Lava, not just for lamps anymore

Here's a story about a guy who decides to go hiking in a lava field to take a closer look at an active volcano. Sound like a good idea at first, but without telling people where he was going, and going alone, doesn't sound so good any more. He remembers the camera, forgets the bottled water. Hey idiot, you're walking towards an active volcano.

Why is it that such morons without common sense can get through that kind of an ordeal unscathed and I can't remember on what level of the garage I parked. And I'm going to medical school.

Oh well. My only solace was that he had to drink "...muddy, green, mossy water,..." to survive. Which, by now, is giving him muddy, green, mossy shits.

Asked later what his biggest regret about the ordeal was, he replied, "I wish I hadn't dropped the rental car keys in the lava." He later admitted to not getting the insurance.

bloglines just lost all my feeds

holy shit... i hope i have a backup somewhere.

UPDATE: i am not alone (found via technorati's bloglines tag)

UPDATE 2: they're back! thank god. now i can get back to wasting my life, one kb at a time.

Technorati Tags: bloglines, feeds, problem, rss, web20, aggregator

greasemonkey exploit

again via waxy links, a critical security hole in greasemonkey 0.4:

a malicious website could retrieve any local file and send it to any other server; uninstall or downgrade ASAP!

Technorati Tags: security, hole, exploit, greasemonkey, firefox, mozilla, javascript, ajax, web20, web2.0, remix, remixable, applications

fold and drop ui

via waxy links, check out pierre dragicevic's excellent fold and drop ui by viewing the movie linked to on his page.

Technorati Tags: hci, fold, drop, ui, gui,

Harry Potter is gay

Hi, I'm an 18 year old girl and I'm a big fucking loser!

I guess all it took to forget about the terrorist bombings in London was a book written for 10 year olds.

my plan is working out brilliantly

400 breast implants stolen in brazil (via warren ellis):

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) - Armed bandits in Brazil robbed a vehicle carrying more than 400 breast implants, officials said on Tuesday.
[...]
A spokesman for the state Postal Service confirmed that assailants, apparently men, robbed the postal van with implants on Thursday night in Rio de Janeiro. Each Silimed breast implant costs nearly $400.

Technorati Tags: brazil, breast, implants, plastic, surgery, cosmetic, crime

optimism, education

via eide neurolearning:

Some children seem to be born more pessimistic than others, but optimism can also be systematically taught. And a child with a higher degree of optimism is more likely to resist depression, be health physically, persist at difficult tasks, and succeed in school and later life. In fact, children with high 'optimism' scales are more likely to outperform in college what their SAT and achievement scores would predict.
[...]
Gifted children may also especially prone to existential depression, and studies of gifted children have shown that gifted students may react more intensely than average-ability students to frustration. Studies of stress and burn-out in gifted students suggest that key factors can be an inappropriate level of intellectual stimulation ('underload' or 'overload' as Hoekman et al. have recently commented).

Technorati Tags: neuroscience, education, learning, gifted, children, optimism, depression

west bank stencil

via eyebeam reblog: beautiful, sad...

[the AP]: A Palestinian man sits in front of a section of Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank village of A-Ram, on the outskirt of Jerusalem Sunday July 10, 2005.

Technorati Tags: israel, palestine, middle, east, mideast, conflict, wall, barrier, west, bank, graffiti, stencil, girl, baloons, floating

largest mobile phone companies

via russell beattie, a wikipedia entry on the world's largest mobile phone networks:

• China Mobile (GSM) - 204.3 million
• Vodafone¹ (GSM, UMTS) - 154.838 million
• China Unicom (IS-2000, GSM) - 100.1 million
• T-Mobile² (GSM, UMTS) - 78.9 million
• movistar (GSM, UMTS, IS-2000) - 51.3 million
• Cingular (IS-136, GSM, UMTS³) - 50 million
• Orange (GSM, UMTS) - 49 million
  
• NTT DoCoMo (PDC, FOMA) - 45.9 million
• Verizon Wireless (IS-2000) - 45.5 million
• Mobile TeleSystems - MTS (GSM) - 34.22 million
  
• Vivo (IS-2000, IS-136) - 27 million
• Turkcell (GSM) - 23.4 million
• Sprint PCS (IS-2000) - 22.2 million
• O2 (GSM) - 21.3 million
• TIM (GSM, UMTS)

Technorati Tags: mobile, cellular, phone, global, carriers

china, banks, sms

via unicast:

Interesting feature: Here in China banks send you an SMS every time your credit card has been charged.

Technorati Tags: china, mobile, phones, cellular, sms, banking, credit, cards

gmap transparencies

check it: the gmap drawings overlaid on the gmap satellite images. [via]

Technorati Tags: google, maps, geography, sattelite, images, cartography, gmap, gmaps, mashup, software, web20, web2.0

tag routing

via the del.icio.us blog: as zawinski's law mandates, del.icio.us now lets you route a tagged article to another del.icio.us user.

We've just begun rolling out support for tagging items for others. To do so, use "for:username" where username is the name of the user you want to send the item to.

You can see items tagged for you at http://del.icio.us/for/ (it'll redirect to your own page, which other users will not be able to see.)

so, if you one day find yourself tagging midget porn on del.icio.us, don't forget to send it my way with a "for:jhc" tag.

Technorati Tags: tags, del.icio.us, delicious, folksonomy, folksonomies, message, routing, sharing, social, software

scanning medical records

via ray kurzweil's blog, a boston globe article on harvard's plan to scan 2.5 million medical records:

Harvard scientists are building a powerful computer system that will use artificial intelligence to scan the private medical files of 2.5 million people at local hospitals, as part of a government-funded effort to find the genetic roots of asthma and other diseases.
[...]
"If we could use routine clinical care to generate new findings without having to do multimillion-dollar studies, that would be a true change in the way medical discovery is done," said Dr. Isaac Kohane, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who is one of the project's directors. "We want to use the healthcare system as a living laboratory."
[...]
...an early test of one of the artificial intelligence techniques found that the computer was able to deduce the main reason for a hospitalization almost as accurately as a doctor, missing only a few times out of 200 case files, Weiss said. Now the team is working on software to extract smoking histories and other key information.

(what are those in the picture??? squid?)

Technorati Tags: healthcare, informatics, emr, electronic, medical, records, boston, harvard, asthma, genetics

more on the real estate bubble: condos in south florida

interesting csm article on the real estate frenzy in miami (although, the article is probably more balanced than i paint it):

Lines of people waiting to buy condos for quick profits and white-hot real estate - it's all part of what some analysts are calling the biggest real estate bubble in America. In Miami, the construction crane could become the new state bird as some 25,00 new units are punching into the skyline - with another 40,000 on the drawing board. And with prices going up 27 to 37 percent per year in the past two years, some buildings' ownership is up to 70 percent investors.
[...]
For economists, one of the red flags in Miami, as in other white-hot markets, is the home-price-to-income ratio. The higher the ratio, the more the buyer has to stretch to make payments. Since 2001, home prices in Miami are up 85 percent, nearly double the national average, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. At the same time, per capita income growth has averaged below 3 percent.

UPDATE: check out the housing bubble blog for more...

Technorati Tags: real, estate, bubble, miami, condos, condominiums, econ, housing

yahoo sms search

russell beattie writes about yahoo's new sms search offering on the y! search blog. i feel like i am becoming a yahoo shill, but their sms search offering definitely has advantages over google's.

for example, when searching for a location, yahoo's results include a link that can be opened in your phone's browser. following this link will take you to a page containing more information: a low res map of the destination, a further link to driving directions, etc.

check it out by texting 92466 (YAHOO):

Right now you can search for any local information by sending a query with your location or zip code like: "pizza 94025", you can get a stock quote with: "s yhoo", weather information: "w 94025", dictionary definitions: "d garrulous", horoscopes: "h aquarius", WiFi hotspots: "wifi 94123", and more are coming.

(pics is of a tv cameraman stencil, outside anthropology, 19th and walnut..for some reason, it reminds me of moore/gibbon's watchmen...)

Technorati Tags: yahoo, search, mobile, sms, texting, cellular, cell, phone, pervasing, computing, wap

coalition fatalities in iraq over time

via eyebeam's reblog, check out this interesting flash visualization of coalition fatalities in iraq...

(picture is of a stencil on the side of a newspaper stand, 18th and walnut. it says, 'listen to your dreams and nightmares'.)

Technorati Tags: iraq, war, fatalities