Have you ever taken a look at the list of functions available in PHP? I just counted 5025 on the PHP quick reference page. Granted, it depends on what extensions you have enabled, but still: that’s one heap of functions. While I can’t show you every one of them, if you’re new to the language, I’ll introduce you to seven really handy ones in this quick tip — via Nettuts
Fans still holding tickets for a cancelled 1979 show in Rhode Island by British rock band The Who can finally use them.
The Who’s 1979 concert in Providence was cancelled by then-Mayor Buddy Cianci, who cited safety concerns after a stampede before a show in Cincinnati, Ohio, killed 11 people. The band hasn’t been to Providence since.
The Who this week announced it will end its latest tour in Providence on Feb. 26 at the same venue where its show was cancelled 33 years ago, now called the Dunkin Donuts Centre.
General Manager Lawrence Lepore said on Thursday the venue will honour tickets from the cancelled 1979 show. Lepore said many ticket holders got refunds for the cancelled show in 1979, but others may have held on to their tickets as memorabilia — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Back in 2008, Boston
Bill Hansbury was learning to live with a prosthetic after losing his leg to an infection. That’s when he met Jake Bainter, who was about to have his right leg amputated. The two struck up a friendship, despite a wide gap in their ages — Hansbury was 70, and Bainter was 7.
The pair recently discussed their friendship, and other topics, during a visit to StoryCorps in St Petersburg, Florida.
Boston Bill, tell me about the day that we met,
says Jake, now 12.
Well, that day, I had just regained the ability to ride my bike,
says Hansbury, 74. And here I am, coming up to a stop sign. I don’t know what happened, but I could not get my feet out of the pedals. So, I took the bicycle over to the curb. And that’s when the car pulled up.
That was four hours before my amputation,
Jake says. We were driving to the hospital, and we saw on the side of the road, a guy with a prosthetic leg. And I remember pulling around up to the curb and meeting you
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
If there’s a dominant custom trend today, it’s dark and minimal. Bikes are being stripped of chrome and artifice, and generally look the better for it. But there’s always an exception, and in this case, it’s the 72 Mono Racer
from Loaded Gun Customs.
If the name is familiar to you, it’s probably because Delaware-based LGC have featured in all three series of Café Racer TV. This is their latest build, a pale and interesting cafe racer that started life as a 1972 Bonneville — via Bike EXIF
If you ever wondered about the post-coital habits of squid, today is your lucky day.
It turns out that squid are a lot like humans, except for a few minor details like their customary three-hour athletic sexual abilities.
Scientists of the University of Melbourne collected dumpling squid from the wild and forced the squid — both males and females — to swim to exhaustion in a flume.
According to this article in the Los Angeles Times, the researchers then allowed the squid to mate, and performed the same swimming experiment.
This is what happened: after sex, both males and females could swim only half as long as normal. If they were allowed 30 minutes of recovery time after sex, however, they could swim normally.
So far, this is hardly shocking information, considering squid mating sessions last up to three hours and are apparently extremely vigorous — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Twitter plans to appeal a ruling to turn over the once-public tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protestor charged with disorderly conduct, a case the company says threatens the First Amendment rights of its users.
A New York Criminal Court judge ruled last month that Twitter should turn over the tweets of Malcolm Harris, since his messages were public and are not the same as an email or a private chat, which would require a search warrant.
At Twitter, we are committed to fighting for our users,
wrote Ben Lee, Twitter’s legal counsel, on Thursday. Accordingly, we are appealing this decision which, in our view, doesn’t strike the right balance between the rights of our users and the interests of law enforcement.
The social networking site was served with a subpoena on 26 January from prosecutors requesting the information citing section 2703 of the Stored Communications Act, which requires service provider to disclose certain kinds of electronic communications without a warrant — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A group of activists have banded together to protect the Internet from what they see as bad legislation, with a focus initially on copyright enforcement proposals.
Members of the new Internet Defence League hope they can harness the online activism against controversial copyright bills the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), when tens of millions of Internet users and thousands of website publishers protested the two bills earlier this year.
The new group, with a broad range of supporters including Reddit, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tea Party Patriots, plans to issue alerts to websites when members spot government actions that may be detrimental to the Internet. The group will send out alert codes, called cat signals
after the cute Internet cat memes, to websites and users.
The group will announce its arrival with cat-themed spotlights in the sky Thursday evening in New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The housing unit is a temporary summer home developed [RRMR Arquitectos] in the coastal desert of Lima, 95Km from the city. The stretch of land stands on a moderate slope in a privileged location with a frontal view to a golf course and a lateral view to the sea — via ArchDaily
Google and MAKE have partnered to host an online summer fun camp, with a new project every day for the summer. Today, it’s my turn to give a workshop on polymer clay, a modelling substance my kids and I have grown to admire. Here’s a link to my instructions, here’s a link to my article about polymer clay — via Boingboing
This time, Alaska may have really found a way to fix American politics. The mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, boats sky-high approval ratings, a 15-year winning streak and, with over 6,000 subscribers, more friends than you on Facebook.
His secret? He’s a cat.
Fifteen years ago, the citizens of Talkeetna (pop. 800) didn’t like the looks of their candidates for mayor. Around that same time resident Lauri Stec, manager of Nagley’s General Store, saw a box of kittens and decided to adopt one. She named him Stubbs because he didn’t have a tail and soon the whole town was in love with him.
So smitten were they with this kitten, in fact, that they wrote him in for mayor instead of deciding on one of the two lesser candidates. Mayor Stubbs has held his position ever since — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A new treatment for Alzheimer’s could halt deterioration in people with early symptoms of the disease, a limited human trial has shown. The treatment, called the most exciting drug in development
by scientists, is currently prescribed to people with immune system problems but could have a significant impact on the quality of life of Alzheimer’s sufferers, the trial suggests.
The drug, intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg), prevented the decline in cognitive skills, memory and the ability to live independently, among patients with mild to moderate symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Those who took a placebo continued to decline. The small number of patients who took the highest dose of the drug for three years showed no decline in memory.
Medical experts said the drug could be used to treat Alzheimer’s within a decade and was probably the most exciting drug we know about that is currently in the late stages of research
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Now that I have gone to my reward, I have confessions and things I should now say. As it turns out, I am the guy who stole the safe from the Motor View Drive Inn back in June, 1971. I could have left that unsaid, but I wanted to get it off my chest. Also, I really am not a PhD. What happened was that the day I went to pay off my college student loan at the U of U, the girl working there put my receipt into the wrong stack, and two weeks later, a PhD diploma came in the mail. I didn’t even graduate, I only had about 3 years of college credit. In fact, I never did even learn what the letters PhD
even stood for. For all of the Electronic Engineers I have worked with, I’m sorry, but you have to admit my designs always worked very well, and were well engineered, and I always made you laugh at work. Now to that really mean Park Ranger; after all, it was me that rolled those rocks into your geyser and ruined it. I did notice a few years later that you did get Old Faithful working again. To Disneyland — you can now throw away that Banned for Life
file you have on me, I’m not a problem any more — and SeaWorld San Diego, too, if you read this — via redwolf.newsvine.com
One of Australia’s peak consumer groups has recommended the Federal Government investigate whether region-coding and charging Australians higher prices for products based on Internet IP address should be banned, in the context of an investigation which has found little justification for average Australian price hikes of 50 percent on technology goods.
In May, following a public campaign on the issue by Labor MP Ed Husic, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications called for submissions to help inform an inquiry into pricing of technology goods and services in Australia, publishing the terms of reference for the initiative on its web site. The results have so far demonstrated a strong groundswell of public anger about ongoing markups on technology goods sold in Australia.
Many of the submissions from users focused on the fact that online stores such as Apple’s iTunes, Valve’s Steam, Microsoft’s Xbox Live, Sony’s PlayStation Network, Amazon’s Kindle store and Adobe’s software store charged Australians higher prices for the exact same software and content than residents of other countries, particularly countries such as the US. Companies such as Microsoft have justified the charges based on the increased cost of doing business in Australia, but in its own submission to the inquiry (PDF), consumer watchdog organisation CHOICE said there was in fact little justification for the price rises and that the legality of geo-IP blocking should be investigated — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Arquitectura en Movimiento have designed the LVII residential building in Mexico City — via CONTEMPORIST
One of the world’s most active spam botnets — Grum — was crippled after two of its command and control (CnC) servers hosted in the Netherlands were taken down, according to researchers from security firm FireEye.
These two CnC servers were responsible for pumping spam instructions to their zombies,
said FireEye senior staff scientist Atif Mushtaq in a blog post on Tuesday. With these two servers offline, the spam template inside Grum’s memory will soon time out and the zombies will try to fetch new instructions but will not able to find them.
If Grum stops sending spam, it will have a significant impact on the global spam volume, Mushtaq said. However, this might be just a temporary victory, because the botnet’s creators still control two CnC servers hosted in Russia and Panama — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Rollins describes the seminal moment when he decided to leave his job as manager of Haagen Dazs to become the lead singer of Black Flag — via Big Think
so, i recently got to visit a friend of mine in his new (to him) neutra house. the sten-frenke house. in santa monica — via moby los angeles architecture
After a lot of theorising, postulating, and non-human trials, it looks like bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the US. These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration (which millions of old people suffer from), diabetic retinopathy, or other degenerative eye diseases.
The first of these implants, Argus II developed by Second Sight, is already available in Europe. For around $115,000, you get a 4-hour operation to install an antenna behind your eye, and a special pair of camera-equipped glasses that send signals to the antenna. The antenna is wired into your retina with around 60 electrodes, creating the equivalent of a 60-pixel display for your brain to interpret. The first users of the Argus II bionic eye report that they can see rough shapes and track the movement of objects, and slowly read large writing.
The second bionic eye implant, the Bio-Retina developed by Nano Retina, is a whole lot more exciting. The Bio-Retina costs less — around the $60,000 mark — and instead of an external camera, the vision-restoring sensor is actually placed inside the eye, on top of the retina. The operation only takes 30 minutes and can be performed under local anaesthetic — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Gunmen have attacked a UN vehicle, critically injuring a doctor who was administering polio vaccines in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.
The foreign doctor was in the run-down Sohrab Goth area of the city, officials say. His driver was also hurt.
No group has said it carried out the shooting, but the Taliban have issued threats against the polio drive and are thought to be active in Sohrab Goth — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Grace Kelly and Alfred Hitchcock by Edward Quinn, 1954 — via Awesome People Hanging Out Together
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