More link dumpage:
MSNBC reports that the Discovery Channel says it has remastered all of the NASA film footage from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space flights in high-definition video, and that NASA will make the videos available to the public for free at its archives. The story doesn’t say whether that includes online access, but the films have been incorporated into a six-hour series that will run on the Discovery Channel in June, so get your TiVo ready.
Contrary to popular belief, people do not use only 10% of their brains (unless, of course, they are Republicans). PsyBlog, a British blog about topics in psychology, offers this list of Top Ten Brain Myths that most of us have at one time or another heard and/or accepted as fact. You might be surprised at one or two of them.
eSkeptic, the website of Skeptic Magazine, has this feature article from environmental engineering expert Dr. Tapio Schneider entitled “How We Know Global Warming Is Real”. Recommend this to your disbelieving right-wing friends and associates, but don’t expect them to pay much attention because it includes things like facts and figures that most of them think are “pretend”.
Concerned about the proliferation of RFID tags in everything from passports to grocery packaging? I am. Luckily, the always-enterprising folks at Instructables.com have devised a fool-proof method for neutralizing RFID tags: smash them with a hammer. It causes the least-visible cosmetic damage to those flat RFIDs that are in your passport or on your credit card, so that The Man won’t tase you, bro when he thinks you’ve tampered with it.
Geeks everywhere are limbering up their salivary glands for the expected release of the 3G iPhone in June, but the suits at Research In Motion (R.I.M.), which makes the Blackberry (the favorite toy of gadget-head biz-wizzes everywhere), are none too pleased. This NYT article from a couple of weeks ago explains how Steverino has decided to aim for the enterprise market, and how his Reality Distortion Field may be strong enough to push the Crackberry out of the briefcase of every road warrior in America.
Lastly, joe of the eponymous bookofjoe.com tells us that those crazy youngsters have figured out another totally cool thing you can do with Google Maps and “smart mobs”: find stolen cars faster than Lojack.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
