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"It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don't." On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that. I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent." To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it's not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy

# As social networks proliferate, they are changing the way people think about the Internet, from a tool used in solitary anonymity to a medium that touches on questions about human nature and identity. # If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populous in the world, just behind the U.S. Almost half of its users visit every day. # Nielsen Online reports that social networking (and associated blogging) is now the fourth most popular online activity. Time spent on social-networking sites is growing at three times the rate of overall Internet usage, accounting for almost 10 percent of total time spent online. # Social networks can lessen loneliness and boost self-esteem. But they can also have the opposite effect, depending on who you are and how you use these forums.

cumon jack...this place Blows twine away. If Kanye were here, he'd say "I'mma letchew finish, but Diigo is the best social bookmarking service EVER."

Absolutely, FishMan! It SO DOES blow Twine away. But, I'm thinking out-into-th-future! There's something on the horizon that will blow Diigo away, ... but, for the moment, it's only a fantasy. I have lots of fantasies, so, ... don't spend any time letting it worry you! LOL, FishMan!

Movies in 3-D are becoming such big moneymakers that Hollywood studios are cramming them into the nation's theaters, even though there aren't enough screens available to give each film its fullest possible run. That will mean an unprecedented number of 3-D movies for film fans to choose from this spring, and smaller profits for Hollywood studios than they might otherwise get with fewer 3-D competitors.

The stunning Plitvice Lakes National Park lies in the Lika region of Croatia. The park is surrounded by the mountains Plješevica, Mala Kapela, and Medveđak, which are part of the Dinaric Alps. The 16 blue-green Plitvice Lakes, which are separated by natural dams of travertine, are situated on the Plitvice plateau. Waterfalls connect the lakes, and the tallest waterfall is Veliki Slap at 70 meters (230 feet) tall. The Plitvice lakes area boasts a large variety of interesting and colorful flora and fauna. Visitors can enjoy walking and hiking the many pathways and trails, or exploring the lakes by boat. The park itself has 3 hotels and a campsite, otherwise visitors can find accommodation at any of the number of villages and cities nearby.

FEEEEEEL the gratitude, FEEL it, cmon dammit feel it.. ah the hell with it, you're fired

brilliant!

Yep. I found it quite inspirational. I'm always at that edge of feeling like I'm faking something.

The saying "You're only as old as you feel" really seems to resonate with older adults, according to research from Purdue University.

"Project Gustav is a realistic painting-system prototype that enables artists to become immersed in the digital painting experience. It achieves interactivity and realism by leveraging the computing power of modern GPUs, taking full advantage of multitouch and tablet input technology and our novel natural media-modeling and brush-simulation algorithms. Project Gustav is a great example of how Microsoft's research efforts are leading to exciting new technologies to support creativity. About Typically the experience of painting on a computer is nothing like painting in the real world. Real painting is actually a very complex phenomenon - a 3D brush consisting of thousands of individually deforming bristles, interacting with viscous fluid paint and a rough-surfaced canvas to create rich, complex strokes. Until fairly recently, the amount of computing power available on a typical home computer simply hasn't been sufficient to attempt simulating such a real-world painting experience in any detail. Project Gustav aims to leverage the increasing power of the PC and ever faster graphics processors and combine that with a natural user interface, to bring a rich painting experience to a wide audience including hobbyists and professionals alike. The result is a prototype system that contains some of the world's most advanced algorithms for natural painting. Image Gallery Here are a few images that were created by users of Project Gustav, and demonstrations of some of the realistic mixing and blending effects enabled by Project Gustav's new painting algorithms. Project Gustav user interfaceProject Gustav user interface (click for hi-res) Project Gustav user interface with palette openUI with mixing palette open (click for hi-res) Pastel fish Pastel clouds - (Cloud computing??) Glossy streaky oil paint rendering #1 Glossy streaky oil paint rendering #2 Oil hand Streaky horse Fall maples Pastel Rose Smearing effects Multitouch Promo in Gusta

"Creativity is a nebulous, murky topic that fascinates me endlessly - how does it work? What habits to creative people do that makes them so successful at creativity? I've reflected on my own creative habits, but decided I'd look at the habits that others consider important to their creativity. I picked a handful of creatives, almost at random - there are so many that picking the best would be impossible, so I just picked some that I admire, who came to mind when I thought of the word "creative". This was going to be a list of their creative habits … but in reviewing their lists, and my own habits, I found one that stood out. And it stands out if you review the habits and quotes from great creative people in history. It's the Most Important Habit when it comes to creativity. After you read the No. 1 habit, please scroll down and read the No. 2 habit - they might seem contradictory but in my experience, you can't really hit your creative stride until you find a way to balance both habits. The No. 1 Creativity Habit In a word: solitude."

Let me start off by saying, the following maps are just JOKES. I'm a very proud American. But I will be the first to admit that my views of the rest of the world are a bit, well to be honest I have never been to any other country before (well Canada once, but that doesn't count.) Haha, C'mon, i'm kidding!! Anyway, don't take the following to seriously.

"Video: A new way to unfold the Earth's surface produces a new kind of map A new technique for unpeeling the Earth's skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world's oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines. See a gallery of the new maps "Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. "The basic idea is surprisingly simple," says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares. Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk's innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word "myriahedral" to describe it, a combination of "myriad" with "polyhedron", the name for polygonal 3D shapes. Warping reality The mathematical impossibility of flattening the surface of a sphere has long troubled mapmakers. "Consider peeling an orange and trying to flatten it out," says van Wijk. "The surface has to distort or crack." Some solutions distort the size of the continents while roughly preserving their shape - the familiar Mercator projection, for instance, makes Europe and North America disproportionately large compared with Africa. Others, like the Peters projection, keep landmasses at the correct relative sizes, at the expense of warping their shapes. An ideal map would combine the best properties of both, but that is only possible by inserting gaps into the Earth's surface, resulting in a map with confusing interruptions. Van Wijk's method makes it possible to direct those cuts in a way that minimises such confusion. Maps of significance When generating a map he assigns a "weighting" to each edge on the polyhedron to signal its importance, influencing the pl

"It was 1993 and I had just decided to drop out of college. I was a graphic design major in a great art school but decided I want to start my second company. Knowing this would mark the conclusion of my studies there I set out to create my final project. I would write a short story, design and produce it in print. I put out an edition of 300 and gave it to my friends and people who inspired me like author William Gibson. Cut to November, 2009, when I returned from sitting on a panel at the second Realtime CrunchUp. I had urged the audience and participants that when thinking about the realtime web we should not consider the challenge through the lens of how consumers behave today. I argued that the future potential of the realtime web is not in the misnomer "realtime search," as the consumption of this signal will predominantly be in what I call ambient streams. These are streams of information bubbling up in realtime, which seek us out, surround us, and inform us. They are like a fireplace bathing us in ambient infoheat. I believe that users will not go to a page and type in a search in a search box. Rather the information will appear to them in an ambient way on a range of devices and through different experiences. A few days after I got back from the CrunchUp, I was organizing some old documents when I stumbled on I Was Just Dead< , a cyberpunk short story I wrote 16 years ago. A story about a world of augmented reality. A world where at birth a chip is embedded in people's brains creating a reality where they no longer discern what is "real" and what is augmented in their surroundings (Hear the audio-book or download the free eBook below). It was strange to hear my former self calling out about the importance of augmented reality from across the span of almost two decades of experiences in the digital world, half of which were spent solving the problem of how to filter the massive realtime stream."

"Internet Censorship Facts January 23, 2010 by Geeks are Sexy | 0 comments Chances are, if youre reading this right now, you don't live in Yemen or Myanmar. Internet censorship can take many forms, from restricting private internet access to blocking searches for politically volatile keywords. Exercise your internet freedom by taking a look at this informative presentation. "

Some have called it the car that will save General Motors: the Chevy Volt, a plug-in electric sedan set to launch in three test markets (in California, Michigan, and the Washington, D.C., area) by the end of 2010. GM's Chevy brand was one of the charter sponsors of this week's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, and it brought a Volt along for the ride. Why, exactly? The 12,000 SXSWi attendees, most of whom are all about the latest high-tech craze, are exactly the people Chevy thinks will want a Volt.

Green-er MACHINES By Marci Blackman Photos by Ed Glazar In a four hundred square foot studio in Red Hook, the hinterland of Brooklyn, a botanist, an engineer, anthropologist and bike messenger mental away the hours putting the finishing touches on a bicycle that could save the world. Okay, maybe not the whole world. Perhaps not even a block of it. And twenty-somethings Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray would probably never refer to themselves as an anthropologist and botanist even though bike messenger Aguinaldo majored in anthropology in college, and Murray once taught the plant science to children with learning disabilities at the Churchill School in Manhattan. Mostly, along with Marty Odlin of Columbia University's Earth Institute (our engineer), they are a brainy trio of bike geeks who-like the rest of us-get excited over things like black-rimmed wheels with matching black spokes and black high flange hubs, gear ratios, and lightweight composites. And none of them is ever likely to profess that he could save the world. But the bicycle the three are developing along with the streamlining of its manufacturing process could help put a dent in a few of our problems: rural world poverty, health and well-being, greenhouse gases. Plus, as a bonus, they might even win the awesome wicked cool award while doing it.

gives a new meaning to getting the 'high score'

A new strain of mosquitoes in which females cannot fly may help curb the transmission of dengue fever, according to UC Irvine and British scientists. Great idea or frankensketter?

We know eye witnesses aren't always reliable, but police composite sketches almost never really look like the perpetrator. Remember the Unabomber? He looked nothing like the stylish, mustachioed, aviator-wearing hoodlum he was made out to be. All kidding aside, these are some of the worst police sketches we have ever seen. Whether they look like they were drawn by a third-grader or one of the guys in Times Square who does the big-headed caricatures, if anyone should be arrested, it's the artist responsible.

Dave DeGobbi's mind-blowing Crawler Town should have its own movie written around it. If there are any fans of Borderlands out there, it's heavily reminiscent of Baron Flynt's massive rig-turned-city, the Thor.