Although not why I originally bought a webcam, this seems to be a good idea as well...
From Kottke - A Story Before Bed allows you to record yourself reading a bedtime story to a faraway child...maybe you're away from home on business or a grandparent who lives in another state or just working late. When storytime rolls around, the child sees the book onscreen plus a video of you reading it to them.
if you record a few books you can start to set up a bookshelf that the child could access at any time...
I bought this cd for one song - Shine (remember doing that??!!). I remember it being one of my most listened to cds too.. every road trip it'd be there. This is one of those cds that you tried to convince everyone else to listen to (the first Matchbox 20 album a few years later comes to mind...).
From the bullets you bite to the pain you request you're finding them harder to digest.
I got my dad listening to it after a while (driving to school it was obviously better than morning radio). He asked me to burn it for him (! - after over playing, we still listened to it after I left for Kingston...). Anyway, what a great cd (it really didn't hurt that they had the instrumental "Pretty Donna").
Your prophecies fail And your thoughts become weak Silence creates necessity.
This song, posted here, is Listen. Not off that CD. Didn't like the Disciplined Breakdown (or the self-entitled) cd as much as a whole, but there is no way this song has fallen out of my top 30, and just as I'm looking those over, I'm thinking this is perfect for the 500th post. Lyrics, guitar, then drums.. It's no Jimmy Chamberlin, but then again, what is. Everything has it's place.
Yeah, Collective Soul, that kinda sorta Christian band. As a warning, Bush may be next (top 50.. don't get crazy!).
Hey you're now thirsty Walking in the desert all alone Hey you're now searching Lost in isolation from your soul The bullets you bite From the pain you request You're finding harder to digest And the answers you seek Are the ones you destroy Your anger's well deployed
Hey why can't you listen Hey why can't you hear Hey why can't you listen As love screams everywhere
Hey you now hunger Feeding your mind with selfishness Hey you now wander Aimlessly around your consciousness Your prophecies fail And your thoughts become weak Silence creates necessity You're clothing yourself In the shields of despair Your courage now impaired
You crucify all honesty No signs you see do you believe And all your words just twist and turn Reviving just to crash and burn.
Surprise, once scheduled for this post, will be delay to later this week unfortunately...
Or, to put it another way, why is there a flu season?
Initial discussions brought up the idea of the cold weather and of the increased activity within the home (vs. the great outdoors), purportedly increasing the risk of exposure.
It turns out both of these are true (as far as the internet knows... ), and here is some additional explication and clarification.
First off, we in North America don't necessarily have the same flu season as others. Australia seems to have it a bit before us, peaking around August, during their winter. So, that shows a clue to temperature. It also seems to provide flu drug designers with clues as to which strains will be big this year in North America and Europe.
Secondly, it's been suggested that kids are back to school, and this could play a part as well. Being away all summer, these little receptacles are now tightly packed in and ready to spread whatever they got. With latency periods considered, this would also make sense as to why the flu has a season.
Thirdly, it seems the flu is around all the time and a new strain can infect you at any time, it is just likely to survive in the air or on surfaces longer in a colder climate. Why?.. well recent studies suggest that it has to do with the cell membranes, and fats. These repulsive lipids make up the majority of the cell membrane. Scientists at NIH have recently discovered that the lipid coating on flu viruses melts at around 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 Celsius) and solidifies into a gel at just above freezing (fortunately for us, our lipid membranes don't behave similarly). Basically, this is the evidence for why flu season peaks during the winter.
The viruses are able to firm themselves up at colder temperatures in order to survive traveling from person to person. Once inside their victims, body heat remelts the lipid coating, allowing the virus to infect the cells of its host. In the warmer months, the viruses dry out, weaken, and go dormant. Researchers hope to use this information to study ways to reduce infection during the winter months, possibly through more effective lipid-dissolving detergents or by encouraging people to spend more time in warm environments (via here).
I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.
Describe an ideal afternoon in the city. I enjoy exploring neighbourhoods across the city and spending time with friends and family. The best way to answer this is probably to recount a Sunday afternoon I spent just over a month ago. We (my partner and I) started by taking the Queen streetcar to Mimico, had lunch and explored Mimico and the historic former Lakeshore Lunatic Asylum (which is being converted by Humber College into a new campus). It is a beautiful series of brick buildings built in the late 19th century. We ended the day with dinner in Bloor West Village. That was a great day.
All it is really is just a donation to a non-profit organisation (Pale Blue Dot) that supports a project to find out the precise size of the planets found by Kepler.
THERE'S A SUN SHADE!
It all really started out as an interest in the Kepler Mission closely and its hunt for planets outside our solar system (these type of planets being called extrasolar planets). Kepler was launched in March 2009 on top of a Boeing 7925-10L (Delta-II) launch vehicle.
In the experiment, two groups of mice were either allowed to rest over a five-hour period or were constantly disturbed by handling. The sleep-deprived group demonstrated particular problems when it came to performing a basic retrieval test, which they had learned before [BBC News]. When the researchers examined the brains of the sleep-deprived mice, they found that these mice made more of an enzyme called phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4). In turn, the surplus of PDE4 caused a shortfall of a compound called cAMP, which is involved in forming new memories in a brain area called the hippocampus [WebMD]. When the researchers gave sleep-deprived mice a drug that stops PDE4 from working, the mice aced their memory tests.
Shazam uses a mobile phone's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of music being played. An acoustic fingerprint is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match. If a match is found, information such as the artist, song title, and album are relayed back to the user (Wikipedia).
First, a short explanation of how Shazam works. The company has a library of more than 8 million songs, and it has devised a technique to break down each track into a simple numeric signature—a code that is unique to each track. "The main thing here is creating a 'fingerprint' of each performance," says Andrew Fisher, Shazam's CEO. When you hold your phone up to a song you'd like to ID, Shazam turns your clip into a signature using the same method. Then it's just a matter of pattern-matching—Shazam searches its library for the code it created from your clip; when it finds that bit, it knows it's found your song.
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Thus Shazam creates a spectrogram for each song in its database—a graph that plots three dimensions of music: frequency vs. amplitude vs. time. The algorithm then picks out just those points that represent the peaks of the graph—notes that contain "higher energy content" than all the other notes around it, as Wang explained in an academic paper he published to describe how Shazam works (PDF). In practice, this seems to work out to about three data points per second per song.
As an egg ages, it loses some carbon dioxide through tiny pores in the shell, making the egg white more basic. At the same time, it loses moisture, which increases the size of the “air cell” at the bottom of the shell, between the inner and outer membranes. The dynamics of this process are, in the words of a University of California, Davis agriculture publication, “not completely understood,” but the combination of these changes makes an old egg a lot easier to peel than a one that is fresh out of the bird.
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“As the contents of the egg contracts and the air cell enlarges, the shell becomes easier to peel,” the USDA Shell Eggs from Farm to Table fact sheet states. “For this reason, older eggs make better candidates for hard cooking,”
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