See screenshots. Or download.

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Wow. This photograph of the International Space Station is pretty impressive.

There is also a set of renderings (1,2,3) showing the relative size of planets and stars.

[Via digg, reddit]

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Link

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There is a reddit user called telegraphonline who, since the Telegraph launched their blogs, has submitted 16 selected articles to reddit. Is this just an avid reader or an official practice? I very much suspect the latter from the lack of comments and the fact that all articles are from the same source.

Is this a sign of the mainstream media recognising the power of social websites and embracing them not as competition but as an opportunity? I hope so!

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“And you do not think it is disrespectful?”
“I think it’s anything but disrespectful.”
“You are American, yes?”

Link

[via waxy]

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This article on writing copy is worth reading.

Trim your sentences to get your message across in the quickest way possible. Adding more words doesn’t make you sound clever and it certainly doesn’t make your app better so again leave them out. A couple of examples of this are:

What you write – What you should write

At the present time – Now
Provided that – If
Owing to the fact that – Because
In order to – To
The majority of – Most
Accordingly – So
Facilitate – Help
Frequently – Often
Commence – Start
Nonetheless – But
In conjunction with – And

And you can pretty much delete the following words from your copy altogether because they don’t mean anything:

at the end of the day
basically
by and large
currently
simply
well

[via]

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This claims to be the hardest web riddle yet. I’ve beaten level 1 and now have some thinking to do.

[Via GB]

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Google Trend is a lovely new service allowing you to see a graph of search activity along with causes of the spikes.

Link

A (morbid) example, the London bombings (which Google fails to identify).

It does comparisons (Internet Explorer – red, Firefox – blue, Opera – yellow)

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This analysis of a right-wing blogger’s claim is entertaining.

So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.

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You might notice that below this post there are a few short links. This a feature known as ‘asides’ that I have added to the blog. It is similar to Kottke’s remaindered links. Currently they don’t show up in the RSS feed though I’ll try to work something out so they are partially.

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The Euro FlyingBed.

[Via Reddit]

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A translation of the Windows EULA, from legalese into plain English, is rather enlightening. I have previouslyu wondered if it would be possible to create a script that strips the effectively meaningless text out of legalesew but decided it would be too much effort. In my opinion the silliest installations are those that force you to scroll down on the EULA as if this proves you have read it.

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