Games
This gated community of Ron Paul supporters
would seem like a weird idea to me if I'd never been to North Florida
where it seems like gated communities are everywhere. It does seem odd
to get all worked up about living in a free country only to gate
yourself into a place that allows you to paint your house only three
shades of pale blue and you can't drive faster than 15 mph but then I
guess part of freedom means being free to give up freedoms. At least in
a Ron Paul community the dues are probably smaller. "You're free to
live your life the way you want and not be forced to do or pay for
other people's life styles you may not agree with." And I imagine there
are fewer rules, not more in a community with libertarian leanings.
Speaking of living free, Colossal Castle or Humble Home?
Same Price – Your Choice
- Depression alert! Not economic depression, emotional depression that
results from seeing the kind of real estate you can get in other
countries versus what that money gets in major U.S. cities. Of course,
you might get a big house but then you'd have to live there. D'oh!
Better than lightning porn, this is
lightning volcano porn.
Funny YouTube Videos May Get Salvia Banned - I confess I never heard of this stuff but recently the health editor near me was researching it and I ended up watching a bunch of these druggy videos. The generation gap just got a little wider.
Dino Run is the hot new mini game. It could also be called "Run like hell" because that's basically what you do as a dinosaur outrunning death by asteroid. (I played on the mirror site as the direct link was slow to load.)
These
stolen laptop stories happen just often enough that I can't understand why the camera feature or other tracking technology isn't standard in all laptops.
Peel & stick solar fulfills the need ... for speed! In this case the speed is speed of installation and essentially "speed to market." In the video it takes 34 minutes to install and hook up six panels for 2.25 kilowatts.
Did you see that new
Clone Wars trailer? Sounds good with headphones on.
Gizmodo has
a different one. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing but I do like the idea of spin-off characters.
Acting like a fool in the background of someone else's photo has a name:
Photobombing.
NOTE: There's a bare butt or two down toward the bottom.
Green Porno describes the sex lives of bugs and other crawlies.
Wicked cool toy of the day: Time Tube - Plots YouTube videos on a time line.
Tips For Dealing With Information Overload - Advice from a number of heavy information consumers.
Wow, this
rewrite of the subtitles on a Hitler movie to make it about Hillary Clinton is about as offensive as you can get but it's amazing how compelling it is to watch. I'm not sure if it's compelling because of the Hillary story or the acting of the guy playing Hitler.
NOTE: I say it's offensive, not just because the Hillary role is that of Hitler but because it uses just about every single letter hyphen word we have (the F-word, the C-word, the N-word...).
5 Snacks That will Smash That Afternoon Groggy Feeling - I totally suffer from this. There are some days at 4p.m. when I need a defibrillator to finish out the day. Lately I've been having pretty good success with mixed nuts trail mix. Some other ideas here sound good, though I'm not sure I want to sit at my desk eating deviled eggs, there's something a little gross about that.
UPDATE: Oh! Here's a great contest opportunity. For one of those digital die and the weird USB LED light, give me the full sentence (not just the licenseplate phrase) that today's headline is based on and who said it.
"On the average Web page, users have time to read
at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely." I'm not sure what kind of game they're trying to play with that "have time to read" phrase. More like "make time to read" or "bother to read" - not that I'm bitter. The question I have is whether visitors would read 100% of the page if I wrote 72% less or if that 28% is a standard "skim comprehension" number that is the bare minimum to understand the content on a given page. It looks like the report has the answer to my question but I'm sorry I just hit my 28%. Moving on!
Speaking of not reading, here's my latest bunch of Twitter related links you may click if you're interested or you may print out, chew into a wad and spit on your computer screen while cursing my name for foisting this trendy juvenile crap on you all the time.
- Tweet Wheel - "Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other"
- Twitter fone - Send messages to Twitter using voice
- Who should I follow? Enter your name and it recommends people to follow (maybe based on what's in your own stream?)
The beautiful game is a really well designed foosball table.
The Nissan Xterra that Dwight Schrute tried to flip on last week's episode of The Office is for sale on EBay from the real life owner. (Looks like the bidding ended early. I'd be interested to know the back story on how they ended up using a real car and not a studio prop car.)
I think this really is the
MySpace page of Tom Hanks. He hasn't blogged since last year but there's a new video on there of his endorsing Obama. I can imagine him calling his people and saying, "I want to endorse Obama, do I have a Web site or something?" And they say, "Well, you have that old MySpace page, wanna use that?"
Play Chronotron - Remember that game a while ago where you see previous turns you played so you end up having to help yourself get through the game? This is the same idea; you play into the level and then go back in time and see your own earlier moves.
WARNING NOTE: This has that freaking terrible idea from Facebook that automatically announces to your Facebook stream that you're playing this game. It does give you a "no thanks" option but by then you'll likely already have suffered shock and horror at being so invaded and how close you got to informing everyone on your Facebook list, including coworkers that you're playing a game in the middle of the day.
Make sure you're logged out of Facebook before you play.
The subprime primer - It's a pretty long but easy to read stick-figure slide show of what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis.
Super slow-mo video of the
Mentos/Diet Coke reaction.
Turn your point-and-shoot into a Supercamera - "The Canon Hacker's Development Kit, aka CHDK, is a firmware enhancement that supports an impressive array of Canon digital cameras." So basically there are hackers out there who are writing programs that tell your camera hardware what to do beyond what the factory has already told it to do.
Essential skills all men should have. Extra credit to Esquire for keeping the whole list on one page instead of going for the cheap page views.
I happened to see the "Yo Momma" headline on
the Newsweek story over someone's shoulder coming into the cube farm this morning. It's about
Postcards From Yo Momma, a site where people share cringe-worthy e-mails from their mothers.
Speaking of communal submissions here's
How I spent my stimulus. (Is this real or propaganda? Regardless, seems like a good idea if you can keep the haters out.)
Morning music: Following the link in the Newsweek item to see what's new on Jezebel I took
the recommendation to compare
Lindsay Lohan's "Bossy" with
the Kelis song.
NOTE: I only played that YouTube clip minimized while sorting through e-mail but looks like there's some bathing suit strutting and probably some booty shaking of some sort. Potentially unsafe.
"This collection contains television news programs recorded
live from around September 11, 2001 by the non-profit Television Archive to help patrons research this important part of United States history." No MSNBC but there is NBC. One of these days I'm going to go to the tape library here and look up my call-in on 9/11.
Random story: Sometimes people who read
my 9/11 essay want to know what happened before or after (or even around) the parts I described. Part of the reason I left some stuff out is that I was trying to write about fear, but also it's a little embarrassing. In fact, I was in the shower when the first plane hit and my wife called to ask if it was true that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. I leaned out the window to look and said, yup, completely clueless as to the severity of what was happening. Later as the morning progressed, I was on the phone with the newsroom when Tower 2 collapsed. I freaked out a little (see fear essay above) and the producer on the other end said, "Will, we're putting you through to the TV." I ended up live on the air with Lester Holt on the other end of the phone. I don't remember much of what he said, but I think it was something like "tell us where you were when the first plane hit." True to my long-winded form, I started my story with being in the shower - not at all what the TV folks were looking for in the midst of their coverage of this huge breaking news event. I reckon I was shuffled off the air quickly. So one day I'll look it up in the archive to see how my role in the history of that day has been recorded. But not today.
If you caught Colbert last night, this is the guy who is
performing surveillance on himself to (sarcastically) assist the government's anti-terror efforts.
The walking bike would have been cooler if they didn't show the video of how lousy it is to ride.
The latest free album download:
Nine Inch Nails, The Slip. You need a working e-mail address to click a verifying link. From there you need to know what format you want. I'm taking the mp3 version now and it's taking a long time but they've got a flac version by torrent if you prefer. Your download window lasts an hour. I don't know if you can resubmit the same e-mail address so best to try it when you have time to do the download.
In time for Mother's Day, next week is the
5th annual mom blog Mommyfest.
From the mailbag:I just saw this, from Slate.com, funny/harsh/on target. It seemed like you'd enjoy it.
PW
Not Using Tweetscan to Manage Your Brand?
You’re Not Doing Your Job OMG! You're doing it wrong! It is really amazing to see how much the hype about twitter echoes the blog hype of 2002. Back then this headline would have read, "Not Using Technorati to Manage Your Brand? You’re Not Doing Your Job." Like blogs we're seeing exponential rates of
growth in Twitter use. And even if the numbers aren't huge yet, they're going to be. And even if they aren't going to be, Twitter users are the kind of people (like bloggers in 2002) that you'd be
well advised to listen to. Twitter is the must-have for marketers, the must-have for anyone with friends, the must-have for customer service, the must-have for journalists...
And so,
How We Use Twitter for JournalismAnd of course, where the people go, so goes the spam and now we're seeing strategies for dealing with Twitter spam. The idea behind the spam
TwerpScan is meant to fight is that when someone follows you (subscribes to be notified of your Tweets) you get a note informing you of that fact. If you don't know the person, you'll likely click through to their profile to see who it is. In that way they trap you into viewing their ad or whatever. (This definitely happens on Flickr where I've had people with streams full of nakedness add me as a contact and later remove me (but not before I'd clicked through to their porn spam profile.) Plus, they are listed as a follower on your account, which gives them a tiny bit of real estate on your profile. And of course, if you make the mistake of following them back, you've opened yourself up to direct spam messages.
So TwerpScan looks at your followers and makes a ratio of the number of people they're following and the number of people following them. If they're following many more people than are following them, the possible implication is that they're playing games and you might want to block them.
Also rooted in this kind of following/follower Twitter math to root out spammers is
The Twitter Blacklist. According to
the explainer, this one can also figure out when a spammer is trying to balance out the ratio by using fake profiles as pretend friends.
And then there are people who aren't spammers but for whatever reason you just don't want to hear from them for a while.
TwitterSnooze lets you turn off a friend for a number of days and then automatically turn them back on. This past weekend I was reading Twitter a lot for the conference and I was thinking that temporary following would be a handy tool. This is more like temporary un-follow but still I can see where it would be useful.
Staying with Twitter but leaving behind the utility,
Twistori scrapes Twitter for a few phrases and scrolls them up your screen for not much purpose other than to be kind of interesting.
"
Inexhaustible energy: The red squares show the necessary surface at mirror power stations on, in order to supply the world (left), Europe (center) and/or Germany (right) completely with river." -- Somewhat imperfect but you get the idea translation from
Babel Fish. (And I don't meant get too literal about a simple diagram, but how 'bout if we put the world's source of energy in a nice stable country this time?)
The Uno motorcycle has two front wheels and... that's it. I've seen prototypes of
Segway-like one-wheeled
motorcycles but this is pretty crazy. I keep looking for the April 1 dateline but I don't see one.
"In the late '90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched
a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy."
The 100 top Web apps for 2008 - Categorized nicely. A good way to see alternatives to the apps you use regularly.
Here's a cool Google trick I didn't know. When you add a bit of code to the end of the URL of a search result it gives you
a time range pulldown menu to narrow your results. The one option I'd want to add is the ability to eliminate short term results.
Worldometers - World statistics updated in real time.
There's no avoiding all the GTA IV hype today so I won't pile on, but I did click this demo of the
animation technology the game uses and it's pretty amazing how well it understands human physics.
MySpace Karaoke - That's all I have to say about that.
I'm having trouble getting through to the actual
NeoCube site but the video looks pretty cool. How soon before someone has a hard time explaining it to airport security?
Simple brain exercise can boost IQ - This would be a great idea as a video podcast. All you need is video, audio, and a button. Perfect for the train.
Commuter Click:
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - I think he's talking about how new technology enables (or requires) you to reshape your life.
I'm looking forward to The Smoking Gun getting hold of the mug shot of
suspect number 3 because I'm having a hard time fathoming his condition.
Y'know what bugs me about
this Miley Cyrus story? Not that we see the bare shoulder blade of a 15-year-old girl, but that I saw it online first. I recently ordered a subscription to the magazine exactly because of stories like this. It seemed like the magazine kept making news or having some of its articles grow some good legs online. So I subscribed, thinking I'd get a jump on some of these stories. Instead I see all the interesting content online for free and when the dead tree arrives I reminisce with a flip-through and off it goes to the recycle bin. Obviously I won't be renewing my subscription. We hear so much hype about the Web killing the magazine industry but there's a case to be made that the magazine industry is killing itself with the Web.
Not only are there
awesome new movie posters for the new Batman out there but there's also a new site feature that looks like
some kind of game puzzle. (How the heck do you start it?)
Also of Batman, someone did some creative editing to put
scenes from the first Batman movie with scenes from the coming movie. There's no real conclusion to draw that I can see, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Speaking of games, here's
one with some social relevance. I had a little trouble getting it to load (eventually it worked in IE) but when it does, it shows a series of photos of scenes with people and you have to decide very quickly whether a person has a gun or not and whether to shoot or holster your weapon. The game is more about the decision than the shooting which makes it an interesting tangent to the Sean Bell shooting verdict. (Yes, that case is not really about whether or not a gun was seen, but it did involve making the quick decision to shoot.)
And on games, here's a new Ralph's Recommendations:
Here's a fun (but gory) new game you can link to.
13 Days in Hell: Ghoul Shooting Gallery
Hell's not a fun place for the living. Lots of lost souls trying to flay your skin off. Fortunately, there's a handy gun shop where you can buy the tools to protect yourself.
As with most games like this, accuracy is more important than overall brute force. On the other hand, sometimes it's fun to pull out the machine gun and start mowing down the monsters. Just be sure to keep an eye on your ammo levels.
Hope you enjoy it!
-Ralph
Will adds: Stone simple controls, point 'n click.
Wow, the
video game on the Audi Ironman site is actually pretty fun and challenging. Better than the Nokia one the other day. Given those two plus another that comes to mind (
ahem) it seems safe to say that no online ad campaign is complete without a video game component to help it go viral. (I was less impressed with the actual car part of the site. Though visually cool, I'm more impressed by the product placement on Dirt than on Ironman.) [And yes, I realize I'm the only person who watches Dirt.]
Speaking of efforts at viral advertising and watching commercials on purpose, it's also apparently the season for banned ads. I was thinking today as I clicked to a couple that while it's always been the case that banning an ad has brought it more attention from the media (on a slow news day at least), with the Internet a banned ad isn't banned at all and a ban assures a certain amount of viral distribution just for the "do you think this ad goes too far?" factor. To wit:
Does this ad go too far? (Note the lack of a NOTE: indicates my opinion.)
Apparently Abercrombie & Fitch have already gone to far in the U.S., so far that they don't bother producing a catalog here in the U.S. anymore (instead they
stand behind presidential candidates during nationally televised speeches) but they're still doing it in the UK and waddaya know,
it's drawing interest from some Americans anyway - or at least the naked guy photos are.
NOTE: This link has censored versions of the images which you then have to click the see the uncensored versions which are frankly nearly SFW anyway. Still, it's a naked guy so...
Speaking of trying to harness the viral,
TechCrunch's description of the new Blowtorch initiative
is easier to understand than the actual site. The idea is to bring some
order (and hopefully some viral energy) to user generated Web videos by
issuing challenges or themes.
Also in the "viral" vein,
Twist lets you track trends in Twitter. Enter the terms and see the frequency of use of those terms graphed comparatively over time.
Lastly on the viral topic, I'm going to be at
ROFLCon this Friday and Saturday. Let me know if you're there as well.
Google Me the movie - A guy Googles his name and finds a bunch of guys who share his name so he films a documentary of himself going to meet them all. He asks them all the same 30 questions.
Have you heard about the Dutch traffic experiment in which they
removed the road signs and somehow traffic ended up running more smoothly and with fewer accidents? Apparently not everyone is feeling moved by that spirit. How'd you like a traffic signal that
throws a holographic wall in front of your car? I vote no thanks.
"PETA is now stepping in and offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to
produce and bring to market in vitro meat." This is kind of like the challenge to find a way to produce stem cells without having to fertilize an egg (or take whatever step is defined as creating human life). In this case they want to find a way to "make" meat without having to cut it off an animal. I want to say this sounds gross, but really, given what I eat I have no grounds to say anything.
(
Slate says the whole thing is a publicity stunt because part of the requirement is that the product has to be brought to market, which kind of defeats the utility of the million bucks.)
Nuclear explosions since 1945 - Interesting to see the one North Korea did in 2006. I remember some pundits deriding it s a dud.
That college student who got in a fight with John Ashcroft over whether U.S. waterboarding is comparable to Japanese waterboarding in WWII. I'm not sure how widely this made news but I caught it on Olbermann last night.
The "leave me alone" box - (When you turn it on it turns itself off.)
The most interesting part of this explanation of
how to identify a Persian prostitute is this weird marriage option:
"But there's a loophole in Islamic law called sigheh, or temporary marriage. According to Shiite interpretation, a man and a woman may enter an impermanent partnership with a preset expiration date. There's no legally required minimum duration (a day, a week, anything goes) and no need for official witnesses..."
'Til 3:45 p.m. do us part.
"Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of
using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft." Somewhere there's an African Seinfeld episode waiting to be written.
Type racer is definitely the best typing game yet. The speed of your typing is reflected in a little car that moves along a dotted line. You play against other visitors to the site to see who can type the same piece of text the fastest. It's like those carnival games where you roll the balls into the holes to make your horse move faster. I lost the first one miserably but won the second game. I haven't tried to play it as a registered user yet so I'm not sure if gameplay changes once you're signed in.
I'm not sure what this video is about but it's pretty amazing to see
a railroad tanker implode in an instant. The explanation: "Hot gas/air in a sealed container and you let it cool. The air pressure difference inside is so great that the structure is compromised."
The idea behind the inchworm shoe is sound. Stretch the shoe as your kid's feet grow. I'm skeptical about two points. First, I don't believe it doesn't get all floppy after a few months of use. Second, so far my kid needs new shoes because he wears out the bottoms as fast as he outgrows them, so this would need a retread feature to appeal to me as a consumer.
Pictures of Dell’s Eco Bamboo Computer - You know I'm a sucker for the natural cased technology.
From the mailbag:
Some people are pretty ticked off about that debate, huh?
Thought you'd like this, just featured on YouTube, 50 seconds of funny.
-Denise
Wow, you said that right Denise. I actually bothered to round up some links about it before I realized they were
everywhere and all over the TV too. Just a few links of note: The item on ABCNews.com has
cleared 20,000 comments, which probably makes them the biggest hub for reaction to the debate.
I also thought the moderators did a poor job so I was looking for a contrasting perspective. David Brooks at the NYTimes
gave them high marks, though his readers are mostly critical. One comment in the vast scroll of reaction there made me pause. Would a debate full of substantial questions have been a lot of boring "plan" recitation? Is there a way to talk about real issues that isn't too wonky but also doesn't become a caricature?
I didn't watch all the way through the end so I missed
the audience booing.
Attytood did an interesting tracing of where the Nash McCabe
lapel pin question came from.
George Stephanopoulos did respond to the criticism in interviews with both
Talking Points Memo and
The Politico.
The one I liked was the Crooks & Liars resurrection of my favorite non-partisan meme,
stop hurting America. I don't think many people in the media really understand
what Jon Stewart was talking about on Crossfire but it's the one political slogan that has the most resonance for me as an American. I like America and I like liking America. And as an American I like liking Americans. My biggest political pet peeve is people who make it their business to encourage Americans to hate each other. Maybe I'm naive but I think we're more alike than our media (including the Web) leads us to believe.
Speaking of stop hurting America, the story of the Yale art student
is a hoax. No doubt it will live on in the rhetoric of people who like to encourage Americans to hate each other but in fact the girl didn't get pregnant just to have miscarriages as an art project.
Speaking to the question I asked above about talking about issues, here's the unexpected linger link of the day: Rachel Lucas did her taxes and came up with a number she's not happy with. As is the prerogative of a blogger,
she vented a bit online (
Note: F bombs). Obviously her rant wouldn't be appropriate as a debate question exactly but she does a good job picking a scab that her commenters are able to work through and weigh in on. (I realize this seems like a violation of my Americans-hating-Americans rule but my bias is the -admittedly possibly naive- expectation that the dialogue ends up reducing the hate through greater understanding.)
"
A dog whistle to the kids" - Obama makes a subtle rap reference in a speech about dirty campaign distractions. Especially interesting to call it a dog whistle because I've mostly only heard that "dog whistle" expression used to describe coded racism from politicians. I think I first heard it in connection to Trent Lott's remarks about Strom Thurmond's presidential candidacy - that making nice remarks about a segregationist campaign was a "secret message" to racists.
SECOND THOUGHT: I just remembered when else I've heard the dog whistle expression. It was when people recognized Biblical references as being a coded message to pious Christian Americans who recognized them.
We Need a Science White House - Can you imagine the crazy Twilight Zone parallel universe in which the U.S. government and its citizens prioritized science somewhere higher than "would like to have a beer with him/her" as a criterion for electing a president?
The "two's a trend" of the day: silent dancing. Apparently some libertarians had a silent dance celebrations to honor Thomas Jefferson's birthday the other day
and it didn't go very well. Meanwhile, there's a
silent rave scheduled for New York City later today. In case you're not familiar, what we're talking about here is people showing up with music on their iPods and dancing to the beat of their own audio. Actually, I can bolster my "it's a trend" argument with a third example the Improv Everywhere folks whose work we admire so much have long incorporated mp3 synching to give simultaneous (and silent) instructions to large groups of people. That seals it, it's a thing.
The latest South Park is about the Internet disappearing overnight. Watch it
online for free.
LATER: Oops, NOTE: I was blogging while watching and made this note before reaching a pretty objectionable scene.
Contains one extremely adult theme that makes this not safe for work or kids. Yes, I know I just said that about a cartoon.
Sony has another cool reality-transforming commercial in this
Foam City clip.
Amazing, though somewhat uneventful, security cam video of
a guy trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. (Goes with
this article.)
The World's Hardest Game is genuinely wicked hard. I made it through the first level just to establish some sense of dignity but gave up after that.
YoungMe/NowMe - The latest game from Color Wars. Participants take a picture of themselves as a kid and then try to re-take the picture as an adult. The sibling shots are the best.
The Korowai "Tree People" of West Papua, IndonesiaTests show BMW's hydrogen car cleans the air - I've read this about other, less fancy, commercial low emission vehicles - that when you drive somewhere really smoggy like L.A. on a bad day, the car's emissions are actually higher quality than the air going into the intake. That might just be urban legend, I've not researched it very deeply.
ADDING: Ok, I just did a little and I think it was the natural gas
Honda Civic GX that I read that about.
Speaking of not researching urban legends,
Mystery creature of the day! Don't think too hard, just go with it. It's a dragon or a surviving dinosaur. The world is more fun that way.
NOTE: When I loaded the page today a Best Western ad started playing audio automatically. I don't know what's up with that but be aware,
mute button alert.
How to make a Sawed-off USB Key - Wicked cheap, pretty easy, quite amazing to see just how small the guts of a flash drive can be, and generally cool.
'Cancer cured' headline of the day: "If all of a tumour's stem cells could be killed then it would torpedo the old wisdom that no patient is ever cured of cancer, but merely goes into remission.
True cures for cancer would be possible."
'Cancer cured' headline of the other day: "
The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?" (We haven't had a CCHotD item in a while so for new readers, I highlight these for two reasons. One is that I think it's cruel the way the media recklessly declares -on a surprisingly regular basis- some new breakthrough that will cure cancer (or not). The second reason is that while there's nothing funny about cancer, the frequency of these stories [with their careful use of "could result in" and "if trials are successful" and "researchers hope that"] approaches satire.)
Treehugger rounds up
vertical farm ideas.
U.C. Berkeley student's Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt - This is a cool story even though I think it's a little weird that they put him in jail with his cell phone. Couldn't he have just called someone?
The ultimate irony about the UK surveillance system is that actual citizens taking pictures is
seen as a threatening act.
Light-emitting wallpaper set to wow - I like the idea of this but there's something about electrifying the walls in a room that seem unhealthy - like if you sat on a metal tray you'd get cooked like a Hot Pocket. Then again, I'm writing this from an office building so stuffed with wired it could probably function as a giant electromagnet, so who am I to judge?
You have to give the UK's Daily Mail credit for knowing exactly what's going through your mind when you see the headline and answering your response before you realize you've made it. Today's example: "
Vladimir Putin rumoured to be leaving wife to marry rhythmic gymnast half his age." And yes, the answer to whatever you just through will be revealed in the scroll of the page.
Banksy put up a massive piece
criticizing security surveillance, directly under some surveillance cameras. This refreshes my suspicion that having security cameras everywhere is mostly useless. I'm sure there are counter examples of CCTV helping catch and prosecute criminals but it seems like most of the time the camera images are either too poor to be any good or they aren't useful after all. I don't mean to suggest that we therefore need more and better cameras, but like so many other security measures, it does seem like there's a disconnect between what they're for and what they do.
Speaking of cameras not doing what they're supposed to,
I've heard that red light cameras actually end up causing more accidents even as they reduce the kind of major fatal accidents that come from running red lights, but it was never clear to me why that is. The best I could figure was that people would overcompensate and stop at yellow lights out of fear of being photographed and the car behind them would not expect the stop. But
this report on a possible gaming of the system by shortening the timing of yellow lights is an even better explanation. Are drivers who expect a longer yellow than they're getting causing a spike in the accident stat when they jam on the brakes at the early red?
Speaking of video cameras testifying, if they hadn't already made Sliver I'd say
this was a possible premise for a movie: "They didn't find evidence of rape. But they did find videotapes of hundreds of sexual encounters with men that Barclay had filmed on high-tech surveillance cameras. The cameras were hidden inside AM/FM radios, motion detectors and intercom speaker systems, among other places. There was also one at his business office." (The twist in the story is that the guy used his secret sex tapes to prove he didn't commit rape.)
First High Definition Moon Map Released, Uranium Sites LocatedOur 12 Favorite Green Technologies - Look! They list my power-generating revolving door idea! (I blogged it = "my idea")
Speaking of saving the world,
Colbert and Kamen Solve the World's Water Problems - I missed this when it was on the air. Pretty remarkable. The
discussion at Gizmodo is good reading but I didn't see an answer to what happens with the impurities that are removed from the water. The actual amount of resources it would take to get a program off the ground also seems problematic. Power for it, fuel for the power, instruction, maintenance...
Pongout is Pong and Breakout in the same playing screen. Stupidly hard.
Twit Links comes pretty close to being a service I've been looking for since Twitter was released. How can you find out what the most popularly traded links on Twitter are?
Tweitgeist shows the most used words every hour, which is pretty cool. I often follow that with TweetScan to see if there's any telling why some words are more popular. But Twit Links is the only service I know of that shows the links being shared. The drawback to Twit Links is that they aren't drawing from the whole Twitter pool. They're only taking results from a pre-selected list of tech bloggers.
The Sony World Photography Awards - The awards are this weekend but the finalists in both the pro and amateur categories are selected and available for viewing.
Benedictions is blogging the Pope's visit to the U.S. Actually, it's always blogging the Pope.
Yankee pitcher
Phil Hughes has a blog. No post yet on the recent loss to the Red Sox.
As long as I'm listing cool sites generally,
Polldaddy lets you make polls in Twitter.
Mug Shot du Jour seems like it's an authentic portrayal of something, I'm just not sure what.
America's hard-luck class?
Photocrank is a photo comments application that takes caption contests to a new level by allowing the addition of talk/thought bubbles. When it's
embedded in a blog the comments run like a slide show.
Mickey Kaus has
the best explanation I've read of what's wrong with what Obama said in that bitter/clinging quote.
Rocketboom Founder Puts His Twitter Account On Sale - This is mostly a theoretical exercise since most people expect that either it's a hoax or Twitter will
pull the plug on it but it still makes for good mental cud. We're all familiar with the way marketers gather names and contact info for sale to spammers, but to voluntarily follow someone on Twitter only to have them sell your subscription to someone else is a
new level of betrayal. Then again, haven't you already bought into
some degree of exploitation just by participating in online communities?
What?Speaking of "what," I'm not with-it enough to know if
Rye Rye is already popular but her "Shake it to the ground" looping is working for me. (Wikipedia:
Looping)
My previous item on sensitivities about linking brings to mind an issue we ran into earlier this week with the story of those teen girls videotaping themselves beating a peer. Generally speaking, the identity of minors involved in crimes is withheld and their images blurred or otherwise masked. In the case of that particular story the horse got out of the barn before the media thought twice and their names, ages, hometowns and mug shots were all over the news along with the unblurred video (actually blurred only to protect the victim). None of that is really my problem as far as Clicked is concerned (and I think the matter was rendered moot once they were charged as adults) but I did face the Web version of that ethical dilemma in deciding whether to link to their MySpace pages. On the one hand I didn't list their names or ages or show anyone's face. On the other hand I provided quick access to those things and more (but then on the third hand, it's not like the links are secret, anyone could have found them).
Also coming to mind is a recent dust-up in the pundit blogosphere in which Glenn Reynolds was accused of linking too closely to a racist blogger. Without getting lost in the
back and
forth of that particular case, it's a good illustration of how Web culture hasn't quite resolved to singularity the meaning of a link. The easy answer is that a link does nothing more than point to a location of information, but it's clear from the tone of the debate and the comparisons to Barack Obama's relationship with his minister that a link is often seen as carrying some degree of social endorsement.
I see confusion about that message of endorsement sometimes in feedback from readers. Like that item about
Obama's connection to Kenyan politics. Also the suicide blog
Michael mentioned in his comment on my earlier post. Linking is not always casting a vote of support. And yet while I'll always insist that my linking is dispassionate but I can't deny there have been times I've gone looking for a different version of the same story because I wasn't comfortable linking to the one I had.
Perhaps the best example of a link being more than a link it ceases to be a link - that is to say, in the act of "
delinking." A few months ago a local Brooklyn blogger insulted the friend of a friend of a fellow Brooklyn blogger and a bunch of us other Brooklyn bloggers received a formal mail declaring that the offending blogger was being delisted (!) and encouraging us to do the same. So aggressive is the act of delisting that bloggers who remove some links in the course of a redesign or general site cleaning will often post clear reassurances that no offense is intended.
There's no ignoring that the simple act of linking means both traffic and page rank (higher placement in search results) but sometimes a link is just a link.
Self-assembling Nanofibers Heal Spinal Cords - I recall a similar technique employed to help heal broken bones. The idea is that the healing is better able to take place when there's a structure of some kind for the tissue to grown on.
"I attached this camera to the bench so
you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I'll be back later this evening to pick it up." Reminds me of the
cameramail project.
Colorwars is holding a
nerd rap competition on SayNow. Nice demonstration of both SayNow and the Colorwars concept.
Speaking of games,
Random Defense is a prettier, more varied kind of Desktop Defense.
Still speaking of games, I had to have the "
You have to burn the rope" game explained to me. Not the instructions, of course, but why it's so damn popular. Apparently it's the cute song after you win. Vaguely "Flight of the Conchords"-ish.
I'm listening to the free songs on
Devendra Banhart's site to see if there's some magic in the music that might reveal how he won the heart of Natalie Portman (in spite of... um..
the odds). P.S. I'm not digging it.
"A Bosnian man whose home has been hit an incredible five times by meteorites
believes he is being targeted by aliens." Lacking a better explanation, I agree with him. It's aliens.
Computer viruses hit one million - That sounds like a big number but recently I was wondering just how likely you are to pick up a virus, particularly if you aren't stupid about your e-mail. In the past few days I've download a few programs that I couldn't really verify as being from a reliable source because I was a little out of my depth. So I download the thing, scan the file with my security software and then... that's it, I click install and hold my breath. I'd love to know how risky this behavior is. Where does the hype end and the danger begin?
Anime eyelids - and eyebrows.
7 Random Objects Sold as Exercise Machines - The lesson: Stop buying stuff and go exercise.
Speaking of stop buying stuff, I love "
you don't need it" stickers. (I'm secretly waiting for high consumer prices to trigger an American "enough" backlash.)
Just when I was reading about Microsoft improving the
3D renderings in Virtual Earth I also saw the
Viewfinder project which aims to let you place 2D photos into 3D map worlds. (I wonder if they've seen
Photosynth.) [
Alan's
Space World demo is worth playing with if you haven't seen the technology.]
"Some experts hope that the perfect condition in which the body of the mammoth was found could allow extricate intact DNA from his cells, and, as a result,
clone the animal in future." I will never give up hope for cloned prehistoric animals.
Garbage Island - A documentary series about people who travel out to the
Pacific garbage island.
Unlimited electronic bubble wrap isn't a bad idea but I need to be able to stomp on it or twist it.
I saw a woman in the park balancing on a rope tied between two trees in the park and though she was an acrobat of some kind, maybe connected to the nearby
trapeze school or maybe one of those
high-flying Cirque Du Soleil kind of shows. But
slackline yoga was not on my list of guesses.
Time.com has launched an annual index of the
top 25 blogs on the Web according to them. (Smart readers will skip the annoyingly paginated original list and
see Valleywag's handy simple list instead.) The idea of such a list, especially the way they derived it, is as preposterous as it is obnoxious but you can't fault the blogs themselves for that so enjoy the list for what it is.
It's fun to see
The Reverse Cowgirl* on there. (She was also on
Rex's list this year.) I think I've told this story here before but when she used to blog on Salon in 2002 and I was writing Weblog Central here at msnbc.com my editor decided we shouldn't link directly to her because of the sexual content. Outraged, she drafted a cartoon in which I was represented as a man in a suit with an NBC logo for a face spanking a woman in a schoolgirl uniform (her). As you know, years later I now link to occasional sexual content without much concern about getting it past my editors (the
NOTE I add is a courtesy to readers). I wonder if there was much debate at Time about the inclusion of a sex blogger on the list. I wouldn't be surprised if there was none. I'm not sure where the turning point was in linking to content that might otherwise be out of bounds. Maybe when the meaning of "NSFW" became widely known and it was unavoidably apparent why such a marker would be useful. I do remember arguing at one point that one couldn't very well claim to report on what's popular online while ignoring all of the (extremely popular) sexual content. Maybe that argument now goes without saying.
*NOTE: In case you don't actually read the words on Clicked, I'm talking about a blog that covers the porn industry and other aspects of sex worker culture. It's not a porn site but there's a good chance you'll see some
naked body parts (or more) in some of the photos.
By the way, The Reverse Cowgirl is a great example of the difference between a blog and a tumblelog.
Her Tumblelog is here. In the way that writers are advised to "show don't tell" it is sometimes the case that seeing what a person highlights in the course of surfing the Web is more revealing than the long form thoughts expressed in a blog. (And speaking of hard to discern turning points, when did blogs become the "long form" option?)
Speaking of changing times, years ago the common advice given to companies who wanted to keep track of online opinion of their product or service was to search regularly through Technorati. Somewhere in the past year (or the coming one) the tech evangelists who work the conference circuit are going to have to amend that slide in their PowerPoint presentation to
include Twitter.
More interesting than today's launch of
Flickr video (which we knew was coming and doesn't really break any ground as far as video goes - though the
sleepy cat video is one for the ages) is the new
Pitchfork.tv.
Speaking of popular music sites turning their attention to video, Stereogum now has
Videogum. In this case, however, the subject matter is actually visual media.
Where on Earth is Waldo?20 Percent of Scientists Admit Using Brain-Enhancing Drugs -- Do You? No, caffeine doesn't count.
Magic Pen is like that Crayon Physics game we saw a while ago. Draw the shapes to roll the ball into the flag.
Charlie Daniels is angry that Guitar Hero has taken his Devil Went Down To Georgia song and made it more about the Devil than he ever intended.
Al Gore's new slideshow. This is actually his recent TED talk. A half hour long. If I can figure out how to play the video on my phone I'm going to try to make this a Commuter Click for today. I always the people on the subway watching video need to break their TV addiction but today I'll be one of them.
Speaking of using your phone for something other than calling, I found
New Media Bytes by accident and have been watching the coverage there of QR codes - like funky bar codes. Today's entry is about how to make your own.
The idea is that you point your phone's camera at the code and the software you've installed translates it into something - a message or sometimes a link, which you can then click through on you phone's Web (or presumably bounce it somewhere to look at later on your computer).
Here's an odd subculture even your kids may not have heard of:
Shriiimping. It's graffiti on bikini girls. It seems a little like a fetish but I think it's more like body art.
NOTE: NSFW Contains boobies.
Speaking of putting graffiti on stuff, I got a kick out of this
series of Darth Vader helmets.
The New York Times shows us
the hand signs used on the floor of the stock exchange. I thought they were more complex than this.
The first few pages of the upcoming Oliver Stone movie on George W. Bush have been released/leaked. Even if you're not interested, this is a pretty cool way to build buzz about a movie. I'm sure we'll see a lot of fact check stories when the movie finally comes up but here's an early look at Bush biographers giving it the sniff test.
ADDING: Ok, I just read it and maybe I'm missing the vision (or it's been greatly improved since this October draft) but it seems pretty crappy.
Speaking of kicking Bush in the pants on the way out, I also clicked this item about h
ow American historians rate him. (Answer: poor.)
But (yes, this isn't an all out Bush-bash item) I was more convinced by this brief blog entry explaining
why history will treat Bush well. In short, he's attached his name to some big ideas that will likely eventually come to fruition. Time will forget the specifics and associate him with any successes farther down the road.
The Segway people have a new cool thing being demo'd. I say "cool thing" because I'm not sure what to call an
omnidirectional rolling platform. The guy shooting the video calls it creepy but I don't think it is, though the wheels are really cool.
The more I poke around MySpace the less I like both for content and searchability but did find this cool instructional video on
how to do a streetball slip and slide. Ultimately I lost some of my day to
Streetball.com.
"Kettering University student Will Foster
builds half-scale Panzer." He built it for paintball, so yes, it does fire. Authorities treated him much better than the guy who
built his own submarine.
The Improv Everywhere folks struck again, this time in California they
treated a random little league game like the most important game in the world, complete with mascots and autographs and shirtless men with letters written on their bellies, Goodyear blimp and real actual NBC Sports newscasters and Jumbotron. I don't recall if it was Improv Everywhere or another group but something similar was done with unknown rock bands once as well. A whole team got together and acted like the band's biggest fans.
Hot Pads foreclosure heat map shows per capita foreclosures across the US. Zoomable by town or even neighborhoods. I see confirmation of what I've heard from folks I know in Florida who say the situation is grim down there.
Somehow, even when Yahtzee the video game reviewer in Zero Punctuation likes a game it
still sounds like he doesn't.
NOTE: Some coarse language but the guy talks so fast you may miss it anyway.
Lately my Web surfing has reached the unwieldy state of having too many moving parts. I'm trying to solve this in two ways. First I'm using
Google Reader to bundle the links to sites I check regularly. Hopefully that will solve the mind-racing "what else do I need to check?" problem. Second, I'm trying to set myself up on a variety of different tools. I really like how
FriendFeed pulls different sources together, so I'm now trying to incorporate
Twitter and
Delicious along with my
Flickr and blogs and
Instapaper to help make my sorting more efficient. We'll see if I can actually put this idea
into practice. Right now I'm at the stage of trying to set up shortcut links to these services so I don't actually visit the sites. Twitter via IM, Delicious via toolbar button. It's weird how many sites you can use without actually visiting the site itself.
Speaking of gathering links,
The Internet Effect on News - This is a nice bit of insight about how people gather their news online. I don't think we can yet say "most," but certainly many people online gather stories one at a time from a variety of sources. The tradition in media is focus on how stories are presented on the cover or front page, so the idea of readers totally bypassing that cover to assemble their own reading list on their own terms is pretty subversive. The next obvious question for the story writer is what that means to how you put your story together. How do you differentiate it from other stories about the same thing and how do you take advantage of the traffic you receive to a story that didn't come through your front page? The story is the new front page.
Bug Labs Founder:
Sold Out Of Open-Source Mobile Gadgets - You may recall these guys from
my CES coverage. They were good guys with a clever product and an honest presentation so it's nice to see they're doing well.
Fears that the Large Hadron Collider
will end the world reminds me of a short story by Arthur Clarke that I read after he passed recently. In
The Nine Billion Names of God scientists help some monks with a computer to decipher God's true name. And it works.
I have almost no reason to fear ever being stabbed but somehow I find the idea of a
knife-proof shirt really appealing. Maybe it's the old D&D nerd in me always looking to upgrade my armor.
The New York Times has a new music blog called
Measure for Measure.
The slow motion slap - It's disturbing to realize how much our face is just a mask on a skull.
If some of the "Find Sarah Connor" items covered here have left you with the feeling that it's just a matter of time before robots are up our asses,
it may be time to start shopping for an isolated shack in the mountains.
The Automotive Family Tree - Which corporations own which car companies.
Speaking of cars, "it seems a transatlantic battle is brewing in the high-performance electric sportscar market." Of all things for there to be transatlantic battles about, this is a pretty good one. The UK side of the fight is the
Lightning GT. Before you pooh-poohers start in with your battery bashing, this one has something called a "nanosafe battery" which apparently doesn't suffer as many of the risks of the Li-ion batteries. (By the way, the U.S. side of the battle is the
Tesla.)
Speaking of power the clean way, "Southern California Edison plans to install 250 megawatts worth of
solar panels on commercial rooftops, generating enough electricity to power 162,000 homes." This makes so much sense it kills me. I've heard of similar projects planned for New Jersey that also included essentially putting solar panel roofs over parking lots as well. This article says the utility will lease the roof space, so that would mean extra income for those businesses in addition to the economic boost from the kick in the pants to the solar industry.
Speaking of energy production, I wonder what the chances are that
Earth Hour
could create a surge in the grid and wipe out our electricity
infrastructure. (In my disaster novel this would happen, not so sure
about real life. Like the
urban myth of millions of toilets flushing at the same time during the Super Bowl commercial breaks and destroying the sewage system.) Earth Hour is March
31st 29th. They're trying to get
people to turn off the lights for an hour as an energy saving
demonstration.
For two days I've been seeing praise for
this site and its ability to explain the time travel situation on Lost and every time I click it it's crashed. Last night I saw it on Digg, which you may know automatically backs up sites it might crash with its own crush of traffic driving force, so
here's the DiggMirror version. Some of the photos don't load but at least the text is there. I'm only half way through so far and some parts of the theory fit better than others. When the parts don't fit well the explanation is that the fates perform a "course correction" on time to make sure that what's supposed to happen still happens even when someone travels back in time to change it.
Speaking of alternate realities, I ignored this video the first couple of times I saw the link because I thought it was just Hillary bashing. But it's actually a pretty
funny use of video effect trickery. (They insert war effects on the news footage of her Bosnia trip.) BarelyPolitical is the same site that puts out the Obama Girl videos.
ADDING: By chance I stumbled upon the blog of
the guy who made the video.
RANDOM: Also
the guy who made Muxtape.
Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing - I took this to heart as it applies to reviewing Web sites. There are only so many ways of saying "here's a cool site" but that doesn't justify getting sloppy.
20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider - This brought to mind the "are you ready for the lightning bolt of fame" question that came after Ashley Dupre was thrust into the spotlight after being exposed as Eliot Spitzer's prostitute. What exactly does it mean to be ready? What might you need? Someone could probably make a lot of money on that book.
YouTube Reveals Video Analytics Tool for All Users - Now for free you can see where your viewers are coming from and when they're doing the viewing. I don't see it mentioned here but I hope it also lists where a video is embedded. That's something I often think about when I link to page with an embedded YouTube video. Does the guy who published the video know that people are watching through this other person's site?
4 second fury - It's a string of games, one after another that are only 4 seconds long.
Moto Art is furniture made from plane parts.
Everyone's playing
Boomstick. It has nice simple controls, no long instructions to read, and yet I can't get past the 400s.
