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Our stuff often says a lot about us, whether we own a hybrid car or a station wagon, a MacBook Pro or an ancient desktop. And this is no less true of our smart phones, sold on a sharply divided market between iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries.

Among other things, cell phone brands say something about socio-economics – it takes a lot of money to buy a new iPhone 5 (and even more money to keep up with the latest models that come out faster than plan upgrades do). Consider, then, this map of Washington, D.C., which uses geolocated tweets, and the cell phone metadata attached to them, to illustrate who in town is using iPhones (red dots) and who's using Androids (green dots):

That picture comes from a new series of navigable maps visualizing some three billion global, geotagged tweets sent since September of 2011, developed by Gnip, MapBox and dataviz guru Eric Fischer.* They've converted all of that data from the Twitter firehose (this is just a small fraction of all tweets, most of which have no geolocation data) into a series of maps illustrating worldwide patterns in language and device use, as well as between people who appear to be tourists and locals in any given city.

The locals and tourists map scales up a beautiful earlier project from Fischer. You could kill a few hours playing with all of these tools, built on the same dataset. But we particularly liked looking at the geography of smart phone devices. As in Washington, above, iPhones are often more prominent in upper-income parts of cities (and central business districts), while Androids appear to be the dominant device in lower-income areas.

These maps are also a blank canvas with nothing on them other than tweets. To the extent that you can easily make out the Washington Beltway above, or plenty of other roadway networks throughout the rest of these maps, that means people are tweeting while driving (or, preferably, sitting in the passenger seat).

Here is New York City, which has a smattering of Blackberries in Manhattan (yes, it's possible to tweet from a Blackberry). That green patch to the left is Newark:

Here is Chicago:

And Houston:

Atlanta:

Los Angeles:

And one place that really loves Blackberries? Jakarta.

Correction: This article initially misspelled Eric Fischer's name.

All images courtesy of MapBox, Gnip and Eric Fischer.

Youtube "make-up guru" Tamang Phan is an amateur make-up artist from Nepal who posts videos of herself transforming into different celebrities and fictional characters.


Check her out transforming into more characters - on her Youtube channel

via

Thanks FTTS

submitted by XT3MPEST [link] [30 comments]

Yes, turning sound into light is fairly easy, especially if you have a pet pistol shrimp, but no one understands exactly why it happens. The phenomenon is called “sonoluminescense,” and here’s a video that explains what we know so far about it.

[Minute Physics]

Treating pain is a tricky business—especially when it comes to the chronic, perpetually debilitating type. For things like back injuries, osteoarthritis, and bone cancer, you're really only left with two options: deal with the often dangerous, unpredictable side-effects of prescription painkillers or suffer through it. But all that might change soon thanks to a Moroccan "cactuslike plant" and its toxin's potential to kill localized pain—forever.

Just starting to be used in human trials, the painkiller, a toxin called resiniferatoxin (RTX), would work by going directly to the source of pain itself—your body's neurons. The specific neurons targeted by the compound produce a protein called TRPV1. And this protein is what travels up your spinal column to tell your brain that something's off, leaving you with that very unpleasant inflammatory sensation. When RTX is injected into the spinal fluid, though, those specific TRPV1-producing neurons get killed dead while normal tissue and other pain-sensing nerves get passed by, totally unharmed.

Though human trials for the potential savior of the chronically pained are just beginning, tests on dogs (who experience pain very similarly to humans) have been highly promising. And David Maine, director at the Center for Interventional Pain Medicine at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, is highly optimistic about the new method:

When you can streamline where a drug acts and avoid consequences outside of that, you potentially have a winner.

Obviously, the inability to feel pain in the longterm—even a very specific type of pain—has the potential to be highly problematic. But for those whose chronic pain is effectively crippling or even the terminally ill, this could turn out to be exactly the kind of relief they've been waiting for. [Scientific American]

Image: Shutterstock/Bartek Zyczynski

The new brain map shows details thinner than a human hair.

Some people went into an absolute state of panic when Google announced in March that it would shut down Reader.

But Digg was quick to jump in and announce that it would try to save the day with an RSS reader of its own. 

That's because it turns out Digg had a bit of heads-up on the news, Wired's Mat Honan reports. 

Digg CEO Andrew McLaughlin worked at Google from 2004 to 2009. But after he left, McLaughlin unsurprisingly stayed in touch with some of his former colleagues. 

After seeing a blog post in the fall of 2012 speculating that Google Reader was shutting down, McLaughlin sent a playful note to a friend at Google, offering to "take it off their hands." His friend simply said that Google couldn't sell the Reader name, user data, or code base, so there was really nothing to buy. 

This past February, McLaughlin ran into that same friend at a TED conference. His friend told him, "I'm not telling you anything, but we're not going to keep this thing around forever and maybe you want to have something ready by the end of the year."

But as well all know now, Google shuttered Reader much sooner than that. But the July 1 deadline didn't seem to affect Digg's efforts to create its own RSS reader. 

Digg will launch the Digg Reader to the public on June 26.

Be sure to head on over to Wired to read the inside story of how Digg built a Google Reader replacement.

SEE ALSO: Google Explains Why It's Killing Google Reader

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This is a video of the R2-D2 birthday cake Marc Freilich made for his six-year old son Alexander. It has a teensy Pico projector inside so it can project the 'hologram' of Princess Leia followed by 'Happy Birthday Alexander' in the Star Wars font. I like how the one kid at the end asks, 'What WAS that?' I'm pretty sure his parents should be hauled off for child negligence because if you haven't seen Star Wars by the time you're six, clearly your parents don't use the TV as a babysitter as much as they should. That's what it's there for. My parents used to leave me for days at a time and look how I turned out. You know how many TV theme songs I know? ALL OF THEM. Hit the jump for the video.

A family is at the dinner table. The son asks his father, "Dad, how many kinds of boobs are there?"

The father, surprised, answers, "Well, son, there are three kinds of breasts. In her 20s, a woman's breasts are like melons, round and firm. In her 30s to 40s, they are like pears, still nice but hanging a bit. After 50, they are like onions."

"Onions?"

"Yes, you see them and they make you cry."

This infuriated his wife and daughter so the daughter said, "Mum, how many kinds of 'willies' are there?"

The mother, surprised, smiles and answers, "Well dear, a man goes through three phases. In his 20s, his willy is like an oak tree, mighty and hard. In his 30s and 40s, it is like a birch, flexible but reliable. After his 50s, it is like a Christmas tree."

"A Christmas tree?"

"Yes - dead from the root up and the balls are just for decoration."

I guess you could say that this bizarre Yoda dog getup is a sort of Star Wars mullet. He’s Jedi master up front, with an Ewok in the back. For some reason, he looks legit. I must travel to his doggy planet and learn the ways of the Force. Screw it, he probably just wants biscuits all day long.

Ren Netherland of Animal Photography took these photos. He travels across America every year to document the most extreme grooming competitions the world has to offer. He’s obviously seen some pretty weird stuff – like this Yoda dog.

This poor was shaved and colored to get his look just right. He also encountered some dogs dressed like Sesame Street characters and different Disney characters. That’s got to mess with their little doggy heads.

[via USA Today via Neatorama]

Has this ever happened to you? If you have kids, you can reconstruct what led to this picture. A child wants that delicious dessert in the refrigerator. He is too short to reach it, because it was "put out of his reach." So he stands on the lower refrigerator shelves, which eventually collapse. An adult, hearing the crash, runs in from the other room and immediately takes a picture. This was posted by the young man's uncle, redditor moe2395. Link

via http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/

Well that’s certainly one way to carry your lunch! A friend of Jaya made this jacket from a bunch of Ziploc bags. I know what she’s having for lunch. And to be perfectly honest- it doesn’t really look that bad! It’s a hands-free lunch-holding solution plus it’s probably somewhat waterproof. Not that I’d wear it, I’m more of a sandwich bag pants kinda guy. I do sense a fashion trend coming on here.

Ziploc Bag Jacket Clearly Holds a Lot

Thanks DGNB

 

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