Author: Serkadis

What was only a rumor in the middle stages of the 2009 season is now set to become reality, as Nigel Mansell is only one step away from returning to competitive motor racing through a part-time Le Mans Series programme in 2010. The 1992 F1 champion bought into the Beechdean Motorsport team, as confirmed this week, and will try to run a factory-backed Ginetta-Zytek Z09R in the LMP1 class of the Le Mans Series.

I’m very happy to announce this partnership between myself and Beechdean… (read more)

With 2010 now upon us, it’s time to think about your new years resolutions. No matter how awesome you are (or think you are), there are ways we can all improve.

AskMen.com recently published their list of 10 New Year’s Resolutions All Men Should Make. While it’s probably overkill to make 10 resolutions for the upcoming year, here are a few we think are worthy of consideration:

Go to the doctor. Sure, us guys hate doctors and all the poking around that involves, but getting regular check-ups is crucial for your continued good health. Pick up that phone and make an appointment – it’s not as scary as you think it will be.

Start saving. It’s boring, but important to your financial well being. If you haven’t started already, 2010 can be the perfect time to put some money away on a regular basis. The more you save now, the longer you’ll have to make that nest egg grow into something substantial down the line.

Volunteer. Helping others in need is one of the best things a man can do. Whether it’s working in a soup kitchen or just helping your neighbor with a chore, giving of whatever time you might have available can help make you a little less self-absorbed. Plus, chicks dig it.

Regardless of whether you make specific resolutions for the next year or not, we can all try to be better men in 2010.

What are your resolutions for the new year? Share them in the comments.

photo credit: Optical illusion

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Over at FiveThirtyEight.com Andrew Gelman posts this chart chart plotting per-capital healthcare expenditure against standard of living.

It seems to show, without a doubt, that those awesome Western Europeans and East Asians get way more bang for their buck than we do.

Except… it doesn’t tell us anything about how well the European system would work if the people there lived the unhealthy lifestyle of so many Americans. And it doesn’t say anything about how the outcomes of individuals with specific ailments (like cancer). And it doesn’t take into account the greater diversity of our population.

But other than that, it’s pretty damning.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• By The Numbers: Ben Nelson’s Stunning Political Suicide
• Left-Wing Frustration Over Healthcare, Wall Street, And Afghanistan Leads To Shocking Internal Anger At Obama
• HEALTHCARE REFORM SEEN SLIPPING TO FEBRUARY, Obama To Focus On New Stimulus

BMW has just released a new feature for all iPhone and iPod Touch owners, under the Joy is measurable slogan: the BMW M Power Meter application, which uses integrated movement sensors to record the performance data of your driving. The app is able to save the last ten results, so you can also compare your performance with others.

Moreover, you can also customize the application even further, thanks to three free design skins offered by BMW, namely "Sport", "Lava&quo… (read more)

With a record 1,826,424 units (to the unit!) sold in China in 2009 and an also record market share of 13.4 percent, American manufacturer GM, together with its Chinese partners, are getting ready to open the champagne. After all, the numbers listed above represent a 66.9 percent increase compared to 2008 and, we all know, there’s plenty of room left in China…

"We are proud of our performance in 2009," GM China Group president and managing director Kevin Wale was quoted… (read more)

Shamed golfing ace Tiger Woods reportedly gifted his estranged wife with a $300 million cash incentive this holiday season.

The world’s No. 1 ranked golfer, who has withdrawn from professional golf after being linked to more than a dozen mistresses, has restored to cash bonuses to keep his fractured family together and is said to have given half of his fortune to the mother of his two children in hopes of convincing her not to dissolve their nearly six year marriage.

“She’s 100 percent determined to split with Tiger. When she boasted of the ‘$300m Christmas gift’ and then laughed it was clear to everyone around her that she’’s more focused than ever about moving on with her life,” News of the World quoted a source as saying.

“She still has feelings for Tiger as the father of her kids, but now her only dealings with him will be to get her and the youngsters set up in a comfortable home with everything they need. And so far Tiger has just agreed to settle for an easy life,” the source added.

Those rumors seem to contradict, Elin’s recent public behavior. The Swedish beauty was photographed wearing her wedding rings for the first time in weeks as she spent the New Year’s Eve weekend skiing and celebrating her 30th birthday.

The 2010 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) will showcase the debut of several models developed under the brands General Motors currently owns, including Cadillac and GMC. Although official details are yet to be revealed – despite the fact that the show is scheduled to begin in a few days – GM’s PR Chris Preuss said in a Twitter post that the US-based manufacturer will display the GMC Granite, the Cadillac XTS Concept and the Aveo RS.

The CTS-V Coupe concept will also … (read more)

About a year ago, I blogged about Yamaha’s portable room that you could set up in bigger rooms to have your well-deserved quiet time. And now another Japanese company called Tamada brings us something similar: The Depot Angel [JP] (what a name), a pre-fabricated basement that can be, again, used to enjoy some alone time, as a storage room or as anything you’d like it to be.

The main idea is to create additional space for Japanese households at relatively affordable prices. Seeing that real estate in Japan is (generally speaking) pretty expensive, it might make sense for some families in this country to get one Depot Angel and bury it under their house.

The female buyer you can see in the (Japanese) video below says her “artificial” basement is ideal for storing rice and vegetables as the room is relatively warm in winter and cool in summer. Tamada got the inspiration for the basements from those underground tanks gas stations use.

A Depot Angel that offers between 4.6 and 6.1sqm of space costs $21,000, whereas the top model (23sqm) has a price tag of $107,000. Buyers can choose between four different models, which range from 770 kg to over a ton in weight.

Here’s a video (in Japanese):

Via Japan Probe

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McLaren’s former F1 principal Ron Dennis decided to set the record straight regarding his decision to leave the sport at the end of the 2008 season in an interview with Esquire magazine. Needless to say, Dennis spoke about the famous spy-gate in which he and the McLaren team were found guilty by the FIA for spying on their rivals Ferrari and consequently handed the biggest fine in the history of the sport.

Dennis insisted that the truth behind the spy-gate is yet to come out, and … (read more)

This little nugget of software is itself still in beta, but if you can’t wait for the full Milestone firmware port to climb out of alpha development, it’s a good alternate route to getting your Droid dancing in the “pinch to zoom” party. Once again produced by the good folks over at AllDroid, the patch substitutes the Droid’s default browser with the Milestone’s multitouch capable one — and from the feedback we’re seeing it does so very cleanly and painlessly, whether you’re running Android 2.0.1 or 2.1. You’ll still need to root your device first, and some background reading is advisable before jumping in, but then you should be clear for take-off into the world of multitouch browsing. Video evidence after the break.

[Thanks, Steve]

Continue reading Milestone multitouch browser ported to the Droid by a user-made patch (video)

Milestone multitouch browser ported to the Droid by a user-made patch (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google doodles are beginning to be a regular fixture on the search engine’s homepage, but there probably aren’t that many people complaining. Making its eleventh appearance in a row, the New Year’s doodle didn’t fail to show up on January 1 marking the start of 2010, a year in which Google has plenty to look forward to. The doodle is one of Google’s best, but it didn’t take long for it to out-do itself with a great celebration of Isaac Newton’s birthday today.

The New Years doodle is one of the best in the series and, thankfully, does away with the furry animals and centers on the actual event, the New Year. It features a familiar sight, the night sky lit up by fireworks, which also make up the two ‘Os’ in the company’s name and a clock tower showing 12 o’clock. The cute part is how 2010 is written using the elements of the drawing, a recurring theme for the Google doodles. The ‘2’ is easy enough to make out, then the two faces of the clock make up the ‘0’ and the ‘1’ and the final ‘0’ is actually a very jovial moon.

But Google wasn’t done with the New Year surprises. As the most enthusiastic Google followers already know, the company has been running a countdown on the homepage, counting the seconds until 2010. It was hidden by default and only showed up if the user clicked in the “I’m feeling lucky” button without entering any search terms.

Once the countdown reached zero though, it was promptly replaced by fireworks and a “Happy Ne… (read more)

There are lots of ways to entice the ladies to bed, but offering them a spin on your Millennium Falcon bed is probably not one of them. One crazed Star Wars fan actually built such a bed, which is scarily accurate to the original space craft piloted by a young Harrison Ford.

The front of the Millennium Falcon bed features two working headlights. A string of LED lights surrounding the bed/spaceship just adds to the romantic ambiance, don’t you think? And as a special touch, this special fan has topped the bed with a pillow shaped like a radar dish.

[via OhGizmo]

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Good catch by Louis Gray, who keeps on monitoring the Twitter-made list of Twitter team members with hawk eyes. Starting today at the new Twitter offices in San Francisco are no less than 10 new staff members in a variety of roles.

The biggest fish Twitter caught is likely Bakari Brock, a former attorney at Kilpatrick Stockton who has served as Corporate Counsel for YouTube and Google since September 2007. Listed as specialties on the man’s LinkedIn profile: “negotiation and drafting of music, video and software licenses; and counseling on copyright, ecommerce, and general policy issues.”

His recruitment hints at Twitter preparing a proper content distribution play, which would clearly require some serious in-house legal talent.

Brock brings heaps of field experience to the startup, and it’ll be interesting to see what his negotiation skill set and no doubt extensive professional network prove to be worth for Twitter. Also joining Twitter from the Mountain View company’s legal team is Anthony Wang, former attorney at Latham & Watkins and Managing Counsel for Google since May 2005.

It’s not only Google losing key staff to Twitter, though. Gray also tracked these people, who are likely starting at Twitter today:

– Paul Soals (ex-IT Support Engineer at Bebo and previously with Apple)
– Nancy Broden (ex-Director of User Experience at Qik)
– Florian Leibert (ex-Platform Engineer Data Services at Ning)
– Jinen Kamdar (ex-Group Product Manager at Ning)
– Edward Ceaser (ex-developer at TiVo)
– Dmitriy Ryaboy (ex-Software Engineer at Cloudera and previously at Ask.com)
– John Sirois (ex-Software Engineer at VMware and Google before that)
– Jane Huang (ex-Software Engineer at 23andMe)

Including these 10 persons, the list of Twitter team members now counts 156 people, although we should note the company also adds freelance workers to it. Other recent hires recently made by Twitter included the Mixer Labs team (through acquisition), Raptr’s Kevin Cheng and Yahoo’s Utkarsh Srivastava.

Curious to see what the new year will bring for Twitter.

(Picture from Flickr / Mags_cat)

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Sold: One virtual space station for $330,000 in real money. It may sound insane, but the buyers and sellers here clearly believe there’s gold in the virtual world of Planet Calypso.

The virtual space station was built by The First Planet Company, a part of MindArk, a Swedish online virtual world maker that operates the Project Entropia Universe, which includes Planet Calypso. A player going by the name of Buzz “Erik” Lightyear paid 3.3 million Project Entropia Dollars for the Crystal Palace, a fully functional space station. Project Entropia Dollars can be exchanged for real money at an exchange rate of 10 to 1.

The purchase isn’t without precedent, as noted by Fatfoogoo’s blog. In 2004, David Storey paid $26,500 for a plot of undeveloped land in Project Entropia. And in 2005, Jon Jacobs spent $100,000 on a virtual night club inside Project Entropia. There’s some real investor speculation going on here, backed by real money. We’ve noted that MindArk’s central bank has been officially sanctioned by the government of Sweden.

The 10-year-old Entropia platform has been developed over the past decade at a cost of $40 million. It was launched in 2003. The Planet Calypso world within the universe has been generating a profit since 2004 and has more than 820,000 registered users in 200 countries. The user-to-user transactions within Entropia Universe exceeded $420 million in 2008.

This may be another indicator of the rise of the virtual goods business model, where players play an online game for free but pay for the digital objects inside it. Players can buy and sell goods inside the worlds, giving them a chance to make real money. Hence, Lightyear’s purchase might not look so crazy a few years from now, if the Project Entropia Universe continues to grow. Lightyear, if he so chooses, can operate a business on the space station, which is depicted in the video below.

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This just in: Mariah Carey is a diva…..and in related news, bears $h!t in the woods. Mariah reportedly took divahood to new heights after demanding nothing less than royal treatment in while performing a series of her hits during a show at the Borgata Resort in Atlantic City last month.

The hitmaking songbird has seen her chart fortunes fade with the release of her most recent LP, Memoirs of An Imperfect Album — of course, that didn’t stop MC from making “a ton of requests” regarding her hotel suite and ordering a total of 10 carts carry all her luggage. Mariah, 39, is further accused of terrorizing stagehands with frequent requests for retouches to her hair and makeup and even had them hand her a glass of bubbly in front of the soldout crowd.

“Do they expect me to stand up for the whole show? They call me a diva… because I am,” a stunned concertgoer

Although Jenson Button has been revealed as Lewis Hamilton’s new teammate at McLaren Mercedes in over a month now, the two haven’t actually met each other at Woking. Although this was supposed to be Great Britain’s dream team in the Formula One championship, the relationship between the two big guns is yet to start off.

When asked about how he gets along with his new teammate – considering he had a very good relationship with his former colleague Heikki Kovalainen – Hamilton admit… (read more)

Katy Perry capped off a holiday excursion to India with a henna tattoo. The singer uploaded a pic of her new body art on her Twitter page.

The “I Kissed a Girl” crooner had her wrist and hand colored as part of her New Year’s celebrations with boyfriend Russell Brand. The henna motif has been carefully crafted to avoid her inked tattoo, which reads “Jesus.”

“I’m typing this with one hand… Isn’t it lovely? It’s Henna!” the brunette excitedly Tweeted.

Katy also visited the Taj Mahal while in India. She even TwitPic’d a flick of herself and the comedian cuddling in front of the 17th century Mughal monument, joking: “He built this for me!”

Racing Dynamics has joined the precocious league of tuners which already propose a tuning package for the upcoming 2011 F10 BMW 5 Series, as bimmertoday reports.

The Racing Dynamics view of the next 5 series includes both technical and visual modifications. The base tuned model, the 535i, now called the R35 will be 34% more powerful than the factory version, producing 410 HP, and will offer an M5 rivaling torque figure of 530 Nm (383.5 lb-ft). One result of all that extra grunt wi… (read more)

When it comes to shopping, Lindsay Lohan is a real show-stopper.

The Mean Girls actress nearly caused a stampede in New York City last month after hundreds of fans spotted her doing some late Christmas shopping with sister, Ali, and mom, Dina, at Intermix in Manhattan.

“They had to close down the store because of overcrowding. Hundreds of people lined the windows to watch her pick out her favorite items,” a spywitness dished to The New York Post.

Speaking of fashion, despite a critcally-panned debut, Lindsay is set to launch her next collection for French fashion house Ungaro.