As an American historian who knows something of economic law, having learned from the Austrians, I became intrigued with how the United States had remained prosperous, its economy still so dynamic and productive, given the serious and recurring economic fallacies to which our top leaders (political, corporate, academic) have subscribed and from which they cannot seem to free themselves—and alas, keep passing down to the younger generation.
Let’s consider ten.

Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies, 1774–2004

Invented in 1887 by Emile Berliner, the gramophone was a huge leap in recording technology, and "record disks" are still in use today! This kit allows you to build your very own gramophone, which will let you record and play back your very own record disks! Everything you need for the gramophone is included; you need only provide the labour and 2 size C batteries, cellophane tape, a Phillips' head ( ) screwdriver, and scissors. Use various materials as disks -- the lids from cup-noodle bowls, old CD-ROMs, plastic file folders, glossy paper -- see which ones work, and which ones don't! A fun experiment for the entire family!

omg! Use AOL cd's to record on like vinyl....

The Emile Berliner Gramophone....

Forums user kalocin started up a thread a little while ago asking people for songs that he would then cover using a synthesizer based on the classic nintendo entertainment system's psg audio system. So what we have for you now is 16 amazing NES-ified hit songs!

Here's what's on the disc:
01 REM - Losing My Religion
02 Europe - Final Countdown
03 Radiohead - Karma Police
04 Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
05 Survivor - Eye of the Tiger
06 Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven
07 Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama
08 Led Zeppelin - Kashmir
09 Slayer - Angel of Death
10 David Pomeranz - Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now
11 Coldplay - Yellow
12 Rick James - Superfreak
13 Semisonic - Closing Time
14 (Silence)
15 Hidden NESmix Intro
16 Zero Wing (Opening Theme) (4x4 Remix)
17 Tetris (Music A) (Piano Practice)

There's also a sweet cover included.

Had to post this... read more to download ... hahaha :P

16 amazing 8-bity NES-ified hit songs...

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented a technology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy: a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

With the new hydrogen tablet, it becomes much simpler to use the environmentally-friendly energy of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a non-polluting fuel, but since it is a light gas it occupies too much volume, and it is flammable. Consequently, effective and safe storage of hydrogen has challenged researchers world-wide for almost three decades. At the Technical University of Denmark, DTU, an interdisciplinary team has developed a hydrogen tablet which enables storage and transport of hydrogen in solid form.

“Should you drive a car 600 km using gaseous hydrogen at normal pressure, it would require a fuel tank with a size of nine cars. With our technology, the same amount of hydrogen can be stored in a normal gasoline tank”, says Professor Claus Hviid Christensen, Department of Chemistry at DTU.

Making society independent of fossil fuels - Danish researchers reveal new technology...

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., has developed the world’s first clear paint that repairs scratches on painted car surfaces, including scratches from car-washing machines, off-road driving and fingernails.

“Scratch Guard Coat” contains a newly developed high elastic resin that helps prevent scratches from affecting the inner layers of a car’s painted surface. With “Scratch Guard Coat” a car’s scratched surface will return to its original state anywhere from one day to a week, depending on temperature and the depth of the scratch.

The water-repellant paint also has a higher resistance to scratches compared with conventional clear paints. A vehicle painted with “Scratch Guard Coat” will have only one-fifth the abrasions caused by a car-washing machine compared with a car covered with conventional clear paint. Scratches from car-washing machines account for the majority of scratches to painted car surfaces.

“Scratch Guard Coat” is effective for about three years.

“Scratch Guard Coat” will be applied for the first time on an SUV model that is scheduled for a partial makeover in the near future. The paint will be applied to the car’s chassis, bumpers, door mirrors, among other parts.

Nissan: Paint that Fixes Itself When Scratched

EcoDesignz aspires to join the growing movement toward reducing the dependence on dwindling timber resources by producing and making available to the public high quality residential and commercial furnishings and accessories produced entirely from bamboo.
Due to recent technological advancements, it is now possible to convert raw bamboo culms into more conventional lumber and plywood such that it can be used to build virtually anything that traditionally has been made from wood. Our experience has shown that bamboo products are highly appreciated because not only does their unique grain and color add warmth and beauty not found in most hardwood products, but more importantly bamboos' incredibly fast growth cycle makes it an environmentally sound and sustainable alternative choice for almost anything made from wood, plastic or metal. And bamboos' inherent strength and hardness actually makes it a better option for many products such as tables, doors and flooring.

Bamboo Furniture For A Sustainable Future

Until now, physicists who wanted to understand how electrons behaved at the nanoscale needed to choose between instruments which had good spatial resolution (down to tens of nanometers or below) or fast time resolution (down to picoseconds), but not both. But researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique F餩rale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have developed a new machine able of tracking electrons at trillionths of a second. This system can work with any semiconductor and may lead to new discoveries in physics of nanoscale phenomena.
This system took four years of development to a team led by BenoDeveaud-Pl餲an of EPFL's Laboratory of Quantum Optoelectronics (LOEQ). Here is what the researchers did.

Inside a quantum dot ....

Extortionists now have a new type of victim to pick on: podcasters. U.S. podcaster Eric Marcus has fallen prey to a hijacker who has diverted his really simple syndication (RSS) feed and is allegedly demanding money to release it. Marcus, who runs the Vegan.com site and produces the Erik's Diner podcasts, is looking for legal redress.

A podcast is audio content that is distributed to listeners over the Internet through an RSS feed. According to press reports, Marcus discovered that downloads of his podcast had suddenly diminished after he had gradually won an audience of 1,500 regular listeners.
Marcus found that Yahoo has an RSS listing for his podcast on its podcasts.yahoo.com directory, but that the listing directs potential visitors to podkeyword.com rather than to vegan.com. He also discovered that Apple's iTunes online music store associates the podkeyword.com Web address with the Erik's Diner podcast.

Podcaster Falls Prey to RSS Hijacking

Beware the privateers! They whisper sweetly of fantastic new services they will provide – a faster Internet, better quality, even medical alerts for consumers….and blah-de-blah. Their unspoken agenda, however, is to convert the open Internet commons into a pay-for-performance marketplace. The companies who control the “pipes” of the Internet – i.e., the telephone and cable TV companies – are starting to make their move.
It’s imperative that we pay close attention to these plans – and register our objections to Congress and the companies themselves.

At a briefing for reporters and industry analysts yesterday, the chief technology officer of BellSouth Corp. testified that Internet service providers should be able to sell higher-quality or priority services to certain websites. We knew this battle would soon arrive, but now we can see the puffs of smoke coming from their cannons. (See Jonathan Krim’s story in the Washington Post.)

William L. Smith told a House subcommittee that BellSouth should be able to charge companies for loading their websites faster than others, or for assuring that a voice-over-Internet service has higher quality sound. If network traffic got heavy, BellSouth should be able to sell guaranteed quality of service for favored types of “data packets” – say, streaming TV – while everyone else could suffer delays or degradation in transmission.

Smith tried to make all of this sound eminently reasonable. As he put it, "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket. In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground.”

But if we follow the logic of market-segmentation and price discrimination, it ends up converting this most precious open commons, the Internet, into an inequitable marketplace, with everything that that implies. It degrades the most fundamental virtue of the Internet – open access on an equal basis – and installs a top-down, seller-dominated system.

Sound familiar? Of course: It’s cable TV. It’s Prodigy and CompuServe. It’s the pop music biz. We’ve been there before, and everyone knows that it sucks.

If BellSouth were to be able to charge Google for priority speed in transmitting its search engine results, for example, then - poof! – only the Big Guys would be able to compete at the highest levels. Any newcomer with a great idea suddenly would suddenly face a huge, insuperable disadvantage. So much for the entrepreneurial revolution made possible by the Internet commons.

Read more...

BellSouth’s Secret Dream: Turn the Internet into Cable TV

"Animator Saiman Chow created this wild claymated Hello Kitty vs Video Game Robot film for the 30th anniversary Hello Kitty Exhibtion held in Hong Kong. Needless to say, the Kitty kicks ass."

Claymation Hello Kitty kicks videogame monster's ass