10 centuries in 5 minutes

YouTube - 10 centuries in 5 minutes

Welcome to WeirdConverter! The site is simple: it is like a currency converter, but for completely unrelated items. Play around, and suggest other stuff you want to see - we will make it happen.

Weird Converter - Translate Babies to Blue Whales to Polar Bears

Extraordinary claims don't come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour.

Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.

What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws. "My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can't be true," says Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website. "Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order."

Is this evidence that we can see the future? - life - 11 November 2010 - New Scientist

No matter your command of the English language, we all have trouble defining, pronouncing, or even remembering certain words, which makes writing tough. Here are some of the best tools to help you out.

We talked about online language tools for nerds a couple years ago, and today we're revisiting it with newer and better options. This list isn't exhaustive, but it's some of our favorite tools we've found—and even make use of on a daily basis—to help in our writing.null

The Best Language Tools for Geeks

The odds of their conception were astronomical; of surviving in the womb, let alone a live birth, slim to none. The odds of living past their first day, worse than a coin toss, though not if the small army deployed by Vancouver’s Children’s Hospital had a say in it. And they did. And today, approaching their fourth birthdays on Oct. 25, Tatiana and Krista Hogan are wearing pretty velvet dresses, red and purple respectively. They greet you at the door of their sprawling, unruly home in Vernon, B.C., carrying a bouncy ball, and issuing a command: come play.

You have just enough time to add your shoes to the pile at the entrance and to give their mother, Felicia Simms, a quick greeting before you’re led through the living room and kitchen, to a long, sloping hallway that leads to some of the bedrooms in what was, until this year, a residential home for the elderly. They plant themselves at the bottom. You’re at the top, with their 2½-year-old sister, Shaylee, rolling and fielding their returns. Then the twins want the higher ground, but you’re doing it wrong. “No,” says Tatiana as though dealing with a mental defective. “Bounce it!”

They are the rarest of the rarest of the rare. Tatiana and Krista are not just conjoined, but they are craniopagus, sharing a skull and also a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that processes and relays sensory information to other parts of the brain. Or perhaps in this case, to both brains. There is evidence that they can see through each other’s eyes and perhaps share each other’s unspoken thoughts. And if that proves true, it will be the rarest thing of all. They will be unique in the world.

They have been drawing international attention, both public and scientific, since before their birth. Dr. Douglas Cochrane, a neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital, is part of the team that has been watching over them since they were in the womb. Last year he conducted tests in which one twin looked at an object while he measured the brain activity in the other. “Their brains are recording signals from the other twin’s visual field,” he cautiously concluded. “One might be seeing what the other one is seeing.”

Macleans.ca » Blog Archive A piece of their mind «

AS the sun rose over the mountains circling Los Reyes, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, one morning in March 2009, a caravan of more than 300 heavily armed law enforcement agents set out on a raid.

All but the lead vehicle turned off their headlights to evade lookouts, called “falcons,” who work for La Familia Michoacana, the brutal Mexican cartel that controls the drug trade. This time, the police weren’t hunting for a secret stash of drugs, guns or money. Instead, they looked to crack down on La Familia’s growing counterfeit software ring.

The police reached the house undetected, barreled in and found rooms crammed with about 50 machines used to copy CDs and make counterfeit versions of software like Microsoft Office and Xbox video games. They arrested three men on the spot, who were later released while the authorities investigate the case. “The entire operation was very complicated and risky,” says a person close to the investigation, who demanded anonymity out of fear for his life.

Mexican drug cartel peddles Microsoft Office and Xbox games

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Before Tuesday's midterm elections, there were 95 House and Senate candidates who pledged support for Net neutrality, a bill that would force Internet providers to not charge users more for certain kinds of Web content. nullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnull

The final nail in coffin for Net neutrality - Nov. 3, 2010

WIM, a beautifully designed book for all ages, presents 65 pen and ink drawings with whimsical names, whose upside can also be their downside and whose downside can also be their upside. With no front and no back, no up and no down, this book invites viewers of all ages to participate in light hearted visual adventures of the human spirit. In the 1970’s, when he created these drawings, Roman wrote: “ . . . the treasures of the spirit within us tend to be encumbered with objects, things, and everyday business. To enter one’s imagination, to play, to delight in the gift of the human spirit – these free activities break through that prison and nurture the quality of human life. Through these drawings I have attempted to enter that imagining mode in the life of the spirit and to evoke some of its treasures for those who view them. . . .”

Dedicated to Fred Rogers who noted that “the child is in me still, but sometimes not so still. . .” these drawings will appeal to children of all ages including those of us in our golden years.

WIM: The Upsidedown Book

It's the NES's silver anniversary this month, yes, but it also happens to be the 25th birthday of Super Mario Bros., the game that arguably did more than any other NES title to ensure that Nintendo's fledgling system would be a runaway success.

Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of SMB and a couple dozen other Nintendo titles you might be familiar with, sat down with Famitsu magazine in this week's issue to share some behind-the-scenes development tales from the NES's flagship title.

Super Mario Bros.' 25th: Miyamoto Reveals All

Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter's infrastructure. Netflix Instant accounts for 20% of all non-mobile internet usage in the US during prime time. Now David Galbraith has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations that show Lady Gaga racking up a big bandwidth bill for Google:

My rough estimate: Lady Gaga has cost Google 10 petabytes in bandwidth same as 10,000 text messages for everyone on earth. If Lady Gaga's Google bandwidth was charged at what ATT charges for SMS, it would have cost: 10.5 trillion dollars.

The rate for SMS messaging is obscene but the real money is in ink cartridges, right? Apparently not. HP's basic black inkjet cartridge is available at Amazon for the astounding price of $29 and will print 495 pages. Assuming 250 words per page and six characters per word (five char/word + one space), 10 petabytes of text messages would cost only $503 billion to print out (excluding paper costs, which would add ~$89 billion to the total). Who knew that texting was more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20?

Bieber, Gaga, and Netflix: Internet heavyweights