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posted by swift » May 31 11:02 AM | 17 comments. The Popcorn Fork^TM [MetaFilter]

23% on history exam in FL is now a passing grade. [FARK]

posted by srboisvert » May 29 11:06 AM | 5 comments. How busy is LAX?Take a look! Zoom out to 96 Miles and it looks like a busy anthill. [MetaFilter]

Microsoft Nearing Completion of Death Star

Galileo spacecraft takes final pictures of Jupiter's moon Io (great pics). [FARK]

"um, uh and er" actually have meaning, and are headed for Webster's Dictionary; does that mean we can use them in Scrabble?. [FARK]

Congress Threatens To Leave D.C. Unless New Capitol Is Built

From The Onion: —"Calling the current U.S. Capitol "inadequate and obsolete," Congress will relocate to Charlotte or Memphis if its demands for a new, state-of-the-art facility are not met, leaders announced Monday."

Well, why should politics be any different?  It is, after all, mostly entertainment... 

[Ernie the Attorney]

posted by revbrian » May 28 12:01 PM | 0 comments. "Power & Weakness" by Robert Kagan . If you have 20 minutes to spare this is the most interesting explanation for the EU/US divide I've come across. [MetaFilter]

posted by Irontom » May 28 8:19 AM | 7 comments. Weird Science: Antigravity that works?These guys are working on devices that apparently do levitate / hover without any visible means of propellant (videos 1, 2, 3, 4). However, nobody can really explain why or how they work. Weird. [MetaFilter]

Need to wash a cat? Can't afford a skin graft? Grand Master Herron will show you the way to safe cat washing. (Some Guy) [FARK]

Albuquerque to name minor league team "Isotopes" from Simpsons episode. (Some Guy) [FARK]

Donald Norman: "Toilet Paper Algorithms: I didn't know you had to be a computer scientist to use toilet paper." [lawrence's notebook]

Interesting JPB interview in the American Spectator. A sample: [Doc Searls Weblog]

We're in the middle of a thorough renegotiation of every power relationship on the planet. Those who have had power are going to have to earn it all over again. That includes schools, parents, employers, Wall Street, the recording industry, the people who do television news. And governments. The nation state is the most exposed, because it's the most removed from most people's actual lives. You have to ask yourself, what does the nation state do that most people want? Outside of your mother's Social Security, what does it do that you'd be willing to pay for? It's not a whole lot compared with what local government does­or compared with what's happening in cyberspace.

 

"We have an attorney general that is, I don't know, how would you describe him, demented? We have an attorney general who doesn't seem to understand the law."  -- sobering observations.

RC

What Do We Really Know About This War?

Links to a report on remarks by investigative jouralist Seymour Hersh at a Chicago press club, and to an audio file of the speech itself. Hersh says the official version of the Afghan war is not consistent with the reality on the ground, and he sounds convincing.

[EdCone.com]

"Triumph the Insult Comic Dog vs. Star Wars Dorks" [Daypop Top 40] This is a riot if you have not seen it yet. [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]

Newport, Kentucky lands second Hofbrauhaus outside of Munich. Drew already making plans to go there. (Cincinnati Enquirer) [FARK]

Good read about the US military in Afghanistan.  I liked this grafetti from a latrine:

Toilet 7: 'I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds'; 'I am become Bored, Destroyer of Motivation'

RC

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Observer site | When Uncle Sam meets 'Stan. The moon came up four hours ago, huge and the colour of a malfunctioning striplight on an office ceiling. [Daypop Top News Stories]

"Falling Coconuts Kill More People Than Shark Attacks" [Daypop Top 40]

This story is an example of a couple of things. First, it calls attention to the lack of media integrity in some past reporting. Second, the innumeracy of reporters and readers alike is so often exposed when they are alarmed by headlines or statistics that have no relative reference. Shark attacks were not "up" in 2001, they were the same as 2000. (Coconut deaths also remained relatively "flat.")

[Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog]

Reeves Teases Matrix Sequels.

Keanu Reeves, who reprises the role of Neo in the upcoming sequel films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, told SCI FI Wire that his newly powerful character faces stiff challenges and continues his journey of discovery in the new films. "The brothers [writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski] have put up some great obstacles to test those powers, and the story kind of goes outside of the Matrix and starts to concern itself with the machines in Zion," Reeves said at a press conference at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, where the films are currently in production.

....

For his part, producer Joel Silver promised to reporters that the visual effects in the two sequels will outdo anything seen in movies so far. "When we made the first movie ... we didn’t have an enormous amount of money to work with, and the boys had very strict ideas about a specific visual effect that they wanted to explore, and they ended up using it four times in the picture, and ... we called it ... bullet time. And it was during the Stone Age. It was a Stone Age effect. ... And immediately when the movie opened, we saw repetitions of that. ... Television commercials came first. They were the first out. And then we began seeing it in a few movies here and there. And then every movie. And it wasn’t just the visual effects that were being stolen.  ... It was the way the boys staged, shot, cut, moved the camera. It was pretty much everything they did began to be copied in every other movie." ...Were the Wachowskis flattered? "For a while ... I bet they thought it was flattering," Silver said. "But after a while, they kind of got angry about it. So they decided that, in these two movies, they would create visual effects that could never be copied. So we have done visual effects for the movie that, because of the time that we took to make them and the cost, will never be seen again. So I really think that the bar has been raised so high that, you know, there is no bar.

I can't wait for these!!! I'm wearing out my Matrix DVD!!

[Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]

posted by stbalbach » May 26 5:42 AM | 4 comments. For the last century, historians, anthropologists and other scholars have searched both human history and the continents to find a matriarchy—a society where the power was in the hands of women, not men. Most have concluded that a genuine matriarchy does not exist, perhaps may never have existed. Untill now. [MetaFilter]

New Scientist.  Nearby star (150 light years away) could go super nova soon and thereby destroy all life on Earth.   Of course, soon could be millions of years from now.  These objects may be more common than previously believed.  Our position at the edge of the galaxy, far from the densely populated galactic core, may explain why we have made it so far.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

05/19/02 05:34 CEST. This is what Milton Glaser has learned (full PDF transcript): "Less is not necessarily more. Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. 'Just enough is more.'" (boldface mine, via bbj)
I *love* that. Just enough is more.
I can't decide if Kenny Rogers' Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) is a song about metadata or a song about WHILE loops. Ok, one more dorky joke: SOAP vs. REST? Do Web developers value cleanliness over sleep? (commence groaning...) [Kottke.org]

"This is either the coolest or scariest thing I've ever seen." [Daypop Top 40]

Evolution of supercats. Moggies have evolved ways to exploit humans using their miaow, say psychologists. [BBC News: sci/tech]

They've Got a Secret -- Lots, Actually (washingtonpost.com) [Daypop Top 40]

Google to the rescue.  Morton Popcorn Salt.  Found a couple of places to buy it online.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Wisconsin keeps alive it's 20-year streak of being tops in the nation in binge drinking. (Wisconsin State Journal) [FARK]

Spaghetti space wars of 1979. Christopher Plummer and David Hasselhoff in "Starcrash"! Topless Bond girls in "The Humanoid" (directed by "George Lewis")! A viewer's guide to the delirious Italian "Star Wars" rip-offs of the late '70s. [Salon.com]

For food addicts, hamburgers are no different than cocaine. [FARK]

posted by mathowie » May 21 4:52 PM | 10 comments. And the top 200 prescriptions for 2001 are...I see Claritin near the top of the charts, with zoloft and paxil not too far behind. Prozac is down, with viagra shooting up the charts like a... hmm. In total 3.1 billion prescriptions were filled in the US, which would be about an average of a dozen per citizen. Also interesting are the previous six years of data, allowing anyone to build a "Rx Zeitgeist" of the american hypochondriac. [MetaFilter]

 All Lies, All the Time:"In the United States of 2002, it's not a scandal unless the corporate media says it's a scandal, and they will not call something a scandal if it centers on the ability of large corporations to procure gargantuan favors from government. It is only a scandal if a member of the political party that's less than 100 percent devoted to granting corporations their every whim is caught doing something wrong." [MetaFilter]

This Modern World. A Republican's guide to debating the Enron scandal. [Salon.com]

Readers Set the Price.

"John Scalzi is relying on readers to determine what his science-fiction e-book is worth. He's offering Agent to the Stars free from his website as shareware and asking for donations through Paypal. He's publicizing his offer with an advertisement at Penny Arcade, a site that's popular with video game fans.

In just a few days, more than 1,000 people have downloaded the book and those who have hit the Paypal button have paid on average $3.80 -- almost four times more than the suggested dollar amount the author requests. Authors with New York publishing houses get an average royalty of $2.50 on an e-book sale." [Wired News]

More BigCos (in this case, BigPubs) being cut out of the picture (and the profits).

[The Shifted Librarian]

David Isenberg and David Weinberger: The Paradox of the Best Network. [via Hack the Planet] [Steven's Weblog]

Roger Ebert was one of the first to talk about the idea of home grown movie commentary in his article "You too can be a movie critic".  The idea is simple, anyone can supply commentary for a movie by recording an mp3 of their comments to be played along side the movie.   There is a lot that is possible beyond simple comments, from alternative soundtracks to Mystery Science Theater 3000 style commentary.

Cory points out a hosting service at DVDtracks.com that is now hosting these: "Unauthorized DVD commentary. Amateur DVD commentary on DVDtracks.com -- anyone can make an alternate commentary track to any DVD, upload it and share it. [bOing bOing]"

[ericfreeman.com]

Google: Glossary, Sets, Voice Search, Keyboard Shortcuts.  [Scripting News]

For all you naffing chalfonts & nadgers: A Dictionary of British Slang. (Some Sledging Farker) [FARK]

Technology Review - 10 Technology Disasters. When three “floating walkways” crashed to the floor of Kansas City, MO’s swank new Hyatt Regency on July 17, 1981, speculation first fixed on the patrons who’d been dancing on them: perhaps their high-stepping had set off a harmonic wave that made the sky bridges buckle and crumble. [Daypop Top News Stories]

Saturday, May 18, 2002   Check o .... Saturday, May 18, 2002  

Check out this great site PDAsupport.com
This site has links to hardware, software, reviews, pdas in education, and a bunch of
other categories. This looks like a fairly comprehensive and well organized page on
pdas. Thanks to them for linking to us too!

posted by Lori Bell | 3:15 PM [The Handheld Librarian]

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

The Case for the Empire.

"In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one. "

An alternative look at the Star Wars epic.

[...useless miscellany]

Fred Hoyle. "Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards." [Quotes of the Day]

Sir Winston Churchill. "Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." [Quotes of the Day]

 Proposed bumpersticker/t-shirt...

BEEN THERE, STILL THERE [EGR Weblog]

Britons dealing with stress the old fashioned way: get rip-roaring plastered.  [FARK]

Stupid parents and kids claim that billboard saying Hey Virgins. Thanks for Nothing. causes them to have sex. [FARK]

—When a male polar bear and a human are face to face, there occurs a brief kind of magic: an intense, visceral connection between man and beast whose poignancy and import cannot be expressed in mere words. Then he rips your arms off.

(Post)modern literary theory - a farce?. In 1963 Frederick Crews wrote The Pooh Perplex, in which he parodied then-current literary theories by applying them to the Winnie-the-Pooh books. In Postmodern Pooh he has written a bitingly funny sequel which takes on the literary theory of the last forty years. Read on for my review. [kuro5hin.org]

Matrix: Reloaded teaser trailer available

33 obscure facts to help you win a bar bet. (KMED.com) [FARK]

Mother destroys art thief son's $1.4 billion collection. [FARK]

Horace. "He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

A Very American Movie

"Star Wars" is a mongrel host of alien traditions under one sleek industrial facade. You just can't get more American. By Bruce Sterling.

NY Times: Opinion, 6:18:34 PM Pacific.    

Wolfram publishes A New Kind of Science. Stephen Wolfram has finally published his A New Kind of Science. The culmination of twenty years of private and furtive work by the creator of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science purports to revolutionize science and mathematics through the application of cellular automata. Normally, claimants with such hubris are laughed off by serious scientists, but Wolfram is arguably one of the brightest minds in science. With this book, Wolfram begins his attempt to take his science to the mainstream and put his name besides those of Einstein and Newton. Here are several articles from Forbes, the New Scientist and the New York Times on the book and Wolfram. [kuro5hin.org]

Tell me if you've heard this one: a priest, a pedophile, and a hood try to kill the governor of Arizona.... [FARK]

Lobsters online.

Charlie Stross's Hugo-nominated story, "Lobsters," is online. This is some powerful extropian singularity stuff, right here. Best read I've had online all week. It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed. Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary) [bOing bOing]

Animated cartoons JD Lasica, senior columnist for .... Animated cartoons

JD Lasica, senior columnist for Online Journalism Review and veteran blogger, has an article about why so few online cartoons are animated. It's a comprehensive review of the issue with lots of good links and interesting tidbits. It seems to boil down to this: Adding a very simple level of animation doesn't enhance the cartoon enough while doing it right requires turning cartooning into an expensive team sport. Or maybe we're still locked into the old rhetoric of single-panel political cartoons and multi-panel "funnies, awaiting the genius who will invent the new genre. We'll know it because it will seem so obvious as soon as we see it.

Meanwhile, proof that the comic strip is at the end of its cycle can be viewed at mnftiu's latest Get Your War On where genius is already at work. [JOHO the Blog]

Boston Globe.  MIT breakthrough in digital video editing.

>>>In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a language she does not speak. The results were enough to fool viewers consistently, the researchers report.<<<

>>>''This is really groundbreaking work,'' said Demetri Terzopoulos, a leading specialist in facial animation who is a professor of computer science and mathematics at New York University. But ''we are on a collision course with ethics. If you can make people say things they didn't say, then potentially all hell breaks loose.''<<<

>>>MIT's Ezzat said that he would like to develop a more complex model that would teach the computer to simulate basic emotions.<<<

There is also a quicktime video of the technique in action. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

The New American Way of War. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (approx 500 BCE) Victory, with minimal actual fighting, is accomplished by so demoralizing the enemy so that continued resistance seems useless, or by destroying the enemy's supplies, communications, and industries to the point where they can no longer sustain resistance. Before World War Two, naval power was the paramount way of doing this. The Greeks could not have fought the Trojans without a Navy to transport them. Rome could not have defeated Carthage without command of the Mediterranean Sea. The British Navy defeated Napoleon. Sea power provided transport and communications that were vital in winning wars. Prior to the 20th century, the only effective weapon against a powerful navy was a more powerful navy. [kuro5hin.org]