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25 Unexpectedly Useful Websites for the Uncommonly Curious

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:19:40 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: The rest are on the site

25 Unexpectedly Useful Websites for the Uncommonly Curious

Guerrilla Mail

Get a temporary email address that expires after 15 minutes. During those 15 minutes you can read and reply to any messages.

A seriously cool concept…you type in a subject you would like to research and this generates a list (you choose its length) of related keywords and topics. You can visit a Wikipedia page at any time or continue navigating through the related keywords until you find what you want. It is a very cool way of diversifying a research effort.

Fix It Club

Learn how to repair or recycle household items that you might otherwise throw away.

Simple Help

This site promises to, “help beginner-to-intermediate computer users learn how to do various things with their computers.” It is free.

Full Books

An index of thousands of books, free for you to read.

Study Guides and Strategies

A huge database of study guides for a number of subjects published in many different languages.

Breast Ironing: another horror girls must endure

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:52:27 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks:

I hadn't heard of this until tonight.
Horrifying.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

If you use very hot objects, if you pound on the breast at this tender age when the structures are developing of course you could cause damage

Prof Anderson Doh

Most tools are warmed before pounding the girls' chests

"Breast ironing is not a new thing. I am happy I protected my daughter. I could not stand the thought of boys spoiling her with sex before she completed school," one woman explained.

Anthropologist Dr Flavien Ndonko says that breast ironing is not an effective method of preventing early sex and pregnancies because many of the girls still become pregnant. He recommends plain talking between parents and their daughters.

This involves pounding and massaging the developing breasts of young girls with hot objects to try to make them disappear.

A nationwide campaign is under way in Cameroon to discourage the widespread practice of "breast ironing".

Cameroon girls battle 'breast ironing'

Tags: breast ironing, superstition, ignorance, torture, women

Hubble Unveils a Mystery 1.2 Billion Light Years Distant

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:08:13 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Nothing is too far to study....

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

While observing stars in our own Milky Way galaxy with the Hubble Space in an ongoing study that has spanned several years, astronomers stumbled upon a distant elliptical galaxy 1.2 billion light years away packed with clusters of stars too dim for most telescopes to see.

Oddly, the light from some of these clusters are not young and blue as expected, but rather, older and redder

an observation Jason Kalirai of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues are wrestling to understand.

Hubble image revealed the large elliptical galaxy that contains several hundred globular clusters, which led to the new discovery and mystery of the apparently older, reddish stars

using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the Gemini South Telescope

They were able to determine the distance of the elliptical galaxy

This showed that the globular clusters are the most distant ever studied

observations may also allow astronomers to test for evolution in the properties of globular clusters themselves

Tags: astronomy

Whales & Dolphins Inspire a Novel Design for Wind Turbines

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:24:24 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: "Engineers have previously tried to ensure steady flow patterns on rigid and simple lifting surfaces, such as wings. The lesson from biomimicry is that unsteady flow and complex shapes can increase lift, reduce drag and delay 'stall', a dramatic and abrupt loss of lift, beyond what existing engineered systems can accomplish," Fish said. "There are even possibilities that this technology could be applied to aeronautical designs such as helicopter blades in the future."

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Dolphins and whales have evolved over millions of years to maximize efficiency of movement through water. The human species has been trying to perfect streamlined designs for barely a century. Biologists and engineers, applying biomimicry, studied the flippers, fins and tails of whales and dolphins, and have discovered some features of their structure that contradict long-held engineering theories.

The shape of whale flippers with one bumpy edge has inspired the creation of a completely novel design for wind turbine blades. This design has been shown to be more efficient and also quieter, but defies traditional engineering theories.

Dr Frank Fish of West Chester University says that the shape of whale flippers has inspired the creation of a completely novel design for wind turbine blades.

Tags: wind, green, dolphin

The Last Supper (really)

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:15:12 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: dixi.blogter.hu

Tags: humor

The Shape of Music

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:03:17 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to connect individual chords. And some composers have displayed a profound understanding of the higher-dimensional geometry of musical chords. In fact, one can argue that Romantic composers such as Chopin had an intuitive feel for non-Euclidean higher-dimensional spaces that exceeded the explicit understanding of their mathematical contemporaries.

Clip Source: www.seedmagazine.com

Roughly 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras observed that objects, such as the anvils he purportedly studied, produced harmonious sounds while vibrating at frequencies in simple whole-number ratios.

More complex ratios gave rise to more dissonant sounds, which indicated that human beings were unconsciously sensitive to mathematical relationships inherent in nature.

For a thousand years, Western musicians have endeavored to satisfy two fundamental constraints in their compositions

The first is that melodies should, in general, move by short distances

The second is that music should use chords

that are audibly similar

Together these constraints ensure a two-dimensional coherence in Western music analogous to that of a woven cloth

not just any sequence of chords we imagine can generate a collection of short-distance melodies. We might therefore ask, how do we combine harmony and melody to make music? In other words, what makes music sound good?

Tags: music, mathematics

Critical Thinking On The Web

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:46:36 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: www.austhink.org

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Clipmarks |

25 Unexpectedly Useful Websites for the Uncommonly Curious

25 Unexpectedly Useful Websites for the Uncommonly Curious

Guerrilla Mail

Chain of Thoughts

Fix It Club

Simple Help

Full Books

Study Guides and Strategies

Breast Ironing: another horror girls must endure

Hubble Unveils a Mystery 1.2 Billion Light Years Distant

Whales & Dolphins Inspire a Novel Design for Wind Turbines

The Last Supper (really)

The Shape of Music

Critical Thinking On The Web