Mondays seem to go by faster – for us, anyway – when you can buy a few gadgets (or at least daydream about buying them).

Neatorama.com tipped us off today to BuckyBalls, which are 216 balls made from those incredibly strong rare earth magnets. You can combine them to make a cool sculpture, like this.  These are now part of Hunch’s Geeky Gadget Gifts topic.  We’re going to order some of these for the Hunch office.

Frank Fillipponio at AutoBlog wrote about this tricked-out SUV/RV/Truck/Van thing that you’ve got to see to believe.  Ok, it’s not really a gadget, but it’s extreme enough that we wanted to write about it, anyway.  It’s been added to Hunch’s dream cars topic.  Unlike the BuckyBalls, though, we probably won’t be getting one of these for the office.

CrunchGear came across a nice little Mac app called Autograph that uses the trackpad to help you easily add signatures to docs.  It includes other fun features like adding sketches/doodles in an iChat session, or even analyzing signatures as a user authentication/biometrics method.  It’s only 7 bucks but does have one catch: you need OSX 10.6/Snow Leopard to run it.  But then, you should probably be upgrading to that, anyway.  You can find Autograph and other helpful Mac programs in Hunch’s Useful Mac Software topic.

We recently ran across a great blog entry from Engadget on back-to-school gadgetry. Of specific interest to us were their cell phone recommendations, which they split into categories based on price: “On The Cheap,” “Mid-Range,” and “Money Is No Object.” We were curious how Engadget’s recommendations aligned with the cell phone opinions of the 13,800 Hunchers who say they are students.

Engadget highly recommends iPhones for well-heeled students, and it turns out that Hunchers could hardly agree more: 80% of student Hunchers providing feedback in the cell phone topic say they like the device. But just 15% of student Hunchers (compared to a pretty impressive 22% of all Hunchers) already own an iPhone. So, mom and dad, it’s pretty clear what back-to-school or holiday gift might be especially appreciated this year by the student in your house.

It occurred to us that the disparity between ‘I want it’ and ‘I have it’ may be a price-related trend, but we found other similarly-pricey phones which are disproportionately favored by students. For example, student Hunchers are 30% more likely than the average Huncher to like the LG Renoir, which garnered a respectable 7.9 out of 10 review points by CNET. And the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which Michael Oryl at MobileBurn calls “A great phone which is intuitive and consistent in the way it works”, is also disproportionately favored by student Hunchers, with more than 50% of those who rated it giving it a thumbs up.

What about that other iPhone alternative, the Palm Pre?  Steven Levy at Wired rates it an 8 out of 10 and calls it an “incredible win” for Palm.  MobileBurn’s Oryl gives it an incredibly thorough but ultimately mixed review, calling it “good for light users but short of the mark for heavy users.” How do Hunch students weigh in on this debate? It’s actually a close call: in Hunch’s iPhone vs. Palm Pre topic, student Hunchers favor the iPhone by only about a 6% margin. This jibes pretty well with a survey covered by Gizmodo which showed that while iPhone 3GS owners have a near-perfect 99% satisfaction rating with their purchase, the Palm Pre landed a not-too-shabby-at-all 87%.

At the end of the day, with an 80% approval rating, the iPhone probably remains the one to beat among student Hunchers. The great majority want it, but an even greater majority of them don’t yet have it. That may also explain how student Hunchers who favor the iPhone tend to answer “Which one of the seven deadly sins would you be?” The sin most highly correlated with this group? Envy.

Hunchers are a pretty green lot.  Of the 45,000 of you who answered the “Teach Hunch About You” (THAY) question regarding your perspective on global warming, 47% say it’s “one of the most serious issues facing our planet, requiring drastic action”.  Among those from South America, this figure rises to 59%.  Roughly another quarter say that global warming is “a real cause of concern, but something we can manage.”  So all told, about 72% of Hunch users find global warming concerning.

Hunch users have also created a smattering of green topics.  You can find out how green you really are, look for a green car, or tidy up with green household cleaners.

A lot of the green ideas are inspired by the folks over at TreeHugger.  Check out this green-as-can-be gift of organic chocolate which they discovered, complete with packaging that converts into both a candle holder and a birdfeeder.  This was also added it to our unique and unusual gifts topic.  Then there are TreeHugger’s suggestions for what to do with your old cell phone.  Users have added these recycling tips to Hunch’s “Ways I can go green” topic.  My favorite of their cell phone recycling suggestions: the mobile phone throwing championship which takes place in Finland tomorrow.

There are also green skeptics on Hunch (in fact, our CTO at Hunch is one of them).  12% of Hunch users answered that global warming is “One of the biggest myths and scams ever pulled on most people.”  This group of 5,400 probably won’t be trying many of the green topics above, but they do have plenty in common with each other.  Green skeptics like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush.  They tend to think “there’s a left-wing conspiracy to cover up the fact that Barack Obama was not born in the US” (which incidentally is one of 25 themes in Hunch’s conspiracy theories topic).  Their green-skeptic opinions also correspond highly (and completely logically) with their preference for vehicles: they lean towards big pickup trucks, Lincolns, and Escalades, and hate the Prius and other hybrid vehicles.  As far as which US city they’d prefer to live in?  They’d prefer to be just about anywhere other than Berkeley or San Francisco.

If you’ve got a blog yourself, or have one you like, please add it to the Green Blogs topic as well! Right now it’s not so built out, just with Good Blog, Worldchanging, Gas 2.0, Crafting a Green World and a few others.

We’ve just shipped an update to our search. The old “spotlight” search is gone, and the new SRP page is live. SRP, in searchspeak, stands for Search Results Page. That means you’ll no longer see the menu appearing beneath the search box but will go instead to a page that shows topics in which your search term appears, sorted by popularity, as well as the top three results for you (if you are logged in) and the most popular if you are not. You’ll also see results containing your search term, highlighted within the topics in which they appear. Here is a search for “printer”:

We think this is a great improvement over the prior experience, and that the underlying search mechanisms are much better as well. Please post in the forums if you have any ideas, suggestions or bugs to report. Please especially let us know if you are getting weird or wonky results, as it is very much a work in progress.

“Foodies” represent a sizable helping of Hunch users, with 37% describing themselves as being food-o-philes.

What specific traits do these folks have in common?  Many that you might expect: they tend to like lots of food which can often be polarizing, such as caviar, sushi, and cilantro. When they splurge, they generally prefer to spend on a great meal rather than clothes.  They know how to make at least 5 different cocktails, feel no stress about hosting a dinner party for 10, and have spent more than $100 on a bottle of wine (and would gladly do it again, thank you very much).  They would happily dig into a helping of tasty sea urchin such as that pictured above.

Other correlations aren’t so obvious.  Hunch foodies tend to favor big cities, occasional meditation, salt on their margarita glass, and dark chocolate.  They are much more likely than the average Huncher to like Andy Warhol’s art and to enjoy a good comedic short story by David Sedaris.  They lean towards thin crust pizza and shun fluorescent lighting.  And they are 50% more likely to be terrified of dentists than non-foodies (who has time to floss, perhaps, when cooking and eating are your driving passions?)

Our foodies have created all kinds of great food-related topics.  There are the classics about what to make for dinner, what to cook for breakfast, or what to have for lunch.  If you’re focusing on cooking, you can choose kitchen gadgets, knives, spices, beef cuts, or cookbooks.  For a quick culinary trip around the world, you could try Italian dishes, pasta shapes, Japanese food, Filipino specialties, or Chinese cuisine.  Oenophiles may like exploring wine varietals, wine/food pairings, bottles of wine to buy or books about wine.

If you prefer going out to dinner, Hunch now has restaurant-related topics for 31 cities ranging from New York, San Francisco, and Houston to London, Paris, Beijing, and Berlin.  We need more results for some of these cities, so please add your favorite restaurants to share your culinary knowledge with your fellow Hunchers.

Finally, check out the weird and creepy foods topic to see how adventuresome you really are.  Think that sea urchin above looks funky?  Just you wait.

We are testing out a new site search tool which isn’t quite done yet.  It isn’t live on the main Hunch site but you can check it out here.

One of the cool things about this new interface is it exposes the personalized rankings that are based on how you answered Teach Hunch About You questions.  For example, when I search for “Manhattan Restaurants” it shows my three favorite Manhattan restaurants.  (If you search while logged out you, the rankings will just be based on overall popularity among all Hunch users).

Please feel free to check it out and leave any comments on this forum thread.

There’s a large backlog of social features coming out on Hunch, but we wanted to get this one out first. Flecks make visible the little bits of social grooming already taking place on the site, such as when people give your Pro/Con a thumbs up, and enabling new ways of flecking people for contributing useful questions, results and topics, or for just being born.

Flecks will be visible on your profile page, and you have to approve them before they are visible to others. You’ll be able to give other people flecks all around the site.

Naming things is always a challenge. What should these things Tasty Licks? Mini-props? Thank yous? Micro-kudos? Testimonialettes? Guestbooklets? No no no. Flecks. And given our already thriving banjo metaphor, it’s convenient that it also alludes to the banjo legend Bela Fleck.

Fleck the night away!