Offbeat posts

You can mark it down as “they just don’t get me.” There was really no chance that they would, anyway, but that doesn’t change the fact that the panel at SXSW on Reddit was a debacle. Then again, did anyone think it wouldn’t be? The panel consisted of Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, Gawker’s Adrian Chen and Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson. They aren’t fans of the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” and it showed. Those who expected it to be a discussion about a Reddit culture that is growing in prominence and maturing in form were disappointed. Those who knew that it would be a not-so-veiled bash session…

Email spammers can reach hundreds of thousands of people in a very short amount of time before their domain is registered through the appropriate networks and filtered. Social media spam attacks can be transmitted to millions in the same amount of time and will often delete their own accounts before allowing them to be tracked by anything other than the logs. Neither of these types of spam attacks have skills that are even close to this lady. Check her out in action. Tireless. Relentless. Accurate. Self-correcting. She has all of the qualities to deliver more spam in less time than a human should…

President Obama’s successful re-election campaign last year was marked with many technological victories. They won most of the many battles on social media, held the attention of the media in a way that almost had the unbiased fabric of journalism tearing away to root for him, and dominated the devices to score major victories through mobile device marketing. From a fund-raising perspective, one of the campaigns most powerful weapons was good ol’ fashioned email marketing and their most powerful subject line may surprise many. “Hey.” That was it. The concepts of “I Need Your Support” or “Help…

They can survive temperatures near absolute zero or as high as 300 degrees. The crushing pressure at the bottom of the ocean doesn’t faze them, nor does the vacuum of space. Radiation 1000x the level strong enough to kill an elephant doesn’t slow the tardigrade down. They are so durable that scientists are either not able to make conclusions about them or they’re coming up with the wrong ideas. The tardigrade, known also as a water bear (because they look and move like an 8-legged bear) or a moss piglet (because they love moss and look sort of like piglets), is a polyextremophile. Its ability to survive…

You can mark this one down for the “do not try this at home” category for two reasons. The first is pretty obvious. You shouldn’t play with fire, particularly with a high-priced vacuum cleaner like Dyson. The second reason is that there’s no practical application for doing this other than to make a video that tech bloggers can post on their websites. Check out this strangely compelling video as a pair take on on a journey of their Extreme Dyson Test. The video by Photonicinduction never mentions why they decided to light the ground on fire before sucking the fire out of combustible existence with their…

In the first Iron Man movie, Tony Stark was clever and bold. In the second, he was confused but arrogant. In The Avengers, he truly emerged as a hero amongst heroes, growing up while maintaining his wit and charm. If the trailer is any indicator, Iron Man 3 has Tony Stark turning into a bitter, grumpy man. The quick one-liners are gone,  replaced by depression, vitriol, and selfishness. He is vengeful. His nemesis seems powerful and philosophical. This is nothing like the trailers for previous Marvel movies. In short, it should be exactly what fans have been wanting – a Tony Stark that takes advantage…

There are plenty of stories about dumb criminals doing dumb things, but we don’t get to hear as often about dumb prisons allowing smart criminals to make them look dumb. At HM Prison Isis in London, teen hacker Nicholas Webber enrolled in an IT class, from which he hacked the prison’s computer systems. The founder of Ghost Market, a website where criminals were able to buy and sell identities as well as learn the ins and outs of digital identity theft, was arrested in October, 2009. He was sentenced in May, 2011, to five years at HM Prison Isis. There, he met IT teacher Michael Fox who claims he was sacked…

Pinterest has grown tremendously. In December of 2011 it had 7 million users. Just a year later, there are over 20 million monthly active users. It is the third most popular social network following Facebook and Twitter. Even more interesting, it refers more traffic than Google +, LinkedIn, Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube.  Get the most out of your Pinterest today!   Is your Pinterest optimized? Use top Search Engine Optimization (SEO) keywords in your “About” section. Search engines index this page. You have 200 characters to communicate who you are and what you can do for your audience….

“No. I am your father.” Audiences across the world collectively gasped when Darth Vader revealed to his nemesis Jedi in training Luke Skywalker that he was, at one point, Anakin Skywalker, his father. George Lucas went to great measures to make sure that the reveal was one of the best ones in history, even having the voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, record a secondary red herring voice-over saying, “Obi Wan was your father.” If it weren’t for the blaster fire and lightsaber battles, one might look at the backwards family history of the Skywalker clan as a soap opera. Heros kissing, only to find…

On earth, we have struggled for centuries to understand the dynamics of life and how everything relates with everything else. For those who have had the pleasure of going into space and experiencing life away from earth, there’s a phenomenon called The Overview Effect that has many astronauts asking the same basic questions from a different perspective. A recent short documentary by the Planetary Collective shows several astronauts discussing their experiences, telling of some of the conclusions they came to as a result, and expanding on the questions that came to mind due to the perspective-bending…