Someone has put together a list of the most awkward TV interviews. Some of these will really make you crack up. My person favorite, is one of Paula Abdul completely drunk on a news channel interview about American Idol. Check these videos out here. Some other’s include the Jim Rome fight, Tom Cruise being himself, and Vanilla Ice with Jon Stewart.
Just because it’s so great, i’ll post the Paula Abdul video below.
A little promo offer i stumbled upon today from WIRED magazine and Xerox. If you are a subscriber you can customize a cover that will be mailed on your July issue of Wired. The promo is limited to the first 5,000 people so you better hurry up. I know I have already made mine. I will be sure to show it off in July. If I remember that is. To take advantage of this opportunity go to here and customize your cover page. -Evan Doyle
Of course someone has to side with the RIAA besides Metallica.
- Evan Doyle
As I was reading the newly arrived April edition of Wired magazine with the lovely Jenna Fischer on the cover, I came upon a one page, one paragraph article that truly interested me. Stop now if you are reading this for a technological learning opportunity, because it is not technical at all. Today’s demand for transplant organs is through the roof because of the effects of smoking and drinking, but if you want to cut straight to the surgery, there can be an easy but expensive way to do so. In countries around the world from South Africa to Iraq to Taiwan you can buy organs in international markets. The cheapest of these organs comes from Pakistan. It is a kidney and goes for about $15,000 US dollars, but the high end of the market is in Asia where a lung, heart, and liver can go for as much at $290,000. This can still be less cost than here in America, also the wait could be weeks instead of years. The main reason people sell their organs is for money. These poor doners need some cash so they put their kidneys and livers on the market. Sadly, hearts and lungs are being removed from people executed by the Chinese government, and then they are sold as well. -Evan Doyle
Justin.tv has been making tech headlines recently, as they launched the net’s first live 24 hour “Truman Show” webcam. Justin and his team have created a live video stream so that viewers can see what it’s like to be Justin. With a camera attached to his head, and a suprisingly fast wireless connected backpack contraption, they are able to broadcast the stream no matter where Justin is. The most important fact about Justin.tv according to the crew is that Justin wears the camera 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even in the bathroom. Even on a date. It’s sort of a really interesting look into someone else’s life.
However, Justin and his friends were suprised when the police stormed into their apartment with their guns ready to fire. Apparently, someone had called 911 using Justin’s cell phone (which he posted on his website) as an alias, and reported a stabbing. When the police arrived, they were suprised only to find two terrified geeks with laptops. And of course, the whole thing went down on camera. What a sick joke.
Check out what Justin is doing now…Watch the live video stream.
Today we are glad to announce Literally Everything Version 2.0.
We’re rolling out specific pages so that it’s easier to find what you want. (And there are more on their way) In addition, we’re welcoming a new blogger who will be working on some great stuff for the site. The podcast is coming back once again, and it has its own dedicated page. Next, we’re launching a mini-web advertising campaign. We’re reaching out to other blogs and sites for advertising space…as well as getting the word out with our own good old “get the word out” grassroots campaign. If you like the site, please let your friends know that we’re worth checking out. Lastly, we’re opening up the site to you guys. We’re adding a page where you can submit your own articles and stories. We think that you guys will have some good things to say.
It’ll take us a few days to flip all of the switches for Version 2.0, so we’ll continue to roll out some more features throughout the weekend.
Sincerely,
The LE Blogging Team
Dan Hoffmann (Editor, Offbeat)
Evan Doyle (Tech)
Ryan Ponce (Politics, Tech)
Do you think you’re hot enough for the net’s newest social networking site? Hotenough.org will decide whether or not to allow users into their exclusive club. Co-founder Jason Pellegrino says that other Internet dating sites don’t have many good looking members. Perspective daters must submit three pictures, including one full-body shot. Their rating will then be assigned by registered members of Hot Enough.
Pellegrino says that rates an 8.2 on the site. At first, they were only allowing about eight percent of applicants onto Hot Enough. Now, they’ve opened it up to about 25%.
However, no matter how hot you are, you’ll still have to pay $10 a month to keep a profile and email other members.
Here’s another article from our guest science writer, Ben Itzkowitz.
An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named Autosub has finally explored the ice shelves of the Antarctic. Autosub’s many cameras, gauges, and motors have all helped scientists get a much better view of the undersides of the huge ice masses floating on the outskirts of the Antarctic continent. About ten percent of all of Antarctica’s ice mass sits on top of water, making it about 1,400,000 square kilometers total. For years, scientists have wondered about what makes up the atmosphere under the thick ice. This information is so important to scientists because it gives them an insight into what will happen later on in the future with the cold freshwater ice and the warm, modern sea waters. Scientists have created crude programs that can simulate currents and somewhat predict what may happen in the future regarding these different underwater activities, but they are highly inaccurate. This is due to the lack of data scientists have about this region of the world.
Because of this lack of data, and strong need for the information, Keith W. Nicholls from the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England has set out to create an autonomous underwater vehicle to scout out this territory. Using sonar equipment, the AUV Autosub was able to navigate itself over a 50 km course recording temperatures and salinities all along the way. For the most part, Autosub stayed about 100 meters underneath the ice’s thick bottom. Readings from the equipment onboard Autosub showed that most cracks on the bottom of the floating ice masses were only a couple of millimeters wide at most, and for a very good reason. Since the pressure is so high the deeper the ice is, the ice melts more quickly and forms a smooth texture. The opposite goes for ice that is closer to the surface; the ice freezes quickly and fills in any existing cracks to create smoothness. However, some places under the ice shelves had extremely large cracks, some almost a kilometer wide. These have yet to be explained, although there are several theories. At the end of Autosub’s journey, however, it stopped sending signals and went dead. It still hasn’t been found out how or why the AUV stopped working so abruptly, but it’s short lived term was very successful. From its data collections, it has given scientists a very detailed idea of just a part of the space underneath the floating ice of the Antarctic. Already, researchers have found that on average, about 2 meters from the bottom of the ice melt annually due to the warm waters coming in from the north. Also, water samples that were analyzed by Autosub have given scientists a vague glimpse of how much fresh water reaches the oceans from these regions in the Antarctic. Analysis of the ice closer to shore would give an even better idea of that, however. After Autosub’s fall, scientists have already constructed a new one currently undergoing tests in the North Atlantic Ocean. This is scheduled to launch on a mission to the Antarctic in early 2007. For now, scientists are left piecing together data that the first Autosub found earlier this year.
Well the long awaited AppleTV shipped today and early this morning. The site was updated with a 3-5 day shipping period. no word yet on any store displays, but I am sure that we will have some for you soon. along with high res photos.
A California man alledgedly broke into a woman’s home and fell asleep on her couch naked. The woman called the police early Saturday morning when she woke up to find Michael Bonnie, 36 on her couch covered by nothing more than a blanket. Police arrested Bonnie for residential burglary and indecent exposure. And that’s really the whole story.
Since the Da Vinci Code was first published, it has sold more than 60 million copies, centres on a sinister plot by Catholic organisation Opus Dei to kill the book’s hero Robert Langdon before he discovers, via clues in Da Vinci’s paintings, that Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and had a son.
Caroline Eldridge, a 38 year old graduate student from of the Wimbledon College of Art and prominent art critic and painter, killed herself because she was convinced of an aspiring plot against her love. Apparently Eldridge had been studying Da Vinci’s art when she stumbled upon The Da Vinci Code. She then became obsessed with Da Vinci’s paintings and the mysteries that had surrounded his work. She was so obsessed with the mysteries that she started to suffer delusions about her and her family being in grave danger because she had information on Leonardo after working on an exhibition about his paintings. While studying Da Vinci in Rome, she had a particular interest in his famous Vitruvian Man drawing, which features on the cover of The Da Vinci Code. A dying murder victim in the Dan Brown novel also arranges his body in the shape of the drawing as a complex clue for investigators.
Eldridge had no prior signs of mental illness, except for a slight case of anorexia when she was a teenager. According to her father, Eldridge had become delirious in Rome, so he father flew to Italy to bring her back home. When Mr. Eldridge found his daughter in Rome, she was working long hours in a panic state of mind designing costumes in the wee hours of the night, so Mr. Eldridge was able to bring his daughter home. Mr Eldridge and his wife Susan referred her to a doctor and she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and sent to a psychiatric unit at Wotton Lawn hospital in Gloucester.
After a month in the psychiatric unit, Ms. Eldridge was sent home, but still had delusions about a plot against her. Then on May 25, while staying with a group of friends, Eldridge complained of having stomach cramps and not felling well, and eventually admitted to her friends that she had taken an overdose. She was taken to Cheltenham General Hospital but died of multiple organ failure on May 31.
Here’s another installment of the great sci/tech stories from our guest writer, Ben Itzkowitz.
Samsung , a company producing some of the leading flash-memory chips in the world, has recently announced a new generation of chip that may be able to hold twice as much data as before without increasing circuit board size. Flash memory today uses a single layer of silicon that can store anywhere from a few megabits to a few gigabits of information. Researchers at Samsung have been able to prove that using multiple layers of silicon (instead of just one) is the key to creating more storage space on the memory. Today, we essentially use a 2-D structure in flash memory. By transferring over to 3-D architecture in the silicon layers, it is possible that one day in the near future a one-terabit flash chip composed of around 8 layers of silicon may begin use and production.
From mobile phones, to USB drives, to MP3 players and laptops, flash memory is found everywhere in our technological world today, greatly increasing the possible benefits of creating larger capacities in the same amount or less space. In recent years, it became popular for two different reasons. First off, it offered an alternative to spinning hard drives, which took up room and was generally very delicate. Since flash takes up much less room because it is solid-state memory, it also is much less prone to damage. The second reason is that it, unlike other types of solid-state memory such as random-access memory, is nonvolatile meaning it can retain data without power consumption. As already stated, silicon is what makes flash memory possible. Because silicon chip size has been consistently decreasing over recent years, so has flash drive memory. However, scientists predict that within the next few years, flash memory may begin to face fabrication hurdles because at a point, some things can only get so small before they are too small for practical use or too small to be manufactured correctly. Currently, flash memory chips contain features about 60 nanometers wide, and are fabricated with lithography machines that carve them out. Some engineers believe that the lithography systems needed to make the small etches in the silicon we use today will only be able to shrink until about 2009. Even then, if flash memory devices were to contain features on the silicon layers smaller than 30 nanometers in size, then the chips would face physical limitations such as leaking in the cell, also known as information loss.
Because of these future limitations, Samsung’s Soon-Moon Jung has begun to devise a way to use existing fabrication technology to increase flash capacity. He proposed that stacking the existing silicon layers on top of one another would do the trick. Two elements were required to do so according to Jung, which were minimizing the amount of extra area used for their stacking architecture, and keeping the number of fabrication steps down so as not to drive up costs. The technology would really work just like a parking lot where the lower level first fills up and it goes upwards from there. However, the only trouble found was that the structures to support the second layer of silicon (think in the parking garage the concrete columns) would take up valuable space otherwise used for storage. In order to decrease the space taken up by these supporting pieces, the “windows” that needed to be opened up to create them had to be strategically placed throughout the chip. Another trick that was used to create the second layer was to simultaneously fabricate the wire connections between the first and second layers. This ensured that costs would not rise because individually placing the connections would be more expensive to make. Although these technological obstacles were overcome, a different challenge in terms of performance came up that was much more difficult to maneuver around. Because of the second layer’s electrical nature (it isn’t grounded), only one cell of memory can be erased at once. On the other hand, larger chunks of memory cells can be erased at once on the first layer. By designing a specific electrical scheme that was able to ground the second layer as well, the data could then be erased in chunks there too. However, this extra component would also add to costs as well.
Although the prototype memory chip is only capable of a capacity of 32 bits so far, the results are very encouraging because they demonstrate the concept well and have successfully taken advantage of multiple layers of silicon in flash memory. The only hurdle that may need to be overcome in the future seems to be manufacturing costs. Obviously more silicon layers require more money, and since flash memory is driven by price, the larger quantities of storage might not be worth it if prices are too high. Possible solutions might be to mix different types of solid-state memory together or to engineer the layers of flash memory with even further minimized manufacturing steps. Over all, however, since Samsung can already utilize its existing 2-D flash memory manufacturing methods, much larger 3-D storage devices may be in store for the near future.
Jessica Hall is now serving a two year prison sentence after launching a “missile” at a car. Okay fine, it wasn’t a missile. It was a McMissile. Hall, of Jacksonville, North Carolina was convicted by a Virginia jury of forcefully propelling a McDonalds soda cup full of ice at another car. Here’s the deal.
On a hot day in July, Hall was heading north on Interstate 95 with her children in tow. Traffic slowed and another car tried to cut her off twice. In a rage, she threw a cup of ice into the other car, where it flew across the driver and landed all over his girlfriend. The driver of the other car, Pete Ballin, 36, and his girlfriend, Eliza Fowle, 28, were heading home to the District after visiting her father in North Carolina. “It was gross and sticky and got all over me and the front of our car, the dashboard and the windshield,” Fowle said of the launched drink. Apparently, Jessica was just trying to keep up with her fathers’ truck when Ballin cut her off, and she was forced into the shoulder.
Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney George Elsasser argued in court that had Ballin been hit by the drink, he might have gotten into a serious accident with injuries.
At least Ballin isn’t suing McDonalds because their ice is cold. But hey, you never know, the”Caution: Ice is cold” label wasn’t there.
Florida teen Jennifer Mee just can’t stop hiccuping. In fact, for more than three weeks now, the 15-year old St. Petersburg teen has hiccuped close to 50 times a minute. She has visited countless doctors as well as tried all of the standards methods. She’s had blood tests, a CT scan and an MRI. None of the drugs she has tried have helped. Neither has holding her breath, putting sugar under her tongue, sipping pickle juice, breathing into a paper bag and drinking out of the wrong side of a glass. Even Jack Bauer couldn’t scare them out of her.
Hiccups are caused by involuntary contractions of the diaphragm, which causes the vocal cords to close for a split second, making that hiccup sound we all know and love.
Jennifer’s mother, Rachel Robidoux, recently put something in the local newspaper calling out for help. “I’m just looking for some answers where somebody’s gone through this,” Robidoux told the St. Petersburg Times. “At this point, we’re willing to do anything.
UPDATE: We just recieved this comment from Kate…
I hope this reaches the teen and her mom who put out the plea for relief. I tried to reach the papers that carried the AP story but of course they do not take comments. Kind of ironic, since the title says the mom puts out a plea…how will she find it?
I posted a story for you/her on divinecaroline.com. Here is the link.
http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22182/26806
You do not have to hold your breath or jump on one leg. Just drink. I have suffered my whole life and this always works. Please let me know if it works for you or if you need further explanantion. You can always comment to me.
I know you will find relief. This even works on my children who seem to have Mommy’s hiccups.
My best wishes for your relief!
As usual Go Daddy showed a very racy ad this year during the superbowl. This year Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht from Diggnation
appeared in GoDaddy’s ad. While you can only see them for about 3 seconds, it is still pretty awesome. It is truly amazing that they started out as a small little video podcast, and now they’re on superbowl ads.
Check out the ad here
Also: The rumored ad from Apple featuring the Beatles did not show up. What’s next on the rumors front?…an Apple media event Feburary 20th. I’ll believe it when I see it.
As probably all of you know, Vista came out today. Horray! Now wait a minute there, don’t judge me too quickly. I am still an Apple fanatic, however after playing around with the version they had at my local CompUSA, I was surprised to see that it’s not so bad after all. I’m not sure if it’s windows roots that have gotten ahold of me, but I really, really like the interface. Sure it has some of the same great features that OS X has, but let’s face it, it’s a hell of a lot btter than Windows XP. I havn’t had a chance to test it out fully, but so far I really really like it (until I get attacked with millions of viruses that is). Something I really like about it is the preview that it gives you of the items you have down in your watchamacallit, taskbar I guess. So I just installed bootcamp on my Macbook and I’m going to run out tonight and buy the Home Premium Upgrade. I’ll test it out a bit and see what the puppy can do.
On a side note there have been some interesting photos of a Mac running Microsoft Office 2008. I really like the improved interface of the application, however it looks to me like it’s a Microsoft version of pages. Click Here to see them.
