

He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word “gimmick” seemed to come from “camag,” meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.

Mr. Cassidy, 63, began compiling a lexicon of hundreds of Irish-inspired slang words and recently published them in a book called “How the Irish Invented Slang,” which last month won the 2007 American Book Award for nonfiction, and which he is in New York this week promoting.

Tags: for, righty

Life & Death - pics

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:58:59 GMT

clipped by: righthand

Clip Source: www.linkinn.com

179620 views

15 votes

Tags: photos

Japan`s most northern-living non-human primate

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:47:23 GMT

clipped by: syncopath
clipper's remarks: onsen .. lost in sensation ......

Clip Source: www.snowjapan.com

The Jigokudani Yaenkoen park opened in 1964 and since then many thousands of people from around the world have visited the park to observe the lifestyle of the Japanese Macaque. The Japanese Macaque (Macaca fuscata) is a monkey species native to northern Japan, and is the most northern-living non-human primate, surviving winter temperatures of below -15 °C. They have brown-gray fur, a red face, hands and bottom, and a short tail - and often seem remarkably human like.

The monkeys have a body length ranging from 80 to 95 cm. The males weigh around 10-14 kg while the females are usually around 5.5 kg.

The park is located in the Yokoyu River valley, which flows down from Shiga Kogen. At an elevation of 850 meters, the area is called Jigokudani ("Hell's Valley") due to the steep cliffs and hot water steaming out from the earth's surface.

All the time the monkeys basically just ignore their human watchers and just get on with whatever it is they want to be doing.

Clip Source: www.snowjapan.com

Clip Source: s197.photobucket.com

Tags: japan, macaque monkey, onsen, jigokudani park

Why We Lie: Evolution and Deception

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:48:10 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Why we lie: The evolutionary roots of deception and the unconscious mind
By David Livingstone Smith
St. Martin's Press, 2004.

Clip Source: www.human-nature.com

“Why We Lie” [1] is a fascinating book about a fascinating subject. Two related general themes run throughout the book. The first theme is that lying is deeply embedded in our subconscious as a result of evolution. Most of the book's stories are linked to this theme. Evolution means simply that those who survive by lying possess among their talents the ability or the features that deceive predators who could harm them, as well as the ability or the features that deceive victims whom they may harm. The living things that did not have the knack to deceive or that had less ability to lie died of starvation or by being eaten. They did not survive to reproduce, more than those who possessed the quality to lie and had a better chance of multiplying. Thus, evolution produced the best liars.

A similar evolution occurs in both predators and their victims. Those who blend into the background survive more readily than those who stand out.

Tags: lies, deception, evolution

Are We Happier Facing Death?

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:29:33 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.time.com

Here's one for the annals of counterintuitive findings: When asked to contemplate the occasion of their own demise, people become happier than usual, instead of sadder, according to a new study in the November issue of Psychological Science. Researchers say it's a kind of psychological immune response — faced with thoughts of our own death, our brains automatically cope with the conscious feelings of distress by nonconsciously seeking out and triggering happy feelings, a mechanism that scientists theorize helps protect us from permanent depression or paralyzing despair.

It might explain the shift toward more positive emotions and thought processes as people age and approach death, and the preternaturally positive outlook that some terminally ill patients seem to muster. Though it looks a lot like old-fashioned denial, that's not the case, says lead author Nathan DeWall. It's not that "'I know I'm going to die, but I just con myself into thinking I'm not

Tags: death, contemplation, mind, mood, emotions, own demise, happiness

You Think Your Job Is Tough?

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:47:37 GMT

clipped by: BartendingBear
clipper's remarks: Consider a Chinese coal-miner's end of day...

Clip Source: www.spiegel.de

A coal miner takes a bath after finishing his shift at a mine in the north China province of Shanxi. China's coal industry is the world's most dangerous, as measured by the number of miners who are killed per year. In the first 10 months of 2007, there have been 3,069 deaths and on average since 2000, 6,000 miners have died in China every year.

Tags: inredible

Behold the power of the ocean

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 03:38:04 GMT

clipped by: raven714

Clip Source: www.funlol.com

Tags: power, ocean