Clipmarks | This Week's Top Clips

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 Great Free Online Libraries

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:44:51 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: www.fotolia.com

Clip Source: www.attiaspace.com

50 Great Free Online Libraries

1. California Digital Library

2. The Online Books Page

3. Free Books

4. Project Gutenberg

5. Research Assistance

6. BookRags - E-Books and Book Notes

7. All Bookstores.com

8. FreeTech Books

10. Free E-Books.net

12. The eBook Directory

13. University of Virginia's E-Book library

14. BizzyDays Ebook Publications

15. Web Source

16. free-ebooks-4u.com

18. Free eBooks and Best Sites

19. Free Electronic Books

20. CIW Free E-Books

21. My Free EBooks

22. Free E-Books

25. EBookstand

26. Bibliomania

27. Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts

28. The eText Archive

29. Free Books 5000

33. Page by Page Books

34. bartleby.com

35. Free Books 4 Doctors

37. Chapter-a-Day - Free Books in Your E-Mail!

38. Free-Book.co.uk: The directory of free online books

39. FreeBooknotes.com - Free study guides for over 250 books

42. BeyondBooks.com

46. eBooks4free.net - Download free books and manuscripts

48. Free Joke Books

56. Be Successful!

57. Daily Literature

58. Bookyards: library to the world

4shared.com

ReadPrint.com

Collection of Eye-Catching Advertisments

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:32:44 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: my.mmoabc.com

Tags: advertisement

New clues on "The Great Dying"

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:55:48 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

The lessons of the Permian-Triassic massacre are "directly applicable to the present," said John Isbell, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He said the world today is in danger of exceeding a CO2 "threshold" that could set off an environmental upheaval as great as the one 251 million years ago.

Clip Source: www.chron.com

An estimated 95 percent of all marine species and up to 85 percent of land creatures perished, according to Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Scientists call it "The Great Dying." Life took millions of years to recover.

Scientific sleuths, however, now think they're making progress toward pinning down what caused the extinction of most plants and animals on Earth some 251 million years ago.

The perpetrator wasn't an asteroid or comet, like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and inspired movies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon.

Instead, it was a cascade of events that began with a monstrous outpouring of hot, reeking lava in Siberia. Repeated floods of lava released massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which produced a runaway greenhouse effect, oxygen-starved oceans and a poisoned atmosphere.

Tags: earth, mass extinction, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, atmosphere, geology, science

The era of the American Internet is ending.

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:45:18 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: “Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

“Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,”

Tags: net, traffic, routing, us

Free Speech and the Right to Offend

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:49:30 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Free speech is indeed precious, but that doesn't mean that we have to defend without qualification every moron who abuses it

Saying that we have a right to offend skips over the question of whether we are right to offend. I have a right to tell random strangers that I think they're ugly, or that they have terrible taste in clothes, but it would be wrong of me to exercise that right,

we don't just utter words, we do things with them, as the Oxford philosopher JL Austin put it. When words belittle or mock, they can reinforce prejudice and hierarchies that have very real effects on people's lives. Mockery of those already on the margins can shore up the very barriers that limit their life chances.

Tags: morons

7 Writing Habits of Amazing Writers

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:48:57 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: This extremely prolific writer has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award. She writes in longhand, and while she doesn’t have a formal schedule, she says she prefers to write in the morning, before breakfast . She’s a creative writing professor, and on the days she teaches, she says she writes for an hour or 45 minutes before leaving for her first class. On other days, when the writing is going well, she can work for hours without a break — and has breakfast at 2 or 3 in the afternoon!

Clip Source: writetodone.com

1. Stephen King. In his book On Writing, King says that he writes 10 pages a day without fail, even on holidays.

2. Ernest Hemingway. By contrast with King, “Papa” Hemingway wrote 500 words a day.

3. Vladimir Nabokov. The author of such great novels as Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada did his writing standing up, and all on index cards.

4. Truman Capote. The author of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood” claimed to be a “completely horizontal author.” He said he had to write lying down, in bed or on a couch, with a cigarette and coffee.

5. Philip Roth. One of the greatest living American writers, Roth works standing up, pacing around as he thinks. He claimed to walk half a mile for every page he writes.

6. James Joyce

Joyce prided himself in taking his time with each sentence. A famous story has a friend asking Joyce in the street if he’d had a good day writing. Yes, Joyce replied happily. How much had he written? Three sentences, Joyce told him.

7. Joyce Carol Oates

Is the End of Unlimited Internet Near?

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:04:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.abcnews.go.com

Get ready to say goodbye to unlimited Internet access.

Comcast Corp., the nation's second-largest Internet service provider, says it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.

Last week, Comcast -- the second-largest Internet service provider in the country -- announced that starting Oct. 1 it would officially set a threshold for monthly Internet usage.

In an online announcement, the service provider said that although it already contacts residential customers who use excessive amounts of bandwidth, it had never provided a specific limit. Now, Comcast said it will amend its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of monthly usage.

The company emphasizes that its cap is generous and will only affect about 1 percent of its 14.4 million customers. Experts say these customers might include heavy gamers and those who use a significant amount of bandwidth for creating or uploading video.

Tags: end, unlimited, internet

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

A wandering mind able to project themselves into imaginary situations - can do important work'..

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:07:08 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: ...scientists are learning - and may even be essential
"Einstein, for instance, was notorious for his wandering mind ".

Clip Source: www.boston.com

A wandering mind can do important work, scientists are learning - and may even be essential

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don't really want to think. It's a sign of procrastination, not productivity, something to be put away with your flip-flops and hammock as summer draws to a close.

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They've demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind - so fundamental, in fact, that it's often referred to as our "default" mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections.

If your mind didn't wander, then you'd be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now," says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California,

'Autonomous' Helicopters Teach Themselves To Fly

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:05:05 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers.

The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own.

The stunts are "by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter,"

The dazzling airshow is an important demonstration of "apprenticeship learning," in which robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers peck away at their keyboards in an attempt to write instructions from scratch.

Tags: ai

What is the power of things we hold dear?

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 02:15:47 GMT

clipped by: syncopath
clipper's remarks: "In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound."

Clip Source: mitpress.mit.edu

Evocative Objects

Things We Think With

For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.

This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects--an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer--are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.

Bwaaaaaahaaaahaaahaaaaa...!

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:23:04 GMT

clipped by: dulios
clipper's remarks: Speak it, brother!

Clip Source: voices.washingtonpost.com

Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain's presidential bid,

"This election is not about issues," said Davis.

Tags: the republican party is officially bankrupt

Speaking whales

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:46:43 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Uplifting is on its way...
I wonder when will us humans learn some things from the whales?

Clip Source: current.com

Japanese scientists teach whale to talk

Scientists in Japan have given a beluga whale a vocabulary of three words, the first time a marine creature has been able to link a sound to an object and then repeat the sound as a 'word'.

"Right now Nack only knows three words, but we are working on the whale recognising different people and giving them a sound as well.

After that, we want to teach it to express likes and dislikes, something that is interesting instead of boring, and be able to say if something is painful," he said.

Professor Murayama said the breakthrough is the first conversation with a cetacean and that he hoped it might lead to humans and whales exchanging greetings in the not-too-distant future.

Tags: whales, intelligence, language

From Egg to Chicken

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:26:32 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: So... Bottom line, what came first the egg or the chicken?

Clip Source: www.picsyard.com

Can you imagine the progress from an egg to a chick? It’s amazing to see such progress in pictures.

Tags: biology, photography