The sociological impact of the remote control and related advancements such as the Walkman, the VCR, TiVo, and iPod. The author has an oddly pessimistic assessment of these devices which give individuals so much more control over the media content they consume.

The best cyber-sex occurs in games (such as MUDs, MUCKs and MMORPGs).

Things to say when you're losing a technical argument. (Via Linkfilter. Update: The original link seems to be out of commission, but Keith Myers was kind enough to alert us to the Google cache.

Satellite radio: A nice review of the Sirius and XM services.

"Sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school". According to the article,

...[T]hese adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students - more than half of those who were romantically active at the school - in one long chain.

Here's a nice graphical representation of the sexual network. (Via Boing Boing.)

"Researchers have identified self-similarity in four types of complex networks: the World Wide Web, a network of actors who have been in films together, networks of proteins with links between those that can bind to each other, and networks of other cellular molecules with links between molecules involved in the same biochemical reactions." Here's the Nature abstract.

"The Lock Busters: They've never met a padlock - or six-pin paracentric cylinder - they couldn't crack. Live, from the lock-picking championship of the world."

Good review article on the use of evolutionary algorithms in engineering design.

A man who has been blind since birth "paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either." Apparently, he is able to integrate the information from other sensory modalities, along with what sighted friends have told him about the world.

One tidbit from the article:

He confides that for a long time he figured that if an object was red, its shadow would be red too. "But I was told it wasn't," he says. But how do you know about red? He knows that there's an important visual quality to seen objects called "colour" and that it varies from object to object. He's memorised what has what colour and even which ones clash.

Neuroscientists at Harvard and Boston University have been running a number of tests which show some fascinating differences from (and similarities to) the visual cortex of normal sighted people. Here's the article as well as one of his paintings. Here are more of his paintings. (Via Linkfilter.)

The "thiefproof" Immobilizer car key security system has been broken. From the article:

The systems reduce car theft, because vehicles will not start unless the system recognizes a tiny chip in the authorized key. They are used in millions of Fords, Toyotas and Nissans.

All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it.

More details available here, including the full academic paper (.pdf format).

Ghanian fantasy coffins. Here's the slide show. (Via Joost Bonsen.)

Great Wikipedia article on heavy metal umlauts. And here's a slick Flash animation showing how this page evolved on Wikipedia. (Via Gravity Lens and Linkfilter.)

Animal-human hybrids. Some of these proposed experiments raise mind-boggling ethical questions, such as the Stanford scientist who wants to create mice with human brains. ("Gee, Brain what do you want to do tonight?" "The same thing we do every night Pinky. Try to take over the world!")

The Secret of the Venus Fly Trap.

High-tech spacesuits.

Programming proverbs. (Via Linkfilter.)

"How to have 'Dungeons and Dragons' themed sex". (Via Fark.)

Girl Scout cookies are a surprising source of office stress.

"Lexus cars may be vulnerable to viruses that infect them via mobile phones. Landcruiser 100 models LX470 and LS430 have been discovered with infected operating systems that transfer within a range of 15 feet." (Via IPList.)

World's fastest elevator.