Your Daily Posterous Spaces Update

	June 30th, 2012 What is it like to be black on a mostly white college campus? Posted about 9 hours ago by Lily Koi to Holy Kaw! Dear White People hopes to answer that question. Take a look at the trailer and, if you're interested, donate.  Embedded media -- click here to see it. Full story at The Daily What. More great video. 岸辺 Posted about 22 hours ago by Koichi Mitsui to s a s u r a u 3 多摩川。 Entrevistamos a Sacha Baron Cohen, 'El Dictador' Posted about 21 hours ago by Maestro Limbo to Conozca Más dictador.pdf View this on Posterous The world's first car ad Posted about 23 hours ago by Annie Colbert to Holy Kaw! In 1898, the Winton Motor Carriage Company took out an ad in Scientific American for its horse-free, hydrocarbon motored Winton Motor Carriage. The ad was the first of its kind and even brought in a customer. Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania became first person to purchase a Winton automobile after seeing the world's first car advert. Via Retronaut. Modern cars. Tasty tomatoes may make a comeback Posted about 20 hours ago by Futurity to Holy Kaw! The days of mealy, pale tomatoes may be numbered, thanks to insights from the plant's genome.  "Now that we know that some of the qualities that people value in heirloom tomatoes can be made available in other types of tomatoes, farmers can have access to more varieties of tomatoes that produce well and also have desirable color and flavor traits," says UC Davis biochemist Ann Powell. Full story at Futurity. More research news from top universities. Photo credit: Fotolia Birds flock back to Britain's urban rivers Posted about 19 hours ago by Futurity to Holy Kaw! After decades of pollution, urban rivers throughout England and Wales have improved dramatically in water quality and wildlife. The new research from Cardiff University shows that rivers in or near Britain’s major urban areas are regaining insects such as mayflies and stoneflies that are typical of fast-flowing, oxygen-rich waters, as well as birds like kingfishers and dippers. Full story at Futurity. More research news from top universities. Esto apesta: 7 razones por las que el excremento dominará el futuro Posted about 16 hours ago by Carlos Valerio to Conozca Más Los humanos somos muy productivos, al menos en el sanitario. Si entendiéramos que la clave para crear una verdadera conciencia ecológica está en el WC, probablemente no existirían tantos problemas ambientales. ¿Por qué? El excremento tiene metano, hidrógeno, nitrógeno y es una forma relativamente económica de obtener energía. La ciencia lo sabe, y lo está aprovechando. Parques En pocos años, los parques de Estados Unidos se beneficiarán del 'Park Spark', un proyecto desarrollado en Cambridge, Massachusetts, por el artista Matthew Mazzota, que tiene como objetivo obtener energía de las heces caninas. Por medio de una bolsa biodegradable, los dueños recogerán las gracias de sus mascotas, para depositarlas en un contenedor especial, que al activarse con una palanca, convertirá el material orgánico en metano. El producto resultante podrá ser aprovechado por cualquier dispositivo que utilice este tipo de energía. Y eso no es todo, actualmente puedes obtener WiFi a cambio de excremento. Transporte La empresa británica GENeco trabajó con Volkswagen para crear el Bio-Bug, un automóvil que funciona con aguas residuales. Con la ayuda de un sistema de digestión anaeróbica (proceso en el cual microorganismos descomponen material biodegradable en ausencia de oxígeno), el producto se transforma en biocombustible, y puede ser utilizado sin problemas. Según la empresa, el Beetle puede alcanzar velocidades de hasta 183Km/h y necesita 70 escusados para circular por un año. ¡No más preocupaciones por el precio de la gasolina! Espacio Los satélites generalmente obtienen su energía del Sol. Sin embargo, los científicos estudian la posibilidad de convertir las heces fecales en hidrógeno para crear celdas de combustible. Tanto en Florida como en Rusia se trabaja en el proyecto utilizando microsatélites de investigación denominados 'CubeSats'. Agua Las plantas de tratamiento de aguas residuales tienden a generar enormes cantidades de óxido nitroso, un potente gas de efecto invernadero utilizado por los propulsores. Debido a esto, algunos científicos de Stanford idearon una máquina que genera energía a partir del gas, y puede ser utilizada para abastecer los mismos centros de tratamiento. Computación Anualmente, las vacas producen diez billones de toneladas de excremento (lo que equivale a 26 galones de gas metano por día). ¿Qué hacer con tanta porquería? La ciencia trabaja en una opción para convertir el desperdicio vacuno y porcino en biogás, para crear energía en el hogar o en servidores. Google ya se unió al proyecto, invirtiendo en una planta al noroeste de Yadkinville, Carolina del Norte, que utiliza excremento de cerdo para encender 35 casas. Hewlett-Packard, por su parte, lanzó una propuesta para rentar terrenos en granjas y obtener energía para las distintas empresas de tecnología. Eventos En lugar de desechar los desperdicios, los investigadores del Bristol Robotic Lab buscan la manera de reciclar la orina y el excremento para desarrollar celdas de combustible. De esta forma, los baños móviles podrán servir para iluminar festivales de música y eventos masivos. Islas Mientras la población defeca, los expertos del Heriot-Watt University's School of Engineering and Physical Sciences in Edinburgh, estudian las propiedades de la urea, un químico encontrado en la orina. Su prototipo convierte el líquido en energía apta para islas, desiertos, e incluso, submarinos. FUENTE news.discovery.com Freshplum (YC S11) raises $1.4M seed round from NEA, Greylock, Google Ventures, CRV Posted about 15 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous What does one move onto after building what we called at one time “the most gorgeous photosharing app yet” and selling it to Facebook? For Divvyshot co-founder Sam Odio, its a new startup focused on analytics called Freshplum. Along with Odio, co-founders Michael Yuan and Nick Alexander are announcing a $1.4M seed round of funding from some pretty impressive investors: New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Greylock Partners, Google Ventures and Charles River Ventures. If those firms weren’t enough, there are a few current and former executives from Google, PayPal and Facebook participating as well. Read the full article on TNW Custora (YC S11) has analyzed $10 billion in retail sales so far in 2012 Posted about 14 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous Companies looking to monitor their web presence interactions have no shortage of analytics service providers to turn to. But in most cases, what they’ll get when they do set up an analytics solution is a database of numbers, which still have to be crunched by data scientists before they can be turned over to frontline staff and used to drive customer interaction policy and action. Custora, a startup looking to provide online retailers with insight about their customers, wants to shorten the loop on data gathered by organizing its analytics around questions rather than spreadsheets in its new 2.0 release. Read the full article in Betakit Hated It: 10 Actors Who Hated Their Own Films Posted about 16 hours ago by mental_floss to Holy Kaw! When actors have a movie out, it’s customary that they publicize the film by saying nice things about it. David Cross recently took a different approach. When it came to describing his new film Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, the veteran comedian — better known for Mr. Show and Arrested Development — went on Conan and called the film a “big commercial for Carnival Cruise Lines” and told people not to go see it. Here are 10 other actors who starred in films they weren’t crazy about. 1. Sylvester Stallone, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Sly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to his film career. Despite co-starring with the delightful Estelle Getty as the titular violence-prone mother, Stallone knows just how bad the film was: “I made some truly awful movies. Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was the worst. If you ever want someone to confess to murder, just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.” 2. Alec Guinness, Star Wars. By the time he played Obi-Wan Kenobi in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope, Guinness had already appeared in cinematic classics like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Great Expectations and Lawrence of Arabia. During production, Guinness is reported to have said the following: “Apart from the money, I regret having embarked on the film. I like them well enough, but it’s not an acting job, the dialogue – which is lamentable – keeps being changed and only slightly improved, and I find myself old and out of touch with the young.” The insane amount of fame he won for the role as the wise old Jedi master took him somewhat by surprise and, ultimately, annoyed him. In his autobiography A Positively Final Appearance: A Journal, Guinness recalls a time he encountered an autograph-seeking fan who boasted to him about having watched Star Wars more than 100 times. In response, Guinness agreed to provide the boy an autograph under the condition that he promise never to watch the film again. 3. George Clooney, Batman & Robin. Sure, Batman & Robin made money. But by every other imaginable measure, the film was a complete failure, and a nightmare to the vast majority of the Caped Crusader’s most fervent fanatics. Star George Clooney recognized what a stinker he helped create and once plainly stated, “I think we might have killed the franchise.” 4. Bob Hoskins, Super Mario Brothers. He was in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. As far as I’m concerned, Bob Hoskins is forgiven for Super Mario Bros. Hoskins, though, doesn’t seem to be able to forgive himself. Last year the Guardian spoke with the veteran actor about his career and he summed up his feelings rather succinctly: What is the worst job you’ve done? Super Mario Brothers. What has been your biggest disappointment? Super Mario Brothers. If you could edit your past, what would you change? I wouldn’t do Super Mario Brothers. See the rest at mental_floss. All the top stories from mental_floss. Citus Data (YC S11) makes scalable data analytics available to anyone, raises $1.6M from Trinity, others Posted about 13 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous As companies from small startups to large enterprise continue to generate an ever-increasing amount of data, the demand for affordable and scalable databases also increases. Typically, this market has been the domain of large vendors like Oracle, but besides them and the usual open-source players, we’ve also seen a growing number of closed-source startups enter this space. Citus Data, which is launching version 1.0 of its CitusDB today, is the latest startup to challenge these incumbents. ...  The company, which has received a total of $1.6 million in seed funding, is based in Silicon Valley, with an additional office in Istanbul, Turkey. Among the seed investors are Trinity Ventures, Digital Garage, Matt Ocko, Ben Ling and Paul Buchheit. The founders are industry veterans who previously worked at Amazon and other companies that had to deal with large amounts of data since the early days of the web. The team has been working on the product for about two years now and already has a number of customers who are using CitusDB in a production environment. Read the full article on Techcrunch Clever (YC S12) launches a Twilio for education data Posted about 12 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous We’re all a bit tired of the “X is Twilio for Y” brand of analogies (though it’s refreshing to see more of Twilio in this equation than Airbnb these days), but if ever there were an industry in need of some modern, standardizing APIs it would be education. Thankfully, Clever, a San Francisco-based startup and member of Y Combinator’s current batch, is today launching a solution that brings some of the Twilio vision to education. Read the full article on Techcrunch Sendhub (YC W12) adds voice calls and voicemail - now the easiest way to get an extra phone number for your business Posted about 11 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous SendHub, the messaging startup that allows businesses to communicate with customers through SMS, is expanding its service today to include support for voice calls and voicemail. These new features put SendHub in more direct competition with Google Voice, as users will now be able to use their SendHub phone numbers to both make and receive phones calls, while keeping their personal cell numbers private. Although the company only has an iPhone application and online service currently, these voice calls can be initiated and received on any device that supports messaging – even on feature phones. Read the full article on Techcrunch Coinbase (YC S12) launches the PayPal of Internet-Only currency, making it easy to transact Bitcoin Posted about 10 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous Does an Internet-only currency — not backed by any government entity — have a chance to become the way merchants and consumers transact business? Coinbase not only believes so, but it has talked investors into giving it some start-up capital to build a much easier way for nontechnical users to pay with Bitcoin. Read the full article on AllThingsD Tagstand (YC S11) hits 1M NFC actions, offers popular Android Task Launcher app for free Posted about 15 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous Last night, Google showcased Beam’s new functionality with two apps, Paper Camera and Tagstand’s Task Launcher. Y Combinator-backed Tagstand, in particular, has been on a mission to make NFC more of a mainstream technology and is starting to pick up steam as a result. Tagstand co-founder Kulveer Taggar tells us that the startup saw a big jump in demand when the NFC-equipped Galaxy Nexus hit stores, so they rebuilt Task Launcher to include a bunch of new features — and a new interface — in March. Sales picked up almost immediately, and they went on to sell as many tags in March as they did during the entire month of June 2011 (when the app launched). Read the full article on Techcrunch No leakage in this Empire Posted about 14 hours ago by Kate Rinsema to Holy Kaw! 1 Rebel forces hoping to catch the enemy with their pants down might be in luck in the galaxy where the Huggies AT-ATs roam, but beware the secret weapons. Stay-at-home mom, Kelly, decided to fight back against a growing pile of diaper boxes with a healthy dose of creativity and probably a not-so-healthy dose of cabin fever. Being the great mom she is, she let her son destroy this fabulous creation three days later, but her work will live on online. Full story at Offbeat Mom via Technabob. Star Wars moms are special. How the Black Belt went blue: Ancient geology and modern politics Posted about 8 hours ago by Kate Rinsema to Holy Kaw! 1 Though states in the southern United States often lean red with a vengeance, a river of blue runs through the region when it comes to presidential elections. But why? Questions of modern politics don’t often look to ancient geology for their answers, but Dr. M at Deep Sea News has done just that and come up with a fascinating theory as to how an ancient coast line turned what’s known as the Black Belt – originally for the color of its soil – predominantly blue. Full story at Deep Sea News via Boing Boing. Weird science. Kicksend (YC S11) gets named among Gizmodo's Top Android Apps Posted about 6 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous Kicksend: It's easy use your phone to share just one photo or video to a friend, but what about an entire set? Kicksend lets you send large batches of photos and videos to your friends in one fell swoop. Free Read the full article on gizmodo.com 半分 Posted about 5 hours ago by Koichi Mitsui to s a s u r a u 2 あと半分。 Sent by Posterous. Change your email settings or unfollow. Other questions? We'd love to help.