FCC Reveals Dell Looking Glass Tablet – “Thanks to documents posted over at the Federal Communications Commission’s website, we now have a sneak peek at Dell’s upcoming Looking Glass tablet. The documents cover the testing of the tablet to ensure the device complies with various regulations. Although we certainly can’t get every detail about the tablet from the documents, they do provide a sneak peek at what users should be able to expect from Dell….”

9 Major Stories Everyone Got Wrong This Year – “Earlier this year we took a look at the “Epic Beard Man” meme, which the Internet sold to us as “elderly white war vet stands up to young black thug” instead of the more accurate “mentally disturbed old man has yet another in a long line of violent outbursts on a confused victim.” It turns out that’s not exactly an isolated incident. If we wrote an article every time something went viral based purely on a lack of context, that’s all we’d write about. So we’ve narrowed it down to the biggest stories that the media and the Internet got the most wrong in 2010….”

The Year in Amazing Scientific Discoveries That Weren’t – “That we can even have this category has nothing to do with science “failing,” but with how science has been sucked into the 21st century information cycle. Call it the 24-hour-newsing of science. Maybe it has a little to do with science being awesome and normal people now being served science news on a more regular basis and how the popularization of science is outing religious fundamentalists/science deniers and how important science literacy is in the century of biology. And, oh my, all of the arguing about science….”

Ipad owners also buy Kindles – “The myth that iPad owners are using their shiny toys to read books has finally been shattered after Amazon revealed that Apple fanboys can’t get enough of its eBook reader…” See also: Amazon Now Making As Many Kindles As Apple Is iPads

Forecasters keep eye on looming ‘Solar Max’ – “The coming year will be an important one for space weather as the Sun pulls out of a trough of low activity and heads into a long-awaited and possibly destructive period of turbulence….”

Nintendo warns: No 3-D gaming for young players – “Nintendo is warning parents that its forthcoming 3-D portable game machine may not be appropriate for the youngest gamers. More specifically, that no one under 6 years old should play 3-D games on it….”

WINTER MAY BE COLDEST IN 1000 YEARS – “BRITAIN’S winter is the coldest since 1683 and close to being the chilliest in nearly 1,000 years….”

Have scientists discovered proof our universe wasn’t the first? – “Other universes have been theorized for years—just about every sci-fi TV show has an episode where characters from the universe next door pop in to wreak havoc on our heroes—but now this theory has been bolstered by photographic evidence….”

Researchers: Heat From Exhaust Could Be Harnessed For Improved MPG – “If you’ve ever crept along in gridlock and noticed the floor of your car getting a little warm, or ‘seen’ all the heat energy escaping from a hot exhaust pipe on a cold day, you know that exhaust systems send a lot of heat right out the tailpipe—heat that could potentially be put to use.”

Android’s rise: Five fuelling factors – “How has Android managed to achieve such staggering growth in 2010? Here are the top five reasons behind the Android revolution….”

China preparing for armed conflict ‘in every direction’ – “”In the coming five years, our military will push forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction,” said Liang Guanglie in an interview published by several state-backed newspapers in China. “We may be living in peaceful times, but we can never forget war, never send the horses south or put the bayonets and guns away,” Mr Liang added…”

Interactive: The American Trade Engine – “Americans imported $1.95 trillion worth of goods and services in 2009, and exported $1.57 trillion worth. American crude oil imports totaled $189 billion in 2009–a figure equal to about half the trade deficit. The deficit aside, the United States is a robust exporter of a broad variety of goods and services. Click on the industry colors and lines below to see highlights….”

Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Understimulation – “Boredom has become a serious subject for scientific inquiry. For example, a 25-year study of British civil servants published earlier this year found that some people really can be bored to death: People who complain about “high levels” of boredom in their lives are at double the risk of dying from a stroke or heart disease, the study concluded….”

Researchers have found a parallel computing algorithm that could offer quantum computer-speed performance – “Researchers used an algorithm to evaluate potential speed in classical computation. Called the matrix multiplicative weights update method, it was developed from research in two mathematical fields of study, combinatorial optimization and learning theory. …”

Uncharted 3 Video Preview

Commentary: Have we become a nation of whiners and wimps? – ““We’re becoming a nation of wussies,” Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said the other day after the Vikings-Eagles game in Philadelphia was postponed due to bad weather….”

Nasty, brutish and not that short – “Medieval warfare was just as terrifying as you might imagine…”

German Archeologists Uncover Celtic Treasure – “Archeologists in Germany have discovered a 2,600-year-old Celtic tomb containing ornate jewellery of gold and amber. They say the grave is unusually well preserved and should provide important insights into early Celtic culture….”

Phone firms back common charger plan – “Keeping a smartphone fully powered could soon be easier as manufacturers back common standards for chargers….”

HiRes Download – “We invite you to join us in this evaluation of future consumer delivery formats. FLAC is a lossless encoding of WAV-files derived directly from our production original used for the SACD and Pure Audio Blu-ray. All resolutions and encodings are derived from the same original DXD source files….”

Computer History Museum to highlight storage, from RAMAC to microdrives – “In the 1950s, storage hardware was measured in feet — and in tons. Back then, the era’s state-of-the-art computer drive was found in IBM’s RAMAC 305; it consisted of two refrigerator-size boxes that weighed about a ton each. One box held 40 24-inch dual-sided magnetic disk platters; a carriage with two recording heads suspended by compressed air moved up and down the stack to access the disks. The other cabinet contained the data processing unit, the magnetic process drum, magnetic core register and electronic logical and arithmetic circuits….”

The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard – “Back in the early 80’s, my dad worked at Storage Technology, a now-defunct corporate entity that made tape drives and pneumatic systems to drive these tapes at high speeds – for that period of time….”

Portugal’s drug policy pays off; US eyes lessons – “Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a “drug supermarket” where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneaked into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts – some with maggots squirming under track marks – staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles….”

ESA unveils latest map of world’s land cover – “ESA’s 2009 global land cover map has been released and is now available to the public online from the ‘GlobCover’ website. GlobCover 2009 proves the sharpest possible global land cover map can be created within a year….”

Europe to ban hundreds of herbal remedies – “Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a “discriminatory and disproportionate” European law. With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades…”

U.S. Diplomats Aren’t Stupid After All – “As a journalist covering international affairs, I have long wondered: Are U.S. diplomats ignorant or lying? I have talked to countless numbers of them in dozens of countries in “on background” interviews, that staple of foreign reportage. Readers recognize a background interview by its citation of “a Western diplomat,” and theoretically that anonymity frees the diplomat to talk frankly. But in practice, I’ve found that when that diplomat is American, the result is still often nothing more than warmed-over talking points, displaying a level of knowledge that suggests a cramming of the Wikipedia entry on the country in question. “Of course things could be better, but overall the situation is improving,” they’ll say blandly, while I scribble “BLAH BLAH BLAH” in my notebook, hoping they can’t see it, to maintain the fiction that I’m interested in what they’re saying….”

Coma and general anesthesia demonstrate important similarities – “The brain under general anesthesia isn’t “asleep” as surgery patients are often told — it is placed into a state that is a reversible coma, according to three neuroscientists who have published an extensive review of general anesthesia, sleep and coma, in the Dec. 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. This insight and others reported in their review article could eventually lead to new approaches to general anesthesia and improved diagnosis and treatment for sleep abnormalities and emergence from coma….”

Chicken Powered Steadicam Comparison (chicken, human head, and handheld)

WikiLeaks clones popping up in Europe and beyond – “The perceived successes of WikiLeaks have catalyzed would-be whistle-blowers to launch their own crusades for transparency. The most recent is PirateLeaks.cz, launched by the Czech Pirate Party….”

Sony’s PS3 Security is Epic Fail – Videos Within – “Approximately a half hour in, the team revealed their new PS3 secrets, the moment we all were waiting for. One of the major highlights here was, dongle-less jailbreaking by overwriting the bootup NOR flash, giving complete control over the system. The other major feat, was calculating the public private keys (due to botched security), giving users the ability to sign their own SELFs Following this, the team declared Sony’s security to be EPIC FAIL!”

College Students Are Less Empathic Than Generations Past – “Research presented at the conference of the Association for Psychological Science found that today’s college students are far less empathic than their counterparts 30 years ago…”

[[[Interesting Reading #653 – Fired by a computer, ‘Cuddle Class’ seats on airplanes, Printing food, Memristor AI and much more!]]]

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