June 2008 - Posts
The folks online are calling it the viral ad JC Penny doesn't want you to see, which sounded suspicious to me since of course if it's an ad they want you to see it. But now I see it's being forced off of YouTube so maybe they really don't want you to see it. Luckily,
AdAge has it on their own server and since they've written about the story they can probably argue some kind of fair use.
NOTE: I think this is work safe but be advised, the plot of the video is two teens practicing speed dressing from underwear to fully clothed. So at a few points in the clip, as they practice, you see these two teens in their underwear. But not sexpot underwear and not really long lingering looks. The controversy here is not teens in underwear but the overall impression that the teens are doing this speed dressing so they can avoid getting caught kanoodling in the basement later on.
What's separately interesting about the JC Penny ad is how it seems to be part of a class of renegade unapproved advertising. That clip we saw the other day of the ball girl making the amazing catch was a Gatorade ad but actually wasn't because Gatorade never approved it.
WSJ requires a subscription but here's the relevant part:
The sleeker version of the ad (which was to carry the tagline: "Never Underestimate the Power of Superior Hydration") was supposed to air on TV. But the spot and online video were never green-lighted because the Chicago agency was dropped from PepsiCo's Gatorade and Tropicana ad account, according to Dennis Ryan, chief creative officer at Element 79. He says he doesn't know how the spot made its way to the Web -- nor does Gatorade. I don't have any insight in this specific release but I think if I spent a lot of time, money and effort to make what I thought was a clever ad, I'd want to share it with the public too. And of course the irony is that if either company had set out to launch a "viral campaign" you know it never would have done as well as these.
By the way, a funny perspective on that ball girl clip is
what it looked like to the minor league team that served as the setting.
In spite of sitting just a few rows from the folks who produce the Today show Web site I don't have a whole lot of insight into the show's planning. That said, I think I can predict
a certain couple's appearance on the show in 3, 2, ...
Speaking of what happens when you give talented and musical people control of a microphone in front of a group of people,
this graduation speech is making the rounds and is good for a laugh.
And if you're a fan of musicals,
Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog is something to keep an eye out for. “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.” Looks like the whole thing starts in mid-July.
I don't follow sports very closely but wow, I had no idea
the NBA draft was such a
spirited event .
Every once in a while someone makes a jerk of themselves on a recordable medium and is transported to Internet stardom. Such appears to be the case for
Dimitri who it turns out has quite a
back-story . (Oh! And a
Web site .) He's already made number 1 on Gawker's list of
Scariest Seducers .
Y'know, at a certain point you can see so many trailers for a movie that it starts to ruin the movie itself.
Batman is not such a movie . I could watch 20 of these and it wouldn't put a dent in my eagerness for its theatrical arrival.
Speaking of Batman movies, I also enjoyed
this little mash-up of fighting Bat-men.
For all the coverage of the
life-friendliness of Martian soil , the discussions about terraforming the place have been cursory at best. If you're telling me the dirt can sustain plants and it contains water, aren't we just a few short steps away from
planting the place full of asparagus and coming back ten years later to a nice breathable atmosphere? Obviously I don't know anything about terraforming,
so I clicked this . Speaking of fantasizing about Mars, I also read this one about
the unspoken hope of discovering signs of life there.
One more on Mars, when someone writes the history of significant Tweets on Twitter, the
MarsPhoenix discovery of water ice on Mars will probably make the list.
The best thing about this
donut bacon burger is that bottle of mustard in the background. Mustard on a donut bacon burger? Bleh!
Thing I'm foolishly hopeful about but will soon be realistically disillusioned and go back to spending my morning commute playing solitaire on my phone: the free Mandarin Chinese lessons on
Chinesepod.com . (I already gave up on
One Minute Polish .)
Speaking of giving up,
One Post Wonder is a blog that features blogs that have only managed a single post. Blogging seemed like such a great idea until they actually tried it.
Here's
the original blog entry from that guy who's started a movement to
take back the name Hussein .
10 cool and free bar tricks - Not all ten are cool but they are all free and a few are worth knowing if you have kids.
Cadbury Egg Rube Goldberg Machine How to hack a parking gate - I don't know if I'd call this a hack exactly but it does demonstrate the way those gates (and also trip lights) work. It was only recently that I learned they're based on an electromagnetic field. Usually it's your car that disrupts the field but apparently you can do it with other metal stuff. I always knew there was something under the pavement but I always thought it was based on weight. Sitting at a red light on the motorcycle I would stomp on the ground thinking I might not be heavy enough to trigger the trip light.
Why the Democrats are still friendly with Joe Lieberman is something
I've also wondered . Values aside, just looking at it in an objective vacuum, the guy left the party and actively promotes the party's opponent. Why haven't they cut him off?
Dubai plans 'moving' skyscraper - This was in a lot of mainstream news as well so it's not exactly a Web story but you probably didn't see the whole video on TV so it's worth a look. I can't imagine it actually turns as fast as
the video shows , you'd be sick and dizzy in no time.
Did you see this business of the
surfers fighting the
paparazzi ? Apparently the paparazzi are on the beach trying to get shots of Matthew McConaughey surfing. The locals are no so into the idea. As much as I liked those guys on the red carpet at the Webby Awards, and as much as I usually cheer against drunk jerks, I find myself rooting for the locals in these altercations.
I haven't played with
Wirewize yet but if it works like they say it could be a real life saver. Like most folks, I have a stack of black boxes with wires pouring out the back behind my TV. A cable box, a DVD player, a VCR, and a stereo that's supposed to function as the brains of the whole thing - not to mention the loose wire I can plug my computer into. I've cobbled it all together but if there was a way to enter the names of all the parts and get a nice clear set of instructions on which input to plug into which output I might even be able to reduce the stack of remote controls scattered across the couch.
A site I did take the time to play with is
Taaz . It bills itself as a makeover site but I have to think the real purpose it to make your online profile photos look better. Regardless, the idea is that you upload a photo, tell the software where the eyes and mouth are and then you can apply make-up and hairstyles in a remarkably easy yet convincing way. Sign-up was also a piece of cake.
Why the cloud cannot obscure the scientific method - This is a reply to the piece we read earlier about massive quantities of data making the scientific model unnecessary.
At the Webby Awards one of the recipients mentioned that the Smithsonian was going to be putting
photo collections on Flickr . I forgot to follow up but happily the link has become popular enough that it drifted onto the Clicked radar.
I'm embarrassed to say I've been playing quite a bit of
Puzzle Farter . If it weren't for the stupid noise you'd never know the little guy was fart-powered and it would just be a fun little game. Just hit the mute button.
Google directions from
San Diego to Sydney include a canoe trip.
I'm trying to decide if I believe that every six hours airline flights in the U.S.
use a million disposable cups . That's a really big number.
Gotham Cable News profiles Bruce Wayne . I wonder how long they could sustain a completely parallel online universe. I like the way they have these real-looking fictional sites and then I think of all the energy behind communities like the Harry Potter fan fiction sites. They could easily continue producing new related content. I guess in a way I'm describing Second Life but with a greater sense of real world overlap.
Solar-saves-the-day headline of the day*:
Antro Solo gets 150mpg - It looks like a colorful bar of soap but the real twist is the Fred Flintstone angle: "If there hasn’t been enough sun to power the batteries, each passenger’s seat comes equipped with pedals that can power the vehicles generator." As a last resort you can switch to actual fuel. Some cool concept cars
on the official (non-English) site .
*The SStDHotD is from an exchange in the comments the other day in which a reader pointed out that the number and miraculous nature of solar technology headlines warrant "Cancer Cured Headline of the Day" treatment.
I'm trying to figure out why I'm not bothered in the least by the torture game Winda Benedetti wrote about today
in her Citizen Gamer column . (
version 1 and the new
version 2 )
I think the bottom line is that it's just not realistic enough to be very disturbing. It takes more than a vaguely human form and the occasional pained sigh to trigger the visceral revulsion of witnessing the mistreatment of a human being. It reminds me more of one of those
time waster games that's more about exploring the properties of the program than the specific subject matter.
I don't want to get into a game of "what's grosser than this" but the floppiness of the torture doll reminds me a little of the
falling bikini woman that was popular a while ago. And what's odd is that I find that somehow less real but more disturbing.
And then there's the obvious thing that makes this torture game not seem like torture - the fact that we've seen torture and it didn't look like this at all. The Abu Ghraib photos were more disturbing than this. The Daniel Perl video and the Nick Berg videos were positively scarring. Just the audio of those things was terrifying and soul-darkening. Splashing a little cartoon man with blood from a mouse-click chainsaw isn't even close.
I'm not insensitive to human suffering. The photo of
that woman giving birth on the subway platform bothered me. Hell, anyone who made it all the way through 2 Girls 1 Cup should have the fortitude to endure the Torture Game 2.
Maybe it ultimately comes down to that relativity. I notice the things that bothered Winda the most are the things that made the game not bother me at all. I don't think the motion is real. The audio isn't real. The skin tone isn't real. The rendering isn't real. The "idea" of the game might be torture but you're not actually torturing anyone so it's really just a human figure abstraction.
"Senior Italian military officers hope the experience of
being humiliated by Miss Wakabayshi will toughen up their soldiers." It's actually about a 77-year-old Japanese grandmother martial arts instructor.
This is probably fake but your daughter doesn't have to know that when you show it to her.
This is another gal performing
a pretty amazing feat of athleticism and I'm pretty sure it's not fake. It's also pretty clever. For all the times I've seen opposing escalators I never considered spinning on them.
Speaking of performing tricks, this guy
shares his parkour workout .
The Lego secret vault has
every Lego set ever .
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
- Y'know how sometimes you read something and realize you better
understand it because there's going to be a wave of follow-up material?
I got that feeling with this month's Wired magazine and this article in
particular. It's not really long enough to qualify as a Commuter Click
but it took a lot of pausing and re-reading for it to really sink in.
The best take-away sentence: "With enough data, the numbers speak for
themselves." The idea is that there's so much raw data and processing
power out there that the old method of taking a bit of data and forming
a model to test a hypothesis is becoming obsolete. In fact, it sounds
like forming a hypothesis at all is becoming obsolete to using powerful
algorithms to recognize trends in data.
British Police in High-Speed Chase ... With UFO 'When John McCain was my captive' - I have to say first that I think this guy is pretty bogus with his claim that there was no torture in the Hanoi Hilton and he had nice polite chats with the inmates. That said, the idea that McCain's captors are alive and well (and dancing) and watching him from afar is pretty amazing. I wonder if anyone dared to show this to McCain himself.
The most cited George Carlin tribute I saw yesterday is this "
YouTube Obiturary ."
NOTE: No bleeps in this. Full bombs from the seven word menu. (Plus some gestures.)
"Marine ecologists have predicted there could be as many as
18 unknown species , with body lengths greater than 1.8 metres, still swimming in the great expanses of unexplored sea." The idea is that the rate of discovery has remained consistent and there are a lot of places in the ocean we have yet to look. I have no idea how that comes down to the number 18.
What the heck is Neave Television? NOTE: I didn't see any unsafe content but there's a lot of random stuff here so who knows what it could pull up.
Don't miss the games menu .
How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand - In essence the suggestion is that the bad English spoken by non-native English speakers isn't bad English but evolving English. The focus here is on how English is spoken by the Chinese, which may not seem to matter until you read a line like this: "An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice."
Hitler released on parole - An amazing tidbit of history from the NYTimes archive. If you don't have a NYTimes account there's a grab of it
here .
Speaking of Hitler and "if only" I also read this
funny little fiction script about communications between time travelers. Everyone kills Hitler on their first trip.
I wouldn't say that
Rex's Microfame story is compulsory reading but section 5, "Ally," describes a lesson that is worth understanding and provided me considerable relief when I finally figured it out myself. The lesson, in short, is the power of the digital social clique. Friends who link to and treat each other like celebrities give the impression to outsiders that they really are celebrities.
This was meant to follow my earlier post but, already a day behind, I didn't want to hold up one post for the other. I tell you this because I'm beginning with a "speaking of."
Speaking of finding excuses to link to things that are probably best unlinked, I had to laugh at the Kotaku line, "
Finally, a legitimate reason to post this video ." They're talking about a YouTube clip on the brink of 4 million views depicting a woman wiggling in her underwear, playing a Wii game.
NOTE: No nudity but it's a woman wiggling in her underwear so you do the math on whether S+FW = N. To further legitimize this as a story, there's a case to be made that the Wii has spawned
a new fetish niche . It doesn't take much searching to find a bevy of videos exploiting the "sweating and wiggling in front of a TV screen" theme.
Death Race trailer . It looks like Cannon Ball Run meets Mad Max. Nice cast, but it looks a little like a movie that was made to promote the eventual video game version.
I said in comments the other day that I didn't think the
Firefox Download Day was a big enough deal for anyone to care, but here I am pointing it out anyway. The stunt was that they wanted to set a world record for most software downloaded in 24 hours. I still feel a little "meh" about setting the record but the new Firefox is worth a look because it has some observable differences. And the map on the page is fun to play with. I don't know why but I like the fact that there are 8 people in Chad who have downloaded the new browser.
Gilded Guns, Pac-Man Grenades Pay Off for Artist - I wonder if this could be a spin off of steam punk. (It calls to mind that
blinged-out iPod shuffle .)
"Scientists have shown off the blueprint for
an 'acoustic cloak,' which could make objects impervious to sound waves."
Speaking of cloaking things, these are instructions for
blocking your identity from security cameras . Actually, they're instructions on putting infrared LEDs into a hat so that when you're viewed on a security camera the otherwise invisible light is so bright it blocks out your image on a camera.
Speaking of whether security cameras are good for anything, the title and description of this clip are flatly sexist and I apologize for that but I'm amazed at how little insight there is to be had in
witnessing this bus crash . What the heck happened??
NOTE: Contains a bit of cursing out loud.
ANSWER: Thanks to x in the comments who
found this story . If the story is the same, and it appears to be, the steering linkage broke.
All the online kids are playing with the
Spore Creature Creator . It's a tease site meant to build interest in the coming Spore video game (already the subject of a huge amount of interest). The install failed here on my work machine so I'm going to try it at home. While it's not imperative that you play with this thing, when the game comes out it's all you're going to hear about and already there are little spin-off memes resulting. So if you hate feeling left behind you'll want to get familiar with this.
UPDATE: It turns out I didn't have DirectX installed. Now that I do and I've played with this thing for a bit I can give it a MUCH higher recommendation. Not only is this cool and remarkably fun to play with but the reason for all the excitement about Spore becomes abundantly clear.
Perot charts is a new site from Ross Perot using his familiar charts and graphs to make his case that the United States is in financial peril.
How to Balance 17 Dominoes on One Domino - Watch at least the first 55 seconds.
An interesting look at a photographer's process of taking
artistic shots of bubbles in his studio .
Did you see the story of the people whose
apartment was turned into a puzzle ? Things this cool should be required in the zoning laws. (If you can't be bothered to read it, just check out the slide show.)
"
Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text."
The Great Office War - For all the effort they put into the soundtrack I reckon they could have done a bit more with the sound effects on the guns, but wow, this is epic.
Gotham City Pizzeria - It's a fake site for a fictional place from the new Batman movie. What you want to see is what happens when you click the "HA" in the store's logo. (It opens
this page with our first glimpse of what Two-Face is going to look like.)
Wow, I'm having a real hard time fathoming how a person decides to get
a Tay Zonday tattoo . A tattoo with no ink in the gun can look sort of real even though it's essentially just a series of deep scratches, but this doesn't look fake to me.
As a nice supplement to the Is Google Making Us Stupid Commuter Click article from the other day,
How we read online . It's a little painful to read given the way I wrote the post below but the truth of the piece is hard to deny.
Best Week Ever has the best take on that series of
photos of famous actors crying .
Wouldn't it be poetic if we invented
bacteria that consume waste and excrete crude oil and they grew out of control, infecting a population of humans left defenseless by overuse of anti-bacterial hand lotions and turned us all into oil? OK, if you're so smart, come up with your own sci fi concept for this one.
How cops really want to police - Anyone read
the Judge Dredd comics ? (No, I don't think seeing the movie is good enough in this case.)
Whole gecko eaten by ants - insert Geico joke here.
'Cancer Cured' headline of the day:
Cloned immune cells cleared patient's cancer The One Hundred Push Ups site reminds me of my friend and work-out partner in college who started taking karate lessons seriously and decided we needed to switch our general body building routine to a strength building routine. We'd do exercises of 100 reps with an empty bar and end up looking like ninnies grunting and straining against no weight. It also reminds me of a "
Get six pack abs in 6 minutes on your couch " video I saw not long ago. It turns out that 6 minutes is a friggin' long time to do sit-ups and if you can actually pull off that work-out you probably already have six pack abs.
In Vestimentis Ursum. There's a robot beneath the fluff .- This guy peeled off all the soft material on stuffed animals with robots inside to reveal just the robot heart.
Contrary to
Jon Stewart's lampooning of the media for giving credulous treatment to ridiculous smears of Barack Obama, my experience in mainstream media is that the folks who produce the news are generally wary of giving attention to unsubstantiated mud flinging.
The example that stands out most clearly in my mind is from early in the 2004 presidential campaign when
Matt Drudge was pushing the story of John Kerry having a fling with an intern. It was a huge open secret. Everyone knew of the story but no one (no one in the circles I have access to) wanted to touch it. (The best account of the story is by the intern herself who got a sort of
journalistic revenge by writing about her experience in New York Magazine.)
Markos Moulitsas wrote in his
Daily Kos blog at the time , "Ugh. Here's a story I don't want to touch, if there ever was one. But it's fast becoming an issue, so it can't be ignored." But to my recollection mainstream media did largely ignore it. Before I digress - because obviously Jon Stewart was able to put his segment together, so there's no real defense of how the media treats unsubstantiated rumors - the point I'm aiming for is that ignoring these things was the standard way to deal with them. So last week's launch of
Barack Obama's Fight the Smears site has me wondering if the changed times require new measures or if the Obama campaign is going to publicly learn the lesson that made the rule.
The reason I care at all is that I had written up a lot of notes on the "whitey tape" smear - a story that there exists a tape of an interview with Michelle Obama in which she refers to white people as "whitey." It was a classic case of a story with a huge life on the blogs and no mainstream daylight, so I gathered links and tried to figure out whether it was rooted in the GOP, the Hillary Clinton camp or just Obama bashers (or some weird amalgam of the three).
But recalling the Kerry intern story, I canned the whole thing. Writing about it would give it legitimacy even if I ultimately concluded that it was a bogus story. And while it's as foolish to think that by not writing about it I was somehow suppressing the story as it is to think that by writing about it I'd be broadcasting it to the public consciousness, in trying to do the right thing I went with the "ignore" heuristic.
Then Obama introduced Fight the Smears and the very first item on the list is
the "whitey tape" story .
I'm still going to ignore the "whitey tape" story but now I'm wondering if I'm being quaint and old fashioned in doing so.
This week
some guy is trying to stir up publicity for his claim that he did drugs and had sex with Barack Obama. The fact that the National Press Club agreed to rent space to the guy for his press conference has
created a stir (
complete with petition ) among media watchdog blogs thus bringing it onto the Clicked radar.
My journalistic sense is that this guy sounds crazy and I should ignore the whole thing rather than give it energy through any further coverage. Does the fact that the Obama campaign seems to think that if the media won't refute scurrilous smears they'll have to do it themselves mean that my journalistic sense is actually a dereliction?
(Not that it does McCain any favors but I should point out that he too is the victim of online smears. The most famous right now is a viral video accusing him of calling his wife the "C word." Like Obama's "whitey tape" no one has any actual evidence, but unlike Obama, McCain has deliberately not dignified it with a comment, even when asked about it directly at voter town hall Q&A.)
I'm listening to
M.I.A. this afternoon. She played an outdoor concert venue near my house a couple weeks ago and nearly leveled the neighborhood with the volume on the bass. The day before they were playing her in the coffee store where I buy my beans, and I read a friend's blog recently and learned he's flatly in love with her. And then last night I read
this item about her rocking Bonaroo and then announcing it was her last show. I feel like I missed something important so now I'm catching up. (Ah yes,
I think it was this one that rattled the dishes out of our cabinets.)
It still hasn't managed to take
that Led Zep song out of my head, however. I reckon I'll be humming that for at least the rest of the week. And on the subject of the floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
has some maps and other info that's
interesting to flip through if floating rooftops and sandbag-filling
footage isn't doing it for you anymore.
But speaking of listening to music online,
Moodstream is a pretty amazing effort from the folks at Getty Images. It pairs a giant slide show of their photos and videos with music clips. What plays depends on a mood dial you set. While you watch/listen you can click to purchase either the music track or the visual media. It looks like you can hear the whole song when you click through to the audio player (from which you can also purchase the track). It looks like you can also build playlists from the things you like in the live stream. I'm a little overwhelmed by it all. I can't see myself using it on a regular basis but it's certainly a novel way to shop for music.
Speaking of browsing media, "
MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we'll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more." The part you're wondering: "MagCloud will pay you the markup for each copy that is purchased. Production cost is currently $0.20 per page, and during Beta the shipping and handling is a fixed $1.40 per copy (USPS first class mail)." Hmm... I'm not sure there's much money to be made with costs like that.
Photojojo just did a feature on making your own magazine and I think I like their other suggestion,
Issuu , better. (It helps if you have a nice big monitor but poking through Issuu is kind of like hanging around in the magazine section of Barnes & Noble.)
Speaking of listening to music online, "Advertisers and record labels are t
urning to MP3 websites to reach a much-desired demographic." The idea here is that mp3 blogs are getting together to form a network. With their combined, concentrated niche audience they can more easily sell higher earning ads.
Speaking of making the bloggers work for you, I don't know what to make of this
AP vs "teh bloggerz" business.
Just about none of it makes sense to me. What does the AP think bloggers are doing that damages their business more than helping it? How did they think sending take-down notices to some random site would fix it? What do they think the "Media Bloggers Association" is going to do for them? How do they think bloggers are going to do anything differently once "guidelines" are established? Without question there's some thinking to be done about the value of the excerpt. I thought the pornographer had a point in
suing search engines for showing peeks of naked pictures in image search results. I'm also sympathetic to news organizations that complain that aggregators like Google News show too much information so that skimming news junkies don't have to click through to the source. But until we develop some kind of telepathy so that we can make recommendations to each other without using any actual words or images, badgering relatively small individual bloggers is not going to solve more problems than it ends up creating.
Speaking of taking back the content, remember my remark about Hulu as YouTube-killer? Mark Cuban says
Hulu is kicking Youtube's Ass . He's speaking in the business sense but I have to wonder if there are lessons the AP can take from Hulu.
A new swimsuit is shattering records and unleashing debate - This thing sounds so cool I want to wear one just sitting here at my desk. "Moreover, there are no sewn seams. Instead, the suit is bonded by ultrasonic welding." Oh yes, I definitely need to get some clothes that have been welded ultrasonically.
"Two necessary molecular ingredients of DNA and RNA have been confirmed to have
originated from outer space ." Engage imagination.
Did you see the
Google recipe search ? Random bizarre recipe I found while testing the search:
Coke salad .
A reader left a comment on the post with the office freak out video pointing out that
the hoax has been revealed . The whole thing is apparently a way of promoting
that Angelina Jolie movie, Wanted , which looks awesome, if not terribly original, so I'm inclined to forgive the deception.
I had an odd experience this morning. Flipping through link I saw this item about
a new anti-war MoveOn ad . What's odd about it is that I went to college and was pretty good friends with the actress in the ad. I haven't talked to her in years so I don't know if that's really her baby but it sure takes the authenticity out of the ad when you know it's an actress. (But don't I know that it's always an actress? Why would this be any different? And couldn't she be an actress and still mean what she says?)
Commuter Click:
Is the Universe Actually Made of Math? This is one of those things I barely understand but feel smarter for trying.
Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape - A little preachy in the way self-help stuff always is, but it's different from the usual set of advice.
I had the opportunity to attend the Webby Awards on Tuesday night with my colleague Helen Popkin as a press photographer. This is not a typical Clicked entry so I'm putting it behind a "Continued" link but it has some good things to click and nice pictures and even a contest at the end so it's worth your while to check it out.
CONTINUED >>
"Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where would you sit on one of those lists?
Here's your chance to find out ." The point of this site is that it shows you how rich you are relative to the rest of the world. The average worldwide annual income is $5000, but that still puts you in the top 14.39% (the 863,571,764th richest person in the world).
Something we see all the time drawing viral clicks are packages of "amazing" photos. Amazing sky photos, amazing bug photos, amazing animal photos. All surely used in violation of copyright and often presented on sites you never heard of using the photo traffic to make easy money from adjacent ads. Boston.com has launched a series called
Big Picture that copies that style of display. Rather that work out a fancy slide show tool or Flash player, it's just big pictures on a page.
Hulu adds
The Colbert Report and
The Daily Show . Of course, you can watch those shows on the Comedy Central site too, but it's hard to ignore the way Hulu is assembling all of this good stuff. How far are they from having a YouTube killer on their hands?
Speaking of Stephen Colbert, if there's one thing we've learned from his success it's that sarcasm is an effective way of communicating a political
message. That's the strategy behind the rapidly spreading
ImVotingRepublican.com . The Republican counter to this cannot be far behind.
Speaking of Stephen Colbert, he won Person of the Year at last night's
Webby Awards and I was there to see it (hence no post last night). I've got gobs of photos and
some thoughts and reflections I'll try to have assembled shortly.
Sometimes it's hard to tell what's going to be a lasting meme and what's just a passing fad. I wouldn't have predicted it, but that Bill O'Reilly freak out seems to have some staying power -
at least in the form of musical remixes .
The trailer for
Transporter III makes this sequel look promising (or at least consistent with the others in the series). Why is the first look at this movie in French? Is this a French series?
The one thing missing from the coverage of
the cloth-body BMW concept car is what it looks like with no cover at all. I want to see the skeleton.
This is the most foul public service advertisement I've ever seen. The idea is that if you don't donate your organs you're wasting them, essentially throwing them away -
like a landfill full of, say, eyeballs .
NOTE: I'm not kidding, this is gross.
How David Copperfield flies . Short Answer: Really thin ropes. Duh. Here he is doing
the actual trick .
Fractal Scene : a robot building a robot building a robot...
With
Mentos Kiss Fight no one can complain that the video game is too violent. It's like the street fighter games kind of except you kiss instead of hit.
Top Tourist Spots Americans Can’t Visit - Some of them are "you can't go because you're American" but the list isn't as America-hating as it sounds.
Rethinking the cost of hybrid cars - Casual conversations about hybrid cars often involve ballpark figuring about whether hidden costs and practicalities make the cars as worthwhile as they seem. This article has a nice breakdown of costs. It'd be interesting to see a similar chart for the environmental impact of hybrids versus conventional cars.
Commuter Click:
Is Google making us stupid? This one's for the metal nerds in the Clicked readership, but the weirdest thing about
this article about Metallica making more online enemies by playing games with music reviewers is that the photo of the Metallica member flipping the bird is Cliff Burton, the bassist who died before Metallica sold out.
These boys posted videos of themselves throwing drinks at fast food drive through window workers - a prank called "Fire in the hole." The judge made them post an apology.
I'm not sure if their particular crimes are still on YouTube. I'd never heard of "fire in the hole" until this story but there are quite a few examples in the related videos. Not very impressive as pranks go.
The Today show had
one of the victims on this morning.
UPDATE: It's not that the video has been taken down but that it doesn't appear to play anymore in embedded form. If you
click through to the video in YouTube it still plays.
It's difficult for me to tell if "
You've Been Left Behind " is a joke but from what I understand about the Rapture and the folks who believe it in the site seems pretty accurate. The general idea is that you pay a subscription fee for them to host messages written to people you know who haven't accepted Christ. When the Rapture comes, your messages are delivered. At first glance I thought the messages were just for gloating but it turns out there's a hitch in the Rapture that last minute repentance can get you into Heaven if you act quickly, so these messages would encourage your left-behind loved ones to do so.
The detail I like the best is the way the system determines when the Rapture has taken place. There are six employees who log in every day. When three of them go too long (a few days) without logging in, the system assumes they've gone to Heaven and the Rapture is upon us.
Speaking of folks with passionate religious beliefs, I don't imagine they're very big fans of Bill Maher who makes no secret of his disdain for religion. His standing with them won't be helped once his new movie comes out in which he literally calls religious people crazy or, as is the title,
Religulous . Maher's also launched
DisbeliefNet .
Speaking of making religious people unhappy - or at least the evolution-denying religious people,
Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab . This article is not as thrilling as the sci fi novel the headline conjures to mind but it's still pretty fascinating. The scientist has been growing bacteria for twenty years to study its changes over time (aka evolution). That's over 44,000 generations he's observed.
Lest I seem to be treating scientists with too much reverence, silliest line of the day: "Some scientists think they'll learn more by
blasting missiles into it ."
Scientists have located the
exact center of the Internet .
Google Good News is not real news but if you suffer from news-induced anxiety it maybe worthwhile to convince yourself that it is.
The varying impact of gas prices - It's a(nother) nice set of informative graphics from the Times. The contrast in gas prices from New York to New Jersey has always perplexed me. I guessed it had to do with proximity to shipping and the harbor or something like that but now it looks more like it has to do with taxes.
Massive protests daily in Korea and
it's the Web's fault . When you consider the number of powerful corporate and governmental interests that are undermined by the Internet, it's a wonder it's not the subject of an all out war to eradicate it or at least relegate it to nerd basements and CB clubs.
Most of the times I consult a dictionary it's for help with spelling but the interface for
Visuwords is so cool it makes me want to think of reasons to use it.
Also cool, the
Visual Dictionary , giving you a labeled diagram related to your search term.
Lego patches on old walls , cool or garbage? My first reaction was that it's cool, but I don't see how this is going to age well. Maybe the apparent age of the walls is exaggerating my sense of how lasting the art has to be.
Wii Spray turns your wiimote into a spray can so you can write graffiti on your TV. I'm not sure I really care to do that but the photos farther down the page show what a clever idea it is anyway.
The Democratic primary race in 8 minutes is WAY more fun than the actual Democratic primary race and it has the same plot and ending. I feel a little ripped off that I spent all this time watching the long version. (P.S. Charlie Todd is not NBC Political Director Chuck Todd.)
Sling announces proof-of-concept SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone - "Proof-of-concept" is a pretty long way away from reality but the implication is clear enough to be exciting. As you may know, Slingbox is a device that allows you to watch your TV on your computer from anywhere. Not "a" TV or Web versions of shows but your TV signal specifically. What this little video is about is using that same idea to send your TV's signal to your iPhone.
"Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don't seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets?
Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?"
A relatively short post but it's a lot of video so it takes a while to get through:
I think this is called contact juggling when there are a few balls, I don't know if that's still the name when it's just one but
this guy does a pretty sick job .
Here's
that insane office freakout video that is bound to break the mainstream soon. (Or here with
that old "nookie" song dubbed over it to make the rage a little more cinematic.)
The second angle (you can see the guy taping in the first angle) has sound but doesn't sound like English. Right now I'm leaning just a little bit to the "yes" side on the "is this real" scale for this one.
Slow motion punches . I wonder how hard a face has to be hit to do that kind of jiggle. I have a feeling that it doesn't take much if your face is relaxed. (Not volunteering though, thanks.)
Here's
that Vanity Fair article that had Bill Clinton calling the reporter "a scumbag."
Maybe I don't understand fashion but
hair hats seem kind of gross to me.
Trailer for Gonzo , the new Hunter S. Thompson documentary.
The most dangerous species in the Mediterranean - Clever anti-pollution ad.
Not new but very cool, "
Natural magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries as scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describe their discoveries." I'm not clear on how accurately the animation represents real field lines or if the whole thing is just an interpretation.
I wasn't familiar with
Andrzej Dragan's photographic work so I spent some time poking through his galleries this morning.
You can download the animated short Big Buck Bunny
from the official site , or if, like me, downloading stuff makes you nervous, it's in really high quality
on Vimeo as well . (NOTE: Watch it yourself first before calling your kids over to watch the cute bunny movie.)
Listening this morning:
The 10.Deep, NYC Wale mixtape about nothing .
Preparation H Finds Place in Club Circuit - Rooted in
this hysterical club bouncer/blogger entry . I've heard of women using Preparation H on their face to reduce puffiness and wrinkles (I think, or something to do with making the skin look better) but rubbing it all over one's body is a new one to me.
This
photo set of miniature pigs is mostly just a novelty but I actually like the idea of a pet miniature pig so I did a little more digging to find out how close we are to buying them at the local mall. What I found was a
fascinating article on the farmer's breeding strategy for producing these little pigs. I know some people think breeding for the selection of mutations is cruel, but it seems like this guy knew what he was doing.
Then again, see number 5 on
this list of predictions for the future. Adios non-dog pets. I have 50 years to get in some mini-pig time before they're deemed to germy to keep.
The best bootleg YouTube clips I watched of the Kimbo fight Saturday are
from this guy . My thoughts on
the controversy : UFC would never let a guy get plonked for a full minute and a half like Kimbo did at the end of round 2. I didn't see any tapping from Kimbo and I don't think he's trained enough to produce that as a reflex. I think he'd just wait to get knocked out. Of course, fairness would have afforded that courtesy to James Thompson as well in the third round. I do think Thompson was headed for the darkness, even if his ear wasn't so alarmingly floppy and deflated (and bloody). I reckon Kimbo would have taken it by KO if there'd been no stoppage. (For those not aware of why this is a Clicked story,
Kimbo Slice was a street fighting viral video phenom with a sizeable collection of sometimes sadistic videos of him pummeling chumps and losers in back yards and parking lots.)
NOTE: If you're not familiar, Mixed Martial Arts fighting is a little more brutal than boxing and Kimbo's highlights reel is not recommended for anyone who doesn't have a taste for violence.
3 Ideas That Are Pushing the Edge of Science - "Sperm powered" may be one of the weirder phrases I've read in recent memory.
Fans rip Metallica a new one - Maybe I shouldn't be but I'm surprised so many people remember Metallica's crime against their fans. There are so many more people online today than there were then and so many young people online who never knew the old Napster I would have thought Metallica would get away with some backtracking on "being Webby."
Read at work - This is going to pull up a page that looks like your Windows login. You might even think at first that you've somehow crashed your machine or something. I think the idea is that they've hidden books in a frame that looks like what you might already have open at work. It's the opposite of NSFW. It'd be cool if it had a community aspect so others could upload to it and grow the library.
The
Burn After Reading trailer (the new movie from the Coen Brothers) opens in iTunes for some reason but it's worth watching, either here or wherever you find it.
NOTE: Brad Pitt says the S word a couple times with no bleep.
"Self-medication may be
the reason the blogosphere has taken off ." As funny as it would be if that sentence was meant to say that bloggers are all on drugs, the actual point is that venting through your blog may have real, scientifically verifiable benefits to one's health. I don't imagine the same could be said of reading blogs however.
"
LastGraph lets you explore your last.fm listening history." I've seen a few of these tools that let you visualize your behavior. Self graphing is the new narcissism.
Speaking of free music,
Top 15 Free Music Websites That You Will Want to Visit NOTE: For some reason this page gives me a login pop-up. I just close it and the page loads fine. I don't know what it's trying to get me to log into.
50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do - Kind of like that list of things men should know how to do but gender neutral and more importantly with links to instructions on how to actually do the 50 things.
With underinflated tires eating up gas, where is the TWEEL? I never heard of the Tweel but I'm thinking it hasn't been brought to market because it doesn't look capable of supporting a car. The appearance alone might override and benefits of the functionality.
It's hard to know where to begin with this one but
The Jawa Report has all the relevant links. A coalition of Web users has formed to attack anti-American online terrorist propaganda. In this case, YouTube videos and the users who post them.
This calls to mind a dust-up at the end of last week about a Web-based
terrorist watchdog group that was
accused /
mistakenly reported to have confused
a video game image with terrorist propaganda. Hopefully targeting terrorists remains targeting just terrorists.
Pink chewing gum sculptures - There's no real reason for this to be gross but it still kind of is.
