From the downloadsquad article Monday:
As if there wasn’t enough to complain about with the IRS, add this to the list. The US Treasury Department is making a charge at forcing Internet auction sites to turn over the identities and social insurance numbers of their users to the IRS so they can keep tabs on income made through these types of sales. Sometimes you read a story and you don’t even know where to start directing your anger.
[via Digg]
Ever have that feeling ‘Today is a great day!’ or ‘Man, today sucks’, even though nothing particularly great or sucky occured to sway your gut feeling?
Well, “Does Today Suck?” is a blog that may help answer where that feeling comes from. Each day is a high level review of events in history on that day with either a ‘Good’, ‘Bad’, ‘Cool’ rating. Sum up all the ratings and that day in history gets an overall rating.
Here’s an example for April 16th in review:
746 – 1,600 men are killed in the Battle of Culloden. – BAD
1780 – The University of Munster is founded – COOL
1946 – Syria gains independence. – COOL
1947 – 600 lives are claimed in an explosion aboard a freighter, in what would be known as the Texas City Disaster. – BAD
1963 – Martin Luther King, Jr. pens his famous letter from Birmingham Jail. – COOL
Notable Births:
Louis the Pious, Henry George Chauvel, Wilbur Wright, John Millington Synge, Ernst Thalmann, Charlie Chaplin, Spike Milligan, Peter Ustinov, Kingsley Amis, Pope Benedict XVI, Dick Lane, Dusty Springfield, Margrethe II of Denmark, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Belichick, Billy West, Rafael Benitez, Ian MacKaye, Martin Lawrence, Selena, Fredrik Ljungberg, Cat Osterman
Notable Deaths:
George Villiers, Francisco Goya, Alexis de Tocqueville, Rosalind Franklin
OVERALL DAY RATING: COOL
Wow! There were some good guesses for the last picture post 
Noone got it, but the right answer is the speaker for a Blackberry 8700g. Too tough for you? Well it’s only going to get harder! Perhaps I can even convince my editor to pony up a small prize for correct answers on these….I’ll keep you posted.
This week I was removing everything from my kitchen (including the sink!) to do that once a year cleaning job that is always a very daunting activity. You know…getting all that stuff that fell behind the oven, dust under the fridge, etc. Not a pleasant or anticipated task, I assure you! So, in a break from all that nifty cleaning, I saw this little gem. Drop your guesses in the comments..I’ll be watching
For the past three years a satellite has circled the Earth, collecting data to determine whether two predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity are correct. Sunday, at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Jacksonville, Fla., Professor Francis Everitt from Stanford University provided the first public peek at data that revealed whether Einstein’s theory has been confirmed by the most sophisticated orbiting laboratory ever created.
This is the longest project in NASA’s history, has cost over US$700M and started in 1963. It went on so long that the project was canceled 7 times and of course revived each time. To get a layman’s explanation of the project, listen to the NPR story on Gravity Probe B that was first aired shortly before it was launched in 2004.
From the Stanford Press Release this weekend:
Gravity Probe B has been a great scientific adventure for all of us, and we are grateful to NASA for its long history of support,” Everitt said. “My colleagues and I will be presenting the first results today and tomorrow. It’s fascinating to be able to watch the Einstein warping of space-time directly in the tilting of these GP-B gyroscopes—more than a million times better than the best inertial navigation
gyroscopes.The GP-B satellite was launched in April 2004. It collected more than a year’s worth of data that the Stanford GP-B science team has been pouring over for the past 18 months. The satellite was designed as a pristine, space-borne laboratory, whose sole task was to use four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure directly two effects predicted by general relativity. One is the geodetic effect—the amount by which the mass of the Earth warps the local space-time in which it resides. The other effect, called frame-dragging, is the amount by which the rotating Earth drags local space-time around with it.
According to Einstein’s theory, over the course of a year, the geodetic warping of Earth’s local space-time causes the spin axes of each gyroscope to shift from its initial alignment by a minuscule angle of 6.606 arc-seconds (0.0018 degrees) in the plane of the spacecraft’s orbit. Likewise, the twisting of Earth’s local space-time causes the spin axis to shift by an even smaller angle of 0.039 arc-seconds (0.000011 degrees)— about the width of a human hair viewed from a quarter mile away—in the plane of the Earth’s equator.
Additional References:
Here’s a really cool world map hand drawn from memory as a lark, and the story behind it. This site belongs to an artist, designer and teacher Christopher Fahey. It’s worth spending some time browsing through his site graphpaper.com, he surfaces a lot of interesting ideas and thought provoking topics.
I see he also uses a lowercase ‘g’ as the favicon.ico.
[via kottke.org]
ScienceBlogThese areas are widgets and can be controlled through the admin page.
