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POPSWar on Blogs? Hmm. . . could this have something to do with the user comments on the ill-fated Tom DeLay Blog?
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POPS10 Most Brilliant Gadgets Of 2008 Popular Mechanics announced its picks for the 2008 Breakthrough Awards awards in what the publication called The 10 Most Brilliant Gadets of the Year. Here's the list of international winners; you may be surprised at the gadgets on the list.
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POPSThe Future of Reading The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet
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POPSThey just don't fear heaven and earth "If anything, they are superior in many ways to us. Thinking too much about the future or worrying too much about the past is really unhealthy. The Pirahã taught me that very lesson. Living in the moment is a sophisticated way to live. I don't see depression. I don't see some of the things that afflict our society - and that's not because they don't face pressures." An interesting story.
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POPSWildlife of Madagascar - pics 2 Avahi occidentalis A western woolly lemur. Scientists have used specially developed software to create detailed maps of how species are distributed on the island down to a per kilometre level 3 Avahi laniger An eastern woolly lemur. Data was collected on the exact locations of more than 2,300 Malagasy species from six major groups: lemurs, butterflies, frogs, geckos, ants and plants 4 Daubentonia madagascariensis An aye-aye. The world's largest nocturnal primate is found only in Madagascar and well known for its unique method of finding food: it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out 5 The Indri indri, one of the largest lemurs. The scientists say the Madagascar model could be used for other biodiversity hot spots around the world by helping scientists to predict where species might go for refuge when habitats are endangered by climate change
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POPSThe Lost Cities of the Cloud People
more: Much about the Cloud People is shrouded in mystery. As recently as 2008, a lost Chachapoya city was discovered in the isolated Amazon rainforest during an archaeological expedition to Peru’s Jamalca district, about five hundred miles north-east of Lima. The fortified citadel was found to contain the walls of buildings and rock paintings, and perched on the edge of a chasm – literally carved into the Andes – it may have been used by the Cloud People to keep a lookout for enemies Little is known about the Chachapoyas as they left no written records, but it appears their culture began to prosper in the 9th century, when their towering cities were developed, possibly as defensive measures against invading Huaris. However, five hundred years on, their fortunes faltered with the spread of the Inca Empire. Despite fierce resistance, the Cloud People were conquered by the Incas, and were by turns rebelling and being suppressed when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1535.
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POPSWildlife in the DMZ: Vanishing rainforest of the Congo basin 1, The demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating South and North Korea is home to over 1,000 plant species and rare animals. The DMZ Forum is a lobby group promoting the idea of turning the area into a nature reserve. 2. The forest is the world's biggest after the Amazon. Now Britain and Norway have created a £108m fund to help protect it from logging and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Congo basin forest is home to around 50 million people in six countries including Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Congo-Brazzaville. The Congo basin forest is twice the size of France and exceeded in size only by the Amazon. It is estimated that logging - much of it illegal - destroys an area the size of 25,000 football pitches every week. The UN estimates that at present rates two-thirds of the forest will have vanished by the year 2040.
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POPSAll-girl fish that hasn't had sex for 70,000 years According to the report in the BMC Evolutionary Biology journal, one theory is that the fish may occasionally be taking some of the DNA from the males that trigger reproduction, in order to refresh their gene pool. Dr Laurence Loewe, of the university's School of Biological Sciences, said: "What we have shown now is that this fish really has something special going on and that some special tricks exist to help this fish survive. "Maybe there is still occasional sex with strangers that keeps the species alive. Future research may give us some answers."
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POPSElectronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.
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POPSThe End of Aging - Still a Controvertial Vision Leon Kass and his friends are contemporary incarnations of an Orwellian nightmare. Besides "War is Peace", I hear also "Death is Life". Of course there are no known social good coming from the conquest of death, we never lived in a social system that conquered death. How could we possibly know? But Kass and his friends, seem to have some privileged knowledge we do not possess, and they already decided for us as individuals and as a society. Well, in time, I believe, they will have the choice to walk their talk. All I want is a chance to walk mine.
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POPSDarwin's entire works go online I love seeing amazing resources like this being made available online! I know bookchick clipped the pilot site for this a while back, but now all of Darwin's works are up.
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POPSAlone Together - Loneliness myth - very intersting !
"Hampton says he views the Internet as the ultimate city, the last stop on the continuum of human connectedness. I’d argue that New York and the Internet are about the same, in the way that a large bookstore feels like it offers just as many possibilities as Amazon.com—maybe slightly less inventory, but more opportunities to stumble on things you might not have otherwise. Whichever the case, what the Internet and New York have in common is that each environment facilitates interaction between individuals like no other, and both would be positively useless—would literally lose their raison d’être—if solitary individuals didn’t furiously interact in each. They show us, in trillions of invisible ways every day, that people are essentially nothing without one another. We may sometimes want to throttle our fellow travelers on the F train. We may on occasion curse our neighbors for playing music so loud it splits the floor. But living cheek-by-jowl is the necessary price we pay .."
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