Link roundup

1. FYI, you have to pay $150 to $495 to be nominated for a Webby award.

2. If you missed it, Minnesota House Majority Leader Matt Dean said he "hated" Neil Gaiman and called him a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota." Neil Gaiman responds here. His response includes a link to Dean's contact page and encourages you to share your thoughts with Mr. Dean.

3. Here's an explanation for why eating asparagus makes your urine smell. Via.

Link roundup

1. From Fast Company's article about the efforts to market carrots like junk food:

The company has been around for nearly a century now, but it boomed in the 1990s, with a breakthrough product. A local grower named Mike Yurosek had become frustrated with all the waste in the carrot business. Supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and color. Anything else had to be sold for juice or processing or animal feed, or just thrown away. Yurosek wondered what would happen if he peeled the skin off the gnarly carrots, cut them into pieces, and sold them in bags. He made up a few test batches to show his buyers. One batch, cut into 1-inch bites and peeled round, he called "bunny balls." Another batch, peeled and cut 2 inches long, looked like little baby carrots.

Bunny balls never made it. But baby carrots were a hit. They transformed the whole industry. Soon, the big growers in Bakersfield were planting fields with baby carrots in mind, sowing three times more seeds per acre, so the carrots, packed densely together, would grow long and skinny, for the maximum number of 2-inch cuts. Yields and profits climbed. The really big deal, the thing nobody expected, was that baby carrots seemed to make Americans eat more carrots. In the decade after they were introduced, carrot consumption in the United States doubled.

Then a couple of years ago, after a decade of steady growth, Bolthouse's carrot sales went flat. Sales of baby carrots, the company's cash carrot, actually fell, sharply, and stayed down. Nobody knew why. This was a big problem.

...

Dunn put together a series of focus groups and surveys and discovered something interesting. People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. What people meant, it turned out, was they were as likely as ever to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, they became more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. But people used to eating baby carrots weren't taking the time to wash and cut the regular ones. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or spoiled.

2. And from an article in the same issue about the business of water:

The water bill at IBM Burlington -- just to get 3.2 million gallons a day into the plant -- is $100,000 a month. The water staff turns plain municipal water into a portfolio of products, depending on whether someone is mixing high-tech chemicals or running air-conditioning chillers. IBM's utility plant creates nine custom varieties of water. Each brand of water costs 4, 5, or 10 times more than the cost of the raw water itself.

3. FYI, if you want to get a hold of the Marvel Universe Cable with baby action figure (possibly the best action figure ever), check out the new Marvel Universe case available at Entertainment Earth. Instead of the last mix, which included several doubles (including two Gladiators), this new set has no doubles, and includes a Thanos.

And speaking of EE, buy 4 Funko items, get a 5th free (Funko makes very cute plush toys you've probably seen all around the net).

UPDATE: You can find the Cable for $25, including shipping, at Amazon.

Breeding animals for violence and domesticity

Interesting article (and great photo gallery) at National Geographic about scientists breeding rats and foxes for violence and domesticity. (That's a angry rat, above.)

Link roundup

1. Hilarious photo of kids learning about the wonders of the human reproduction.

2. A Baltimore Sun photographer accepted a buyout, started a blog, and then more or less destroyed the industry for professional photographers:

By teaching a horde of novices the skills necessary to shoot photographs of a quality that was until very recently only within the grasp of an elite few, Hobby has played a significant role in the transformation of the profession. In the last few years, the market rate for many types of professional photographs has dropped by as much as 99 percent.

3. "A special mask that produces sights and smells fooled study participants into thinking they were eating a cookie they weren't."

*Buy vintage cameras at eBay.

Portal 2 images/spoilers

The ARG seems to be a bit of a dud unless there's a true surprise waiting, but the game's tremendous. It has a strong feel of Bioshock, if Bioshock had a sense of humor (I hope someone puts together a video highlighting the dialog). Here's a few signs and other moments from Portal 2.


Safety first.


Test warning.


Repulsion gel.


Press to open.


In case of implosion, look directly at implosion. (Because implosions are awesome.)


GLaDOS emergency shutdown and cake dispensary.



Potatoes actually play a fairly large role in the game. Is it too late to make my son's science project a potato battery?

*Portal 2 is $35 at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. There's a Thor version of Angry Birds that you can play in your browser.

2. Here's a fun series of experiments to do with your kids over spring break - - use homemade play dough as squishy circuits and light up LEDs and spinning motors.

3. Last Exit to Nowhere is giving away 10 t-shirts.

This hologram of a magnifying glass is awesome

Check out these holograms of a telescope and magnifying glass - - they seem to actually function/magnify. Via.

*Buy comics with hologram covers at eBay.

Link roundup

1. io9:

The Isle Royale wolf population was founded in the late 1940s, and it's been under close scientific observation ever since. Researchers had assumed that the wolves were completely cut off from their relatives on the mainland, but in 1997 one wolf crossed over to the island using an ice bridge, and his arrival may go a long way to keep the population genetically viable.

2. And also from io9:

About 9,000 years ago, the Fuzhou Basin in southeastern China fell victim to rising sea levels, pushing underwater the marshy lands needed for rice farming. The marooned people there became seafarers, which eventually led to the colonization of Taiwan.

3. An ARG at Valve.

Link roundup

1. How to make a battery out of pennies. Via.

2. MSNBC:

The Los Angeles City Attorney's office is trying a new legal maneuver to try to stamp out graffiti — it's charging 10 graffiti writers with violating unfair competition laws because they're selling works on the strength of reputations built on vandalism.
Assistant City Attorney Anne Tremblay says these graffiti writers — all associated with the MTA tagging crew — have an unfair advantage over legitimate artists because they gained notoriety through crime.

Via.

3. WebMD:

Electronic faucets may be touch-free, but they are far from germ-free. In a new study, researchers at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine report finding higher levels of disease-carrying bacteria on hands-free faucets compared to conventional, manually operated faucets.

Via these sites.

*Buy chemistry sets at Amazon.

1000 Words: Science, Perfected

All it took was a single lock of hair for Rick Fox to create Earth's first clone. Unfortunately, Rick doubled the recipe.

The 2008-2009 Periodic Table of NBA Bloggers

Matt and I did this because he's good with spreadsheetish things and I'm a science guy. Click that beast for a linked-up legend. Or else.