Link: What Would Don Draper Do?

Absolutely brilliant decision chart! Mad Men rock!

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/wwddd

Link: RIAA Accounting: How To Sell 1 Million Albums And Still Owe $500,000

An astute Slashdot reader sums it up nicely:

For all the complaints from the RIAA about ‘pirates,’ who are the real pirates in this scenario? Through a variety of contractual tricks, it’s nearly impossible for artists signed to major labels to get paid. The article and video detail how an artist who thinks he’s getting a 10% royalty is actually getting closer to 2.5% through various tricks placed in the contract. The labels, then, end up with 97.5% of the gross revenue, and anything they ‘spend’ on the artist continues to come out of the royalties, not the labels’ cut.

Link: Turning radio waves into power (with circuits printed on paper)

    <img height="200" width="300" src="https://blog.davidcantatore.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ga_tech_sensors.jpg" />

Researchers at Georgia Tech have found a way to harvest energy from electromagnetic waves in the air. The harvesting devices are produced using an inkjet printer and can collect small amounts of power from a wide band of frequencies—everything from FM radio up to radar.

Via Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/new-devices-convert-large-variety-of-electromagnetic-waves-to-power.ars

Link: Water Caught at 7000 FPS Is Mesmerizing(via @Gizmodo)

Water is beautiful. Romain Glé and Thomas Séon worked together on this music video, “High Hopes”, to show that slo-mo water fighting a presumably evil black ball is stunning to behold.

Link: Why we have brain farts, and what scientists are doing to stop them

IO9’s  Robert T. Gonzalez — I was absent-mindedly shoveling cereal into my mouth when the brainfart struck: my hand decided to reroute the incoming spoon’s flight trajectory into my cheek. As I sat there with milk dripping down my chin, my immediate reaction was to blame my hand. But then I realized that my hand had just been following orders. If anyone was to blame here, it was my brain. Turns out that neuroscientists agree with me.

Brain farts, the momentary lapses in attention that strike when you least expect them, may actually be rooted in abnormal patterns of brain activity. Neuroscientists call them “maladaptive brain states.” We spoke to researchers in an emerging field of neuroscience that examines these brain states to learn about the neurological basis of brain farts, their potential evolutionary origins, and how they might one day be a thing of the past.

Link: Climate sceptic Willie Soon received $1m from oil companies, papers show

One of the world’s most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical aboutclimate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.

jaymug:

Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi Logo Evolution, Revised Edition

Source: Brand New

See the first edition here

In the footsteps of a genius

Link: Massive botnet ‘indestructible,’ say researchers

A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million PCs is “practically indestructible,” security researchers say. “TDL-4,” the name for both the bot Trojan that infects machines and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is “the most sophisticated threat today,” said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis Monday. “[TDL-4] is practically indestructible,” Golovanov said. Others agree.