Archive for January, 2010

It turns out that this is so easy. It doesn’t matter if you are sincere or not. It doesn’t matter how cheesy the flattery is. The way to flatter someone is simply to flatter someone. Research is indicating that it works every time: Flattery Will Get You Far The basic theory is that, even when [...]

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Moscow, the largest city in Russia, is a bustling megacity with a storied past and a burgeoning future. Learn more about Russia’s capital city in this episode of The Coolest Stuff on the Planet.

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Now that every studio on the planet is trying to get into the reboot biz, so-called Americanizations have lost a bit of their luster. Primarily reserved for horror movies and TV adaptations, these American remakes of foreign works have garnered vats of money for the studios, but little in the way of real prestige. Until now. Maybe.

Amidst all the reboots, 2010 will also usher in two of the more highly anticipated American remakes in recent years: April’s “Death at a Funeral” and October’s “Let Me In.”

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The myth of the Sony ‘kill switch’ – “In Japan, a surprising number of consumers really do claim to believe that Sony products are programmed to break as soon as the warranty expires…” Report: Fifty Apple Tablets Detected Online – “Flurry Analytics said Monday that their monitoring software has detected what the company claims are [...]

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At first thought, weaponry seems like a bad addition to the Olympics (unless we’re talking marksmanship, archery or, if you want to go ancient, javelin and shot-put). However, there’s a role for weapons in the Olympics that doesn’t culminate in competition or a swift arrest — it just involves a quick, compulsory melting.

London’s Metropolitan Police force recently announced that 58 tons of confiscated guns and knives — plus some keys thrown in for good measure — will be recycled into girders for the 2012 Olympic Games site in Stratford, East London.

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You Asked: How do bears survive the winter in hibernation without dehydrating? — Mike, Stockholm, Sweden Marshall Brain Answers: Many different mammals hibernate. In some species, body temperature can drop down near the freezing point. Heart rate and breathing rates slow way down as well. Bears do not hibernate nearly that deeply, but their body [...]

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The fastest text-input method is obvious – it is the keyboard. But what is the second-fastest? Now you can find out: Pen v keyboard v Newton v Graffiti v Treo v iPhone For some time I’ve been meaning to test my small collection of PDA/smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was [...]

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Wednesday can’t get here fast enough. Either Steve Jobs will finally unveil the long-rumored Apple tablet computer device or legions of Apple fans (and tech journalists) will collectively lose their minds. Whispers and claims and even videos about the mythical device have hit a new high. If Jobs doesn’t debut a tablet device at Apple’s big press event on Wednesday, there may be a riot.

But with all the speculation, rumors and information about the tablet flying around the Internet these days I’m still left with a question: Who is going to buy a tablet computer?

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So you may have heard about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to reverse longstanding limitations that banned corporations from directly contributing financially in elections. It’s kind of a big deal.

As reported in the Washington Post, for a few decades now, corporations have been limited to contributing to political action committees, which have set limits of $5,000 per calendar year, and kept corporations away from contributing to a candidate directly. Of course, there are always loopholes: Corporations have a way of strongly suggesting to its rising stars that contributing to a certain campaign would probably be good for the old career. Maybe even those employees’ bonuses later in the year will reflect an additional amount of the same sum they contributed. So you’ve got a few execs writing $5,000 checks to a Political Action Committee. It’s disingenuous, but tolerable. The limits for individual campaigns are even narrower: $2,400 per candidate, per election.

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Reconceptualizing the wedding invitation: How long before there is a whole new wedding sub-industry – people making custom wedding invitation videos for people? According to this article: “Over $120 billion dollars are spent by soon-to-be newlyweds on items needed leading up to and after a wedding. It is an incredible industry to become a part [...]

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