Burly.Thurr

Eyal Press

Traitor, hacker, high-school dropout, narcissist: Edward Snowden has been called many things since coming forward as the source who gave documents to The Guardian showing that the National Security Agency has been collecting telephone and Internet data on hundreds of millions of Americans, revelations that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed the NSA to explain at a contentious hearing in Washington last week. The one thing that Snowden’s detractors have insisted he does not merit being called is a whistleblower.

Who’s the zealot? A scholarly study of early Christianity becomes a best seller thanks to a belligerent online reporter… more»

Saudi Arabia is so desperate to rid their region of Syria's dictatorial regime that they offered Bashar al-Assad's biggest benefactor $15 billion and protection for their vital oil business. The Russians said "no."

According to a report from Reuters, Prince Bandar bin Sultan (pictured above in 2008) met personally with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to persuade him to stop blocking the U.N. Security Council and withdraw his financial and military support from the Assad regime. In exchange, the Prince offered assurances that the next leader in Damascus would be under Saudi control, and much friendlier to Russian interests than the Islamic militants threatening to take over the country. They'd also start buying Russian tanks again, re-starting roughly $15 billion in weapons contracts between Riyadh and Moscow that have been halted for several years. 

Putin however, remains firm in his support for Assad, in part because he doesn't trust that the Saudis can guarantee a friendly regime in Damascus. And also because Russia has never had more influence in the region that it does right now. Nearly every one of Assad's neighbors wants him gone, but most have not been as friendly to Russia in the past. The loose alliance forged between Syria, Russia, and Iran is good for Putin politically and economically, even though (or because?) it enrages the West so greatly.

Even with promises of a friendlier Saudi Arabia pulling the strings in Syria — which some people believe includes the United States pulling the strings in Riyadh — it seems Moscow prefers to stick with the devil they know.

Here's an interview with Liu Xeubin, formerly of GlaxoSmithKline in China. That prospect should perk up the ears of anyone who's been following the company's various problems and scandals in that country.

Liu Xuebin recalls working 12-hour shifts and most weekends for months, under pressure to announce research results that would distinguish his GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) lab in China as a force in multiple sclerosis research.
It paid off -- for a while. Nature Medicine published findings about a potential new MS treatment approach in January 2010 and months later Liu was promoted to associate director of Glaxo’s global center for neuro-inflammation research in Shanghai. Two months ago, his career unraveled. An internal review found data in the paper was misrepresented. Liu, 45, who stands by the study, was suspended from duty on June 8 and quit two days later.

Liu was the first author on the disputed paper, but he says that he stands by it, and opposed a retraction (only he and one other author, out of 18, did so). He had been at the NIH for several years before being hired back to Shanghai by Glaxo, which turned out to be something of a change:

“This was my first job in industry and there was a very different culture,” Liu said behind thick, rimless glasses and dressed in a short-sleeve checked shirt tucked neatly into his belted trousers. “I was also not experienced with compliance back then, and we didn’t pay enough attention to things such as recording of reports from our collaborators.”

There was also a culture in which Glaxo scientists were grouped into competitive teams, known as discovery performance units, which vied internally for funds every three years, he said. Those who failed to meet certain targets risked being disbanded.

What I find odd is Liu's emphasis on publishing, and publishing first. That seems like a very academic mindset - I have to tell you, over my time in industry, rarely have I ever felt a sense of urgency to publish my results in a journal. And even those exceptions have been for other reasons, usually the "If we're going to write this stuff up, now's the time" sort. Never have I felt that we were racing to get something into, say, Nature Medicine before someone else did. Getting something patented before someone else, into the clinic before someone else? Oh, yes indeed. But not into some journal.

But neither have I been part of a far-flung research site, on which a lot of money had been spent, trying to show that it was all worthwhile. Maybe that's the difference. Even so, if the results that the Shanghai group got were really important for an approach to multiple sclerosis therapy, that's all the more reason why the findings should have spoken for themselves inside the company (and been the subject of immediate further development, too). We don't have to get Nature Medicine (or whoever) to validate things for us: "Oh, wow, that stuff must be real, the journal accepted our paper". A company doesn't demonstrate that it finds something valuable by sending it out to a big-name journal, at least not at first: it does that by spending more time and money on the idea.

But Liu doesn't talk the way that I would expect in this article, and I feel sure that the Bloomberg reporter on this piece didn't pick up on it. There's no "We delivered a new MS program, we validated a whole new group of drug targets, we identified a high-profile clinical candidate that went immediately into development". That's how someone in drug R&D would put it. Not "We were racing to publish our results". It's all quite odd.

Douglas Rushkoff - "Present Shock" [0:00:00] https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/50073

August 6th, 1945 - Rare photo of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima

twistedlilheart:

songoharotto:

ghostanswers:

FUCK YES

There’s ‘black comedy’ and then there’s M*A*S*H.

There’s a reason why I love this show

Brewers, especially in the United States, have embraced the time-honored Belgian art of deliberately infecting beer with the same “wild” bugs that generations of their predecessors so painstakingly eradicated.

pbs-food:

"I’m drying lettuce!"

More Julia Child fun!

Wildcatting is a stripper’s guide to boom towns like Williston, North Dakota. It’s insightful on the principal-agent problem, why natural resources aren’t a geographic blessing even when they aren’t a curse, selection effects and immigration (“ I never met a boring stripper in Williston.”) and small town life.

I am thinking of asking my IO students to explain why stripper pay structure changed with the boom:

It took a long time for things to quickly change. First, Whispers started booking four dancers. Then a second club, Heartbreakers, opened right next door, and they didn’t even cap the number of dancers that could work. Not only that, they didn’t pay the dancers — and instead charged them a whopping $120 flat stage fee. Whispers upped their game by going to six dancers at some point in 2011. The last time I got a paycheck from them was in February 2012, and then the owner told me they weren’t going to pay dancers at all anymore.

So starting in 2012, instead of getting paid $250–500 a week, depending on the booking, we paid Whispers $120 a night. Instead of keeping $15 from each dance, dancers kept the whole $20.

Strippers are not immune to the great stagnation:

The American worker has never been so efficient in terms of output over hours worked. At the same time, real wages and benefits have plummeted. Prospects are shitty for college graduates and non-graduates alike. Layoffs and cutbacks in previously solid industries protect the profits of an ever-smaller class at the expense of those who produce value. In stripper terms, here’s what that looks like: Lap dances in many places still start at $20, the same price they were in 1990. Customers expect ever-higher levels of contact and performance skill, meaning strippers work harder to earn the $20 or the dollar stage tip that is worth a lot less than it used to be.

…The one big advantage you have if you’re a stripper, though, is the ability to travel to greener pastures. If you would like to have a job in another town, as long as you look good enough for the club’s standards, you’re hired. So those who can, move. When the level of bullshit is too high or the earnings too low, they the hit the road. Same as the men who wind up traveling to work in the oil fields. If you can make $30,000 more a year driving heavy equipment in North Dakota instead of in Louisiana, and you need that money, you go. Is this the logical progression of a service economy? It looks like migrant labor.

…Mobility giveth and mobility taketh away, and while I was grateful to have the freedom to come to the boomtown, I was even more thankful to have the freedom to leave.

The piece is also of interest when read at the meta level.

pewinternet:

Who uses the internet the most? http://www.pewinternet.org/Static-Pages/Trend-Data-(Adults)/Whos-Online.aspx

Joshua Oppenheimer [Joshua Oppenheimer on the The Act of Killing]
"The Act of Killing"
Alix Lambert [Alix Lambert on Crime: The Animated Series]
Crime: The Animated Series https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/51411

Thanks to an alert reader, I was put on to this paper in PNAS. It's from a team at Washington U. in St. Louis, and my fellow Cardinals fans are definitely stirring things up in the debate over "junk DNA" function and the ENCODE results. (The most recent post here on the debate covered the "It's functional" point of view - for links to previous posts on some vigorous ENCODE-bashing publications, see here).

This new paper, blogged about here at Homologus and here by one of its authors, Mike White, is an attempt to run a null-hypothesis experiment on transcription factor function. There are a lot of transcription factor recognition sequences in the genome. They're short DNA sequences that serve as flags for the whole transcription machinery to land and start assembling at a particular spot. Transcription factors themselves are the proteins that do the primary recognition of these sequences, and that gives them plenty to do. With so many DNA motifs out there (and so many near-misses), some of their apparent targets are important and real and some of them may well be noise. TFs have their work cut out.

What this new paper did was look at a particular transcription factor, Crx. They took a set of 1,300 sequences that are (functionally) known to bind it - 865 of them with the canonical recognition motifs and 433 of them that are known to bind, but don't have the traditional motif. They compared that set to 3,000 control sequences, including 865 of them "specifically chosen to match the Crx motif content and chromosomal distribution" as compared to that first set. They also included a set of single-point mutations of the known binding sequences, along with sets of scrambled versions of both the known binding regions and the matched controls above, with dinucleotide ratios held constant - random but similar.

What they found, first, was that the known binding elements do indeed drive transcription, as advertised, while the controls don't. But the ENCODE camp has a broader definition of function than just this, and here's where the dinucleotides hit the fan. When they looked at gene repression activity, they found that the 865 binders and the 865 matched controls (with Crx recognition elements, but in unbound regions of the genome) both showed similar amounts of activity. As the paper says, "Overall, our results show that both bound and unbound Crx motifs, removed from their genomic context, can produce repression, whereas only bound regions can strongly activate".

So far, so good, and nothing that the ENCODE people might disagree with - I mean, there you are, unbound regions of the genome showing functional behavior and all. But the problem is, most of the 1,300 random sequences also showed regulatory effects:

Our results demonstrate the importance of comparing the activity of candidate CREs (cis-regulatory elements - DBL) against distributions of control sequences, as well as the value of using multiple approaches to assess the function of CREs. Although scrambled DNA elements are unlikely to drive very strong levels of activation or repression, such sequences can produce distinct levels of enhancer activity within an intermediate range that overlaps with the activity of many functional sequences. Thus, function cannot be assessed solely by applying a threshold level of activity; additional approaches to characterize function are necessary, such as mutagenesis of TF binding sites.

In other words, to put it more bluntly than the paper does, one could generate ENCODE-like levels of functionality with nothing but random DNA. These results will not calm anyone down, but it's not time to calm down just yet. There are some important issues to be decided here - from theoretical biology all the way down to how many drug targets we can expect to have. I look forward to the responses to this work. Responses will most definitely be forthcoming.

In March of this year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos discovered, at the bottom of the Atlantic, giant F-1 engines that he believed propelled Neil Armstrong and the team of Apollo 11 to the moon. Bezos raised them to the surface, and after months of clearing the engines of corrosion, today announced his team has identified a serial number on one of the blasters: 2044. The discovery confirms the engine is indeed from Apollo 11.

One of the conservators who was scanning the objects with a black light and a special lens filter has made a breakthrough discovery -- "2044" -- stenciled in black paint on the side of one of the massive thrust chambers. 2044 is the Rocketdyne serial number that correlates to NASA number 6044, which is the serial number for F-1 Engine No. 5 from Apollo 11. The intrepid conservator kept digging for more evidence, and after removing more corrosion at the base of the same thrust chamber, he found it -- "Unit No 2044" -- stamped into the metal surface.

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khealywu:

thespacegoat:

Courses:
Coursera
EDX
Udacity
University of Reddit

Books:
Bartleby
Gutenberg
Librivox
Poem Hunter

Videos:
Academic Earth
C. G. P. Grey
Crash Course
Khan Academy
Minute Physics
The New Boston Tutorials
TED
Unplug the TV

Documentaries:
Documentary Heaven
Top Documentary Films

Languages:
BBC Languages
Busuu
Dou Lingo
Live Mocha
MemRise
Verbling

Music:
How to Play Piano
Justin Guitar
Music Theory
Play Bass Now
Teoria

Programming:
Code Academy
Coding Bat
HTML Dog
Learn Code the Hard Way
Ruby Monk
Trypython

DIY/How-To:
Howcast
How Stuff Works
Instructables
The Daily Miscellany
Wiki How
Wonder How-To

Math:
Math Run
Project Euler
Wolfram Alpha

Cooking:
Cooking for Engineers
Cooklet
How2Heroes
Reluctant Gormet

Even more learning webbysites!

religioner:

i dont reblog gifsets very often, but this movie

Scott Aukerman: What's your favorite movie Werner?
Werner Herzog: Probably... Herbie Goes Bananas.
Ben Schwartz: Is that the sequel to Herbie Fully Loaded?
Werner Herzog: This is the original Herbie series.
Scott Aukerman: Ah yes. How many films in that series?
Werner Herzog: Four.
Scott Aukerman: Okay, and let's name them. Of course, Herbie the Love Bug.
Werner Herzog: Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Herbie Goes Bananas...
Ben Schwartz: And then?
Werner Herzog: Herbie: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

theniftyfifties:

Groceries, 1950. 

Annalee Newitz [Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction] [0:00:00]
Pharmakon - "Milkweed/It Hangs Heavy" [0:22:27]
Annalee Newitz [Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction] [0:22:40] https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/51029

How to say beer in Europe (larger)

likeafieldmouse:

Charles Freger - Wilder Mann (2010) - A series exploring human fascination with myth, ritual and tradition

Wrong turn through unexpected suburban neighborhoods.

Free admission to no-petting menagerie of glass at Grandma Doris’s condo.

Overnight accommodations in enclosed space near screaming baby.

Rust Belt Motel 6 boasting heirloom Frosted Flakes.

The visitor center of broken exhibits serving 0 million visitors a year.

5-day road trip through bucolic backroads and bad Yelp recommendations.

Breathtakingly cold water in locals-only municipal swimming pool.

The Goddamit-We-Paid-a-Lot-of-Money-So-Quit-Crying Amusement Park.

Historic B&B with peeling paint and… is that cat pee? It’s definitely cat pee.

Don’t-miss state park campsite near drunk racists who enjoy loud sex.

Staycation in living room, nestled between eatery (kitchen) and spa (bathroom) with all the comforts of home.

High school reunion featuring wine coolers and vengeful scene policing.

Mother-In-Law’s beach house featuring whimsical maritime knickknacks and rustic potpourri.

National monument with more stairs than a stair factory.

Immersive, authentic experience in depressing town you left at age 18.

Selfie while tackled by Security

Olivier Assayas - "Something in the Air"
Kio Stark - "Don't go back to school" https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/50540

Questions swirled over whether fugitive Edward Snowden, the admitted leaker of U.S. secrets, has a clear path to asylum in Ecuador.

WORTH SEEING: Brian Williams rapping G-Thang is a glorious start to Thursday.

hypervocal

I didn’t know what I was going to write about today. When this happens, normally I grab a coffee to help get the ideas flowing, but for the last few days in Montreal, no one’s been allowed to drink the water due to a bacteria leakage. This also means: no coffee. So instead, I grabbed the next best thing to help me get going: a beer.

This got me wondering about coffee and beer and which one would actually help me be more creative and get work done. Hopefully, what I found out will help you decide when it’s best to have that triple shot of espresso or an ice cold brew.

What is Creativity Really?

From a scientific perspective, creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between pre-existing ideas in your brain. These connections are controlled by chemicals called neurotransmitters. One of these neurotransmitters is adenosine, which alerts your brain when you’re running out of energy and reacts by slowing down the connections made between neurons by binding to adenosine receptors.

Adenosine is kind of like your brain’s battery status monitor. Once your energy levels get low, adenosine starts to slow your brain function down. This is why after a few hours of intense work, you begin to feel tired, like your brain has run out of juice. The only way to recharge it is to take a break, unless you’ve got a secret weapon handy.

Your Brain on Coffee

Every coffee drinker is familiar with the feeling after drinking a fresh cup of java. I know after I’ve had a latte or espresso, I feel more focused. If I’m having a conversation with someone, words seem to flow without pauses, ums, or ahs. If I’m writing, my fingers never stop typing. This happens because caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, preventing adenosine from binding to it’s receptors and tricking your brain into thinking you have lots of energy. (Check out The Oatmeal's comic illustration of what caffeine does when it makes it to your brain.)

This effect happens within just five minutes of drinking your coffee. When adenosine receptors are blocked, chemicals that increase the performance of your neural activity—like glucose, dopamine, and glutamate—are allowed to work overtime. So while you may feel that coffee is giving you more energy, it’s simply telling your body that your energy reserves are good to go even when they’re long gone.

Coffee is Like a Bottle Rocket

The peak effect of caffeine on your body happens between 15 minutes and two hours after you consume it. When caffeine from coffee enters your bloodstream, you become more alert from an increase in the production of the hormones adrenaline and cortisol. The problem is: if this over-stimulation of adrenaline and cortisol occurs too regularly, your adrenal glands— which absorb adrenaline to help make you feel energized—gradually begin to require more adrenaline to give you the same "pick-me-up" feeling as before.

When researchers at Johns Hopkins University looked at low to moderate coffee drinkers (as little as one 14-ounce mug per day), they found that even this little amount of coffee can cause your body to develop a tolerance to caffeine (and require more of it to get the same stimulation). Just like the thrill of lighting a bottle rocket and watching it explode all within a few seconds, the good feelings associated with coffee are short-lived, and pretty soon you need another hit to feel good again.

There Are Lots of Famous Drunk Artists, but No Famous Drunk Accountants

While caffeine pulls a number on your brain to make you feel like you have more energy, alcohol has it’s own way of influencing your creativity. After you’ve had a couple beers, drinking makes you less focused as it decreases your working memory, and you begin to care less about what’s happening around you. But as researchers at the University of Chicago discovered, this can be a good thing for creativity’s sake.

The researchers devised a game where 40 men were given three words and told to come up with a fourth that could make a two-word combination with all three words. For example, the word “pit” works with “arm”, “peach”, and “tar”:

Half of the men drank two pints of beer before playing the game, while the other half drank nothing. The results showed that men who drank solved 40 percent more of the problems than sober men. It was concluded that a blood alcohol level of 0.07 (about two drinks) made the participants better at creative problem-solving tasks, but not necessarily working memory tasks where they had to pay attention to things happening in their surroundings (like driving a car).

By reducing your ability to pay attention to the world around you, alcohol frees up your brain to think more creatively. It looks like author Ernest Hemingway was on to something when he said:

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

Alcohol Produces Better Ideas

In an interesting study on the topic of alcohol and its effects on creativity, author Dave Birss brought together a group of 18 advertising creative directors and split them into two teams based on their amount of career experience. One team was allowed to drink as much alcohol as they wanted while the other team had to stay sober. The groups were given a brief and had to come up with as many ideas as they could in three hours. These ideas were then graded by a collection of top creative directors.

The result? The team of drinkers not only produced the most ideas, but also came up with four of the top five best ideas. While alcohol may not be the drink of choice when you need to be alert and focused on what’s going on around you, it seems that a couple drinks can be helpful when you need to come up with new ideas.

A Creative Prescription: The Optimal Way to Drink Coffee and Beer

Both coffee and beer (in moderation) have shown to be helpful when you’re working on certain types of tasks; however, you shouldn’t drink either when you need to do detail-oriented or analytical projects like your finances. The increase in adrenaline from caffeine and the inhibition of your working memory from alcohol will make you more prone to make mistakes.

Beer For the Idea

The best time to have a beer (or two) would be when you’re searching for an initial idea. Because alcohol helps decrease your working memory (making you feel relaxed and less worried about what’s going on around you), you’ll have more brain power dedicated to making deeper connections.

Neuroscientists have studied the “eureka moment” and found that in order to produce moments of insight, you need to feel relaxed so that front brain thinking (obvious connections) can move to the back of the brain (where unique, lateral connections are made) and activate the anterior superior temporal gyrus, a small spot above your right ear responsible for moments of insight:

Researchers found that about five seconds before you have a "eureka moment" there is a large increase in alpha waves that activates the anterior superior temporal gyrus. These alpha waves are associated with relaxation—which explains why you often get ideas while you’re on a walk, in the shower, or on the toilet.

Alcohol is a substance that relaxes you, so it produces a similar effect on alpha waves and helping us reach creative insights. Coffee doesn’t necessarily help you access more creative parts of your brain like a couple pints of beer.

Coffee For the Execution

If you’ve already got an idea or an outline of where you want to go with your project, a cup of coffee would do wonders compared to having a beer to execute on your idea. The general consensus across caffeine studies is that it can increase quality and performance if the task you are doing seems easy and doesn’t require too much abstract thinking. In other words, after you have an initial idea or a plan laid out, a cup of coffee can help you execute and follow through on your concept faster without compromising quality.

Quick tip: If you drink coffee, do so before noon so it doesn’t affect your sleep. On average, it will take 5-10 hours for the caffeine from a cup of coffee to be removed from your system, and messing up your sleep cycle can have a negative impact on your creative output for days to come.

Always in Moderation

If you decide to drink coffee and beer while you’re working, you should stick to no more than two cups of coffee or a couple of beers per sitting, and try to do this no more than once or twice per week. Coffee and beer shouldn’t be thought of as magic bullets for creativity. They are ways to create chemical changes that occur naturally in your brain with a healthy lifestyle. (Quality sleep patterns and allowing yourself to take breaks by splitting your day into sprints will do the same trick.)

But, if you have to choose between coffee or beer, think about what type of task you are about to do and make sure you don’t over-drink. Too much of either and you’ll lose the benefits of both.

Coffee vs. beer: Which drink makes you more creative? | Ooomf

---

Mikael Cho is the co-founder of ooomf, a creative marketplace connecting mobile & web projects with vetted, first class developers and designers from around the world. Mikael writes more posts on psychology, startups, and product marketing over on the ooomf blog. Find him on Twitter @mikaelcho.

Illustration by Tina Mailhot-Roberge.

Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.

Bwahahaha:

Since Snowden’s purported arrival in Moscow yesterday, scores of journalists have been staking out Sheremetyevo Airport, hoping to catch the 29 30-year-old (happy birthday Ed!) ex-contractor as he left Russia, possibly with an eventual destination in Ecuador, where he’s reportedly seeking asylum. When Russian media reported that he’d booked a ticket on Aeroflot Flight 180 to Havana, Cuba, a number of them did the journalistic thing and booked tickets as well.

Only: Snowden never showed.

And now, in a national-security version of the Rihanna plane, journalists from AP, AFP, BBC and NBC News, among others, are trapped on a 12-hour flight from Moscow to Cuba. It gets worse:

* Starting from Feb 10, 2010, the sale of alcohol is suspended on flights to/from Havana, Bangkok, Shanghai, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Yuzhno-Sahalinsk, and Khabarovsk.

And worse (or, really, better?): Thanks to travel regulations in Cuba, they’ll have to stay there three days before they’ll be allowed to fly back.

Hello everyone!

This morning I have mixed feelings: I am happy that we have the possibility to bring our beloved The Old Reader to a new level, and I am sad that Google Reader soon will be completely over. It was a large part of my daily internet life. We even started making The Old Reader because no one could stand my whining anymore.

News came unexpected (mind you, we are living in GMT, so it was literally the middle of the night), but we are doing out best. We tripled our user base (and still counting), and our servers are not amused so far. We will be deploying more capacity shortly, so things should get better by the end of the day. Please, be patient with us.

(The Old Reader’s team before March 13, photo by repor.to/shuvayev)

This is overwhelming. When we started this as something for us and our friends to use, we never expected so many of you to join us in our journey. Thank you very much for your kind words and support, we appreciate this.

Seeing Google Reader go, many of you are asking whether The Old Reader is going to stick around. Also, quite a lot of people would like to donate to keep our project running. We have been discussing this quite a lot recently, and we decided that paid accounts (the freemium model) are the way to go. We want to keep making a great product for our users, not cater it for advertisers’ needs.

We are going to be honest, we have not even started coding this yet. However, we would like to get this news out as soon as possible for everyone to know the way we will be going. Paid accounts will have some additional features, but the basic free accounts will still be 100% usable. We are not in this game to make money, but we want to give something special back to the people who are going to be supporting us.

We have our daily jobs, so we can’t promise that new features will be ready tomorrow or next week. We have no investors or fancy business plans, but we are open about everything we do, and we want to do it the right way.

We reworked the plans according to the news today. Creating an API for mobile clients is the number one priority in our roadmap. We would love to collaborate with any developers who were making Google Reader clients. Please, spread the word about this if you can.

For those of you who are posting feedback and creating new feature requests - please, double-check for existing items in Uservoice. We hate answering the same questions multiple times and removing duplicate requests.

Most asked questions are:
- “When will OPML import be working again?” As soon as we launch more capacity to handle this. Hopefully, later today.
- “Why are you asking for access to my Google contacts when I log in via Google account?” We don’t anymore.
- “When will you make an iOS app? How about Android?” We will start with API as soon as we can and see how it goes.
- “Why is there no way to login without Google or Facebook accounts?” We cover that one in our knowledge base, but we plan to implement own login code. The demand is high.
- “How do I rename a feed?”. Just browse the Tour page, please? 
- “Shut up and take my money!”. Will work on that, stay tuned.

We have lots of things to do, and it will probably take us several days to reply to all emails and tickets. Also, Twitter keeps reminding us about daily tweet limits, so there might be delays as well.

Some other news: last week our developer (on the left) turned 21, and we have implemented PubSubHubbub support. Many of you asked us to make feed updates faster, and PubSubHubbub makes compatible feeds refresh almost instantly. Yay!

Thank you very much for your support. We will do our best during next three months to prepare for the day Google Reader will no longer be around.

The wireless charging options available on flagship phones is a great feature, but most of us aren’t rocking the latest and greatest cellphone. [Daniel] came up with a great mod that adds wireless charging to just about every cellphone ever, at a very low price and a few bits and bobs ordered off eBay.

[Daniel] used a Palm Touchstone inductive charger – available for a few bucks on eBay – along with an inductive charging circuit from a Palm Pixi. This charging circuit was designed to complement the Touchstone charger, and is simple enough to wire up; all [Dan] needed to do was put the coil and charging circuit near the charge, and it output 5 Volts to charge any phone.

To get the power from the charging circuit into his phone’s battery, [Daniel] simply wired the output of the coil’s circuit to the USB in on the phone. The space inside his S2 was pretty tight but he was able to come up with two ways to install the charging circuit, for use with either the stock back cover or a third-party case.

For anyone with a soldering iron, it’s a quick bit of work to add wireless charging to any phone. We’re loving [Dan]‘s solution, as the Palm gear he used is so readily available on eBay and junk drawers the world over.

Filed under: Cellphone Hacks, phone hacks