What is it about cute animals that is so popular with so many individuals? There is no question that most people are not able to ignore the appeal of cute and funny animals, whether it be in pictures, movies or indeed the genuine article. Actually, there is nothing new about this allure. Cute animals have often featured on birthday cards, wrapping paper, motivational posters and chocolate boxes.

It has been the appearance of the internet however, and notably YouTube, that has caused an upsurge in cute animals videos’ popularity. There is something really attractive about the immediacy of being able to grab a video of cute animals preferably engaging in something cheeky, such as dropping off to sleep and then falling off whichever piece of furniture they happen to be resting on!

When you take a look at which humorous video clips have gotten the the majority of visits on YouTube, then you will find a prevalent theme occurring throughout them. Just what makes them humorous is when we are able to identify something of our humanity in their activities. This could be because they are possibly displaying such human qualities as foolishness, cleverness, a sense of fun, cunning, affection, even being embarrassed. There is no recognized proof that creatures have similar motives and feelings as we do, nonetheless it is definitely attractive and heart-warming to imagine that this is the truth.

As an example, anyone who has seen the sea otters at the Vancouver Aquarium sleeping and holding paws while they float on their backs in their pool cannot fail to reckon that their performance is sweet. Moreover, the suggestion that their devotion is accidental is completely dispelled when, having separated, one of them swims his way back to the other and takes hold of her hand for a second time. What was originally sweet gets to be stunning. Virtually human.

There are numerous cheeky video clips of other otters doing what they do so perfectly – playing and socializing with one another. At wildlife centers, you can watch men and women viewing with delight and in amazement as these adorable critters frolic and play together, while chirruping and squealing. Then, almost always there is a certain otter which insists on messing around with a stone, tossing it up in the air, resting it on its stomach and carrying it under one of its front legs. These creatures are exactly like small children demanding attention, begging for food and playing with each other.

You may at the same time have watched the video clip of the moonwalking bird taken at a wildlife center in the UK. This smart flamingo appears to have found a unique technique to help him disturb the dirt in its pool to assist in his feeding. The genius of this cheeky bird is that he looks like he is performing the Michael Jackson moonwalk! He leaves the other birds standing as he slides backwards in the water.

We can certainly get a considerable amount of enjoyment from looking at cute animals on video. It most certainly seems as if the videos that are the favorites on YouTube are not simply the ones of cute kittens and puppies (which are good value in their own right), but also those video clips in which the players exhibit behavior most like ours, whatever it may be. Most likely, interest in them will carry on growing.

Game of Chess From the Voiceprint DVD Bruford-Borstlap ‘Live in Holland’ featuring Michiel Borstlap on piano and keyboard electronics, Bill Bruford on drums. This was the first public performance of this group – filmed here for Dutch national TV. Pianist Michiel Borstlap won the 1996 of the Thelonious Monk Composer’s Award and has had his music recorded by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Neither quite rock, nor quite jazz, both musicians believe in a music with immediacy, with authorship, and without boundaries or safety nets. A new CD is in production. This DVD available at www.voiceprint.co.uk

Yes, that’s right. Carrie has been seen around town with something in her hand. Although we have yet to hear a howl out of Cujo on the Kindle. Jack, as of yet, has not uttered those faithful words “here’s” Kindle. None the less, when introduced at the Kindle 2 launch, Stephen King did say he has written a novelette exclusively for the new device. As he stated in a recent article, the prolific author defined the Kindle as “a gadget with stories hiding inside it”. He especially liked that you can adjust the typeface. Something, as he pointed out, that is good for those of us getting on in years. All and all he  says “for what it is, it’s just fine. It’s light, holds its charge, is simple to operate”. So what is Mr. King going to think of the kindle 2? Will we eventually see the Children of The Corn looking up “definitions of words that puzzle you as you read”? Another feature that he seemed to like about the Kindle.

Well Stephen, if you liked the Kindle, you are going to love the Kindle 2, the next generation wireless reading device. Although it has a thin design, it holds over 1,500 books with seven times more storage. For those of you who get so engrossed in what you’re reading, the Kindle 2 turns the pages faster. The new display offers a book-like-reading experience, with a much clearer text and crisper images. Of course for those who can’t put a good book down, it has a longer battery life. Another new feature is “Read to Me”. It actually reads to you, with the new Text to Speech feature.  

The designers of Kindle 2 kept everything that consumers loved about the Kindle. The immediacy of getting a book wirelessly delivered in less than 60 seconds, and Kindle’s ability to “disappear” in your hands so you can get lost in the author’s words. Also, there are over 230,000 e-books available, including Times best sellers, at the Kindle Store.
So here are 8 new reasons to get a Kindle 2.

New Features & Enhancements
Slim & Lightweight: Just over 1/3 inch and 10.2 ounces
Books in under 60 seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for crisp images and text; even reads well in bright sunlight
Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging
More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books
Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns
Read-to-Me: Text-to-Speech feature means Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud.
No Wireless Bills: No monthly wireless bills, data plans, or commitments. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so you won’t see a monthly wireless bill.
Large Selection: Over 230,000 books, plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines and blogs available
Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

For more info on the Kindle 2 as well as a FREE download of a Stephen King like short story of terror, please go to;

My RecomMANNdations

You will also find other topics of interest like Investment Help, Natural Cures, and much more.

Love can be difficult. Throwing tech into the mix can complicate things even more.

We’ve got tech that can put us in touch with so many people at once, but can keep us from real intimacy with our closest few: Facebook friends don’t have to meet, tweets don’t require thoughtfulness, movie dates don’t require talking, and sexting obviates touching. But we still need to get down to brass tacks for love and fucking. Uh, so to speak.

The underlying game remains but it seems like we have a lot more interference to deal with.

Of course, it isn’t that one-sided. We’re meeting people we might have never met before, and we’re engaging with them, even superficially, across barriers and distances and with immediacy impossible even a few decades ago.

But my guess is that when we spend all this time at arms length or farther, engaging in little meaningless conversations with the crowd, it’s hard to imagine we’re all as good at the one-on-one time than we might been sometime in the last century. I might even suggest from my pop psychobabble arm chair that gadget geeks who prefer to fiddle with apps at a party instead of conversing with other human beings are at least slightly damaged romantic goods. I’d be speaking about myself. And so would my girlfriend:

When Brian first brought his iPhone home, it was like he’d taken a mistress. All day, all night, he fondled its touchscreen and gawked at its shiny face. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of it for more than five minutes at a time. Like a good Japanese girlfriend, I let him get the lust out of his system instead of trying to stop the inevitable. I pretended not to care while he lay in bed smoothing his finger across the unlock bar, and sat stoically at the other end of the dinner table as he and the iPhone whispered sweet nothings to each other.

Geek-on-geek love isn’t all bad. Nerds use the same websites and gadgets and develop, together, the same affinities and rules of right and wrong. The challenge is, along the worldwide spectrum from geek to non-geek, everyone gets comfortable with these modern tools at different paces. What’s left, and constant, then, is human nature.

For the next few days, counting down to Valentine’s day, we’re exploring love in modern times. Our resident love doctor, Dr. Debby Herbenick, will be sharing wisdom and data to help us understand the new challenges, and we’ll all be publishing various takes on this complicated subject, as well as sharing your experiences as well.

It’s not all bad, in fact, sometimes it’s beautiful, but let’s face it, love is messy enough and adding social networks and smartphones into the mix without any established rules for how or when to use them properly, things can only get messier.

This is where our theme—and our exploration of awkward geek love—begins.

You can read all our Bad Valentine stories here.

Bad Valentine is our own special take on the beauty—and awkwardness—of geek love.

Chances are you’ve heard of the text-to-donate system set up by the Red Cross to provide relief to quake-devastated Haiti. It seems that the ease of donating and the immediacy of the disaster have prompted a response far beyond what the Red Cross anticipated. I can understand why: I used the system to donate $10 (not to toot my own horn), and found it as easy as dropping a quarter in a slot at the grocery store. So: good work everyone, and if you haven’t donated yet, give it a shot or check out Google’s catchall page for Haiti relief efforts.

The success of this campaign raises some questions about the way this sort of thing should be handled by the telecoms. A $10 charge will appear on my T-Mobile bill, I’m assuming; they volunteered to support this effort, so I think that’ll be the end of it, but now that I’ve gotten a taste of it, I want more. Not necessarily just for donations, but for mobile charging in general. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of the donations and things going on right now, but they bring up a few issues worth discussing.

The ease of payment is made possible by the fact that T-Mo already has my card and address. Making a donation was easy; wouldn’t it be just as easy for an online retailer to say “text 342856 with BILL to buy this item!” This would work better for single-serving sites or those with limited numbers of products, but still, it’d be nice. But that makes T-Mobile into an arbiter of normal transactions. The $10 I’ve donated to the Red Cross has been given to them, but it won’t be paid back to T-Mo until my monthly payment goes through. What if it were a $20 donation? or a $50 shoe purchase?

It would be good to have a system in place for this that is well-understood by consumers. Having an e-wallet of sorts, perhaps managed for an extra $5/month by your service provider or something, would be a great way to avoid having your credit card information spread over 10 or 15 sites. Easy pay systems are here and there, I know, but they’re far from mainstream yet — this donation rush might just be the thing that tips the scales, though. People might find, as I did, that it would be just as easy to buy as it was to donate. It’s something we’ll have to deal with sooner or later.

Of course, there are things like Square out there, but doesn’t Square strike you as a bit of a weird hybrid? It’ll last for a bit, but the marriage of the old card system with a new cardless system seems like a sideways step instead of a forwards one. The challenge will be to make a system that is secure, robust, and easily accessible from any phone.

The New Oxford English Dictionary has announced that 2009’s Word of the Year is unfriend. While it is perhaps not used as broadly as the newly-verbed friend, the latter is already in the dictionary, so they can’t very well call it new. The best they can do is run with unfriend, which implies and extends the other. A worthy choice, I think, with “currency and potential longevity,” as Oxford’s Senior Lexicographer puts it. It set me thinking, though: how prescient have Word of the Year choices been? Have they infallibly documented the rise of tech in mainstream language and culture? —or are they a dusty collection of buzzwords, a history of folly and haste? And really, which of those is the truer depiction of the world of technology?

I examined Oxford’s Word of the Year lists going back as far as their blog documents them, and consulted a few other word-tracking sources. Unsurprisingly, the popularity and continued pertinence of new words have been as unpredictable as the technologies they describe. Still, the world from a dictionary’s perspective makes for a unique retrospective.

Take hypermiling, for instance. 2008’s word, relevant and rich at the time, seems positively archaic now; as electrics and more efficient hybrids populate our roads more and more, the idea of hypermiling seems to be no longer a cool technique employed by savvy drivers, but a weird fuel-based cult obsessed with aging technology. It brings to mind a sentimental geek zealously maintaining a Windows 3.1 box. Webster’s 2008 word, more farsighted to be sure, was oversharing, certainly a symptom of the personal-broadcasting era that we’ve all observed. Hypermiling was chosen for its immediacy, which does not correlate well with longevity.

Yet podcasting, chosen in 2005, is going stronger than ever. A blog or website these days is incomplete without a podcast, though some question the practicality of adding yet another modality to the increasingly multi-tiered stream of information assaulting every webgoer. Still, no one would dispute that it is a meaningful and useful term, and one not likely to be replaced any time soon. Runners-up that year included rootkit, a surprisingly technical entry that has stayed with us, and lifehack, which, while being an interesting blog, is a pretentious failure as a word.

2007 was a bit of a misfire for Oxford; although it was a big year for Apple and Facebook, their tech nominations were red herrings like bacn, an abortive attempt to brand “desired spam,” and cloudware, which at the time was (if you’ll forgive the expression) too hazy a concept to really get much traction among casual users. Locavore hasn’t gained much ground in the popularity contest, probably because people who use it tend to be selling it. It’s still a good app, though. Unfriend would have been a real win here, since the new politics of online relationships were being written by users at large. Cloud has remained but I think perhaps the term which may best have represented 2007 was iTouch. This common misnomer evokes both the rapid expansion of personal media devices and widespread mystification at its terminology and function. Unfortunately, those who use the word are by definition nearly incapable of propagating it as a meme.

The ‘97-’98-’99 series of WAP, to Google, and blogger have an almost causal connection, as if each must have necessarily followed the other. While WAP was never a term laypeople used, and Wi-Fi would have been a better choice, its import was clear. Increasingly secure, convenient, and popular, the internet began getting personal in 1997, and that wave gathered energy with Googling over the next year, finally crashing on the shores of the collective idiom as blogging. Laptop plus coffee shop plus being able to explore the internet efficiently was a sort of tech trifecta, and blogs started sprouting like weeds (sorry about that).

But back to this year’s words. Unfriend is, I think, one for the ages. But the others are groaners: intexticated? Funemployed? Sexting maybe, but we can’t nominate every clever portmanteau. If that were the case, half the words in the dictionary would be creations of my own (I have a talent for them). Better to collect them in a little bundle, as they’ve done with what I called the infernal bird-based jargon of Twitter: Tweeps, Tweetup, Twitt, Twitterati, Twitterature, Twitterverse/sphere, Retweet, Twibe, Sweeple, Tweepish, Tweetaholic, Twittermob, and Twitterhea (Twitterhead?).

These word clusters provide an interesting cross-section of the culture around a certain word (the other one they note is Obama) and its emergent phenomena — Twitterati is a good example of this, and a good word to keep around. The others I consign to the pit.

The level to which this invented jargon, or even something like the more practical unfriend, is actually used is unclear. I’m sure we’ve all seen freemium, and it has worth, but will it end up as widely used as paywall? It’s impossible to say, given the malleability of both new words and the people who use them. The environment for creating words is becoming more democratic, for better or for worse. Personally, I find my new words in old books, but even this cursory look at the new word market shows that those terms we may dismiss as fleeting or overly specific may be the most signal of the era.

Lastly, as many of you readers are specialists in tech, feel free to submit some of your more interesting or useful terms. For example, I like tentacular but rarely get to use it. Not really jargon, or a word even, but when it works, it works. Let’s populate this post with submissions for next year’s list; maybe someone from Oxford will find something they like.

[image: first recorded tweet; chemheritage's Flickr]