Twitter on Nightline

Nightline's tongue-in-cheek piece on the phenomena that is Twitter.

Why the Japanese hate the iPhone

Apple's iPhone is a hit with the majority of the world, but not in Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it's being offered for free.

What's wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it's not Japanese.

Besides cultural opposition, Japanese citizens possess high, complex standards when it comes to cellphones. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos -- and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner.

These t-shirts were tested on animals

Always endlessly amused by Top Gear's sense of humor.

4085 square mile natural mirror

The world's largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni in Southwestern Bolivia (near the crest of the Andes, 3,650 meters high), is one of the most exotic place sceneries on earth. There is an estimated 10 billion tons of salt in the flats, 25 times the amount in the Bonneville Salt flats in Utah in the United States. The 4085 square mile salt flat looks like a scene from another planet. The endless sea of white salt is paired with small islands, which are small rocky hills of earth cluttered with odd plants such as cacti. The flats were once part of a large lake more than 40,000 years ago.

Continue Reading "4085 square mile natural mirror"

A fish with a transparent head

Macropinna microstoma is the fish with the see-through head.

The common name for the fish is "barreleyes." Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute investigators recently figured out why this species has such an unusual head. Its eyes can actually rotate within its "skull," so the transparency allows the wary swimmer to keep a literal eye on happenings above it, as well as to the sides and directly in front.

Replacing things lost

Amy DePaul writes about the unlikely intersection of breast cancer and breast augmentation.

He pulled out his pen and opened his file and began asking questions, looking over my medical information: Do you smoke? No. Did they find cancer when you had your cervical cone biopsy? No. "Good," he said. And then: "What is your current bra and cup size, and what would you like to move up to?"

Huh?

Stephen Colbert dials up the 1997 internet

Stephen Colbert takes us on a trip down memory lane. Briefly anyways.

I did some pretty embarrassing things in 1997, but it all pales in comparison to what the internet was doing in 1997. Back then, the internet was basically five chat rooms, Hamster Dance and a bulletin board for fake Star Trek nudes. How did we not all kill ourselves?

For everyone's sake, I think we should agree to pretend the internet was invented in 2006. I, for one, won't be able to someday look my grandchildren in the eye and tell them I once was content with sub-1080p furry porn.

Man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's temple

A retired farmer has spent more than 30 years building an enormous scale model of Herod's temple, and it's still not quite finished.

Broadway closing down car traffic

New York plans to close several blocks of Broadway to vehicle traffic through Times Square and Herald Square, an experiment to reduce traffic congestion in Midtown and turn the streets into pedestrian malls.

Although it seems counterintuitive, officials believe the move will actually improve the overall flow of traffic, because the diagonal path of Broadway tends to disrupt traffic where it intersects with other streets.

The city plans to introduce the changes as early as May and keep them in effect through the end of the year. If the experiment works, they could become permanent.

Andy Richter joining Conan O'Brien

Andy Richter will be joining Conan O'Brien, as the two take over the Tonight Show reins from Jay Leno this summer.

This time around, however, instead of serving as O'Brien's on-air wingman, Richter will take the role of full-service announcer. In addition to serving as Tonight's official voice, he will also regularly appear in comedy bits.

"Andy is one of the funniest people I know, and we've maintained a close friendship since he left Late Night," O'Brien said. "We have a proven chemistry that will be an incredible asset to The Tonight Show."

An email from the FBI

I dunno, this email from the FBI looks pretty legit.

Girl raised by dogs in her home after her alcoholic mother neglected her

A three-year-old girl has been found being cared for by dogs while her alcoholic mother neglected her.

Social workers discovered the girl in her mother's house in Russia, naked and walking on all fours, gnawing bones with the dogs who she clung to for warmth.

The child, called Madina, only knows two words - yes and no - and growls like a dog when people come too close.

Explanation of Gmail's outage

Gmail had a major outage yesterday morning and here's Google's official explanation.

This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

Effects shop fulfills amputee's mermaid dream

Good: double amputee gets prosthetic legs so she can walk. Better: double amputee gets realistic-looking mermaid tail so she can swim. Awesome: it's developed and built by Weta, the special-effects company that did all the work for the "Lord of the Rings" movies, as well as "King Kong" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" series.

The Anti-Bono

The New York Times interviews Dambisa Moyo, who believes we should stop giving aid to Africa. Instead, she believes we should invest in microfinance, giving money instead as loans to African entrepreneurs.

Q:You argue in your book that Western aid to Africa has not only perpetuated poverty but also worsened it, and you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.

Think about it this way -- China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.

Q: Maybe that's because they have so much money that we here in the U.S. are begging the Chinese for loans.

Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

Q: What do you think has held back Africans?

I believe it's largely aid. You get the corruption -- historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty -- and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

Anatomy of a crash

This is a reconstruction of a crash from the perspective of the car's computer. Everything happens before the driver is even aware of the collision.

0 milliseconds - An external object touches the driver's door.

1 ms - The car's door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.

2 ms - An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.

2.5 ms - A sensor in the car's centre detects crash vibrations.

5 ms - Car's crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.

6.5 ms - Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures.

7 ms - Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions.

8 ms - Computer sends a "fire" signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.

8.5 ms - Side airbag system fires.

15 ms - Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.

17 ms - Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load.
Airbag covers occupant's chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone.

20 ms - Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant's chest away from the impact.

27 ms - Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A "pusher block" in the seat moves occupant's pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation.

30 ms - The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.

45 ms - Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure.

50 ms - Crash computer unlocks car's doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant.

70 ms - Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car.
Engineers classify crash as "complete".

150-300 ms - Occupant becomes aware of collision.

The Real Shaq

After Shaq tweets that he's hanging out at a local diner in Phoenix, two nervous Twitter users venture out to see if THE_REAL_SHAQ is actually the real Shaq.

Returning to our hushed whispers I asked Sean, "Should we go talk to him now?" "I don't know, should we?"

"Yes, you should" a very deep voice entered our conversation from 2 booths over.

Legislation introduced to legalize marijuana

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano will announce legislation to legalize marijuana and earn perhaps $1 billion annually by taxing it. It's highly ambitious, though I see very little chance of this passing.

Mecke said Ammiano's proposed bill "would remove all penalties in California law on cultivation, transportation, sale, purchase, possession, or use of marijuana, natural THC, or paraphernalia for persons over the age of 21."

Welded Dif, What the hell!!!

I can't tell if this is a troll or not, but I'm really hoping it's real. Mostly because I want to believe somebody actually thought welding their gears together for traction would work.

Alright, after reading a ton of threads on welding up gears for extra traction, i went ahead and welded mine up.

I put the third back in and went to pull out of my garage, and I just roasted my clutch. I figured that maybe there was some slag left in the bearing, so i dropped it in 4lo and lo and behold something broke loose.
MY FUCKING DRIVE LINE.

I'm really pissed at all this BS talk. I welded my junk really wel. And now my driveline is twisted up like a damn pretzel.

You are all a bunch of shit talkin Jerks.

What the hell did you all do differently?

PepsiCo dropping the terrible new Tropicana packaging

PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to their Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, and the previous version will be brought back in the next month.

Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.

The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.

Some of those commenting described the new packaging as "ugly" or "stupid," and resembling "a generic bargain brand" or a "store brand."

"Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?" the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. "Because I do, and the new cartons stink."

Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana or differentiate Tropicana from other orange juices.

Nate Silver explains his missed Oscar predictions

The man behind FiveThirtyEight.com went four for six in his Oscar predictions, and here he breaks down the reasons for the misses.

The advantage in making a subjective judgment is that you may be able to account for information that is hard to quantify -- for example, Rourke's behavioral problems or the politics of Sean Penn playing a gay icon in a year where Hollywood felt very guilty about the passage of Proposition 8. The disadvantage is that human beings have all sorts of cognitive biases, and it's easy to allow these biases to color one's thinking. I would guess, for instance, that most critics would have trouble decoupling the question of who they thought should win the Oscars -- those performances they liked the best personally -- from who they thought actually would win them.

You can see Nate Silver's original Oscar predictions here.

How Kate Winslet won her Oscar

Her brilliant strategy revealed by Ricky Gervais' Extras.

An important message from the global entertainment industry

The internet will definitely be the end of...something. I guess.