flickering pictures

A creepy-sounding outfit called the Fertility Institutes is offering parents the controversial chance to screen for blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned babies, and lots of people aren’t happy about it. For a fee, the Institutes promise to let you choose your baby’s features through “pre-implantation genetic diagnosis” — sort of implying that ugliness needs diagnosing. The L.A.-based [...]

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* = may not actually happen If someone told you that IBM and the U.S. government were building the world’s most powerful supercomputer — one that could perform a staggering 20 quadrillion calculations per second — what would you think its purpose was? If you guessed curing cancer, studying climate change or running Vista smoothly [...]

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This is apparently an authentic ad for Microsoft’s Songsmith song-writing program, which I guess is supposed to compete with Apple’s less seizure-inducing GarageBand. If there’s a commercial out there that makes you want to incoherently spew obscenities more than this one, I haven’t seen it. Microsoft says: Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s [...]

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If you’re one of those people who desperately craves individuality, or if you just happen to love the unusual, TokyoFlash makes your watch. The one above — the “Star Performer,” from the company’s “Pimp” line — comes with blue or white LEDs and costs $94.96. Unfortunately, I’m neither cool enough nor geeky enough to pull [...]

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Information Week reports: Despite her lifelike appearance and 32-23-33, anatomically correct measurements, Trung insists Aiko is not a sex doll. “I’m attached to it, but do I sleep with it? No.” You heard it here first, folks. Creepiness aside, Aiko can read, do math and recognize people, and responds to touch and voice commands. She [...]

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I’m a little pressed for time, and I didn’t have the foresight to set up a delayed post last night, so just a little one today: Hardware giant Logitech has just announced the sale of its one billionth mouse, meaning it has made one mouse for every 6.7 people on the planet. If a mouse [...]

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The Los Angeles Times reports that peeling a strip of Scotch tape off the roll in a vacuum chamber releases enough energy to x-ray your finger. The process is called triboluminescence and apparently creates visible light, too — something you can try at home — though you likely haven’t noticed unless you’ve been taping things [...]

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To the guy in Ozark, Arkansas who surfs this site with Opera on a Nintendo Wii, all I have to say is: awesome… Image via Opera Software ASA.

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Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius. And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore. From the Times of [...]

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Google In Quotes is still in beta, but it’s an excellent tool for finding out where the candidates stand on specific issues like abortion, oil, Iraq, human rights, etc. The app also compares quotes from Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, and the usual cast of six-o’clock-news types in the American political [...]

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