dave

"Farmers selling pumpkins from their fields realized that the experience was somewhat lacking in drama. And while hay rides, corn mazes and petting zoos are nice, if you really want to draw a crowd, you need a little destruction. Or, as Donald Totman of Daisi Hill Farm in Millerton, N.Y., said, “We’re doing the entertainment to sell the pumpkins.” Now on a busy weekend he’ll smash 1,000 pounds of pumpkin in the interest of moving product off the vines." - dave from Bookmarklet

“It’s an act of love,” Mr. Wagner said. “This is intense work. You can’t just take money and throw it at it. You’ve got to apply your mind, your soul, your body, your spirit. It’s effort. And a lot of grace.” “It’s an act of love,” Mr. Wagner said. “This is intense work. You can’t just take money and throw it at it. You’ve got to apply your mind, your soul, your body, your spirit. It’s effort. And a lot of grace.” - dave from Bookmarklet

"We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy." - dave from Bookmarklet

"Creative people may think broadly and make unusual associations because they, like schizophrenics, may be less able to filter out information, a Swedish study found. Researchers at the Stockholm-based Karolinska Institute followed 13 healthy men and women who took creativity tests. The more solutions the participants found for a problem, the higher their creativity levels were. The researchers also studied images of the people’s brains. The creative problem-solvers had a lower concentration of proteins that aid in the chemical transmission of information in the thalamus, the part of the brain that determines what data is relevant for reasoning, according to the study. That’s a trait commonly found in patients with schizophrenia, a mental illness whose symptoms include hallucinations, jumbled thoughts and paranoia." - dave from Bookmarklet

Steve Jobs explains why apps fill in for search on mobile devices. - dave from Bookmarklet

"Controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said during a visit to Bolivia that he would like to invite Bolivian President Evo Morales and Cuban political leader Fidel Castro to join him on Twitter, according to Reuters." - dave from Bookmarklet

You just know Casto's tweets would hit the maximum character limit every time. - dave

"Amazon has started rolling out the 2.5 software update for Kindle and Kindle DX to a small group of users — a broad release planned for “late May 2010″ — and boy does it bring a lot of goodies. Perhaps the most notable new feature is the ability to share book passages with friends on Twitter() and Facebook() directly from your Kindle. Sure, the Kindle may not have a flashy color screen, but it doesn’t mean you can’t access your social networks from it." - dave from Bookmarklet

"Getting away from it all: it’s a common fantasy. But for some people, fantasizing isn’t enough. For whatever reason — the desire for peace and quiet in an increasingly frenetic world, an attempt to escape the intrusiveness of technology or the need for an isolated place to recover from heartbreak — they feel compelled to act out the fantasy, seeking the kind of solitude found only in the remotest locations." - dave from Bookmarklet

"Hundreds of Carlsberg workers have gone on strike for a second day after a 'beer ban' was imposed by bosses. Up to 800 employees walked out of the firm's Copenhagen factory in protest over its decision to allow drinking only at lunchtime." - dave from Bookmarklet

"It’s only a matter of time before an episode of The Big Bang Theory opens with Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Raj playing iPad Scrabble and using their iPhones as virtual tile racks. Aside from bringing a whole new dimension of geekiness to Hasbro’s word game, it may also be the most expensive way to play: The app is only $9.99, but add an iPad and" - dave from Bookmarklet

"Honda has taken the wraps off a new mobility device that allows you to steer and cruise around simply by shifting your weight." - dave from Bookmarklet

"Collins sounds like anthropologist Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: "One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," sharing "a sharp curve of decline" that "may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power." Yes, if it happened to Bank of America, why not America?" - dave from Bookmarklet

"I’m always amazed that more people don’t know the little tricks you can use to get more out of a simple Google search. Here are 10 of my favorites." - dave from Bookmarklet

"The bottom line is that genius is the result of lots of hard work, and not just the fortune of having the right match-up of genes. David Shenk, for one, says that everyone, regardless of genetic makeup or background, has the potential to excel at a chosen field. Annie Murphy Paul recently reviewed David Shenk’s new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. Shenk argues that we have before us not a “talent scarcity” but a “latent talent abundance.” Shenk states that “the vast majority of us have not even come close to tapping what scientists call our ‘un­actualized potential.’ ”" - dave from Bookmarklet

It appears to be working :) - Ken Morley

Funny looking monkey! - Robin Van Heck from email

"The so-called sunshine vitamin, which can be obtained from food or manufactured by human skin exposed to the sun, plays a key role in boosting the immune system, researchers believe. In particular it triggers and arms the body's T cells, the cells in the body that seek out and destroy any invading bacteria and viruses." - dave from Bookmarklet

"In addition to the usual array of "share" icons at the bottom of each post, you'll now see an "Embed This Post" button. This will allow you to do the same thing with our posts as you can with embeddable videos: Stick them on your site or blog." - dave from Bookmarklet

"After every Olympic event, rather than receiving their medals, athletes are given a bouquet of flowers. At the Beijing Olympics, roses dominated the bouquets. In Turin, it was rhododendrons, azaleas, and camellias. This year, it's green mums and hypericum berries. The bouquets come from Just Beginnings Flowers and Margitta's Flowers in Surrey, British Columbia. Their entry was chosen from 58 contending florists. June Strandberg, the bouquet designer and owner of Just Beginnings, teaches floristry to women who have left prison, are recovering from addiction, or have been victims of violence. It's a pretty amazing program, and Strandberg has even taken it behind bars, where she educates convicts. She believes it's her work with these correctional programs that secured the Olympic contract." - dave from Bookmarklet

"Canned food: It’s probably shocking to find a food item on a toxic product list, but it’s no mistake. Food cans are lined with an epoxy resin that contains bisphenol-A (BPA). Most experts believe this is our main source of exposure to BPA, which has been linked to hormone disruption, obesity, heart disease, and much more. Eden Foods is currently the only company with BPA-free canned foods (other than the canned tomatoes, which they haven’t found an adequate substitute for given the acidity of the tomatoes). Opt for fresh, frozen, dried or jarred foods." - dave from Bookmarklet

More hormone disruption: http://friendfeed.com/kjmorle... - Ken Morley

"The kids are calling it “Two Teachers, One Chair,” and it has all the makings of a YouTube hit. But school administrators and parents are hard pressed to find humour in a graphic lap dance caught on video between two teachers at a spirit rally at Churchill High School in Winnipeg last week." - dave from Bookmarklet

"Over the last couple of years, a few phones have entered the marketplace, specifically in China, that include a pico projector. The technology is still in an early stage, but these projectors are extremely small and enable projection of movies, photos and presentations directly from a mobile phone." - dave from Bookmarklet

I want one of these http://scienceblogs.com/insolen... - Ken Morley

"Hold on to your hat -- an excrement-based television pilot is in the future for the man called the Shat. The straight poop, the Hollywood Reporter website says, is that William Shatner will star in a CBS comedy project based on a popular profanity-laced but very funny Twitter account, Shit My Dad Says." - dave from Bookmarklet

Perfect! http://twitter.com/shitmyd... - Ken Morley

"Google has apologized for a shocking image that turned up on its first week of showing Street View maps of Windsor, Ont." - dave from Bookmarklet

From a couple months ago: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009... - Edward Zwart

"People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday." - dave from Bookmarklet

Blame corn syrup and fructose. They behave exactly the same way as alcohol in your liver. In USA they also have replaced regular sugar in sugary sodas. - Tapio Kulmala

So what's worse for you, fructose or sugar substitutes? Best to stick to glucose? - Ken Morley

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left. 'As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future." - dave from Bookmarklet

This is an intriguing model. "Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website." - dave from Bookmarklet

I've been a member for a few years. I love that you get follow up reports on how the lenders are doing and how the loans have impacted their business. - Eivind

"The new tablet is a powerful tool to get consumers to buy content that’s exclusive to Apple" - dave from Bookmarklet

"But Mr. Fukuda said he saw Toyota’s decision to suspend sales as a typical Toyota move. “At a Toyota factory line, when something goes wrong, they stop the whole line.” he said. “Now Toyota is doing the same thing, at the company level. That’s the Toyota way.”" - dave from Bookmarklet

Charles Biderman, founder and CEO of Trim Tabs Investment Research, discusses the possible role of U.S. government cash in the current stock market rally with Bloomberg's Lori Rothman. He basically says that the markets are rigged, the Fed [through its primary dealers] is pumping the overnight futures market and is the stock buyer of last resort. He says that when it ends, the markets will crash. - dave from Bookmarklet