Minding the Planet: Some Women See in More Colors Than the Rest of Us
This article discusses an interesting fact — some women have extra color receptors enabling them to distinguish a vastly larger range of colors than everyone else. Instead of seeing in 3 colors, they see in 4 – enabling them to tell the difference between 100 million different colors.
Gore says tax pollution, not payrolls | Politics News | Reuters.com
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Monday suggested taxing carbon dioxide emissions instead of employees’ pay in a bid to stem global warming. “Penalizing pollution instead of penalizing employment will work to reduce that pollution,” Gore said in a speech at New York University School of Law. The pollution tax would replace all payroll taxes, including those for Social Security and unemployment compensation, Gore said. He said the overall level of taxation, would remain the same. “Instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees it would discourage business from producing more pollution,” Gore said.
I think it is a brilliant idea. Read the speech in its entirety here.
Minding the Planet: Dolphins are Smarter Than We Think
Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
Open your Diebold AccuVote-TS with a minibar key
Remember those guys from Princeton who recently dissected a Diebold voting machine and wrote a serious academic paper laying the smack downon our favorite shady e-voting company? The plot thickens with those Jersey brainiacs: after giving a presentation to some computer science colleagues last week, Prof. Ed Felten was approached by Chris Tengi, a member of the department’s technical staff, who pointed out that the key that opens the AccuVote-TS voting machine is very similar to a key that he has at home. Tengi’s key opened the voting machine, and upon further investigation, the Princeton posse discovered that both keys are actually a common office furniture type used for hotel minibars, electronic equipment and jukeboxes. Furthermore, said keys can easily be bought on eBay or from various online retailers.
(Via Engadget)
The safest way to vote might be by absentee ballot.
For Apple laptop owners:
Coconut Battery
Scroll down the above web page and ownload the Beta widget if you are running Tiger – if you don’t you can get the regular version. Both are free.
My laptop battery is sucking and I just ordered a new one. According to the Coconut Battery Widget my old battery is on Load Cycle 652 and batteries have a lifetime of 300-500 loadcycles. In other words: no wonder!!
You can order a replacement battery by Newer Tech at OWC. Each new battery includes a label to return your old battery for proper recycling or disposal. They are also Mercury-free.
