scaling

Not only are the gifts covered in today's episode perfect to meet the mediocre expectations of a white elephant party, but this episode itself is in essence our very own white elephant gift to you! Interpret that as you will, and have a wonderful holiday, everyone!

Gifts to bring to a white elephant Christmas

Snuggie for your neck (Thanks, Greg and Sam)

Snuggie for your dog (Thanks, Eric!)

Doormat Scale

Electric rock guitar shirt… Read more

MOJAVE, Calif.--Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne took the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004, unveiled the VSS Enterprise Monday, a sleek commercial rocket plane that represents the ultimate thrill ride for well-heeled space tourists and amateur astronauts.

Seating six passengers and two pilots, Virgin Space Ship Enterprise--also known as SpaceShipTwo--will begin test flights next year with commercial launchings carrying paying customers starting after government regulatory requirements are met. More than 300 people have already put down deposits or paid the full $200,000 cost of a ticket for future sub-orbital … Read more

Rom Houben has been trapped in a series of worst nightmares, including trying for 23 years to alert those around him that he was not in a coma. A new report suggests he's not alone in his experience.

In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely-used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal, and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious--but completely paralyzed.

"I screamed, but there … Read more

Do you love listening to music as much as you love to precisely measure cooking ingredients? Of course you don't. But that's not going to stop ADE Germany from slapping an iPod dock onto a kitchen scale early next year, with an expected asking price of $103.

The scale, which is curiously dubbed "Rihanna," includes an LCD that measures 1.7 inches by less than an inch and an integrated iPod speaker that plays beneath the glass measuring area.

The scale itself handles loads of up to 11 pounds, graduated in .04-ounce steps. It cannot, however, … Read more

Scales are handy little things to have around the kitchen. One can weigh ingredients for baking and always be assured of the exact amount. Flour is notorious for volumetric trickery, so for baking, weight-based measurements are the way to go. The same can be said about a whole host of other ingredients, but when it comes to the actual scale, there is no reason they can't do a little more.

The Cesto by Escali is a scale that brings more to the table. In fact it brings more to wherever you would like it to go. Dubbed a "… Read more

For this week's installment of the weekly Crave giveaway, we're offering a high-tech health accessory, Withings' Wi-Fi Body Scale.

This thing not only automatically tracks and charts your weight (and the weights of up to seven other people in your household), but it records your lean and fat mass, and calculates body mass index (BMI). Plus, you can access your data (it's secure, of course) from any Web browser or Withings' iPhone app, WiScale. Better yet, you can even have the scale Tweet your weight loss (or gain) to all your Twitter followers. How awesome is that? … Read more

You take a scale. You give it Wi-Fi. And then you let it log in to your Twitter account to tell the world how much you weigh each morning. That's what this is: the Wi-Fi Body Scale.

At first it sounds silly, but the more I think about it the more I like the idea. If I'm trying to lose weight, this is a good way to force me to watch what I eat lest I embarrass myself in front of my Twitter followers. If it shows me blowing up like a whale instead of dropping pounds then … Read more

Having a scale in your kitchen gadget repertoire is useful to the point of being essential; just ask any baker. Flour can be one of the most inconsistent ingredients to work with, due to its volume-changing tendencies. A cup of hard-packed flour contains much more actual flour than a cup of sifted flour. So, we use scales to accurately measure our ingredients. With such utility comes options, with designs ranging from the ornate to the sparse. Some even focus on where you store the scale.

The Terraillon Wall Mount Kitchen Scale, as the name suggests, is a kitchen scale for … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day, Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer said in a talk Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit here.

Some 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week, and 2 billion photos are uploaded each month--1.2 million served per second on a "peak day," he said. Five billion calls to Facebook's application program interface (API) were made on Tuesday. It's huge: Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, was focused on talking about the challenges of scaling a social network to the more than 300 million active users … Read more