Photo by lovelypetal, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license
Yesterday Gizmodo posted an article about a new torrent containing information scraped from 100 million Facebook profiles. Yes, your profile is in there.
Today they traced the IP addresses of the people downloading, and identified which corporations were behind those IP addresses. They posted a list of the companies, but it’s hard to say whether you should be more surprised about who is in the list, or by who isn’t.
To start with, there are two very notable entries missing from the list: Google and Microsoft. I don’t think anyone expected Microsoft’s hands to be clean on this one, but they seem to have held their head high. Similarly, Google seems to have lived up to the image that they try to convey, and kept their hands out of the cookie jar. Microsoft and Google are especially notable because of their size. Nobody, authorized or not, used a Google or Microsoft server to download this. No buts. No excuses.
Now, who IS on the list is similarly interesting. Read the rest of this entry »
Battery life after the tweek. Screenshot by pingpongboss.
I’ve been drooling over the Evo since a month before it was released. With a massive 4.3 inch display, 1GHz processor, seriously impressive dual cameras, a stack of other features, and the Android OS, what’s not to love? It’s like an iPhone with no antenna issues.
Unfortunately, for all the awesome coolness, there was one major flaw. This glutton eats batteries like a fat boy eats Twinkies. Read the rest of this entry »
Old Spice’s Commercial “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” is one of this year’s best commercials. Not only was it brilliantly fresh, it also succeeded in effectively marketing a mens product to the women doing the actual shopping.
Twit TV interviewed the masterminds behind this project to find out how they did it. Truth is stranger than fiction, and the reality was impressive enough to warrant inclusion in a blog of impossible things. Read the rest of this entry »
Your browser knows an amazing amount about your identity, where you go, and what you do. Every time you visit a page, the browser remembers it in the history. In theory, to protect your privacy, the sites you visit don’t have access to this history information. In practice, it is actually possible to get at part of it. To prove my point, let’s look at the sites you do and don’t visit:
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I ran across a new “your computer can’t do that” lie today.
Suppose you have a site example.com, and a subdomain dev.example.com. The dev site is just a clone of the main one, but you can make changes and test things before deploying to your live site. You might want to tell all robots to leave your dev site alone, and for good reason. The dev site could trigger Google’s duplicate content filters, or if not, Google might decide to show dev.example.com pages in it’s search results, resulting in visitors seeing things they shouldn’t.
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Gavel photo by jonathunder
Judging by the recent past, we might conclude that it’s impossible to get a supreme court nominee appointed without fight. We might also conclude that it’s impossible to win the fight if the president’s party doesn’t have a senate majority. Obama’s two most recent appointments have been viciously fought by conservatives (for now I’m ignoring whether there was a good reason). Sotomayor would have failed appointment in a Republican Senate, and Kagan looks like she’ll be the same.
Suppose for a moment that all the Democrats in the Senate die. Perhaps they had poorly prepared puffer-fish. Then suppose that all the seats are filled by Republicans (hang on, stay with me). Obama has an empty seat to fill, but is it possible? Can he select a candidate that will satisfy him and a fully Republican Senate? History may have an answer.
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The Orion Nebula
We have a beautiful sky. There are sunrises, and sunsets. Some love the tropical rays of noon in the bahamas, others savor the brutal cold of a winter afternoon. And yet, for all the beauty of the daytime sky, nothing has so completely captured humanity as the night sky.
NASA photographed it, Vincent van Gogh painted it, and the Mesopotamians worshiped it. The Greeks used to draw pictures with the stars, and their fantasies immortalized Orion, the mighty hunter. Christopher Columbus would have certainly been well acquainted with his sky, and used it to navigate to America, as did Vespucci and Erickson before him.
More than one couple has been comforted at night by the thought that, although separated by distance, they are united by the stars. Perhaps you wished on a star as a child. What did you wish for? Did you ever tell? Maybe you once sat with someone you loved, and whispered to each other which stars were your favorites.
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Alpha Centauri
In the time it took this page to load, a photon could have circled the entire earth 15 times. Light is the fastest thing in the universe; and, it so happens that (at least in empty space) the speed never varies. Because the speed of light is constant, it can be used to measure distances. One light-year is the (incredibly huge) distance that takes light one year to travel.
At these distances really funky things start to happen. It is just like in a thunderstorm when you see lightening and only later actually hear the thunder; because, it takes time for the sound to reach you. Similarly, if a star 500 light-years away goes supernova today our great great great grand children will still see the star burning bright in the sky, even though it died hundreds of years ago. We can see stars today that burned out before the dinosaurs went extinct because they are millions of light-years away. If aliens millions of light-years away have awesome telescope technology, they might be looking at our planet right now and freaking out about T-Rex’s impressive grill.
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