Category Archives: Uncategorized

Small clumps of misfolded protein might be the cause of many incurable diseases, including Alzheimer’s. While the results are still preliminary, they sound wildly optimistic: Alzheimer’s disease may be caused by small clumps of wrongly folded proteins, two new studies suggest. Stopping rogue proteins ganging up might prevent or reverse this and other diseases, includingContinue reading “Clumps of disease”

A recent study performed at Penn State looks longitudinally at Excite queries: web search patterns are evolving. This is the same study that has underpinned a number of stories touting the recession of porn on the web. This new article a few results related to user interaction: The number of search engine users who viewedContinue reading “Google makes me fickle”

Can’t afford those expensive Japanese dancing robots, but want the benefits of having a small child around the house? Try a ShyKid™. They’ll love you no matter how badly you treat them. (thanks: aidan)

James Lileks, columnist for the Star Tribune, received this email from Alex Beam, before publishing his rant yesterday: James, weren’t you once a talented humor writer? Why are you churning out this web dreck? I can’t tell if these bleats about Rod Serling or the Palestinians are diluting your humor work, because I can’t claimContinue reading “Journalist sides with blogs”

Every month Cambridge scours its streets, to a much larger extent than most cities (including nearby Boston). Every month that is, except January-March, when the city deems it too cold to sweep. And just about every month, my stupid ass gets towed. Of course, this being the first week of April, I unexpectedly walked outContinue reading “Another month, another tow”

Now that blogging has tipped in trad-journalism, it’s not uncommon to see a local story as bitter as this: In the world of weblogs, talk is cheap. Choice statements: The Web loggers’ main shortcoming is their compunction to ”say” something several times a day, consequences be damned. Another cloying attribute of bloggers is their intenseContinue reading “Just me here in lower Blogovia”

I’ve used Teoma a few times before, but the flurry of articles today about Teoma taking aim at Google necessitated a bit of further inquiry. Given that Teoma’s index is only a tiny fraction of Google’s (200 million compared to 3 billion), the results are difficult to compare. The technology used is termed “Subject SpecificContinue reading “Teoma aims at Google’s throat”

One of life’s greatest mysteries solved: why eggs flip upright when spun.

While the title is misleading, “Microsoft to keep track of instant messages” might be one of the biggest advancements in communication technology in a long while. Email gave us access to an archive of past communications, but having a record of all informal messaging is like a complete memory prosthesis. The thought of having aContinue reading “Instant message cache”

my friend dan put up a page about his experience with a mullet. to our collective dismay, it’s gone.