From a thread about the trend for more and more film and TV actresses to resort to plastic surgery and botox:
On the bright side, it’s nice to know that folks are doing their best to bridge the Uncanny Valley from both ends at once.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:25 PM on March 12
In a million years or so the solar system is in for a close encounter:
The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.
[...]
What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he’s found is a shock.
He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs into space.
[Via James Nicoll]
Rob Foster on /the/path/of/most/resistance:
Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.
If your computer is being used to carry out a relatively limited set of activities, hiding the file system behind an application-oriented user interface can work well; I happily spent years using various PalmOS devices that did just that.
I think the problem arises when you try to apply that principle to a more general-purpose computer; once you have files that you might want to use in several applications – say, image files that you’ll want to view, edit and insert into documents – you need a shared file store which you can dip into and organise to suit your workflow.
While it’s true that tagging and searching can substitute for a hierarchical file system if you have a decent search tool, I’d hate to have to rely of that approach to manage a large number of files. I wonder if the first generation of iPad users will find that the approach to file storage that works well enough on their iPhone will prove inadequate when they’re trying to do real work with their iPad.
[Via Daring Fireball]
Doctor Who: Handlebars. A classy fanvid tribute to Ten.
[Via MeFi user rdc, posting to this MetaFilter thread]
Fingerprints? DNA? Iris scanning? Old news. Nose scanning is the wave of the future:
[Bath University...] researchers scanned noses in 3D and characterised them by tip, ridge profile and the nasion, or area between the eyes.
They found 6 main nose types: Roman, Greek, Nubian, hawk, snub and turn-up.
Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance. [...]
Presumably when you walk up to an ATM you’ll be required to turn to the right, so the camera can capture your profile.
[Via Bruce Schneier]
The marathon at the 1904 Olympic games at St Louis must give hope to the organisers of London’s 2012 Games. No matter how much they cock things up, they’ll never surpass St Louis:
The 1904 Olympics were such a farce that the Olympic Committee were somewhat forced to hold an interim games only 2 years later at Athens.
[Via The Memory Palace podcast, which devoted episode #26 to the story of the 1904 Olympic marathon.]
You need a paper licence to link to the Royal Mail website. You might think the post title says it all. Believe me, you need to follow the link: it’s even worse than it sounds.
I’m only surprised they don’t keep the paperwork in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard,’.
[Via currybet dot net]
YouTube Closes Down For The Night. Strangely soothing, that music…
[Via Qwghlm]
Gobekli Tepe might conceivably be the site of the world’s first temple:
Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it’s the site of the world’s oldest temple. [...]
Be sure to view the photos that accompany the article.
[Via the Long Now Blog, which linked to a rather less satisfactory Newsweek story1 about the temple.]
__________Not the sort of message you want to see when you walk up to an ATM.
Just in time for the Oscars: Honest movie titles.
[Via Orbyn]
What self-respecting geek could resist an RSS feed notifying you every time another star falls within your light cone?
72 Herculis is 46.9 light years from Earth. It was enveloped by your light cone 2 months ago.
Nu-2 Lupi, here I come…
[Via James Nicoll]
Rafe Colburn reflects on the lessons of the ReadWriteWeb/Facebook mixup:
For those of us who have completely internalized URLs, it’s hard to empathize with people who see getting to Web sites as a series of steps they follow. At this point it doesn’t matter whether people access all the Web sites they use through Google or some other search engine, other than to figure out how to make things better for people who use the Web that way.
I have to admit that I’m torn. On the one hand, I’ve stopped being surprised at the number of web users who use Google as their primary means of navigating their way around the World Wide Web, to the point where they don’t even consider that it might be an idea to bookmark their favourite web sites. On the other hand, I do think that it would be a very good idea if all web browsers displayed URLs in the address bar in a format that made the domain name stand out more; I gather that Internet Explorer 8 does this, and an add-in called Locationbar2 implements a similar approach to URL formatting for Firefox. Universal adoption of this approach wouldn’t solve the problem of web users not understanding the structure of a URL, but it’d increase the chances that they’d focus on the most important part of the URL to non-techies.
It strikes me that in the medium to long term a partial solution to the URL problem might be to de-emphasise the URL by hiding it away from the user completely. One day in the not-that-distant future, the majority of people visiting Facebook will end up accessing the site by firing up their Facebook App on their iPad or iPhone (or the Android equivalent, or whatever other platform comes along). That App will, in effect, remember the site’s URL for them.
I know there will always be a fair number of occasions when users will visit sites they don’t use regularly enough to make it worthwhile installing a custom App, but if your bank, your favourite newspaper and your social network of choice all provide a custom App wouldn’t that go some way towards cutting down on the number of times users have to think about a URL?1
__________