a cool photoshop tool demo

"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.""

you gotta see this to believe it

"How do you know you have to much time on your hands? Well, you make a techno beat, film a chicken, and make one of the funniest videos I have ever seen. German Techno Chicken is by far the funniest animal video I have seen. So break out your glow sticks and xtasy and party it down with this chicken, and if you get hungry…"

"Charles Babbage is cited as the father of modern computing - although perhaps "uncle" would be more accurate, since his designs never actually saw completion and computing is based on totally different principles. But his idea of a "difference engine," a hand-cranked device that could solve mathematical problems, is essentially the first instance of a computer in human history. numbersUnfortunately, the device, designed to tackle the huge amount of calculation involved in tracking the British navy, was never completed. After 10 years of tinkering, the project was aborted and the prototype melted down. But Babbage's plans and a few pieces of the Difference Engine remained, and just recently someone decided they'd finish what he started. Now there is a complete and working Difference Engine at the Computer History Museum down in Mountain View. It was put together by Doron Swade, a former curator at London's Science Museum, and a team he assembled over the last two decades. There is another working Difference Engine being kept at that museum, and this one will only remain in Mountain View for a year before it heads out to Seattle to enter a "private collection." I'm guessing Ballmer's (actually, Nathan Myhrvold, former MS CTO. Close, though). So go see it while you can, startup guys! There's more info at NPR, where you can, as always, have it narrated to you. I love that. I'm going to make some coffee and listen to it again. Update: A commenter at NPR notes that the Harvard Mark I was a functioning difference engine, but relied on electricity rather than clockwork. It was completed in 1944."

"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

"The gravity of the solar system Today on xkcd, an illustration showing the gravity wells of our solar system's planets and some of their moons. Gravity wells Two of Mars' tiny moons barely have any gravity at all: You could escape Deimos with a bike and a ramp. A thrown baseball could escape Phobos. That's great, but you forgot Pluto!"

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!"

"Here is an innovation borne of the need to make solar modules that are more able to capture more sunlight in regions like New York (or Germany) that have relatively low level insolation. Normally that means that it takes more panels to make the same power, which means it simply costs more to make the same electricity in upstate New York than in the Southern California desert. Prism Solar Technologies in Highland, NY has innovated a breakthrough holographic thin-film (Holographic Planar Concentrator™) that makes possible a very parsimonious use of crystalline PV cells to counteract that problem for Northern region"

James Gaussman and the Jewelled Pyramid of China Egyptian pyramids? Sure, everyone knows about the ones at Giza - and a few aficionados might know about the 138 others (!) scattered around them. Mesoamerican pyramids? Okay, a lot of folks know about them, too -- or even that the great one at Cholula is considered to be the largest one in the world.

"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."

"Nathan Shedroff spoke to Vicky Teinaki about the difference between businesspeople and designers, his upcoming foray into sci-fi, and what designers wanting to get involved in sustainability can do. Shedroff is a leading author in experience design and the increasing value of design. His book subjects have included experience design (the 2001 experience-in-itself-book Experience Design 1), design thinking (Making Meaning, 2006) and sustainable design (Design is the Problem, 2009). He is currently the head of the Design MBA Strategy at the California Institute of Arts (CCA)."

"A programmer who claims he produced software that detected hidden terrorist messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts was apparently responsible for a false alert in 2003 that grounded international flights. The 2003 incident raised the government's security level, according to a remarkable story published by Playboy. The developer also allegedly faked software demonstrations and conned the Pentagon into investing in a program that fellow workers suspect never existed or couldn't do what the developer claimed. In December 2003, DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced a terror alert based on intelligence from "credible sources" about imminent attacks that "could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11." Dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial "flights of interest" were canceled, and news agencies were reporting that the threats extended to "power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska." Playboy says the source of the intelligence was never revealed publicly. But the evidence points to Dennis Montgomery, who had convinced the government that Al Jazeera - the Qatari-owned TV network - was unwittingly transmitting attack orders to Al Qaeda sleeper cells concealed in video it broadcast."

"Related Sections: Household Rolling fireplace puts danger on the move Rolling fireplace puts danger on the move I love a good fireplace, but I hate having to move away from it to make myself a sandwich or use the bathroom. That's why I love this rolling fireplace: I can roll it around with me wherever I go. Sure, if it tips over or goes down some stair accidentally you might just burn your house down, but come on. You're not some sort of klutz. I think the possibility of imminent danger makes this thing even cooler, anyways."

"Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country's space agency said Wednesday. Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized. When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate. Further studies ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) above Earth's surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters. In October, NASA lowered the odds that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 from a 1-in-45,000 as earlier thought to a 1-in-250,000 chance after researchers recalculated the asteroid's path. It said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact. Without mentioning NASA findings, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. "I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032," Perminov said. "People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov said. Scientists have long theorized about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or using nuclear weapons to hit it."

A Welsh company developing the technology, which uses an electrical current to stimulate chemicals to produce light, has been awarded a £454,000 grant from the Carbon Trust to help get it into homes, business and on the roads. The organic light emitting diodes (OLED) technology, which can be coated onto a thin flexible film to cover walls like wallpaper, can also be used for flat screen televisions, computers and mobile phone displays.