Archive for the ‘Shared News’ Category
February 4th, 2010
Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, went on a quest to find out why some people seem to develop massive levels of talent while others do not. His major thesis was that myelin (glial cells), which are fatty deposits that form protective sheaths around nerve fibers (axons) throughout your neuronal network, allow electrochemical impulses to travel much more quickly. The more layers of myelin that develop, the better.
He equated this build-up of myelin as the difference between possessing a broadband or dial-up Internet connection. What's even more significant about this is that impulses seem to jump from one myelin node to the next so they do not have to travel the entire distance that it would have to on a non-myelinated network. For people who achieve high levels of ability this build-up occurs through slow and fast deliberate practice of actions repeated thousands of times.
But that is just the ‘science' behind his book. Anyone who has had a General Psychology, Anatomy and Physiology course or has read any books about the brain knows this information. To me, the most fascinating part of his book dealt with the people and more importantly the environments they developed their talents in.
One of the chapters dealt with how Brazil became a powerhouse in soccer. On a visit, Coyle describes what he observed when walking through one block in a city in Brazil. He counted 50 symbols, before he gave up, of how much the sport is revered. He saw boys walking down the street juggling soccer balls with their feet, people watching a soccer match in a pub and men and teenagers playing a mini-form of soccer called futsal on what looked like a basketball court. The environment is geared toward the one thing that a soccer fan or practitioner loves most and that is soccer.
Making it Personal
For your main passion, how often do you find yourself in an immersive environment such as the one Coyle describes? Common folk wisdom such as "birds of a feather flock together" and "if you lay down with dogs you'll get fleas" is abundant and warns us about the negative consequences of associating with the wrong crowd or being in a ‘bad' environment. Yet, how often do we remind ourselves that we should always be searching for the optimal environment to advance our own interests?
At times, as long as the environment isn't overtly ‘hurting' our progress we may overlook the fact that it isn't helping to increase our development, nourish our talent or prod us to increase our capabilities. But this approach doesn't promote the growth and excellence that many of us are searching for if we find ourselves in non-optimal environs.
Final Thought
If your quest for excellence has you puzzling on what to do next, maybe finding or developing an optimal environment may be the spark you need.
Bakari Akil II, Ph.D. is the author of Super You! 101 Ways to Maximize your Potential! You can also check out his page on Twitter.
February 2nd, 2010
1468: Johannes Gutenberg dies in Mainz, Germany. His name lives on.
Gutenberg made one contribution to technology in particular and to civilization in general, but it was a doozy. The printing press made the mass production of printed material possible and revolutionized human communication.
Gutenberg was born in Mainz sometime between 1394 and 1400 — his actual birth date is uncertain. A goldsmith by trade, he borrowed money from local businessmen to develop a printing press that used movable, replaceable letters made from cast metal.
Although movable type existed in China as early as the 11th century, Gutenberg’s printing press began a chain of events that altered the social and scientific history of Europe.
His press was inspired by the screw-type wine presses then common in the fertile Rhine Valley. He essentially mechanized the craft of woodblock printing, a painstaking, time-consuming process. His technology continued evolving over the centuries, and with these refinements Gutenberg’s invention has remained the cornerstone of printing to this day.
Gutenberg began using his printing press in the 1450s to produce what has come down to us as the Gutenberg Bible, a beautifully executed, two-volume folio that would have taken a talented monk months, if not years, to complete by hand. Copies of this bible sold for 30 florins, an enormous sum of money at the time.
Only 180 copies were printed, and 48 known copies still exist, in whole or part. The Library of Congress has one and the British Library two.
A 1987 auction of a Gutenberg Bible brought $4.9 million (more than $9 million in today’s green). And that was for a Volume 1 alone.
Source: About.com, Gutenberg.de
Photo: The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C, holds this Gutenberg Bible.
An earlier version of this article appeared on Wired.com Feb. 3, 2007.
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February 2nd, 2010
The head of the screw you stripped while you were hanging that shelf may not have seemed like a big deal at the time—until you needed to unscrew it, that is. Next time you're having trouble, try a rubber band.
Home hacks and design blog Apartment Therapy offers a a few simple, smart tips for removing a stripped screw without any special equipment like an extractor—like using a rubber band:
A rubber band may aid in providing enough grip to remove, or at least loosen, the screw. Place a wide band rubber band inbetween the screw driver (we recommend bumping one size up from the screw head which caused the strip) and the screw, then apply hard, but slow force as you turn. If you're fortunate, the rubber band will fill in the gaps caused by the strip and allow extraction.
They also suggest more obvious solutions like changing the size of your screwdriver, using a pliers when possible, or just pounding the screwdriver into the screw head with a hammer, hoping you can create your own traction. If you've ever tried the rubber band trick—or have your own favorite method—let's hear how it worked in the comments. If your screw's just fine but your screw hole is stripped, a golf tee may be all you need.
January 30th, 2010
We’re not going to see the iPad hit stores for another two months, but it is already changing the ebook game and forcing publishers and consumers to pick sides.
Last night, several blogs including Venturebeat and NYT’s Bits Blog noticed something was amiss on the website of the world’s largest retailer: Amazon suddenly stopped selling books from Macmillan, one of the world’s largest book publishers.
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January 18th, 2010
1983: Apple releases the Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) — the advance that would finally make computers usable by people with no special training. It doesn’t sell well, but it does get Apple on the right development track, sparks the first of many brawls with perpetual rival Microsoft, and sets in motion the animus between Steve Jobs and John Sculley that would frame the company’s history for a decade.
Sure — you’re all fancy now with that multitouch iPhone. You wiggle and writhe like an idiot to operate your Nintendo Wii. Maybe you’ve got your eye on a breath-controlled laptop — because using a mouse to work on your computer is so 20th-century. But you owe it all to one of Apple’s earliest and most magnificent failures.
Apple revolutionized computing with the Macintosh of “1984? TV-ad fame — the world’s first affordable GUI computer. But a year earlier Lisa set the stage. It was one of the company’s most glorious missteps, one without which the Mac may not have succeeded as dramatically as Lisa had failed.
“The Lisa was doomed because it was basically a prototype — an overpriced, underpowered cobbled-together ramshackle Mac,” Cult of Mac author (and former Wired.com editor) Leander Kahney said in an e-mail interview. “Lisa taught the Mac team they’d need to articulate a clear purpose for the Mac.”
Apple spent $150 million developing Lisa but sold only 10,000 of them in a world dominated by cheaper IBM desktops. With an outrageous price tag of $10,000 (more than $21,000 in today’s leaf), the Lisa’s built-in calculator could tell you Apple lost a lot of money.
Lisa’s specs were improved and the price cut in half, but the plug was pulled in only three years. And — oh yeah — Apple co-founder Jobs got kicked off the Lisa team by CEO Scully and went to another project. The Macintosh. See above. Jobs, of course, would be pushed out by Sculley in 1985 only to get his revenge by returning the favor 10 years later.
Before Lisa — the name was the acronym for “Local Integrated Software Architecture” and possibly the daughter of someone on the development team (Jobs had a daughter named Lisa) — the only user interface was the command line, the only input was a keyboard, and the only display was some lines of off-white text on a black screen. Microsoft’s somewhat approachable DOS (Disc Operating System) had been around for a couple of years, but that only simplified the command set, not the input technique.
Lisa changed all that. Its screen displayed little pictures — icons. Moving the mouse on your work surface moved a cursor in a spatially equivalent way on the screen. When your cursor hovered on an icon you clicked a soon-to-be-iconic one-button mouse, and a program would start, as if by magic.
Not so magical was the dearth of software for Lisa, which was not compatible with any other computer in the world. Lisa shipped with seven programs, and not much else got written for it during its brief stint in the Apple product line, which (price aside) contributed to its lack of traction.
Though Lisa was first to market, the GUI was not exactly an Apple innovation. Jobs got a look at the very first computer with a graphical user interface during a tour of the storied Xerox PARC lab. This was a turning point, according to invention historian Mary Bellis: Even though work on Lisa had already begun, Jobs would hire several PARC engineers to join the Lisa (and later Mac) team.
Apple sued when Microsoft released Windows 1.0, arguing that its once and future nemesis had stolen the “look and feel” of Lisa’s OS. According to Andy Hertzfeld, who says he witnessed an exchange between Jobs and Bill Gates at the 1983 Comdex industry trade show, the Microsoft co-founder expressed the nuanced view that both companies had stolen the idea — from PARC.
From Hertzfeld’s account:
“You’re ripping us off!” Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!”
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Xerox itself had an early incarnation of a machine that had some GUI functionality — the Star — and Lisa’s developers said they were informed by that less-than-successful commercial attempt, to a point. In an interview with Byte in October 1982, three months before the Lisa came out, Wayne Rosing, Bruce Daniels and Larry Tessler were asked about the Xerox Star:
BYTE: Do you have a Xerox Star here that you work with?
Tesler: No, we didn’t have one here. We went to the NCC when the Star was announced and looked at it. And in fact it did have an immediate impact. A few months after looking at it we made some changes to our user interface based on ideas that we got from it. For example, the desktop manager we had before was completely different; it didn’t use icons at all, and we never liked it very much. We decided to change ours to the icon base. That was probably the only thing we got from the Star, I think. Most of our Xerox inspiration was Smalltalk rather than Star.
BYTE: What does Lisa have that the Star doesn’t have?
Tesler: We’re talking about graphics capability. You originally asked why we didn’t use graphics hardware. Our graphics primitives in software are more general than the Star’s, so they perform better. We have a faster and more general ability to draw on the screen a picture of multiple graphical objects in different shapes, to have one window that uncovers another, and to repaint just the parts that are uncovered.
Daniels: Look at the desktop managers of the Star and Lisa. With the Star, you can only put them at fixed places on the screen so you know they don’t ever overlap. On ours, you can put them any place you want. It’s that generality that allows I us to have arbitrarily shaped things I and covering each other up and…
BYTE: Documents or forms, shapes, or anything…
Daniels: Yes.
Tesler: Right. We have curves in it. Everything in the Star, you’ll notice, is really rectangular, and our things can have curved edges and that sort of thing.
Apart from some specialized contexts GUIs are the norm now in computing. Microsoft has considerably more copies of its GUI in customer hands than Apple — yet another instance of the first to market not becoming the dominant player. And while it would be Mac that captured the public’s imagination, he might not have had quite the swagger without lessons he learned from his awkward older sister.
“Although it was a technical and commercial flop, Lisa was important because it was the progenitor of the Mac,” says Kahney. “Apple screwed up the Lisa, but without it, there would be no Macintosh.”
Source: Various
Lisa advertisement courtesy Apple
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January 13th, 2010
Netbooks are a great compromise between pecking away a smartphone keyboard or hauling a tank-size laptop around—but they aren't without shortcomings. Make the most of your netbook with these netbook-friendly tips, tricks, and applications.
Although often derided for being under-powered and a poor substitute for a full laptop, netbooks fill a nice niche. They're tough to beat for portable browsing, note taking, and mobile computing when a laptop is over kill, the battery life is too short, and using your phone is impractical or uncomfortable. Still, you can do a lot to make life with a netbook easier.
Accept the Hardware Limitations and Tweak When Possible
Netbooks are limited and you can't be happy using one unless you accept that. Watching video on it won't be like watching video on a 24" widescreen monitor. It won't run Crysis. You're not going to be single-handedly solving complex protein-folding operations on it and curing cancer. Nearly every netbook has a fairly standard cookie-cutter spec sheet of a 1024x600 pixel screen, a 160GB HDD, 1GB of RAM, and a modest mobile processor.
If you already own a netbook, the best thing you can do is shell out $30-60 and upgrade the 1GB of RAM to 2GB of RAM. It's a cheap enough upgrade and it provides a significant performance boost. If you're shopping for a netbook, the best advice we can give is to focus on two things: battery life and the physical inputs, like the spacing of the keyboard and arrangement of secondary buttons—physical design is about the only thing distinguishing one netbook from another these days.
Strip Your Netbook of Bloat and Crapware
Computer manufacturers love to stockpile their pristine machines with all sorts of crapware. Fortunately, for the most part, netbook manufacturers aren't too extreme with this practice. Given the already underpowered nature of the machines they sell, we'd imagine they're paranoid about bogging it down with too much crapware. Nonetheless, it's still worth your time to give your netbook a solid run through the decrapification-gauntlet. Photo by Fabio Bruna.
You can dig through the bloatware and delete it manually, but some bloatware—we're looking at you Norton Anti-Virus trial!—is a huge pain to remove by hand. Fortunately applications have been created that are specifically tailored to giving bloatware the boot, like PC Decrapifier—seen in the screenshot above. PC Decrapifier is great for any new computer including netbooks and will help you get rid of applications like Norton Anti-Virus, Microsoft Office Trial Edition, and other annoyances.
One caveat regarding gutting the crapware from your new netbook: Although 90 percent of the junk that is installed is in fact junk, be careful not to delete software that actually does something useful. For example, on my Asus Eee netbook there were two very similar programs with similar Eee branded names. One was a useful aggressive battery monitoring application designed to squeeze even more life out of my 6-cell battery and the other was a fairly useless application dock only for Eee netbook apps. Had I blanket nuked all the installed apps, I'd have kicked out the useful battery tool with the rest of the junk.
Once you've booted the factory-fresh crapware off your netbook, it's really important to keep things clean for optimal future performance. If a little bit of crapware and software creep slows down your beefy desktop a tiny bit, a little on your netbook will definitely gum up the works. Make sure to install an application like CCleaner—a favorite among Lifehacker readers—and run it on a schedule to keep things clean.
Learn to Love Full-Screen Mode and Keyboard Shortcuts
You might have a nice spacious monitor at home and never even think to switch to full screen mode, but on a netbook using full screen mode is an absolute must. The screenshot above shows a comparison between running Firefox in regular mode and running Firefox in fullscreen mode, displaying the Lifehacker homepage. Between the title bar, menu bar, tabbed sites, and the Windows start bar, around 40% of the screen gets chewed up. The same kind of situation exists when you load popular word processors like Microsoft Word and other office applications. Most software designers are simply not designing for small screens anymore; netbooks generally have a 1024x600 resolution, which is nearly 200 pixels shorter than the already quite small 1024x768 standard monitor size that most designers keep in mind when creating toolbar and site layouts.
Unfortunately no standard exists for which a keyboard shortcut will switch an application to full screen mode. Check the menu bar in your application or hit up Google with a "myapplication fullscreen shortcut" query to find it. The full-screen shortcuts for a few common applications are: Firefox/IE/Opera/Chrome - F11 (press again to return to normal view) and Microsoft Office - ALT+V+U (press ESC to return to normal view).
In addition to searching for individual and specific keyboard shortcuts to help with things like full-screen mode, it's worthwhile to extend your knowledge of shortcuts even further—typing on a reduced size keyboard and mousing on a small trackpad can be rough on your hands. If you extend the range of your Google queries from just the keyboard shortcut to something like "myapplication without a mouse" or "myapplication keyboard shortcut guide" you'll find gems like this guide to using the Opera web browser completely sans-mouse—or our own guide to mouse-less Firefox. Photo by Declan TM.
The best thing about improving your keyboard chops with the netbook is that all the new shortcuts you learn are transferable to your main workstation. For more information on handy keyboard shortcuts, application tricks involving keyboard shortcuts, and how to make them if your application lacks for them, take a stroll through the archives of the keyboard shortcuts tag here at Lifehacker.
Select Applications with a Netbook-Centric Attitude
Selecting applications for a netbook is a lot like packing for a camping trip. When you pack for a camping trip you select things for your pack that are efficient and lightweight versions of things you use every day at home, and you also pack things that are distinctly related to camping that you'd never use at home. Photo by ??? the Nictoyking.
For example, you may use Firefox loaded down with 1,001 extensions on your quad-core home computer but opt to run Firefox with only one or two critical extensions or Google Chrome on your netbook. Also, just like with camping, selecting lightweight tools that are multifunction is valuable. Why use a bloated media application when something snappy and light like open-source VLC can take care of all your movie and music needs? In the same vein, look for ways to ditch software that is known for being bloated and resource hungry, like swapping out Adobe-gonna-eat-all-y'RAMs-Reader with FoxIt Reader. If you're unsure where to start when it comes to selecting lightweight software, you might want to check out past Lifehacker Hive Five topics. Lifehacker readers tend to gravitate towards the fastest and lightest-weight solutions even when constraints like using a netbook aren't brought into the equation.
Aside from searching out lightweight versions of applications your normally use, the netbook also benefits from applications you'd likely never use on a desktop computer.
Netbooks, for example, make pretty handy ebooks. They're full color, they have no annoying DRM or restrictions, and they're lightweight with a long battery life. I've been experimenting with using my netbook as an ebook reader and don't have any complaints to log. If your netbook doesn't already support screen rotation, you can easily remedy that situation by downloading EeeRotate—in use in the screenshot above. The tiny application allows you to rotate your screen using CTRL+ALT+RIGHT (you can rotate it so that you hold the netbook with the screen on your right or left hand side) and it reverses the axis of the mouse so you can still use your mouse without hassle. Pressing CTRL+ALT+UP will return the screen to normal.
If you're a Gmail user, you'll definitely want to enable Offline Gmail to allow you to compose emails in Gmail when you're between wireless hotspots and unable to access the net. If you're not a Gmail user it's worth downloading an full-fledged email client like Thunderbird and configuring it to use your web-based email so you can enjoy the same functionality.
Even if your keyboard chops are up to par, it's still a pain to launch applications on a netbook. Although I've yet to install Launchy—as much as I love it!—on my main Windows 7 desktop, most netbooks run Windows XP and Launchy can go a long way towards making application launching pleasant on the tiny keyboard and touchpad. Check out our guide to doing more with Launchy here.
Being able to shuttle files between your main workstation and your netbook, as well as keeping them backed up, is a must. Dropbox is a valuable addition to your netbook for this task. It's lightweight, it's fast, and for most users the free account is more than adequate. While writing this article I used Dropbox multiple times to easily toss screenshots and installation files between my netbook and desktop and as I took notes about the netbook—on the netbook!—I saved the .TXT file to Dropbox. Check out how to use Dropbox for more than just file syncing here.
Netbooks serve as an excellent go-between tool for lightweight and portable notetaking and web browsing, especially with the proper tweaking and software selection. While our list of tweaks and software suggestions is long, it's certainly not exhaustive. If you have a netbook of your own, it's time to sound off in the comments with your tips, tricks, and favorite applications for maximizing your netbook's capabilities.
January 11th, 2010
Windows/Mac/Linux: When it comes to time management methods, some love David Allen's Getting Things Done approach while others swear by Stephen Covey's First Things First philosophy. Whichever you prefer, TimeGT aims to keep you on track and on target.
(Click the image above for a closer look.)
TimeGT works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, but to get started you'll need to register for a free account on the web site and then download the app. It comes pre-populated with some sample data so you can play around and get a feel for how TimeGT works before you dive in and add your own stuff.
Adding tasks is a simple affair, and they're easily sorted and searched once they're in your system. Hunt around for action items via tag, context (@home, @work), order of importance, or deadline. Filter tasks according to project, urgency, things your waiting for, or things you hope to get around to one day—the sky's the limit.
TimeGT sets itself apart from other time management apps thanks to its ability to adapt to different user needs. Not everyone cares about being able to group tasks according to where they happen to be at the moment, while others don't have a need to prioritize tasks according to level of importance. This app is a veritable buffet of options that will appeal to all but the choosiest of users.
TimeGT's basic version is free, but the premium version that allows users to sync and back up data will set you back $7.99 (£4.95) a month. What dream features do you look for in a time management app? Talk about them in the comments.
January 6th, 2010
Ever wonder why some planes leave trails of smoke and others don’t? Is it just that certain commercial jetliners are trying out some geometric skywriting while others can’t be bothered?
Actually the answer is much more complicated. First of all, those long trails you see sometimes coming off the back of planes, or from their wings, isn’t smoke at all. It’s more like what you see when you exhale on a cold winter day and see your breath.
Contrails, as the lines are called, are formed when the hot, humid air coming out of the jet exhaust mixes with low vapor pressure in cold temperatures. I’m talking cold like the kind of cold that usually exists 26,000 feet up or higher. This is completely different from the real smoke planes use when they sky-write.
As you’ve probably noticed, some contrails will remain in the air for quite some time, while others dissipate more quickly. It all depends on how humid the air is and how windy it is up there. If the atmosphere is near saturation, the contrail may hang around for hours. But if the atmosphere is dry, they usually only last a few minutes, spreading out, thinning, and then, poof! They’re gone. Unless, of course, they’re captured by a talented photographer…
Photo credits (all used under Creative Commons license.):
Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3, Photo 4, Photo 5, Photo 6
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January 5th, 2010
Now that it’s January, it’s time to prepare for two things: the NFL playoffs and terrifyingly low wind chill reports. What does it really mean when my weatherman is telling me that it feels like minus-20 in Chicago, though? Is there a wind chill thermometer somewhere, or is he just using a mathematical formula? Let’s answer these and some of the other pressing questions about the ubiquitous winter statistic.
1. Why does wind make us feel cold?
When the wind blows across the exposed surface of our skin, it draws heat away from our bodies. When the wind picks up speed, it draws more heat away, so if your skin is exposed to the wind, your body will cool more quickly than it would have on a still day.
2. Who came up with the idea of calculating wind chills?
American explorer and geographer Paul Siple and his fellow explorer Charles Passel made the first breakthroughs in wind chill research while on an expedition in the Antarctic in 1940. Siple and Passel suspended bottles of water outside a hut at their base station and measured how long it took the water to freeze under various wind conditions. After taking hundreds of these readings, the pair had a good idea of how rapidly heat was lost at different wind speeds.
3. What exactly is a wind chill temperature?
When Siple and Passel did their research, they weren’t really trying to develop a temperature equivalent that alarmist weathermen could trot out. In fact, their original measure expressed the heat loss in a more esoteric unit: watts per square meter.
The idea of expressing wind chills in terms of an equivalent temperature—the “feels like” language we hear on the news—didn’t start until the 1970s. Before the switch, weathermen would report the wind chill in three- or four-digit numbers which were a bit difficult for viewers to wrap their heads around. American weathermen started translating wind chills into temperature equivalents in order to give viewers a more familiar term.
4. If the air temperature is 40 degrees but the wind chill is 28 degrees, will water freeze?
Nope. Although high winds can make those of us with a pulse feel more miserable than normal, they don’t have the same effect on inanimate objects. Lower wind chills mean that inanimate objects cool to the air temperature more quickly, but even high winds can’t force the object’s temperature below the air temperature. That means that in the above example even though your skin might think it’s 28 degrees, your water pipes will still be a balmy 40 degrees.
5. So is there an actual formula for wind chill?
You bet. Just in case you ever find yourself with a calculator, thermometer, and anemometer but without access to The Weather Channel, the Fahrenheit version of the equation looks like this:
Wind Chill = 35.74 + 0.6215T – 35.75(V^0.16) + 0.4275T(V^0.16)
T is the air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, and V is the wind speed in miles per hour.
6. Wait, shouldn’t how cold the wind makes you feel depend on all sorts of variables like your body type, and whether you’re walking into the wind?
Those things certainly affect how quickly the wind cools a person’s skin. The above formula makes some simplifying assumptions to get its numbers. Basically, the wind chill factor you hear reported assumes that your exposed face is roughly five feet off the ground, it’s night, and you’re walking directly into the wind in an open field at a clip of about 3 mph.
7. Are those conditions really all that realistic?
If you’re in a profession that involves a lot of night-field-walking, sure. Otherwise, maybe not. Critics of wind chill reports note that lots of factors can mitigate the reported wind chill. Your weatherman may tell you that it feels like 50 below outside, but if you’re dressed warmly, standing in the sun, or in an area with cover like buildings and trees that block the wind, you will feel significantly warmer.
8. So if the formula is arguably somewhat dubious, can we just disregard wind chill reports as frivolous statistics?
Not so fast. While the methodology concerning wind chill calculations is still being debated in some quarters, that doesn’t mean that the measurements are altogether useless. Remember, the basic concept behind wind chill is that stronger winds will cause exposed skin to cool more quickly. The faster skin cools, the faster frostbite can set it. As wind chills drop south of -50 or so, the onset of frostbite can take as little as five minutes, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the wind chill even if the notion of your skin “feeling like” a certain temperature may be a bit misleading.
9. Has the formula always been the same?
The above formula is actually a fairly new development that the National Weather Service introduced in late 2001. During the year 2000, the National Weather Service and its Canadian counterpart had independently started looking for ways to improve the wind chill formula, partially because they had a sneaking suspicion the old formula overstated just how cold it was. This overstatement may sound innocuous, but the weather services worried that it would lull citizens into a false sense of security if it led people to believe they could withstand colder temperatures than they realistically could.
Since the collaborating weather services knew that the old wind chill formula was broken—“feels like -50” actually felt much warmer than standing around on a windless 50-below day—they recruited a group of volunteers to walk on treadmills in a refrigerated wind tunnel. Using sensors on the subjects’ skin, scientists calculated a more accurate formula. You can read one of the test subjects’ thoughts on the experiments here.
10. What’s the lowest wind chill ever recorded?
With all of the tweaks in the formula over the years, it’s tough to say definitively, but how’s this for chilly: on July 4, 2003, a remote weather station in east Antarctica picked up a minus-94 degree day. That would be plenty frigid on its own, but the wind was also blowing at 75 miles per hour, which would be good for a wind chill of about minus-150.
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January 4th, 2010
If you need to make diagrams, wire frames, network charts, and more but you don't have much experience with graphic design, Cacoo makes chart creation as simple as drag and drop.
Cacoo has a huge library of icons you can drag and drop to create site maps, flow charts, mind maps, and more. You can easily align them to each other, connect them with lines and arrows, and easily rearrange them. Cacoo supports multiple users, so you can edit your creation in real time with other team members. You can also export your creations or embed them into your blog or wiki—edits you make to the original will be reflected in the embedded item. Check out the video below to see Cacoo in action.
Want to try out other online chart-creation tools? Check out previously reviewed Gliffy, Lovely Charts, and Creately for other ways to create charts and diagrams. Have a favorite tool of your own to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.
