How Apple could shake up TV: A la carte channels

How Apple could shake up TV: A la carte channels: Apple's much-expected TV could have one big trick up its sleeve: Giving consumers the power to pick--and pay for--only the channels they want.

British Prime Minister to run the country with the help of a personalized iPad app

British Prime Minister to run the country with the help of a personalized iPad app: British Prime Minister David Cameron is having a personalized iPad app...

How to download YouTube videos using Safari or Firefox | Macworld

How to download YouTube videos using Safari or Firefox | Macworld: And then there’s the ugly way—using a screen capture utility to grab video and audio in real time. You can do this with QuickTime Player by choosing File -> New Screen Recording, but you won’t be able to capture the video’s audio until you install Cycling ’74’s free Soundflower. To do that, download and install Soundflower, open the Sound system preference, and choose Soundflower (2-ch) in the Output tab. Within QuickTime’s Screen Recording window, click on the triangle and under the Microphone heading choose Soundflower (2ch). Start the recording and then start the video playing.

Before Science Fiction: Romances of Science and Scientific Romances

Before Science Fiction: Romances of Science and Scientific Romances: The origin of science fiction stories is well-known to both critics and the public: by consensus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was the first SF novel. But the origins of "science fiction" as a concept are neither well-known nor agreed-upon. The phrase "science fiction," meaning the genre of scientifically-oriented fantastic fiction, was popularized in 1929 by Hugo Gernsback. But "science fiction" had a 19th century predecessor: "scientific romance," a term used by H.G. Wells. However, as we'll see, science fiction started decades before that, as did many of the terms describing science fiction.

Good Will Toward Men

Good Will Toward Men: And there were in the same country Shepherds abiding in the field, Keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, And the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, "Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, Which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day In the city of David A Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the...

Amazon Builds World's Fastest Nonexistent Supercomputer

Amazon Builds World's Fastest Nonexistent Supercomputer: The 42nd fastest supercomputer on earth doesn't exist. This fall, Amazon built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic Compute Cloud -- a web service that spins up virtual servers whenever you want them -- and this nonexistent mega-machine outraced all but 41 of the world's real supercomputers. Amazon is the poster child for the age of cloud computing. Alongside their massive e-tail business, Jeff Bezos and company have built a worldwide network of data centers that gives anyone instant access to all sorts of computing resources, including not only virtual servers but virtual storage and all sorts of other services that can be accessed from any machine on the net. This global infrastructure is so large, it can run one of the fastest supercomputers on earth -- even as it's running thousands upon thousands of other virtual servers for the world's businesses and developers.

CineXPlayer: A powerful movie app

CineXPlayer: A powerful movie app: One of my favorite media apps for this is CineXPlayer, a powerful and versatile program for $3.99 that lets you watch your Xvid high-def movies and other formats on the iPad even if they aren't supported by the tablet natively. That way, you don't need to first convert your video content into a file the iPad can read.

Along with being the only iPad app that supports Dolby Digital Plus audio for clear and well-balanced sound, CineXPlayer can also convert your 2-D movies into 3-D to playback on a compatible 3DTV (via a 99 cent in-app purchase).

Similar to the VLC app, which got pulled off the App Store earlier this year, getting content into CineXPlayer is easy. Connect your iPad to your PC or Mac and open iTunes. Click on the App tab of your tablet and scroll to the bottom to see apps that support drag-and-drop functionality. Now, you can take movies off your hard drive — such as .Xvid, .AVI, .MOV, .M4V, .3GP and .MP4 files, or ripped from DVDs using software like Handbrake — and copy them to this folder. Unplug, and then go.

POW! Marvel, DC and the other comics publishers finally go digital - Chicago Sun-Times

POW! Marvel, DC and the other comics publishers finally go digital - Chicago Sun-Times: On behalf of what must be hundreds, or dare I even say thousands, of comic book readers who also own phones, tablets, and even our own home computers, it is my pleasure to finally welcome the comic book industry into the 21st century. Each of the big four comics publishers (DC, Marvel, Image, and Dark Horse) have committed to releasing every issue of every comic for digital download on the same day that the physical comics ship to retailers.

Brad Bird Talks <em>Ghost Protocol</em> and Making Great Movies

Brad Bird Talks Ghost Protocol and Making Great Movies: Since the turn of the century, director Brad Bird has galvanized Hollywood with animated masterpieces The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Now he's boosted a sagging spy franchise with Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol, his live-action thriller that has ironically blown past comics-based blockbusters like Captain America and Green Lantern to become the year's finest action film.

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine)

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine): It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.” Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”

North Korea Fires Off Missile As Kim Jong-Il Dies

North Korea Fires Off Missile As Kim Jong-Il Dies: The porno fetishist and nuke enthusiast who ran North Korea is dead. His twentysomething son now runs the world's most militarized state, without having served a day in uniform. So naturally North Korea launched off missiles on Monday morning, to tell the world: This is not the time to mess with it.

Bugs & Fixes: No green light for UltraViolet | Macworld

Bugs & Fixes: No green light for UltraViolet | Macworld: In the end, watching UltraViolet movies required that I first set up two accounts, download a viewing application on my Macs (and another on iOS devices, if I didn’t already have it), install Flash Player and Air on my Macs, download each movie multiple times (to get the better quality version), and put up with numerous login complications. And I haven’t even mentioned using the UltraViolet website to add additional family members to your account (needed if you want each member to have their own login) and add additional viewing devices (a feature that is not even up and running yet).

How to make a photo journal in iPhoto | Macworld

How to make a photo journal in iPhoto | Macworld: With iPhoto’s book-creation tools, you can easily combine the best elements of photo albums, written diaries, and scrapbooks to create compelling and personal photo journals. Unlike a regular photo book or album, a photo journal takes your photographs and uses them to tell a story. The images are typically organized chronologically and combined with large amounts of text to create an extensive and coherent narrative.

These journals can be a history of a period of time in your life, or they can get creative. You can document all your meals for a month, take a snapshot every day for a year, or create a record of your child’s first months in the world.

Bryan Ferry, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, review - Telegraph

Bryan Ferry, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, review - Telegraph: For someone who has helped shaped popular music over the past 40 years, Ferry doesn’t really have a lot of crowd-pleasing hits. He did eight cover versions and delved into some obscure corners of the Roxy catalogue, including the odd, sci-fi boogie of If There is Something from their 1972 debut.

Census data: Half of U.S. poor or low income - CBS News

Census data: Half of U.S. poor or low income - CBS News: (AP)  WASHINGTON - Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

Spiders' Hundreds of Fine Hairs Are Hundreds of Ears

Spiders' Hundreds of Fine Hairs Are Hundreds of Ears: Tiny hunting spiders can not only watch your every move, but they can feel those moves, and that of their prey, through the air. But how they do it, exactly, has puzzled researchers for decades.

LiveCode 5.0.2 - Create iOS applications quickly and easily.. (Demo)

LiveCode 5.0.2 - Create iOS applications quickly and easily.. (Demo): LiveCode will help you unleash your killer app. Build apps twice as fast as any other environment with a modern and powerful workflow that saves time at every step. LiveCode is more than just mobile; deploy to 7 popular platforms from one code base. LiveCode has an incredibly rich, deep feature set with more than 2000 features for even the most sophisticated project. From ask password to zoom box, drop shadows to data grids, vector graphics to native scroll bars - LiveCode has it covered.

For NFL Teams, iPad Is Valuable Playbook | Playbook | Wired.com

For NFL Teams, iPad Is Valuable Playbook | Playbook | Wired.com: The Jets are but one example of how the ubiquitous tablets are changing how teams throughout the National Football League prepare for, and review, games. The iPad is quickly replacing traditional “films” and even printed playbooks in the NFL, much like it is replacing charts in many airliners. A growing number of teams find the devices are faster, cheaper and easier than ripping thousands of DVDs and compiling reams of paper. Tablets also provide far greater flexibility in when, where and how players and coaches prep for upcoming games, allowing them to, say, review annotated game clips or new plays just about anywhere.

“All the video that our players want to see, whether it’s all the third downs that the Patriots ran or all their red-zone plays, they’ll have all that stuff on their iPads,” said Jets video director Tim Tubito.

Inside Siri: Apple’s game-changing technology – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Inside Siri: Apple’s game-changing technology – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: “Siri’s technology represents decades of combined research on artificial intelligence from more than 20 universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale,” Tobak reports. “It’s a spinoff of SRI’s Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project that was originally funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program.”

ComicBookLover 1.5 - Comic viewer, collector, organizer.. (Shareware)

ComicBookLover 1.5 - Comic viewer, collector, organizer.. (Shareware): ComicBookLover (formerly ComicBookViewer) enables you to easily view, collect and organise digital comics. Find comics by browsing cover art. Create smart lists. Edit information quickly. View comics in full-screen mode, on laptops and external displays. Supports CBZ, CBR and PDF comic archives.

Meet Gordon, the World's First Flash Supercomputer

Meet Gordon, the World's First Flash Supercomputer: Supercomputers aren't what they used to be. The Chinese are building a supercomputer with their own microprocessors, shunning American chip giants Intel and AMD. The Spanish are building one with cellphone chips. And this week, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) officially plugged in the first supercomputer that uses flash memory for storage rather than good old fashioned spinning disks. Naturally, they it call it Gordon. As in Flash Gordon.

Symantec: Spam levels fall to lowest in three years

Symantec: Spam levels fall to lowest in three years: Global spam fell to the lowest level in three years in a sign that spammers may be getting a better rate of return by hitting social-media websites instead, security firm Symantec says.

Why Sugar Makes Us Sleepy (And Protein Wakes Us Up)

Why Sugar Makes Us Sleepy (And Protein Wakes Us Up): Sugar subdues neurons in the brain that regulate wakefulness, and protein amps them up. Mixing both sugar and protein, however, leads to surprising results. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains why.

Reliving the Momentous 1882 Transit of Venus

Reliving the Momentous 1882 Transit of Venus: Nearly 130 years ago today, the premier event in astrophysics involved watching a tiny dot slowly sail across the surface of the sun. That dot was our sister planet, Venus, and observing its transit as it passed directly between the Earth and sun was a momentous scientific undertaking.

And the Transit of Venus features heavily in the first part of Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon."

How to Dispel Your Illusions by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books

How to Dispel Your Illusions by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books: Another famous example of statistical prediction is the Dawes formula for the durability of marriage. The formula is “frequency of love-making minus frequency of quarrels.” Robyn Dawes was a psychologist who worked with Kahneman later. His formula does better than the average marriage counselor in predicting whether a marriage will last.

The 27th Annual Editors’ Choice Awards | Macworld

The 27th Annual Editors’ Choice Awards | Macworld: The Editors’ Choice Awards (we affectionately call them the Eddys) recognize our favorite products released during the past year. It’s a task we take very seriously; starting with a list of over 130 candidates, we spend weeks discussing each product, debate its merits, and whether it fulfills our standards of quality, utility, innovation, value, and excellence.

Dec. 5, 1901: Disney, Heisenberg ? Separated at Birth?

Dec. 5, 1901: Disney, Heisenberg ? Separated at Birth?: Animation pioneer Walt Disney and nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg share a birthday. So, if you've ever thought the Uncertainty Principle was a bit goofy, you may be onto something.

Rihanna: Why is she so popular? - Slate Magazine

Rihanna: Why is she so popular? - Slate Magazine:

Famous classical composers: the last piece they wrote before they died. - Slate Magazine

Famous classical composers: the last piece they wrote before they died. - Slate Magazine: Last words are pithier than last pieces of music, and the world remembers the apropos or the funny ones. Enlightenment genius Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "More light!" Gen. Robert E. Lee: "Strike the tents." Gustav Mahler: "Mozart …" Richard Wagner, in the truest and most lucid words he ever spoke: "I feel lousy." Oscar Wilde, contemplating the garish wallpaper in his hotel room: "One of us has to go." Eugene O' Neill, son of an itinerant actor, who was similarly unhappy about his last residence: "Born in a hotel room, died in a goddam hotel room!" Salvador Dali: "Where is my clock?" Steve Jobs: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event | KPIC CBS 4 - News, Weather and Sports - Roseburg, OR | - Roseburg, Oregon | Local & Regional News

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event | KPIC CBS 4 - News, Weather and Sports - Roseburg, OR | - Roseburg, Oregon | Local & Regional News: Anyone is welcome to join in. Playing is free for YMCA members and community members wanting to give it a shot.
If you want to try your hand at pickleball, you can drop by the matches on Monday and Wednesday mornings from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
The Y also offers family pickleball on Wednesdays and Fridays from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The American Scholar: A Jew in the Northwest - William Deresiewicz

The American Scholar: A Jew in the Northwest - William Deresiewicz: It’s like this. I fell in love with the place. I spent a sabbatical here a few years ago just for the hell of it, and by the time it was over, I never wanted to leave. Everyone was so nice! They looked you in the eye! They smiled at you! They asked you how your day was going, and they really wanted to know. (Their day? Well, their stupid roommate had taken their bicycle without permission and ended up wrecking it, so now they needed a new bicycle and a new roommate, which totally sucked.) The niceness was political, as well. The Portland planning genius, which had created a city that was neither a playground for the rich nor a decaying postindustrial shit-hole, was all about making room for other people, putting public space over private advantage. Here was a city, a real city, that didn’t make you feel like garbage.

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event:

Now that the weather is cold, the YMCA has an activity that can help you get in a workout while making a few new friends. It's called, 'Pickleball.'

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future | CNET UK

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future | CNET UK: A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."

This isn't the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a CERN physicist and full-time rock'n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. "Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn't mention bloody black holes."

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Further developments at the LHC: Accident at Large Hadron Collider shunts April Fools' Day to 1 November