NASA to Unveil Plans to Send 4 Astronauts to Moon in 2018

WASHINGTON – NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.

10 Smart Hacks fot Google Reader

10 Smart Hacks for Google Reader

If you’re like me, then you probably have a serious case of information overload. In today’s web of information, it’s easy to get caught up in the constant news stream. In fact, I have over 50 RSS feeds in my feed reader. Talk about a mental meltdown.

14 Rules for Fast Web Pages

Steve Souders of Yahoo’s “Exceptional Performance Team” gave an insanely great presentation at Web 2.0 about optimizing website performance by focusing on front end issues. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see it in person but the Web 2.0 talks have just been put up and the ppt is fascinating and absolutely a must-read for anyone involved in web products.

His work has been serialized on the Yahoo user interface blog, and will also be published in an upcoming O’Reilly title (est publish date: Sep 07).

12 Coolest FireFox Tricks, ever!

 

Everybody’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, is great right out of the box. And by adding some of the awesome extensions available out there, the browser just gets better and better.

But look under the hood, and there are a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. Get to be a Jedi master with the following cool Firefox tricks.

Improve your photography with classical art.

 

Adjusting your photographs to get the color ‘just right’ can be a chore. Think about this: The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?

When Photoshop entered the CS series it included a new tool called ‘Match Color.’ This tools was made so that you could match a series of photos to one another.

23 Ways to Download YouTube Videos

Google has a solid amount of cash in its pockets, but with all the recent lawsuits against YouTube one has to wonder if it’s time to salvage whatever videos you like from the service and save them somewhere where evil attorneys won’t look – your hard drive.

Luckily, there are literally dozens of tools for downloading videos from YouTube and/or converting those YouTube videos to some format other than .flv. It’s hard to pick the best one, as they all have pluses and minuses. Thus, we’ve chosen 23 YouTube downloader tools we’ve found to be actually working. Here they are, categorized according to the platform they work on:

Top 57 Wikis By Rank

from :http://www.advolcano.com/blog/?p=11

Over the last couple years we’ve watched Wikipedia go from a virtually unknown website to one of the top 10 in the world – so it’s no secret that Wikis have seen an unprecedented amount of growth and popularity (not to mention free Wiki engines such as MediaWiki or MoinMoin feeding that growth).

I took the liberty to scour the web for as many Wiki’s as I could find, meanwhile compiling a list of each. Some of my findings were great, such as: WikiTravel, Heroes Wiki, and WoW Wiki (for all you WoW fanatics), and some, well, not so great.

I also noticed an increasing amount of businesses adopting the concept. More and more businesses are beginning to see the value in Wikiing (wikiing?). Aside from Wikis being a helpful resource to customers, they are a great way for marketers to build a community and gain easy access to that all-too-important customer feedback.

Anyway, on with the good stuff. Here’s a list of over fifty Wikis by rank. If there’s something I’ve missed, post a comment and I’ll be happy to add it. Enjoy…

The Mathematics of Life

The Mathematical Lives of Plants

Julie J. Rehmeyer

The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pine cone all grow in whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their complexity and beauty, they also show consistent mathematical patterns that scientists have been striving to understand.

Each yellow nub in the center of this daisy is actually its own miniature flower, complete with a full set of reproductive organs. The buds form interlocking clockwise and counterclockwise spirals. Scott Hotton

A surprising number of plants have spiral patterns in which each leaf, seed, or other structure follows the next at a particular angle called the golden angle. The golden angle is about 137.5º. Two radii of a circle C form the golden angle if they divide the circle into two areas A and B so that A/B = B/C.

How to Whistle with Your Fingers!

Fingered Whistle

“Tuck away your lips
First, your upper and lower lips must reach over to cover your teeth
and be tucked into your mouth. Only the outer edges of your lips are
visible, if at all.

12 Tips on how to be a Great DAD.

How can you be a great dad?

1. Put their interests first, always. Do you enjoy drinking or smoking? Guess what — it’s not good for them, and you’re setting an example with everything you do. I quit smoking about 18 months ago not for my sake, but for my kids. Now, it is still important to take care of yourself (otherwise you can’t take care of them), but you should still have them in mind.