Archive for July, 2010

I play kickball and it’s a ton of fun. Unfortunately, not being a baseball fan, I still struggle with understanding all of the rules. So the post on how to play kickball will have to wait. What I can speak on, however, is what to do when you’ve torn a muscle. Because I’ve managed to master that particular party foul.

About two weeks ago during kickball practice, I accidentally tore the crap out of my right quad muscle. If you’ve never torn a muscle, or it’s been a while since you have, let me remind you what it’s like: immediate-and-excruciating-drop-to-the-ground-and-roll-around-sobbing-hysterically level agony. I did not, however, act on that impulse, owing to the fact that I’m technically a grownup and I try to behave like one as often as possible. What I did do was attempt one more kick to determine whether or not it really was a game-over intensity injury, then quickly deciding this was the case, I limped pitifully in defeat to deep right field where I proceeded to pray the ball would not be kicked. (It was. Repeatedly.)

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Taking (yet another) cue from Jamie Keiles, whose Seventeen Magazine Project, prompted my little foray into Cosmoland, I wanted to see what types of products are advertised in its pages. This breakdown doesn’t include all of the advertorial items included in the what-to-wear, how-to-be-beautiful sections, but rather the actual ad spots. As expected, there’s a [...]

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So… after writing the drain unclogging post, I was left with this question that has been nagging me all day… how DO people shave their heads? Here is one answer, using a combination of a high-performance electric shaver and a traditional razor…

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I’ve been reading about energy transference in animals of late, and the data clashes in interesting ways with the current state of our electrical grid and our hopes for a smart grid future. It’s tempting to run to the biomimetic principle of “nature always designs it better” and look to the animal and plant worlds for energy efficient inspiration. But when you look closer, you start running into trouble.

Plant Energy vs. Animal Energy
Plants that get their energy directly from the sun (through photosynthesis) are the most energy-efficient organisms on the planet. They absorb a renewable energy source and use or store all of it. That’s the bottom of the food chain — the base of the pyramid.

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Who would have thought that something so incredibly simple could work so well to unclog a drain? And that unclogging a drain would be so funny?

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The Automotive X Prize has a simple goal: Find production-capable cars that get 100 MPG or more. Production-capable means these cars are real – they are designed to be safe, reliable and manufacturable, and they don’t run on fairy dust.

Looking at the nine finalists, you can see that this is not such an easy challenge – most of the finalist cars look pretty “weird” by normal-car standards. But then, maybe one day these X Prize cars will all start to look normal if they are successful. Most of the cars are electric cars – unusual by today’s standards where almost all cars on the road are gas-powered.

You can see how “weird” some of the cars look, and also see how they are being tested for safety by Consumer Reports, in this video…

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Imagine that, every time you buy something, you steal a little money from someone else. Would that be fair? Probably not. But that is what this article is proposing…

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You can now buy the first “real” production electric motorcycle. The word “real” means it can go 100+ miles per hour like a real gas-powered motorcycle can, as opposed to being a slower “commuter” bike. It also has “real” range – up to 100 miles depending on the model you buy.

The new motorcycle is called the Empulse from Brammo, as described here…

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Given California’s history of earthquakes and major fault lines, it’s not surprising that people speculate about parts of California breaking off into the ocean. Fortunately, seismic forces don’t work that way, as Marshall Brain explains in this episode.

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Statistical evidence suggests that men are very preoccupied with the size of their penises. But should they be? In this episode, Molly and Cristen examine statistics and syndromes and debunk some myths in their quest to answer this age-old question.

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