MSNBC: Cosmic Log: 3 Billion-year-old Genetic ‘Fossil’ Traced – “The collective genome of all life on Earth today went through a rapid growth spurt between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, according to scientists who used computer algorithms to reconstruct the evolutionary history of thousands of genes.“
Varasona’s Pizzeria: Jeff Varasano’s Famous New York Pizza Recipe – “This pizza is modeled after Patsy’s on 117th street in NYC. I have been working on this for SIX years, but FINALLY I can report that I have achieved my goal. Many people have tried my pie and swear it is not only the best pizza they’ve ever had, but a clone of the original Patsy’s recipe. This margarita pie is incredibly light and perfectly charred. It took just 2 minutes and 10 seconds to bake at 825F.“
Smashing Magazine: Free Icons Sets for Web Developers: Coded – “The Coded Icon Set makes an excellent addition to any website, especially those inspired by the trade of web development. Perfect for your next client’s site or for showcasing your own web development — these icons are useful for every coder.“
BBC News: Cosmos May Show Echoes of Events Before Big Bang – “Professor Penrose, of Oxford University, and his collegue Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, have now found what they believe is evidence of events that predate the Big Bang, and that support CCC.“
Arxiv.org: Astrophysics > Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics: Concentric Circles in WMAP Data May Provide Evidence of Violent Pre-Big-Bang Activity – “Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) posits the existence of an aeon preceding our Big Bang ‘B’, whose conformal infinity ‘I’ is identified, conformally, with ‘B’, now regarded as a spacelike 3-surface. Black-hole encounters, within bound galactic clusters in that previous aeon, would have the observable effect, in our CMB sky, of families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low, the centre of each such family representing the point of ‘I’ at which the cluster converges. These centres appear as fairly randomly distributed fixed points in our CMB sky.“
Steve Blank: When Its Darkest, Men See the Stars – “I believe that we will look back at this decade as the beginning of an economic revolution as important as the scientific revolution in the 16th century and the industrial revolution in the 18th century. We’re standing at the beginning of the entrepreneurial revolution.“
Search Engine Land: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search) – “According to Experian Hitwise, it was social media — not search — that drove a lot of the online interest and, more importantly, the online traffic surrounding The Beatles addition to iTunes. Consider this stat: On November 16, the first day Beatles songs were available on iTunes, 26% of UK traffic to Apple.com came from social media, about double the amount that came from search.“
Peteris Krumins: Announcing Browserlinq! – “Our first product is built on top of StackVM and is called Browserling. It’s an interactive cross-browser testing tool inside of your browser. A real browser inside of your browser! Just go to browserling.com to try it out! “
Service Alley: About – “Service Alley was built to help consumers find trusted local service providers. Whether you have a leaky pipe or have decided it’s time for a new kitchen, Service Alley give you access to information about all the service providers in your area so you can start to figure out which one is best for you.“
CNBC: Next Debt Crisis May Start in Washington: Bair – “The US needs to take urgent action to cut its debt in order to prevent the next financial crisis, which may start in Washington, Sheila Bair, chair of the Federal Deposits Insurance Corp. (FDIC) wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post. “
The Washington Post: Will the Next Fiscal Crisis Start in Washington? – “Unless something is done, federal debt held by the public could rise from a level equal to 62 percent of gross domestic product this year to 185 percent in 2035. Eventually, this relentless federal borrowing will directly threaten our financial stability by undermining the confidence that investors have in U.S. government obligations. Financial markets are already sending disquieting signals. “
Laughing Squid: Glitch, A Browser-Based Massively Multiplayer Game – “Glitch is a web-based massively-mutliplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world.“
The Economic Collapse Blog: 15 Reasons Why Barack Obama’s Debt Commission Is An Exercise In Futility – The U.S. Government Will Never Have A Balanced Budget Ever Again – “The truth is that virtually none of our politicians are willing to make the hard choices that would be necessary to get the national debt under control. Today, the U.S. national debt is rapidly approaching 14 trillion dollars and it is growing at an exponential rate. It is the single largest debt in the history of the world, and it has increased in size for 53 years in a row. It would be very difficult to understate the true horror of the debt that the U.S. federal government has accumulated. “
Colleen Moffit: Personal Awareness in a Social Media World – “think it is important for people engaging in social media to consider not only what they are communicating, but how that information may be perceived by others. Short messages of 140 characters do not afford an opportunity to provide context and individuals who do not know you may misinterpret your message.“
IIAR: Why Virtual Events Should Become Part of Your AR Strategy – “I have had the experience of running two global virtual analyst events over the last year. In my last virtual event, more than 300 analysts attended and interacted with our company. The only requirement: a PC with a reliable bandwidth connection.“
CloudFab: Make Anything Online – “We use 3D printing technologies to make what you want. CloudFab takes your 3D design, sends it to the manufacturer, and sends it to you or your end-users. Having a web API* allows you to put digital making into your web service and products. This means you can directly integrate 3D printing into your website or application easily and quickly.“
Dave Winer: Using S3 to Store a Complete Site – “Amazon made it so that if you stand on one foot while touching your nose with the pinky of your right hand and say Wild Beatnik Pie! three times you can host a static site in S3, which seems to have been made to serve static sites. “
The Dragon’s Circle: Second Life Alternate Viewers in Windows 7 x64 – “Moral of the story? If you’re running Windows 7, and your SL client of choice is being extremely slow, make sure you turn on compatibility for at least Vista, if not XP. I’ll bet that will fix you problem right there.“
The Baseline Scenario: How Are the Kids? Unemployed, Underwater, and Sinking – “While it appears everyone is hurting since the financial collapse, young adults bear a disproportionate burden, constituting just 13.5% of the workforce while accounting for 26.4% of those unemployed. Even with good credentials, it is difficult for young people to find work and keep themselves afloat.“
Codebox Software: BitMeter OS – “BitMeter OS is a free, open-source, bandwidth monitor that works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. BitMeter OS keeps track of how much you use your internet/network connection, and allows you to view this information in a variety of ways. “
Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Deploy HTTPS Correctly – “This article is designed to help web operators get a conceptual handle on how to protect their users with HTTPS. Taking a little bit of care to protect your users is a reasonable thing for web application providers to do, and a good thing for users to demand.“
Petr Stanicek: Color Scheme Designer – “The main feature you might like is the Pantone™ and RAL™ color support. The update is almost done, I have to improve some algorithms and I’d like to publish it during October. Thank you for your patience.“
A Smart Bear: Why I Feel Like A Fraud – “I felt like a fraud every day. Here I was, selling a wobbly, buggy tool and pawning myself off as an expert in a field that didn’t exist. Every second I felt like I was putting one over on the world.“
CNBC: Dying With Debt: A Dirty Little Retirement Secret – “Retired Americans are racking up credit-card debt like never before, be it for vacations or medical expenses, and a surprising number have no intention of paying it off before they die.“
*Unethical Blogger: GNU/Parallel Changed My Life – “Over the past month or so I’ve fallen in love with an incredibly simple command line tool: GNU/Parallel. Parallel has more or less replaced my use of xargs when piping data around on the many machines that I use. Unlike xargs however, Parallel lets me make use of the many cores that I have access to, either on my laptop or the many quad and octocore machines we have lying around the Apture office.“
Metaverse Journal: Second Life in a Web Browser – “With minimal fanfare, Linden Lab have launched a beta of their ‘Second Life in a browser’ offering AKA Project Skylight. Found here, you can sign-up and check it out in a session lasting up to an hour. “
Alicia Chenaux: – “
These are straight screenshots from my computer. I didn’t edit anything at all. Also, I didn’t quite go in order with some of them because I just realized that I should have taken a screencap of the start-up page, and at one point my internet flickered slightly and I had to get a new guest avatar.“
The Imprudence Blog: Announcing the Kokua Project – “Kokua Viewer is the spiritual successor to the Imprudence Viewer, but using the latest SL Viewer 2 source as the starting point. Many of the improvements we have made in Imprudence will be carried forward to Kokua Viewer, and we will be applying the same dedication to creating high-quality, usable software that we have put into Imprudence for the past two years. “
UK Guardian: Open Minds Reap Rewards – “His argument, as as far as Fowler could make out, was that the process would be speeded up if, by a bizarre coincidence, carbon-12 had an energy state exactly equal to the energy of three colliding helium nuclei at the 100 million-degree temperature inside a red giant. That energy was 7.65 MeV. The state had to exist, reasoned Hoyle, because life existed and life was based on carbon“
Chetan Surpur: Life Hack – The 30/30 Minute Work Cycle Feels Like Magic – “Spending a ton of hours trying to work still feels like a ton of hours of work, even if you end up getting nothing done. With the 30/30 cycle, you’re only working half the time, and the relaxation time actually feels like relaxation without the stress of work. This makes many continuous hours of work much more bearable and productive.“
My Damn Channel: You Suck at Photoshop – “You Suck At Photoshop #1: Distort, Warp and Layer Effects. Donnie Hoyle pulls a digital end-around on a restraining order and vandalizes a Vanagon.“
JustinCC: My Masters Dissertation on Internet-Scale Virtual Environment Architectures – “The initial part is devoted to describing the classic ‘grid’ model, both conceptually (e.g. through the lens of the dimensions of transparency for distributed systems defined by the ISO International Standard on Open Distributed Processing) and in formal Z notation. The second part of the dissertation takes this description and compares it against what I think are the requirements for a truly Internet-scale virtual environment network. The last part of the text explores alternative architectures to the classic grid model for getting to Internet-scale.“
Don MacAskill: Why ‘Be Passionate’ is Awesome Advice – “We could survive a total failure for no reason other than we didn’t put anything into the business other than blood, sweat, and tears. Zero dollars of investment, either by the founders or outsiders, meant we could easily walk away. Painful, but possible. (We bummed free rack space from a friend, used three ancient free servers from a failed dot com, and threw some code on it).“
Business Model Generation – “Business Model Generation will teach you powerful and practical innovation techniques used today by leading companies worldwide. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a new business model — or analyze and renovate an old one.“
Popular Science: Astronomers Make Extraordinarily Detailed Map of the Universe’s Dark Matter – “The new map says Abell has a lot more dark matter than expected for a cluster of its size, which leads to some interesting questions about the genesis of galaxy clusters. In order to get so big, Abell and similar clusters must have started clumping together much earlier than previously thought, when the universe was still pretty dense.“
Mastering Emacs: Running Shells in Emacs: An Overview – “To use Emacs effectively, you must learn to use all that Emacs has to offer. One of Emacs’s strongest selling-points is its shell integration and terminal emulation. If you come from other editors or IDEs you’re probably using an external terminal window (like xterm), a terminal multiplexer (like GNU Screen) or console window (in Windows) and switching back and forth. But there’s a better way…“
Estately Smart Schools: A New Way to Find a Home – “Today we are creating a new way for people to find a home: Estately Smart Schools. For people who want to live in a certain school area, Estately Smart Schools will help search only the homes for sale in any school’s attendance area.“
Hotel 1000 – “Hotel 1000: Seattle’s Premiere Luxury Hotel Destination.“
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks: Join the Hypergrid Adventurers Club – “Are you an Adventurer? Looking for a friendly group of fellow travelers and pioneers interested in exploring Virtual Worlds? Join the Hypergrid Adventurers Club and let your journey begin! The Hypergrid Adventurers Club is a group of explorers interested in discussing and exploring virtual worlds on the Hypergrid.“
Smashing Magazine: Fresh, Free and Gorgeous RSS/Feed Icons – “Today we are glad to release a free RSS/Feed icon set. The set contains 8 icons which you can use for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free. The icons are available for both Mac and Win-users in resolutions 16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px, 256×256px and 512×512px. This icon set was designed by Dirceu Veiga from Brazil especially for Smashing Magazine as a gift for its readers.“
ListVerse: 10 Strange Things About the Universe – “The universe can be a very strange place. While groundbreaking ideas such as quantum theory, relativity and even the Earth going around the Sun might be commonly accepted now, science still continues to show that the universe contains things you might find it difficult to believe, and even more difficult to get your head around. “
The Big Picture: To Hell Through QE – “The world is heading towards high inflation and political instability. It’s only a matter of time before there is another global crisis. The first sign would be a collapsing treasury market. The Fed is controlling the yield curve through its QE program. But, it is irrational for other investors to play this game. The only reason to stay in is that the Fed won’t let the market fall. But, the underlying value is evaporating with rising money supply and the inflationary consequences. When all the investors realize this, they will run for the exits and the Fed won’t be able to stop the stampede.“
Engineers vs. Hackers: – “The overall goal is straightforward: to cause a deterministic program abort any time that a callee forgets to set an error code, or a caller fails to check an error code — whether or not there was an error condition. This determinism enables the developer to rapidly discover and correct places where we’re not handling errors properly.“
