"In this remarkable and fully rockin' video, an Italian singer performs a rock piece whose lyrics are gibberish intended to sound like English. Entitled "What English Sounds Like to Foreigners," the video is meant to illustrate which English phonemes and syllables carry into the foreign ear, but I tell you what, it sounded like English to me, too, though like English as sung in such a way as to make it hard to decipher. What English Sounds Like to Foreigners (via Making Light) Update Thanks to commenter LukeWhite for this intelligence: "It's actually titled Prisencolinensinainciusol, written by Adriano Celentano wrote it in 1972.""

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.

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.

"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

"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."

I really like the look of the Guppie multitool, which turns a carabiner into a multidriver, adjustable wrench and utility knife (there's even a pocket-clip that doubles as a money-clip if you want to carry it in a front pocket). Hell, it's even got a flashlight! And a bottle opener! I haven't tried it (I've been scared off of carrying anything with a blade by the fear that it could be used as a pretence for some Orwellian shakedown if I'm stopped by the cops here in London), but I want it.

but how do you cut the guy hanging off you's line when the knife is on your carabiner?

You don't cut him off--you shoot him with your class 7 plasma rifle.

Tub-E bathtub adds automation and style to your bathing ritual Does anyone still take baths these days? While the speed and efficiency of a quick shower is hard to beat, there is something to be said for a long soothing hot soak in the tub. I'm just not sure I'd want to do it in the Tub-E. Looking like a triumph of form over function, the undeniably cool looking Tub-E includes several high tech functions to make your bath time a bit more luxurious. A thermostatically controlled heater under the seat keeps the water at a constant temperature, so you won't be adding hot water to reheat the water every few minutes. Add to that its auto fill, auto empty, and auto clean cycles, plus the ability to inject various bath oils during the fill process, and you certainly have a few improvements over the centuries old basic tub. My main issue is that it just looks incredibly uncomfortable. The Tub-E is available from Wild Terrain Designs. No word on the price."

this is frightening.

yes, maybe this is a bit too much... the cool bossanova music in the background seems out of place.

very cool. need to cut channels in the walls of the pool to allow water to flow better, but very cool, useful for parties

beer package in a dead animal (not a real dead animal that's cruel) stylin, someone needs to make a beer cooler sleeve that looks like this and I'm in for six, the more realistic looking the better - keep the girls off the patio

"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

I felt like posting this in HBSN would be a bit too random.. ..though it's somehow appropriate^^

Cool! Cool! Cool! Thanks, Facyla!

Hey Facyla, feel like a lone nut today?

Caleb Charland is a Maine-based photographer who combines a love of scientific experiments and photographs into wonderful and amazing photographs. If Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin were into photography, their photographs might look something like these:

How do you enter your home? Through a normal door? Bo-ring! Just take a gander at this ludicrous entrance, which is made to look like you're entering a spaceship (or at least a spaceship from the set of a 70's TV show) every time you come home. Apparently, this house is located in San Francisco on 3rd Ave near Geary. And sadly, it's not a permanent entryway. Instead, the folks who live there change up the front of the house for various theme parties that they have. And based on the entryway, I'm guessing those parties are pretty crazy.

"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

"Loud, persistent ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, can be vexing for its millions of sufferers. This perceived noise can be symptomatic of many different ills-from earwax to aging-but the most common cause is from noise-induced hearing loss, such as extended exposure to construction or loud music, and treating many of its underlying neural causes has proven difficult. But many people with tinnitus might soon be able to find refuge in the very indulgence that often started the ringing in the first place: music. "

Thanks for this post, fish man, (wow! I'm really liking diigo!!); as I experience tinnitus, and, I've only had it for a year or so, music DOES help, because, like so many other audio phenomenon, it distracts the mind from 'listening' to the tinnitus sound (frequency, in my case) and, thus, I don't really hear it, if I'm not paying attention to it - a wonderful ailment, really, because, if you don't pay attention to it, you really don't have it!!

(agreed!!!) and I too have been dealing with the incessant ringing just quite recently. (I think it's because of my cold) but it is worrysome, as there does not seem to be any real cure. perhaps it has something to do with playing a brass instrument too loudly?

Where do you Twine a bookmark that doesn't fit into any particular category, or Twine, but is still an interesting diversion from the everyday web experience? Why here of course, in Trawling the 'Net! Trawling for you landlubbers, is a salty fisherman's term for running your boat real slow with a bunch of lines out at different lengths and depths, with different kinds of bait in hopes of attracting tonight's next meal. It's also a good excuse to drink beer, So go ahead, post randomness! There's only Two rules--if you can Twine an item to more than two other places, then most likely it doesn't belong here. And--this is not a political forum. Please keep this feed focused on the frivolous, interesting, and fun. Failing to follow these two simple rules will be cause for immediate expulsion from this Twine. So go ahead, post randomness!"