An Embarrassment of Geeks

At its most basic, an Internet meme is simply the propagation of a digital file or hyperlink from one person to others using methods available through the Internet (for example, email, blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging, etc). The content often consists of a saying or joke, a rumor, an altered or original image, a complete website, a video clip or animation, or an offbeat news story, among many other possibilities. In simple terms, an Internet meme is an inside joke, that a large number of Internet users are in on. An Internet meme may stay the same or may evolve over time, by chance or through commentary, imitations, and parody versions, or even by collecting news accounts about itself. Internet memes have a tendency to evolve and spread extremely quickly, sometimes going in and out of popularity in just days. They are spread organically, voluntarily, and peer to peer, rather than by compulsion, predetermined path, or completely automated means. The term “Meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 pop-science bestseller, The Selfish Gene.²

The term may refer to the content that spreads from user to user, the idea behind the content, or the phenomenon of its spread. Internet memes have been seen as a form of art.³

“Around four tonnes of ancient Roman lead was yesterday transferred from a museum on the Italian island of Sardinia to the country’s national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso on the mainland. Once destined to become water pipes, coins or ammunition for Roman soldiers’ slingshots, the metal will instead form part of a cutting-edge experiment to nail down the mass of neutrinos.”

“Arora et al. show it’s even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his “senior tranche”), he can’t prove that that tampering occurred: he can’t prove that the distribution of lemons wasn’t random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs."

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo lifted off at 7:05am on 3/30 from the Mojave Air and Space Port. The flight lasted for nearly three hours and achieved an altitude of 45,000 feet. Spaceshiptwo was attached to WhiteKnightTwo, the second generation spacecraft from Scaled Composites.

Virgin Galactic says it has already taken in around $45 million in deposits for space flights from more than 330 people.

The test program for SpaceShipTwo will continue through the rest of the year and 2011. There has been no announcement of a date for the first commercial flight carrying paying customers.

Several extrasolar planets have been discovered to be orbiting backwards — that is, they revolve in the opposite direction that their host star rotates — challenging accepted ideas of how planets form, according to the astronomers who made the discovery.

Create and discover Ning Social Networks for your interests and passions.

MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to open and play most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in a DVD authoring tool, and use them with many other applications or devices.

This is the way I always download videos I find on the net that I want to save to my drive.

iPhone app for controlling your cursor from your phone. Works better than Apple’s!

“I expect to be around to see it,” Obama said of pioneering U.S. trips starting with a landing on an asteroid — a colossal feat in itself — before the long-dreamed-of expedition to Mars. He spoke near the historic Kennedy Space Center launch pads that sent the first men to the moon, a blunt rejoinder to critics, including several former astronauts, who contend his planned changes will instead deal a staggering blow to the nation’s manned space program.

“We want to leap into the future,” not continue on the same path as before, Obama said as he sought to reassure NASA workers that America’s space adventures would soar on despite the impending termination of space shuttle flights.

Anatoly Zenkov provides this nifty tool (Mac and PC) to track your mouse pointer. Really simple. Just start it, let it run, minimize the window, and carry on as usual. In the end, you get this image that looks something like a Pollock. Circles show areas where the pointer didn’t move while the tracks show movement.

The question of how to print from wireless devices has been thrust once again into the limelight recently thanks to the printing-anemic iPad. Longtime notebook and mobile device users are quite familiar with the printing conundrum—cables, drivers and all.

Google has announced that it’s looking to address this problem in the form of Cloud Print. Part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects, Cloud Print aims to allow any type of application to print to any printer. This includes Web, desktop, and mobile apps from any kind of device—potentially, this could be used on a BlackBerry, Windows machines, Macs, or even the iPad. (That is in addition to Google’s own offerings: “Google Chrome OS will use Google Cloud Print for all printing. There is no print stack and there are no printer drivers on Google Chrome OS!” says the company.)

USB Golf Fidget
Product Code: ULIFE017500
Here comes another fun game you can play if you are bored at office work! The aim of the game is to hit the golf quickly to avoid it hits the right side of the screen. Once you click the ball, it bounces back to the other side on the fly. Play now to challenge your speed!

Know Your Meme: Documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.

The question of how to print from wireless devices has been thrust once again into the limelight recently thanks to the printing-anemic iPad. Longtime notebook and mobile device users are quite familiar with the printing conundrum—cables, drivers and all.

Google has announced that it’s looking to address this problem in the form of Cloud Print. Part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects, Cloud Print aims to allow any type of application to print to any printer. This includes Web, desktop, and mobile apps from any kind of device—potentially, this could be used on a BlackBerry, Windows machines, Macs, or even the iPad. (That is in addition to Google’s own offerings: “Google Chrome OS will use Google Cloud Print for all printing. There is no print stack and there are no printer drivers on Google Chrome OS!” says the company.)

After 16 years, $10 billion, and two false starts due to electrical failures, the Large Hadron Collider finally began to make subatomic particles collide on 3/30.

Protons were accelerated to more than 99 percent of the speed of light to record-high energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece. They raced around a 17-mile underground magnetic track outside Geneva, Switzerland. The particles crashed together inside apartment-building-size detectors designed to capture every detail from the resulting collisions thought to hold insights into the beginning of the universe.