The world’s largest Lite Brite image

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A brite artistic statement.

Rob Surette send us this image of his latest art project: the world’s largest Lite Brite creation! The work is titled “World Peace” and features American faces on the left and faces the rest of the world on the right, gazing at each other in friendship. The piece is 20 feet long and 10 feet high, and contains 504,000 Lite Brite pegs!

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SF Bay Area’s Pacific Pinball Museum

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Pinball machines are a glimpse into our historic arcade past.

The Bay Area’s Alameda Island is home to the Pacific Pinball Museum, a decade-old non-profit “dedicated to teaching science, art and history through pinball, and to preserve and promote one of America’s great pastimes.” The Bay Citizen spoke with founder Michael Schiess. From the Bay Citizen:

Disappointed by other museums’ pinball offerings, Mr. Schiess started snapping up the machines in 2001, buying 36 all at once. He installed 14 of them in a room that he rented for $400 in Alameda and put out a donation jar. In 2004, Lucky Ju Ju, as the arcade was then called, expanded to become the Pacific Pinball Museum, a nonprofit, and instituted a $15 admission. It now features 90 machines; most are free to play, but a few are for display only…

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Telex: an infrastructure-level response to state Internet censorship

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J. Alex Halderman and his colleagues have unveiled Telex, a “state-level response to state-level censorship.” It’s a network of censorship-busting major ISPs that provide infrastructure-level, hard-to-detect proxying that allows people in repressive regimes to get access to sites blocked by their national firewalls. The descriptive materials on the site are very easy to grasp and very exciting…

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Android App displays brain waves via wireless headband

Here’s an experimental app that can measure your brain waves. This wireless device embraces the head, clips onto an earlobe, and measures neural activity and pulse. The results are sent to an gaming app installed on an Android smartphone, which displays graphs and info about the state of the brain during a 30-second test…

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China shut down 1.3 million websites 2010

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More than one million websites closed down in China last year, a state-run think tank has said.

China claims that they offer a “high level of freedom” for online speech. Hah! I don’t know what world they live in because in our world, the real world, China has shut down 1.3 million websites and routinely block websites.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the state-run organization who reported the figure, also said that there were were 41% less websites at the end of 2010 than a year earlier. It’s like they don’t want the Internet to grow…

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5 legal considerations for your Social Media Campaign

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Good choices in your Social Media decisions can certainly result in fewer legal headaches.

Most companies enjoy the benefits of having a social media presence, but not every company also appreciates the legal risks that can lurk there. Companies have run into legal problems, and been forced to defend their social media campaigns in public, in front of regulators or in courts.

All of this, however, can be mediated with a little knowledge and forethought. Although each social media campaign should be evaluated individually, there are at least five legal considerations every company should note…

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Can’t decide on a tattoo? Get a QR Code inked on your chest!

As part of whisky brand Ballantine’s “Leave an Impression” campaign, Paris-based tattoo artist Karl Marc seared a QR code onto his friend Marco’s chest.

Marc says the whisky company approached him and asked if he would be interested in executing the tattoo — a QR code that unlocked an animation when scanned — via a live stream on the brand’s Facebook Page. The brand is doing similar events with other artists, from ice sculptors to graffiti artists…

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High Tech Specs may change the way we see the world

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Perspective changing glasses are coming soon.

Imagine glasses that can read body language and offer suggestions about how you should respond, or goggles which can scan faces and call up criminal databases to find a real time match. These snazzy high tech specs aren’t just science fiction props anymore, and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are sure that their “social x-ray specs” are going to find a multitude of uses in society, from communicating more effectively with Autistic people to becoming human lie detectors and much more.

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Free “Pocket Penguins” app offers live views of endangered penguins 24/7

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Pocket Penguins app will keep you up to date on penguins any time.

If you love penguins, this app is perfect for you. California Academy of Sciences has a highly popular African penguin exhibit, and now they’ve added cameras to it so that even if you can’t visit CAS, you can watch the penguins all day, any day, even from an underwater vantage point which I’m sure is amazing during feeding time.

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HOWTO clean LPs, DVDs, and CDs

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REALLY close up of a vinyl groove.

I’ve recently picked up several old vinyl LPs at thrift stores and garage sales. My musical taste is very eclectic, but these discs have one big thing in common: they’re all filthy. Similarly, we have dozens of kids DVDs and CDs in our house coated in toddler goo that would almost certainly beat the adhesive that holds the tiles on the space shuttle. This weekend, I plan to brew up a cauldron of the cleaning solution used by the master preservationists at the Library of Congress. Or maybe I’ll just go with Ivory dish soap, warm water, and an old t-shirt. Anyway, here’s the LoC’s recipe..

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.