Offbeat posts

For decades, scholars have debated the validity and inspiration behind what many consider the biggest archeological discovery of the 20th century. To see the Dead Sea Scrolls, one had to travel to Israel. Now, they’re available to everyone through the internet thanks to Google in a project managed by The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The 2000-year-old collection of 972 Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts were discovered in bits and pieces between 1947 and 1956. They were put together over the decades and preserved in Israel, but digital records have been limited until now. Google technology took…

In the oft-siloed world of grad school, MIT’s Media Lab leads the way when it comes to creating environments that foster interdisciplinary exploration. New discoveries routinely get shared between seemingly unrelated fields and lead to unexpected applications. This approach is broken down by our friends at Online PHD. There are times when accidents turn into breakthroughs. MIT Media Lab has a knack for putting together circumstances and environments that are conducive to these “accidents.” Click to enlarge. Created by: Online PhD…

Let’s look at the lighter side of social media. With so many privacy concerns rolling around, turmoil around the world fueled in many ways by social media, and general shenanigans dominating status updates, we want to lighten things up a bit and have a chuckle or two. What would happen if social media sites were actually your neighbors? That’s the questions that our infographic designers at Column Five Media tacked in their latest take on offbeat visual news. Click to enlarge. …

There has been a lot of controversy brewing over recent weeks about changes that George Lucas and his team made to Star Wars movies before being released to Blu-ray. Regardless of whether you feel that these were mistakes or not, one thing that should be noted is that he chose not to add online training to the list of changes. Imagine if Luke had logged into Yoda’s Jedi Academy online rather than risk life and limb on Dagobah. Could the Mos Eisley Band have made it out of the rathole of a space dock had they known more songs? Would Greedo be alive today had he taken an online interpersonal communication…

Very few people are able to post 3 words on a new website and get articles written about it, hundreds of comments, and RSS feed subscribers before the fourth word of a blog post is published. One such person is TechCrunch founder and former editor Michael Arrington. The humor cannot be missed in the naming of his new site, Uncrunched. As we mentioned, TechCrunch lost a little credibility when Arrington created CrunchFund, then regained credibility but lost overall power when they ousted him. Very little is known about what Arrington will use the site for, but since he’s a blogger and the site is built…

The buzz and obsession that once was Twitter has leveled off in the last year to a level that is nearly sane. It’s being used more now as a communication tool, a news aggregator, and an opinion-expression machine. The days of “the more mundane, the better” are behind us. Well, most of us. Yet, when I mentioned to a friend that they were the “Twouble with Twitters” she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to hunt down this old video (yes, 2 and a half years is old on the internet) and show her. She nearly cried laughing, not simply because it was hilarious but because it still holds a degree of truth even…

It’s like clockwork. When anyone gets a payday, there are those who will express dissatisfaction with one thing or another that they’re doing to cheat the system, hurt the little guy, or kill innocent animals. Clockwork. Disclosure: I am an unpaid and (very) occasional contributor for Business Insider. Even if I were not, I would still defend them against the horde. First and foremost, everyone is right. Business Insider has made a killing by taking advantage of a system that is designed to reward content aggregation more than hard-hitting journalism. In the world of journalism, it’s an unfair…

The trends are heading in different directions. As devices become more mobile-data capable and applications push towards a mobile internet, service providers are shrinking, throttling, and increasing the prices of data plans. In  three minutes, AT&T and Verizon user UrgoClips encapsulates the frustration of the nation. Call it #firstworldproblems, but it’s still frustrating to many to have access to these wonderful new toys but to not have the service infrastructure to truly take advantage of them affordably. Listen to this video editorial and ask yourself if you’re “mad as hell…

Humans take fire for granted. The reality behind the science of fire is actually pretty interesting. Whether looking at the chemistry behind it, the quantum mechanics that drive it, or the simple but amazing concept of lighting a candle in space, fire can be a very stimulating subject. That’s the thought in this physics-minute (and a half) about fire. Amazing stuff. …

While the privacy war wages on one end of the spectrum with people, companies, and even governments going after Facebook, Twitter, and Google about how they handle the information that people give (or do not give) them, the other end of the spectrum is using their mobile devices to announce anything and everything they’re doing and where they’re going. The differences are striking. More and more people are giving stalkers everything they need to keep track of them. Mobile devices are using automatic tracking and one-touch check in features to put our whereabouts out there to the public web. As…