Items: Miscellaneous
Really must clear out some browser windows.
Squirrels:
- Y'all know about Crasher Squirrel? This couple was on vacation in Banff, and they set their camera to take a timer photo of them, and just as the timer went off a ground squirrel popped up in front of the camera. Which has led to zillions of imitators, such as Mashable's Top 10 Crasher Squirrel pics, and Crasher Squirrel throughout history.
- Other famous squirrels: Twiggy! The Waterskiing Squirrel; Sugar Bush Squirrel, shown wearing a multitude of costumes.
Nanotech art:
- Nanobama: World's tiniest candidate portrait, where each Obama face is half a millimeter across, created out of carbon nanotubes using nanolithography.
- Self-Assembling DNA Makes Super 3-D Nano Machines. "DNA is the world's greatest architectural material."
Science and science fiction:
- Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction?, a blog entry by Nnedi Okorafor.
- Google Earth 5.0 now includes a map of the moon; it even has Moon Street View.
- Videos of classic physics lectures by Richard Feynman are now available free online, courtesy of Microsoft.
- Hubble is back online. WaPo has some cool new photos taken by the telescope.
- The Outer Alliance is an advocacy group for sf writers who want to "educate, support, and celebrate LGBT contributions in the science-fiction and fantasy genres."
Speaking of LGBT stuff:
- Cool detailed discussion of Federal marriage-equality lawsuits.
- Video of spoken-word piece about being transgender.
Misc other:
- Street Medic Wiki, "the online resource for street medics that anyone can edit."
- The planning fallacy: it turns out that people are terrible at estimating how long it's going to take them to do something. "Even when asked to make a highly conservative forecast, a prediction that they felt virtually certain that they would fulfill, students' confidence in their time estimates far exceeded their accomplishments." To improve your estimates, ask yourself "how long similar projects have taken in the past, without considering any of the special properties of this project."
- Interesting Guide to Formal Consensus. Not necessarily the best decisionmaking process for all contexts (and I don't endorse everything that article says; for example, I've seen benevolent dictatorships work), but some interesting ideas there. See also the Wikipedia article on Consensus decision-making.
- Jenn recommended EventBox as a good Mac app for aggregating feeds from social networks. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.