So now that Barack Obama has officially announced his running mate will be Joe Biden, the most important question has to be answered. What should their celebrity couple name be? Make sure you vote (or die) below:
Loading ...Yes we can-tribute! If you have other suggestions for the Obama-Biden ticket nickname, leave a comment.
Our friend Gideon Gono (Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe) has decided to tackle the ultra-hyperinflation pummeling Zimbabwe in one fell swoop. His solution? Lopping zeros off of the Zimbabwean Dollar — ten of them! That means, as of August 1st, a 10 Billion Zimbabwean Dollar (ZWD) bill will be worth one ZWD. That’s a 10 000 000 000 : 1 ratio…. or a 99.99999999% devaluation!
A report from the BBC helps to put things into perspective, 100 Billion ZWD will buy a few eggs, with a try of 24 eggs costing somewhere around Z$600bn.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has accomplished an impressive milestone. Thanks to Gideon Gono, the present Governor of the Reserve Bank and President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe now has the highest percentage of Billionaires per capita than any other country in the world. The billionaire ratio is even higher than a recent gathering of the Bugatti Owners Club. Ultra-wealth also attracts crime. However, Zimbabwe has also done an excellent job with crime. In fact, it is common place to see people walking down the street flashing their wealth by carrying hundreds of billions of Zimbabwean Dollars (ZWD) in open daylight. Analysts estimate that at the current pace, Zimbabwe will soon have the world’s highest concentration of Quadrillionaires. You listening Donald Trump? Continue Reading »
I ran across a couple of really interesting sites today while on a search for a new alarm clock. They make generally dull clocks/calendar applications from a pure functional tool and turn them into social activities. As odd as it may sound, Human Clock is basically a photo repository where people submit pictures of themselves or photos they take of a time during the day. Think of it like Flickr on a scavenger hunt. The cool (and possibility annoying) part of this application is that you don’t just get the time by glancing at a clock, but you have to search for it in the picture. Even better, those not in the know will be puzzled at why you have a gallery of random pictures (scores, addresses, product names etc) flashing on your screen.
The sister site to Human Clock is Human Calendar. Because its development only started after the clock was released, it doesn’t seem to have the same polished look or social popularity. Also, the photos in the calendar seem a bit more complex than just someone holding up a sign for 9:59PM. At first glance, I didn’t appreciate the full interactivity of the heads in the month, but if you tweak with it a little bit — change the week to start on a Monday vs Sunday or change the timezone — you’ll really begin to see how much coordination it took to put it together. Craig Giffen did a great job on both sites!
For all you space and science geeks out there, I’m sure Discovery’s “When We Left Earth” series was the HD event of 2008. If you didn’t get a chance to watch it, missed an episode (like me), or just want to see all the NASA footage in all its HD glory, you can pre-order the six episode DVD box set. The box-set comes with 4 discs and is available in two formats — standard definition and Blu-Ray HD. Bonus features include 4 hours of NASA highlights, extra mission clips and detailed astronaut interviews. The standard version runs $64.95 and will ship on July 10th. However, the Blu-Ray version will set you back $74.99 and ships a couple weeks later on July 24th. Continue Reading »
In these times of online ad media spend continuing to increase (projected to reach $70B by 2010), it may sound absurd to diminish the value of page views. However, with the growth in popularity of AJAX & Javascript, user generated content and advances in dependable CPA/CPL based advertising, I believe page views as a metric has less and less value. If you think about it, sites using a large amount of AJAX for navigation don’t really generate a new page, unless they really want to. Sites depending on User Generated Content run into the reverse problem, with users who contribute content artificially inflating the PPV number. Finally, as the industry gets closer to precise tracking for CPA campaigns, the ad impression count will really be used to gauge success versus another ad network. Continue Reading »
All 190 megs of Spore’s Creature Creator was made available to the public on June 14th. Within days, YouTube was flooded with thousands of videos of user-made creatures hanging out in a swamp and dancing to some bongo music. The video game is a “MSO” (massively single-player online game) and the brainchild of Will Wright, creator of SimCity and the Sims. The user starts off by creating a cellular organism but have full control of its evolution into an intelligent being with the ability to travel into space. The unique thing about this game is that each user gets their own world within a galaxy of other users’ planets. The release date is still a fuzzy “late 2008“. Can you say Christmas release?
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Mozilla is trying to set a world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours with its new Firefox 3 release. That official download day is today, Tuesday, June 17th, 2008… conveniently also the launch date for the browser. As of this post, over 1.7 million users have pledged to download the new Firefox 3 browser, but I’m sure most of them are waiting for the “download now” email.
If the Mozilla/Firefox management team is smart (which I assume they are), they will use the country information entered by pledgees as a guide to email out the download tokens by timezone and number of people in that region who have pledged to download. At least that way it will stagger the downloads and save some hope for their servers.
This Sunday was the second part of When We Left Earth, Discovery Channel’s three part series covering NASA’s first 50 years. While the part one documented the agency’s shaky beginnings up to the Gemini missions (1958 to 1966), part two really focused on the Apollo lunar flights. Once again, they did an excellent job covering in depth all steps leading up to the flights from the Apollo 1 fire, Apollo 10’s dress rehearsal, Apollo 11’s lunar landing, Apollo 13’s struggles to the end of the program with Apollo 17’s final visit to the moon. They wrap up part two with the launch of Skylab - NASA’s project to gauge the effects of extended weightlessness on the human body.
I must say again that the folks at The Discovery Channel did a wonderful job combining HD converted footage with interviews to tell the history of NASA as if you were there for the ride. The third and final part of this documentary is scheduled to air Sunday, June 22 at 9pm. They will cover the recent history of the agency, with a focus on the Space Shuttle program. But, if you can’t wait until then, or would like to watch more video, be sure to check out NASA Video Vault.
Today I launched a mobile version of misbah.org! Now you can get all the items from the desktop version on your WAP enabled phone or PDA. This includes all the posts, polls, images and other miscellaneous items I choose to throw up on here from time to time. So, to all my on-the-go visitors, enjoy your cellular stay.
