Hey You Guuuuyyyys! A New Electric Company Starts in January!

Once upon a time, before he became a brilliant movie actor with an Oscar and dozens of films under his belt, Morgan Freeman was known to a generation of children as the Easy Reader, Count Dracula, and hosts of other characters on The Electric Company. From 1971-77, The Electric Company was a sort of hip older step-cousin to Sesame Street, and it helped teach a lot of kids how to read, or how to read better.

Starting in January, an entirely new generation of kids will get their own version of the show, being developed by Sesame Workshop and to be shown on PBS Kids as part of their Raising Readers effort.

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Addictionary: A Website for Made Up Words

Addictionary is a website with made up words. Try the "There Ought Be a Word" and "Wordoff."

Proctovisionary:
by Laura Sprung

Looking at the world with ones head up ones ass.

George W. Bush is the greatest proctovisionary of our time.

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10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2009

From picotech to compressed air energy storage, here are the big ideas that will make headlines next year. Get to know them now, before you have to go through your first T-ray machine.

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The 15 Most Expensive Paintings in the World

In 2006, media mogul David Geffen sold Jackson Pollock’s masterwork, No. 5 1948, for $140 million. This made Pollock’s work the most expensive painting in modern history, leading a list of the world’s most highly acclaimed artists. From Pollock to Picasso, Renoir to Van Gogh, famouse fine art fetches an other-wordly price on today’s market. In celebration of their masterworks and the riches now behind them, here is a list of the 15 most expensive paintings in the world.


To round out this list, we’ve arranged these paintings by an adjusted price in 2008 dollars. The U.S. dollar has inflated quite a bit since 1987, when Van Gogh’s Irises sold for $53.9 million. Today, that $53.9 million is worth roughly $102.3 million.

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Football's High-Tech Revolution

Football may be one of America's most treasured sports, but this traditional pastime is getting a high-tech makeover that is moving the game from the gridiron to the Internet and even video game consoles.

More PhotosFor many college and pro coaches, technology is a necessary tool to connect with players in the digital age. Some coaches acknowledge that there can be a digital divide between player and coach, and say that it has become increasingly important to engage their players online.

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Score: Romantics, 1 - Cynics, 0

Well, we might not be able to prove 'love at first sight', but hopeless romantics out there can defend their belief in long-lasting true love - physiologically.

Cynics and single girls tend to argue that love fades in a relationship, and married couples don't really feel the same way about each other as they once did. Well, that's not necessarily true.

A new study, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, has found that couples that have been together for a long time and claim to be "madly in love" still actually are, at least as far as brain scans can tell.

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Thanksgiving Myths

It's one of American history's most familiar scenes: A small group of Pilgrims prepare a huge November feast to give thanks for a bountiful harvest and show their appreciation to the Indians who helped them survive their first winter. Together, the Pilgrims and the Indians solemnly sit down to a meal of turkey, pumpkin pie, and cranberries.

Just how accurate is this image of America's first Thanksgiving? Not very, it turns out. Here are some common misconceptions about the origin of one of our favorite holidays.


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The Demon Core

In 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian was working on a 6.2 kg (14 lb) spherical mass of plutonium at the Los Alamos laboratory. He was stacking bricks of tungsten carbide around the plutonium core when he noticed a nearby neutron counter signaling that the addition of the final brick would make the assembly supercritical. Daghlian immediately withdrew his hand ... and the brick slipped onto the center of the plutonium core and the assembly went critical. Daghlian was able to dissemble the bricks (the core didn't explode), but he died from radiation poisoning 28 days later.

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10 Things You Didn’t Know About General Motors

With General Motors losing $1 billion in cash every month (that's about $23,000 per minute), we figure that we better do this post pretty darned quickly. Behold Neatorama's 10 Things You Didn't Know about GM:

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e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right

PARIS (AFP) – It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms

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Dumb Ass Republicans

Scientists say Copernicus' remains, grave found

WARSAW, Poland – Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books. The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.

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God and Evolution Can Co-exist, Scientist Says

NEW YORK — A scientist is going public with his Christian belief in God and acceptance of evolution, in the wake of the Dover trial and recent, high-profile scholarly writings that have highlighted the contradictions between religiosity and science.

Karl W. Giberson, a physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts, is hardly alone in holding both views (Francis Collins, who headed up federal Human Genome Project, is one widely-known example of a Christian scientist), but the nation's current cultural climate allows such a person to easily make a splash.

Giberson has rejected fundamentalism, but remains a believer as well as a scientist. He has staked out a middle ground when it comes to the battle between Christians and Darwinists, stating that they can be reconciled with one another. He is sympathetic toward the motivations of creationists and scientists alike, though he is fed up with much of intelligent design as well as hard-core atheists.

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GM in Crisis—5 Reasons Why America's Largest Car Company Teeters on the Edge

Strapped for cash, GM is on the brink of bankruptcy. It's a dramatic shift for a car company that had begun to right itself after decades of trouble. So what happened? We turned to PM Advisory Board Member and Chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, David Cole, for his take. Ironically, GM's perfect storm of troubles hit just as the company seemed to be making progress on a number of fronts: The company is producing its most competitive cars and trucks in decades, and the upcoming 2011 Chevy Volt has generated more excitement for GM than any product in recent memory. On the cost side, the market slowdown has closed factories, which has removed most if not all of the industry's overcapacity of cars and trucks. And when a new labor agreement kicks in, GM's cost to produce a car will fall to a point where it can once again be profitable. That's the good news. The question is, will GM be around to benefit once the economy improves? The troubles at GM are vast and complex, but Cole summarized what he sees as the immediate and long-range factors that have brought the once dominant automaker to its knees.

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Ten Reasons why Teddy Roosevelt is the Coolest President Ever

In many ways Roosevelt stands out in history. Here are just ten, in no particular order. One commenter mentioned that readers of this blog would not know who Teddy R. is. That would surprise me, but maybe this will help you know him a little better.

1. At 42, he was the youngest person to become president, when President McKinley was assassinated (although not as young as this earlier picture would indicate-I just like the picture). He was also the first to succeed to the office after a president’s death, and then to later also win by election.

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How to Get Lucky

Scientific proof that you make your own breaks.

For centuries, people have recognized the power of luck and have done whatever they could to try seizing it. Take knocking on wood, thought to date back to pagan rituals aimed at eliciting help from powerful tree gods. We still do it today, though few, if any, of us worship tree gods. So why do we pass this and other superstitions down from generation to generation? The answer lies in the power of luck.

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Cool Spy Gadgets for the James Bond Within You

People keep developing and using cool new gadgets to spy on people. While this practice might offend some people, it is at the same time, fun and enjoyable for others. Spy Gadgets can be used to see what your 3 year old son is doing with the toys or to find the numbers your daughter calls frequently. Or maybe, you can become the next James Bond and save the world with these cool spy gadgets.

We have gathered a Cool Spy Gadgets list that can help you become the next James Bond. some of these are not too expensive, so they can also make great Christmas Gifts or Stocking Presents.

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NFL admits mistake in Steelers game; error costly to gamblers

PITTSBURGH — The officiating mistake and touchdown that wasn't at the end of the Pittsburgh Steelers' 11-10 victory over the San Diego Chargers didn't change the result. From a betting standpoint, it was huge.

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5 Psychological Experiments That Expose Humanity's Dark Side

Psychologists know you have to be careful when you go poking around the human mind because you're never sure what you'll find there. A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions about the subjects.

Oh, we're not talking about the occasional psychopath who turns up. No, we're talking about you. The experiments speak for themselves:

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The (New) New Einsteins: Marin Soljačić

Who He Is: Marin Soljačić, assistant professor of physics at MIT

What He Did: Soljačić invented “WiTricity,” the first steps toward wireless electricity. That is, moving electricity without cables. It all started when Soljačić awoke in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time to his chirping cell phone, reminding him to plug it in. It occurred to him that in this day and age, cell phones should be able to plug themselves in and save him the hassle.

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What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Martin R. from Aardvarchaeology has the answer.
"What came first, the chicken or the egg? Easy, you say, eggs were laid by other animals aeons before the first chicken saw the light of day.

But what came first, the first chicken egg or the first chicken? This boils down to whether a chicken egg is one laid by a chicken or one out of which a chicken can hatch."

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Can you copyright a magic trick?

It's the sort of conundrum that apprentice wizard Merlin - eponymous hero of the current BBC children's drama - needn't concern himself too much about: how do magicians stop others from pinching their tricks?

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Why Canada's Banks Don't Need Help

In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Canada has joined the ranks of governments that in recent weeks stepped up to help banks cope with more fallout from bad U.S. subprime mortgages. In Canada's case, however, the reason for the assistance is a little different from some of its G-7 partners. Unlike banks in the U.S., Britain and Germany, which needed to be bailed out with hundreds of billions of dollars in new capital, Canada's major banks are solid and solvent. They don't need any help to work through their subprime exposure.

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How Lobotomies Work

­With the wide range of drugs and other types of therapies available to treat severe mental illness today, it's hard to imagine that doctors once thought that such a drastic operation was the way to a cure. As you'll read in this article, it wasn't always much of a cure. Let's start by looking at exactly what goes into performing a lobotomy.

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The Lazy Man’s Guide to Getting Things Done

What if I told you that you could be totally lazy and irresponsible, and still accomplish just as much? What if you could slack off, loiter, and essentially do nothing and get more done than the average person. It’s a bit of an art, but you can master this skill with some practice.

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Some things shouldn't be put to a vote.

Keeping a Promise When a Life Is Near Its End

“If something should happen to me, and I couldn’t help myself, would you be willing to help me?”



It is the question so many of us dread hearing. My mother asked it of me around her 75th birthday. Of course I didn’t need to ask what she meant by “something” or “help.” She was a card-carrying member of the Hemlock Society. On her bookshelves were titles like “Final Exit” and “The Peaceful Pill Handbook.”



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Keeping a Promise When a Life Is Near Its End

“If something should happen to me, and I couldn’t help myself, would you be willing to help me?”

It is the question so many of us dread hearing. My mother asked it of me around her 75th birthday. Of course I didn’t need to ask what she meant by “something” or “help.” She was a card-carrying member of the Hemlock Society. On her bookshelves were titles like “Final Exit” and “The Peaceful Pill Handbook.”

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Effects of Light Pollution

Light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it's not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.

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In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition

A new genetic theory suggests that mental illness may be a product of struggles between the genes you get from your father and the genes you get from your mother.

In short: autism and schizophrenia represent opposite ends of a spectrum that includes most, if not all, psychiatric and developmental brain disorders. The theory has no use for psychiatry’s many separate categories for disorders, and it would give genetic findings an entirely new dimension.

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Earhart Crosses the Atlantic

Eighty years ago this week on June 18, 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger aboard a Fokker tri-motor aircraft that was piloted by Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon.

This image shows Earhart standing in front of the Lockheed Electra in which she disappeared in July 1937. Born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897, Earhart did not begin flying until after her move to California in 1920. After taking lessons from aviation pioneer Neta Snook in a Curtiss Jenny, Earhart set out to break flying records, breaking the women altitude records in 1922.

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Sooner vs. later: Is there an ideal age for first marriage?

And as young people wait longer to marry, there is growing debate over whether waiting is a good idea, and if so, how long is best. Those who advocate marriage in the early to mid-20s say that's the age when the pool of possible mates is larger, it's when couples can "grow up" together and it's prime for childbearing. But others favor the late 20s or early 30s, saying maturity makes for happier unions and greater economic security — both of which make divorce less likely.

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When the Deity Knows You're Dead

How do different religions define death?

Usually, the same way it has traditionally been defined in all cultures: by a lack of vital signs. Most world religions lack a clear doctrinal statement that certifies when, exactly, the moment of death can be said to have occurred. For most of human history, there was no need for one since prior to the invention of life-support equipment, the absence of circulation or respiration was the only way to diagnose death. This remains the standard of death in most religions. By the early 1980s, however, the medical and legal community also began to adopt a second definition of death—the irreversible cessation of all brain functions—and some religious groups have updated their beliefs.

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Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Honda's Assisted Walking Device

The device will supporting a portion of user's body weight whether they're crouching, walking or climbing stairs and is meant to help both those physically weakened with age or injury as well as workers who would need to reduce the stress on their bodies from heavy work or unusual positions.

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Yes we can!