How OK Go’s Amazing Rube Goldberg Machine Was Built – “In music, timing is everything. When you’re dancing with an enormous machine, it’s even more important to get the timing correct, down to the microsecond. For its latest video, released on YouTube Monday night, pop band OK Go recruited a gang of very talented engineers to build a huge, elaborate Rube Goldberg machine whose action perfectly meshes with the band’s song, “This Too Shall Pass,” from the band’s new album, Of the Blue Color of the Sky…”

Don’t Hit F1 in Windows If a Web Site Asks You To – “A dialog pop-up that convinces the user to hit F1, the commonly known “Help” button, could then run code on the machine, which would lead to, well, all kinds of unfortunate things…”

Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration? – “Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing…”

WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD Review – “Solid State Storage products are obviously setting the computing market on fire as of late. There is little question that the writing is on the wall. Like the vacuum tube transistors of yesterday, spinning hard drives are bound to go the way of the Dodo bird. It’s only a matter of time; not if, but when. However, the “when” in reality will likely not come for years yet of course. In the Data Center, where ridiculously cheap bulk storage is critical, there is just no substitution for the cost per gigabyte metrics of traditional spinning disk media. However, in the end user notebook and desktop markets, especially where performance is often times a differentiator, SSDs are making huge inroads. It’s only a matter of time (and cost reduction) before SSDs are the de facto standard for notebooks and then comes the desktop. We won’t make any grand predictions here but there’s good reason why the major hard drive manufacturers are lining up now to get some skin in the game…”

Stuntman Breaks Motorbike Jump World Record:

Personalized Medicine on the Spot – “A new device can rapidly test biological samples for genetic variations that could cause dangerous reactions to some drugs…”

Virgin Galactic sees space test flights in 2011 – “Virgin Galactic is aiming to launch test flights into space in 2011, but does not need additional financing after selling a stake to Abu Dhabi’s Abaar last year, its chief executive said on Wednesday…”

Bottled-water sales begin to dry up – “Sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years, assailed by wrathful environmentalists and budget-conscious consumers, who have realized that tap water is practically free. Even Nestle, the country’s largest seller of bottled water, is beginning to feel a bit parched. Last week, it reported that profits for the first half of the year dropped 2.7 percent, its first decline in six years…”

How the Hajj Works

We’re so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong – “It’s possible to get the mental equivalent of whiplash from the latest medical findings, as risk factors are identified one year and exonerated the next. According to a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, this isn’t a failure of medical research; it’s a failure of statistics, and one that is becoming more common in fields ranging from genomics to astronomy. The problem is that our statistical tools for evaluating the probability of error haven’t kept pace with our own successes, in the form of our ability to obtain massive data sets and perform multiple tests on them. Even given a low tolerance for error, the sheer number of tests performed ensures that some of them will produce erroneous results at random. ..” See also: Lab Rats’ Pampered Lifestyles Found to Skew Research Results

How I Got $8 Glasses – “A couple of years ago in college, I found out that I needed to get new glasses, yet again. At this point, I was no longer underneath my parental coverage, and as such, could not get them to cover the incredibly expensive cost of a new prescription and new glasses. Even if I got “cheap” frames, at about $150, I’d still have to pay for the lenses, which would double the cost to about $300. That was money I simply didn’t have. Luckily, I had been reading a couple of personal finance websites, and one of them mentioned buying glasses online for cheaper. So I looked at a couple of websites, and wandered around online, cautiously collecting information. I was hesitant for a couple of reasons. First, this was a classic “too good to be true” situation. Why would glasses that regularly cost hundreds of dollars be sold for so much cheaper? Something must not be right. Second, even if they were legitimate, how could I guarantee that they would look good on me without trying them on first?”

ISRO full steam on ‘man mission’ – “The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has started work on its most ambitious project yet – sending humans into space. The government has approved research and development work relating to the manned space mission. It has okayed start of pre- project R&D activities leading to detailed definition of the manned mission, according to the budget presented in Parliament this week…”

Energy Required To Produce a Pound of Food – One thing it explains is why everything is made of corn these days.

Weird Science to the Rescue – “Climate change is no longer an impending catastrophe to be averted, but an existing condition to be managed. That was the sentiment among scientists at this year’s annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego. Just as the world at large seems to be coming to terms with the reality of a warming planet, so too, it seems, science is moving beyond hope of reversal and instead focusing on experimental new measures designed to contain the damage…”

Will ‘Marriage Ref’ Ruin Seinfeld’s Legacy? – “The one star who appeared to be immune from the curse was Jerry Seinfeld who enjoyed relative success in stand-up comedy despite ill-conceived endeavors such as Bee Movie. But now with his new near-universally loathed show The Marriage Ref his legacy seems more threatened than ever. Here’s what entertainment critics are making of the man who brought America arguably the best sitcom of all time…”

Fun with dry ice:

Hella number: scientists call for new word for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – “A campaign for “hella” to join the likes of “kilo”, “mega” and “giga” as an internationally accepted prefix is attracting growing support. More than 20,000 scientists, students and members of the public have signed an online petition backing the new quantity, which would be used for figures with 27 zeros after the first digit…”

21 Apps Apple Doesn’t Want on Your iPhone – “The past year of Apple updates has certainly altered the pre-3.0 iPhone jailbreaking landscape. Yet ongoing developer and user frustration with Apple’s enigmatic app acceptability rules, as well as Apple’s deliberate hobbling of many application capabilities, make for a jailbreaking community that is as vibrant as ever. The following 21 apps today run only on jailbroken iPhones. Some may even prove precursors to features released in future Apple iPhone firmware updates…”

The Difference Between 3G Mobile Internet and WiFi Wireless Networks – “I’ve noticed that quite a few people are confused by wireless internet media, more specifically 3G and WiFi. Every time I try and explain it, I end up drawing a rough sketch outlining the differences. Here’s a neat diagram showing the difference between the two…”

Cheese Thief Jailed for 7 Years in California – “On Monday, more than a year after a man was arrested outside a market in California with a $3.99 bag of Tillamook shredded cheese in his pants he had not paid for, a judge decided to go relatively easy on him, sentencing him to seven years and eight months in jail…”

Free will is an illusion, biologist says – “When biologist Anthony Cashmore claims that the concept of free will is an illusion, he’s not breaking any new ground. At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how humans seem to have the ability to make their own personal decisions in a manner lacking any causal component other than their desire to “will” something. But Cashmore, Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, says that many biologists today still cling to the idea of free will, and reject the idea that we are simply conscious machines, completely controlled by a combination of our chemistry and external environmental forces…”

Foodborne Illnesses Costs U.S. $152 Billion a Year – “America’s health care tab for foodborne illnesses is $152 billion a year. That’s the finding of a study by a Pew Charitable Trust project on food safety. The research shows a substantially higher cost than previous estimates (a U.S. Department of Agriculture figure put the number at $6.9 billion a year). The current research includes illnesses from a wider base of sources and includes pain and suffering losses related to illnesses…”

Spanish police arrest masterminds of ‘massive’ botnet – “It is estimated that the so-called Mariposa botnet was made up of nearly 13 million computers in 190 countries. It included PCs inside more than half of Fortune 1000 companies and more than 40 major banks, investigators said…”

Intel Jumps Into the E-Reader Competition – “The new convertible Classmate PC has an Intel Atom processor, 10.1-inch display, up to 160 GB hard drive including both solid state and disk drive options, up to 8.5 hours of battery life, a resistive touchscreen, and a range of wireless connectivity options including Wi-Fi and WiMax. The device also has a 1.3 megapixel rotating camera and two speaker jacks…”

Digital Billboards, Diversions Drivers Can’t Escape – “Safety advocates who worry about the dangers of distracted driving have a new concern beyond cellphones and gadget-laden dashboards: digital roadside billboards…”

10 Companies Reinventing Our Energy Infrastructure – “When most people think about changing the way America uses energy, they imagine new ways of generating electricity like solar farms or new nuclear reactors…”

Be Sad and Succeed – “Next time you find yourself in a bad mood, don’t try to put on a happy face—instead tackle a project that has been stymieing you. Melancholy might just help you hit peak performance…”

[[[Jump to - Interesting Reading #429 – Some people attach to Roombas like pets, nose scanning, robot hummingbirds, kids need “dangerous” childhood and much more…]]]