Archive for January, 2011

Nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards, which will take place on February 27, have been announced. So you know what that means — you have about a month to plan your Oscar party and only a couple weeks to get those e-mail invitations out there. FYI — Evite has a few awards party themes to choose from if you need some help on that front. But before you get carried away on what that invite looks like, you need to decide the essentials: who to invite and when they should arrive.

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There are now three companies, with three different technologies, that are claiming they can eliminate fossil fuels and replace them with something green and much less expensive. We have already talked about Joule Unlimited, which claims it can use modified E. coli bacteria to create diesel fuel at a $30/barrel equivalent price: The impossible has [...]

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‘Wave and pay’ technology for iPhone 5 – “Apple is expected to install “wave and pay” technology for the next version of its iPhone, boosting mobile commerce and potentially giving the company a big piece of the multibillion-dollar transaction industry…” Breakthrough promises $1.50 per gallon synthetic gasoline with no carbon emissions – “UK-based Cella Energy [...]

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Like vampires, bedbugs feed on your blood. And it hurts.

But it’s worse than that. These little blood-sucking beasts have been evolving to resist the pesticides we’ve developed to make them go bye-bye. That’s why they’re in your hotel bed, Mr. and Ms. Traveler.

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Cool thing I came across today: drowned towns; towns that have become submerged as the result of a dam constructed nearby. That water’s got to go somewhere and when it backs up, a surprising amount of small towns around the world have been abandoned in sacrifice.

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One of my coworkers pointed this article out to me late last week and I thought it would make a great post. Poor e-mail etiquette in the workplace is devastatingly common, and often carries serious consequences. Coworkers can get the impression you’re careless, abrupt, insipid, disrespectful, snooty and so on, simply because your e-mailing style is a little off. (Of course, if one of those adjectives applies to you anyway, this probably won’t really help.) So if you suspect you’re not the most savvy when it comes to shooting off work e-mails, we’re here to help.

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One thing that I personally enjoy is reconceptualizations. For example, the idea of solar road made of glass is a fantastic reconceptualization of what a road can be: It takes what is normally a completely passive, non-productive surface (an asphalt road) and turns it into something that produces power, displays messages, and transmits power and [...]

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Something interesting showed up in my Twitter feed yesterday — a link to a podcast from Buddhist Geeks called “Gaming as a Spiritual Practice.” It’s a discussion with game designer Jane McGonigal on how games can work to end suffering. (In other words, it’s the near-opposite of the usual coverage of games in the media.)

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Imagine that you would like to take satellite photos like those seen in Google Earth. The traditional way to do it, obviously, is to launch a satellite. But there are at least five problems with this approach: Satellites themselves are expensive to build Satellites are even more expensive to launch (some estimates put the cost [...]

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Many people who go to see a 3D movie get a headache about 20 minutes into the movie. And even if you don’t get a headache, you may notice that your eyes don’t feel right. It could be anything from excessive tearing to an achiness that makes you take off the glasses and rub your [...]

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