Drewbot

I'm Drew Breunig, an anthropologist/advertiser/developer/geek. These are things I think are interesting. Here are some things I read. Questions? Comments?

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Isolated in the Farallons, Biologists Have Bizarre “Island Invasion Dreams” 

One scientist dreamed the biologists played the cormorants in a game of hockey on West End Island, cheered on by a crowd of drunken elephant seals. Another dreamed that interns were thrown to the great white sharks that circle the islands during seal breeding season. Biologist Pete Warzybok once dreamed he saw a flamingo on the island, and then he was suddenly riding in his father’s old 1961 Buick. Next a bum began cleaning the windshield with spit and a dirty rag.

(Via Discover Magazine)

“Researchers learned that its owners helped spread the iPhone virus spread rapidly throughout their social network. A person with just one iPhone-carrying friend was three times more likely to own one themselves than a person whose friends had no iPhones. People with two friends who had iPhones were more than five times as likely to have sprung for the Apple device. Apparently the iPhone virus was highly contagious. “Its pattern differed from the way other devices and services rippled through the customer base. For instance, other Telenor products, including the Doro, a simple handset generally marketed at the elderly, did not exhibit the same kind of network effects. Neither did a video-calling feature introduced by Telenor in 2007, which grew in popularity at first but suffered after a new pricing model was introduced.” (via Here Comes the iPhone Virus « NextNature.net)

“Researchers learned that its owners helped spread the iPhone virus spread rapidly throughout their social network. A person with just one iPhone-carrying friend was three times more likely to own one themselves than a person whose friends had no iPhones. People with two friends who had iPhones were more than five times as likely to have sprung for the Apple device. Apparently the iPhone virus was highly contagious.

“Its pattern differed from the way other devices and services rippled through the customer base. For instance, other Telenor products, including the Doro, a simple handset generally marketed at the elderly, did not exhibit the same kind of network effects. Neither did a video-calling feature introduced by Telenor in 2007, which grew in popularity at first but suffered after a new pricing model was introduced.”

(via Here Comes the iPhone Virus « NextNature.net)

They test drones just like iPhones. (Via Discover Magazine)

They test drones just like iPhones. (Via Discover Magazine)

Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent 

No surprises here. I know of several who have had crawled data for at least a year. (Via Gizmodo)

Domesticated Siberian foxes are bound to be the next ‘in’ pet. These silver foxes were domesticated on the sly (get it?) by a scientist working in Soviet Russia. Their story is fascinating, and was featured on a recent episode of Radiolab. If you’re wondering about how they’d fare as pets, it sounds like they act as cute as they look: If the fox lives outside, the cage should have a bottom or the walls of the cage should be dug deep enough so that the fox cannot dig a hole and escape. Inside your house, they will snuggle on a bed like a cat. The cutest piece of science history can be yours, for only $6,000.

Domesticated Siberian foxes are bound to be the next ‘in’ pet. These silver foxes were domesticated on the sly (get it?) by a scientist working in Soviet Russia. Their story is fascinating, and was featured on a recent episode of Radiolab.

If you’re wondering about how they’d fare as pets, it sounds like they act as cute as they look:

If the fox lives outside, the cage should have a bottom or the walls of the cage should be dug deep enough so that the fox cannot dig a hole and escape. Inside your house, they will snuggle on a bed like a cat.

The cutest piece of science history can be yours, for only $6,000.

“ I think there’s an official president’s tweet, but some 20-year-old is doing a lot of the tweeting. ”

Obama

bbook: chrismohney: ladymisskate: And it’s only his second day. UUUUUUUGH #whitegirlproblems. Instant follow.

bbook:

chrismohney:

ladymisskate:

And it’s only his second day.

UUUUUUUGH

#whitegirlproblems.

Instant follow.

“ Jack showed how you could walk up to an ATM, break into it using a common universal key, and then use a universal serial bus (USB) stick to load a rootkit, or hacking software, that could compromise the machine’s security. On stage, he showed how he could run a program that could talk over the machines and get them to display “jackpot!” on the ATM screen and then spit out bills. ”

Guy hacks an ATM machine at the Black Hat security conference. He says he was inspired by Terminator 2. (Via VentureBeat)

“ As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars. ”

NYMag’s profile on James Franco, who seems to be a real life Buckaroo Banzai.

Picture of the day: Russian guy shows off his CPU collection. (Via CruchGear)

Picture of the day: Russian guy shows off his CPU collection. (Via CruchGear)

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