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There’s a whole lot of mystique, paranoia, and guessing as to how Google comes up with its generally best-in-class search results. Steven Levy at Wired digs in to discover what really makes Google’s search engine different, and how it learns from us.

PageRank, the generally accepted metric of, among other things, how often a page is linked to, is only a small part of the larger story at Google. Talking to Google’s engineers and tracing the history of publicly announced search features, Levy discovers that a good deal of what Google has learned about search comes from the searchers themselves.

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

If you’re at all intrigued by what Google gets right or wrong, Levy’s piece is well worth the read. It’s a lot of straight talk from inside Google about search, written up in plain English.

If you’re looking for a novel and crafty gift (seriously last minute Valentine’s Day gift?)—or just want to give your home a little boutique flair—DIY felted soap bars are surprisingly easy to make.

If you’ve never heard of felted soap, it’s a pretty neat concept. You take a bar of soap and wrap it in some unspun wool and wet it, massaging—felting actually!—the wool around the bar of soap until it has taken on the shape of the bar. After that you rinse it off with hot water and let it dry.

The result is like a self-lathering and self-cleaning washcloth perfect for washing your hands or tossing in the shower. If you choose a really nice soap and some wool dyed to match the bathroom of the recipient it makes for a crafty gift without the “Uhhh thanks?” DIY gifts are sometimes received with.

Check out the full guide, complete with great pictures, at the link below. If you’ve got a favorite tutorial or trick for replicating swanky boutique finds through DIY magic, let’s hear about it in the comments.

If you dumped all your glassware into a sink full of water last night and went to bed after the big game, you might find some of the glasses nested tightly together this morning. Here’s how to get them unstuck without breakage.

Photo by evelynishere.

DIY Life’s Diane Rixon recommends first drizzling some vegetable oil or dish soap in between the two drinking glasses and wiggling gently to see if they’ll pop apart. If that doesn’t work, try a hot and cold one-two punch:

Hot water and ice water. Submerge the bottom glass or bowl in very hot (but not boiling) water. Fill the uppermost glass or bowl with ice water. Presto! The simultaneous expansion and contraction of the layers should unstick even the most stubborn glassware.

Check out the post for more ideas on how to release stuck glassware. If all the time you spent unsticking your glasses has made you realize they’re dingy and cloudy, scrub them with toothpaste to restore their sparkle.

What morning-after cleaning hassles have you encountered after hosting a bash? Share them—and your best cleaning tips—in the comments.

Towels would seem to be such a utilitarian object that they could never need any sort of optimization. As your towels age however, their absorbency decreases. Boost them back to their glory days with this simple hack.

Photo by evelynishere.

If you’re in the habit of using the amount of detergent recommended on the bottle, which is almost always way more than you need, and then hitting towels with fabric softener or dryer sheets you’re setting yourself up for towels that lose their absorbency and can even begin to stink.

That’s right, most of the time stinky towels aren’t a result of failing to wash your towels enough but using too much detergent and fabric softener. The short of it is this: more isn’t better and over time soap residue can accumulate within the fibers of the towels ensuring that not only do they fail to absorb as much water as they can but they also don’t dry as effectively as they should. When your towels seem to get a funky smell immediately upon getting wet again, failure to dry completely thanks to soap residue is usually the culprit.

What can you do? Saving your towels is as simple as running them through two hot loads. Skip the detergent on both loads, run them through once with hot water and a cup of vinegar and then again with hot water and a half cup of baking soda. Your goal, whether washing brand new towels or old towels, is to strip the softener and detergent reside from the fibers of the towel and get them as absorbent as possible.

Read the full guide at WikiHow for more information and if you have your own laundry tricks, let’s hear them in the comments.

Originally posted 2009-09-18 18:25:29. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Filed under: Portables, Software, Apple

Fox News writer Clayton Morris was also wondering just why Apple went with AT&T yet again for the iPad data plan, but it turns out things between the two companies weren’t quite so cut and dry as Jobs made us believe on stage. He says that inside sources at Verizon still insist that they’ve been talking with Apple about handling some of the data service, and he even says that they’ve mentioned not only an iPhone set up to work with Verizon later this year, but an iPad as well.

Rumor also has it that AT&T simply outbid the other cellphone providers for becoming the official iPad data service, and that makes sense: that $29.99 unlimited plan is a heck of a deal for consumers, but then again, it’ll bring in a heck of a lot of business for AT&T (who should have already been in hot water for their service outages, and will probably end up in more, despite their promises that their network can handle the data).

Of course, Verizon is really the only source saying they’re still in the game at the moment — most analysts believe Verizon won’t see Apple hardware until they bring out their next-generation LTE service, and even then having a bunch of different plans to choose from doesn’t really sound like Apple’s kind of thing. But it is interesting to hear that AT&T is willing to take a dive in price to keep Apple’s business. Wonder what might happen if their network dives as well.

[via Apple Insider]

TUAWRumor: AT&T outbid Verizon for the iPad data plan originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Super Glue and its off-brand cousins are the next best thing to duct tape when it comes to good-enough repairs, but heaven help you if it spills. Luckily, there’s a guide to getting SuperGlue out or off of nearly anything.

Photo by ATKR.

Lots of folks know to reach for the nail polish remover to get glued things unstuck, but the acetone in the remover can damage and discolor surfaces. According to the makers of Super Glue, you can actually use hot water to get yourself out of your gluey mess.

For instance, if you need to unstick your lips (and, please, we don’t want to know why), here’s what you do:

If lips are accidentally stuck together, apply a generous amount of warm water and encourage maximum wetting and pressure from saliva from inside the mouth. Peel or roll (do not pull) lips apart. It is almost impossible to swallow the adhesive as a liquid. The adhesive solidifies upon contact with saliva (moisture) and could adhere to the inside of the mouth. Saliva will lift the adhesive in 1-2 days, avoid swallowing the adhesive after detachment.

Hit up the post for more tips on how to get Super Glue off of clothing, countertops, and more. Confession time: What have you accidentally glued together without meaning to? Own up to it in the comments.

If you prefer loose tea and an infuser over the bagged varieties, you don’t have to settle for lesser quality when you travel. Make your own reusable travel teabags to take single servings of your favorite loose-leaf brew wherever you go.

It only takes two things to make your own teabags: a few 4″ x 3″ pieces of loosely woven muslin and a some 12″ lengths of cotton string. Hit up the post put together by the creative smarties at Craft Leftovers for exact directions on how to sew the muslin into a tiny bag, then fill it with tea and stash it in your bag or purse.

The next time you’re out and about, all you need is a mug of hot water and you can kick back with your favorite beverage. If tea’s not your, uh, bag, then consider making your own single-serve coffee pods instead.

Tales of Star Trek piracy and sexy slumber party pics topped the week’s tech and science stories. Here’s what was hot over the past seven days.

Two high school student athletes got in hot water after pictures from a slumber party posted on MySpace—with privacy controls, no less—ended up on the principal’s desk. After being barred from extracurricular activities, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on the girls’ behalf claiming the punishment violated their First Amendment rights.

Somehow we knew that the story about Larry Johnson, the Kansas City Chiefs running back in hot water for his barrage of inappropriate tweets, wouldn’t go away quietly.

First we saw Johnson banned from practice, then he was officially suspended by the team, costing him $315,000 in lost salary. Johnson released an apology, albeit a very unconvincing one, after previously stating on Twitter that he wouldn’t regret his actions. Now, Kansas City fans are taking action in the form of an online petition.

According to ESPN, signatures from Kansas City Chiefs fans have been collected in the hopes of getting Johnson deactivated from the team so that he won’t be able to surpass Priest Holmes’ team rushing record. At the time of their article, there were 1,400 signatures, but the number has since drastically risen to 4,300 signatures and counting as of this afternoon.

Fans are banding together and asking Chiefs GM Scott Pioli to take more punitive action against the running back. You can view the entire petition, and the signatures here, but we’ve included the entire text of the petition below.

Stop Larry Johnson Petition

To:  Kansas City Chiefs Fans

Dear Scott Pioli,

Let us start with the point: We do not want Larry Johnson to become the Kansas City Chiefs all time leading rusher.

We are lifelong fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. Win or lose, good or bad, right or wrong, we love the Kansas City Chiefs. Growing up in Kansas City, we were raised knowing there are two seasons in KC: Chiefs season and Road Construction. We feel we speak for an entire city when we say that we are an organization of hard working fans, hard working players and blue collar coaches that care passionately about not only our win/loss record, but also for the integrity of the game of football.

Being new to the organization, we would like to talk about something that has been on our minds since before the season started. We have had a long standing tradition of putting the best players in roles that best serve the needs of our team.

As a fan base, we have always taken pride in some of the names that have played on our field, hung in the Ring of Honor and those that are now immortalized in the Hall of Fame at Arrowhead Stadium. Names like Bobby Bell, Christian Okoye, Willie Roaf, Lenny Dawson, Priest Holmes, Abner Hayes and the amazing Derrick Thomas. These are just a few of the names that will live forever in the hearts and minds of Chiefs fans everywhere.

The times we’ve spent watching and supporting our great past players are times that we hold dear. The players were role models for us as we grew up, and they will be names we share with our children as they grow up. With that being said, one name that I hope is never mentioned amongst those great Chief names is Larry Johnson.

While we are thankful for his service, we feel that Larry has been a black eye on the organization and has no business being mentioned with some of the above names.

During his first few years in Kansas City, Larry Johnson ran through holes created by one of the greatest offensive lines ever put together. He was handed the ball and was asked to follow Tony Richardson, the best fullback to ever don a Chiefs helmet. Because of those early successes, Larry Johnson now sits on the cusp of becoming the all-time leading rusher in Kansas City Chiefs history. Not to discredit anything he has accomplished, but we believe it would be a travesty if Larry were to surpass the great Priest Holmes as the Chiefs all-time leading rusher.

It’s not a hidden fact that Larry hates being in Kansas City. He doesn’t like the organization, he doesn’t like the fans, he doesn’t like the city. He has been more than vocal about how he feels about being a Chief. We’ve waited for years for him to be traded and we don’t believe that there is an offensive line that can open a hole big enough for Larry and the chip on his shoulder to run through.

Let’s talk about facts now. So far on the season, here are Larry’s numbers:
7 Games
132 attempts
358 yards
2.7 yards per carry
51.1 yards per game
0 TD
0 runs of 20 or more yards
2 fumbles

That is abysmal. For a professional back in the NFL, that is absolutely terrible. There is no reason for him to keep getting starts. There is no reason for him to even see the ball. There is no reason for him to be on the sidelines. The number 27 should be taken off the field because of a line like that.

We are asking you, as fans of this team, this organization, and of the pride that this city has in the Chiefs, please deactivate Larry Johnson. Please do not let his name sit atop the all-time rushing leaders in Kansas City Chiefs history. He needs a mere 80 yards to surpass Priest. He doesn’t deserve that opportunity. He has never represented anything close to the values that we have for our Chiefs and it would be another dagger to the fans that continue to support this proud franchise.

We are asking this as a favor to those of us who have supported this team long, long, long before you were brought in. We will support you through thick and thin – you will find out that we are a loyal, loyal bunch. As you will learn, Kansas Citians are very supportive of our organizations. We love the Royals and the Chiefs. We understand there are ups and downs and we do not expect the team to win 12 games every year. We know the Chiefs will get better and that it might take some time. While we may be frustrated at times, we understand. However, allowing Larry Johnson to attain a record is something that can never be erased. In a year where the team is trying to look toward the future with many young players, please don’t add to the collective morose this city is feeling by allowing one of the truly great players, people, and role models in this city’s sporting history to be replaced in the record books by someone who we don’t like and who doesn’t like us. Show this town you are the leader the organization needs and release or deactivate Larry Johnsons now and never again let him wear the red and gold on Sunday.

Thanks for your time and understanding.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, lisafx.

Tags: larry johnson, petition, twitter

Aspirin is a medicine cabinet staple for those prone to headaches. Combined in the right ratio with tap water, it’s equally handy for keeping dandruff flakes at bay.

Photo by Wikipedia

With winter on its way your hair and scalp will be taking the brunt of the constant indoor/outdoor drying climate changes. If you’re looking to help keep those pesky flakes in check, try that bottle of asprin from the back corner of your medicine cabinet to make up this DIY mixture.

Finely crush 3 tablets of Aspirin then dissolve in a spray bottle of hot water, allow to cool. Apply to scalp (all over) then shampoo as normal. Shake the spray bottle before each use.

We’ve shown you before in the past how to keep your hair shiny and flake free by using Listerine, but for those who are looking for a less minty-fresh experience, you might give Asprin a try. Home help weblog Tip Nut has 8 more ideas, in case either of these seem a little off the wall for your daily routine.