It’s called the Mpemba effect.  It’s a weird phenomenon that has been repeated, but not effectively recreated.  I had heard about it a long time ago, something like a friend told me to put hot water in the ice tray so that it would freeze faster.  It doesn’t seem like that’s entirely valid, but maybe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect

Let’s talk about the octothorp.  What is it?  It’s what you might call the hash symbol, or the pound sign, or the number key.

#

Kallie had read one of my twitter updates one day, and i tagged something at the end of it, and as she repeated it out loud to me she said “number”.  I laughed.

To be clear, the octothorp is different from the sharp symbol found in music (♯).  I’m not sure what that one is called…

Warning, you may not want to watch this.  You may not want to let your kids watch this either.  I’m going to talk about the genitalia of the duck.  Specifically, the male duck.  It’s crazy.  The claim is that female ducks have been evolving to prevent the male from impregnating them by forming twists in their…”tubes”.  In response, the male penis has evolved to “fill up” the tube and spiral around to make sure it gets to where it needs to be…  You just have to watch the video.   Or, read the Discover Magazine article.

Eversions in barriers / from blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

Typing 2 spaces after a period at the end a sentence is wrong.

Maybe “wrong” is too strong, but it’s not right.  Don’t believe me?  Go ask the experts, like the Modern Language Association – http://www.mla.org/style_faq3

It stems back to the old days of typewriters, where each character took up the same “space” as any other character.  Skinny letters like I and l took up the same space as M and W, which would leave sentences looking broken apart and disorganized.  So, the double space rule was implemented to make paragraphs easier to read.

I guess it’s up to you to follow the rules, but they’re there.  Let’s see people try to enforce them.

Brought to you courtesy of Slate.

If the royal family were to be outed tomorrow, for whatever reason, what would their last names be?

As of 1917, it seems to be Mountbatten-Windsor, which is pretty much made up any way.  Technically, any of them can chose whatever last name they want.  King George V created the name in the first place.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/ThecurrentRoyalFamily/TheRoyalFamilyname/Overview.aspx

Here’s a picture of what Deirdre’s white iphone 3G used to look like:

I won’t get into the discussions, but long story short, she gave me her phone, knowing full well that I was just going to fix it and sell it.

So, her screen was cracked, but the LCD was still completely operational.  I knew I could just buy the glass panel for ~20 bucks, but I found a nice kit at ifixit.com that came with everything I would need.  I highly recommend them!  They operate out of San Luis Obispo, Ca, which I visited in December, so I couldn’t help but envision some beach bum college kids running this operation out of their dorm room or something.

Anyway, the guides make this easy!  I had the phone all disassembled and put back together in under 30 minutes.  After a little charge, she was up and operational.  The home button was a bit wonky, you had to press firmly or just right to get it to work, but Deirdre said that is the way it was before she gave it to me.  I wish I knew, or I would have tried to fix that too, but since I already used the doublesided tape to get it all back together, I figured I may as well leave it alone, since there was no guarantee i could fix it.

So, with the phone looking back to normal, it’s time to jailbreak and unlock!  since it’s rocking 3.1.3 OS, a quick visit to Jailbreakme.com on the phone uses an exploit to jailbreak it in a snap.  no tethering or restoring ipsw files or anything!  Once cydia is on the phone, open it to record the SHSH for future jailbreaks, download ultrasn0w for the unlock, and BAM, you’ve got yourself a phone ready for any sim card you want.

It was really that easy.  take a few pictures for ebay, and away she’ll go!  This counts for #18 on my 30×30 list too!

after a botched update to some apps, Cydia would not longer launch completely. Cydia would crash when I tried to open it, even after rebooting.

First, I got DiskAid from : http://www.digidna.net/products/diskaid
Second, connect the iphone to your computer and using DiskAid, remove the numbered and tmp files from /var/lib/dpkg/updates/  – (This may be enough to resolve your problem.  Try a reboot and open Cydia again)

Third, I don’t have SSH installed on the phone.  These steps could also work if you don’t have WiFi to use OpenSSH.  I downloaded Universal Extractor:  http://legroom.net/software/uniextract.  That will let you extract .deb files

Fourth, download the latest Cydia .deb file from http://apt.saurik.com/cydia-3.7/debs/

Fifth, extract those files to your desktop and then copy them over to your phone in the appropriate paths using DiskAid  (you’re basically just manually extracting the files)

Sixth, reboot and try again.  Good Luck!

The disclaimer here is that you’re just overwriting files and not editing them.  SAVE BACK UPS OF ANYTHING YOU ARE OVERWRITING!

Thanks to Beckie Hollerman for reminding me that today, the first Tuesday of February, should be used to educate ourselves about common misconceptions!

Some quick excerpts from the wikipedia page:

• Nowhere in the Bible is Satan described as ruling over or being in Hell. Throughout the Bible Satan is described as constantly on Earth, and the Book of Revelation says that after Judgment Satan will be cast into Hell.^[215]
• Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball.^[202][203]
• Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children.^[127] Double-blind trials have shown no difference in behavior between children given sugar-full or sugar-free diets, even in studies specifically looking at children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or those considered “sensitive” to sugar. The difference in behaviour proved to be psychological.^[128]
• Poinsettias are not highly toxic.

• George Washington did not have wooden teeth. According to a study of Washington’s four known dentures by a forensic anthropologist from the University of Pittsburgh (in collaboration with the National Museum of Dentistry, itself associated with the Smithsonian Museum), the dentures were made of gold, hippopotamus ivory, lead, and human and animal teeth (including horse and donkey teeth).^[15]

I fixed my xbox 360 at home! thanks so much to llamma.com for the instructions!

Step 1: Diagnosis. I had 3 flashing lights on the xbox, the top right one was still dim. This is the Red Ring of Death.  It’s certainly worth asking someone else to borrow their power supply to test your xbox.  Pop off the hard drive and try to boot it to see if you still get it.  Try different outlets.  Basically, try everything else in efforts to get a different result!  There’s a way to get a more detailed secondary error message which is outlined here.  Mine just told me “WTF dude, your crap is broken, i dunno what’s wrong”.

Step 2:  Know your options.  OK, you’re hardware is shot.  Check your warranty status since you may be able to have Microsoft fix it for free.  Log into Live, add the serial number for your xbox and check warranty status.  Even if it’s out of warranty there, they have extended their warranties to 3 years specifically for this error!  Don’t break your warranty if you don’t have to! If they still won’t replace your box, you’re out of alternatives, make sure you don’t just want to shovel out money for a new box.

Step 3:  Get your hands dirty with demolition. You will need:

• A power drill with a 3/16 or 5/16 bit
• A TL 8 and TL10 sized star shaped screw driver

Search youtube for some videos to take apart the xbox.  basically, pop off the faceplace, pop off the grids from the side, monkey around with the back hinge design (the hardest part), and take out the motherboard and heat sinks.  You’ll have to pop off those X brackets buy prying at the tips one tip at a time.  Once those are off, use some plyers to get the studs out of the bottom of the heatsinks.

Once the heatsinks are off, you have to clean off the old thermal paste from the bottom of the heat sink and the processors. i cleaned off whatever i could with a q-tip or tissue, then you can get some arctic-clean cleaner, or just some kind of grease remover worked.

last part is to grab your drill and make those holes bigger in the xbox case where the xclamps were.  Technically, 3/16 should work, but i had to use 5/16 since I tried fitting the studs (or even the bolts if you already have them) through them, but they didn’t fit.  Don’t worry too much, that’s what the washers are for.

Step 4: Put it all back together. you’ll need:

• 8 screws
• 32 steel washers
• 16 nylon washers
• Thermalpaste

You have to put a really thin layer of thermal paste on the processors. it’s so easy to put too much on when you apply it, so be careful! All you have to do is put a layer as thick as a sheet of paper. just enough to cover the writing basically.

The tricky part is putting the screws and washers in without them falling all over the place. What I did was stick the screws in the case, and put a piece of tape over the heads to hold them in the case. then, flip it right side up, put 3 steel washers and then 1 nylon washer on them. Then goes the motherboard. Then another nylon then another steel on each screw. put the heatsinks back on, and hold them in place while flipping the box upside down so you can get the screws threaded without them falling out and losing the washers.

That’s actually enough to get it working. hook up the fan, the dvd drive, the front power board, and crank it up. Mine went right up, and I just discarded all the other screws and crap since these new screws are holding everything in place enough.

Follow up: so, after 3-4 weeks of running fine, it rrod’d again. This time with the sub error code 0031, which indicates a short somewhere. I tried all the steps over again with no avail. Not sure if I did something wrong, but I am bummed!