The ellipse is the Frisbee of art, the circle freed from its flatness that sails out into imagined space tilting this way and that and ending up on the top of the soup bowl and silver cup in Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s still life or, imagine this, on the wheels of the speeding Batmobile. From James Mc [...] [Posted: 24 Sep 2010]
Running scripts in WebKit WebKit nightly builds now support the HTML5 async and defer script attributes. This makes it easier for web pages to load faster by downloading JavaScript without blocking other elements of the page. How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users Oh snap! Chrome comes out ahead in a recent [...] [Posted: 22 Sep 2010]
Contrary to the popular narrative, most foreclosures were not on sprawling “McMansions” but rather on modest properties that were typically valued significantly below area median values at origination. One of the key findings from Dreams Deferred: Impacts and Characteristics of the California Foreclosure Crisis, a report by the Center for Responsible Lending. You can also [...] [Posted: 21 Sep 2010]
Photo by papalars. Found on Flickr The story of how chilies got their heat is pretty straightforward. A recent study suggested that capsaicin is an effective defense against a fungus that attacks chili seeds. In fact, experiments have shown that the same species of wild chili plant produces a lot of capsaicin in an environment [...] [Posted: 21 Sep 2010]
Kaleidoscope has proved most helpful, Sternberg said, in helping admissions officers choose among the upper middle group of applicants. He noted that the mean SAT scores of the incoming freshman class at Tufts have improved every year since Kaleidoscope was introduced, and so has student body diversity. In the first year of its implementation, for [...] [Posted: 19 Sep 2010]
The show appealed to my belief that art only got better once the boundaries between high and low culture were relaxed, most famously by Andy Warhol, then by countless others. It also satisfied my hunger to try new things; my demons that demand I dance naked in public; and my desire to see if art [...] [Posted: 18 Sep 2010]
Photo by mclcbooks The Netherlands resembles the United States as a prosperous, technologically advanced nation where a huge share of the population owns automobiles. They simply don’t drive them each and every time they leave home, thanks to common sense transportation policies where biking and transit are promoted as an attractive alternative to the car. [...] [Posted: 16 Sep 2010]
Say you bought a house for $350,000 in July 2006 — those were the days of 100% financing, so you borrowed $350,000 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6.8%. The house is now worth $280,000, but your mortgage balance is $334,000. The current rate for a 30-year fixed-rate loan, if you could get one, is [...] [Posted: 16 Sep 2010]