Yet another amazing bit of mimicry by another species of my favorite animal. With video.

If this interview is any indication, this book is bound to be fascinating. See also the Amazon interview with the author.

According to this research, if you are female and not yet fat, then moderate drinking will keep you from gaining weight. At least, that is suggested by correlations after the fact; the mechanism, if it is real, is not yet understood.

An excellent roundup of the sad situation.

You could, if you wanted and iphone and had little money, buy a horribly scratched unit with a broken screen on ebay and, with a bit of manual labor and an additional investment of less than $50, transform it into a device pristine in looks and fully functional, burnished of even the blemish of the Apple logo. This detailed guide shows you how.

I have pubsubhubbub working now, so new items added to my feed show up instantly (two seconds in my last test) in readers that exploit the technology, such as Google Reader.

Now that Google Reader uses Pubsubhubbub, I want to test it. So this is not a real news item, but you should see it as soon as I publish it!

Some fuel cell experts see nothing new there.

Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security outfit, is believed to benefit from a network of Palestinian informants. It has now been revealed that one of these informants, Mosab Hassan Yousef, is the son of one of the founders of Hamas. There is not a single sentence in the article describing Yousef’s work for the Israelis that is less than fascinating. In this man’s opinion, “the Israelis care about the Palestinians far more than the Hamas or Fatah leadership does.” His reasons for this pronouncement make the article required reading for those who make a facile equivalence between the Israelis and the terrorists. Naturally, the story is being denounced as false “Zionist propoganda” by Hamas and its friends.

One of my favorite nanogenres is the correction issued by a fastidious publication, such as the New Yorker or the New York Times. Follow the link for a correction so excellent that it should be inscribed over the door to the correction hall of fame. It’s funny because it’s the Times. (Discovered by TPM and in turn by John Gruber)

Feeds in Google Reader from PubSubHubbub-enabled sources will now finally appear in near real time.

I found this when looking for a free iphone calculator that could do some plotting. The full version does a wide array of symbolic mathematics as well as numerical calculation. Even the free version is impressive: it’s the only one I found that lets me change the x and y scales of a plot independently (using a pinch gesture).

That’s what the lady at my bank asked me when I phoned because their banking system suddenly stopped allowing me to log on. I was stumped. I didn’t know there were different kinds. She elaborated: “Are you using Internet Explorer?” Oh. It didn’t help that the “kind of internet” I was using was a browser that she never heard of. All turned out well, though, as she solved the problem by resetting my password, although she had no explanation for why the previous one had stopped working.

This looks really useful: Google Reader (the web-based feed reader that I use to read the news) can create a feed from a page that does not publish its own RSS by “periodically visit[ing] the page and publish[ing] any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.”

‘“Your personal interests certainly drive what you’re interested in,” said Peter Farago, vice president for marketing at Flurry.’

Someone with full access to a Wave can now do these things: make selected users read-only; and restore a wave to any state in its history, sort of like a git-reset.

André Roberge, new to cython, nevertheless finds it fairly easy to reduce the running time of a simple numerical python program by a factor of 100.

Firefox may crash, but it’s better at displaying type.

I’m using the very fast Google Chrome browser for linux, and like it well enough to use it as my default. But I prefer mouseless selection of links, and the options for this are not yet mature. Gleebox looks excellent, but installing the current version (0.6) rendered the browser almost functionless. The only other option is Crossfire, which still needs development but at least works in most pages.

“Sometimes a difference between the sexes is not based on sex at all. Women have a finer sense of touch than men do, but a new study shows that this is simply because their fingertips tend to be smaller.”

Wave feels like a native application on the iPhone, partly because it is optimized for WebKit and partly because it exploits “app mode,” which hides most of Safari’s UI.

This article praising the “Brooklyn-based alt-Sephardi indie band DeLeon” embeds an entertaining YouTube video of their song “La Serena” from a live concert. Their album is available from Amazon.

... using sneaky URLs.

I hope Robert Scoble is exaggerating when he says, “I thought Google was going to be a better company than Microsoft. It’s not any different except it has a better cafeteria.”

I’ve long been convinced of the truth of the article’s conclusion: probability theory, in some form, should be taught to the young.

The insight of the article “Unwebbable” by an expert in web accessibility, Joe Clark, is that certain standard document forms convey their structure and semantics through visual layout and formatting, and that they can not be satisfactorily translated to HTML. The assumption implicit in the article is that there exist some documents that can be satisfactorily translated to HTML.