alex mizell -- 49% sacred, 51% profane

If I ever want to buy a mobile home, I will go to this guy.

Caveman Science Fiction:

Strangers in Paradise: Strangers in Paradise is the story of the lure, seduction and potential addiction of creating a “second life” online. Imagined lives in a virtual world, where users can make their dreams come true — what could possibly be wrong with that? For some, a lot. The fallout of a fictional virtual life can have far-reaching repercussions for their real lives.

Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again | Magazine: In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.

One of the students flipped a switch and intense blue light shone through the cable into the mouse’s brain, illuminating it with an eerie glow. Instantly, the mouse began running in counterclockwise circles as though hell-bent on winning a murine Olympics.

Then the light went off, and the mouse stopped. Sniffed. Stood up on its hind legs and looked directly at the students as if to ask, “Why the hell did I just do that?” And the students whooped and cheered like this was the most important thing they’d ever seen.

Spherical cow wiki: Spherical cow is a metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of reality. The phrase comes from a joke about theoretical physicists,

http://ffffound.com/

Irrational Decisions Anchoring and Arbitrary Coherence: Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls arbitrary coherence. Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. Thats the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. Ive read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the arbitrary part. The initial anchoring factor can be totally arbitrary, but it will still heavily influence your subsequent decisions.

Nonsensical Infographics

(via boingboing)

Bad memories written with lasers:

Sidekick Snafu: Data Restored But Lawsuits Filed: We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage.

First black hole for light created on Earth: "I expect that our demonstration of the optical black hole will be available by the end of 2009," he says.

Such a device could be used to harvest solar energy in places where the light is too diffuse for mirrors to concentrate it onto a solar cell. An optical black hole would suck it all in and direct it at a solar cell sitting at the core. "If that works, you will no longer require these huge parabolic mirrors to collect light," says Narimanov.

I caught a little of this on screens at Alchemy and I had to go on a couple-hour Internet quest to find it.  It’s an incredible movie, well worth your time.

Watch or download the full movie here – creative commons licensed

Hash House Harriers wiki:

Microsoft’s Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage: …T-Mobile owns the Sidekick brand, and the cloud services failure associated with its brand will likely decimate the million active Sidekick subscribers T-Mobile maintains, despite the fact that the mobile operator did nothing wrong.

"T-Mobile has an SLA (Service Level Agreement) with Danger/Microsoft … that requires Danger/MS to reimburse T-Mobile with defined monetary penalties if the service goes down for longer than x minutes, etc. I have no clue about the details, but clearly a week-plus outage plus permanent loss of all user data stored in the cloud (leaving only the user data stored on the devices themselves, which will completely vanish if the device is shut down improperly or crashes!) is the worst possible violation of the SLA conceivable, and essentially guarantees a very nasty lawsuit against Microsoft, regardless of whatever forensic and legal investigations they are doing to try to find the culprit," one of the insiders explained.

T-Mobile: we probably lost all your Sidekick data: Well, this is shaping up to be one of the biggest disasters in the history of cloud computing, and certainly the largest blow to Danger and the Sidekick platform: T-Mobile's now reporting that personal data stored on Sidekicks has "almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger." They're still looking for a way to recover it, but they're not giving users a lot of hope — meanwhile, servers are still on the fritz and customers are being advised not to let their devices power down because anything that's still on there will be lost the next time the device is turned on. Another communique is promised from T-Mobile on Monday to give everyone a status update on the recovery efforts, but at this point, it's not looking good at all.

Gun-toting Pa. soccer mom, husband found shot dead: "I'm shocked at the whole thing," Fortna said. "I'm surprised she didn't defend herself."

Enter the Rape Tunnel, For Art: I've constructed a 22 ft tunnel out of plywood that leads into the project room. There is no way in or out of the project room except for this tunnel. As you travel through the tunnel, it gets smaller and smaller, making it so that you have to crawl and put yourself in a submissive position in order to reach the tunnel's destination. At the end of the tunnel the subject will find me waiting in the project room and I'll try to the best of my ability to overpower and rape the person who crawls through.

Toyota recalls 3.8 million cars with iffy floor mats: Toyota issued a safety recall for 3.8 million Lexus and Toyota cars because of potentially deadly floor mats.

Ants vs. worms: New computer security mimics nature: "Our idea is to deploy 3,000 different types of digital ants, each looking for evidence of a threat," Fulp says. "As they move about the network, they leave digital trails modeled after the scent trails ants in nature use to guide other ants. Each time a digital ant identifies some evidence, it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection."