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Animation: North and South Poles melting away

11 Mar

Melting poles

Adrian Meyer and Karl Rege of Zurich University of Applied Sciences visualize the melting poles, starting 21,000 years ago and advancing 1,000 years into the future.

End summer sea ice is shown. The yellow line shows the actual shoreline. The future projection is based on the assumption of complete cessation of carbon dioxide emissions in 2100 (IPCC A2). Because world population is rather uncertain we froze to its current value.

Check out the video below. Adding some speed could've made it more dramatic, but wow.

[Blue Marble 3000 | Thanks, Geoffrey]

 
 

Ray of light

10 Mar

via
 
 

What if you had bought AAPL stock instead of Apple products?

10 Mar

Since 2003, the rise of Apple's stock has been stratospheric. Currently AAPL sits at US$346, but many analysts expect it to be at $450 or higher in the next 12 months. The growth of the stock over the years is attributed to Apple's bottom line, its creative and business teams, the fact that it has zero debt, tens of billions of dollars in the bank, and of course, the fact that it sells the hottest consumer electronics on the planet. But what if instead of buying Apple's products, like a PowerBook or original iPod, those who are most responsible for the stock's increase -- you, the consumer -- bought AAPL stock?

Software engineer Kyle Conroy has compiled a list of how much money you would have today if, for example, instead of spending $5700 on a Apple PowerBook G3 250 when it was released on November 10, 1997 you'd spent that same amount on AAPL stock. The answer? Instead owning of a laptop that's probably worth all of twenty bucks today, you'd own $330,563 of AAPL stock. Makes you cringe, doesn't it?

For those of you who bought an original 5 GB iPod for $399 on October 23, 2001, your money, had you purchased AAPL stock, today would be worth $11,914. Spending $1599 on Apple's original iBook G3 on July 21, 1999 would net you $32,031 in AAPL stock today. The list goes on and on.

The good news is that Apple is one of the strongest, healthiest companies on the planet, which controls many emerging markets that still have a decade or more of growth (smartphones, tablets, etc.). In three years today's closing price of $346 is going to make AAPL stock look cheap.

What if you had bought AAPL stock instead of Apple products? originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Couple Denied Adoption Because They’re Vegetarian

10 Mar
sad-veggie-face.jpg Original photo: estoril / CC Adopting a child that's in need of a home is one of the most selfless and loving decisions a person can make -- but in Greece, having a big heart means nothing if you don't eat meat. A vegetarian couple from the island of Crete recently had their adoption application rejected on the grounds that they might impose their diet on their adoptive child, because they say that a child's upbringing must include eating meat. There's just one problem though: that's <...Read the full story on TreeHugger
 
 

Best Mars Images From Orbiter’s First 5 Years

10 Mar
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Dust-Devil Tattoo

NASA's prolific Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter turns five Earth years old Thursday.

Since settling into orbit around the Red Planet on March 10, 2006, MRO has transmitted more data to Earth -- 131 trillion bits and more than 70,000 images so far -- than all other interplanetary missions combined.

After the orbiter finished all its initial science objectives in the first two years, NASA extended its lifetime twice. The extra time let MRO watch Mars change over two-and-a-half Martian years, giving a new picture of a shifting, dynamic planet.

"Each Mars year is unique, and additional coverage gives us a better chance to understand the nature of changes in the atmosphere and on the surface," said Rich Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in a press release. "We have already learned that Mars is a more dynamic and diverse planet than what we knew five years ago. We continue to see new things."

MRO carries six science instruments, including radar that peels back the layers of the Martian surface, a spectrometer that has mapped the mineral content of three-quarters of the planet, and a weather camera that monitors clouds and dust storms.

But the show stopper is the HiRise camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), which can resolve features the size of a beach ball from 180 miles away.

To date, HiRise has snapped more than 18,500 close ups of Mars' canyons, craters and dunes. In honor of MRO's fifth birthday, here are some of our favorites.

Above:

Dust-Devil Tattoo

These twisty trails were traced by dust devils, spinning columns of rising air that pick up loose red dust grains and reveal darker, heavier sand beneath. Dust devils have been blamed for unexpectedly cleaning off the Mars rovers' solar panels. This image was taken Aug. 24, 2009.

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Images: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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WIN: Rock Paper Scissors, TL;DR Edition

09 Mar

epic fail photos - WIN: Rock Paper Scissors, TL;DR Edition

See more epic wins on FAILBlog’s silver lining, WIN!



 
 

Universal wrapping paper

09 Mar

Here’s an idea I thought was worth sharing — universal wrapping paper.

universal wrapping paper

universal wrapping paper

universal wrapping paper

universal wrapping paper

universal wrapping paper

Brilliant.

Designed by Fabio Milito and Francesca Guidotti. Found on The Dieline.

Published on David Airey, graphic designer

Logo Design Love, the book

Related posts on David Airey dot com

 
 

Please welcome YSlow for Chrome

09 Mar

Ever since YSlow for Firefox was first released, it has helped millions of developers analyze web pages and suggested ways for them to improve their websites' performance. YSlow ranks in the Top 25 for Best of 2 Billion Firefox Add-ons downloaded so far. We are very proud of where YSlow stands today and we continue to work hard to take it to the next level.

Today's another "Hello World!" moment for YSlow. We are very excited to announce the beta release of YSlow for Chrome. YSlow looks beautiful inside the Chrome browser.

Image of YSlow running on Yahoo! homepage seen within Chrome

    Here are some of the feature highlights:
  • You'll feel at home here. We kept the user experience consistent with YSlow for Firefox.
  • Added the ability to detect post onload components, including for pages that prevent itself from being embedded and/or iframed. (experimental)
  • Support for 3 main rulesets: Default YSlow V2, Classic V1, and Small Site or Blog as well as the ability to create new ones based on these 3.
  • Offenders in CDN rule are now listed as domains only.
  • Runs multiple YSlow instances (new windows). This feature is excellent for comparing YSlow results for different pages side-by-side as shown below.

Screenshot comparing Amazon and Yahoo! performance w/YSlow  Some caveats: As of today, the current version of Chrome does not provide access to its network panel. As a result, we have relied on Ajax calls to do most of the heavy lifting for us. Hence, some rules might be affected thus, fluctuating the grades a bit if you compare them with the Firefox version.

Special thanks to Marcel Duran, front-end engineering lead for the Exceptional Performance team, who has led all the development efforts for this next-generation YSlow. We would also like to thank Stoyan Stefanov, our YSlow alumnus, for his valuable technical guidance.

If you’re interested in learning some of the “behind-the-scenes” techniques used to build YSlow for Chrome, please join us for a presentation introducing next-gen YSlow on March 15th during the Velocity online conference.

Last but not least, since this is a beta release, so please voice your feedback, report bugs, or request features on the Yahoo! Group for Exceptional Performance.

 
 

Technology Review: The Authority on the Future of Technology

09 Mar
Business class: IBM's Lotus Connections software, shown above, offers versions of consumer social technologies that are appropriate for business use. ...
mobile.technologyreview.com/business/35066/
 
 

Technology Review: The Authority on the Future of Technology

09 Mar
Business class: IBM's Lotus Connections software, shown above, offers versions of consumer social technologies that are appropriate for business use. ...
mobile.technologyreview.com/business/35066/