February 2009 - Posts
I don't think I'll ever get tired of these massive 3-D street projects.
Welcome to the future which might not seem like such great shakes but then, do you remember the Web in 1996? My earliest Internet memories are of Gopher in 1993 and of being in England in 1994 and chatting (green letters on a black screen) with my professor in New York with a HUGE lag time but still amazed that it worked and was free. The guys at the other terminals played Doom. Anyway, speaking of appreciating the miracle of technology, this Conan segment gave me a laugh.
I bang the worst dudes (Sorry, Mom) - Seems not too distant from F- My Life and even Post Secret and Facebook's 25 Random Things. Where will it end (and should it)?
Nice word cloud of last night's speech by the Wall Street Journal.
Taking multiple pictures of the same place and marrying them is a neat idea but I especially like the groupings of people doing the same thing. How did all those people yawn right there? I wonder if it was some kind of contageous yawn trick.
26 Awesome 3D Robots, Cyborgs and Armored Suits
In case you were having trouble placing it, here's the "Boom goes the dynamite" clip that Will Smith referenced at the Oscars. I can never make it all the way through. Too painful. (start 2:18-ish)
Great Depression cooking with Clara (Born in 1915, Clara shares the cooking tips that got her family through the Great Depression.)
No matter how bad a day you had, at least this didn't happen to you.
A glass hermit crab shell is a great idea, if a little gross.
A new one of those Hitler subtitle movies is pretty funny.
Speaking of old memes, I somehow never saw the "interior crocodile alligator" hook even though it looks like it dates back to at least last summer (assuming this really is the original. NOTE: N-word usage.). I think my favorite mix is with the fingerboard tricks.
Two funny things about this. First, you will never get it out of your head. Ever. Second, it's really hard to say "interior crocodile alligator" without adopting the rhythm of the hook. UPDATE: Here's one from 2007. I don't see it on the timeline.
Speaking of N-word usage, President replaces N word (Yes, it's fake, but seems kind of like it could be real.) UPDATE: New link.
I enjoyed this Mardi Gras mix yesterday. (Looks like MuxTape but it's actually OpenTape, which, from what I can tell is like MuxTape but you have to host the songs yourself.)
Wil Wheaton loved Watchmen. This is going to be awesome!
I think it'd be funny to build a collection of "yes it's me" videos of celebrities confirming their Twitter accounts. See David Lynch, John Cleese.
Did Google Earth find Atlantis?
Science fair ideas
"F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day." I haven't tried this yet but it's a great idea. Unfortunately at night I'm usually working on photos so I'm concerned about what the different color would do to my perception of the photo's color.
The Laugh Track comedy blog has lots of good stuff, including highlighting funny TWeets in case you're looking for good people to follow. NOTE: Some off-color stuff here.
Yes, Virginia, there is a magenta - This has been bothering me since I posted it last night. Aren't there a lot of colors, not just magenta that are a mix of wavelengths? This more thorough explanation says yes.
What News Anchors Do During Commercial Breaks w/sound - Um... they don't. In fact, my headline for this would have been something like "Playing with Fire" or "Tempting a YouTube moment." (I've heard stories here of Brokaw and Russert doing some kind of team political coverage and sitting in absolute stone silence during the breaks. This story was relayed to me with a tone of awe at their professionalism and discipline.)
The
Chicken Nuggetini looks like it would work better as a variation on shrimp cocktail instead of a drink with garnish.
Magenta Ain't A Colour - Well, not in the single wavelength sense. (UPDATE: See Wednesday.)
ROLcats - Sort of Russian LOLCats and yet not as immediately annoying as I was expecting.
RapidStack is a Rapidshare search engine, which I didn't even know was possible.
The new Simpsons introRachel
mentioned Boozoo Chavis so I had to look it up. Spent the morning
bopping to zydeco. (I almost never use Rhapsody, which is actually good because it means I never excede the limit for free songs per month. They had the best Boozoo catalog I could find and it took an hour and a half to burn through my free allowance.)
This explanation of the
new F1 rules is enough to make me want to watch a race or two. I'm having a hard time finding out how that's possible, however.
The Rules of Gunfighting - Seemed like kind of a joke at first but then I realized we're talking about a real actual killing gunfight, so it does make sense. (2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. - Not a bad picture taking rule too.)
So...
World Press Photo of the Year, eh? OK.
Neck of State tracks Obama's ties.
Folks are pretty worked up about the
new Facebook Terms of Service. Short version: "We can do anything we want with your content. Forever."
It seems in poor taste to put entertaining links next to that air traffic audio so I'm starting a new entry.
Read the stimulus bill and leave a comment if you like.
Wicked cool YouTube idea of the day:
A camera on a sushi conveyor. This is a music video just waiting for the music.
COPPA Kids - The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is the reason so many sites ask you for your birthdate. It's making sure you're over 13. Since it's based on the honor system I didn't think it ever worked but apparently some 12-and-under kids don't realize what happens if they admit the truth. This site shares some of their pleas.
Trailer for the new Tarantino flick
Inglorious Basterds.
50 of the Most Insane Things Never Seen on Google Street View (Photoshop contest)
Most interesting thing I accessed on the Web today is the audio of the air traffic in Buffalo last night.
Here's the mp3 from
LiveATC.net. You're best off right clicking and saving it to your machine and then playing because it's a half hour long. You have to be a bit of a nerd to listen to all of this. The first 25 seconds are silence. Here are the points I heard that are relevant to Flight 3407:
12:40
14:04
15:15
16:00 - I think this is the "last contact" we're hearing played on TV.
17:00
17:29 - Sounds like they're looking for her around these times.
17:55
20:10
20:30
23:59 - The crash is announced to the other planes
25:00 - Some discussion of icing conditions.
27:00 - Around here they figure out the location of icing and warn other planes.
29:20
A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women is probably the coolest name of an organization I've ever heard. (Here's the
Facebook group the article mentions.) Second coolest goes to
the Pretty Boy Goonies (though the PBGs are an actual criminal street gang, so I reckon I'd prefer the company of the pub-going women in pink underwear).
I'm not a huge pixel geek but the idea of
cooking with play dough toys has a strong appeal.
Over 2000 high fives in 45 minutes - in case you ever though escalators are under-utilized.
Wired did a look over time at
the BMI of Playboy Playmates versus average women. A reader added
this slightly different analysis of the numbers. I'm not saying this is anything, and here in the cube farm we spent more of our discussion poking holes and coming up with exceptions. But since we did end up chatting about it for a while, I think it's worth sharing.
NOTE: The links are SFW but do offer the ability to magnify the graph, which can also mean magnifying the Playmate image. These are technically safe, with the naughty bits covered by words, but it's still essentially what Playboy is famous for.
This is why you're fat. You will actually feel full just from looking at this.
MIT students develop wearable computer - turn Internet into a sixth sense. This is some real Minority Report stuff and they're not even using RFID or that UPC-like
tag technology. (I don't know if something is funky with my machine but the audio on these clips seems broken.)
One of my favorite sci-fi imaginings:
Scientists take another step toward resurrecting extinct animalsCould you define yourself with
only 5 brands? This is obviously pretty gross but it's interesting to see how just five logos does bring a certain kind of person to mind.
I'm embarrassed to admit I completely underestimated
the amount of attention the hacked highway signs would get in the mainstream media. The how-to link was hot online for a bit but I didn't think it would be any bigger deal than any other how-to hack. Anyway, "hack" is a bit of a glorification of what is
a pretty short process.
Speaking of evil but clever,
fake parking tickets with sinister "pay online" links is pretty brilliant (in a Lex Luthor sort of way).
Pipl: The most comprehensive people search on the web - Incorporates a number of people searches for some pretty impressive (disturbing) results. NOTE: You may want to test this thing by searching for some old friend you've lost to time. That's what I did and ended up losing a couple hours to random Facebook grazing. Beware.
Tweet Chat turns your Twitter hash into a chat room. What the heck do I need this for: Let's say you're in an online book club and you want to meet to discuss the book. You want to use Twitter because you hope your discussion will draw the attention of other interested people. You could ask all of the members to end their Tweets with a code like #bc and then search Twitter for #bc to see who's contributing to the conversation. Or just use Tweet Chat and create a room called bc and do it all in one interface.
Monitter let's you watch several automatically updating Twitter searches at once. What the heck do I need this for: When the plane crashed in the Hudson River, some of us here in the cube farm went searching for passengers and witnesses on Twitter. I opened separate windows with separate Twitter searches for "crash" "Hudson River" and "plane" because just using one of those might have missed something. With Monitter I could have put all three search terms into the app and watched them as live feeds on a single page.
Speaking of all this Twitter stuff,
the NY Times has a wicked cool interactive timeline that shows word frequency mapped geographically during the Super Bowl. The keywords don't include "porn" though, so you can't see
all of Tucson freaking out after the Fitzgerald touchdown. (Note warnings contained in that second link.)
Here's a nice variation on the "
foods you should eat" list, breaking them down into what they do for you.
Nature is looking for science reader community police.
Daily Mugshot. I never use my own image as an icon in IM or Facebook or Twitter but a lot of people do. If you're one of those people, Daily Mugshot will not only help you take that picture but will save them all and play them in a high speed slide show so you can see how all that computer time is taking its toll on your complexion and the bags under your eyes.
This guy never misses.
So simple and yet...Automotivator makes motivational posters.College Students Build Hydrogen Fuel Cell Motorcycle.
Here's more detail. It looks cool enough (Buell chassis) but the video is not particularly impressive. It's not really clear what the thing sounds like.
"The Korea Communications Commission is spending $24 billion to
secure 1Gbps access by 2012." I mean really, can you imagine what media would be like with that kind of capacity?
FML (F*** My Life) is my favorite new meme.
Did you see the video of
the kid on pain meds following mouth surgery? I completely accept that putting a kid on drugs like this would be necessary and the kid doesn't even seem upset and yet the whole thing seems somehow kind of cruel.
Absolutely
HEADPHONES ONLY audio:
The dance remix of the Christian Bale tirade.
NOTE: Crazy groovy F-BOMBS in large quantities.
Headphones only.
