Timmy writes "Wired Science has picked ten of the best videos from YouTube and their own show on PBS to highlight the wonderful things chemistry can do. Only four of them involve fire or explosions. The rest range from music videos about the polymerase chain reaction to reactions that repeatedly change color. One shows how to pour sodium acetate stalagmites. Another shows Chris Hardwick giving instructions for building a glow stick while making absurd comments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

electrostatic writes "In a Nature.com oldie-but-goodie, a physicist says he has solved a problem that costs airlines millions every year: what is the quickest way to get passengers aboard an aircraft? Boarding is a serious issue for airlines, particularly those operating short flights that run several times a day, yet boarding times have steadily increased for decades. Back in 2005 Jason Steffen of the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois said the method used by many airlines to this day is almost the worst. 'The best way to board, according to the researchers, would be a row-by-row, seat-by-seat, strict order. That would mean everyone lines up, row 25 first. I can't imagine fliers will go for that. Next best, they say, would be boarding all the window seats first, followed by those in the aisle. Obviously that's not practical, at least for couples or families traveling together.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Richard Esguerra sez,

If you live in Southern California or happen to be going to ETech in San Diego, come and hang out at the EFF Pioneer Awards fundraiser on Tuesday night!

This year, the winners are the Mozilla Foundation and its Chairman Mitchell Baker, University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist, and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. Past winners include Linux creator Linus Torvalds, security researcher Bruce Schneier, and Cory Doctorow.

Michael Robertson, the Founder and CEO of MP3.com, Linspire, MP3tunes, and Gizmo5, will keynote the ceremony with his talk: "What to Expect When You're Expecting... To Be Sued".

The awards ceremony is open to the public.

Link

See also: EFF announces Pioneer Award winners

Eirikso sez, "A while ago you wrote about the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and our experiment with distribution of a very popular TV-show DRM-free and in full quality through the use of BitTorrent. The experience so far has been very positive and we've now published some more thoughts on the project and some numbers. The load balancing of the BitTorrent protocol works perfectly well, people are happily seeding the files and the download time for one full 30 minute episode is still 3-5 minutes on a good broadband connection in Norway. We're closing in on 90 000 downloads of the torrent files and are running with a P2P ratio of about 95%. Saving huge on bandwidth cost." Link (Thanks, Eirikso!)

See also: Norwegian broadcaster puts popular show online as no-DRM torrent

tringtring writes "Computer World reports on an HP Labs researcher who foretells a future in which power management features will be built into the processor, memory, server, software and cooling systems. Coordination will be paramount. 'What happens if you turn all these elements on at the same time?' the principal research scientist at HP Labs asks. 'How do I make sure that the system doesn't explode?' This future is the vision of Parthasarathy Ranganathan, the man behind the "No Power Struggles" project at Hewlett-Packard. Power management systems will have to operate holistically, without one component conflicting with another, Ranganathan says. Ranganathan is just one of many researchers at the tech industry's biggest labs researching on how future data centers will handle increasing demands for processing capability and energy efficiency while simplifying IT."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

brandaman writes "Akamai, the largest content delivery network (CDN) with about 70% market share, recently won its lawsuit against the against second largest CDN - Limelight Networks. The suit asserted that Limelight was infringing on Akamai's patent which, upon examination, seems to be somewhat on the obvious side. 'In accordance with the invention, however, a base HTML document portion of a Web page is served from the Content Provider's site while one or more embedded objects for the page are served from the hosting servers, preferably, those hosting servers near the client machine. By serving the base HTML document from the Content Provider's site, the Content Provider maintains control over the content.' Limelight is obviously not pleased, and this is not the first lawsuit Akamai has won regarding its patents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle's Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City's shop-lined education mall. Without some dramatic changes, The Extinction Timeline predicts libraries will R.I.P. in 2019."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The ThinkPad has long been a favorite of IT departments everywhere and is the preferred notebook for legions of no-nonsense users. As times have progressed the ThinkPad has improved but the X300 marks the most significant change in its design since the butterfly keyboard. While we've already discussed a few leaked specs, official news of big changes like LED-backlighting (the first on a ThinkPad) and a widescreen display accompany a number of important but smaller design tweaks. Current thinking is that these changes indicate that the X300 is the first step in a series of larger changes to the ThinkPad. The notebook has already received a number of favorable reviews, but the other changes - the ones that will ultimately trickle down to the rest of the ThinkPad line - are perhaps more interesting than this specific $2500+ notebook."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I spent the weekend watching every youtube clip tagged "Dr. Steve Brule," alone and with friends, on laptops and iphones. This was Dr. Steve Brule Weekend. The character is played by John C. Reilly, and is part of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job on Adult Swim. LMFAO. This one's my favorite. no, this one. (thanks Coop)

Ian Lamont writes "Telcos, ISPs, mobile phone companies and other communication service providers are known for their complex pricing plans and creative attempts to give less for more. But Larry Borsato asks why we as customers are willing to put up with anything less than 99.999% uptime? That's the gold standard, and one that we are used to thanks to regulated telephone service. When it comes to mobile phone service, cable TV, Internet access, service interruptions are the norm — and everyone seems willing to grin and bear it: 'We're so used cable and satellite television reception problems that we don't even notice them anymore. We know that many of our emails never reach their destination. Mobile phone companies compare who has the fewest dropped calls (after decades of mobile phones, why do we even still have dropped calls?) And the ubiquitous BlackBerry, which is a mission-critical device for millions, has experienced mass outages several times this month. All of these services are unregulated, which means there are no demands on reliability, other than what the marketplace demands.' So here's the question for you: Why does the marketplace demand so little when it comes to these services?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

meteorit writes "Mozilla has been working on a mobile version of Firefox since last year, and is now looking to repeat the success of Firefox on the PC. Although development seems not to have been completed, it is known that informal negotiations have already started with mobile network operators. Firefox Mobile is scheduled to be launched by the end of the year and the inaugural version will be compatible with the Linux and Windows Mobile operating systems. Work is already underway to determine what the browser's UI will look like. In the meantime those negotiations seem to be hitting 'brick walls', as cellphone operators resist the intrusion of the open web onto their platforms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've been a regular watcher of the Sunday morning political talk shows, and I've always in my heart wanted my own show. Then I started talking about it, people kept telling me just do it. So today I did.

http://sundaygang.com/001.mp3

My guests are Nicco Mele and Morra Aarons, a married couple, they live in Medford MA. Morra is a frequent guest on CNN and writes at BlogHer. I met Nicco when he was working on the Internet for the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Nicco was famous for switching to McCain a couple of years ago, but now he appears to have regained his senses. He still likes McCain and explains why in this 33 minute conversation which was cut short by the battery on my phone running out.

The next Sunday Gang show may actually come on Tuesday night, after the returns are in from Texas and Ohio. Hope you enjoy!

PS: I haven't got the RSS feed ready yet, I'll post a link here as soon as it is.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

V!NCENT tips us to a write-up about an addition to MSI's Ecolution motherboard which harvests heat from the chipset to power a fan. The device is based on a Stirling engine. The heat from the chipset expands a trapped gas, which pushes against a piston to generate power. The article contains a YouTube video of how the device works. According to MSI, the device has 70% efficiency.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

StCredZero brings news that scientists have developed sheets of nanotubes that measure up to three feet by six feet, and they promise "slabs 100 square feet in area as soon as this summer." The developers see uses for the sheets in electromagnetic shields and airplane construction, and according to the Next Big Future blog, the sheets could also impact the development of solar sails. "The sheets, which the company can produce on its single machine at a rate of one per day, are composed of a series of nanotubes each about a millimeter long, overlapping each other randomly to form a thin mat. The tensile strength of the mat ranges from 200 to 500 megapascals--a measure of how tough it is to break. A sheet of aluminum of equivalent thickness, for comparison, has a strength of 500 megapascals. If Nanocomp takes further steps to align the nanotubes, the strength jumps to 1,200 megapascals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I looked up blogging to find the names of some more obscure ones, the first hit was the Wikipedia page, and out of curiosity I searched the page for my name. It's not there. All kinds of people get credit for building blogging as a practice and tools for blogging, but apparently, according to Wikipedia, I had nothing to do with it, nor did Scripting News or UserLand.

Anticipating some of the lectures I'm likely to get, no I can't fix it, for two reasons: 1. It would be like editing my own bio page (which I haven't looked at in ages, and don't want to). 2. It would certainly get reverted in seconds.

Of course it's likely this will be changed within minutes of my posting this. Check back later to see how it is after this has scrolled off. And that's why, btw, we need blogs, wikis are not enough. Otherwise we'd all have to accept the mass view of history, as filtered through trolls. Blogging lets you object to the democratic view, and may result in a more accurate story. I say may, and not will, because it seems people are willing to accept Wikipedia as authoritative.

Oh well. Sighh.

My post yesterday about my excitement over innovation in the Pownce API, led to what, in retrospect, was a predictable backlash from users who don't want:

1. Twitter to get more complicated.

2. To switch to a service with less users.

3. To switch to another service.

And who do want:

1. Twitter to get more reliable.

I feel largely the same way, even so, I'm still going to:

1. Fill out the connective glue between my development environment and Pownce.

2. Revise my Flickr and podcasting tools to post to Pownce in addition to Twitter.

3. Possibly develop new services that can only work with Pownce because of their (new) API advantage over Twitter.

Now, what does this mean for the market? Hard to know for sure, but here's what it could mean:

1. Twitter might be inspired to match the features in the Pownce API, thus blunting the new edge Pownce has.

2. Pownce could become more popular and may prove to have the same or worse scaling problems than Twitter.

3. Pownce could retain its edge, allowing different kinds of apps to be built that run on their network, and both continue to grow and deal with scaling in their own ways.

4. Something else.

I'm pretty sure what won't happen is:

1. Pownce kills Twitter.

In blogging there are many platforms and related technologies. They all work differently and appeal to different groups of people. I suspect that's what's going to happen here.

USA Today is running a story about the emergence of robots in common aspects of life in Japan. Many simple yet social jobs are being filled by robots of increasing sophistication. The article suggests that Japanese culture is more open to such interaction than the majority of other cultures. Quoting: "For Japan, the robotics revolution is an imperative. With more than a fifth of the population 65 or older, the country is banking on robots to replenish the workforce and care for the elderly. The government estimates the industry could surge from about $5.2 billion in 2006 to $26 billion in 2010 and nearly $70 billion by 2025. Besides financial and technological power, the robot wave is favored by the Japanese mind-set as well. Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

superbrose writes "According to MSNBC, thousands of U.S. citizens have wrongfully been declared dead, due to an average of 35 data input errors per day by the Social Security Administration (SSA). Many other agencies rely on the data provided by the SSA, such as the IRS. People who have been wrongfully declared dead face many problems, such as rejection of tax returns, cancellation of health insurance, and closure of bank accounts. The article states, 'Input of an erroneous death entry can lead to benefit termination and result in financial hardship for a beneficiary.' Apparently it is far easier to declare a person's death than it is to correct the mistake. It continues, 'Social Security says an erroneous death record can be removed only when it i