News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Somehow I’ve never considered that diamonds could have a melting point, much less that there may be oceans of liquid diamond on Uranus and Neptune. Turns out that solid diamond floats on liquid diamond, much like ice floats on water. Melting a diamond, however, is more complicated than just raising the temperature. The linked article explains all.
Google Chrome version 4 has native support for Greasemonkey scripts. This means there are instantly 30,000+ extensions for the browser.
Link: http://blog.chromium.org/…
(via Lifehacker)
Modern-day smoking bans are becoming more and more restrictive, but they don’t even come close to some of these draconian bans from the past—which include excommunication and summary execution as punishments.
So you have a game console that you don’t need anymore. Thinking about selling it on eBay, donating it to charity, or perhaps giving it to a friend? The linked article explains how to remove personal information that may be stored on the console’s hard drive.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Scientists can now make a drop of oil traverse a complex maze by itself. Be sure to watch the video.
Link: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/…
(via Neatorama)
The best way to speed up older computers is by adding more memory. But in lieu of that, replacing the hard drive with a solid-state drive (SSD) gives a significant speed benefit. The linked article does note, however, that it’s almost more cost-effective to purchase a new computer.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
I just did a Google search on my name and was pleased to see that my personal website, www.cloman.com came up as the number-one result. The remaining nine results were all profile information from various websites that I belong to. In the past, my cloman.com page has been eclipsed by these other sites. The linked article, however, gives a simple piece of HTML code that tells Google which web page you consider to be the primary source of information about yourself. The trick is to add this attribute to the appropriate link(s): rel="me"
Link: http://marshallk.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
From the article: “North Korea’s New Year’s wish of seeing the destruction of a massive concrete wall dividing the Korean peninsula never seems to come true — mostly because there is no such barrier.”
Link: http://www.reuters.com/…
A man who claims he is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation is suing his neighbor for using her iPhone at home.
Link: http://sfreporter.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Back in the day, companies would advertise their AOL keywords in print and television. But AOL has been in decline for years now, and having an “aol.com” email address is a sign of being behind the times. In the linked article, the writer discusses how she feels about using her AOL email in a professional capacity, and I have to agree with her. I’ve had the cloman.com domain since 1999 and simply forward its messages to whatever mail client I’m currently using—in this case, gmail. This gives me a certain amount of portability, as well as some tech world street cred.
Link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Last week Apple introduced its latest invention, the iPad. Despite the fanfare, I don’t believe the iPad will dramatically change the state of the art. I expect the chief reason for buying an iPad will be its advanced e-book reading capabilities.
The iPad has been described as a large iPhone. It can run all existing iPhone apps without modification. It runs the Safari web browser but has no support for Flash, which disables quite a few websites. It does not have a built-in camera, nor does it allow you to make phone calls (even VoIP is prohibited for now).
Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…
Link #2: http://www.engadget.com/…
Despite the many attempts to cash million-dollar bills and the availability of fakes, the largest banknote ever printed by the US government was a mere $100,000. The linked article has this and other interesting facts about obscure and large-denomination bills.
