Originally posted at Deep Tech

Well put, and it's true enough! Unfortunately for me, only one of these can get you from Venice Beach to Hollywood in fewer than 30 minutes, but I'm rethinking that commute.

The art is by Australian Peter Drew. The photo is by Carlton Reid.

Via Boing Boing

Love (!) the Puzzle Board by Ooms Dutch Design Studio. Minimal, beautiful, functional. $26

(via apartmentthereapy)

Radial Engines

Radial engines are used in aircrafts having propeller connected to the shaft delivering power in order to produce thrust its basic mechanism is as follows

Steam engine Principle

Steam engine once used in locomotives was based on the reciprocating principle as shown below

Sewing Machine

Maltese Cross Mechanism

this type of mechanism is used in clocks to power the second hand movement.

Manual Transmission Mechanism

The mechanism also called as “stick shift” is used in cars to change gears mannually

Constant Velocity Joint

This mechanism is used in the front wheel drive cars

Torpedo-Boat destroyer System

This system is used to destroy fleet in naval military operations.

Rotary Engine

Also called as Wankel engine is a type of internal combustion engine has a unique design that converts pressure into rotating motion instead of reciprocating pistons

Isn’t it strange that the media carefully label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language but there’s no labelling system for wacky journalism and other questionable content? (like this blogpost :-)
Geek comedian Tom Scott designed a solution for this. He made a sticker template which is downloadable at his website. It’s up to you where to put them.

Mobile web development is an emerging hot topic in the web development community. As such, the jQuery Team has been hard at work on determining the strategy and direction that the jQuery Project will take. Today, we are proud to announce the jQuery Mobile Project. We’ve launched a new site at jquerymobile.com that publicly outlines our strategy, research and UI designs.

As always, we want to hear from you.  We’ve created a new Mobile jQuery forum to collect feedback from the community.  Please feel free to join in on the discussion and read more in the announcement.

Finding the appropriate font for your design purpose is important. Simple designs can become extraordinary with the correct font choice. Though a wide variety of fonts are available to download online, there is always a demand for fresh varieties to express text or copy in a brand new way.

With today’s post of 33 Fresh and Cool Fonts for Designers, we bring you a collection of fresh and trendy fonts you can download for free. Breathe life into your design’s copy with these unique font faces. Enjoy!

Nobile Font

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Arcus Font

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Fracmetrica Font

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Free Font Two One

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Qub Font

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Age Free Font

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Megapolis Font

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Section Font

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Modo Font

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Musa Ornata

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Piron Free Ront

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Code Free Ront

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Acid Type Font

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Sansation Font

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Zero One Base Font

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Chunk Five Font

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Val Stencil Font

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Amperisk Font

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Code Font

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Q Section Font

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Sumkin Typeface Font

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Popu Font

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Laconic Font

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Merge Font

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Oblik Serif Font

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Dekar Free Font

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Lobster Font

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Bebas Font

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Patagonia Font

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Saf Free Font

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Q H Font

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Tertre Font

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Glide Font

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The Evolution of Steve Jobs Fashion

An observation tower comprising of 2 polygonal staircases. Via abitare

Giorgio / Invisible to the eye:
Google never removed Oracle from its index  —  Some folks have been reporting a strange behavior assumed by Google after the lawsuit filed by Oracle against Android and Google: it supposedly removed oracle.com pages, and all the pages that talk about Oracle, from its search index.

Via Paul Kedrosky.

Advises unhappy users to switch to Google's browser

Microsoft has advised Hotmail users struggling to access their email accounts to surf via Google’s Chrome browser in order to successfully connect to the recently overhauled service.…

Sean Gardiner:

Slater demanded an apology from the passenger, the official said, but the passenger refused. The two argued before the passenger told Slater to  “fuck off”, the official said. The official said that Slater then got on the plane’s PA system and directed that same obscenity at all the passengers and added that he especially meant it for the man who refused to apologize.

Slater is alleged to have then activated the plane’s inflatable emergency slide, grabbed two beers from the galley, then slid down the chute, the official said.

Shared by ocular avulsionist
I love re sharing this when ever it come back around.

Came across this on the internets last night.  It’s been around for a while, but I’d forgotten about it until I saw it again…

Now THAT’S a great way to sell soda! (via Reddit)

The In Out Bottle for sugar dispensing has a very clever twist to it, the silica gel mouth kinda in-turns to form a funnel, so that you don’t spill the sugar while refilling it. Reminds me of the funnel refill bottle for soaps we did recently. So I guess the consensus is that funnels incorporated into the lid cuts around two steps in the refilling process, hence better! What do you think?

In Out Bottle For Sugar is an IDEA Design 2010 winner.

Designers: Yan-Ting Chen & Hsin Yeh

----------

Yanko Design
Timeless Designs - Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store - We are about more than just concepts. See what's hot at the YD Store!

Architects Newspaper recently shared some surprising news suggesting that new low-E windows could be responsible for melting the vinyl siding on neighboring homes. Reflections from the windows are reported to be heating up nearby vinyl siding to the point that it melts.

Read the rest of Are Low-E Windows Melting Your Neighbor’s House?http://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", Green Building, green design, green myths, low-e windows melt houses, solar, sun, sustainable design, vinyl siding, windows

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Reuters - A federal judge on Wednesday struck down a California ban on same-sex marriages as unconstitutional, handing a key victory to gay rights advocates in a politically charged decision almost certain to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Simply remarkable.

Just 6 weeks ago, Warren Buffett and Bill & Melinda Gates launched The Giving Pledge, an effort to encourage all of the nation’s billionaires to give away at least 50% of their wealth.

Today, it was announced that 10% of all billionaires have already publicly made the pledge.

The Giving Pledge will be holding a press conference later today, so more information will become available. But a list of the billionaires who have pledged is now available, including their Pledge letters.

The pledges are an interesting cross section of well known philanthropists as well as billionaires whose philanthropy is generally unrecognized. Each person making the pledge has written a letter describing why they have done so. The letters offer an amazing insight into the philanthropic impulse and will certainly become a standard part of philanthropy education efforts.

Fascinatingly, most of the pledge letters state that the person making the pledge plans to leave virtually all of their wealth to philanthropy. The reasons cited and the causes the pledgers plan to support are as varied as can be.

• George Lucas writes of his own poor educational experience how he wants to help build a better education system.
• Gerry Lenfest writes about the joy she and her husband experience when they give to a worthwhile cause.
• George Kaiser admits that his charity is driven by guilt.
• 36-year-old John Arnold and his wife Laura describe their disbelief that they ever came into so much wealth.
• Ken Langone points to the spiritual purpose that the Pledge embodies.
• Lorry Lokey describes growing up in the depression and explains why he flies coach.

But not every letter is a heartwarming call for equality and self-sacrifice. Maybe the most surprising name on the list to me was Larry Ellison, the CEO of the technology company Oracle who is generally described in the press as a self-styled bad boy who spends huge sums on jets and boats. [Update: I failed to mention in the first version of this post that Ellison is the third wealthiest person in the US, meaning that the top three wealthiest people have all said they'll be giving away virtually all of their wealth].

Ellison’s letter makes it clear that he is also the “bad boy” of the Giving Pledge. But in doing so, he opens the door for participation in the Pledge by billionaires who might not resonate with some of the bleeding heart rhetoric of some of the Giving Pledge members.

While many of the letter writers address Warren Buffett directly, Ellison writes:

“To whom it may concern,

Many years ago, I put virtually all of my assets into a trust with the intent of giving away at least 95% of my wealth to charitable causes.  I have already given hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research and education, and I will give billions more over time.  Until now, I have done this giving quietly – because I have long believed that charitable giving is a personal and private matter.  So why am I going public now?  Warren Buffett personally asked me to write this letter because he said I would be “setting an example” and “influencing others” to give.  I hope he’s right.”

I hope so too.

As I wrote in my column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy following the announcement of the Pledge, I hope that it “sets an example” for and “influences others” who come from every walk of life, not just billionaires.

If Larry Ellison can sign the pledge, maybe my hopes for a Second Great Wave of Philanthropy aren’t so far fetched!

Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is... an online gaming community. 

Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game.

According to a news feature on Foldit, the project arose from an earlier distributed computing effort called Rosetta@home. That project used what has become the standard approach for home-based scientific work: a screensaver that provided a graphical frontend to a program that uses spare processor time to solve weighty scientific problems. For Rosetta, that problem was the task of figuring out how proteins, which are composed of a chain of chemicals called amino acids, adopt their final, three-dimensional shape.

Read the comments on this post

...how much do I want to be in Santorini right now?

{photo by Marcel Germain}

Complaint #661

Sent by Danny

I now have in my possession a pocket-sized computer which, when I speak a question to it (“Who is the author of Kraken?” “Who was the fourteenth president of the Unites States?” “What is the name of John Scalzi’s cat?”) provides me an answer in just a few seconds. If I take a picture of something, the same pocket computer will analyze the photo and tell me what I’m looking at. Oh, and it makes phone calls, too. Among other things.

None of that is the cool part. The cool part is, when I speak a question to my pocket computer and it gives me a bad answer, I get annoyed. Because here in the future, when I talk to my pocket computer, I expect it to get the answer right the first time.

I think I’ve said before that one of the neat things about getting older is that you really do become aware just how much things change. To be more specific about it, as you get older, at some point you cross an arbitrary line and are aware that you are now living in the future. I’m not precisely sure when it was I crossed my own arbitrary Future Line, but I’ll tell you what, I’m well past it now.

That is all. Carry on.

Many artists have used pencils to create beautiful pieces of work – but only one creates stunning masterpieces on the tip of one. Microscopic artist Dalton Ghetti spends up to two-and-a half years painstakingly crafting each handmade piece on the graphite of a pencil.

The New York Times reports

“Mr. Ghetti, who owns about as many possessions as a monk, is aware how unusual his craft is. He started carving tree bark when he was a child and experimented with everything from soap to chalk before settling on graphite. It’s second nature now, and for 90 percent of his work, all he needs is a sewing needle, a razor blade and a carpenter’s or No. 2 pencil.

‘The pencil tip is great; it’s like a pure, very homogenous material,’ he said. ‘It cuts in the same direction, not like wood, which has a grain. But when I tell people how long it takes, that’s when they don’t believe it. That’s what amazes people more, the patience. Because everything nowadays has to be fast, fast, fast.’”

It is really remarkable niche in the art world. There have been artists who use pencils as part of their craft, but none use the smallest and most fragile part: the pencil lead.

via & via

Related posts:

1. Incredible Pencil Sculptures Creative artists always try to make something new from normal...
2. Incredible Pencil Art from Paul Lung Last year, I once introduced some photo-realistic pencil drawing from...
3. Incredible Phone Book Carvings I have wrote several posts about book carving art, see...
4. Awesome 3D Pencil Art: They are coming out of Paper We have featured lots of realistic drawing artists on this...

• Interviewing. It absolutely does not help your career one bit, even though it's absolutely critical for Google in the long term. It's not rewarded, considered during the promotion process, and it burns a lot of time. Put it off as long as possible. And don't even bother with hiring committees. That's even more of a time sink.
  
• Mentoring other googlers. Just like interviewing, it is under-valued and not considered real work when performance reviews come up. Even worse is rescuing someone on a PIP. Unless you're a manager, don't even spend time on that. If you succeed in rescuing that person, he did it himself. If you fail, you've wasted a ton of time. Only managers can get any credit from this, so decline any requests to help.
  
• Changing projects. This helps Google by spreading knowledge around. The reward system, however does not reward this. The way to get promoted is to stay at one project for a long time, not to switch projects every 18 months, as management might sometimes tell you. (Note: if you want to switch projects, the best time is right after a promotion)
  
• 20% time. Depending on your manager, it could absolutely hurt your career. triple check to make sure your manager does not take a negative view on this. I liked my 20% time, but I was well aware of the trade-off for my career I was making.
  

• Don't subscribe to misc. Mailing lists are a big time sink. I never felt hurt by not reading misc, misc-mv, or eng-misc.
  
• Set a limit on the number of tech talks/fun talks per week that you should go to. Try to stay under that number. I'll admit I didn't always succeed.
  

• the best projects, and your choice of projects
  
• faster promotions and more money
  
• "secret" founder's awards (they're not very secret because people brag to me about them)
  
• respect from your peers (comes along with the promotions)
  

The big picture: Google rewards hard work, but much more importantly, high profile projects. Never sacrifice a chance to work on those high profile projects versus equally important but unsexy maintenance tasks that will get no respect from promotion committees. Google does not reward the maintenance work, no matter how important it is (Exception: War-room firefighting. Google loves those, and loves heroic performances from people in war-rooms). In particular, if you're stuck doing SRE work but you're a SWE, you need to negotiate your way out of that. In any organization, there are work horses, show horses, and horses' asses. Most people have no trouble figuring out how not to be the 3rd. But it's far better to be a show horse than a work horse. You get all the rewards with less effort. It is rare that the Raymond Chens of the world get rewarded for the effort they put in. (Yes, and Microsoft at its best was smart enough to do so)

Finally, if you get fed up of working for a big company, consider joining a startup.

Perhaps you think you’re doing something useful when you boot up your PC and head online. Odds are, there’s a one-in-three chance you’re spending your time on Facebook. Or playing with virtual sheep.

So says Nielsen in a new report about what American do online. Title: “What Americans Do Online.”

The key takeaway here is that social networks and online games take up about a third of our Web time. That’s up from last year, when the two categories combined to take up about 25 percent of our time.

And that’s good news for Facebook and Farmville-maker Zynga, which dominate the two categories. It’s neutral news for Google (GOOG), since search’s share has stayed consistent at about 3.5 percent, and it’s bad news for Yahoo (YHOO) and AOL (AOL), since portal time has decreased by 19 percent.

Here’s your data in chart form (click to enlarge):

And in a groovy graphic:

Interesting side note is that usage patterns change if you’re talking about Internet use on your phone. There, Nielsen says, you’re much more likely to spend time tapping out email:

What accounts for the difference? Nielsen doesn’t hazard a guess, so I’ll make a couple:

• Even on sophisticated handsets like Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Google’s Android, it’s easier to check email than just about any other online experience. And if you’re talking about cruder feature phones with very limited Web access–the kinds that average Americans still use in great numbers–that difference is even more pronounced.
• The mobile content people keep telling us that that phone users are interested in “snacking” on content. Can’t get more snackable than an email, right?

One other data point to consider when considering the different data points: The data comes from different places.

Nielsen’s PC-based Web stats come from both self-reported surveys and panel data, where a small group of users allow Nielsen to track their behavior. The mobile data only comes from self-reported surveys. So it may be that people would like us to think that they’re less likely to screw around on their phones than they really are. So be truthful–how much does your Web usage differ when you get on your phone?

Jailbreak the display iPhone 4. lol…

Related iPhone News

• August 3, 2010 -- “I can charge whatever the hell I want…” – Telstra managers anger customers
• July 26, 2010 -- 73% of iPhone Users Are “Very Satisfied” With AT&T
• July 25, 2010 -- UK iPhone Users Hit With Massive Bills
• July 25, 2010 -- Browser Speed Test: iPhone 3GS vs Windows Phone 7
• July 16, 2010 -- Analysis of Apple’s New Signal Bars

outdoorsanctuaries:

(via xenabitesback, vintagerosegarden)

Troy Holden brings our attention to this gem, How 2 Rep Suckafree, a chart that allows you to throw up your 'hood sign, and thus bask in OG glory.

While it lacks proper hand signage for NOPA (what is this "Western Addition" of which you speak?), Presidio Terrace, SOMISSPO, or the LoRi (Lower Outer Rincon Hill is hardcore, yo), it's still something you will want to learn, live. Print it out and tape it to your cubicle wall. You are, after all, bad ass.

Aside: We haven't a clue who dreamed up the cart. For credit's sake, if you or your BFF created it, do let us know. Thanks!

Update: Chart by Generic.

The classic definition of a programmer actually rarely exists anymore. Being a programmer can be a difficult job trying to figure out why the code you have developed isn’t working and if everything is going good according to the specs then he’s feeling himself a happiest guy around. It’s not unusual for them to face dynamically new situations so often while performing their job. But they are use to with it. However excitement, enthusiasm, love, horror, frustration and other emotions are the vital part of their professional personality.

Below is a cartoon sequence to find out how programmer reacts on different situations. Let’s enjoy and relate it with you if you gets these reactions too while programming.

Via Programmer’s life (cartoon)

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Shared by caldwell
this is a little mind-boggling, super awesome.

Michigan machinist GarE Maxton makes many different types of interlocking solid puzzles of this type, but this one, which he calls The Intimidator, is his masterpiece. Starting the disassembly process requires a special key. Once diassembled, about 20 of the pieces can be recombined to make a functioning single-shot pistol. Other parts of the puzzle separately and securely store "a customized set of tools, all necessary hardware, 45 caliber bullets, a standard sight, a laser sight, a cannister containing black powder pellets, a secure storage area for 209 shotgun primers, a spent primer removal tool and a ramrod for loading the bullets."

EVER met someone who was rich for a really annoying reason? Someone who flipped his condos just before the sub-prime crash? A trader who made millions betting his employer's money in a bull market but is so stupid he thinks the London underground is a political movement? So much is down to dumb luck. For all those who feel hard done by, read this story from Michael Mauboussin, the strategist at Legg Mason and contemplate the unfairness of life.

For almost two centuries, Spain has hosted an enomously popular Christmas lottery. Based on payout, it is the biggest lottery in the world and nearly all Spaniards play. In the mid 1970s, a man sought a ticket with the last two digits ending in 48. He found a ticket, bought it, and then won the lottery. When asked why he was so intent on finding that number, he replied "I dreamed of the number seven for seven straignt nights. And 7 times 7 is 48."

I don't want to give this away in this post, but see if you can suss out this problem:

 my $value = 200 * 1.15;      # 230
 print "Value is [$value]\n";   # Value is [230]
 my $result = $value % 5;     # 4

When you give up, read my answer on O'Reilly Answers.