Tagged: newsandpolitics

Mat Honan perfectly captures the good and bad of Google after spending four-hours live-blogging its I/O keynote.

Spending $1.1 billion for Tumblr seems like a coup for Yahoo. Tumblr gets its exit strategy without worrying about how to actually make money and Yahoo gets the youth street cred it was sorely lacking. The big question that is yet unanswered is whether Yahoo will muck this up like most of its acquisitions or can they treat Tumblr similar to how Facebook has treated Instagram? If it's more like the latter, then this will be a good thing for both. Time will tell.

Yowzahs . Skygazers across the Australian Outback were among the lucky few to witness a solar eclipse on Friday as the moon glided between Earth and the sun, blocking everything but a dazzling ring of light. The celestial spectacle, known as a “ring of fire” eclipse, was the second solar eclipse visible from northern Australia in six months. In November, a total solar eclipse plunged the country’s northeast into darkness, delighting astronomers and tourists who flocked to the region from across the globe to witness it. The eclipse lasted between [...]

High intensity interval training is essentially the principal for which P90X and Jillian Michaels' 30 Day Shred are based off of. Those workouts really do work - if you stick to the regiment. That was my biggest problem. Well, my inherent laziness was really my problem. But, anyway, I digress. Turns out, you don't have to devote 30 minutes or even an hour per day to get in shape. You can devote as little as seven minutes per day ( Farrelly Brothers nailed it way back when [...]

Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, obviously, because as long as as the government is still engaging in domestic spying and the TSA makes getting through airport security a nightmare, we will constantly experience the ripples of 9/11 in America. But, I couldn't help but feel some sense of closure as the spire was placed atop 1 World Trade Center to the height of 1776 feet. (Photo courtesy of NBC's Anne Thompson.) More at HyperVocal .

Betaworks describes itself as "a company that builds companies," but really it's a start-up incubator and the most interesting media technology company at the moment. Lately, it has scooped up a bevvy of smaller companies. We know they are working on a Google Reader replacement . It bought the much-maligned Digg last year and gave the site a nice facelift, doing the impossible - it revived a dead corpse and made it better. Last month, the company bought a majority stake in Marco Arment's [...]

Meet Charles Ramsey, who just provided the next news interview destined to become autotuned. I've already seen this posted everywhere today, so Ramsey is blowing up. Not only is he a master interviewer, but he helped rescue three Cleveland girls that were kidnapped back in 2003. While Amanda Berry, Michele Knight and Gina DeJesus can thank Ramsey, the Internet gets to thank him for today's unintentional comedy. Charles Ramsey definitely joins the Autotuned News Mount Rushmore with Sweet Dee and Antoine Dobson. [via deathandtaxes ]

Reddit was one of Y Combinator's first successful start-ups back in 2005. Now, the site, which appropriately bills itself as the front page of the Internet, has become one of, if not, the most influential sites in the world because it's a community, but also "the crib sheet for weary bloggers who need to hit page-view quotas," as Simon Dumenco so aptly puts it. Basically, if you read it on Gawker or BuzzFeed, chances are it was on Reddit the day before. If you are watching a goofy video on the local news or [...]

A few things I learned from this article on Silicon Valley's start-up incubator Y Combinator : If you're over 32, don't even think about trying to be the head of a start-up. Investors are skeptical of any idea from older people, probably because they have the life experience to run their company how they want to and not how the investors would like. "Among the eight start-ups that graduated Y.C.’s first class, in the summer of 2005, were the social-news site Reddit, recently valued at [...]

Atticus Lane-Dupre, an eight-year-old Portland, Ore. kid, was diagnosed with kidney cancer last fall and missed the end of his soccer season. Make-a-Wish contacted him and he said his dream was to play a soccer match against the Portland Timbers. Yesterday, his team, The Green Machine, took on the Timbers in front of 3,000 cheering fans. Atticus scored four goals in a 10-9 victory. In keeping with Timbers tradition, Timber Joey rewarded him with a slice off the victory log at the match's conclusion. "It was fun," [...]

I've been testing a lot of Google Reader replacements ever since Google announced it was sun-setting the application . One thing is clear: Reader was damn good; it's a shame it didn't fit in Google's business plan; and, it will be missed greatly. All of the replacement services I tested suffer from one glaring deficiency - speed. Reader was instant when switching feeds, having them update, etc. There's a lag to most Reader replacement services that probably results from not having Google's infrastructure or engineering teams . Once you get over [...]

Steven Spielberg is doing a sequel to Lincoln called Obama and he got Daniel Day-Lewis to play the lead, who nails it. Obviously. Because he's Daniel Day-Lewis. Created for the 2013 White House Correspondents Dinner.

"I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, 'I'm different.' If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand." - Jason Collins , just became the first openly gay athlete in an American pro sport. Oddly, it seems this would [...]

It turns out that many diagnosed cases of ADHD in both children and adults could be the result of chronic sleep deprivation. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 11 percent of school-age children have now received a diagnosis of the condition. I don’t doubt that many people do, in fact, have A.D.H.D.; I regularly diagnose and treat it in adults. But what if a substantial proportion of cases are really sleep disorders in disguise? For some people — especially children — sleep deprivation does not necessarily cause [...]

Seems like everyone is coming out with a streaming set-top box these days and now Amazon is throwing their name into the collective hat, according to Bloomberg . It makes sense, I suppose, but only if they do something different than what's already being offered by the likes of Roku, Apple TV, et al. It's the software that matters and the first company that cracks the fully-integrated Internet media box combining a DVR, video games, apps, and pay TV at an affordable price is going to make a mint. The hardware, [...]

Totally agree with Jason that US currency is pretty embarrassing from a design standpoint and that the new $100 US bill doesn't help matters. But, it's less easy to counterfeit, so we've got that going for us as a country. [via nbcnews ]

In its latest trial run, SpaceX's Grasshopper spacecraft, a 10-story tall Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) rocket,  soared to a height of 820 feet, hovered, then lowered itself back to the launchpad. The Grasshopper, and VTVL more generally, is a crucial tentpole for Elon Musk's SpaceX initiative, which hopes to implement the reusable launch system in its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. The Falcon 9 has already been used to lift cargo to the International Space Station. Why is this significant? Well, with VTVL the propulsion system used during the detach phase, which typically [...]

There were 80,000 drug and alcohol-related overdose deaths in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database in 2010 - the most recent year statistics are available. Wondering which drugs actually kill Americans? The rate of reported overdoses [in] the U.S. more than doubled between 1999 and 2010. About half of those additional deaths are in the pharmaceuticals category, which the CDC has written about before. Nearly three-quarters of the pharmaceuticals deaths are opioid analgesics—prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin. And while cocaine, [...]

Juli Weiner points out how ridiculous those New York Times travel articles are by offering a more sober look at what actually happens when traveling to a foreign country for the weekend. Saturday Eleven a.m. Awake to the sound of your significant other tapping away on his iPad. “Holy shit! Is there Wifi?” you ask. “Yup!” he responds, elated. You get out your own iPad and the two of you sit in silence and respond to work e-mails and personal [...]

An early look at next week's New Yorker cover, "Shadow Over Boston," by Eric Drooker. [via @RWW ]