Dark.saian

Editor’s note: Jason Shellen is a former Googler and founding product manager of Google Reader. He is now co-founder at Boxer and advisor at Tapedeck. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @shellen.

As part of Google’s recent announcement that it is shutting down Google Reader in July, I thought looking back at the history of how our beloved, but beleaguered, feed reader came to be, why we’ll miss it and what we really want in the future.

Back in the days on the Blogger team, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to get people blogging after they had signed up. However, when Blogger achieved critical mass, the need to model good blogging seemed less important since great writers, musicians, photographers and journalists were gravitating towards the form and showing the rest of us what made good blog content. The questions we began to hear from users changed from “How and what do I blog?” to “Where do I find the good ones?” and “How do I keep up with all of these great blogs?” Naturally, blog search and a blog reader or aggregator of some sort couldn’t be too far off.

Meanwhile, there was an ever-increasing number of good Windows and Mac desktop aggregators popping up (Feed Demon, NewsGator, Radio Userland and NetNewsWire). They were mostly made by great independent developers but didn’t have a web-app component until a few years later. Then along came Bloglines. It was the first feed aggregator that our Blogger team gravitated towards. It was very simple at first and gained more powerful features over time. But my personal frustrations were growing not just with Bloglines, but with some of the social integrations I wanted to see on the web.
I remember a very early version of Firefox had crashed, taking with it my open Bloglines tab and thus losing the 100+ items that it would surely “mark as read.” If I went back to Bloglines it would appear as if I had read all of those items, and there would be no way to catch up. I was upset!

I wheeled around in my chair in the Blogger bullpen and complained to Biz Stone: “I wish there were some sort of eye tracking that would tell which item I had read and saved my state!” He agreed with my wacky proposal. I continued to stew.

Aside from dreaming up features for products I didn’t control, I had spent a considerable amount of time at Google helping to form the cross-industry group that ultimately published the Atom feed format and Atom Publishing Protocol. We were pushing Atom to become a recognized Internet standard, with companies such as Six Apart, IBM and Macromedia onboard. When Blogger turned on Atom feeds for all of our millions of users, Blogger single-handedly became the No. 1 producer of feeds in the world. This was huge for aggregators, because for any of them to become mainstream, more content in a subscribable format was needed.

One beautiful wonderful thing happened along the way to creating Atom.

Atom was an effort to make feed reading and subscriptions more consumer friendly. If we were really successful with what we had built, we imagined a world where you didn’t need to market the plumbing of a technology to realize the benefit. Some who embraced RSS-only saw this as an opportunity to latch onto a brewing controversy or, worse, as the window to market RSS to consumers. The next few years would be a boring marketing landscape, as we saw orange and blue chicklets slapped up haphazardly around the web. In hindsight it’s easy to see that consumers understood words like “follow” or “friend” for content they wanted delivered regularly rather than “subscribe,” “RSS” or “Atom feed.”

One beautiful wonderful thing happened along the way to creating Atom. For a few years, I had kept a little side-blog right alongside my main blog at shellen.com. The main view showed larger posts, but I was using some server-side code to read a file I was publishing in another directory and display the second blog on the right-hand column. It was great for shorter posts, but I wondered if there would be a way to display an Atom feed alongside my blog instead of my slapped-together solution.

I wondered this aloud to Chris Wetherell one day in 2004, an engineer on the Blogger team.

“Say Chris, do you suppose you could display an Atom feed in JavaScript?” He took the challenge and “Feedless” was born. I dropped in a few files on my blog server and pointed it to my new Blogger-created Atom feed. It worked!

However, Chris wanted to show me something else. He quickly modified his first script into something that could display more than one feed into a beast that could blend items together. My mind raced and I saw the value immediately. We could create Blogger Friends, a page on Blogger where you could see all of the blog posts from your friends. LiveJournal had something like this years earlier but maybe you could even follow people who weren’t on Blogger? Before long this was all Chris and I could talk about, and plans began for Chris’ 20 percent project to become a full-fledged Google project in early 2005.

The “Goals and Objectives” section of the product plan for Project Fusion (an early codename for Google Reader) stated “Our goal is to build a robust web service and best-of-breed user interface for viewing subscriptions. We will be producing an API for read/unread state of individual posts on a per-user basis and will also build our feed viewer on top of this API.” Pretty geeky stuff. However, we also had a vision statement that was sufficiently less geeky and more jaw-droppingly, ambitious. “Our vision is to become the world’s best collaborative and intelligent web content delivery service.”

I’m sad to see it go but Google Reader shutting down isn’t a surprise to me.

As far as we were concerned, the text of blog posts was just the beginning of a content revolution. In fact that early codename, Fusion, was meant to be a hint of the future of how web content would be consumed, fused together perhaps in a new TV-like format.

The future was ripe with possibilities. Our little team was going to launch our product on Google Labs, which meant we could try wild ideas. We knew that Google Video was around the corner and YouTube was still an independent but promising site. We also knew that the Picasa acquisition would help bring fast photo embedding and display to the web. The possibilities were seemingly endless. Our short-term vision included tying all of this together in an easy-to-consume way that also allowed you to easily share it with friends and find or subscribe to more content from a search box powered by Google all from within our app.

In October 2005, Google Reader launched to 100,000 of our closest friends. The team pulled off some amazing feats in a short amount of time. We quickly learned that there was indeed a truly long tail of feed-based content. We experimented with audio, video and photo content displays. We became the relied-upon backend for iGoogle’s feed-based gadgets and had a Reader gadget on iGoogle that became one of my favorite ways to use Reader.

But in early 2006, it was clear to me that, while I was proud of what we were building, we weren’t likely to be that magical fusion of all things digital. I moved on to other projects at Google. Reader was and remains today a great delivery system of content you knew you wanted to see every day.

I’m sad to see it go, but Google Reader shutting down isn’t a surprise to me. The recent hiccups and fact that it remained separate from any other Google social efforts didn’t bode well for its long-term health. I’m certainly overwhelmed by the petition and public outcry. And who doesn’t love a good “Downfall” parody? But what is it that we’re responding to in Google’s decision to shutter Reader?

Reader was like TiVo for the web, appealing to completists and skippers alike.

Reader was an application that felt like you were in control of the programming. You could summon the content you told it to keep track of at your leisure. Reader was like TiVo for the web, appealing to completists and skippers alike. Read everything or read nothing. The choice was yours. When we started Reader, I envisioned something a little more like Google News that knew about your likes and dislikes and would program based on what we thought we knew about you. Indeed recommendations became a part of Reader in the past few years.

But it’s no surprise that Facebook and Twitter (who know an awful lot about what you like) are in a better position to deliver suggested content these days. They don’t explicitly put you in the driver’s seat of programming what you see. We rely on the people (or brands) we follow to act as filters. But it’s not that level of control we came to expect with Reader.

A feed reader lets you subscribe to known content. A feed reader lets you know about content you should subscribe to. A good feed reader lets you know what your friends are reading and gives you the opportunity to share. A smart feed reader displays content in a specific way based on the content and shows you only what you need to know and nothing you don’t. Perhaps the smartest of them all doesn’t need to care whether or not this content comes from a feed at all, toes the line between curating and creating content, and maybe already exists.

I’ve been asked a lot recently if an aggregator or feed reader is even needed these days and what should take Reader’s place. Certainly the folks at Feedly, Digg, Zite and others have promising efforts, but my recommendation is to build something that moves beyond the confines of reading or feeds. Just build the world’s best collaborative and intelligent content-delivery service.

[Illustration: Bryce Durbin]

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Are you a desperate vagabond ready to conquer the highest peaks and submerge into the deepest depths to steal the concealed secrets of the universe? Buck up! Today is a great time to plan the possible route of your next risky adventure! You might not believe your eyes, but the places we will show you really exist. Some of them will bring you on the verge of tears, some will make your heart beat faster, another will make your hair stand on end - anyway, they won't leave you indifferent.

We won't go too verbose as no words can render the celestial charm of those sites. "A picture costs a thousand words" - they say. So, come on, pack your bags and join our thrilling expedition to the most surreal places on Earth!

Fly Geyser, Nevada

Can you imagine that even not all Nevada residents know about this wonder? Fly Geyser is located on the territory of a private Fly Ranch which makes it extremely difficult to access. High fence and locked gate with spikes on top guard the geyser from tourists. To be absolutely honest, we should mention that the Geyser is not a completely natural phenomenon. It was created by chance during well drilling. The well went out of order after several decades of operation as warm geothermal water has found a weak spot and began to leak onto the surface. Dissolved minerals started their sculptor job, which is still going on. Geyser coloration is explained by the variety of minerals it is made of.

The Wave, Arizona

The Wave is a sandstone rock formation in the United States of America near the Arizona and Utah border on the Coyote Buttes slopes. Travelers and photographers from all over the world are attracted by its colorful, wavelike forms. The Wave's intersecting U-shaped troughs are the result of erosion of the Navajo Sandstone during the Jurassic period.

Lake Retba, Senegal

Lake Retba or Lac Rose is located in the north of the Cap Vert peninsula of Senegal. It got its name due to the Dunaliella salina algae making its water look like strawberry milk shake. Pink color is clearly visible during the dry season. The lake is also famous for its high salt content, allowing people stay on the surface similar to the Dead Sea experience.

Derweze, Turkmenistan

Have you ever stood at the Hell's Door? Go to Derweze village, which name means "The Gate" in Turkmen language if you search for extreme! This terrifying attraction is located in the middle of the Karakum Desert, about 260 km north from Ashgabat. The Derweze area is rich in natural gas. Soviet geologists got into a cavern filled with natural gas while drilling. Due to the ground collapse, a large hole has created. It was decided to burn off the gas, but the roasting breath of the inferno is still trying to break into the world of living!

Socotra, Yemen

Socotra is considered to be a unique archipelago in the Indian Ocean for the diversity of its exotic flora and fauna. Its weird alien plants are the result of island's long geological isolation together with unbearable heat and drought. One of the most unusual Socotra's plants is the dragon's blood tree, resembling a strange umbrella. Aboriginals believed its red sap to be the blood of a dragon.

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

Have you ever walked through the clouds guessing are you in the top or the bottom? Salar de Uyuni gives you such unique possibility! Salar de Uyuni or Salar de Tunupa is the world's largest salt flat occupying the area of about 10,582 square kilometers. Today's Salar is a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes. Its surface is covered by a few meters of salt crust possessing the utmost flatness, which varies within one meter over the entire area. Actually, the crust serves as a source of salt and makes a pool of brine, rich in lithium as well. The sky over the Salar is always clear, which in combination with large area and exceptional flatness makes it a perfect object for calibrating the altimeters of Earth observation satellites.

Jiuzhaigou Valley, China

Five-Color Pond is one of the smallest but the most amazing water basins in Jiuzhaigou lakes. Despite the shallowness, it has a breathtaking colored underwater landscape and some of the brightest and clearest waters in the area. As the legend goes, the Goddess Semo used to wash her hair here and the God Dage brought her water every day.

Sossusvlei, Namibia

Deadvlei is one more surreal attraction of Sossusvlei, Namibia. It is a clay pan located about 2 km from Sossusvlei. It used to be an oasis with several acacia trees before, but the river that watered the oasis has changed its course. Now the dead acacia trees make an odd contrast to the shiny white salty floor of the pan and the intense orange of the dunes.

Badab-e Surt, Iran

Badab-e Surt's terraces are made of travertine, which is a sedimentary rock deposited by flowing water from two distinct mineral springs. Thousands of years the water from these two springs had been streaming down from the mountain, it mixed up and gradually created a number of orange, red and yellow colored pools which now have the form of a staircase.

Crescent Lake (Dunhuang), China

Yueyaquan is a crescent-shaped lake in the oasis, lying 6 km south of the city of Dunhuang. Its name comes from the Qing Dynasty. The lake itself and the surrounding deserts attract the tourists appreciating camel and 4x4 rides.

Lake Natron, Tanzania

The queer lake's hue is normal for water basins with extremely high evaporation rates. During the dry season, as the water evaporates, salinity level increases to the maximum point and specific salt-loving microorganisms begin to thrive. Some of them produce red pigment colorizing the water and turning it into the Martian landscape.

Ice Cave in Skaftafell, Iceland

This cave in the glacier appeared as a result of glacial mill. The rain and melt water on the glacier's surface are forming streams that flow into the crevices. The streams melt holes in the glacier forming long ice caves with intricate walls and ceilings. Cold wind finishes the job and we can observe a momentary marvel ready to collapse at any time. Due to the constant glacier movement one can hear a scaring cracking sound inside the cave. The incipient crevices let the indirect daylight into the tunnel and we can observe its mysterious play on ice bubbles.

Pamukkale, Turkey

Pamukkale can be translated as "the cotton castle" from Turkish. It is a natural attraction in Denizli Province in southwestern Turkey. Snow white Pamukkale's terraces are made of travertine, a sedimentary rock, deposited by water flowing from the hot springs.

Lencois Maranhenses National Park, Brazil

The Lencois Maranhenses National Park is a low, flat, occasionally flooded land, covered with large, white discrete sand dunes. Though it looks like a desert, in fact it is not. Due to the regular rain season in the beginning of the year, fresh water accumulates in the valleys between the sand dunes, reviving the desert with blue and green lagoons. It's rather surprising, but those water basins are inherited by fish, even despite the dry season.

Angkor, Cambodia

Angkor is a huge complex of the 12th century temples in Cambodia. No doubt that it's a place of historical and cultural interest. The buildings are ancient and magnificent. But what do you think is really strange about this place? Just look at those trees! They look like ancient nation of Ents, the walking trees from "The Lord of the Rings" movie! Do you think they can really exist?

Chand Baori, Rajasthan

Have you ever seen anything like that? Chand Baori is a famous stepwell in the village of Abhaneri near Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It is located opposite Harshat Mata Temple and was constructed in 800 CE. Can you imagine that those 3500 narrow steps in 13 stories extend 100 feet into the ground, making it one of the deepest and largest stepwells in India.

Frozen waves in Antarctica

These waves look like decorations from popular "Ice Age" cartoon. It seems as if they were frozen immediately at the will of a snow Queen. In fact, the waves are the result of melting, not freezing. Melting has created those downward pointing spikes, which are simple icicles.

Hidden Beach in the Marieta Islands near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Hidden from stranger's eyes, the beach of Marieta Islands, Puerto Vallarta can be called a lost secret world. Marieta Islands are archipelagos formed as a result of volcanic activity. This natural wonder possesses its unique marine ecosystem. The beach is a real paradise for people fond of snorkeling and scuba diving. Diverse, virgin flora and fauna in combination with transparent crystal water make the experience unforgettable. Humpback whale, sea turtles and dolphins are just a few animals that can be seen there.

The Glow Worms in Waitomo Caves

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves are definitely worth seeing not only because of their historical and geological significance. The glow worm, Arachnocampa luminosa, is a unique creature living in New Zealand. Thousands of these small worms radiate their otherworldly luminescent light hanging from the cave rocks during your unforgettable boat ride. The glowworms create a really magical view, every tourist should see at least once in a lifetime.

The Tunnel of Love in Ukraine, Kleven

In this photo you see the abandoned railway track, located nearly 350km from Kiev, which has transformed into a special romantic place, frequently visited by couples. The Tunnel of Love is especially beautiful in spring, when the green trees growing from both sides of the track form an improvised arch around it. This arch stretches for up to three kilometers and looks like a green picturesque tunnel of trees. The railway is occasionally used by the fiberboard factory, which preserves the tunnel in its initial look.

Glen Brittle, Scotland

Glen Brittle is a large glen in the south of the Isle of Skye, in Scotland. The magic Fairy Pools you see in the picture run down from the mountains into the glen. The area is extremely popular among hikers and mountain bikers. The marvelous lilac slopes above the Fairy Pools are covered with thick forests full of rare plants and animals and who knows, maybe even elves and fairies have found their refuge in this mystical place.

Cano Cristales, in the Serrania de la Macarena, province of Meta

Cano Cristales is a unique biological wonder often referred to as "the river of five colors" or "the river that ran away from paradise" and "the world's most beautiful river". Greater part of the year, Cano Cristales looks like any other river, but during a brief period of time yearly, it bursts into blossom and turns into the vibrant explosion of colors. Between wet and dry seasons, when the water level is just as required, a unique Macarenia clavigera plant turns the river into a sparkling ruby red stream, contrasting to the patches of yellow and green sand, blue water, and the enumerable shades in between.

Mount Roraima, South America

This rock soaring in the clouds is called Mount Roraima, the highest mountain of the Pakaraima chain of tepui plateau in South America. The mountain includes the triple border point of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. The tabletop mountains of the park are considered some of the oldest geological formations on Earth, dating back to nearly two billion years ago. The mountain's highest point within Venezuela is Maverick Rock, which is 2810 m high.

Richat Structure, Mauritania

Look into the Eye of Sahara, isn't it impressive? The Richat Structure is a prominent circular feature in the Sahara desert lying in the west-central Mauritania near Ouadane. This structure is a deeply eroded, slightly elliptical dome, 40-km in diameter. Differential erosion of the resistant layers of quartzite has created these high-relief circular cuestas. Its center consists of a siliceous breccia covering an area of approximately 3 km in diameter. Initially, there was a theory that the structure appeared as a result of an extraterrestrial asteroid impact. Looking at the circularity of the Eye, you might be inclined to believe it, but the point is now argued to the favor of highly symmetrical and deeply eroded geologic dome.

Grand Prismatic Spring - Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

If you want to see something really magnificent, put Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming into your list. This hot spring is the largest in the United States and the third largest in the world. The devilish colors of the spring strike the imagination! The water is saturated blue, with red lava-like color surrounding it. Would you like to know the secret? This amazing tint is produced by the pigmented bacteria. They form microbial mats around the edge of the water. Seasonal temperatures as well as levels of chlorophyll and carotenoids greatly influence the hue of the bacteria. The mats do not form in the center of the spring because the water is too hot for bacterium's live cycle. The water is heated by the underground vents, which are a part of the volcanic system, the Yellowstone stands on.

About the author

Helga Moreno is a copywriter for TemplateMonster Blog and one of those bloggers, absolutely cranky on writing and always hungry for new experience. When not writing about WordPress or responsive design, she loves sightseeing and travelling and always strives to capture everything beautiful on her way.

Tags:  inspiration photography surreal places earth guest guest post

By Jenna Pitcher on Mar 22, 2013 at 8:31a

The Witcher 3: The Hunt developer CD Projekt Red plans to expand to the U.S. in addition to releasing REDkit to modders and developing three smaller titles based on its brands, according to the company's four year strategy document.

As outlined in the document, written in Polish, CD Projekt's strategy for the year of 2013 includes opening a marketing and PR branch in the U.S., and release an open beta of its REDkit editor and provide support to community development modders.

For the period of 2014 to 2016, the developer plans to release two smaller "chart-topping quality titles supporting one of the product lines" of approximately 20 hours of gameplay each and a cross-platform game on mobile platforms based on one their brands.

For the same period, the company plans to release The Witcher 3: The Hunt, as previously announced, simultaneously across three platforms, including PS4 and Windows PC. The document notes that The Witcher 3 has 100 hours of gameplay is 35 times the size of The Witcher 2. It also notes its intention of long-term support for the title.

Also part of the three year plan, yet already revealed, is the 2015 release of futuristic thriller Cyberpunk 2077, which will feature tactical combat and diverse character classes associated with the plot.

In the three year time frame, CD Projekt wants to start selling REDengine licenses and release the full version of REDkit whilst providing development support for community modders.

Polygon has reached out to CD Projekt Red and will update this story as information comes to hand.

As we’re been providing APIs to build feed readers for years now, last week, we saw a flock of people coming to us and asking if we could help them overcome the disparition of the Google Reader API.

Replacing the Google Reader API

Superfeedr will provide a partial replacement for the Google Reader API by the end of June. We have already started on it an we’re confident we can release something quickly. As you may know, the Google Reader API actually consists of two different things:

• The entry and feed data.
• The sync’ing of user state: read/unread, starred, tags, shared items… etc

At this point, we know that we will provide a compatible API for the feed and entry data, but, more importantly, we will try to backup as much of that data out of Google Reader for the feeds that our customers have subscribed to.

In other words, our goal is to support all the /reader/atom/ prefixed calls, and the params for it, along with the historical data served by Google Reader that we will have been able to ‘rescue’.

Syncing the state

Sync’ing state has never been our core business, and as we’ve built a backend system, we are not completely sure we will be able to provide the sync layer that many developers would love to see. It will take us a couple more weeks to figure whether we can (or not) provide a replacement for that part of the Google Reader API.

However, we believe this is a less critical aspect, as people tend to stick with the same reader, which means that the sync data can be local to a given reader. After all, even Twitter is not able to sync the direct messages you get on different platforms.

If you listen to the radio long enough, you've probably noticed that many songs sound similar or remind of you of a song you've heard before. Hooktheory shows you just how similar some songs are via chord progressions in over 1,300 songs. The small group analyzed the data last year and presented some static charts, but this interactive version takes it a step further.

Simply start by selecting a chord in the network diagram. Songs that use that chord appear on the right. Then select another chord in the network diagram to find songs that use the chord progression from the original to the new. Keep selecting chords to filter further.

So in the end, there are two main things you can do: (1) Find songs that use the same chord progression and (2) see the most likely chord given the current selection.

My musical knowledge from middle school jazz band is long gone, but it's fun to explore, and you'll likely find relationships to songs that you didn't expect. [Thanks, Dave]

This video is a bit gruesome, but it is demonstrating a remarkable substance that can stop bleeding almost instantaneously. Jack Millner of Humans Invent interviewed NYU student Joe Landolina, the creator of Veti-Gel.

"In all of our tests we found we were able to immediately stop bleeding,” says Landolina. “Your skin has this thing called the extracellular matrix,” he explains. “It’s kind of a mesh of molecules and sugars and protein that holds your cells in place.” Landolina synthesises his own extracellular matrix (ECM) using plant polymers, which can form a liquid when broken up into pieces. He says, “So it goes into the wound and the pieces of the synthetic ECM in the gel will recognise the pieces of the real ECM in the wound and they’ll link together. It will re-assemble into something that looks like, feels like and acts like skin."

The gel that stops bleeding instantly

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Villains from every Batman movie tiptoe towards trouble in artist Rafa Toro series of prancing Batman baddies. Even if you hated Joel Schumachers' Batman & Robin, we bet you can't stop watching Poison Ivy march forward for infinity.

Check out Toro's art-filled website and Vimeo for loads more animation.

[via Comics Alliance]

As I was browsing through some old magazines the other day, I came across a fantastic issue of Popular Science from 1962 that contained a feature on unarmed self-defense. The article was adapted from a book entitled Modern Judo and Self-Defense by Harry Ewen, a “police judo” expert. The best part of the multi-page article are the fantastic mid-century illustrations by Dana Rasmussen, featuring a well-dressed judo expert who looks like he might work with Don Draper when he isn’t throwing ruffians over his shoulder. Even the “thug” in the article is pretty dapper, proving once again that everything was just swankier back in the day — even the bad guys.

Below you’ll find step-by-step illustrated instructions on how to defend yourself from chokes, bear hugs, kicks, and knife attacks when you’re unarmed, all while still looking incredibly handsome. Enjoy.

Three Ways to Defend Yourself from Chokes from the Front

Finger Lock

Grab the thug’s little fingers, with your thumbs under the tips (fig. 1). The knuckles of your index fingers should be over the the second joints of his little fingers (fig. 2). Move your wrists in a circular motion down toward your hips. Applied pressure will force the thug to his knees to avoid broken fingers. As he goes down, strike him in the face or jaw with your knee (fig. 3).

Nose Break

First, clasp your hands (fig. 1). Then, with fingers locked and elbows bent, swing hard from the waist and strike the thug’s forearms with the bony parts of your arms. Follow through until your clenched hands are above your assailant’s head and the choke is broken (fig 2). Finish by bringing down your still-clenched hands, with all the force you can muster, on the bridge of his nose (fig. 3). Stop short of this, naturally, while practicing this move.

Basic Arm Lock

Grasp the thug’s right forearm with both your hands (fig. 1). Holding his right wrist firmly with your left hand, slip your right thumb under his right palm and pull his arm toward you to ensure that it is straight (fig. 2).

Keep on turning until you are almost at your assailant’s side (fig. 3). Keep his hand elevated above the level of the rest of your arm (fig. 4). Now put all the weight of your body behind your left upper arm and elbow, pushing down on his right arm just above the elbow (fig. 5). Unless he submits, he will end up with a dislocated shoulder.

How to Break a Grip from the Front That Pins Your Arms

Force the thug to move back by giving him a couple of sharp jabs in the groin with your thumbs (fig. 1). As he draws his hips back, pivot on your left foot and move your right foot across in front of him (fig. 2). You should now be facing the same way he is. As you turn, slip your right arm behind his back and grasp his right sleeve with your left hand to keep his body close to yours (fig. 3)

Keep your knees bent slightly, maintain a steady pull on the attacker’s sleeve, and keep your right hand in the small of his back (fig. 4). Straightening your legs will now raise his feet off the ground (fig. 5). Your opponent is now balanced on your right hip, and you can toss him by turning him over as you continue to pull on his right sleeve (fig. 6).

How to Break a Bear Hug from the Rear

This defense works as well against an overarm grip as against an underarm one (fig. 1). With your feet apart, bend your knees, stoop down, and grab your assailant’s right ankle with both hands (fig. 2). Pull his ankle forward and upward to throw him on his rump (fig. 3).

Defense Against Kick Aimed at Face or Stomach

Trap the thug’s foot by bending your knees and crossing your hands in front of you (fig. 1). As the kicker’s shin contacts your wrists, turn your left hand (fig. 2) so that you have a firm hold around his calf. Assuming that the kicker uses his right leg, spin around to your right, throwing him forward on his face (fig. 3). Once he’s thrown, follow up by going down on the ground with him. In the final position (fig. 4), your left forearm is behind his calf, your left hand is on your own right bicep, and your right hand is on top of his foot. Use care when practicing this lock: doing it jerkily could dislocate the leg.

Three Ways to Subdue a Thug Who Tries to Choke You From Behind

Arm Lock

Grab the choking forearm at the wrist with your left hand and place your right hand under the assailant’s elbow (fig. 1). Pull down with your left hand and push up with your right, turning and bending your body as you do so. This should give you enough space to extricate your head from between your attacker’s elbow and body. Bring your left foot back as you turn, so you are at his side (fig. 2). Twist his right arm behind his back (fig. 3).

When his right arm is twisted almost as far back as it will go, slip your left hand under his right wrist (fig. 4). Slide your left arm across his back (fig. 5) until your left hand is trapped in the crook of your left elbow. To apply the pressure part of the lock, raise your left elbow in a forward circular motion while holding your assailant’s right elbow steady with your right hand.

Shoulder Throw

Grab the thug’s sleeve at the elbow with your left hand while your right grips his shoulder (or as high up on his sleeve as you are able to reach) (fig. 1). Bend your knees, but keep your torso upright. Bend your body forward. Pull down and to the left with your left hand, forward and slightly to the left with your right (fig. 2). Push your hips back against your attacker’s thighs as you pull, and he’ll be thrown over your shoulder. (fig. 3)

Shoulder Drop

This throw starts the same way as the shoulder throw. You first grab your opponent’s right sleeve at elbow and shoulder. All you have to do now is drop onto your left knee, stretching your right leg sideways as you do so (fig. 1). Pull down with your right hand and the thug is tossed over your shoulder (fig. 2). This and other throws that are shown on these pages should be practiced only on well-padded surfaces or on a soft lawn.

Dislodging a One-Hand Hair Grab

Grab the attacker’s wrist with your right hand. Hold his hand on your head (or throat) as you turn right and raise your left arm high (fig. 2). Bring that arm down upon your foe’s upper arm, placing your left foot in front of him (fig. 3). If you do this swiftly, you may well injure your assailant. Better go slow when you’re practicing, though.

Two Defenses Against a Boxer

As your opponent aims a blow, spin to your right with your full weight on your right leg. Bend your left knee and then straighten that leg right out at the attacker, catching him just above his right knee with the sole of your left foot, backed by the full force of your body. As your left leg kicks out, jerk your head right. This counter-balances the weight being pushed left. It also gets your head nicely out of the way of the aimed fist of your opponent (fig. 1). An alternate method is to deflect the blow with your right forearm and counterattack with a knee to the groin (fig. 2). Skip the knee jab, however, during practice sessions.

How to Protect Yourself from a Knife Wielder

As the knifer raises his blade (fig. 1), parry the blow by striking his forearm with the edge of your own left forearm (fig. 2). Quickly seize his clothing near his right shoulder with your right hand. Then with a strong, but smooth movement, pull his right shoulder toward you while also pushing his right (knife) hand upward and away from your body (fig. 3).

Grab his right wrist with your left hand as you push his knife up, while still holding on to his shoulder with your right hand (fig. 4). Now move your right hand from the knife-wielder’s shoulder to his right elbow. Pushing down on that elbow keeps his knife arm straight (fig. 5). Pulling his wrist toward you applies a very drastic shoulder lock. Unless your assailant drops his knife, you can easily dislocate his shoulder.

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Researchers found that changes in gravity affect the reproductive process in plants. Gravity modulates traffic on the intracellular “highways” that ensure the growth and functionality of the male reproductive organ in plants, the pollen tube.

Leelee Sobieski. Só tenho uma coisa a dizer:

Meua migo

O ilustrador Hat Boy resolveu recriar os ‘monstros de bolso’ o traço do Tim Burton. De tão bom, o passatempo virou um projeto cuja meta é recriar todos os 151 bichinhos.

Ilustrator Hat Boy decided to recreate all the ‘pocket monsters’ as if they were Tim Burton characters. What started as a hobby was so successful that he plans to keep the project going and draw all of the 151 little creatures.

1a geração // 1st generation

 

With rheumatoid arthritis patients, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Karolinska Institute evaluated the chemical tags that tell genes to be active or not.

For the first time, scientists have discovered quadruple-helix DNA in the human body. Until now the general consensus has been that only double-helix strands of DNA were found in nature, with those...

[Ne laissez pas traîner votre ADN partout | Passeur de sciences](http://passeurdesciences.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/02/10/ne-laissez-pas-trainer-votre-adn-partout/) #génétique #adn #phénotype #hérédité #masque #art

Last month, researchers created an electronic link between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles. This was just another reminder that technology will one day make us telepaths. But how far will this transformation go? And how long will it take before humans evolve into a fully-fledged hive mind? We spoke to the experts to find out.

I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have given this subject considerable thought: Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.

They all told me that the possibility of a telepathic noosphere is very real — and it's closer to reality than we might think. And not surprisingly, this would change the very fabric of the human condition.

Connecting brains

My first question to the group had to do with the technological requirements. How is it, exactly, that we’re going to connect our minds over the Internet, or some future manifestation of it?

“I really think we have sufficient hardware available now — tools like Braingate,” says Warwick. “But we have a lot to learn with regard to how much the brain can adapt, just how many implants would be required, and where they would need to be positioned.”

Naam agrees that we’re largely on our way. He says we already have the basics of sending some sorts of information in and out of the brain. In humans, we’ve done it with video, audio, and motor control. In principle, nothing prevents us from sending that data back and forth between people.

“Practically speaking, though, there are some big things we have to do,” he tells io9. “First, we have to increase the bandwidth. The most sophisticated systems we have right now use about 100 electrodes, while the brain has more than 100 billion neurons. If you want to get good fidelity on the stuff you’re beaming back and forth between people, you’re going to want to get on the order of millions of electrodes.”

Naam says we can build the electronics for that easily, but building it in such a way that the brain accepts it is a major challenge.

The second hurdle, he says, is going beyond sensory and motor control.

“If you want to beam speech between people, you can probably tap into that with some extensions of what we’ve already been doing, though it will certainly involve researchers specifically working on decoding that kind of data,” he says. “But if you want to go beyond sending speech and get into full blown sharing of experiences, emotions, memories, or even skills (a la The Matrix), then you’re wandering into unknown territory.”

Indeed, Sandberg says that picking up and translating brain signals will be a tricky matter.

“EEG sensors have lousy resolution — we get an average of millions of neurons, plus electrical noise from muscles and the surroundings,” he says. “Subvocalisation and detecting muscle twitches is easier to do, although they will still be fairly noisy. Internal brain electrodes exist and can get a lot of data from a small region, but this of course requires brain surgery. I am having great hopes for optogenetics and nanofibers for making kinder, gentler implants that are less risky to insert and easier on their tissue surroundings.”

The real problem, he says, is translating signals in a sensible way. “Your brain representation of the concept "mountain" is different from mine, the result not just of different experiences, but also on account of my different neurons. So, if I wanted to activate the mountain concept, I would need to activate a disperse, perhaps very complex network across your brain,” he tells io9. “That would require some translation that figured out that I wanted to suggest a mountain, and found which pattern is your mountain.”

Sandberg says we normally "cheat" by learning a convenient code called language, where all the mapping between the code and our neural activations is learned as we grow. We can, of course, learn new codes as adults, and this is rarely a problem — adults already master things like Morse code, SMS abbreviations, or subtle signs of gesture and style. Sandberg points to the recent experiments by Nicolelis connecting brains directly, research which shows that it might be possible to get rodents to learn neural codes. But he says this learning is cumbersome, and we should be able to come up with something simpler.

One way is to boost learning. Some research shows that amphetamine and presumably other learning stimulants can speed up language learning. Recent work on the Nogo Receptor suggests that brain plasticity can be turned on and off. “So maybe we can use this to learn quickly,” says Sandberg.

Another way is to have software do the translation. It is not hard to imagine machine learning to figure out what neural codes or mumbled keywords correspond to which signal — but setting up the training so that users find it acceptably fast is another matter.

“So my guess is that if pairs of people really wanted to ‘get to know each other’ and devoted a lot of time and effort, they could likely learn signals and build translation protocols that would allow a lot of ‘telepathic’ communication — but it would be very specific to them, like the ‘internal language’ some couples have,” says Sandberg. “For the weaker social links, where we do not want to spend months learning how to speak to each other, we would rely on automatically translated signals. A lot of it would be standard things like voice and text, but one could imagine adding supporting ‘subtitles’ showing graphics or activating some neural assemblies.”

Bridging the gap

In terms of the communications backbone, Sandberg believes it’s largely in place, but it will likely have to be extended much further.

“The theoretical bandwidth limitations of even a wireless Internet are far, far beyond the bandwidth limitations of our brains — tens of terabits per second,” he told me, “and there are orbital angular momentum methods that might get far more.”

Take the corpus callosum, for example. It has around 250 million axons, and even at the maximal neural firing rate of just 25 gigabits, that should be enough to keep the hemispheres connected such that we feel we are a single mind.

As for the interface, Warwick says we should stick to implanted multi-electrode arrays. These may someday become wireless, but they’ll have to remain wired until we learn more about the process. Like Sandberg, he adds that we’ll also need to develop adaptive software interfacing.

Naam envisions something laced throughout the brain, coupled with some device that could be worn on the person’s body.

“For the first part, you can imagine a mesh of nano-scale sensors either inserted through a tiny hole in the skull, or somehow through the brain’s blood vessels. In Nexus I imagined a variant on this — tiny nano-particles that are small enough that they can be swallowed and will then cross the blood-brain barrier and find their way to neurons in the brain.”

Realistically, Naam says that whatever we insert in the brain is going to be pretty low energy consumption. The implant, or mesh, or nano-particles could communicate wirelessly, but to boost their signal — and to provide them power — scientists will have to pair them with something the person wears, like a cap, a pair of glasses, a headband — anything that can be worn very near the brain so it can pick up those weak signals and boost them, including signals from the outside world that will be channeled into the brain.

How soon before the hive mind?

Warwick believes that the technologies required to build an early version of the telepathic noosphere are largely in place. All that’s required, he says, is “money on the table” and the proper ethical approval.

Sandberg concurs, saying that we’re already doing it with cellphones. He points to the work of Charles Stross, who suggests that the next generation will never have to be alone, get lost, or forget anything.

“As soon as people have persistent wearable systems that can pick up their speech, I think we can do a crude version,” says Sandberg. “Having a system that’s on all the time will allow us to get a lot of data — and it better be unobtrusive. I would not be surprised to see experiments with Google Glasses before the end of the year, but we’ll probably end up saying it’s just a fancy way of using cellphones.”

At the same time, Sandberg suspects that “real” neural interfacing will take a while, since it needs to be safe, convenient, and have a killer app worth doing. It will also have to compete with existing communications systems and their apps.

Similarly, Naam says we could build a telepathic network in a few years, but with “very, very, low fidelity.” But that low fidelity, he says, would be considerably worse than the quality we get by using phones — or even text or IM. “I doubt anyone who’s currently healthy would want to use it.”

But for a really stable, high bandwidth system in and out of the brain, that could take upwards of 15 to 20 years, which Naam concedes is optimistic.

“In any case, it’s not a huge priority,” he says. “And it’s not one where we’re willing to cut corners today. It’s firmly in the medical sphere, and the first rule there is ‘do no harm’. That means that science is done extremely cautiously, with the priority overwhelmingly — and appropriately — being not to harm the human subject.”

Nearly supernatural

I asked Sandberg how the telepathic noosphere will disrupt the various way humans engage in work and social relations.

“Any enhancement of communication ability is a big deal,” he responded. “We humans are dominant because we are so good at communication and coordination, and any improvement would likely boost that. Just consider flash mobs or how online ARG communities do things that seem nearly supernatural.”

Cell phones, he says, made our schedules flexible in time and space, allowing us to coordinate where to meet on the fly. He says we’re also adding various non-human services like apps and Siri-like agents. “Our communications systems are allowing us to interact not just with each other but with various artificial agents,” he says. Messages can be stored, translated and integrated with other messages.

“If we become telepathic, it means we will have ways of doing the same with concepts, ideas and sensory signals,” says Sandberg. “It is hard to predict just what this will be used for since there are so few limitations. But just consider the possibility of getting instruction and skills via augmented reality and well designed sensory/motor interfaces. A team might help a member perform actions while ‘looking over her shoulder’, as if she knew all they knew. And if the system is general enough, it means that you could in principle get help from any skilled person anywhere in the world.”

In response to the same question, Naam noted that communication boosts can accelerate technical innovation, but more importantly, they can also accelerate the spread of any kind of idea. “And that can be hugely disruptive,” he says.

But in terms of the possibilities, Naam says the sky’s the limit.

“With all of those components, you can imagine people doing all sorts of things with such an interface. You could play games together. You could enter virtual worlds together,” he says. “Designers or architects or artists could imagine designs and share them mentally with others. You could work together on any type of project where you can see or hear what you’re doing. And of course, sex has driven a lot of information technologies forward — with sight, sound, touch, and motor control, you could imagine new forms of virtual sex or virtual pornography.”

Warwick imagines communication in the broadest sense, including the technically-enabled telepathic transmission of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and emotions. “I also think this communication will be far richer when compared to the present pathetic way in which humans communicate.” He suspects that visual information may eventually be possible, but that will take some time to develop. He even imagines the sharing of memories. That may be possible, he says, “but maybe not in my lifetime.”

Put all this together, says Warwick, and “the body becomes redundant.” Moreover, when connected in this way “we will be able to understand each other much more.”

A double-edged sword

We also talked about the potential risks.

“There’s the risk of bugs in hardware or software,” says Naam. “There’s the risk of malware or viruses that infect this. There’s the risk of hackers being able to break into the implants in your head. We’ve already seen hackers demonstrate that they can remotely take over pacemakers and insulin pumps. The same risks exist here.”

But the big societal risk, says Naam, stems entirely from the question of who controls this technology.

“That’s the central question I ask in Nexus,” he says. “If we all have brain implants, you can imagine it driving a very bottom’s up world — another Renaissance, a world where people are free and creating and sharing more new ideas all the time. Or you can imagine it driving a world like that of 1984, where central authorities are the ones in control, and they’re the ones using these direct brain technologies to monitor people, to keep people in line, or even to manipulate people into being who they’re supposed to be. That’s what keeps me up at night.”

Warwick, on the other hand, told me that the “biggest risk is that some idiot — probably a politician or business person — may stop it from going ahead.” He suspects it will lead to a digital divide between those who have and those who do not, but that it’s a natural progression very much in line with evolution to date.

In response to the question of privacy, Sandberg quipped, “Privacy? What privacy?”

Our lives, he says, will reside in the cloud, and on servers owned by various companies that also sell results from them to other organizations.

“Even if you do not use telepathy-like systems, your behaviour and knowledge can likely be inferred from the rich data everybody else provides,” he says. “And the potential for manipulation, surveillance and propaganda are endless.”

Our cloud exoselves

Without a doubt, the telepathic noosphere will alter the human condition in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. The Noosphere will be an extension of our minds. And as David Chalmers and Andy Clark have noted, we should still regard external mental processes as being genuine even though they’re technically happening outside our skulls. Consequently, as Sandberg told me, our devices and “cloud exoselves” will truly be extensions of our minds.

“Potentially very enhancing extensions,” he says, “although unlikely to have much volition of their own.”

Sandberg argues that we shouldn’t want our exoselves to be too independent, since they’re likely to make mistakes in our name. “We will always want to have veto power, a bit like how the conscious level of our minds has veto on motor actions being planned,” he says.

Veto power over our cloud exoselves? The future will be a very strange place, indeed.

Top image: agsandrew/Shutterstock, Nicolesis lab.

Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS.

If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides.

Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. They just don’t tell you — because why should they?

RSS is used for mundane things too, like Mac app updates (for non-App-Store apps) and Xcode documentation.

And those people you follow on Twitter who post interesting links? They often get those links from their RSS reader.

One way or another, directly or indirectly, you use RSS. Without RSS all we’d have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

Boring

RSS is plumbing. It’s used all over the place but you don’t notice it. Which is cool.

But here’s why it’s great plumbing:

• There are many millions of feeds, from the smallest blog to the many feeds at the New York Times. Just about everything that gets published on the web is available via RSS. (Outside of Twitter and Facebook.)

• There are no user caps. No company can tell your favorite app how many users it can have. (Twitter does this.)

• Nobody can tell you how to display an article from an RSS feed. (Twitter does this with tweets.)

• The formats are stable. Code I wrote five years ago to parse feeds would work today and will work in five years. (The formats are simple, too.) Other services have APIs that change and break existing apps.

• RSS can’t be shut down. Any number of companies can go out of business, but nobody can stop anybody from publishing and reading RSS feeds.

• Nobody can force ads on you. A given RSS reader could add ads, but you can switch — because another RSS reader can read the same feeds. A given publisher could put ads in their own feeds, but you can unsubscribe. There is no company that can force ads on everyone, as Twitter and Facebook are working on for their systems.

• Nobody can force you to be tracked. If you’re not using a syncing system, then nobody knows what you subscribe to and what you read.

• You don’t need to register anywhere to write an RSS app. (You do need to register to write Facebook and Twitter apps.)

• In the general case there are no security issues with feed reading. (Unless you’re using a sync service or reading authenticated feeds.)

This is elegance. It derives from the design of the internet and the web and its many open standards — designed so that no entity can control it, so that it survives stupidity and greed when it appears.

Lots of things work like this. Not just RSS.

Capitalism

A naive reading of the above makes it sound like RSS is anti-business. That’s not true at all. (I did well with my RSS business.)

Instead, it’s anti-monopolist. By design it creates a level playing field. Anybody can write RSS apps, and anybody can use RSS however they want to.

This means that competition and innovation are permitted to thrive.

But it’s not a guarantee. In the past several years it seems to have slowed way down.

Prague 1948 Forever

When Eastern Europe opened up, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prague looked like it had been sealed up in a bubble since 1948.

Google Reader isn’t communist Russia, obviously, duh — but it’s a similar pattern. There was one gigantic player and a bunch of satellites, and RSS readers more-or-less looked like it was still 2006.

Not that there wasn’t any innovation — there was some — but it’s been pretty quiet, especially compared to the several years before 2006.

RSS the format has remained as useful and cool as ever, but RSS readers haven’t done so well.

My hope — my expectation, even — is that a few things will turn this around:

• The end of Google Reader takes away that one dominant player. The market for RSS readers is no longer frozen — and it will interest more developers than it has in recent years.

• Over-reach by Twitter and its diminishing user experience makes people interested in other ways of finding good stuff to read.

• The lower costs of server-side development and deployment brings creating RSS services within reach of smaller companies.

The challenge — as ever, with everything — is to make useful and delightful apps that people love.

But now, if I’m right, we’ll have more people working on that challenge.

In the meantime, the loss of Google Reader syncing is going to be tough. That’s a big hurdle. Marco proposes some baby steps. I don’t like Google Reader’s (undocumented) API, but I like the pragmatic approach.

Well

At any rate — these are interesting times! I know that’s a curse, but I take it as a blessing, because it’s way more fun that way.

Google's Turn to the Dark Side:

The subtext of the furor over Google Reader’s shutdown is that Google no longer considers publishers its primary customers. Google folk (particularly Marissa Mayer) used to talk quite eloquently about how best way to ensure someone would return to the site was to send them away quickly. Google Plus doesn’t even have an open API (yet), there is nothing you will get from Google Plus without driving into the horrendous cul-de-sac that is plus.google.com. Just last week, I was reminiscing about the fury when Google launched a toolbar update that allowed Google to offer user’s features on top of the pages they were browsing. This was also the guiding philosophy of Google’s unfairly-maligned OpenSocial product. These products represent a philosophy turned 180 degrees relative to Google Plus; to use google’s software you never even had to navigate to Google.com.

Google’s shuttering of Reader, as well as their doubling down on the dual debacles of Google Plus and Glass, represent the complete rejection of the “send them away so they will return philosophy” which was the primary reason that nerds (like me) fell in love with Google in the first place. Google is replacing a strategy that was easily understood and straightforward with one that is nearly Orwellian in scope. They’re already quite far down this road, but the shuttering of Google Reader makes it clear for all to see. Google is a different company than it used to be, but the dramatic turn feels like a turn to ‘evil,’ and that’s quite sad for me.

“Simple point: just because Google couldn’t make a business out of a free RSS reader, it does not mean that business models that have a free component do not work, since, obviously, much of the rest of Google’s business is based on offering stuff for free, and monetizing elsewhere. And, similarly, just because you have a paid app, it does not mean that enough people will pay to make a viable business out of it. In both cases, the situations are basically the same: whatever you do, you need to be able to bring in enough revenue, and that usually needs to involve offering a good product with plenty of benefits. The business model discussion that goes on top of that is interesting, but not defining in the way some people seem to want it to be.”

- No, The Death Of Google Reader Doesn’t Mean ‘Free’ Doesn’t Work | Techdirt

If Game of Thrones Was Made in 1995

The beloved but doomed Google Reader is still a healthy source of traffic. Google+, on the other hand…

According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed's data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today. (Yesterday, Google announced that it would close Reader in July.)

We should add that this data isn't complete. Google Reader traffic became much harder to measure last year when Google began defaulting users to SSL encryption in such a way that masked referral data. And this doesn't include data from apps that use Google Reader as a sync service, such as Reeder. In other words, it's likely that we're actually missing some Reader traffic here.

The second graphic* shows measured Reader and Google+ referrals over time. This one, too, requires qualification: The changes in Reader's numbers can be explained mostly by the addition of new sites to BuzzFeed's partner network, not growth in Google Reader (the total number of visitors to partner sites increased, in other words).

But the relative numbers are still surprising: Despite claims that it has over 100m monthly active users, Google+ barely moves the needle for sites across the network, while Reader is a healthy source of readers.

*For reference: in August of 2012, according to the same data, Facebook drove over 70m visitors to sites in the network while Google Reader was well under 10m.

View Entire List ›

Google's sudden decision to sunset Reader — perhaps the best-known RSS reader ever made — has been met with swift reaction from high-profile users across the web. Here's a sampling of people asking to save an RSS service on Google... all coming from the service that probably helped kill it in the first place: Twitter.

Continue reading…

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.

Interrogé par nos confrères de The Verge, Julie Uhrman, un des fondatrices du projet Ouya, précise que la console ne disposera pas de toutes ses fonctionnalités multi à sa sortie.

homicidalbrunette:

first the Ring now the Throne

Physicists at Virginia Tech, as part of a collaboration with U.S. and Chinese researchers, took part in one of 2012's top scientific breakthroughs according to Science magazine. It's a breakthrough that could have a significant impact on physics and the universe as we understand it.