Wall Street goes halvsies…

The New York Times charts the dramatic declines in market capitalization of 29 selected financial firms in the period from October 9, 2007 (shown above) to September 12, 2008 (below).

In the intervening 339 days, the value of those firms has declined from $1.86 trillion to $0.98 trillion, for a staggering loss of [...]

One Dr Mark Miodownik holds forth via podcast on how to make a perfect cup of coffee at home. Steps are: Roast, Grind, brew, drink.
roast with a hot air gun, typically used for stripping paint 190-200 degrees C
grind with propeller grinder
nb coffee grounds do not last long - time is of [...]

TuneUp Media relabels & cleans up missing metadata from your music collection. TuneUp creates an acoustic signature for each track and compares it to a database of 19 million songs on Gracenote. There is then a 85% to 90% chance that TuneUp will identify the correct Track Name, Artist, Album, Track Number, Year, Genre and [...]

One Harry McCracken of Technologizer is apparently sick of the soft sell in the current round of video ads for Microsoft that star Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, so much so that he’s that he’s stitched together his own version of episode 2 starring the irascible Steve Ballmer, in place of a stiff Bill Gates.
No [...]

The second and third videos ads for Microsoft starring Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld, aired yesterday. The vids are called “A Family Affair: Seinfeld and Gates Perpetually Connecting “, or simply “Gates. Seinfeld. New Family.”.The episode features Bill and Jerry staying with a suburban family and trying to connect to ‘real people’. Funnier and more [...]

There were kudos all around today, as CERN flipped the switch to turn on the LHC or Large Hadron Collider, and it worked! Some clumps of protons made it all the way through the 16.565 miles of piping in the particle accelerator, and dutifully registered on the detectors.
Basel Online was able to sneak their apparently-high-res [...]

Tanaka Kikinzoku Jewelry KK has on offer a 31-piece set of gold tableware for 100M Yen (!) or about $925,000. TKJ indicates that Han Dynasty emperors associated gold tableware with good health, long life and eternal youth. The set is also engraved with dragon motifs, symbolizing longevity.
In time for Respect-for-the-Aged Day 敬老の日, Sept 15. Serves [...]

The journal Nature tries its hand at gleaning the technologies of the year 2018. Here’s their list of what’s making your life easier/more interesting 10 years from now…
1. Electronic Paper … the author predicts that ebook readers will push paper aside and help bring about the elusive paperless office, with a side benefit of eliminating [...]

Here’s a poster for the TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles…

…with Summer Glau as Cameron, the reprogrammed Terminatrix.

Spore is an unusual video game that allows the player to play god to single-celled organisms and guide their evolution through creature, tribal, civilization and space-faring phases.
While Spore looks faintly silly to us, apparently many most people disagree. GameRankings tallied 9 reviews in sites like GameSpot and IGN and determined that the average rating for [...]