News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
With 3-D movies becoming all the rage, Slate takes a look at the difficulties inherent in converting an older 2-D movie into 3-D. Unfortunately the viewing experience is not as good as native 3-D, especially if they do a sloppy job. Also, since it costs more to film in 3-D than to convert from 2-D, we may see upcoming films doing the conversion anyway.
Link: http://www.slate.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Starting this year US pennies have a new design on the back, with a shield instead of the Lincoln Memorial. The previous time it changed was back in 1959. And based on what happened with the old wheat pennies, it wouldn’t hurt to save a few hundred dollars worth of the memorial pennies as a long-term investment.
Link: http://www.usmint.gov/…
(via The Consumerist)
The linked article has the winners of the National Wildlife Federation’s 2009 photo contest. The eagle about to catch the starling is a pretty amazing picture.
Link: http://www.nwf.org/…
(via Neatorama)
From the article: “A paper in the current issue of Science discusses the ability of a single-celled creature to create a robust network while foraging for food—one that mimicked the Tokyo rail system in complexity.”
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
I was pleasantly surprised to learn of a new tax credit of up to $400 ($800 for married filing jointly). It’s called “Making Work Pay,” and pretty much everyone is eligible. The thing about this credit is that it’s easy to miss—you have to claim it on the main tax form and fill out Schedule M. And keep in mind that this is a tax credit, not a deduction. You calculate the amount you owe and then subtract $400.
Link: http://taxes.about.com/…
Somehow I’ve never considered that diamonds could have a melting point, much less that there may be oceans of liquid diamond on Uranus and Neptune. Turns out that solid diamond floats on liquid diamond, much like ice floats on water. Melting a diamond, however, is more complicated than just raising the temperature. The linked article explains all.
Google Chrome version 4 has native support for Greasemonkey scripts. This means there are instantly 30,000+ extensions for the browser.
Link: http://blog.chromium.org/…
(via Lifehacker)
Modern-day smoking bans are becoming more and more restrictive, but they don’t even come close to some of these draconian bans from the past—which include excommunication and summary execution as punishments.
So you have a game console that you don’t need anymore. Thinking about selling it on eBay, donating it to charity, or perhaps giving it to a friend? The linked article explains how to remove personal information that may be stored on the console’s hard drive.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Scientists can now make a drop of oil traverse a complex maze by itself. Be sure to watch the video.
Link: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/…
(via Neatorama)
The best way to speed up older computers is by adding more memory. But in lieu of that, replacing the hard drive with a solid-state drive (SSD) gives a significant speed benefit. The linked article does note, however, that it’s almost more cost-effective to purchase a new computer.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
I just did a Google search on my name and was pleased to see that my personal website, www.cloman.com came up as the number-one result. The remaining nine results were all profile information from various websites that I belong to. In the past, my cloman.com page has been eclipsed by these other sites. The linked article, however, gives a simple piece of HTML code that tells Google which web page you consider to be the primary source of information about yourself. The trick is to add this attribute to the appropriate link(s): rel="me"
Link: http://marshallk.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
