The Croods

    THE CROODS is a 3D comedy adventure that follows the world's first modern family as they embark on a journey of a lifetime when the cave that has always been their home, is destroyed. Traveling across a spectacular landscape, the Croods are rocked by generational clashes and seismic shifts as they discover an incredible new world filled with fantastic creatures -- and their outlook is changed forever.

Surviving in a volcanic world is tough enough, but caveman Grug (Cage) gets a rude awakening when an earthquake forces him to leave behind the only world he knows. With his family in tow, he ventures out into the volatile world in search of a new home. The situation becomes even more complicated when Grug's family - in particular his eldest daughter - become smitten with a nomad (Reynolds) they encounter on their dangerous journey. This quirky, imaginative stranger's search for 'tomorrow' is at odds with Grug's reliance on the traditions of yesterday.

Paranoid Android status update

Pie style revamped, snappoints look better, reorientation bug fixed
PhabUI panel quick access for phone ui (aokp?)
Lockscreen widgets display maximized if wanted (aokp)
Lockscreen challenge lock will unlock on longpress if minimized (aokp)
2G/3G tile updated to cm's last head (cm)
180 degree rotation thing fixed by killing it (???)

So much robbing, but we gotta get up to speed with the others to compensate for all the time that was lost by hacking features.  Many many thanks to aokp and cm!

No word on when nightlies drop - they do when they do. (-:

Mathematical smilies

Because sometimes the standard ones just aren't geeky enough Edited to add:  For those who don't get it or are stuck on what these mean, shown below.  With spoiler space, for those who prefer to figure it out on their own.
Easiest to use the explanation offered by +Patrick Ryan in the comments below:

Following down the left side column we have inverse, square, cube, sine (sign), and log. Right side's a little more complicated.

The first one is "real" - when applied to a complex number - that is, one with real and imaginary (designated by some factor times "i") parts - you take the real component only and drop the imaginary component. i.e. You drop the i's (eyes). "Imag" (imaginary) is the converse of "real", so that would be only the i's.

The inverted triangle is a math operator called "grad", and it takes the gradient of a function. When applied to a vector - and we know it's a vector because of the cross product operator - it's known as the "curl".

Then finally, we have "root".

Yeah, we know - if you have to explain it, it's not funny.

fight around animal

there are war between to animals cat and dog..

free electricity from thin Air

German student creates electromagnetic harvester that gathers free electricity from thin air

A German student has built an electromagnetic harvester that recharges an AA battery by soaking up ambient, environmental radiation. These harvesters can gather free electricity from just about anything, including overhead power lines, coffee machines, refrigerators, or even the emissions from your WiFi router or smartphone.

This might sound a bit like hocus-pocus pseudoscience, but the underlying science is actually surprisingly sound. We are, after all, just talking about wireless power transfer — just like the smartphones that are starting to ship with wireless charging tech, and the accompanying charging pads.

Dennis Siegel, of the University of Arts Bremen, does away with the charging pad, but the underlying tech is fundamentally the same. We don’t have the exact details — either because he doesn’t know (he may have worked with an electrical engineer), or because he wants to patent the idea first — but his basic description of “coils and high frequency diodes” tallies with how wireless power transfer works.

In essence, every electrical device gives off electromagnetic radiation — and if that radiation passes across a coil of wire, an electrical current is produced. Siegel says he has produced two versions of the harvester: One for very low frequencies, such as the 50/60Hz signals from mains power — and another for megahertz (radio, GSM) and gigahertz (Bluetooth/WiFi) radiation.

The efficiency of wireless charging, however, strongly depends on the range and orientation of the transmitter, and how well the coil is tuned to the transmitter’s frequency. In Siegel’s case, “depending on the strength of the electromagnetic field,” his electromagnetic harvester can recharge one AA battery per day. He doesn’t specify, but presumably one-AA-per-day is when he’s sitting next to a huge power substation. It makes you wonder how long it would take to charge an AA battery via your coffee machine, or by leeching from your friend’s mobile phone call.

Plantbook Laptop Concept

A highly futuristic concept of a laptop that bases it’s charging system in the same water-soaking abilities of the bamboo by the designers Seunggi Baek and Hyerim Kim. The Plantbook system uses an external water tank, hence the Plantbook continuously absorbs water when soaking it in water and generates electrolysis using power stored in a solar heat plate installed on the top. In this process, it is operated using hydrogen as energy source and discharges oxygen. If you put it into a water bottle while you don’t use the laptop, it automatically charges a battery and discharges oxygen.

It's about time

"There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the Best as the past withdraws."
–Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

For bubble universe to have merit, and for one to have a mechanism that gave rise to a big bang or other bangs, it seems absolutely necessarily to admit that there are multiple dimensions of time.  This seems to be the fundamental starting point to getting beyond the singularity.

For us, time becomes infinitely slowed down as you approach the big bang.  A natural consequence for this, in terms of time that we can understand, is that event can never be reached because we cannot define the event.

For us to define the event, we need to suppose another dimension of time.

As soon as you admit to multiple dimensions of time, and segregate our space-time to our own experience in a bubble, it seems that you're admitting to holography.  That a more fundamental sense of what we might call time exists in a form that is different than child form of 3+1 space-time created by the big bang.

The only other way you can get around this is to suppose that GR space-time curvature isn't actually created by the big bang, rather that it extends through the singularity in a frozen or infinitely small state that might seem like it doesn't exist.  This would keep the same dimension of time existing beyond the big bang.

Personally, I make sense of the big bang by thinking of it in terms of a phase transition.  It's not scary for me.   Our problem always been that we jump to conclusions about things we don't know about in the most self-centered of ways, so, our reality must be the only one and if we can't understand beyond the big bang, then it must have been the beginning of time.  This is the same idea that the Earth was the center of the universe.  It's the same thinking that would automatically assume that the flexible space-time that Einstein gave us must be the only form of time.

Everything seems to tell us that we're continually wrong and that there is way more that we do not know than we know. And in terms of known unknowns, we now know that most of the observable universe we can see includes indirect evidence for the existence of a dark matter and dark energy which would constitute the majority of the observable universe.  These are things we've only recently discovered and have no real grasp on.

It stands to reason that there is no reason to suspect that our level of misunderstanding should end there.

Turn any Surface into a Virtual iPhone Keyboard

While most people speculate and theorize about the future, some others make it obsolete by achieving today what seems to be improbable or even impossible, hence making the future a thing of the past. This time, the defendant is University of London’s student Florian Kraeutli, who developed a (wait for it !) Virtual keyboard for iPhone , using an accelerometer to teach each tapping made on a surface to the iPhone so the gadget can remember it. Sounds like a wacky but useless application at the first time, doesn’t it? Maybe it is. And maybe we’re wrong!

I think I’ve seen this approach somewhere else
Looking back some time, there were virtual laser keyboards that you could use on any flat surface. The motion sensors detect a key being pressed on the virtual keyboard, and this movement is then transmitted to the connected device. It didn’t get that much of a hype as it was too expensive and didn’t also perform in the best conditions if you were traveling, as the movement could cause you to stroke a wrong key, even though it could be used virtually with any device like a mobile phone or a tablet. This new invention is somewhat different though, as it uses key stroke strength and vibration patterns to tell the device which key is being pressed.

Status of the application
Using it is rather simple: you put the iPhone on top of a paper sheet with a delimiting area, with all the keyboard keys below. The idea is to have it near the keys so when you tap them the phone will receive the vibrations and transform each into a character, then a word (that is presented through a dictionary on the phone) and then it is inserted. So far, the accuracy rate is in the 80% outskirts, which is encouraging on one hand but still not enough, as Florian says. Besides being a cool app, so far it’s only intended for the iPhone, but if released for other devices it may well be something to watch.

Strippers unemployment

The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that exotic dancers at a strip club have the right to collect unemployment insurance as employees and not independent contractors.
If you're an out-of-work stripper, you can collect unemployment while looking for a new place to shake your tassels. That's the ruling from the Kansas Supreme Court,
The Kansas Supreme Court just passed a new law that says strippers can claim unemployment as employees and not just independent contractors.
Seems odd that they should need unemployment. Can't they just depend on the money they've been saving for law and/or medical school?
The implication here is that if you are going to be a stripper for whatever reason, you can only be a stripper. Strippers are not allowed to be anything else — now or ever given how many people lose their jobs when adult history pasts come back to haunt them. But there is more here: the suggestion that sharing one’s personal narrative is a call for attention is something leveled against women all the time

In essence, strippers are employees. So it stands to reason that they should be allowed to have the same kind of benefits as other employees,  What are your thoughts?

weight gain with Katy Perry

Katy Perry is reportedly not worried by her recent weight gain of 10lbs.The 28-year-old singer surprised audiences with her curvier figure onstage last week at a celebration in honour of US President Barack Obama's inauguration. The starlet’s shape is apparently down to being content in Katy Perry’s skintight pink dress at the launch of her new fragrance, Meow!, on December 14, 2011, set off another round of pregnancy rumors.

Oprah hit with lawsuit

Oprah Winfrey is being sued by a former employee who is claiming the OWN Network discriminated against her. The former employee, Carolyn Hommel, filed a lawsuit on Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, When Oprah Winfrey started her own television network, there were a lot of positive aspects about it. However, there were also dangers for the talk show queen.Oprah Winfrey does not look out for her OWN. At least not according to a new lawsuit accusing her and the network of sexual discrimination.