Comment Mod parent up - informative (Score 0) 642
mod up, please
Comment Re:Thats it? (Score 1) 243
Rest easy... There is factual information, but it has nothing to do with the actual article.
Comment Not the same device! (Score 5, Informative) 243
The spec sheet is for something different: instead of 4.8'' it is 2.4''; instead of 16.8M colors it displays 260k colors, and it is only 320x240 pixels (at 170 ppi). It appears to be a spec sheet for their previous announcement. I can't find anything about the current announcement on the Ortustech website...
Comment skunkpost, on the other hand, (Score 5, Funny) 162
not being hosted in the state-of-the-art facility, has its server on fire
New York To Spend $27.5 Million Uncapitalizing Street Signs 322
250,000 street signs in New York City feature street names in capital letters only, which is not the national standard. Having no other issues on the table, The New York City Department of Transportation has decided to fix the problem and put up proper signs featuring both capital and lower-case letters at a cost of $27.5 million. The Transportation Department hopes to have the job completed by 2018 with 11,000 of the most important improperly capitaled signs fixed by the end of the year. Catastrophe averted.
Comment 007 (Score 1) 342
My name is...
Comment In fact, 50% of Pi digits are 0... (Score 1) 299
... since it is in binary.
Unless there is some pattern.
Comment And the real winner is... (Score 1) 758
TPB
Over a Third of the Internet Is Pornographic 247
Th'Inquisitor writes "Pornography makes up 37% of the total number of web pages online, according to a new study published by Optenet, a SaaS provider. According to the report, which looked at a representative sample of around four million extracted URLs, adult content on the Internet increased by 17% in the first quarter of 2010, as compared to the same period in 2009."
Snails On Methamphetamine 93
sciencehabit writes "Science answers the question: What happens when you put a snail on speed? From the article: 'The results suggest that meth improves memory, something that has been previously observed in creatures with large, complex brains like rats and humans. But since the snails store their memories in a simple, three-neuron network, the team hopes that studying the meth effect in these gastropods will help pinpoint how the drug's memory magnification powers work.'"
Comment Re:Bioinformatics (Score 1) 398
I second that. Just in the past month or two, there has been:
- a Neanderthal genome sequenced
- a genome from two different types of human cancers
- genomes sequenced of a pair of identical twins, one twin has multiple sclerosis, the other doesn't
ALL of this data is in public databases. You can either access it through various web interfaces, or just download the sequences as text files, work with them offline. I am sure there is a lot of interesting information in it, just waiting to be discovered. If you are interested, check out http://www.genome.ucsc.edu/Neandertal/. Brush up on Perl, read up on BioPerl if you want, and dig away!
- a Neanderthal genome sequenced
- a genome from two different types of human cancers
- genomes sequenced of a pair of identical twins, one twin has multiple sclerosis, the other doesn't
ALL of this data is in public databases. You can either access it through various web interfaces, or just download the sequences as text files, work with them offline. I am sure there is a lot of interesting information in it, just waiting to be discovered. If you are interested, check out http://www.genome.ucsc.edu/Neandertal/. Brush up on Perl, read up on BioPerl if you want, and dig away!
Comment publicly available data (Score 1) 398
There are piles of astronomy data that are publicly available - you just need to write the software to dig through it. I remember a few of years ago there was a paper in the top science journal Nature in which the authors found a snow/ice/dry ice outcrop on Mars that was not there in some earlier images of the area, but appeared in some of the more recent ones. All the raw images are available online, someone just had to find this needle in the haystack. So, if you have an interesting idea, you should be able to pursue it even without astronomic equipment.
Btw., the original Nature article is here (if you have a subscription):
http://www.nature.com/nature/foxtrot/svc/mailform?doi=10.1038/444800a&file=/nature/journal/v444/n7121/full/444800a.html
The 'before' and 'after' images are available, for example, here:
http://popsci.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/marswater.jpg
Comment 3309 (Score 1) 145
While I don't remember my current phone number, I still remember my family's phone number back from when I was 6 years old. But maybe it has something to do with the fact that it was just 4 digits: 3309.
The year was 1979, and we lived in what was then the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
Comment Laser pointer (Score 1) 74
That's the laser I actually use the most... Even though I run a microscopy lab that uses all kinds of lasers (Ar, He, He-Ne, dye, also two femtosecond titanium:sapphire lasers).
Comment Re:First time? (Score 1) 739
1998 or 1999. I realized the modem didn't work, so I booted into Win95, read about it online, booted linux, tried the suggestions, booted into Win95, read some more, booted into linux, tried it, booted Win95,... for the rest of the day. Then I gave up.
