Yummy Wakame Weblog

“It’s the Google Zeitgeist of crime” says Wired.

Nathan told me about The Pirate Bay – the world’s largest, legal, BitTorrent tracker. You can pretty much find any bit of software, games, music as well, even full version software with cracks, serials and activation keys, without worrying about those pesky popup windows or porn ads while browsing your options. Simply search for what you need and use any one of a number of free pieces of BitTorrent software to download the files. Of course actually downloading and enjoying copywrited material without paying for it or asking permission is completely illegal… but knowing where to find it isn’t.

In case you were wondering, Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers. As you can imagine, Pirate Bay have received legal threats from big corporations like Microsoft, Dreamworks, SEGA, Apple etc, but since only torrent files are saved on their server, no copyrighted or illegal material are stored by them, so its not possible to hold them responsible for simply linking to servers that do store the material. Proprietor Fredrik Neij insists that Pirate Bay is perfectly legal under the copyright law in Sweden, where it’s based, and its continued existence lends credence to that claim.

The site has a clean look, advanced search and support for 10 languages, its open to everyone and it’s free. Tempted?

Do you have a WordPress blog but frustrated with your lack of html and css knowledge required to personalise the default Kubrick theme? This fantastic little tool lets you replace that giant blue default header at the top of your blog with a nice photo from Flickr. Type a tag you want to search for, select your favourite image from the results page and crop to the area you like best. Try it!

Found on limn, my new daily hangout these days.

Here’s a cute little list of 50 things you can do with your iPod.

The good people at AskMen.com, along with my dearest mother, tell me that Teflon is a bad idea. Reportedly, Teflon’s miracle coat contains “ammonium perfluorooctanoate (more commonly known as C-8), which has been linked to cancer, organ damage and other negative health effects in laboratory animals.”

Besides, a good iron skillet doubles as a defense mechanism in the event that a cartoon rabbit might try and break in to your house.

Wow this film looks amazing…

GRIZZLY MAN is a docudrama that centers on amateur grizzly bear expert Timothy Treadwell who journeyed to Alaska to study and live with the bears for 13 summers. Acclaimed director Werner Herzog explores the life and death of Timothy Treadwell who lived unarmed among the bears, and filmed his adventures in the wild during his final five seasons. In October 2003, Treadwell’s remains, along with those of his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were discovered near their campsite in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Reserve. They had been mauled and devoured by a grizzly.

Check out the unbelievable trailer and here’s the official website.

Thanks to Shawn for telling me about it.

He’d make a great Governor. Possibly even better than Arnie.

Anyone who’s website is called Page Title gets my vote.

Thanks me julie!

Japan has, in the past 100 years, achieved what most Western civilizations struggled two or three times as long to achieve. The result, as we’re all aware, is video games and text messaging (among my favorites, anyway). But spawning countless Pokemon isn’t easy, and the average Japanese person is ridiculously overworked.

Kakegawa City is a town built on the principles of returning to an older, more thoughtful time in Japan’s history (and all of ours, I’d venture.) The city is built on a series of 8 guidelines to how a life should be lived, which it calls “Slow Life.” Wanna hear more?

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A cowboy hipstar I know, if he wasn’t already sewing one, would probably love a funky hand-knitted bag like this:

“I had been searching for this video for years, after having seen it on TV. The lead in is in German as are the subtitles, but it doesn’t matter. The dialogue is in English. This is for real. It’s from the dash-cam of a Maine State Trooper. I crack up every time I see it.” ~ Cait

These are Prime Numbers, and they go on into infinity.

BBC Radio 4: Prime Numbers

Last month a team of researchers in Missouri successfully calculated the highest latest prime number and it is 9.1 million digits long. For nearly two and a half thousand years since Euclid first described the prime numbers in his book “Elements“, mathematicians have struggled to write a rule to predict what comes next in the sequence. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler feared that it’s a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate. But others have been more hopeful. In the middle of the 19th century, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann discovered the connection between prime numbers and a complex mathematical function called the Zeta function. Ever since, mathematicians have laboured to prove the existence of this connection and reveal the rules behind the elusive sequence.

What are prime numbers and what is their significance?

Prime Numbers, which most people remember from school, are numbers which are not divisible by anything. A number like 17 can’t be made up of two smaller numbers multiplied together. But 15 can be written as 3 times 5, so it’s not a prime number.

They are so important to many mathematicians because they are the building blocks of all numbers. So if you take any number, it can be built by multiplying these prime numbers together. So a number like 105 is built by multiplying 3 x 5 x 7. So the primes are like the atoms of arithmetic – the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of mathematics. They are a little bit like the Periodic Table for a mathematician.

Mathematicians are constantly having to go back to understanding the primes, because primes build numbers, from numbers you get mathematics, from mathematics you get the whole of science. Quite often a mathematician will be exploring a subject and will find they need to find out more about the primes to make progress.

Did you know that prime numbers are fundamental now to the codes that protect our privacy on the Internet? Every time you send your credit card details to a shop online, we’re using prime numbers to keep that information secure. Currently we rely on the fact that we don’t understand the primes well enough to crack the encryption.

This is where it gets really interesting – prime numbers occurred in nature long before man knew about them. Many animals depend on prime numbers for their survival. Take a listen to this fascinating BBC Radio programme to discover the secrets and modern day uses of these amazing numbers.