Thomas Brox Røst - FriendFeed

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BBC NEWS | Europe | Base-jump goes wrong in Norway

"Base-jumper Hans Lange managed to avoid serious injury after jumping from the side of a mountain in Norway. He escaped with just a broken leg after his parachute failed to release properly, and he landed in a tree." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

Helmet-cam view of what it looks like when a parachute doesn't deploy as it should. - Thomas Brox Røst

favorited a photo on Flickr

Carmen's Birthday 021

13 hours ago - Link

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Geeking with Greg: KDD 2008 panel on the future of social networks

20 hours ago - via Bookmarklet - Link

"One question that was repeatedly presented to the panel was how to make money off social networks. Underlying this question, and at least once stated explicitly, was the issue of whether social networks really matter or are just the latest flash in the pan, the latest bubble, and soon to fade if people find the riches they deliver fall short of their absurdly hyped expectations." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"The best answer to this question came only at the very end, sneaking in when the session was already over, from panel chair Andrew Tompkins. Andrew said that he thought that what was most likely is that most money would be made from understanding an individual in a network and their immediate neighborhood. He expected that, as the space matured, the more theoretical work that we see now that looks at global patterns and trends across different types of social networks would continue, but the emphasis would shift to understanding each person in the network and from their behavior and their immediate neighbors to help people find and discover things they want. - Thomas Brox Røst

published photos on Flickr

Wednesday at 4:01 pm - Link

edythe, Yolanda, Mahdi Ebrahimi, Cee Bee and Anna Haro liked this

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Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing the AWS Start-Up Challenge - Win $100,000 in Prizes

Wednesday at 6:12 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Deepak liked this

"We've launched this year’s AWS Start-Up Challenge, a contest for entrepreneurs and start-ups that will award the winner $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, a potential investment offer from Amazon.com, and more. Submissions will be accepted until October 3, 2008. " - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

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The exiles who wowed America (Clive James, TLS)

Wednesday at 6:25 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

"Schoenberg, Hindemith and Bartók couldn’t make a living like Stravinsky, but at least they had the chance. Sometimes it must have seemed tantalizingly close. In Hollywood, Schoenberg played ping-pong with a neighbour. It was George Gershwin. The case of Schoenberg raises the character issue: he actually had to concentrate quite hard to stay unpopular, cursing himself whenever he lapsed from the atonal back into something that a non-expert audience might have liked. Not even the basket cases could honestly say that they had fallen among Philistines." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

TextUML Toolkit, use a textual notation for creating UML class diagrams faster

Wednesday at 6:15 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

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PsyBlog: Happiness Could Add 10 Years to Your Life

Wednesday at 6:14 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

mhmazidi, Carlos Ayala, Maryam Ardakani and Mahdi Ebrahimi liked this

"In comparison, studies on people who were in good health do find a strong positive effect for happiness on health. Professor Veenhoven suggests that happiness may not have a beneficial effect on the physical health of those who are ill, but it does help prevent people falling ill in the first place. A particularly spectacular study on nuns found that those who were happiest in early life lived 10 years longer than those who were unhappy. Another study of 660 inhabitants of Ohio found that higher levels of happiness translated, on average, into 7.5 years more life. " - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

i am so happy :)♥ - Mahdi Ebrahimi

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Quest for Holy Grail in Iceland Unsuccessful

Wednesday at 5:43 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Eric, Svartling and Baard Overgaard Hansen liked this

"Italian cryptographer Giancarlo Gianazza and a team of scientists and Holy Grail enthusiasts believed to have found clues that the Holy Grail and other treasures from Christian mythology were hidden in Iceland—but found nothing. According to history magazine Sagan Öll, when Gianazza and his team searched for the Holy Grail in Skipholtskrókur in Iceland’s highlands near Kjölur mountain pass this summer they only found water and no evidence of a secret underground dome. " - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"In Botticelli’s “Primavera” a series of numeric symbols form the date March 14, 1319, which somehow supports Gianazza’s theory, and in da Vinci’s “Last Supper” Gianazza believes to have found outlines matching the landscape at Kjölur. Further clues were found in Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” and an ancient Icelandic script states that poet and politician Snorri Sturluson was accompanied by “eighty armored Eastmen” at the Althingi parliament in 1217, who could have been the Knights Templars. " - Thomas Brox Røst

Well that was a bummer. - Thomas Brox Røst

Interesting! - Svartling

published photos on Flickr

Tuesday at 5:07 pm - Link

Michael W. May and Anna Haro liked this

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ThinkGeek :: Kaossilator Touchpad Synthesizer

Sunday at 7:37 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Bec and Deepak liked this

"The moment we ran our fingers over the touchpad of the Kaossilator and heard the otherworldly sounds of the future we were hooked. This pocket sized music synthesizer is like nothing we've seen before. Rather than using keys or buttons to play musical notes, the Kaossilator features a revolutionary touchpad design. Move your finger from left to right to change the pitch of the note, and up and down to change the sound. But musical sounds are only the beginning, the Kaossilator can also be used like a drum kit with dozens of built in beats and drum sounds." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

Oh so nice, GAS worthy - Deepak

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Presentation Zen: Kermit learns visual thinking

August 30 at 4:46 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

David Andrew, Michael Nielsen, Nir Ben Yona, Baard Overgaard Hansen and 5 other people liked this

"While reading Dan Roam's blog today I stumbled on this great little clip of a 1966 Kermit the Frog skit on visualization from the Ed Sullivan show. And then I found an earlier version of the skit from the 1950s below." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

<3 - Anna Haro

You have to love Harry the Hipster - although Kermit did age better. - Thomas Brox Røst

that is awesome. the jazz riffing is great, as is the image that loads over Kermit when he says he doesn't like jazz. - Stephanie•CogSciLibrarian

favorited a video on YouTube

David Bowie - Heroes (live)

Sunday at 4:05 am - Link

Donna Mugavero, Bec, Alemsah, Emma and 2 other people liked this

This is a really good live version. - Thomas Brox Røst

<3 Bowie! - Bec

favorited two videos on YouTube

The Snowman part 1

Sunday at 4:15 am - Link

Sunday is Raymond Briggs day. - Thomas Brox Røst

When the Wind Blows (1986) - Part 4

Sunday at 4:15 am - Link

Still scary. - Thomas Brox Røst

favorited photos on Flickr

August 29 at 8:12 am - Link

Baard Overgaard Hansen and Anna Haro liked this

published photos on Flickr

August 24 at 3:06 pm - Link

RAPatton, Patricia Hanrahan and edythe liked this

added a product to the Amazon Wish List Wishlist

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers

August 28 at 8:34 am - Link

Cee Bee and edythe liked this

favorited photos on Flickr

August 28 at 2:27 pm - Link

Anna Haro, Ruth Ferguson, RAPatton and edythe liked this

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The American John Milton: The poet and the power of extraordinary speech.

August 28 at 4:34 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Anna Haro, Cee Bee and edythe liked this

"Great art is great not because it enters an academic curriculum, and neither is greatness affirmed by the awarding of prizes or titles. But great is not necessarily a vague term. It can indicate work that penetrates the shapes, feelings, ideas, and sounds of a culture, as in the cadences of speech. Sometimes that kind of penetration is so deep, so transforming, that it is nearly invisible, or barely acknowledged." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Milton's genius, and his particular, infectious kind of eloquence, combines two kinds of energy, seemingly alike but explosive together: an individualistic ideal of freedom and the syntactical variety of the Latin language. When Milton imposes that variety on English, which lacks Latin's inflected endings, he introduces new emotional registers, amazing patterns of repetition and vocality." - Thomas Brox Røst

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Maurice Earls: The Life and Times of Samuel Pepys

August 28 at 4:27 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

edythe liked this

"Samuel Pepys was, near enough, London’s Leopold Bloom – intelligent, curious, diligent and decent, with an abiding interest in music, food, women and the life of the city and people around him. Both individuals, the historical and the fictional, were bourgeois gentlemen who provide what are among the most honest records of human, and in particular male, thinking available. They told the truth about themselves, a simple enough matter, but also a rare phenomenon and one which separates them from the bulk of memoir writers who are always, to some degree, engaged in personal propaganda." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"As is sometimes the case in the married state, many of their disagreements were about money. In July 1664 Pepys wrote: "I walked homeward still doing business by the way, and at home I find my wife this day of her own accord to have lain out 25s upon a pair of pendances for her eares which did vex me and brought me and her to very high, and very foul words from her to me, such as trouble me to think she should have in her mouth …"" - Thomas Brox Røst

favorited a photo on Flickr

Fall 63

August 28 at 4:36 pm - Link

Anna Haro, RAPatton and edythe liked this

published photos on Flickr

August 30 at 8:51 am - Link

Baard Overgaard Hansen, Anna Haro, Mark Trapp, Yolanda and 2 other people liked this

favorited photos on Flickr

August 30 at 9:44 am - Link

Anna Haro, RAPatton and edythe liked this

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Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Poetry amidst commerce

August 30 at 4:22 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

"I'm glad I bought this pitcher / I think it's very nice / It fits well in the fridge's door / With quarts of juice and ice" - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

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Multicore: Faster chips, slower computers?

August 29 at 3:00 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Fortune explains multicore: "[P]rogramming in parallel is simply too complex for the average code writer, who has been trained in a very linear fashion. In conceptual terms, traditional coding could be compared to a woman being pregnant for nine months and producing a baby. Parallel programming might take nine women, have each of them be pregnant for a month, and somehow produce a baby." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

published photos on Flickr

August 29 at 10:48 am - Link

edythe, Neil Saunders, Sally Church, Arash and 4 other people liked this

Beautiful. I love going to Yosemite. - Jason Shultz via twhirl

I only spent a day there - am definitely going back. - Thomas Brox Røst

Still one of the best trips I have ever taken, and it was covered in snow then :) - Deepak

I took a drive up to Yosemite one year in the middle of December. It was awesome. Snow everywhere, no tourists, it was spectacular and soooo quiet. I loved it. - Jason Shultz via twhirl

published photos on Flickr

August 28 at 2:27 pm - Link

Anna Haro and Cee Bee liked this

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Just right for the garden: a mini-cow

August 28 at 4:22 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

"For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

More on Dexter cattle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... - Thomas Brox Røst

posted a message

“"I meticulously copied out this salacious "Lettre à la Président" from the manuscript, sitting primly at a high, isolated desk in the restricted section of the Bibliothèque Nationale, known in those days as "L'Enfer" (Hell, or perhaps, the Infernal Regions)."”

August 27 at 5:02 pm - Link

edythe and Cee Bee liked this

"It was staffed only by male assistants of a certain age, who were all required to wear (fantastic as this now sounds) scarlet rubber aprons reaching from the chin to well below the knee." - Thomas Brox Røst

Richard Holmes, describing the travails of French librarians ca. 1974 ("The Fantoms of Théophile Gautier": http://www.nybooks.com/article...) - Thomas Brox Røst

sounds like a weird s&m party - Cee Bee

published photos on Flickr

August 25 at 5:09 pm - Link

edythe, Anna Haro and Cee Bee liked this

posted a link

Core Biomedical Research Software and Web 2.0 Tools | Highlight HEALTH 2.0

August 25 at 5:53 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jere, Mahdi Ebrahimi and Deepak liked this

"Following a discussion on Twitter, Dr. Chris blogged about essential medical software and invited others to share their “core apps”. I thought I would add to the discussion with my own essential programs, albeit with a genomics/pre-clinical research bias. Since a number are Web 2.0 apps, I’m posting this on Highlight HEALTH 2.0. " - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

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