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Practice Makes Perfect: A Quick Tip for Making Money

Entrepreneur Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a successful Chicago-based software and design firm that has doubled its sales every year for the past decade. Although Fried has a degree in finance, making money isn't a skill he picked up in the classroom or a book. Practice makes perfect, and Fried's experience has taught him that excelling at making money is separate from the product or services provided. Understanding the buyer and experimenting with price models are two of Fried's ke...

News: Building a Bonafide Solar Death Ray Sounds Too Easy

Eric Jacqmain is one smart cookie. Borrowing from the same principles of Archimedes’ mythological death ray, the Indiana teenager used an ordinary fiberglass satellite dish and about 5,800 3/8" mirror tiles to create a solar weapon with the intensity of 5000x normal daylight. The powerful weapon can "melt steel, vaporize aluminum, boil concrete, turn dirt into lava, and obliterate any organic material in an instant."

How To: Hot Wheels! Workshop Teaches Kids How to Steal Cars

It may look like a modern take on Oliver Twist but, we assure you, this is for real. Before you get too alarmed, however, you should note that the headline reads "how to steal cars" and not simply "to steal cars." We are, after all, dealing with the fine people at Machine Project, a Los Angeles-based non-profit community space organized around the investigation of "art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food."

News: 80s SF/Fantasy Revival

The Writers at io9.com have been running through a fantastic series of blog posts, in which they're teaching their readers about the history of great 80s sci-fi and fantasy. Because so much of this is right up my alley, I though I'd aggregate their aggregations, so to speak, and write a little retrospective of my own.

Real Life Cyborg: Man Plans to Implant Camera in the Back of His Head

Professor Wafaa Bilal of New York University plans to soon undergo a surgical procedure that would temporarily implant a camera in the back of his head. The project is being commissioned for an art exhibit at a new museum in Qatar. The Iraqi photographer will be a living, breathing cyborg for an entire year, during which the implanted camera will take still photos every minute, simultaneously feeding the images to monitors at the museum.

News: Colors and Meanings

White: the first thing comes to my mind when I see light white is an angel, I think that this color represent the good side of everyone, the angel form of a person, sometimes you can see someone and look at him like he is a real angel, what a wonderful feeling, and even someone who is very gentle with you, you can display him in your mind with a white circle on his head.

Do Not Try This At Home: The Human Torch

PopSci's Gray Matter demonstrates again and again what the layman should absolutely Not Try at Home. Which is precisely what makes Gray's experiments so fun. Remember when the mad scientist fully submerged his hand in liquid nitrogen? Today's demonstration also plays with what is (quite reasonably) assumed to be extremely dangerous and painful: torching the human hand.

News: It's Hot, It's Creamy. It's Three Course Gum as a Meal

Remember Willy Wonka's magical gum? Wonka promised the flavors of tomato soup, roast beef, baked potato, blueberry pie and ice cream. As the avid gum lover Violet Beauregarde tested it out, she exclaimed: “It’s hot and creamy, I can actually feel? it running down my throat!” Um, yum... I think. Good news. Wonka's three course chewing gum is finally a reality-in-the-works. Scientists at the Institute of Food Research (IFR) have been developing recent advances in nanotechnology, which could pot...

News: Proposition 23 Valero and Tesoro Oil Companies

Valero and Tesoro are known as the biggest oil companies in California. They have spent large amounts of money on the Proposition 23 campaign, Valero with $4,050,000 and Tesoro with $1,525,000, in hopes of passing the Proposition, which would suspend the Assemmbly Bill 32, the Global Warming Act of 2006, until unemployment drops to 5.5% for 4 consequtive quarters. Valero's stand is that the California's Global Warming Act will only cause more lost jobs for California and therefore should not ...

News: Look! A Diamond the Size of the Moon!

Lucy, whose real name is BPM 37093, is a diamond roughly the size of our moon. At around 4000 kilometers in diameter (2,485 miles), Lucy is estimated to be around 10 billion trillion trillion carats. A billion trillion trillion? x 10? It's easier to imagine dividing by zero than to put this ridiculous number into perspective.

News: Cheeseburger Dipped in Acid (Plus: Why You Should Fear McDonald's)

Ok, so first Periodic Tables demonstrates how a McDonald's cheeseburger breaks down in your stomach during the digestion process. Everybody has hydrochloric acid in their stomach, so drop a burger in acid and you can see it happen before your eyes (minus the amino acids a human stomach would supply). Seems innocent enough. Here's what happened after 3.5 hours: NASTY. So my question is: does healthy food look the same? What would a pile of broccoli or granola look like? Probably just as nasty....

News: No, It's Not an App. It's a Japanese Soft Drink.

Shiny, pretty touchscreen vending machines have finally gone mainstream in Japan. My only question is... what's taken so long? The vending machine business can be quite lucrative (location, location, location), so all the more reason to make the interface as aesthetically appealing and user friendly as the iPhone AND as smart as a robot (read below). Features (translation via YouTube):

How To: Make an easy tomato and basil salad with mascarpone and bleu cheese mousse

A tomato and basil salad sounds like a simple delight, right? It is, and the only thing that can make it even better is a mousse with a delicious blend of mascarpone and bleu cheese. Eric Brennan, Executive Chef at Post 390, created a tower of garden-fresh tomatoes with layers of basil and a decadent and creamy mascarpone-bleu cheese mousse. No slaving over a hot stove here and a real crowd pleaser.

HowTo: Play With Fire on Camera

Here at WonderHowTo, we appreciate the fine art of photography (including its extensively vast bag of mind boggling tricks). We also enjoy playing with fire. Sorry, most of us are little boys at heart, and we can't get enough tutorials that fall within the playing-with-matches realm.

News: World's First Bionic Cat

Oscar the cat is one lucky feline. After losing his two hind legs in a combine harvester, his loving owners had Oscar outfitted with two prosthetic paws, or metallic pegs to be more specific. This revolutionary veterinary procedure is nothing to scoff at - biomedical engineering experts and a neuro-orthopedic surgeon were both called in to create the world's first bionic cat. Via BBC:

News: The Witcher Quick Look

Besides Killing Floor, I played a bit of The Witcher over the weekend. If you're curious about the game now is the perfect time. It's on sale on Steam, and the sequel is being released early next year. Though the game is three years old, it's still one of the best western rpgs on the PC. Here are some quick impressions on the game:

News: Are North Korean World Cup Fans Really Chinese Actors?

World Cup World asks: "How'd North Korean fans get to the game?" Fair and valid question. It's seeming IMPOSSIBLE for any North Korean citizen to get a visa to leave the communist regime (not that they could afford it, anyway) to attend this past week's game. After much initial speculation on whether these fans were the real deal, the mystery has been resolved by multiple news sources.

WC 2010 grim view: low scores, low attendance.

I still have hope that this will be a good World Cup... This article aggregates a lot of things that have been said about the World Cup experience this year (South Africa's infrastructure, low scoring games, uninteresting first round match-ups, etc). I've noticed in a few broadcasts that upper seating areas are not filled to capacity and maybe the vuvuzelas make up for this. I think this will change once the Knock-out stages begin, but Nick Webster has a point:

News: Attendance woes make FIFA take notice.

This article aggregates a lot of things that have been said about the World Cup experience this year (South Africa's infrastructure, low scoring games, uninteresting first round match-ups, etc). I've noticed in a few broadcasts that upper seating areas are not filled to capacity and maybe the vuvuzelas make up for this. I think this will change once the Knock-out stages begin, but Nick Webster has a point: