February 2008 - Posts
Did you ever play with those puzzles that are clues to phrases like 88
K on a P or God/nation? That's what these
song lyric graphics remind me
of. I have to think they're inspired by the
graphed rap songs but it could
be that there's a class of people who think in terms of this kind of
organization so the idea could crop up independently in a lot of places.
Speaking of funny songs, the Rickrolling has been out of control lately and I think I've finally figured out why. Rickrolling is when someone posts a link ostensibly to something worth clicking but actually points to
the Rick Astley "Never gonna give you up" video . Or at least, that's what it
was but now it involves a link to just about anything having to do with the song whether it's
one of those lyric charts or even
this comic , which apparently
uses the music to the song even though that has nothing to do with the joke. Poking around to see if there was some tipping point I missed, I see it
was played and performed at some of the recent anti-Scientology protests .
I'm pretty sure this song is not a Rick Rolling joke -
All the world in a song .
Did you know
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is blogging ?
Did you find anything good online following William F. Buckley's death?
This would have been a good one for the drug post the other day: "Teaser for Doug Benson's super anticipated documentary
Super High Me , a documentary where he smokes pot for 30 days and then doesn't for 30 days." Obviously he's a comedian so it's meant to be funny, but maybe there's something to be learned in the end?
Speaking of trailers,
The new Get Smart trailer Still speaking of movies, "
Christian Bale plays the adult John Connor , leading a rebellion against the sentient computer network known as Skynet that seeks to wipe out all of humanity." If it was anyone but Christian Bale I'd scoff. The T4 target release date is May 22, 2009. Hopefully by then it won't seem like it belongs in the Batman series instead of the Terminator series.
Also movies,
The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 - 2007 - Another cool, if vaguely vaginal, infographic from the NY Times. Note that it scrolls (horizontally!).
The Entire Communications Industry, in Less than 200 Pages You might as well start budgeting your time now because when
Crayon Physics comes out you'll be losing a lot of it to game play. (That's assuming you can get to it.
This is supposedly an official link but it's crashed for me. Try later. [Looks like it redirects to
the blog .])
"
Crazy Blind Date is a place where you can coordinate a date on extremely short notice." For what looks like a short notice hook-up/booty call site it certainly asks a lot of questions. I was curious to see if anyone was actually using the service but not curious enough to go all the way through with the registration process.
iPhone Haptic Keyboard Prototype debuts - You'll recall "haptic" is the word for tactile response when something is touched - specifically lately, a keyboard. There was concern that because there's no click to the iPhone's buttons that no one would feel comfortable using it. I guess that question is resolved but some people are still interested in the challenge of giving some sensory feedback when pressing a button that on its own doesn't offer any. The idea in this new prototype is to use the phone's ring-muting vibration.
Speaking of the iPhone,
the strangely exciting answer to the question of what happens when the iPhone's built in stop watch reaches 1000 hours. NOTE: One very small S-bomb.
Is there a restaurant you like (and visit) enough that you'd consider a $5000 annual subscription? A restaurant in the Bronx is
trying to work that as a business model . Apparently it's already been done in a more complex way at a few
Vermont establishments .
Disclosure: I occasionally contribute photos to Eater.com. Do power lines really generate enough of a magnetic field to
make a florescent bulb light up ?
How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib -
NOTE: Again,
NOTE: The slide show on this story contains Abu Ghraib photos depicting torture, a dead body, some male nudity and probably other things my mind has blocked out. The article is clean but watch out for that slide show. (P.S. This is part of Wired's coverage of the TED conference going on now. Pretty much everything coming from there is fascinating and worth reading.)
Best first paragraph for starting your spy thriller novel of the day: "The Home Office has launched an investigation into how an optical disc holding confidential information was discovered
hidden beneath the keyboard of a laptop bought on the online auction site eBay."
Wow,
this is a mindblowing statement about environmentalism and how we treat our air and water. (The blogger later confesses he can't vouch for the accuracy. I wonder how close it is.)
On the same blog I watched Clay Shirky on the power of
love and technology .
20 Surprising Ways Wal-Mart Clinics Will Affect US Healthcare - I don't visit Wal-Mart often so I didn't know there was such a thing as a Wal-Mart health clinic but this is a pretty interesting list to think about. At first I thought it was a Wal-Mart shill piece but it seems to mix positive and negative. I'm still not sure about the host site, however. Looks like spam for online nursing classes. But even if the whole thing is linkbait it's still interesting.
NOTE: Any cursing is mostly garbled but it's a few girls fighting so it gets pretty loud and screamy so you'll want to watch the volume if you're at work.
My colleague James sent me
this video of kids fighting with their bus driver . I'd seen the story on TV but only as one of those quickie rubbernecking items they do because there's good video. I had no idea there was a full ten minute clip out there. Once I watched it my interest was piqued and I went looking for what happened next.
The girl ended up expressing some regret for
being "immature ." You have to wonder if this realization was encouraged by the prospect of expulsion from school.
There's an interview with the girl and her mom
here . They're both disappointingly sane and reasonable sounding. Note: The video would only play for me in IE but the quality is good enough to hit the full screen button.
In case you can't hear the kid in the front calling 911, that tape was
eventually released , though I couldn't find the original audio. ADDING:
Here it is . There were three different calls. Actually there's lots of good coverage from that
AZFamily site. (
ahem )
Video links at the East Valley Tribune include some comments from the mother of the girl standing behind the central figure. Interesting to see the mother behind the girl who kept announcing that she was calling her mom who "lives around the corner."
Here's
the latest update I find . Yesterday was the first day back at work for the bus driver (she's been reassigned).
Seeing how many local news sites have the full video it's much less of a mystery how it ended up on YouTube. I also see a lot of the local sites using the word "raw" to describe some of the materials they have. We don't see a lot of that in national media but I wonder if it'll be more common as local traditional media makes greater use of their Web properties (without having resources to add a lot of Web producers).
Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert Someday we'll look back and wish we'd found Sarah Connor.
I don't know if DXM is a new thing or an old one. Maybe I'm revealing just how big a geek I am, but I always thought people drank/abused cough medicine for an effect that was like alcohol. It turns out the
particular drug in Robitussin and other cough medicines is a hallucinogen. The greatest revelation to me, however, is the apparent popularity of kids videotaping themselves high on drugs and posting the clips to YouTube. I couldn't get the inline videos to play in this article so I copied the URL and watched them at YouTube where the related videos feature produced clip after drug addled clip. To my mind this is a more disturbing practice than schoolyard fight videos.
Speaking of drugs, see it before the layers pull it: The uncut trailer for
Pineapple Express -
NOTE: It's a rated R trailer, some cursing, no nudity. The movie is a pot comedy - a Gen Y Cheech and Chong.
"
A tribute to the fantastic biomechanical creations of H.R. Giger and the vegetable portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo"
World's Largest Solar Power Plant Coming to Arizona in 2011 - I'm not sure how a "plant" differs from a "farm" - like the
world's largest solar farm announced recently. Meanwhile, the claim of
"world's largest solar" anything is a popular one, perhaps because the field is still pretty thin.
Speaking of solar,
Sharp Developing Home Solar Power Batteries - One of the most appealing things about solar power is paying energy back into the grid when you're not using it. Batteries like this would be for emergencies or people living totally off the grid. Regardless, solar storage batteries contribute to the larger picture of burgeoning alternative energy industry.
I feel like we've seen
3-D room planners before, but this is really cool and works surprisingly well. You can play with the "get started" demo without registering or anything. It didn't ask me to download any software either. I guess it's Flash based?
"
All the revenue models you can find in the media industry " - not counting charging for the content itself. This is a little dry, but it's a nice follow-up to that piece the other day about making money from a site loaded with AdSense.
Top 20 Parent Hacks: Tips for Organization, Kid Optimization, and Happiness - Heh, "kid optimization."
Yahoo has changed its
Buzz page to be more like Digg. From what I understand it's drawing from a limited set of sources right now, with plans later to make it include the whole web. So at least it's not spammable and the content is guaranteed to be of a certain quality. I have to think that's their strategy for making sure they don't reproduce the Netscape mess. (I can't find a succinct link, but you'll recall AOL turned their front page into something resembling Digg but it never took off and they apparently gave up on the idea because when you go there now it looks more like MSN's front.)
While it's too late to save Jennifer Love Hewitt, definitive proof that the biggest problem with the Garfield cartoon is Garfield himself has been realized in
Garfield minus Garfield . Previously we'd seen
his text bubbles removed , but it turns out removing his presence entirely is the best idea.
"In the brawl for the hearts and wallets of young male fans,
ultimate fighting has boxing and wrestling on the ropes ." I haven't watched professional wrestling since I was young but I do follow boxing and watching the Klitschko snoozer on HBO this past weekend all I could think was how much better it would be if it was a UFC fight. Even Friday's Pavlik/Taylor match, while satisfying in its result (and I say this as a Taylor fan) did not provide the adrenaline rush that comes so reliably from the octagon.
And to go from reading the above article to learning that
Floyd Mayweather is going to do some kind of pro-wrestling stunt ... well, that's a sad state of affairs indeed.
I'm not exactly timely with this one but
The Echo Park Time Travel Mart is the best thing in time travel since
the Time Traveler Convention . And the best thing in real world theme marts since the
7-11/Kwik-E-Mart stunt .
Speaking of mainstream TV that
everyone's talking about online , Fox no doubt got what it was aiming for with its lie detector show "Moment of Truth" when a contestant
admitted to cheating on her husband, among other things, for a shot at winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Justice prevails in the end.)
The story in the Post answers some of the questions I had about why the husband didn't just walk off the stage.
More interesting to many Clicked readers (because of course we're above being interested in base reality show scandal) is the Red Lasso video service on which the Moment of Cuckolding clip is hosted. I haven't requested a membership yet, but from
the silent instructional video they offer I see they're like a Tivo clip cutting service.
You search for a time range, find the segment you're looking for and cut it to the specific clip you want. From there it behaves like a YouTube video. It's a great idea and the service itself seems pretty good. I can't imagine how they get away with it legally but maybe once they show off what they can do they'll get buy-in from the content providers (or bought-out by the content providers).
As long as we're trying to be highbrow about lying, "
find the lie " is a fascinating idea in making students pay attention to class lectures.
You've likely seen it by now because it's racking up millions of views on sites like YouTube as well as on the ABC.com site (which for some reason didn't think it necessary to come up with a way for me to link directly) but just to cover the base, if you kept your TV on after the Oscars and your local news you saw Jimmy Kimmel's amazing music video response to his girlfriend's viral hit.
The story in short: Comedian Sarah Silverman gave her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel writers strike gold with an outrageously funny music video, "
I'm F-ing Matt Damon ." He replied in kind with an over-the-top production of the only possibly response, "
I'm F-ing Ben Affleck ."
I'm not embedding the videos here because they do involve a lot of cursing but technically it's SFW because it's just a TV clip so everything is bleeped (though it's late night TV, so not something kids should watch). But, on the third or fourth hand, there are an awful lot of those beeps, so if you play it at work it could sound like your cube is having its own little fire drill.
I was interested to read these two articles back to back. First,
a BBC item about Facebook being too noisy
to be useful and losing participants in the older age groups. Then this
one which is largely a complaint about RSS being too noisy but mostly
an encouraging review of a not-yet-public
service called Persai which sounds a lot like Pandora with news instead of music; using your pattern of use to determine what you want to read.
This
idea of the web having too much stuff and even the tools that are meant
to help (like Facebook and RSS feeds) end up with too much stuff helps
set the stage for the semantic web and "push" technology. A lot of
people think the internet of the future will be better able to tailor
itself to what you're interested in, saving you the time and trouble of
doing your own surfing.
Speaking of noise and news, more e-mailed than the McCain story on the New York Times site yesterday was "
More Americans Are Giving Up Golf ."
Given that the baby boomers are entering retirement age I'd expect the
golfing class to be on the brink of explosion but maybe that reveals my
bias in thinking of golf as a game for old people with a lot of time to
kill. This part is concerning: "The disappearance of golfers over the
past several years is part of a broader decline in outdoor activities —
including tennis, swimming, hiking, biking and downhill skiing —
according to a number of academic and recreation industry studies." The
article makes no mention of video games.
Speaking of what occupies the time of older folks,
Little Known 'Boring' Websites That Make Incredible Money With AdSense
- This article is a few months old but it makes it sound like
septuagenarians can simply design a web site and sit back and let tens
of thousands of dollars come pouring in via Google's AdSense. By all
accounts I've heard, this is not as easy as they make it sound.
I'm sure I'm offending some of my readers with all of these references to older people but here's one more. "Zhou Youguang is the inventor of Pinyin, a romanisation of the Chinese lexicon
used by millions to learn the language ." And those millions include Chinese as well. (And God bless this friggin' guy, 102 years old!)
A long list of
things this guy will do for money . It's hard to describe this other than to say it's silly. There are a few really inexpensive items/activities that people have actually purchased.
When Wikipedia Won't Cut It: 25 Online Sources for Reliable, Researched Facts - Though what you'd want with reliable, researched facts I just can't imagine.
Commuter Click:
Learning to Smoke - A really outstanding first four paragraphs. I'm taking this one to read on the train home tonight.
That video of
women looting in Belgrade during the anti-U.S. riots/protests. I'm not sure what to make of this. It looks like just these same two women, not some kind of social phenomenon.
I think the
G Shot is a hoax so I'm not going to get too
worked up about it.
I also think
Nubrella is a hoax because who in their right mind would wear this? (Hey, that's my office building in the background of the photo on their home page. If I had a window you'd see me in the background.)
Air-Powered Car Coming to U.S. in 2009 to 2010 at Sub-$18,000, Could Hit 1000-Mile Range - We've read about air-powered cars a few times lately but this article comes with cool concept drawings. I still can't read about them without smiling at the thought of them making a flatulent, untied-balloon sound or drivers out of air manually blowing into their cars to get a few more miles or gas stations with a long lines of cars at the air pump behind a little kid dropping in a quarter to pump up his bicycle. It's a cartoonists' dream.
17 Extreme Houseboats and Houseboat Designs: From Luxury Habitats to Humble Floating Homes
Red Bull has a game that lets you build a paper airplane and then fly your design. The game was more interesting than I expected but didn't make Red Bull taste any better.
Speaking of games,
this calls itself one but isn't really . I don't want to spoil it but it makes you the guinea pig in a psychological experiment.
Social media in the 1990s - Reminds us what things were like before the Internet we now know and love.
Web meme of the day: "
...is your new bicycle ."
Three million bucks for the world's largest music collection. What is the sound of color? Musicians are assigned a color and asked to interpret it in a song. (Don't they know they're all bold as love?) I've heard of people for whom the reverse is true; music makes them see colors. It's called
Synesthesia .
Some follow-up links for those of you who've been interested in the McCain story from the NY Times:
Here
the Times answers readers' questions about what they were thinking in publishing the story. I still can't decide if I think they were foolish for not anticipating the reaction the story got. That's been the most interesting question for me through this. The story is about how a man whose public image is based on his reputation plays fast and loose with that reputation and how it freaks out his aids. Should the Times have known that the cable news echelon of our media class would relay it as "The Times says McCain had an affair and did favors for this attractive woman." Surely we can agree that anticipated reaction should not alter an organization's news judgment, but maybe the story should have been presented differently? Remember a few years ago when a member of Congress used the word "niggardly" and everyone went crazy with condemnation before they actually bothered to look up the word to find out that it has nothing to do with the forbidden n-word? How much of that did the member of Congress bring on himself by using that word in the first place?
Correcting: It wasn't a member of Congress, it was
a local official . Interesting
recent history of that word .
This is
the New Republic piece that
supposedly forced the Times to print the story before they were really ready.
Why the Seattle PI
didn't run the story when it came up in the feed.
I think this is the most effective presentation of this accusation I've seen. Certainly better than Hillary's "Xerox" line last night. I do find the racial implications of using Vanilla Ice a little troubling.
ADDING: Oops, I guess "The Daily Show treatment" (side by side video editing) is a game everyone can play.
...and read
the actual New York Times story [or
here ] on McCain that's caused all of the fuss this morning. The more chattering analysis I hear and see, the farther it gets from what I read in the original story.
M. Night Shyamalan's new one,
The Happening . Walberg's character seems a little too smart for his ability to act it but it does look pretty exciting. It also looks a lot like all the other "where did everyone go?" movies and shows we've seen from I Am Legend to 28 Days Later to even the Jericho TV show. Anyone care to venture a bit of cultural analysis about this trend? Do Americans spend so much time in isolation (in cars, in front of the TV,
on the computer , in work cubicles, etc.) that they nurse a fear that the rest of humanity could disappear and they might not notice?
Speaking of lonely people,
Cinch is the new hotness from BlogTalkRadio. The idea is that you call their computer and the computer turns what you say into a podcast with the URL being derived from your own phone number.
You want to talk "easy," how about a camera that's
not much more than a memory stick ?
Music using ONLY sounds from Windows XP and 98! Holy moly this
Can-Am Spyder is cool. I'm heading down to Daytona Bike Week at the end of the month and I hope to at least sit on one of these to feel the ergonomics. I remember seeing a prototype that had serious power and was impossible to tip. With a wind shield you could drive this and never feel the weather. I'm wondering how this thing has three wheels and a lot of steering and stability extras but still weighs the same as my Harley.
Speaking of cool things to ride, we're seeing a lot of new toys in the news and folks online are
falling in love with KOTA , the baby robot triceratops your kid can actually ride. (I also followed
Geek Parenting's item with a link back to his kid's
utter lack of interest in a robot horse . Hysterical.)
Speaking of the old made new again, wouldn't it be great if the recent rousing of Amtrak
from security somnolence is in anticipation of a new initiative that will take transportation alternatives seriously and actually try to exploit
the potential of the U.S. rail system ?
Country codes of the world If you're seeing the headlines about the demise of HD DVD with dismay because you bet on the wrong horse, there is an option for you to
rip your HD DVDs to Blu-Ray . It's not as simple as having a dual tape deck in your stereo, however. The idea is to use special software to rip the HD DVD to your computer, then more special software to burn those ripped files to a Blu-Ray disk.
The Nautilus House looks like it was designed by Dr. Seuss. where does the TV go?
I keep hearing about “Unbeatable Banzuke,” but haven't watched it because I thought it had that same stupid narration like MXC on Spike channel. Looking at
this amazing clip , it's more like watching the original Iron Chef shows with natural sound and subtitles. Entertaining and yet no one had to eat any bugs. Or
as the NY Times puts it , "There’s nothing quite like them currently being made for American TV, where skill is defined as knowing whether to listen to your brother-in-law when he tells you that the next briefcase is sure to be worth a million dollars." Ouch.
Speaking of cool Japanese stuff,
Lunch in a Box - A mom's creative (bento box) lunch packing blog.
A mile high building in the making? If you're going to make a building 5,250 feet tall, you might as well make it 5,280 feet tall, really. Depending on where they put it and how they use it I don't think a mile high building is such a terrible idea.
"Simply
enter the lost phone number and listen for it to ring. When you find it, hang up and you're done!"
The above is an example of a
Single Serving Site , a phrase coined by Jason Kottke for "web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing."
That guy Chris Matthews hung out to dry last night uses his Web site to take
another shot at answering the question about Obama's legislative accomplishments.
A diagram of this person's family's movements
over the course of an hour's TV watching . Maybe if I moved this much the last cushion on my couch wouldn't be shaped like a hammock.
Lamp lit by gravity - I looked for a better link for this story but didn't find one. The idea is that you put a weight in a sled at the top of a tube and its travel to the bottom generates the electricity that powers the LED lights. Interesting emphasis on the longevity of the device.
ADDING: Ah,
here's the better link .
Looking for more on the Greener Gadgets 2008 competition I clicked this video demonstrating the
Hymini , a pocket sized wind/solar recharger for your gadget batteries.
FIXING: Not sure what happened to this link,
here it is on Treehugger .
Also, "the new UltraBattery, developed by Australia’s CSIRO, is a high-performance hybrid storage cell that
runs for 100,000 miles without recharge or replacement ." I know people who don't even drive their cars that long.
Qik would have been a good one to include in that trend of live webcasting sites. Qik's trick is to let you stream video live from your phone. It's full of videos of people just walking around. Seems like a good cheap way to do live news reports from the field if they can get the resolution up.
NOTE: It has some kind of function that starts a video playing after a while even when you've already turned all the videos off - just something to be aware of if you leave it open in your browser for a while.
"
Turns Out Social Networks Aren't Breeding Grounds For Sexual Predators " - It's an interesting point that sexual predators don't pretend to be kids and then spring their trap. They instead prey upon kids who are more inclined to form (or can be tricked into forming) inappropriate relationships with adults. That puts the onus back on parents to teach kids how to deal with adults in the first place. One vaguely related story I can share is that I once took a picture of a mother and child walking down the street and mother has under her arm a huge Barbie-like doll with no clothes on. On Flickr I called the picture "Creepy naked life sized child doll." (
The doll is clearly a toy .) Now that Flickr shows traffic stats I can see that every couple of weeks someone hits that picture with a search for "naked child" or variation of that phrase. To keep my blood pressure down I tell myself it's the FBI policing the system for child porn.
Hey,
Josh Marshall won a Polk Award . Well deserved.
Ann Althouse plumbs her blog archives to try to find a thread of explanation for
why she's voting for Obama in today's Wisconsin primary (from her starting point as a Giuliani supporter). She doesn't come up with a solid answer and the real explanation seems to have more to do with her disdain for the Clintons and the viability of Obama as an alternative.
"
What the heck is Lila Dreams? It's a massively multiplayer online game where you become a mental entity (called a "memekin") and live out an adventurous life inside an 11 year-old girl's psyche." Um... what? There isn't really anything of the game to see yet but they're
being taken seriously , perhaps because of the novelty expressed in that one sentence.
Commuter Click:
The Next Slum? I read a prediction once that exurbs would become ghost towns as cities became more desirable to live in and the cost of gas made commuting (and heating a McMansion) less appealing. That was before the subprime crisis. I don't recall anyone predicting exurban slums, however, so I'm printing this one out to read on the train.
This weekend a friend of mine was marveling at the ability of her camera to remove the red-eye from her photos. Just finding the eyes in the first place seems pretty amazing and we chatted about the technology that must go into facial recognition in cameras. Today I clicked this: "Enter motion capture company Mova, whose Contour Reality Capture system uses an array of cameras to create
100,000 polygon facial models that are accurate to within a tenth of a millimeter -- no special reflective balls required." Check out the videos, pretty amazing. (Find Sarah Connor an acting job while there's still work for humans.)
50% Of All BitTorrent Downloads are TV-Shows - This is surely a message to the TV networks. I wonder if the number is decreasing now that it's possible to watch so many shows on demand on the networks' sites. For some reason I can never remember when the new Sarah Connor show is on and since the premiere I've watched every episode on the Fox site.
Speaking of the Connor Chronicles, io9 does more research than I guessed was possible on
the various models of Terminator bots , culling details from the movies, shows, books and amusement park "ridefilms." I can't pretend to know much Terminator trivia but it does bother me a little that the show always seems to reveal a new flaw just when it's convenient. "Wait! They need twenty seconds to reboot!" "Wait! They go into hibernate and don't notice you removing keys from their necks!"
Speaking of obsessive show trivia,
A Visual Tour of the Dharma Initiative Stations: 7 Mysterious ‘Abandonments’ of the ‘Lost’ Island - There's so much extra Lost information online, both official and unofficial, and yet it's all I can do to keep up with what's on the TV. Even though I watch religiously, I get the distinct impression the writers are just making up as they go along, which discourages me from bothering to try to make sense of it all.
Speaking of too much of a good thing, I really like
this story of the mom who tries to get her text-happy family to use Twitter to make their texting more efficient. As obvious a fit as it seems to be for their needs, they hate it.
I have no way of knowing if this is true but it's pretty fascinating to think that different cultures have
different ways to flip through bills .
Play Shift . It's got nice easy controls like I like (need). Just arrow keys and the space bar. But sometimes you need to completely reverse the puzzle with the shift button. Good exercise in mental visualization.
Where Internet memes come from - I have no opinion (or information) on whether this is real but "I can believable" and "little girl" taunting it bound to stay with us for a while. Oh,
and this .
New Indiana Jones trailer - Some folks are losing their minds with excitement over this. To me it affirms that the new movie will fit reliably in what we expect from an Indiana Jones film.
Possibly one of the best bad movie reviews ever .
Penn & Teller Explain Cups & Balls - And you still don't know how to do it. (The explanation comes at the end with clear cups.)
I meant to pair this with the unique architecture link from yesterday:
The largest and tallest spanning arch bridge in the world .
An Entire Apartment's Furniture in One Small Box The Strange Maps guy is
looking to make a book . Interesting to read the story of his meteoric success. And yet, I can't think of any news organization doing a map of the day.
Now that I read that Mossberg item about the new super-thin solid state ThinkPad I've been watching some of the comparisons. Here's a
side by side with the MacBook Air .
Speaking of being side by side with the MacBook Air,
Poonovation - I could swear there
was an April Fool's site last year with this same idea. In this case
the real hot new feature is the MacBook Air docking slot. You actually
store your laptop in your toilet for convenient retrieval.
The Kinetic Cell Phone works like one of those self-winding watches.
combines the mesmerizing non-stop world spinning of
Twittervision with the utility of a news site. (If I had to guess I'd say the reason this link is coming up is that a lot of people saw that
Yahoo! Design has closed down and followed the advice in this entry to see some of the work they've done. The rendering of the
Query Bursts is similar and actually cooler to look at.)
Though not as cool as the David Lee Roth vocal track, playing with
the tracks on this Arcade Fire song is pretty cool.
From a press release in the mailbag:
iChapters will plant a tree for every eChapter or eBook you buy.
There was some interest in the cube farm this morning about what could be found online about
this latest university shooter Steven Kazmierczak.
His online trail is a bit of a jumble and a lot of links are going deal with the curiosity traffic but here's what I've found so far.
Odd Culture has a really big picture of him. It looks like it comes from the high school yearbook photo on
this newspaper site .
A lot of the info I'm seeing posted on blogs is a copy of the contents of his entry in the
campus phone directory .
This blogger has a nice round-up of links and explains that he used the user name in that phone directory brings him to
this LiveJournal account . I'm
skeptical that it's certain it's not related to this case. (Indeed it's a hazard of blindly searching for references to the name that random things come up that might fit a sensational big picture but really there's no way of knowing. I mean,
what the heck is this ?)
ADDING: Steve Huff has a nice collection of links and points out in a note at the end that Steve Kazmierczak is a more common name than you might think, resulting in a lot of false or dubious hits in Web searches, like the above LiveJournal link.
The shooter apparently co-authored a paper on
parasuicides the criminological term for prison self-injury.
Here's the abstract .
This site mentions he won a Deans Award two years ago but the link is down at the moment. The site also has a nice eyewitness interview video.
And he was the vice president of the
Academic Criminal Justice Association .
He sounds surprisingly sane in
his post on a PayPal complaint forum . Also not particularly crazy in
this ACA bio .
Wow,
this more recent photo from the AP looks very different from his high school photo.
I know people often have objections to researching criminals for fear of glorifying them. To my mind, the point of looking into a person like this is to see if there is any way to make sense of the act. For those looking for some of the online representations of the victims, I clicked this
Ryanne Mace tribute site on Facebook and
Julianna Gehant's impressive friends list . I'll add more in a bit as I try some more deliberate searching. Let me know if you have any links to add.
UPDATE: Even the Chicago Tribune, whose
coverage is outstanding , doesn't have much on the victims at this point beyond a
couple of photos and brief bios .
Awesome food fight spoons - Also funny,
temporary tattoo lines for writing on your hands
Speaking of food fights, I don't know what the deal is with
Coolio's cooking show . I guess this new video site is paying him to do it, and to that end it's working because I'm seeing the link (and helping to spread it). I wonder if it was Coolio's idea.
NOTE: Unrestrained cursing. Also, I couldn't pause the little ad at the intro so there's a bit of an auto-play panic situation to get to the volume button.
That 90 Day Jane fake suicide blog made a bigger splash than I realized. People are still trying to
figure out who she is . "Jane's" mention of the TV reporter committing suicide on the air had some of us in the cube farm talking about public suicides. Gawker rounds up a few of them
at the end of this item .
Speaking of atheists, "
Atheist Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast "
Speaking of significant religious events, there's something odd about the phrase "
World's biggest Christ ."
Marketers Salivate Over Lickable Ads - There's no way you're getting me to lick an ad. This has public health disaster written all over it. And there's no way I'm going to touch the People magazine next time I'm in a waiting room.
I was playing in Newsvine this morning and saw they have banner ads for
Newser.com . Lots of cool an interesting ideas about displaying the news here.
"The Mayor of London confirmed today that
drivers of 4x4s and high emissions vehicles will be hit by a £25 charge every time they enter central London." This is a pretty fascinating article because the original idea behind congestion charging was about traffic, not pollution. The system for knowing whether your car is a polluter looks pretty complicated, though I imagine you go to a service station, get your emissions tested and they give you a sticker declaring your car's "band."
There was some fuss here this morning as producers tried to decide what to do about the web version of Jane Fonda's appearance on the Today show in which she said the C word.
Gawker has the uncensored clip and frankly she barely said the word and the context was about as appropriate as you can get for a word like that. It looks like
Today shot a second version of the interview for the West Coast broadcast. It's ironic that they spend so much time talking about how it used to be forbidden to say the word vagina on television while the elephant in the room is that it's still forbidden to say the C word on television. (Admittedly it's an apples and oranges comparison but similar since the whole question this morning was what is allowed/appropriate on television.)
ADDING: Here's how they handled
the original interview , cutting a bit out rather than an annoying beep. Also, I should point out the Today show
apologized to viewers who were offended .
Speaking of the potential for offense, as a white person I found "
Stuff White People Like " to be really funny, even though the "stuff" isn't especially remarkable.
My Blueberry Nights trailer - This is the movie with Nora Jones in the female lead role. Looks a bit too sappy for me, but just from the trailer it looks like Natalie Portman puts in another outstanding performance. She's the real deal.
"When is a Hollywood celebrity big enough to require
special legal protection not available to little people?" This article is about a proposed new law that would require paparazzi keep a certain distance away from celebrities - like a paparazzi restraining order. I'd love to see what process is put in place to assess whether someone is a big enough celebrity to qualify for the law. Number of Google hits? Average market value of an unflattering bikini photo? Would celebs have to re-register every few years to make sure they're not has-beens?
Though I'm pleased to be young enough to know what Quidditch is, I'm embarrassed to say I had no idea people were actually playing it on a
regular basis . Not the real Harry Potter game, of course, but a seriously ridiculous version thereof. Again, I'm behind the curve on this, but
USA Today had a big item on it and I guess it's big on college campuses. If you don't click any of the links in this item, give
this video a few seconds just to confirm how truly silly it is.
"Only a month or so after Apple announced its MacBook Air laptop, which it calls the world’s thinnest laptop, Lenovo is about to spring
its own super-skinny machine : the ThinkPad X300." Tech reviews aren't really my field, but just last night I was remarking that it's difficult to know whether it's a good idea to buy a laptop right now because soon they'll all be solid state ultra thin, ultra cool, longer life, less battery draining, so it may be best to wait. Then this morning my cubemate was saying she's willing to overlook the MacBook Air shortcomings and here we see she may not have to.
Bill Gates gets
8000 Facebook friends requests a day .
Top 9 unique structures soon to be built The entire Web has been virtually quivering with anticipating for a new game by Sims creator Will Wright called Spore. Apparently the gameplay will be unlike anything else ever - from the descriptions I've read, the point is to evolve your character from soup to space. The projected release date for the game was recently announced like a clap of thunder as September 7.
Wired got some pictures of what it's going to look like. Expect much hype.
Getting Fired At Yahoo: A Twitter Log - Remarkable mostly for how well it captures the typical experience. If you were writing fiction with a character that gets laid off, this would be a good reference.
Google's holding a
"Google Doodle" logo contest for schools K-12. Hook 'em while they're young.
Videos you didn't know were staged - Some of these I never heard of in the first place but overall, seeing a collection of these, I'm getting a bit of a sour feeling about these fake-amateur viral campaigns. Dear marketers, just make something clever; don't try to make me feel like an idiot for being duped by an ad campaign. I'm beginning to resent it.
I don't know why it's a theme today but the other "cop caught on camera"
story in the news today is about the paralysed man being dumped from his wheelchair by a police deputy who apparently didn't believe his physical state was genuine.
In this case, the little clip they keep showing on TV is pretty much
all there is to see, but in case you were curious whether anything
significant takes place before or after the dumping, here's a much
longer version of the tape:
The Today show had the guy, Brian Sterner, on this morning with his lawyer.
I had this Clicked Court item in my notes for later but I see the TV folks are showing a bit of it in their news cycle. The story is that after seeing the video the Baltimore Police Department wasn't impressed with what they saw from one of their officers on YouTube
so they suspended him (desk duty with pay). Of course, the part you care about; the video:
I love the very last chopped-off line when he remembers there's such a thing as YouTube. I also like how he shouts his own name, just to make sure there's no question about who's abusing his power.
"A 'pacemaker' for the human brain might be on the horizon." - This is another crazy brain surgery story. By definition brain surgery stories are crazy because they start with "while the patient was awake we stuck the electrode in his brain and turned it on and he..." In this case, he remembered long forgotten things in flawless detail and was able to learn better too. What's a little disturbing is that the guy was there for help with obesity and they ended up playing with his brain to learn memory tricks. But now they're talking about putting something in the brain that keeps the brain-boosting current flowing to help people who suffer from things like Alzheimer's. I don't see why it would be limited to them. Grad students might also go to have their brain boosted and top it off with a prescription for those on/off autism pills while they're at it. Lastly, what else makes this crazy is that the batteries would be stored in the chest somewhere. Soon we'll be walking around with those battery removal ribbons hanging out of navels.
Possibly one of the strangest "cancer cured" stories we've seen: "Tattoos could be a useful way of delivering therapeutic vaccines in humans,
including for some cancers ." A therapeutic vaccine is not the same as a preventative vaccine. I once saw a reporter do a piece on tattoos and he got one done without ink in the gun so it was basically just a scab. Still pretty cool to have a skull scab for a week or so.
OK, one more crazy science item: "British scientists have created
an embryo with three parents ."
This woman is going to kill herself in 90 days . ...well, 84.
UPDATE: That link is down - actually it looks like she took it down. I found
this link instead , which resolves to something similar but different and mirrors the content of the original including the most recent post in which she explains that it was all "art" and a commentary on celebrity culture and a TV reporter from the 70s who killed herself on air (no footage). At this point, more interesting than the blog itself is the Google results for "90 Day Jane" the pulls up the Web-wide discussion of the issues this brief project raised.
I love the idea of
a science debate . I'd love some science questions in the debates and interviews that are already taking place. I know it's trite to complain about a weak emphasis on actual issues in the campaign coverage but I wouldn't mind a full on shift in the issues that are covered.
There are ape hangers and then
there are ape hangers... (Of the states I know with laws about this sort of thing, your hands can't be higher than your shoulders. I don't think all states have laws about it though, and as is often the case, the law only matters if the police catch you breaking it.)
Did you see
this set of charts in Sunday's NYTimes ? Most interesting is the lower, rate of consumption chart. It looks like people are quicker to get on board with the latest inventions. I'd love to see the iPod on there or digital cameras or DVD players so we can compare that line to the rate of adoption of VCRs. Color TV caught on really quickly. I wonder how that compares with the first black and white TVs or the new HD TVs.
New Hellboy trailer - Do you remember Nightbreed? This feels a little like a Nightbreed sequel in that it looks like a revenge of the underground freaks.
Pixish almost seems like an open freelance photography assignment site, but they've added the role of "the community" in sorting the good from the bad photos. And instead of getting paid, "winners get prizes and rewards." So really it's like a photo contest site. I have a feeling that
real professional photographers have a pretty dark view of systems like this. UPDATE: Derek from Pixish offers a bit of clarification in the comments below.
So while photo contests are hardly new, trendspotters may want to note that the Brooklyn Museum has announced an open call for submissions to
a "crowd-curated exhibition." Again, the community picks the good ones and the hope is that the result is a museum-worthy show. I have to think the danger is that they'll end up with a lot of kitten and baby photos. (Or maybe I'm just bitter because the photos I vote for in the
Week in Pictures are usually not even in the top five of the popular vote.)
Remember that game we played where you
see your own previous turns at the game so you help yourself get through the levels? Jason Kottke does a cool round-up of examples and ideas about that kind of "
time merge ."
Color pencils reviewed as tech gadget. February 10th was the date for the protests against the Church of Scientology, lead by their online foe "Anonymous." Crowds turned out in
Clearwater ,
New York City ,
London ,
Manchester, England ,
Milwaukee ,
San Diego ...(and that's just what I clicked). "Anonymous" is pretty
pleased with the effort .
Police: Crack Found in Man's Buttocks - No word on whether a search of his belly found a button.
Play Spin the black circle. (
Play Spin the black circle .)
Most of the time my workflow is such that any good links I find can wait until I've got a nice pile of them before I post them to Clicked. Every now and then, however, there's a you-gotta-see-this link than can't wait for me to get my act together to be shared.
This is
Van Halen's Running with the Devil with everything stripped away except David Lee Roth's vocal track. In itself it's stellar and a true jewel for da-na-na air guitar Beavis and Buttheads everywhere but
as the meat in a remix sandwich it's a true work of art.
Other low hanging fruit:
This is a parody music video by the folks who made that Obama video. They give the same treatment to John McCain but with an anti-war twist.
As Josh Marshall points out here, Huckabee's fate in Washington State is ultimately a nonstarter, but
the story of how he was/is being railroaded is pretty amazing.
And
Cannon Challenge is a familiar but fun game. I played it with the mute button on.
When I saw the URL
Live.Yahoo.com I thought it was some kind of clue as to the future of Yahoo and Microsoft's Live.com. It's not. It's a collection of live video channels. I don't have a cam on my work computer but it looks pretty easy to do it. It looks like a giant "look at me!" hub.
I'm not sure what to make of it, but Yahoo Live is only the most recent in a series of "live" sites I've seen lately. Recently I was researching
BlogTalkRadio which allows for live call-in radio style podcasts. And I clicked the announcement of the launch of
pulverTV , "the first 100% Indie Internet TV channel" which also streams live (powered by something called
BlogTV ).
All of my experience at the mass media level tells me that live events online don't work as well as "on demand" pre-recorded events. The lesson I've learned is that people would rather watch things on their own terms on their own schedule. But at the niche level or the blog level or even the "there's crap on TV, let's see what's out there that's fun" level, this appears to work pretty well. (The cynic in me wonders how long it takes for this to degenerate -again- into sex shows and cam girls.)
Feeling related:
U.S. Internet Users Viewed 10 Billion Videos Online Speaking of digital sex shows, the world of Hong Kong cinema is in the midst of being rocked by
a pretty good sex scandal . A hunky young actor named Edison Chen had made a hobby of bedding young starlets and photographing (and possibly videotaping) them in compromising positions. The going theory is that when he brought his computer into a shop for repairs his entire home porn catalog, some 1,300 images, were stolen and are slowly being distributed online. The resulting scandal has reportedly destroyed one marriage and snuffed an engagement. For his part,
Chen has posted a video apology on his blog . The whole thing makes Paris Hilton look like a total amateur.
P.S. Computer service technicians stealing porn and other content from the machines they're working on
is not unheard of .
I've seen this story of
New York City stores accepting Euros in addition to dollars pop up on a few local blogs and I suspect it's getting traction from the Ron Paul folks who frequently express alarm at the weakened dollar. What's worth emphasizing for those who aren't in New York City is that the place is seriously shoulder to shoulder with Europeans. The exchange rate has turned the city into a giant outlet mall for them, and that's not to mention the real estate they're snapping up. My point is that it isn't necessarily a question of what alternative to use for a weak dollar. It's more a matter of the sheer number of customers who have Euros in their pockets and how businesses can make it easier for them to spend as much as possible before they leave.
Speaking of Europeans, I listened this morning to
Ali Harter 's "
Take Away Show " on
La Blogotheque . For some reason I've found myself at this site a few times in the past couple of weeks which means either it's growing in popularity or I'm in a reading rut.
Macro photos of wonder:
Speaking of photos, when I see this I think surely it's
the saddest picture ever . Don't even click it if you don't want to be sad. Of course war photography trades in tragedy so I'm sure there are other saddest-photo-evers out there. I was hesitant to even mention this because I'm not a fan of making people unhappy on purpose but the photo does seem to have struck a viral nerve and watching yesterday's quitter speech from Romney suggests we'll see a picking of the pro-war/anti-war scab in the coming months.
Speaking of picking scabs, there are a few (new) instances of Muslims protesting
the display of Mohammad's image online . I reckon Muslims are going to have to just get over it. I mean what are they going to do, cut all the undersea cables so the offenses of the Internet can't reach them? Er... nevermind.
Actually, Wired appears to have
put the bulk of that cut cable story to rest :
"Cable cuts happen on average once every three days," Beckert said. There are 25 large ships that do nothing but fix cable cuts and bends, Beckert adds. Is it just me or is this article about the
polluting effects of biofuels
a little like those arguments that say walking is worse for air quality
than driving because it burns calories so you require food which uses
more energy to grow than if you'd saved the calories and used the car?
"British scientists are ready to turn
female bone marrow into sperm , cutting men out of the process of creating life." Talk about being born of Adam's rib or Zeus' thigh, sheesh! What's funny is that the idea is plainly an effort to solve the problem of infertility but the article treats it as though the whole point is to make it possible for lesbians to reproduce without men. Compounding the matter: "Couples who have children from artificial sperm created from women would be able to have girls only. This is because the female sperm would lack the Y-chromosome needed for boys." The future is
Themyscira .
Why is the fossil record gappy and uneven? (A: Because fossilization events and evolutionary surges are gappy and uneven.)
"Facebook announced an important forthcoming development that should
make FB apps a whole lot less annoying ." I was just remarking to a colleague the other day that I would appreciate Facebook a lot more if it was less annoying. What this article goes on to describe is a new era of competition between social networking sites to be more attuned to what you want them to be.
If Banner Ads Were Forced To Be Truthful... I didn't know the TSA had a blog and I definitely wouldn't have guessed that they
answer questions and respond to reader feedback by changing national policy.
How much of this
parkour soccer video is fake? What I'm willing to believe is that some kids around the world have the time and inclination to practice tricks over and over again and they only have to pull something off once in front of the camera. If you follow that link at the end of the clip you go to
a video game site that has some cool toys to play with.
The disturbing thing about this list of how
tech companies' logos have evolved is that in every example I like the oldest one the best.
Did you ever see that Japanese
t-shirt folding trick ? Apparently there's a way to be
similarly efficient when you're finished with your clothes.
NOTE: The clip that follows this one, after an ad, is a little racy though utterly bizarre. Probably not work safe since I don't know how you'd explain it.
The most thorough list of advice possible on
being a successful evil overlord .
Exactly what I was asking for: Guitar Rising is like Guitar Hero but the hours you spend mastering it actually leave you with the ability to
PLAY THE DAMN GUITAR !
Oh, and
the sun is broken .
The problem with that
Instapaper tool is that it turns into a really long to-do list really quickly. I burned through about half of my list this morning.
Flash price drop spurring innovation ; Users are likely to see greatly expanded capacity - At CES I was eavesdropping on one of the guys at the SanDisk area and I'm pretty sure I heard him say they were coming out with a 72 gig SD card. Now I see
confirmation of a 32GB iPod Touch for 5 bills. I reckon that's a price worth waiting on. Not only will you get a drop but that memory capacity will probably get even higher.
Of course, if you wait too long you may end up paying more for the new memory standard. The latest in the "what comes after flash" articles:
So Long Flash, and Thanks for the Memory Speaking of making predictions,
The Industry Standard has relaunched as a Web-only property, relying heavily on betting (fake money) on predictions made by the community of readers. Apparently the site is going to pay contributors but they also seem to draw in headlines and excerpts from external sites in a way that reminds me of
Newsvine . It led me to today's Commuter Click.
Commuter Click:
Mother Earth Mother Board (probably end up as weekend reading) - A Wired article from 1996,
described as "book length" it's about the laying of undersea fiber optic cable.
ACK! NOTE: "Book length" is a good description. This thing printed out to 64 pages. More than I'd want to read off the screen but a hefty pile of paper.
Speaking of prediction markets, another new site in that rapidly growing field is
Hubdub . I don't quite have the hang of it yet but the idea is that in the course of following your predictions about news stories turn out the site helps you follow developments in those stories. So, to stay with the cut cable story, I see
there's a prediction about recovery happening by February 7 . Since that's today and it's not fixed, the odds are pretty long, but below the prediction you can see a trail of headlines related to the topic -and a few utterly unrelated headlines which are forgiven by the site's beta status.
Less nerdy, more artistic (and shorter) Commuter Click:
What makes a great portrait? Lots of names and links, making it a good springboard for further clicking and reading.
Trailer for Where in the World is Osama bin Laden One Pill Makes You Autistic -- And One Pill Changes You Back - Prepare to have your mind blown in just a few short paragraphs. The idea is that science will make it possible for you to make yourself temporarily autistic to apply your attention obsessively to a task or break damaging emotional hang-ups. I never thought I'd read the phrase "recreational autism."
One from the mail:
Take a look at this newspaper cover (pdf). (Anything peculiar?) Will reveals: The answer
here . And
the question I was wondering .
How does this guy take
these amazing photos ? My guess was that he had a really huge flood light and was actually shooting in the dark. Turns out
it's all a photoshop trick . You don't have to understand the trick, but just like it's good to understand how models are photoshopped so you don't develop a complex about your own appearance, so it is important to understand how photos are photoshopped so you don't develop a complex about your ability to take a picture.
Speaking of photos and what's real, selling your photos through a collective service like
iStockphoto is a great idea for photographers who wouldn't otherwise be able to break into the stock photo industry as well as for photo purchasers (I understand the prices are lower than the established pro services).
But of course every new way to make money brings new ways to defraud people.
The example this time is a photographer whose shots were submitted to the stock photo database for someone else to make the money when they're sold.
The way to prevent such a thing? Beats the heck out of me. I did recently click something called
Copyscape , which somehow checks the content of a web page against all the content of all the other pages to see if anyone is scraping your content to make money for themselves. Perhaps a similar idea can be applied to photos.
Speaking of fraud with photos, I'm not sure whether it's more fascinating that a real working key can be made from an online photo of a key or that such a key could be made
from a photo on the site of the Diebold voting machine company thereby enabling the first step for any would-be election hackers.
Speaking of voting problems, I saw Keith Olbermann make a joke last night about Floridians showing up to vote on Super Tuesday (their primary was a week ago). It turns out
it wasn't just Florida , making the joke considerably less funny.
Speaking of being confused about voting, I poked around here to try to get my head around the idea of
SuperDelegates . Because of the way my mind works, I appreciated the Google Earth display.
I don't know why it's so hard to find good confirmation but it looks like there are
now 5 undersea cables "cut." (I keep putting "cut" in quotes because in some cases it sounds like "cut off" is being shortened to "cut" without meaning a literal break in the line.) This entry has a map of
where the cables are .
The NY Times has launched a
cooking/recipe blog .
Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged - Without revealing anything that would get me fired, my time out in Redmond last week definitely confirmed to me the likelihood that "in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services." Demonstrations of software (not necessarily Microsoft software) from advertising to marketing to news delivery all showed an interest in exploiting the Semantic Web. The idea is that software will get better at understand Web content and especially the context -not only of words but of actual users. The Semantic Web knows the answer to "What does this page say and who's looking at it?" and can provide ads or related links or other users with the same interest based on the answer. From a practical standpoint there's some problem in how the software will know this stuff. For some, the answer is to manually or with some automatic assistance, label everything with keywords to help explain what a page contains. Others are working on solutions whereby the software really can tell on its own whether, for example, the word "Bird" on a page means the thing that flies or the guy that shoots basketballs.
Speaking of new sites,
Howcast is another one of those sites compiling little instructional lessons. Most of the advice is a little more constructive than this "
How to get laid " video. It's odd that as useful as these sites always seem to me when I post them here, I seldom end up using them on a regular basis. They don't even come up in my searches. Note to self: Come hang out on Howcast a bit instead of watching crappy rerun TV.
An orchestra playing
instruments made from a Ford Focus - "The musical maestros used Focus parts to create such original works as a Rear Suspension Spike Fiddle and Door Harp."
I should have known better than to disrespect Chuck. From the mail:
Will – Have you tried this yet?
Metafilter explains
the International Pancake Day controversy - though I'm still not sure why voting conflicts with pancake eating. I always thought Pancake Day was something IHOP made up, like one of those Hallmark holidays but then a colleague who grew up in Ireland stopped by and explained that not only did they celebrate Pancake Day (
Shrove Tuesday ) but he was shocked to come to America and find that we eat pancakes all the time, not just once a year. Yes my friend, American truly is a paradise.
Speaking of controversies I wasn't aware of, apparently it's a problem that Jessica Alba isn't as "Latin" as her name and pigmentation might imply. Compounding the problem (for some) is her appearance
on the cover of Latina Magazine .
And as long as we're being controversial, this
statutory rape public service ad campaign has caused some controversy as well. The idea is obviously that it's sick to sexualize young girls. I find the ad a little weird and unfortunately not as effective as a single photo of JonBenet Ramsey or, frankly, just about
any image from a child beauty pageant .
Speaking of beauty pageants, don't ask why, but I was looking for an explanation for a recent
Google Trends spike in searches for "butt glue" and read this
insightful piece about participating in a teen beau 
