Wired News: Picture this, you’re shopping online for a new minivan, surfing automaker websites and buying guides. You then head to the homepage of your local paper to check out the headlines, and at the top of the page is an ad for a local car dealer, offering rebates and low financing on new minivans. If you’re like many web […]
Knowing Your Behavior
In Search of the Music DNA
Boston.com: In a downtown office building an hour’s drive north of Silicon Valley, the technology revolution beats on. Young musicians, their headphones plugged into desktop computers, are analyzing thousands of songs — from popular artists to garage bands — by more than 400 musical measures. In an adjoining room lined with rock posters and shelves crammed with compact discs, T-shirted […]
Alpaca Farming
Iconoculture: Urban escapists looking for the perfect artisanal farm like the idea of raising animals for fun and profits that don’t involve slaughter. They’re cute as heck and they can fetch big bucks: One alpaca stud recently sold for over half a million dollars. Small wonder alpaca farming is catching on with rurbanites, who love raising the gentle South American […]
Toilet Restaurant
IOL: Displaying fancy toilet seats studded with flowers and shells, colourful bathtubs, faucets, mirrors and shower curtains, the well-lit window in this southern Taiwan city looks like a showroom for a trendy bathroom brand. But this is a restaurant. It’s unusual theme is proving a draw for customers eager to eat food off plates and bowls shaped like western loo […]
Smart Sleepers
New Scientist: Are you a real grump in the mornings? Do you wake up every day feeling tired, embittered, aggrieved, and all too ready to hit the snooze button? If so, then a new alarm clock could be just for you. The clock, called SleepSmart, measures your sleep cycle, and waits for you to be in your lightest phase of […]
Blink Contactless Credit Card
Reuters: JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Thursday introduced a credit card that allows a consumer to merely wave it past a sensor to make payments, a function already common at many U.S. gas stations. A top issuer of credit cards in the United States, JPMorgan Chase said its new credit card, called “blink,” will be marketed this summer and can […]
TV From The Internet
TechnologyReview: Cable television often boasts that it can deliver esoteric fare suiting nearly any taste. But it could be rendered obsolete by the likes of Bill Eason’s hog cooking class. The North Carolina cook’s program — self-described as an “all-day, whole hog class edited down to 45 minutes on how to find, select, prepare and serve whole hog from the […]
C28 Evangelists
World Magazine: At first glance, the narrow store near the merry-go-round at Parkway Plaza could be any of a dozen Southern California mall-chain clones, the kind that hawk stud-belts and double-entendre T-shirts to skater-punks and posers: Back-alley brick walls, exposed-pipe ceilings, cutting-edge clothing lines, rock music throbbing from the rafters. But the only double-entendres shoppers will find here are based […]
Playing Pacman On The Streets
New Scientist: The classic arcade game PacMan has resurfaced on the streets of Singapore using “augmented reality” technology developed by military-backed scientists at the University of Singapore. While virtual reality immerses a user completely inside a computer-generated environment, augmented reality combines both real and virtual sensory information to produce a digitally-altered version of the real world. The original arcade game, […]
No More Botox
Iconoculture: Ask Cleopatra. Empowerment through beauty is an ageless desire for both women and men. Bye-bye, Botox? Probably not, but acupuncture facials do offer a drug-free (albeit pricier) alternative: special tiny needles placed in the forehead, chin, and cheeks to tighten up loose skin and reduce wrinkling. From an acupuncturist’s perspective, the treatment works by increasing the flow of chi, […]