Trawling The Net

Ask CEOs to pick their favorite color and what they select will often be very different than what most people would pick. For example, when 877 members of USA TODAY's CEO panel took an online personality color test, they were three times more likely to favor magenta than the public at large, three times less likely to select red, and 3½ times less likely to choose yellow.

Back in the old days when the Web was young the the solution to the problem of rich interaction with an online resource fell to Adobe’s Flash. Thanks to HTML5, however, the browser does all the business and in a way that is open and accessible to all. Case in point: Sketchpad. I can’t embed it here, but feel free to check it out with any major new browser and report back how amazing it is. Go ahead and check it and let me know what you think. As you see loading is instantaneous and the ability to create rich interfaces all within the browser is amazing. I’m sold.

Five-dollar registration fee for persons planning to overthrow US government

Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina's Secretary of State and declare their intentions -- or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.

There's even a $5 filing fee.

I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them. In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can.

the idea behind the modular configuration is to define a spatial solution which would be able to grow and adapt according to the changing need; or according to varied conditions at different locations. notionally, if more and more modules were to be added, the clinic facilities could grow infinitely but always confined the circular matrix, defined by three differently sized courtyards.

There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts. So imagine you’re hiking through this – – which has been kept ice-less since God was a child because of something called the katabatic winds, which sweep over the valleys at up to 200 mph and suck all the moisture out of them. Anyway, you’re hiking along, passing dessicated penguin carcasses and such, and you come to this. A bleeding glacier. Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. According to Discover Magazine – The source of that water is an intensely salty lake trapped beneath 1,300 feet of ice, and a new study has now found that microbes have carved out a niche for themselves in that inhospitable environment, living on sulfur and iron compounds. The bacteria colony has been isolated there for about 1.5 million years, researchers say, ever since the glacier rolled over the lake and created a cold, dark, oxygen-poor ecosystem. Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar ice caps of Mars and Europa.