Over my head and under my feet
Posted: Saturday, May 12, 2007 10:32 AM by Will Femia
Just when you felt secure in your low-to-medium grade anxiety about global warming driven flooding and mega storms science finds new global quirks to freak you out. "There is, however, a growing body of evidence that the Earth's magnetic field is about to disappear, at least for a while. The geological record shows that it flips from time to time, with the south pole becoming the north, and vice versa."
How 'bout this one: Satellites solve mystery of low gravity over Canada - I would have guessed that Earth's mass was a unit as far as gravity is concerned but apparently there are "fluctuations in the distribution of mass" that makes for some soft spots.
Speaking of mind blowing gravity stories, what the heck is a gravity wave?
Speaking of things that sound like the end of the world, the mystery bee colony collapse we read so much about a few weeks ago apparently doesn't apply to organic bees. I saw this story in a few places, but this version has lots of cool beekeeping lingo.
Just because you explain quantum physics to a dog doesn't mean I understand it any better - even if the dog seems to.
Sick of your screen saver? How 'bout wicked cool fractals? No? OK, how about wicked cool transformers?
"You may have been a good smuggler, but now you're dark chocolate."
The eCigarette may seem like a good idea for nicotine delivery for smokers but I'd still only rank it second after nicotine gelato. (See the last paragraph of the excerpted story.)
Griffith Park burns
What the heck is Joost and why are people giving them so much money? I finally got around to clicking over to their site. It looks like Web enabled Tivo with community features. (NOTE: Flash movie plays with audio as soon as the page loads.)
Speaking of how we'll consume media in the future, The future's five enemies (and how to beat them)
Chess queens - Who needs cheerleaders?
Women paint letters on their bellies to support their college lacrosse team but upon seeing a photo of themselves in such a state on the cover of the school paper they deem themselves too fat for public consumption and decide to steal every paper. And so we have exhibit 2,234,983,328 of "the cover up is worse than the crime" in that now the whole web has seen the photo instead of the couple thousand who might have otherwise.
Looks like it's time to start paying attention to widgets. While there's still some debate about how to count them but they appear to have reached "craze" status. Generally speaking, a widget is an application embedded on a blog or personal page. An MSNBC.com widget might allow you to feature top news headlines in a box in the margin of your blog or MySpace profile.
Speaking of counting, how do you feel about advertisements being able to tell when you've looked at them? The ads would come with a camera that can tell when your eye is looking directly at the ad. I don't know why this bothers me. It's no big deal if the girl on the Victoria's Secret poster catches you looking, right?
The OPhone is just a joke, but I support anything that draws design inspiration from Krull.
Meanwhile, folks are drooling over Apple's new plans which are not a joke.
The amazing color changing card trick and why you're not as smart as you think you are.
It's not exactly a replicator but still, a "home-built three dimensional fabricator" is pretty neat.
Mother's Day is about the children of mothers not being killed in war.
Mr. T brings his own brand of Mother-inspired peace on Earth.
Speaking of the war, I keep reading about Robert Greenwald and the Iraq for Sale video about war profiteering in Iraq. (I'm not a doctor but if you have blood pressure problems you might want to skip this one lest your head explode.)
Doll Face - Sad and somewhat creepy, "A machine with a doll face mimics images on television screen in search of a satisfactory visage."
Something I didn't mention the other day is that there's also a pretty strong online contingent that has a real dislike for Ron Paul, and I'm not talking about Democrats.
Best MSNBC.com citation ever - NOTE: This has no nudity but it's a woman in various stages of undress with stats about the online porn industry written on her body. Not vulgarities, just percentages and pie charts and stuff.
Speaking of sex, comma sutra
"50,000 MyFootballClub members are about to bid for an English football club. They will make history together, voting on team selection and on which players to buy and sell." The idea is that you sign up for free now and when they get 50,000 members you pay 35 pounds and they buy a team. Once that's done all 50,000 members can strangle each other over differing opinions on how the team should be run.
