Some people have asked me how come the embedded YouTube videos on The Presurfer are of much better quality than the ones you can find on the YouTube site. There’s a little hack I use and it goes like this.
Copy the embed code of the video you want to show from YouTube. Then add ‘&ap=%2526fmt%3D18′ at the places shown in red below.
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints.
Google is digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, Google will be adding the entire LIFE photo archive — about 10 million photos.
The path to modern-day computing is longer than many suspect, and strewn with interesting nuggets of information. These include:
The inventor of e-mail can’t remember when he got it working.
Pac-Man was modelled on a pizza and called Puck-Man until vandals forced a name change.
The first hard drive had a 5MB capacity and could only be moved by a fork-lift truck.
Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov was described as a ‘psychological triumph’.
Full details of these milestones, and other gems of computing history.
When the World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, its main objective was to enable the free exchange of information via interlinked hypertext documents. Almost 20 years later, that objective has been accomplished on most parts of the world, but not in all of them.
Some countries are trying hard to keep an iron hand over the flow of information that takes place on the Web. Here are 10 countries who are censoring the web.
Things you do not need to know. Unnecessary Knowledge.
Tommer Leyvand and colleagues have created a “beautification engine,” a software program that uses a mathematical formula to alter a person’s face into what theoretically is the more “beautiful” version, while retaining “unmistakable similarity” to the original:
Studies have shown that there is surprising agreement about what makes a face attractive. Symmetry is at the core, along with youthfulness; clarity or smoothness of skin; and vivid color, say, in the eyes and hair. There is little dissent among people of different cultures, ethnicities, races, ages and gender.
Yet, like the many other attempts to use objective principles or even mathematical formulas to define beauty, this software program raises what psychologists, philosophers and feminists say are complex, even disturbing, questions about the perception of beauty and a beauty ideal.
To what extent is beauty quantifiable? Does a supposedly scientific definition merely reflect the ideal of the moment, built from the images of pop culture and the news media?
A good diet is one that avoids foods that contribute to problems that raise the risk of heart disease like obesity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure.
Diet can play an important role in lowering your cholesterol. Discover ten foods that can protect your heart.
You will be busy in the driving in the future. It looks not very safe. By Erik Pawassar
Anatomy Arcade makes basic human anatomy come ALIVE through awesome free flash games and interactives.
Anatomy Arcade contains awesome flash games to help teach basic human anatomy. Whack-A-Bone is a perfect example of an addictive game that can take you from a novice to a skeletal expert in no time.
Times are tough, and the economic crunch is definitely hitting a lot of people hard, so if you’re one of the unlucky ones that’s been forced out of your home by unfriendly foreclosure, then Motive is here to help.
They’ve put together a How-To that’s filled with tips for living out of your car, and with such gems as “screw fast food”, “keep clean to maintain your job and your sanity”, and “leave dryer sheets under the front seats to help mitigate the stink”, it’s an indispensable guide to mi casa es mi coche living arrangements.
Hari Merdeka (Independence Day) is a national day of Malaysia commemorating the independence of the Federation of Malaya from British colonial rule. In a wider context, it is to celebrate the formation of Malaysia.
image credit to vincent
*note: i love my country!
Heated car seats are nice and toasty for your bottom, but it may prove be too toasty for men’s sperms:
Optimal sperm production requires a temperature 1 to 2 °C below
the core body temperature of 37 °C. This is one reason why the testicles hang outside the main part of the body. To test whether heated car seats might be raising scrotal temperatures above this threshold, Andreas Jung at the University of Giessen in Germany and his colleagues fitted temperature sensors to the scrotums of 30 healthy men, who then sat on a heated car seat for 90 minutes.An hour in, and scrotal temperature had already risen to an average of 37.3 °C, with a maximum temperature in one man of 39.7 °C. [...] Although that’s only a slight increase due to the heated seats, Jung notes that it may nevertheless be enough to damage the sperm production process.
When it comes to famous images the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the most recognized in the world. The Mona Lisa has been at the center of much debate and speculation over the years but why is it an image that intrigues people so much and what can we learn from it as photographers today?
While we live in a different time (the Mona Lisa was painted in the 1500s) and use different technology - is there something in this famous image that we can be inspired by as image makers today?
Awesome! The Burj Dubai tower is about to be completed. David Hobcote has taken and shared his excellent quality of the Burj Dubai, the pictures were taken from a bell helicopter with a canon 1Ds mark 3 digital camera. The under construction building which previously measures 512.m (1,680ft) tall has already beats the record of the 508m high Taipei 101 in Taiwan. At present, the Burj Dubai has reached the 16th steel level, it is now 688.1 meters tall.
Burj Dubai Skyscraper
• Height: ~ 800m – 950m
• Floors: ~ 160 – 189
• Construction start date: 2005, February 1
• Completion date: 2009, August 16
Update your bookmarks, guys 
Hundreds of games for kids placed in categories like geography, math, logic, and word. There’s useful metadata about each game and users are given the chance to comment and rate them.
