I know, I know. I keep harping on the selfishness of social networking. Well, the unselfish side is subscribing to the status updates, blog posts and twitter feeds of people you care about. You get to see a whole side of the person that you might never see, you know where people are visiting, and most important, you hear about what matters to them in a way that would be impossible (or tedious) in person.

Exclave: A portion of a country which is separated from the main part and surrounded by politically alien territory.

But here’s the great part: “The same territory is an enclave in respect to the surrounding country and an exclave with respect to the country to which it is politically attached.”

(definition excerpted from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, as referenced at Dictionary.com)

Lovely, isn’t it? Came up in the context of the territories of Liechtenstein:

While many of these Liechtensteinian fragments might be considered exclaves, most also border more than one other territory, and consequently only three can be considered enclaves…

[Strange Maps blog]

You read that right: 1880s. 1881, to be exact. That’s two years before my great-grandfather was born. That’s coincident with Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House childhood. That’s… well, that’s a long time ago.

[via Comic Book Resources — with thanks to Michael Danziger for the tip]

Nokia has an enormous digital presence at London Heathrow’s new Terminal 5: a display about 30 feet long projecting Nokia lifestyle ads around the clock. The display is mounted on the upper level between the security checkpoints, overlooking the main hall downstairs. How much do you think that costs? And how good is the advertising at prepping people for the Nokia store on the lower level?

My favorite airport advertising, however, is in Switzerland’s Zurich airport, where ads are projected against the tunnel wall just outside the train windows, and follow you as you are shuttled from one terminal to another. Very slick.

Triboluminescence: A theoretical effect thought to occur when two contacting surfaces move relative to each other.

“Just peeling tape is the quickest, cheapest way to provide X-rays… It’s X-rays for everyone.”

Peeling tape from a roll of Scotch releases tiny bursts of X-rays that are powerful enough to take images of bones in fingers and hands, researchers have found.

The unusual discovery was made by a University of California at Los Angeles team, intrigued after hearing that Soviet scientists in the 1950s found that sticky tape, when separated at the right speed, released pulses in the X-ray part of the energy spectrum.

Reporting in Thursday’s issue of the British-based science journal Nature, the investigators used a motorised peeling machine to unwind a standard roll (25.4 metres in length by 19 mm) of Photo Safe 3M Scotch tape at a speed of three centimetres (1.18 inches) a second.

By placing the machine in a vacuum, they were able to measure X-rays that were enough to take images.

[from Physorg.com]

Yowsers. Isn’t anything safe anymore?

Carnival of the Mobilists #144 is now up at Xen Mendelsohn’s Xellular Identity blog (cheers from Israel!). My “On Delaying Gratification” post of Sept. 28 is included. Have a look to see this week’s best writing on everything mobile!

*This image makes me hear “Masquerade” from Phantom of the Opera.

I’ve heard over the years that DOS [and Windows] sometimes err in calculations over a certain size. Something to do with floating points, I think. Anyway, I never understood the problem, so I appreciate that this report of Google Calculator having trouble includes an explanation:

It’s not a simple case of a cutoff where things fall apart, though. 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,995 incorrectly equals 0, but 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,993 correctly equals 6. And 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,001 incorrectly equals 0, but 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,000 correctly equals 2.

Perhaps most amusing for the schadenfreude crowd, Google botches some math involving a googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The quantity of a googol plus one, minus a googol, equals 0 rather than the correct result, 1.

[CNet News]