I was eating dinner with a lady friend of mine (a rarity if you know what I mean), when my mobile phone started singing. I pulled it out, hit silent, and stuffed the phone back into my pocket. The girl was impressed. “I can’t believe you didn’t answer that! Thank you so much”. I figured that I can talk on the phone almost anywhere and any time. Why then, would I talk on the phone while in the presence of an attractive girl that knew my name? –easy answer!

The ability to talk on phones anywhere and at anytime is very new to our society. The person who usually sits in wait for you to finish your jabber most often does so in your presence. The tables have now turned. The people in my presence are not the ones I talk to anymore. The people on my buddy list, address book, and mobile phone contact list are the ones I communicate on a daily basis. Not answering the phone is an easy, not so easy, thing to do.

Woot! With OSX for x86 torrents in the wild (legally? bah!) and blogs and tech news sites posting screenshots of some flavor of OSX running on all manner of boxes, it’s about time for someone to post a guide to building your own Mac. According to the guys at the OSx86 project, you can do it for much less than you might initially think.

Here’s what you’ll need:

Case – $9.95
Motherboard – $52.99
Processor – $60.77
2x 256 RAM – $38.00
20 Gigabyte HD – $25.95
DVD Drive – $12.00
Grand total: $199.66

[props to TUAW and Make:Blog]

So the internet’s been abuzz since last week’s announcement by Yahoo! of an expansion to its web search index, and, more importantly (at least when it comes to gossip), the number of objects therein. Here are the numbers that got everyone talking, courtesy ZDNet:

•Yahoo! – 20.5 billion objects indexed (19B documents, 1.5B images)
•Google – 10.3 billion objects (8.2B documents, 2.1B images)
•In June 2005 Google held a 36.9% share of the US search engine market with Yahoo! at 30.4%, according to comScore Networks.

So people start talking, Google fires back (saying it was “baffled” by Yahoo!’s claims), and some other big boys stepped in, in this case the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). After performing their own study, they came to the following conclusions:

Based on the data created from our sample searches, this study concludes that a user can expect, on average, to receive 166.9% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results.

It is the opinion of this study that Yahoo!’s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google’s index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, we find it puzzling that Yahoo!’s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google.

Ouch. There is no way this one’s over yet.

[kudos to BoingBoing]

More people keep joining up.

According to this article in Public CIO magazine, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm started sending out her weekly radio address via Podcast earlier this month. Released each friday at 10 a.m., the Governer hopes, in typical government-ese, “to talk directly to the citizens of Michigan about what their government is doing to improve their state for them.” Seems straighforward enough, albeit rather broad.

Nonetheless, props to the administration’s bold attempt at embracing a new technology favored among those ever-present “young people.” Now if they could only get the aformentioned whippersnappers to actually listen to an audio file likely chock-full of budgetary, legal and other administrative news.

“Hey man, what are you listening to?”
“Oh, just the Governor’s weekly podcast.”
< silence >
“Um…cool…”

Given this past week’s lack of positive publicity surrounding the FedExFurniture/Jose Avila fracas [see this post], here’s some love for the shipping giant:

Last week FedEx became the proud owner of California’s largest corporate solar-power installation to date when they activated the photovoltaic cells covering the roof of their package processing hub at Oakland Int’l Airport. The 904 kW array covers nearly all of the building’s 81,000 square-foot roof and can meet roughly 80 percent of the facility’s energy needs. It was designed and built by California-based PowerLight Corp., using 300,000 solar cells from Japan’s Sharp Corp.

So Devin Moore got the death penalty for killing three police officers in 2003, but his subsequent attempt to use GTA as an excuse isn’t faring well. With Rockstar off the hook, perhaps we can spend more time thinking about our society’s complete lack of personal responsibility the ways in which video games influence kids, newly important for this reason:

A study released by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which claims to be the first long-term study of this type, found that “robust exposure” to a violent game did not directly translate into real-world aggression. The key points:

Gamers played MMORPG Asheron’s Call 2 for an average of 56 hours over the course of a month, and researchers found “no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,” said lead author Dmitri Williams. Aggression was determined my measuring “argumentative behaviors” before and after gaming, which were then compared to a non-game playing control group.

Understandably, Williams is unwilling to make strong predictions based on the results of his study. Notably, the study did not look at teenagers, nor did its exposure of participants to fantasy-style violence mirror urban, GTA-style violence recently made famous by Moore. But Williams’ take-home message is noteworthy:

Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle.

[Cheers to Science Blog.]