5126453
submission
Tablizer writes:
Singer, dancer, and inventor; Michael Jackson co-filed a patent for "a system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface. The shoes have a specially designed heel slot which can be detachably engaged with the hitch member by simply sliding the shoe wearer's foot forward, thereby engaging with the hitch member."
4548169
submission
Tablizer writes:
I've been annoyed by CSS-heavy sites for some time, including ol' slashie. Digging around the web for various opinions on this, I've noticed that CSS are indeed controversial, creating a lively practical-versus-idealism debate. But one blogger went beyond mere ranting and did some research:I used the Firefox developer toolbar to take a look at the frontpages of the top 20 Alexa sites...So, the five companies that use CSS are the web powerhouses--MSN, MySpace, Blogger, AOL and Imageshack. MSN, MySpace and AOL have been maligned for years throughout the web savvy community. My hypothesis is that these companies are overcompensating for the crap that they've taken thoughtout the years by designing their site in pure CSS. Other companies that have more web street-cred like Google and Facebook don't really have to worry about how the web design community sees them.
4229415
submission
Tablizer writes:
'Deep tree' GUI menus are getting annoying as vendors rack up the feature quantities to compete with each other. Searching in menus for some long-lost feature is becoming ever more time-consuming as the trees grow. Perhaps it's time to rethink hierarchical menus and borrow some ideas from search engines, such as Google.
Consider listing (and perhaps linking) all the options or features in a database-like contraption, and key-word searching on these behind the scenes to produce a Google-like list of feature/option matches. A simple SQL "LIKE" statement(s) can be used for a simple implementation, with dedicated text indexers for fancier ones.
The database could also contain synonyms to assist finds. Some options will have prerequisites, which need to be dealt with. These can be tracked via a dependency tree or graph.
Has anybody tried something similar to this in a desktop app with success? If so, what technologies and techniques did you use, and what lessons did you learn?
794239
submission
Tablizer writes:
The Phoenix Mars lander has been frustrated yet again by Mars' odd soil. The wet nature of the soil they are targeting appears to have made it get stuck in the scoop rather than drop into the oven. Past problems with similarly clumpy soil may have damaged the lander because the vibrator had to be used longer than designed, resulting in a short circuit.
722161
submission
Tablizer writes:
The so called "Pioneer Anomaly" is a slight acceleration of the now-defunct Pioneer probes that doesn't match gravity models, suggesting a mysterious force. Researchers have been subtracting out known forces, such as power-cell heat, to isolate the mysterious portion.
Pioneer Anomaly Project Director Slava Turyshev presented
preliminary results of the thermal modeling efforts at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
...The magnitude of the Pioneer Anomaly is so very tiny that it could conceivably result from the uneven radiation of heat from the spacecraft...Turyshev reported that the [heat] model can generate an acceleration that amounts to about 30% of the Anomaly for that distance [25AU] from the Sun.
495838
submission
Tablizer writes:
Paul Graham, the dot-com zillionare who created what is now Yahoo Stores, along with Robert Morris has finally released their revamped dialect of Lisp, called Arc. "Arc is designed above all for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software. It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language.
388957
submission
Tablizer writes:
Science News describes a youtube sensation whereby Mobius transformations can be described simply as a linear projection through a sphere to a plane. The coolest transformation is the inversion, in which a rectangular image can be turned inside out. I'd like to see this transformation on actual images (but not goatse, please).
212645
submission
Tablizer writes:
According to Parade Magazine, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao says American employees are rude and have B.O., and this is allegedly why foreign workers are preferred. "U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. 'American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene,' says Chao. 'They need anger-management and conflict-resolution skills, and they have to be able to accept direction. Too many young people bristle when a supervisor asks them to do something.'" Do we need to reshape ourselves into compliant borg?
191839
submission
Tablizer writes:
The New Horizons probe caught the moon Io in the act of barfing into space. "This five-frame sequence of New Horizons images captures the giant plume from Io's Tvashtar volcano. Snapped by the probe's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter earlier this year, this first-ever "movie" of an Io plume clearly shows motion in the cloud of volcanic debris, which extends 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the moon's surface...The appearance and motion of the plume is remarkably similar to an ornamental fountain on Earth, replicated on a gigantic scale."
139957
submission
Tablizer writes:
Did the laws of physics think themselves into being? Observing may not only force quantum resolving of atomic particle features, but perhaps the universe's very laws themselves. Paul Davies states: "In that manner, what we must imagine is that the origin of the universe is an amalgam of realities, and only those realities that lead to observers who can resolve those ambiguities are going to be selected for. So the universe can engineer its own bio-friendliness, because the very observers who arise at a later stage are those who project out from the bio-friendly histories". (Sorry, no mention of cats)
11635
submission
Tablizer writes:
Sounds like a bad IT shop-talk joke, but tutoring has finally been outsourced to India. Now you can get that high-end education you always wanted so that you can compete successfully with 3rd-world labor to build perpetual outsourcing....I mean motions machines.
