May 2007
Item: Vyper exo M →
Bathtime at Clerkenwell - Yahoo! Video →
Told you so.
www.indexed.blogspot.com (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
See: we're optimists here.
www.indexed.blogspot.com (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
April 2007
Sumo wrestlers compete to make babies cry
Mark Frauenfelder:
CNN has a photo gallery from an annual competition held every year in Tokyo in which sumo wrestlers hold babies and face off in an attempt to make them bawl.
For some reason, I doubt these guys will catch as much flak as the amazing photographer Jill Greenberg did for giving and then taking away candy from little kids to make them cry.
Link (Thanks, John!)
(via...
Beer bottle cellular automata movie
Mark Frauenfelder:
Emma says:
Artist Lozano Hemmer presented “Synaptic Caguamas” a large motorized Mexican “cantina” table with 30 “Caguama”-sized beer bottles (1-litre each). The bottles spin on the table with patterns generated by cellular automata algorithms that simulate the neuronal connections in the brain.
Every few minutes the bottles are reset and seeded with new...
Photographs of novelist Will Self's writing room,...
Photographs of novelist Will Self’s writing room, seemingly wallpapered by Post-Its. (via moon river) (link) (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Internet radio crisis: Newsweek's coverage
Xeni Jardin:
Over at newsweek.com. Brian Braiker writes:
As you read these words on your monitor, there is a decent chance that you’re also streaming a little online radio. After all, with an estimated listenership of approximately 50 million Americans per month, Internet radio has become a go-to destination for a fuller spectrum of music, an alternative to FM’s mind-numbing monotony. And if...
Cats, Comics, and Closure
As it turns out, there’s more to say about kitty pidgin, and thanks to all of those who’ve emailed and commented with additional links.
First, a great example of prior art for the commercial use of lolcats is Twitter’s various error messages. That’s the first place I’ve seen the grammar used in official (albeit informal) communications for a company.
More...
Using floating junk to study oceans
David Pescovitz:
Fifteen years, ago a shipping container fell off a boat crossing the Pacific, spilling tens of thousands of rubber duckies, turtles, and other bath toys. The mishap was actually helpful for oceanographers who to this day occasionally find the toys and use their recovery location and time as data points in their study of ocean currents. This is just one example of how scientists...
Capn Crunch's first name revealed
From the May 2007 Saveur comes this great tidbit: the full name of Cap’n Crunch! His proper name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch. The Horatio makes him sound British, which makes sense since his outfit looks like an English Navy get up (or something Naploean would have worn). And the Magellan gives him an air of exploration. The Crunch is straight out of Dickens. He may be Capt. H.M....
Slang of the 90s.
Slang of the 90s. (link) (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Mike Gravel’s Internet Boost
From NeoMeme:
If you haven’t heard of long shot Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, you will soon. Immediately following his participation in the first Democratic debate, Gravel’s popularity shot up tremendously, thanks in large part to exposure online. If debate performance can be measured by the number of supporters won over post-debate, then Mike Gravel won the debate hands down....
Bread is dangerous. Here are some frightening...
Bread is dangerous. Here are some frightening stats: “More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread” and “Bread is made from a substance called ‘dough.’ It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!” (link) (via...
Inside the Green Zone
From Time.com:
Saturday night in Baghdad, and Heidi, the barmaid at the Baghdad Country Club, is worried about the beer. On a busy night, she might serve 800 cold ones to the diplomats, security guards and construction workers who frequent the Country Club, a white cinder-block house with blue trim on a residential street in the Green Zone. The BCC, as it’s known, gets its alcohol from suppliers...
Kitchen of Tomorrow, from 1967
Cory Doctorow:
1999 AD is a short film produced in 1967 by the Philco-Ford Corporation about the world of 1999. In this short clip, they introduce the creeptacular kitchen of the future, in which drunken fathers and obnoxious sons harass mothers to push buttons fast to irradiate frozen, computer-inventoried pre-fab meals: “Split second lunches, color-keyed disposable dishes, all part of...
Just why are there so few women on Digg, anyway?
Come for the intelligent, totally non-sexist commentary, stay for the well-targeted advertising. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Are you religious?
Over the weekend, Hasket sent me a message via facebook, alerting me to some pretty ridiculous shit on Wikipedia: Pensacola Christian College.
PCC also has strict policies regarding mixed-gender interaction. Physical contact between members of opposite gender (including shaking hands) is not permitted under any circumstance. Written permission of the dean’s office must be procured for all...
Airbus A380 evacuation - 873 people in 77 seconds!
Hamburg, Germany, 26. March 2006. With only 8 of the 16 exits opened, the task for this evacuation certification was to evacuate 853 passengers and 20 crew in 90 seconds. This all happened in darkness, the footage is from infrared cameras.
(via Monkeyfilter)
(via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Define “Free” Speech
Suppose there was a hit song that caused 80% of its listeners kill themselves. Should that song be banned, or would you argue that free speech is more important?
I think most people would take the practical approach. We already have some minor constraints on free speech. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater. You can’t defame someone in public. It would be no big deal to ban one...
Questions for Russell Simmons: Hip-Hop Guru
The rap producer and clothing designer talks about why he prefers John Edwards to Barack Obama, the importance of meditation and what’s so spiritual about Donald Trump. (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
[TS] About New York: The Very Voice of History in...
As WNYC prepares to move, an archivist is hunting down every element of sound captured over eight decades. (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Weave
OMG. It’s, like, what the fuck!? I know!!! And we’re, like, what the fuck!? (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Amateur Batman movie destined to become a...
Mark Frauenfelder:
“Defenders of the Night” is a six-minute long Batman and Robin fan film that’s a hundred times more fun to watch than any of the big budget Batman blockblunders. As Coop says, it’s “possibly the best thing ever.”
Link
(via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
john ratcliffe-lee: journal.ratcliffe-lee.com is the 2nd GOOG result for “observation of people in the elevator.” someone in marietta, GA is creeping hardcore. (via Twitter / john ratcliffe-lee)
john ratcliffe-lee: picking 24 photos from my flickr to sell as prints through jratlee.imagekind.com. @tombiro: best thing i’ve watched all night. hilarious. (via Twitter / john ratcliffe-lee)
john ratcliffe-lee: poking around the newsvine relaunch. pmetrics now needs my $ to keep working. might just wait until tumblr rolls out new features instead. (via Twitter / john ratcliffe-lee)
Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and...
Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle encyclopedia. See also fully armed and operational battle Cuisinart, fully armed and operational battle shed, fully armed and operational battle blog, and fully armed and operational battle subwoofer. (link) (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Timeline of a 2003 Shabu party in Denver. Shabu...
Timeline of a 2003 Shabu party in Denver. Shabu is chemlab-pure methamphetamine. “The rush of Shabu itself is freakishly powerful. A single minuscule hit — about one-tenth of a gram, vaporized and inhaled — is enough to keep a weekend warrior like Nick riding the lightning for twelve hours. The statuette on Nick’s coffee table, cut into tiny pieces and smoked, holds about...
Is Spiderman 3 the most expensive movie ever made?...
Is Spiderman 3 the most expensive movie ever made? “With marketing and promotion factored in, the total price tag will approach half a billion dollars — positioning Spider-Man 3 as the most expensive movie of all time.” (link) (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Flip This Lawsuit
Fans of the A&E TV show “Flip This House” were dismayed to discover that the show’s stars, Richard Davis and Ginger Alexander of Trademark Properties, were evicted for the show’s second and third seasons.
Oddly enough, Davis — a developer who buys distressed properties in South Carolina and rehabs them for a profit — was ejected from the show he had...
Link Wray - Rumble
From Wikipedia:
For the TV show, they also backed many performers, from Fats Domino to Ricky Nelson. At a live gig in Fredericksburg, VA, attempting to work up a backing for The Diamonds’ “The Stroll”, they came up with the stately, powerful 12-bar blues instrumental “Rumble”, which they originally called “Oddball”. The song was an instant hit with the live audience, which demanded four...
Two More From The Ventures
Hawaii 5-0
Surf Rider (I can’t hear this song without thinking about the end of Pulp Fiction)
(via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Walk Don’t Run
(via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Apache
(via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
The long-term success of films isn't always...
The long-term success of films isn’t always determined by how they did at the box office. Traffic made $124 million at the box office in 2000 while Requiem for a Dream made only $3.6 million ($9.50 of which was mine), but Requiem gets rented 33 percent more from Netflix than Traffic. ‘It’s almost impossible to go onto someone’s MySpace page now and not find a reference to...
Time to lower the drinking age? "The age at...
Time to lower the drinking age? “The age at highest risk for an alcohol-related auto fatality is 21, followed by 22 and 23, an indication that delaying first exposure to alcohol until young adults are away from home may not be the best way to introduce them to drink.” (link) (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Ego
Just about every book publisher, including mine, has a beautifully lit display case of their books in the lobby. And just about every author, including me, looks at the display case when he walks in, hoping (expecting?) to see one of his books there.
So put it there.
Sure, we’ll know you put it there just because you knew we were coming, but we can’t help but wonder whether...
Great interview with Hendrik Hertzberg, who writes...
Great interview with Hendrik Hertzberg, who writes about politics for the New Yorker. “The quality of our members of Congress is lower than similar bodies in Europe. I don’t think the moral qualities are lower, but in terms of experience and expertise and knowledge of the world, they’re much lower. And it’s lower because the geographic basis for advancement is qualitatively...
A letter from the Paleoanthropology Division of...
A letter from the Paleoanthropology Division of the Smithsonian Institute: “We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents ‘conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.’ Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie...
john ratcliffe-lee: my fault for not following their blog, but i realized performancing metrics has been down for a while now. oh well, back to GOOG analytics. (via Twitter / john ratcliffe-lee)
Photos of Manhattan from 1964-69 by Irwin Klein.
Photos of Manhattan from 1964-69 by Irwin Klein. (link) (via john’s shared items in Google Reader)
Cartel To Record New Album In A Bubble For MTV
Cartel will be recording their new album as a part of a four-episode reality series on MTV called Band In a Bubble. The transparent fiberglass dome in which they will be locked with producers Zack Odom and Kenneth Mount is located on Pier 54 in New York, and Dr. Pepper will allow fans to monitor the bubble around the clock via drpepperbubble.com. The show will begin on May 24th. Check out the...
john ratcliffe-lee: would you rather put $9k into restoring a ‘79 porsche 911 or get to drive any of these (http://rurl.org/1lz) 20 days per year? simple math? (via Twitter / john ratcliffe-lee)
New free Boston daily written by bloggers
Cory Doctorow:
Jason sez, “This week, Boston Now, a new free daily newspaper launched in Boston to compete with the Metro. The paper is called Boston Now and will rely heavily on bloggers and user-submitted photos for content, with very limited content from the wire services and traditional full-time journalists.”
In the name of relevancy, BostonNOW is handing huge swaths of its...
john ratcliffe-lee: @tombiro: i don’t doubt it. anywhere is better & healthier than FYI. we should start a trend of eating somewhere diff. every single day. (via Twitter / john ratcliffe-lee)