Miles, Ben and Lyle chat about the week in geek news.
U.S. Web surfers are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google, according to new data from researchers at comScore Inc.
In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.’s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.
U.S. Web users spent 37.7 million minutes on Yahoo Inc. sites, or 9.1 percent of their time, putting Yahoo third in terms of time spent browsing. In July, Facebook crept past Yahoo for the first time, according to comScore.
It looks like the Moon, doesn’t it? But it also looks different. That’s because this mosaic of 3700+ images shows the Moon as if you were seeing it from above its east side — like you were hovering above it and following it as it orbits the Earth!
The images were taken with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Wide Angle Camera, which can snap between roughly 50-100 km (30 – 60 miles) of lunar landscape in one image. As LRO circles the Moon, the camera builds up a map of the entire surface, but only one narrow strip at a time. Astronomers can then use those images to create a mosaic of the Moon as seen from any angle… but it’s not easy.
The author is a geek himself and brings “geek-like” approaches to the subject matter – deep intellectual curiosity, affinity for details, appreciation of problem solving and hacking, scientific method, and a love of technology. What is even better is his filtering of cooking concepts by a computer coder’s framework, analogizing recipes to executable code, viewing of ingredients as inputs and as variables, running processes over and over in a logical manner to test and improve outcomes.
Talk about finding a needle in a cosmic haystack. Scientists this week said they found microscopic shrapnel in a meteorite of a star they say exploded around the birth of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
