David Lidsky's Blog, page 4843

Infographic of the Day: The Female Orgasm, by the Numbers [SFW]

67% of women fake it! Meanwhile, 70% of men know where the clitoris is--but astonishingly, only 75% of women do.

At the risk of overplaying this one--or simply revealing too much about ourselves--we're just gonna present this graphic by Koldcast.tv without comment:

San Francisco's Old Bay Bridge to Become Gateway Park--Wacky Proposals Ensue

San Francisco plans a 50-acre park underneath the new Bay Bridge.

Most of the fun of watching San Francisco rebuild its seismically-suspect Bay Bridge isn't from seeing the new span emerge, or from snickering at the BART chaos is causes, but from cataloging the brilliant and wacky proposals for what to do with the old bridge--besides blowing it up. There was the Bay Line project, from Virginia San Fratello and Ronald Rael, which proposed a deck-top park and hanging houses suspended...

Google Releases PowerMeter API to Developers, Following Microsoft's Lead

Google's entrance into the energy management space hasn't exactly been subtle--the company has already invested millions in renewable energy projects, applied for (and received) a license to buy and sell energy on the open market, and publicly announced that it wants to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. But Google's PowerMeter energy-tracking software has remained under the rader, mostly because Google opted to team up with just two device partners--The Ted 5000 in the U.S. and...

Switch Me! Light Switch Makes It Painful to Waste Energy

How much do you really need to turn on the light above your head? Enough to get physically punished for it? French designer Josselin Zaigouche's Switch Me! light switch makes turning on the light a painful chore by equipping a standard switch with a mouse trap-like device.

Designboom explains:

'Switch me!' makes you think twice about whether or not you should turn on the light. it is a metaphoric symbol that helps you feel the pain of the planet, making you reconsider how you can...

U.S. Cyber Security Czar Comes Out of the Shadows to Reveal Defense Plans

The U.S.'s cyber security czar Howard Schmidt has obviously been doing something apart from tidying his desk in the three months since being appointed: He's been coming up with a cyber defense plan, which he's just revealed to the World.

Schmidt was speaking at the RSA event in San Francisco, and it's the first real showing he's made since starting his job in December 2009. What he was talking about were the aspects of the freshly-upgraded Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative that...

Voice-Recognition Software Somewhat Sexist, Only Listens to Women

Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Stanford have discovered that voice-recognition technology doesn't work as well on men as it does on women. The report, which recorded phone conversations in an attempt to understand why those infuriating automated booking lines don't work quite the way they should, discovered that it's all in the pitch. And, um, the weird linguistic, err, tics that apparently afflict, umm men more than the, err, fairer sex, have got a lot to do with it.

As...

Switch Me! Light Switch Makes it Painful to Waste Energy

How much do you really need to turn on the light above your head? Enough to get physically punished for it? French designer Josselin Zaigouche's Switch Me! light switch makes turning on the light a painful chore by equipping a standard switch with a mouse trap-like device.

Designboom explains:

'Switch me!' makes you think twice about whether or not you should turn on the light. it is a metaphoric symbol that helps you feel the pain of the planet, making you reconsider how you can contribute ...

How to Use Android's Gesture Search and Leave Your Phone's Keyboard Behind

Typing is sooo yesterday. Google Gesture Search, a freshman out of Google Labs, lets you find stuff on your Android phone by drawing letters on the touchscreen as if you were jotting on a notepad. In addition to Android's existing search by voice, image, and barcode, Gesture Search is yet another keyboardless input method for your touchscreen phone. At the very least, Gesture Search is a fun proof-of-concept; at most, it will hook a few dedicated touch keyboard haters. Here's how it works...

Penguin Demonstrates iPad-Bound Books: Amazing, but Are These Really "Books"?

If publishers (and, more importantly, the public) really embrace the iPad, we're going to be seeing more than just black-text-on-white books--if you wanted that, you'd buy a Kindle, not a giant iPhone with Wi-Fi, a huge LCD, and a top-of-its-class mobile processor. But then, are these crazy game/video/audio hybrids really "books"? If Penguin's amazing examples are a sign of things to come, we may be asking that question quite often.

Said Penguin's CEO, John Makinson, at an event this week:

 We...

Google Introduces Personalized, Starred Results, Because You Know What You Like

Today Google added a new star feature to its search engine that allows users to mark their favorite sites, so they'll show up right at the top even if they're not the most popular.

Stars are essentially replacing SearchWiki, a tool that pretty much nobody liked--it also let you personalize search results by reordering, removing, or adding links, but it actually replaced Google's usual search results with your altered ones. That system would sometimes result in lousy search results, because...