Facebook Saga

More love from Facebook:
(ongoing)

• 2011/May: "Facebook Admits to Smearing Google." (shocker)
  
• 2010/June: Apparently Facebooks CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was at a lack of words when questioned about privacy. Sharon Gaudin, from Computerworld writes "Facebook's CEO sidestepped questions about facebook privacy rather than giving the audience real, thoughtful answers. ... Facebook has been knocked about recently because of user concerns that the social networking firm is playing fast and loose with user information. Criticism mounted significantly last month after Facebook unveiled a bevy of tools that allow user information to be shared with other Web sites."
• 2010/June: Also, in a possible method to cash in on all of this, Adam Jensen from the Tahoe Daily Tribune notes: "A South Lake Tahoe man has sued Facebook, claiming the social networking website violated its privacy policy by divulging personal information to advertisers."

Buddhist sand mandala

From CNN's June 2nd 2010 article titled: A masterpiece in minutes

"It took six days for a group of Buddhist monks to create an extravagant sand mandala at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. But you can watch the entire process in about two minutes thanks to the time-lapse video"



Detail of the work:

Tuckers Law

Tuckers Law: It basically covers how bad things will be made worse at the least convenient time, around unreliable people.

(headphones only, and please avoid contact with woman and children.) - this clip comes from the movie In the Loop, and is spoken by the character Malcolm Tucker, who has some of the most hilariously vulgar lines ever heard on film.



And along those lines, Here's a clever photo...

Top 500 supercomputer list

BBC has a nice graphic (tree map) showing the top supercomputers based on speed, OS, app, country, processor and manufacturer.

As far as the winners: Linux is by far the largest, with the most overall systems in the US, Intel has over 50% of the market, and IBM being the most prevalent.

Memorial Day

See Clay Bennett @ Chattanooga Times Free Press

Where Sunscreen?

Baz Luhrmann once wrote a song titled Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). (It actually has a good back channel story to it.) But apparently, that advice is maybe not so good.


SFGate has a story where a Green group compares sunscreen to snake oil. Some of the things they point out is:


"...EWG was so un-impressed with the results of its survey that the group's Vice President Jane Houlihan compared sunscreens to "modern-day snake oil, plying customers with claims of broad-spectrum protection but not providing it, while exposing people to potentially hazardous chemicals that can penetrate the skin into the body."

Ingredients to avoid are retinyl palmitate (Vitamin A) and oxybenzone. The best suncreens, according to the survey, are:

• Badger Unscented, SPF 30
• California Baby Sunblock Stick, No Scent, SPF 30
• Loving Naturals, SPF 30
• Soleo Organics All Natural, SPF 30
• thinkbaby/thinksport, SPF 30
• UV Natural Baby Sunscreen and Sunscreen Sport, SPF 30
• Purple Prarie Botanicals, SunStuff or Sun Stick, SPF 30"

Floating lighthouse seeks harbor to call home

Okok...

So I'm not really interested in having a light house boat. But for free, it could be a cool thing to tool around the bay in. (maybe?) ...128 feet long, probably a lot of berths. Never have to worry about folks bumping into you where ever your park it...

...Or maybe I'm just totaly obsessed with the idea of having a horn that is "so powerful they caused the ship to shiver with the sound", or described as "so loud it was "an instrument of the devil, a device designed in hell for the specific purpose of torture," wrote James Gill, founder of the U.S. Lighthouse Society."

hmmmm... yep. gotta have it...

An Oops Moment

An older (April 12, 2010) Znet article notes: "Here’s a small safety tip. When you’re telling a 361-foot long, billion dollar submarine where to go, turn off your iPod. That’s what a Navy JAG investigation determined last week when it announced its analysis of the collision of the USS Hartford fast attack submarine, when the sub bashed into the USS New Orleans a year ago."

mad-scientist coffee machine

Make has a neat article on how to build a "Florence Siphon Arabica Brewing & Extraction Apparatus".

It's a cool way to work. Put the coffee grounds in the left beaker with a filtered tube, and the water in the airtight container on the right. Boil the water and send it to the coffee grounds. When the boiler cools, the vacuum will pull the coffee back through, and voila!

The nector of the gods is fattening....

As I have aged, I have noticed that, I have started to be more like my french counterpart Obelix. As in, it's not that I'm fat, just my chest slipped.

Quite randomly, I've come to notice that this has some parallels to the 6-10 20oz. Mt. Dew bottles I used to drink a week.

Seems that one bottle of this wonderful green holy water comes with 275 calories, and 77.5 grams of sugar. (13.7 cal, 3.9g sugar per 1oz.)

To compare, a sweet dunkin donuts coffee has no sugar, and 10 calories for a big 14oz cup. (.7 cal, 0g sugar per 1oz.) ...okok, spice it up with 3 spoons of sugar and you still only add 18g or sugar, and 75 cal. total.

Breaking this out we get:

	MtDew	DD Coffee
cal./oz	13.75	0.7
g sugar/oz	3.9	0
serving	20oz bottle	14 oz med.cup (3sp sugar)
cal	275	85
g sugar	77.5	18

This basically means that for every med cup of coffee I drink instead of a Mt. Dew, it's 1.6 miles ~less~ I need to run per *day*.

So drinking coffee can be considered a fairly good diet?!?!

Post Note:
Now to make matters worse, it would seem that Coffee's Jolt Just an Illusion?!?!

Also, on the "it's frigging fattening" topic, in Aug '09 NYC's Health Department started posting signs around the city reminding folks that soda is really not the choice beverage if you have any interest in *not* getting that "American Silhouette" look. It's an affective add.... (ick!)