amyemdee:

check out this track by mah friend heRobust!

djnaked:

Tit Thinks It’s People

rocketboom:

During these dreary economic times, it pays to be frugal. So the police in China’s Jiangsu Province have come up with a clever ruse to keep traffic in check, while keeping the department’s overtime pay low: Cardboard cutouts, painted to mimic the rear-end of a squad car - perfectly proportionate in size. They even has solar powered red flashing lights to enhance the realistic feel. A sign of the times: Reality is changing.

Story via

rocketboom:

via

Launched in 2009 by Sina Corp, Weibo is China’s most popular micro-blogging platform, with over 250 million users (that’s a cool 50 million more users than Twitter claimed as of May 2011). The Twitter-like service, allowing users to blog 140 character tweet-length posts and gather followers, is steadily gaining influence in China, and, perhaps paradoxically, abroad. As China routinely blocks access to U.S. social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, Weibo, the Eastern So-Me alternative, is attracting the attention of influential users abroad.

According to a public relations representative, Sina’s Weibo now has 450,000 users in the U.S. — roughly .2% of total user accounts. Notable early Western adopters include Christine Lagarde (French head of the IMF), Tom Cruise (affectionately known as “A-Tang Brother” in China), Bill Gates, tennis star Maria Sharapova, Emma Watson (50 points for Gryffindor!!!), and even global brands like the Coca Cola Company & LVMH’s Louis Vuitton. With sophisticated social media strategies increasingly becoming necessities of modern-day marketing, and social media sites mining online data about their users allowing multi-national corps a direct link to their target markets’ vital stats, Weibo allows Western users to tap directly into China’s mostly educated, mostly white-collar, burgeoning middle-class to promote their corporate and/or celebrity brand-identities. No word on when hyper-social Bieber-san will open his Weibo account. Fingers crossed! /sarcasm

Okay, awesome. Now China has an online watercooler forum of sorts where hundreds of millions of increasingly enfranchised people can say, and are saying, what’s on their minds. Amazing, right? Well, hold on. Don’t forget your grain of salt. If this all sounds like one really big “small step” forward in the oft-closed, centrally controlled society, maybe it is. But to be sure, it’s no “giant leap.” Many features of Weibo still smack of the trademarked Chinese political brand of expressive control and censorship. For instance, anyone in the world can register for a Weibo account (Rocketboom did, with the help of Google translator, but a full-fledged English language Sina Weibo platform is in the works). However, in order to get verified, Weibo requires users to submit proof of identification, which sends a “watch what you tweet, cuz we know where you live” kinda message. China’s tolerance of Weibo so far is in part due to the willingness of Chinese Internet firms to self-censor :( But of course, Sina also employs “technicians” to censor content on Weibo that contains “politically sensitive keywords.” So, if you want to know what’s going on real-time inside China (at least the happy-happy good fun stuff), log in to your Weibo account and see some of what people are saying.

Holiday: Veterans Day - the United States’ annual federally recognized holiday honoring our military veterans. Since it’s federally recognized, you’d think everyone would have today day off, right? Not so. According to a Society for Human Resource Management poll conducted in 2010, only 21% of employers planned to observe the holiday in 2011… Oh well. WE ARE THE 79%!!!!

Whacky Fashion: National Corduroy Appreciation Day - The Corduroy Appreciation Club loves today’s date because of 11.11.11’s visual likeness to corduroy’s wales. Like occupy Wall Street, the corduroy movement is spreading, with sold-out celebrations scheduled in locales like Washingoton D.C., Chicago, and Fromberg, Montana. Currently posted on the Corduroy Club’s website, is a call to action seeking cord-party organizers in Boston, Portland, Seattle, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and elsewhere. To get into the party Friday night at New York City’s Desmond Tutu Center, you must wear at least three items made of corduroy. One can only imagine what the dance-floor will sound like.

Tech: Droid Razr Launch Day - tech-freaks likely already knew the Droid Razr was dropping today. The big surprise? Amazon Wireless is celebrating the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of this century by selling the new mobile for an introductory today-only price of $111.11, srsly undercutting Verizon’s $299.99 price-tag. Amazon marketers, give yourselves a pat on the back for this one. Verizon’s marketing team… doh!

Vertical Food: Pepero/Pocky Day (Japan, Korea) - these snacks - chocolate dipped sticks of bready cookie - are known the world ‘round, but are probably most popular in Korea (Pepero’s rule!) and Japan (home of the Pocky). Motivated by the same visual similarities as the aforementioned corduroy celebration (11.11.11 - look at all those Pepero’s/Pocky’s… aww), the observance in South Korea is similar to Valentine’s Day with young people and couples exchanging Pepero sticks, other candies, and romantic gifts throughout the day. Japan’s celebration, on the other hand, seems to be mostly about shoving handfulls of Pocky sticks in your hungry maw. Nom noms!!

China Celebrates: Singles Day (China) - Single’s Day, One’s Day or Guang Gun Jie is a Chinese pop-culture holiday popularized in the internet era for people who are still living the single life. In America, we call that Friday. Like our Fridays, Single’s day is now a special day for all fashionable youths. The main way to celebrate Singles Day is to have dinner with your single friends, but it’s important that each person pay their own way to show their independence. Sounds like Fridays to me. People also hold ‘blind date’ parties in an attempt to bid goodbye to their single lives. But, since breakfast is the “most important meal of the day,” for breakfast on Singles’ Day, singles often eat four Youtiao (deep-fried dough sticks) representing the four “ones” in “11.11” and one Baozi (a steamed stuffed bun) representing the middle dot.

This Day in History: Armistice Day - first proclaimed on November 11, 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson, Armistice Day commemorates the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I and the soldiers that perished in the Great War. The major hostilities of World War I (*wink*wink - one-pun intended)were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice. Sort of like the “original” Veterans Day, November 11 was co-opted decades later by a Kansas man with the idea to expand Armistice Day to celebrate all veterans, not just those lost in World War I. 

Not the First Time, Not the last Time: 11.11.1911 - Last time we celebrated 11.11.11 (that would be a century ago), it turned out to be one of the hottestand coldest days in America. Ever. Cities across the U.S. recorded record highs and lows on the same day as a massive cold front moved through America. See y’all in a hundred years!

Researchers at China’s Wuhan University have successfully spliced human genes into rice plants. No, this is not some neo-communist plot conceived to create a 21st century “red army” of genetically superior mutant rice-soldiers intent on securing China’s world-dominance. China is well on its way without a mutant army. Instead these genetically modified grains are designed to save lives by producing a key component of human blood. The protein, Human Serum Albumin (HSA), is the most plentiful protein found in human blood. HSA performs important biological functions (trucking hormones and minerals around the body, removing toxins from the bloodstream and helping to regulate blood pressure, to name a few), and has a number of emergency-room-ready applications as well (e.g. treating burn victims, severe blood loss, and liver disease).

Currently, HSA is primarily collected from donated human plasma, which is in constant short-supply. The idea coming out of Wuhan is that one could potentially grow crops of the genetically modified rice in the fields on a large enough scale to mass-produce HSA for use in hospitals and make HSA shortages a thing of the past. (I shamefully admit to never once setting foot onto a Red Cross cookie-&-needle-mobile to donate, so I gotta say, I’m glad to see this development, if only for my selfish IV-avoiding reasons.) Further, there is apparently no risk of contracting HIV/AIDS from a rice-based HSA transfusion, as can be the case with human-derived blood products. Presumably the same goes for having unprotected sex with a genetically modified rice plant, though I would still recommend against sharing needles, because that’s just unsanitary.

This latest work to introduce human genes into rice is likely to inflame opposition to genetic modification technology further amid fears over the safety of genetically modified crops and alarm at combining human genes with those from other species. A notion I can totally understand might cause some alarm. The stuff apparently works, though. The protein has been shown effective in relieving symptoms of cirrhosis in lab rats suffering from the disease, and the tests run in the labs have demonstrated no adverse reactions in the protein’s rodent-recipients. The real test will be to show that this stuff can be purified and sterilized so that it is safe for human use (human trials have not yet begun). And after that, maybe farmer John can start growing fields of blood to help solve the world’s HSA supply issues. Maybe the mid-west will become known as America’s blood-basket. Maybe just maybe… “O beautiful for spacious skies, for crimson waves of blood-rice…” will actually happen. Wouldn’t that be something?

On Nov. 8, 6:28 p.m. EST a huge asteroid will pass within 201,000 miles of Earth. Ummm… that’s closer than the moon. The 1,312-foot object dubbed 2005 YU55 will be visible from the northern hemisphere, although it will be too dim and far away to see with your inferior naked eyes without a pretty good telescope. 

Though 2005 YU55 will temporarily displace the moon as our nearest extraterrestrial neighbor, there is no need for panic, and no plans to scramble an rocket-crew of hard-nosed miners to blow our erstwhile guest to stardust whilst an Aerosmith anthem plays in the background. According to NASA Jet Propulsion Lab researcher, Lance Brenner, we’re safe… for the time being. Brenner assures “2005 YU55 cannot hit earth… at least over the interval we can compute the motion reliably, which extends for several hundred years.” That’s geek-speak meaning the orbit of 2005 YU55 is well-enough known that we can rule out an impact for at least the next century or so. While this givesus the all-clear, it further reinforces the notion that the future remains bleak for our children’s children’s children: rising global temperatures, dwindling natural resources, stagnating economies, shrinking social security assurances, and now, unpredictable asteroid motion intervals! Poor kids :(

Interestingly, this will be the second time the interloping space-traveller has visited the earth in recent years — it made another close pass in 2010. Query whether the Man in the Moon is becoming suspicious of Mother Earth’s continued close encounters with the younger, hipper space-renegade, 2005 YU55. [sigh] Love fades after 4+ billion years together. Oh well, here’s to hoping we can keep the fam together, at least for the holidays!

Here’s an animation of the asteroid’s path as it passes earth.

We’re constantly asking “where does all the time go?” Earlier this week the world gained some insight into answering this chronological quandary. With Angry Birds surpassing the 500,000,000th (that’s like… half a BILLION, bro) download benchmark, it’s apparent that a significant chunk of collective man, woman, and child hours are dedicated to the high-flying pig-destroying exploits of Angry Birds.  Rovio announced this milestone on Wednesday, and revealed some other telling statistics at the same time.

So what exactly does half-a-billion downloads mean? Let’s parse the numbers. According to Rovia:

• Collectively, we’ve played over 200,000 years of Angry Birds.
• 300 million minutes are spent each day on the game.
• 400 billion birds have been launched into the stratosphere on their mission to knock green pigs off their pedestals.

Now, lets put things in perspective. According to me:

• Anatomically modern humans first appeared in the fossil record in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago.
• In 300 million minutes you could walk (at an average clip of 5mph) from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate… over 8,300 times.
• If you had a penny for every one of the 400 billion birds that have been flung, you’d have collected $400M in your green-pig piggy bank (which would weigh 220 million lbs, give or take a hundred-thousand lbs or so).

Time is a scarce resource these days. Put down the phone/tablet/mouse and do your part to help solve the world’s time-scarcity problem.