The following is excerpted from Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan's new collection of essays, which Deadspin cannot recommend enough.

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises--developed as an open source project--allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World.

I'm gonna come right out and say something that I'm sure you won't all openly agree with: McDonald's french fries are great. At their best, they are everything a french fry should be: salty, crisp, light, and not greasy. Granted, you get the occasional odd franchise that lets'em sit under the heat lamp for a couple hours too long, but on the whole, I find it remarkable that the bigwigs have discovered a way to create a frozen fry that even a one armed eyeless chimp has trouble screwing up. And I know, because they've got one working the fry station at the franchise on my corner

A NASA research document came to the conclusion that “house plants can purify and rejuvenate air within our houses and workplaces, safeguarding us all from any side effects connected with prevalent toxins such as formaldehyde, ammonia and also benzene.

Most comprehensive at-home DNA test

GIANTmicrobes® are stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes — only a million times actual size! They're humorous, educational, and fun!

The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.

There is a nasty rumor making its way around the interconnected series of tubes we call the Internet. The rumor was sparked by an article on The Neurostimulation Technology Portal by Liz Elliott entitled "Magenta Ain't A Colour," which has since had people exclaiming, "Fact: Magenta isn't a color," or, "Magenta is a lie." The truth is a little more complicated than that, but I assure you that magenta is not a lie—or at least not any more a lie than any other color.

Newton gets all kinds of credit. They call it the Law of Gravity. They put his picture on pages that profile geniuses. They say he discovered gravity. Nonsense. He just named it.

This site provides a series of online textbooks covering electricity and electronics. The information provided is great for both students and hobbyists who are looking to expand their knowledge in this field. These textbooks were written by Tony R. Kuphaldt and released under the Design Science License.

People need mathematical and statistical knowledge to solve everyday problems. A good understanding of math can also come in handy in school, on the job and when it's time to sit for a standardized test.

To help find your way around the night sky, Skymaps.com makes available for free* each month The Evening Sky Map -- a 2-page monthly guide to the night skies of the northern and southern hemispheres. Each issue contains a detailed sky map, a monthly sky c

Miracle Fruits Exchange Inc. is an American-owned and operated farm supplying retail customers. I am the owner and grower. I have been involved in the growth and development of the Miracle Fruit for more than a decade.

How does 'electricity' work? If you've learned about electricity from grade-school textbooks, then first we have to do some "debunking" and find out how electricity DOESN'T work. Sorry if the following is a bit contentious at times. I wrote it in an attem

Quotations about Technology

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at t

Phun is without question the greatest computer toy in the history of the universe, if this had been around when I was a kid I would be a frickin genius by now. You don’t need things any more.

A high quality education doesn't have to come at a high cost. In fact, it's possible to take classes from big names like Yale, MIT, and Tufts without ever submitting an application or paying a cent in tuition. We've compiled 200 online classes from these

Heard the one about reading in dim light being bad for your eyes? It's just a myth

“Food combines with each other when they have major flavour components in common.”

University of Arizona - Southwest Gardening Information - College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Arizona

Maricopa County Home Horticulture: Environmentally Responsible Gardening & Landscaping in the Low Desert

Arizona Master Gardeners are university-trained volunteers who serve as community educators. They work with the University of Arizona providing research based information on environmentally responsible gardening and landscaping to the public. After comple

Within minutes of consuming the berries, guests were devouring lime wedges as if they were candy. Straight lemon juice went down like lemonade, and goat cheese tasted as if it was "covered in powdered sugar," said one astonished partygoer. A rich stout be

The ingredient information in this article came straight from the various fast food restaurants’ web sites.

Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.

Periodic Table of Elements

12 Volt Battery Hack! You'll Be Surprised...

Long before technology was developed to predict the weather, people had to rely on observation, patterns and folklore to avoid being caught off guard by the elements. If your plans, livelihood or even your survival depend on the weather, it certainly woul

University of Washington physicist (and science-fiction author) John Cramer is moving forward with his experiment in backward causality, thanks in part to tens of thousands of dollars in contributions sent in by his fans. Although Cramer emphasizes that h

Differences in skull features are related to genetics, and genetic variation depends on how much mixing occurs with other populations. “The main problem with the paper is that it takes some assumptions from genetics papers of 10 to 15 years ago that we

scientists announced that the Sun, the Moon, our planet and its siblings, were not born into the familiar band of stars known as the Milky Way galaxy, but we actually belong to a strange formation with the unfamiliar name of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy!

How To Make Thermite

James Randi's Collegium da Vinci talk "The Search for the Chimera" at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, 29 September 2002. ... all » The Amazing Randi debunks talking to the dead, homeopathy, therapeutic touch, faith healing, dowsing, and o

Bad news from the WWF this week, and no, it doesn't involve burly men in unitards hitting each other with folding chairs. The World Wildlife Fund has released their biannual Living Planet Report in conjunction with the Institute of Zoology and the Global

"It's hard to say why it's happened, but scientists in the U.S. say this type of limb deformity is caused by a parasite, which invades the frogspawn and disrupts normal growth patterns," Foster said.

In several years of debating atheism and theism, I have made an observation. Ask any believer what would convince him he was mistaken and persuade him to leave his religion and become an atheist, and if you get a response, it will almost invariably be, "N

In a formal invitation sent to former Vice-President Al Gore's Tennessee address and released to the public, Lord Monckton has thrown down the gauntlet to challenge Gore to what he terms "the Second Great Debate," an internationally televised, head-to-hea

Think way back to elementary or primary school, somewhere around third-grade physical science, when you first learned about the various states of matter. At the time you were undoubtedly told that there were three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human- induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?

Training, Races & places, shoes and gear, injury prevention, nutrition and weight loss, and motiviation. A great resource for running

Victims of even slight hypothermia often exhibit altered states of judgment, which is known in mountaineering circles as being "cold stupid". One common but especially bizarre behavior of hypothermia victims is a conundrum known as "paradoxical undressing

Make Flickr photo pool member gl3n writes with his penny-powered LED from MAKE 07 - "After finding out that you can make a 1.5 volt battery out of 13 dimes, 13 pennies, 13 paperclips, some salt water and an ice cube tray, of course we had to try it. It wo

I work in a computer lab with a physical computing studio, and recently I cleaned out the component closet. It occurred to me that the reason we had a build up of unlabled resistors was because noone knew how to read them without the Resistulator widget o

How did life begin? What's the universe made of? Why do we sleep? 42* of the biggest questions in science.

Your hard drive is advertised as having a 60GB capacity, but your computer shows only 55.8GB. What gives? The discrepancy is the result of having two methods of measuring memory. Computers are binary, or "base two," mathematical systems, and in a binary w

Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham (Guillelmus de Ockham in Latin). Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more

Let's get something straight, you've come to the wrong place if you are looking for a laser pointer. We do not sell laser pointers. Wicked Lasers can burn, slash, melt plastic and when your lighter runs dry, it'll even light up your smoke. This is a joke

It sounds like a tired joke--but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.

It's a bird ... it's a plane ... it's ... walnuts? Don't laugh. The humble walnut, along with a dozen other dietary choices -- from beans to yogurt -- is no less than a "superfood," say some health experts.

This instructable shows how to wire up one or more LED's in a in a basic and clear way. Never done any work before with LED's and don't know how to use them? Its ok, neither have I.

Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? It’s because it gets you high. They took the cocaine out almost a hundred years ago. You know why? It was redundant.

Washington D.C. - Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the outgoing Chairman of Environment & Public Works Committee, is pleased to announce the public release of the Senate Committee published booklet entitled “A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warmin

The Monty Hall problem is a puzzle involving probability loosely based on the American game show Let's Make a Deal. The name comes from the show's host, Monty Hall. A widely known statement of the problem is from Craig F. Whitaker of Columbia, Maryland in

An advanced tutorial showing the programing techniques involved in simulating inverse kinematics

Things that don't add up with current science.

Since the discovery of Pluto in 1930 astronomers had considered the solar system to have nine planets and assorted other bodies. However, since 2000 the discovery of at least three bodies (Quaoar, Sedna and Eris), all comparable to Pluto in terms of size

Unless you're an avid bread or cake baker, an all-purpose flour is probably your best choice. It's made with an average protein content to be versatile enough for everything from cakes to breads. In general, you may find that cakes made with all-purpose f

The ebook FEEE - Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering and Electronics is based on material originally written by T.R. Kuphaldt and various co-authors. For more information please read the copyright pages.

Most of the time, it's good that the little Vince Lombardi sitting on our shoulder tells us to shut up and play through the pain, otherwise we'd never get anything done. On the other hand, there are a few instances in which we can actually talk ourselves

The Voltage Gel's effect is activated when you first open the container and mix the contents as instructed using the provided applicator. Once activated, the glow will last for at least 6-8 hours. Each container is intended for one-time application but de

I think one of the main reasons it’s so hard to quit smoking is because all the benefits of quitting and all the dangers of continuing seem very far away. Well, here’s a little timeline about some of the more immediate effects of quitting smoking and

I have heard that at 16 years old, Albert Einstein constantly wondered what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. Students in physics always seem to be fascinated by the properties of light. However, speed-of-light demonstrations often require exte

The truth here is that shampoo's bad for your hair. It cleans out dirt, but also the oil that makes your hair shiny and strong. However shampoo's sold as something your hair really needs, and the truth is suppressed.

Any die-hard fan of Calvin & Hobbes© remembers the explanations that his dad (a patent attorney in the comic strip) would offer to Calvin's technical questions. Here are a few of the most memorable.

Richard Feynman - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

You can obtain the times of sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, transits of the Sun and Moon, and the beginning and end of civil twilight, along with information on the Moon's phase by specifying the date and location in one of the two forms below and cli

Soothe a burn, cure a toothache, clear a stuffed nose...

The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire. Variations of this list have appeared over the years with additions by Jim Dodge, Peter Berg, and Stephanie Mills among others. I have rec

A daily dose of fish oil is better at treating hyperactivity than Ritalin - the 'chemical cosh' linked to the deaths of children, stunning research has revealed.

Zeroth-order approximation (also 0th order) is the term scientists use for a first educated guess at an answer. Many simplifying assumptions are made, and when a number is needed, an order of magnitude answer (or zero significant figures) is often given.

This is a list of problems that have been solved by the fictional character MacGyver from the television program of the same name.

Water -- heavier when chilled, lighter when frozen, absorbing enormous heat with but a slight rise in temperature, the foundation of life, the most common of liquids, and the strangest. If only we knew how it worked.

Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor.

It proves that T-SQL is more versatile than you might imagine, and it only gets better with SQL Server 2005.