NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an amazing photo by Phill Round. It looks like a frame from a Spielberg movie—an humanoid figure appearing at the base of a mountain, with the unknown starry sky of an alien world behind it. In reality, it’s a man getting into N ew Zealand’s Hollow Hill Cave. Read more…
More:
This amazing starry sky is a cave full of glowworms in New Zealand
The songbook of the damned—or at least of the employed. “For thirty-seven years,” reads the opening passage in the book, “the gatherings and conventions of our IBM workers have expressed in happy songs the fine spirit of loyal cooperation and good fellowship which has promoted the signal success of our great IBM Corporation in its truly International Service for the betterment of business and benefit to mankind.” That’s a hell of a mouthful, but it’s only the opening volley in the war on self-respect and decency that is the 1937 edition of Songs of the IBM , a booklet of corporate ditties first published in 1927 on the order of IBM company founder Thomas Watson, Sr. The 1937 edition of the songbook is a 54-page monument to glassey-eyed corporate inhumanity, with every page overflowing with trite praise to The Company and Its Men. The booklet reads like a terribly parody of a hymnal—one that praises not the traditional Christian trinity but the new corporate triumvirate of IBM the father, Watson the son, and American entrepreneurship as the holy spirit: Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Taken from:
Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook
Add / Remove This is part of a series of articles that looks at entrepreneurs hoping to get their ideas off the ground through crowdfunding. At the time of writing, each of these innovations is currently seeking funding. Smart lightbulbs aren’t a new concept — we wrote about the smartphone controlled NXP system back in 2011 — but so far, they’ve mostly been limited to the task of illuminating a space. Recognizing that smart capabilities can enable devices to do much more than their original function, LightFreq has created a bulb that offers intelligent audio features on top of smartphone-controlled lighting. Currently seeking funding via Kickstarter, the LightFreq device is no larger than the average incandescent lightbulb, yet includes a built-in high definition 5W speaker and Bluetooth and wifi connectivity. Along with standard smart bulb features such as remote control, timer functions and color-changing capabilities, the device can also stream music into any room in the house. Users can choose where they want the music to play through the app, which allows them to name each LightFreq according to the room it’s in and selecting it. Alternatively, the bulbs can be set to track the location of mobile devices in the house, so that the audio follows users as they move from room to room. With more than one LightFreq bulb installed, the devices can be used as an intercom system since each bulb also has a built-in mic. Watch the video below to learn more about the smart lightbulb: LightFreq fits into any standard light fitting and is currently available to pre-order through Kickstarter for USD 70 each. The campaign runs until 4 September. Are there other ways to combine intelligent home functions into a single device? Kickstarter: www.kck.st/1miDXgv Website: www.lightfreq.com Contact: www.twitter.com/golightfreq
Read More:
Smart lightbulb features a HD speaker for music and room-to-room chat
This looks like some 3D rendering of a fantastic alien matter that can’t possibly exist on Earth. But, being the amazing planet we live in, it is actually a real thing: “A bismuth crystal illustrating the many iridescent refraction hues of its oxide surface.” We live in a wonderful world, people. Read more…
More:
A rock so fantastically beautiful that it’s hard to believe is real
This LAPD patrol car is equipped with a LPR unit, mounted just in front of the light bar on the roof of the vehicle. Steve Devol A Los Angeles Superior Court judge will not force local law enforcement to release a week’s worth of all captured automated license plate reader (ALPR, also known as LPR) data to two activist groups that had sued for the release of the information, according to a decision issued on Thursday. In May 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) in an attempt to compel the agencies to release a week’s worth of LPR data from a certain week in August 2012. The organizations have not determined yet whether they will file an appeal. The organizations had claimed that these agencies were required to disclose the data under the California Public Records Act . In late July 2012, the ACLU and its affiliates sent requests to local police departments and state agencies across 38 states to request information on how LPRs are used. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read More:
Los Angeles cops do not need to hand over license plate reader data, judge finds
Animal Planet calls Anthony Archer-Willis “the best in the world for what he does—designing and delivering the ultimate swimming experience.” That’s why they gave Archer-Willis, a British landscape architect with a specialization in swimming pool and water garden design, his own show. In ” The Poolmaster , ” he designs dream swimming pools for a handful of lucky clients. While the TV show will reveal Archer-Willis’ own creations, in the following video he shows you his appreciation for another pool designer’s work. An unnamed family in Utah commissioned this absolutely insane, mammoth $2-million-dollar swimming pool, which was designed to look all-natural. With five waterfalls, a grotto, a waterslide, hidden passageways, an integrated indoor kitchen/bathroom/showering facility, a scuba diving practice area and more, this is not the average swimming pool that most of us Americans will be hitting up this holiday weekend. Watch and be amazed: (more…)
See original article:
Insane $2 Million Naturalistic Feature-Packed Swimming Pool
Kalev Leetaru programatically recovered all the images that were discarded by the OCR program that digitizes the millions of public domain books scanned by the Archive; these were cropped, cleaned up, and uploaded to Flickr with the text that appears before and after them, and links to see their whole scanned page. Read the rest
Originally posted here:
Internet Archive uploads more than 14 million public domain images to Flickr
Archaeologists discover earliest known wooden toilet seat
More:
Archaeologists discover earliest known wooden toilet seat
You know what can teach you Braille and piano a lot more quickly than traditional means? Vibrating gloves, or gloves with haptic feedback, if you will. In fact, IEEE Spectrum senior editor David Schneider was so intrigued by the idea, that he put together his own version to serve as a haptic touch-typing tutor for his 11-year-old son. He admits that his gloves (made using transistors, $14 worth of vibration motors purchased from eBay and long cords connecting them to an Arduino Nano board) aren’t as sleek as Georgia Tech’s piano-teaching ones . But, hey, they worked, and once he created a program to go along with them, they did their job well enough. Schneider’s program displays one among the 100 most common English words at random on screen — it does so one letter at a time, sending vibrations to the right finger as the letters appear. Not bad for something he merely cobbled together. But (as he realized later on), the program would’ve been a lot more fun and effective if it were more of a typing game than a boring digital tutor. Filed under: Peripherals Comments Source: IEEE Spectrum
See the article here:
Home-made vibrating gloves train your finger muscles to touch type (video)
If you typically share your computer and your browser with a sibling, a roomie or a friend who has no respect for your privacy, this latest Google Chrome beta update might make things easier for you. It comes with a pull-down menu that lets you easily switch users, put the browser to guest mode or launch an incognito tab on Windows, Mac or Linux. According to some comments in the update’s Google+ announcement , though, you still have to log off from your accounts to be sure your activities remain for your eyes only, just in case someone decides to peek. The guest mode automatically deletes the other user’s browsing information, on the other hand, so they won’t have to worry about you seeing their secrets. Aside from this update, Google has also unleashed a 64-bit Chrome beta for Mac, a few days after the company released a 64-bit stable version for Windows computers. This will make the browser launch more quickly and will generally make it faster than its predecessor. Finally, the new beta update also comes with a bunch of APIs for web app devs to play with. You can get Google Chrome beta (or any other channel you want, whether stable, Canary or Dev) through The Chromium Projects website . Filed under: Misc , Google Comments Source: Google Chrome Blog , Chrome Releases , Google+ , The Chromium Blog (1) , (2)
See the article here:
Google Chrome beta gets account switcher and 64-bit support for Mac