Imagine you need a liver transplant, but there’s a problem. There is, of course, a shortage of organs and unfortunately you are the 52nd person on the list in your region. What do you do? Well, if you’re a Saudi national, you pull some strings, and you get the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia to…
October, 2005
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Okay, maybe the West is not doomed, but it is still a bit shocking to see how quickly Western institutions bow to religious extremism at the same time that individuals in countries dominated by religious extremism fight that trend. In late September, two stories appeared in the British press about separate art exhibits and very…
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Apparently, LockerGnome is so unusable — what with the average 20 ads per sentence of content — that Chris Pirillo has taken the extraordinary step of launching a gimmicky meta-search engine just so he can find things without be distracted by the bajillion ads that appear on every LockerGnome page. Pirillo spins his usual bullshit…
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Via Boing! Boing!, here’s directions on constructing a working pinhole camera from made entirely Legos.
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Cliff Atkinson has an interesting blog to support his book, Beyond Bullet Points. The book and the blog look at ways to use PowerPoint that effectively use the software rather than churn out the endlessly dull presentations that most of us endure.
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Indigo Instruments sells an awesome line of Molymod Molecular Model Kits that can be used to make any number of molecule models. They even sell kits for caffeine, THC, Nicotine, and cocaine to model your drug of choice. And scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the excellent crystal/latice structures of ice,…
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Pure Pwnage is a hilarious online episodic video program simultaneously lampooning and celebrating the extremes of geek game culture. Episode 3, “FPS Doug” had me laughing uncontrollably — I’ll never be able to hear the term “headshot” again not think of FPS Doug. And the climactic battle of Episode 4, “Pwn or Be Pwned” is…
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I am not exactly what you would call a stellar money manager. Like many banks, mine offers overdraft protection and I end up being hit with overdraft charges more often that I’d like. My bank charges me $25 per overdraft. That’s essentially very high interest on an extremely short term loan, since the bank requires…
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Billboard has a story about the increasing prevalence of copy protected music CDs. Typically these CDs are designed so they won’t play in — and therefore cannot be ripped by — computers. Most come with a second layer containing DRMed Windows Media files of the music. There’s a very odd claim by Billboard buried in…
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In another lifetime — i.e. a few years ago — I used to run a small search engine. Rather than try to index every possible site in the world, this search engine used some pretty basic technology to index the then-handful of web sites on the Internet opposed to the animal rights agenda. It was…