Trawling The Net

# 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!

"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?

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."

Friday, January 01, 2010 Up, Up And Away! Posted by Jeremy Barker | Labels: balloons, Pogo, Up Upular Remix artist POGO has done it again, taking the chords, bass notes and vocal samples and clips from the Disney Pixar film Up to create an original song called Upular. Having finally seen Up over Christmas I'm enjoying it all the more and it seemed an inspiring way to kick off 2010. Happy New Year everybody, let's see what we can do this year!

it would be nice if diigo would embed thumbnails and videos like some of the other services...

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."