December 2008 - Posts
Last night I was reading
this piece and its related links about the rise of "alternative medicine" and corresponding compromise of actual science based medicine. Then
I saw Bob in the office today. He was booked to go on the air to talk about new credit card scams and the fact that hard economic times make people more susceptible to scams. After he came back to his cube we chatted about the psychology of suckerness and how interesting it is and then, waddayaknow, tonight I come upon
this summary of a book called Predictably Irrational, which is about that very subject of suckerness. (The summary is actually an outline, which I'm a little embarrassed to say makes it much easier to read and digest and if it had been a long bit of text I probably wouldn't have made it as far as I did.)
If texting costs the phone company
next to nothing, why does it cost as much as it does? I know the answer is that it costs what the phone companies can get, but why hasn't a price war brought that price down further?
I sent
this photo to one gal in cube farm and listened to the cascade of "awww"s as it was forwarded across the floor.
Random thing to play with of the day:
cloth physics simulatorI'm listening to The Black Keys because
their song Lies plays in the background of a commercial for Big Love on HBO. This particular song is pretty bump & grind, but a lot of the songs (the earlier ones?) are strikingly reminiscent of old Black Sabbath if any of you are Tony Iommi fans. (And yes,
the original is still around.)
The file name says "
oarfish" but since the bulk of my marine biology knowledge comes from reading the tags on pet store fish tanks I'd say that's a seriously huge arowana.
I didn't understand why so many people were linking to what looks like a pretty crackpot article about the U.S. dissolving into civil war in two years until I saw mention of
the map at the end (I hadn't bothered to read that far into it myself). Still utterly crackpot but fun in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi way.
Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home - Relax! What could possibly go wrong?
I've been calling this the
awesome zombie game but looking at it now I realize it doesn't actually say zombie on it anywhere. For some reason, maybe the colors or the way the bad guys swarm, it reminds me of zombies. Anyway, awesome. One note: it's much easier with a mouse than a laptop touch pad.
Rex has once again rounded up
the year's list links in a link list.
The week feels like it's ending in a mad crush. I'm heading to the in-laws in Florida next week so some of that sense is personal. I did manage to waste a little time, however, mostly on this
massive visual archive of New York Magazine. Even if you don't care about New York City, the ads alone are a real trip. The fact that you can skip ahead through to years so easily makes comparison fun.
Also:
How to Build a Kick-ass $800 Gaming PCA lot of media outlets have similar "year in photos" but
Boston.com's Big Picture seems to be drawing the most link attention - probably for the larger size of the images.
The Benny Hillifier puts the Benny Hill "Yackety Sax" theme song to any YouTube video.
It kind of reminds me of the Curb This blog that puts the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music on the end of famous movie scenes.
Prehistoric Japanese Goblin Shark - I have to assume that its drool will dissolve the metal grated catwalks of space stations, though I can't be sure.
Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - I've decided to wait and watch it on my TV but it's cool that this option exists.
I should probably save all of these for one big Christmas post but this microwave song is too neat to hold.
Speaking of must-share Christmas items, check out this photo. I know it's older than Mad Men but that's what immediately comes to mind.
I feel such ambivalence about this improved homeless box story it hurts my head. It's so nice that some homeless people don't have to sleep in a box and also so utterly crappy that they have to sleep in a fancy box instead.
Speaking of cognitive dissonance, how about Mike Tyson's bad-ass face tattoo versus... the rest of him?
I don't know what the deal is with IE but I got two viruses in two weeks after years of clean surfing so I'm back on the Firefox. I had quit Firefox and Chrome because when I have a billion tabs open sometimes videos won't play and I don't have that problem with IE. I'm still not pleased with Firefox because it feels slow to me. I know that's not born out by the speed tests and maybe it's some extension I've installed but it makes me crazy. Chrome is nice and zippy for me and I like how visually open it feels - I'm just not in the habit of clicking the icon on my desktop yet.
The ads on MSNBC on Time Warner Cable in New York City (not sure if these are local ads or national) lately are often for a weird kind of baggy blanket with sleeves. I forget the name but it's the same as this. Am I the only one who feels like these are real life thneeds? (Even the marketing has a "which everyone, everyone, everyone needs" quality to it.)
The new Wolverine trailer slays.
Yesterday I was trying to tell someone that the shoe throwing incident reminded me of Lew Zealand the fish boomerang throwing Muppet and in the course of searching for a video of him I found this bit of Rowlf doing
Tea for Two backward.
That reminded me of
this amazing performance (yes, watch the whole thing or you won't get it) and how it made me feel deficient for not having a similar ability.
(Remarkably comprehensive list of
backward messages in songs.)
Speaking (almost) of New Zealanders,
How to Avoid Looking Like an American Tourist - Just two days ago I was talking with someone from New Zealand who mentioned that they always know American tourists because they wear white tube socks and tube t-shirts (apparently U.S. t-shirts are unique for not having a seam down each side). Since I only own white tube socks and outside of work I only wear t-shirts I thought that was pretty funny. what's interesting about this list is that you can read it in the converse to know how to identify a European tourist. Somehow European tourists always look a little overdressed to me.
And speaking of Shoey Shoethrower, not surprisingly he's inspired a bevy of parody
animated gifs, well cataloged at Boing Boing. There are also a bunch of
modified shooter games (shoe-ter games?) paying tribute to the event but they're mostly pretty crappy.
KickYouTube actually works. You change a YouTube URL to KickYouTube instead and it gives you a bunch of download options. Random story: When Obama had that 30 minute ad before the election, a TV guest was booked to talk about it but wasn't able to watch it live so I got a call from a producer asking if I could get a digital version to him ASAP. The ad was on YouTube right away but the guest wasn't sure about having 30 minutes of internet access so I had to find a way to download from YouTube and send him the file. Had I known about KickYouTube that process would have been much easier.
Nicely rendered robot fight short animated filmWhat the heck is rock dust?
You know it's going to be good when the first step is "
weave bacon."
Daily Routines: How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. They don't mean that generally. This is descriptions of the daily flow of specific people.
The flight path of
every commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period in a 72 second video.
Clerk Dogs is an "if you liked x, you'll like y" movie recommender. It did an
interesting job with Delicatessen.
Whoever said cap guns are not a gateway more destructive diversions never saw
this exploding hammer festival. </end offending anyone who knows what this festival actually is.>
The story of
capturing images directly from the brain is the fun kind of science that lends itself to imaginative, if not completely responsible sorta-science reporting. My mind went to something along the lines of crime fighting by analyzing the latent mental images of crime victims. The Daily Mail jumped
televised dreams. Good one.
Crazy YouTube stunt cringe video of the day:
Kite surfer crash NOTE: The crash isn't so bad and everyone lives but there's one point in the video where they briefly show his severely bruised hip and that's both gross and kind of naked-ish.
Social media etiquette handbook - I was dismissive of social network "drama" in my Twitter description but it's still not a bad idea to know how things are done on a service you're using, especially if you're new to that service.
Clicked reader Mark R. offered up
Play Auditorium in the comments the other day. Dangerously cool.
I'm having trouble committing to the Joe Satriani/Cold Play plagiarism thing. It seems like the melody or the chords could be done independently but the rhythmic similarity gives me real pause. Cold Play denies it flat out by the way.
Speaking of ambivalence, have you seen the Whopper Virgin ad campaign? The idea is that they find people who haven't been exposed to McDonald's or Burger King marketing to see which does better in a taste test. It's totally fascinating and I've read some really cool stories about people experiencing American culture for the first time. That said, I hate that it's fascinating because it's freeking Burger King doing a freeking taste test and could there possibly be a more absurd embarrassingly stupid premise for the whole damn thing? And true to form, the people are so very nice and welcoming and accommodating and play along and here are these fast food manipulative poison merchants acting like they're some kind of cultural ambassadors... Gah! Now I'm all pissed.
Our old friend desktop tower defense comes in many flavors.
Endice is a good puzzle game that requires more thought than dexterity.
Time smartly takes advantage of the popularity of top ten lists by producing a massive collection of them.
I know we've seen fun bento boxes before but that doesn't make it less fun to see more of them.
Crazy ass thrill seeker video of the day - It's a little slow to start, skip ahead at will. The stunt itself isn't very flashy but made me a little ill once I gave it some thought.
Every year we see real life versions of Calvin and Hobbes snowmen. Here they all are in case you want some reference inspiration.
Just an awesome rhino photo. No more no less.
Is it going to rain today? Will I need an umbrella? (I should add that as a child of New England I don't endorse this kind of weather report. Something I consistently miss about the Greater Boston broadcast area is that the TV weather shows (or showed, last I watched) actual meteorological conditions with barometric pressure and those little flags and fronts and high pressure and low pressure. New York City weather gives us a happy sun or a little cloud animation. And now these one-word weather Web sites.)
Feeling somehow similar: What online cartoons are funny today?
I'm enough of a geek "green-enthusiast" that I read this headline as "driving on saliva" and thought it was going to be about converting saliva into fuel somehow. Turns out it really says driving on salvia, which is not new (I remember Googling it when the health editor who sits behind me was producing this piece) but what I thought as I clicked through the related videos is that first time salvia trip videos are the new first time Two Girls One Cup videos.
A nice clear not-at-all-hard-to-read-through explanation of how the binary number system works.
Another before/after Photoshop job. I think the pose itself is so awkward you almost have to Photoshop it just to be fair.
I think if I'd invented the miracle tea bag I'd have used a different metaphor (like maybe the patch?) but it's funny that British scientists would come up with a tea bag-like solution to administer stem cells.
Random non-link bit: For the first time, after years of blindly and recklessly clicking every link with a catchy headline I caught a nasty trojan last week. Likewise, the old machine I have for my baby to practice typing the letter W has been incapacitated. I'm hearing similar reports from friends. Be careful out there.
My Commute Clicked series should probably be renamed "Things I read half of with the hope of reading more but we all know I'll never get around to it." As such: Roger Ebert eviscerates Ben Stein's Intelligent Design movie and Scientific American re-publishes an article from July 1959 speculating about the relationship between human-generated carbon dioxide and global warming.
I'm not sure what the trigger was, if anything. It may have been the press coverage of the use of Twitter in disseminating news about the Mumbai attacks. Maybe it's all the press coverage Rachel Maddow's been getting that never fails to mention that she uses Twitter. Or maybe it was just an inevitable step in the growth of the service, but whatever the explanation, Twitter has reached the media class.
I mean that in a genuinely immediate sense. Like just the last week or two. Obviously Twitter has been popular for a long time, almost from its introduction as I recall, but the nature of its adoption seems to have shifted since around Thanksgiving. Within a day of each other, Kathleen Parker wrote about Twitter in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal did a similar overview and N.Y. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof signed on.
(No, I don't think it has anything to do with Rick Sanchez.)
Shaquille O’Neal felt strongly enough about the significance of Twitter that a couple of weeks ago he signed up to foil an imposter. (And I learned of that story from Kanye West, who chose Twitter as the method with which to respond to Stephen Colbert's Operation Humble Kanye.)
As of the drafting of this entry, Michelle Malkin began Twittering 7 hours ago.
So since I've never really written a Twitter overview and questions have come up in comments on this blog and elsewhere I'll give you my nutshell perspective (because it's way more simple than some of the hype makes it seem).
Twitter is word of mouth made visual. That's what makes it so exciting. The Kathleen Parker piece mentioned above gets it backward because she buys into the Twitter catch phrase "What are you doing?" The best part of Twitter is not the talking about what you're doing but the listening to others. You listen in two ways, you search or you follow.
Search for Mumbai while terror attacks are happening there and you get a noisy but occasionally very immediate view from people on the scene. With the Maddow show I've been encouraging fans to search for Maddow and to also Tweet Maddow during the show. Their tweets show up in the search results and form a sort of chat room from which fans can network.
Following is a little more difficult because you have to find people worth following. There are a few services out there to help you do that (I'm still waiting to hear from Mr. Tweet). And Google will produce a lot of lists. I began by following a few names from the "most followed" list at Twitterholic.
Once you start following a few people your list is bound to grow because you'll see their recommendations and who they're talking to and who they're following and it's really easy to add and subtract from your follow list. My personal account is only following 40 or so people. But I also monitor the Maddow account and she's following 544 people. Surprisingly, it's not an unmanageable amount of content. The beauty of the "follow" is that unlike blogging that requires a steady stream of content to maintain and grow an audience, with Twitter, your followers are standing by, ready when you are. And if you're not tweeting, you're not wasting anyone's time.
There is some drama associated with following and being followed. Some people care very much about the ratio of followers to followed - if you're not watching as many people as are watching you, you're a snob. Similar accusations come up when people don't "follow back." Not unlike blogroll drama with some bloggers, I've seen some Twitter users have to announce their "follow policy" to avoid any hard feelings. As with anything, if you look for drama you'll find it.
I've mentioned that I use Twhirl to follow Twitter activity. I like it because it makes Twitter resemble an instant messenger. Sometimes I notice there can be a lag between something showing up on Twitter and the time it takes to arrive in Twhirl but it works good enough for me. A lot of people use Twitter exclusively on their phones. You'll notice that after every tweet is a note of when it was sent and where it was sent from. Watch what other people are posting from for suggestions on other apps you might want to try.
The only codes you really need:
- @ sends a public message to someone else
- d sends a private message to someone else
- # doesn't send a message but does tag your Tweet so it comes up in searches for that tag
- RT means retweet and it's usually followed by @ to indicate the source of the tweet you're relaying. The networking word-of-mouth power of Twitter is well illustrated when one person tweets a message and a follower retweets that message to their own followers.
Lastly, because you're only allowed 140 characters per tweet, if you're sharing a link you can eat up a lot of valuable character real estate. Twitterers use URL shortening services like tinyurl.com to reduce the space taken up by long links.
Hopefully this will serve as good grounding for the new wave of hype that's surely on the way.
I read through this list of popular Japanese phrases of 2008 but ended up feeling guilty about it afterward. It seems like every time I read about Japanese culture it's in the context of "look what crazy trend they're up to now." I'm sure it's no difference for people abroad to read about American culture but I'm pretty sure my sense of Japan is a complete caricature because of lists like this.
In case you haven't seen the original yet, this is the star-studded Prop 8 video everyone's clicking.
Random non-link advice: Part of what I have to do every day is make sure the Maddow and Countdown podcasts have published correctly. That basically means subscribing to them and playing them a bit. Recently I found my home machine was woefully low on disc space. Turns out I'd been storing these video podcasts without realizing it and those video files are so big it was amounting to gigs and gigs of saved shows. The lesson: use the Settings on your podcast subscriptions to make sure it erases old ones as it downloads new ones.
Wikileaks has a pdf of the Honolulu Advertiser page containing the birth announcement of Barack Obama. I realize this is probably part of the whole tussle over where Obama was born but as a stand-alone artifact it's kind of neat. Puts a new perspective on boring newspaper birth announcements.
Boston.com's series of photos of flooded Venice is on all the most-linked lists. (Why doesn't there appear to be more gondola use? [Should I have put that question as a "speaking of" after the cultural caricature remark?])
Sketches in coffee on napkins. Every time I see a lot of links to this blog I kick myself for not paying better attention to when it updates. His October entry on New York Cheat Sheets was also clever.
15 of the World’s Most Creative Papercraft Artists - Struck a chord with me because I spent some time this weekend assembling paper animals my son had painted. This list includes that crazy gear heart video that was popular recently.
I thought this was going to be one of those sneaker ads where the person does something real-ish but humanly impossible. But I think this is actually real. It reminds me of the video of the guy who was dragged through a parking lot when he tried to parasail in the hurricane. (Volume note: At the end, when the guy doesn't die his friend starts screaming and cheering really loud.)
Speaking of big air, my Commuter Click lately has been Infinite Jest*, which is more like a Commuter Clunk because it's a dead tree book over a thousand pages long (and I'm on 104), but there's a character in a wheelchair who's part of an improbable team of secret assassins. Long story short, people doing crazy things in wheelchairs is not so improbable after all.
Speaking of special secret assassin skills, did you see the video of Bruce Lee playing ping pong with nunchucks? This one actually is an ad, so does that make it automatically fake?
OK, one more special skill from Joe the brick stacker.
*In carrying this monster book back and forth to work I've discovered there's a subculture of Infinite Jest readers. It's like people who've sampled some exotic drug or difficult sexual position and give each other knowing nods as they pass in crowds. One guy cornered me in the elevator and told me he'd just finished his second time through and it's funny and sad at the same time. A woman passed me in the hall and told me she'd tried but wasn't able to make it all the way through - and yet somehow we were kin for trying.
Using the Hell out of your Digital Camera - I use my little point n shoot pocket camera for all of these things. The map idea is great, especially if you're someplace like a mall where you don't have a map you can take with you. I used mine this summer to photograph the number of threads showing beyond the nut on the axel bolt on my motorcycle to make sure I put it back centered. I don't take pictures of Chinese Food menus but I do take pictures of menus in windows of new restaurants when I want to show my wife what the place has to see if it looks worthwhile. And literally just the other day I felt a bump on my chin and was self conscious that I was walking around with a giant white head or something. Turns out I wasn't, and I learned that by taking a quick picture of my own chin. Weird but effective.
I've been ordering a bunch of gifts online for the holiday season. Since the gifts aren't for me, I don't feel any particular compulsion to sign up for a store account if I don't have to - particularly given the amount of spam I'm likely to incur as a result. Long story short:
Melt Mail gives you temporary e-mail forwarding in case you just want your order confirmation number or the "click here to confirm" mail but don't want to be a lifelong correspondent with whatever site is providing you with holiday trinkets this year.
I just spent $50 on a birthday present of Lush bath bombs, so yeah, DIY has some appeal. Actually, what else has some appeal is that I love the way little local herbal smelly stores feel like they could be on Diagon Alley but really I have no idea what to do with herbal smelly stuff from an herbal smelly store (except now maybe to make bath bombs).
Speaking of recipes, this guy claims he's mastered the recipe for perfect NYC pizza.
And again in the recipe category, I was surprised to learn there's no honey in the goo that covers General Tso's chicken. I guess that would have been too obvious an ingredient.
I had a great time last night playing Draw My Thing with total strangers. I didn't register or sign up for anything and it all loaded pretty quickly. Surprisingly, there were no trolls or jerks either.
More in the mood for an old fashioned time killer? I lost most of a Saturday night to Body Ladder. I don't think the scoring system works but there are levels to strive for. For all the time I put into it, I never got past the axe level but it's the kind of game that makes you think that with just one more play you'll pull off that technique you think you're perfecting.
...we can still have fun.
I needed to take these past couple of weeks to see what my new workload would allow in terms of maintaining Clicked. What I've found is that I don't have the time for some of the heavier reading and broader contextual reporting. However, I'm still watching Web trends and enjoying memes and will have links to share on a regular basis so we can still have a good time.
One other note: I made the mistake of using my Clicked e-mail account to set up some public accounts for the Rachel Maddow Show. As a result that box is stuffed full with mail for the show so until I can get our mail admins to give me some extra addresses, e-mail is going to be a bit of a morass. For casual communication I'm Tweeting as WillAtWork (my personal account is TrespassersWill, which I also stay logged into all day [one of the benefits of Twhirl]).
