Google rolls out yet another web app, and it’s ambitious. Google Wave. It looks to be a blending of email, IM, and several other things; they claim it’s the logical evolution of web communication.
It’s good that they’re thinking in these terms because basic email, IM, et al. haven’t really evolved much over their respective existences.
Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”
Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree. Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale. The much better comparison is coincidentally the company started by another group of (former) Googlers, FriendFeed. But Wave is a different product for a number of reasons, and seemingly has loftier goals — all of which I’ll touch on below.
Here is the app in action to give you a better idea of its potentiality.
I’ve been waiting for Dre’s new album Detox since about 1994. Which makes sense considering I’ve gone threw a handful of copies of The Chronic and still insist it’s one of the best albums of the 90’s. But Detox is starting to resemble Chinese Democracy for crying out loud.
Anyway, Dre’s staring in a new tv spot for Dr. Pepper’s “Trust Me, I’m A Doctor” campaign. The spot begins airing Monday and signals the start of Dre’s promo for his long-awaited album, supposedly due this fall. [via Rap Up]
Shivashankar spelled the word Laodicean, which is an adjective meaning lukewarm or indifferent towards religion or politics.
A 13-year-old originally from Kansas but now living in California, she wrote out every word on her palm as she outlasted the other 11 finalists for 16 rounds. She even gets to bring more than $40,000 in cash and prizes and one huge champion’s trophy back home.
Turns out fourth time is the charm as she finished 10th, 8th, 4th the past three years and finally won this year.
Other words spelled during the competition include:
One of the long running jokes amongst my friends and I are coming up with stupid one-liners and ending with “there’s an app for that.”
Right? I mean, it’s probably one of the best killing time in a bar when there’s nothing to talk about games going.
It can really be applied to any scenario either. Ahem, (creating my best iPhone narrator voice): Say you want to kill a hooker, steal her money and cover up her dead body and then frame your best friend. Well. There’s an app for that.
And now, there’s an app for that. The game I mean, not killing hookers.
Coffee addiction drove Aimee Kick into fashion design. She is the “coffee cup girl” at Francis Howell North High School in Missouri. When it came prom time, she knew she wanted a one of a kind statement dress. So in her spare time she rounded up a few bazillion coffee filters and designed and made her own dress from the filters. She looked to veggies, tea bags, bubble wrap and aluminum foil but didn’t like the durability of these materials. Aimee, the “coffee filter dress girl” is a senior taking three courses at the high school, one online course and working part time.
More work needs to be done to determine if the fossilized remains was a Democrat or Republican, but it’s clearly the missing link between our ancestors the current generation of politician. [via Abundance and Happiness]
There was lots of chafing when President Obama decided to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — the lone holdover from the Dubya adminstration. He was a Republican, liberals complained.
And yet, reading this profile of him in Time, I’m struck by how right the decision was to retain him and propers where they are due, the decision by then-President Bush in 2006 to pluck Robert Gates from Texas A & M to replace Donald Rumsfeld.
After a quietly impressive career in government that has spanned more than 30 mostly Republican years, Robert Gates is suddenly seeming almost, well, charismatic. He reeks authority. He is, according to several sources, the most respected voice in National Security Council debates. The President is said to love his unadorned manner. Much of which is attributable to the fact that, in the self-proclaimed twilight of his public career, Gates has emerged as that most exotic of Washington species — the bureaucrat unbound, candid and fearless. He tells members of Congress what he really thinks about their pet programs. He upends Pentagon priorities, demotes the military-industrial hardware pipeline and promotes the immediate needs of the troops on the front line. He fires high-ranking subordinates without muss or controversy — an Air Force secretary and chief of staff who didn’t agree with him on the need to end production of the F-22 aircraft; the commandant of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, who presided over disgraceful conditions; even a well-respected general like David McKiernan, a conventional-warfare specialist unsuited for the asymmetrical struggle in Afghanistan.
Long interested in mathematics, Altoumaimi has spent the last four months toiling over his notebook in an attempt to write a formula to explain a number of complex relationships dealing with Bernoulli numbers.
The numbers are named for the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and consist of a sequence of rational numbers which are important for number theory.
Needless to say, Altoumaimi’s teachers were more than sceptical when he showed up to school recently claiming he had come up with a formula all on his own.
“When I first presented it to my teachers, none of them believed that the formula I had written down really worked,” he told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.
Undeterred by the doubts of his teachers, Altoumaimi decided to contact a professor at Uppsala University in hopes of validating his work.
“Right away he wanted to take a look at all my calculations and the documents where I show that the formula really works,” said Altoumaimi.
Here’s the rub. According to University professors, what Mohamed Altoumaimi did with the Bernoulli numbers isn’t necessarily new. But it is waaaaaay advanced for a first year high school student. So much so that now he’s teaching the teachers and getting outside tutoring from local universities.
Nicolas Cage? Warner Herzog? Nicolas Cage? Warner Herzog?
A red-band (read: NSFW) promo for director Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has surfaced. It’s a kinda-sortaBad Lieutenant remake of the classic Harvey Kietel cop flick that was directed by Abel Ferrara. Unfortunately, the new one is Abel Ferrara-unapproved.Not that this movie has to be approved by the director, but we figured we would point that out.
The film, which stars Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Coolidge and Fairuza Balk, is due in theaters this December. It doesn’t look good and if it was directed by anyone other than Warner Herzog, I would say no thanks this movie looks like shit. Because of Nicolas Cage, of course. [via Slashfilm]
This has to be one of the singular best events to happen every year and it happened on Monday. Monday! How did we miss that?
Anyway, the Cooper Hill’s Cheese Rolling and Wake (official name, natch), for those unsure of what it is, is an annual event wherein an eight pound round of Double Gloucester Cheese is given a one second head start, and competitors race down the hill to catch the cheese; that rarely happens because the cheese can reach a top speed of 70 mph. People tumble, stumble and rumble down the hill and usually get injured. Hilarity ensues.
First to pass the finish line wins the wheel of cheese. There’s also a less dangerous uphill race, but no one gives a shit about that because no one gets injured or rolls down a hill. The Big Picture has a great photo set and the official Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling website has results and more photos.
Not surprisingly Portland didn’t make the list because the unemployment rate sucks here (or it’s awesome if we’re playing by high score — unfortunately unemployment is like golf).
Shockingly, a city in Alabama won; which means we can call bullshit on this entire list.
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