New battery for my palm pre = awesome

The Whitest Kids U' Know - Pledge of Allegiance

bicycle tire myths

Wider tires roll faster than narrower ones: Riders have argued for years that narrower tires – especially on the road – roll faster and are more efficient than wider ones when in fact, the opposite is true. According to Wheel Energy, the key to reducing rolling resistance is minimizing the energy lost to casing deformation, not minimizing how much tread is in contact with the ground. All other factors being equal, wider casings exhibit less 'bulge' as a percentage of their cross-section and also have a shorter section of deflected sidewall.

To test rolling resistance, tires are mounted on control wheels and applied to the rotating drum with hydraulically controlled pressure
How big a difference are we talking about here? For an equivalent make and model of tire, Wheel Energy claim the 25mm-wide size will have five percent lower rolling resistance on average – the supposed average limit of human detection – than the more common 23mm one. However, 23mm and narrower tires do still have the advantage when it comes to aerodynamics, and to a lesser extent weight. If you're selecting a tire for drag strip time trials, narrow is the way to go, but if you want a better handling tire for road racing and crits, go wider – particularly for rough road surfaces

good resource for resume building

Nearly Half of 2011's New York Times Issues Rely on WikiLeaks

Why you are paying so much for gas

you think its supply and demand? Think again. This article discusses the impact speculators have had on gas  prices

vudu

netflix alternative

bird balancing on ball

Behold Freesyle Canoe

Behold! Freestyle Canoe! Freestyle canoe apparently does not consist of throwing a canoe at the biggest white water rapids you can find, but to my disappointment merely consists of old men in canoes carefully maneuvering a canoe on smooth water.

how its made - train tracks

design is not my thing

design just isnt my thing. Anytime I attempt to change something on my blog I just get bogged down with too many choices. All I really want is just something clean and minimal, nothing bold or loud.

I think I will just stick with what I have...

The Enduring Power of Virtue - The Atlantic

blog ethics

blogs have become more legitimate sources of news and media corporations are taking note. as blogs have become more legitimate sources of news what example does it set for media corporations? blogs are unfiltered rambling thoughts of the writer and more often than not they are not fact checked. this in my mind leads to the media corporations adopting these same practices, thus the need for some sense of "blogging ethics" are needed. here Rebecca Blood outlines in her blog some ideas for ethically blogging news and information

Jaron Lanier: On one level, the Internet has become anti-intellectual because Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice. It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia. Or, if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced. I don’t think a collective voice can be effective for many topics, such as history--and neither can a partisan mob. Collectives have a power to distort history in a way that damages minority viewpoints and calcifies the art of interpretation. Only the quirkiness of considered individual expression can cut through the nonsense of mob--and that is the reason intellectual activity is important.
On another level, when someone does try to be expressive in a collective, Web 2.0 context, she must prioritize standing out from the crowd. To do anything else is to be invisible. Therefore, people become artificially caustic, flattering, or otherwise manipulative. (from interview on Amazon)

"the internet provides the welcome mechanism needed for widespread citizen participation, both to stimulate creative discussions about constitutional change and then to help organize mock constitutional conventions throughout the country, which can eventually lead to the real thing" Larry Sabato

Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person

High-Quality DNA. In an improbable corner of China, young scientists are rewriting the book on genome research.

Kevin Kelly presents some great commentary on this article.

I want to see this

No Sleep Till Brooklyn

guitar tab after the break 

William Gibson on the web

recently I read William Gibsons "Neuromancer" and I thoroughly enjoyed his hyper connected dystopian universe that was startling prescient of today's technology. I found this interview on him on his thoughts on the internet to be an interesting insight into his ideas of the web way back in 1996. here are some quotes I liked.
Gibson on the nature of HTML coding

he's got to spend however many hours in the HTML sweatshop to produce this stuff...and it turns out to be like knitting -- it's a bunch of guys manipulating little bits.

his analogy of HTML coding reminds me of my experience of learning HTML, tedious, slow, and time consuming. Oh how the web has changed these days with blogs and facebook, now anybody can become a part of this shared experience.

You can just sit there forever. Looking. Looking. And maybe not finding anything. Seeing a lot of goofy stuff.

funny how the web has changed so much since 1996 yet still remains an infinite time-suck.
Gibson noting the democratic nature of the web

this accidental global post-national post-geographical thing that we've created -- which is growing constantly and exponentially in an unplanned way -- is very scary for nation-states in the traditional sense. Because where's the border? It's a violation of what they do.
I'm also inclined to think, in the very long view, that a lot of what nation-states do, and have done traditionally, is responsible for a lot of the problems in the world. So if we're going to get to something a little better, this is maybe the only thing in the world that's pointing in that direction. This is taking us somewhere.

this quote really speaks to me the power that the web holds to democratize information and knowledge. And this democratization has not only impacted the individual with powerful technologies such as email, social networking, wikipedia, youtube, and blogging, but also as Gibson notes nations  themselves which can be most recently seen in the meteoric rise of wikileaks in national issues. Further more Gibson notes that this powerful democratization of the web has the ability (if we choose to use it) to direct us to become better, more informed citizens.