Back in 2005, it was decided that the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California needed some sprucing up. It needed a paint job of some sort, but not something bland and corporate. No, something fun, colorful, and interesting. As such, Facebook hired graffiti artist David Choe and commissioned a few stupid dope burners, offering him a choice of payment upon their completion: He could either take a few grand, or some stock. You can probably guess which choice he made.

A while back, Google+ developers mentioned that they’d be allowing pseudonyms at some point in the future, suggesting that it had been a planned feature all along, despite the banning of several pseudonymed users at the service’s start. Well now that option is finally being rolled out, but with a catch: You have to prove that your pseudonym is already has some pull somewhere. You can’t just give yourself a nickname and have it stick on Google+. You have to get people to call you by it first.

This plucky little guy is Ole, a Welsh Corgi who somehow managed to survive a horrific avalanche that killed one of his owners near Cooke City, Montana. After presumably tunneling out from under snow many times deeper than the small dog’s stature, Ole walked for four days before finally coming to rest at a local motel. This is one incredible little dog.

Kids are tough. You’ve gotta give them enough space to strike it out on their own a little and make their own mistakes, but at the same time, you need to be ready to have their back at a moment’s notice. Sounds tough, right? Need an example? Check out Awesome Dad here who not only manages to give his tyke free reign to practice the valuable skill of toddling, but also manages to save his kid’s face from some nasty scrapes. Also, he saved himself from a car ride of screams on the way home, probably, but that’s just a bonus.

European cloud-based music streaming service that the Internet really, really liked to talk about, Spotify, has finally made its United States debut. There are two versions available, a free version and paid version. The free version is currently only available via invite, while the pay version is available to everyone.

There are a few pricing plans available. The “Open” plan is the free option, and will allow users to stream tracks locally from their computers, and share tracks and playlists with friends, though they’ll have to deal with an ad-supported service. The biggest caveat for the free plan, though, is for the first six months, free members can only listen to music for 20 hours per month, then after that six month period, users can only listen to music for 10 hours per month, and will not be able to listen to a track more than five times, essentially making the service worthless and forcing people to move on from the free option. The next tier up, the “Unlimited” plan, will cost $4.99 per month, and gives the user full access to music without any kind of silly restrictions. The highest tier, the “Premium” plan, will cost $9.99 per month and basically adds mobile devices onto the features of the Unlimited plan, but also adds an offline access to playlists (somewhat curbing the biggest downfall of the cloud, in that if you do not have Internet access, you do not have access to anything on the cloud), as well as provides a higher quality stream and exclusive content, like early access to album launches. Interested? Pop on over to the official US Spotify site, and head on past the break to check out a promotional video for the US launch.

Though cellphones generally display the name of the caller, they tend to do so only if the calling number is in the phone’s address book, if not, then only the number is displayed and we all wonder if we’re about to pick up the phone with an ex or telemarketer inviting us to a taste test on the other end. Now, if one happens to have T-Mobile as their carrier, a new caller ID service is available for an extra $4 per month.

Using technology based on Cequint, the service, called “Name ID,” displays a caller’s name, phone number, and the city from which they are calling. Oddly, none of the four major US carriers have had caller ID — a service that has been available on landlines for quite some time now — available on their mobile service, and it is a little surprising that it took so long to come to mobile phones, but hey, better late than never.

(Electronista via Techmeme)

Long before Wikileaks was even a glimmber in Julian Assange’s eyes, there were the Pentagon Papers. Leaked to the press in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg and published by the New York Times, the Pentagon Papers showed a side of the war unseen by the public and damning documentation that many government officials had lied about the goals and progress of the conflict. Now, decades after the end of the Vietnam war, the National Archives has announced that the full report titled The Vietnam Task Force Study will be available for public viewing in the Richard Nixon Library.

Though having the documents fully available is a boon to the general public and historians alike, not all are satisfied. Steven Aftergood with Secrecy News writes, “the fact that portions of the half-century old Papers remained classified until this year is a reminder that classification today is often completely untethered from genuine national security concerns.”

During the first week of May, something very unusual happened in coastal Maine. Normally seismically boring, Maine experienced about a dozen tiny earthquakes that rippled across the region. In their wake, the cracking earth sounded like explosions or gunshots in the distance.

Far from being the precursor to an impending disaster, these pint-sized earthquakes (all under 2 on the Richter scale) are the result of the massive Laurentide ice sheet that once covered huge swathes of North America during the last ice age. Under the weight of all that ice, over a mile thick,  the crust of the earth was squished down. Some places, as much as 500 feet. Since the ice sheet receded some 14, 000 years ago, the ground has been springing back up.

Earthquakes and other seismic fallout from eons of icey repression are not uncommon in Maine, but a cluster of a dozen is rather unusual for the region. It’s a surprising reminder that although we may think of the landscape as unchanging and eternal, it is constantly in flux and responding to forces that stretch far beyond our lifetimes.

(image and story via Wired)

It’s been a rough week for Apple, since a pair of researchers put forward the shocking claim that iPhones and 3G iPads were keeping a log of user’s movements in an unsecured file. After seven days of near-silence, Apple has finally issued a Q&A on how, exactly, the location data stored on iPhones is used. Their answer is, to say the least, quite intriguing.

The thrust of Apple’s argument is that they have never been tracking your location, and that the information within consolidated.db is actually not even your data. Confused? Understandable.

It was announced last summer that 1980s teen sensations Debbie Gibson and Tiffany would be appearing/battling each other in a SyFy movie called “Megapython vs. Gatoroid,” which is scheduled to air this Saturday. Just try and tell me what’s wrong with this sentence, because for me, a girl who sang “Electric Youth” into a hairbrush the year I got my first pair of glasses, this is proof that all is right with the world. Everything is going according to plan.