Month: August 2008

Sometime between 12:12 and 17:19, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Tweet Scan for ‘little known fact palin’: Using Tweet Scan to track Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin. Works better than the Twitter Search version linked to in the Chicago Tribune post.
• On Twitter, McCain veep choice Sarah Palin already a folk hero: "Little known fact: the Northern Lights are really just the reflection from Sarah Palin's eyes." "Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin doesn't need a gun to hunt. She has been known to throw a bullet through an adult bull elk." "Little Known Fact: The Russians sold Alaska to America because Sarah Palin would not submit to autocracy." The above one-liners are just a few of the gems from the instant Twitter meme developed around the storied toughness of John McCain's vice-presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Some are making fun of the tales of her essential Alaskan-ness, some are celebrating it, some are doing both.
• Alter: Why Sarah Palin Is Likely to Belly-Flop: Happy birthday, Johnny Mac! You're 72 now, a cancer survivor, and a presidential candidate who has said on many occasions that the most important criteria for picking a vice president is whether he or she could immediately step in if something happened to the president. Your campaign against Barack Obama is based on the simple idea that he is unready to be president. So you've picked a running mate who a year and a half ago was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town of 8,500 people. You've selected a potential leader of the free world who knows little or nothing about the major issues of the day beyond energy. Oh, and she's being probed in her state for lying and abuse of power.
• Fall Down, Go Boom: Playgrounds have gotten safer, more streamlined, and progressively worse. Now innovators are taking them more seriously than ever. (This is something I've babbled about in the past.)
• Alaska governor Palin comes from small town to national stage: The selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate marks an extraordinary political rise for a 44-year-old Alaskan whose previous highest elected office — just three years ago — was mayor of Wasilla, a town near Anchorage with a population of less than 10,000. (Interesting choice — it caught me off guard this morning, and it's strategically smart — but it really does make his "inexperienced" argument a lot harder to defend.)
• Mullets: Party in the back not over yet: Beautician Julea Penland is campaigning to beautify Kitsap County "one mullet at a time" by offering "Free Mullet Removal." No one has taken her up on the offer. Sadly, she says, the people who sport the once popular hairdo either love them or are in "mullet denial."

Sometime between August 28th and August 29th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Portal to mythical Mayan underworld found in Mexico: Clad in scuba gear and edging through narrow tunnels, researchers discovered the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and what could be the remains of human sacrifices at the site in the Yucatan Peninsula. Archeologists say Mayans believed the underground complex of water-filled caves leading into dry chambers — including an underground road stretching some 330 feet — was the path to a mythical underworld, known as Xibalba.
• Flowchat of Things to Say During Sex:
• Intelligent Design: In Recent Scifi, Intelligent Design Is Truth: This is the truly proscience version of ID theory: The notion that humans will eventually live in an ID universe, where our bodies and everything around us is designed. Only it will have been designed by us, in the service (hopefully) of bettering humanity. We won't be the playthings of some third party entity whose motivations are unclear. In the end, we will become our own intelligent designers.
• Pegg: Star Trek Getting Back To What Made It Good: Every time Simon Pegg says a little bit more about the new Trek film, I get a little less skeptical and more excited. He's a master at giving good non-spoilery interviews and drumming up real excitement and interest for the film. Can't wait to see this!
• Goblin shark caught on video: The creature featured is a Mitsukurina owstoni, or goblin shark, which lives between 100 metres and 1000 metres beneath the waves. It gets its common name from the Japanese, who nicknamed it after their long-nosed supernatural creatures, the tengu. The coolest thing about it is its Alien-like retractable jaw, which seems to leap out of its mouth to catch its prey…

Sometime between August 25th and August 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Exclusive Excerpt: Stephen Davis’s ‘Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses’: Some think the legend of Guns N' Roses began in the nighttime Los Angeles of 1985, a distant echo of West Hollywood's neon-lit Sunset Strip. Others think it should begin ten years earlier, at the confluence of two Indiana rivers, the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, in the 1970s. But in this telling, the GN'R saga begins in gritty New York, in upper Manhattan, on a sweltering, run-down street in the late afternoon of a summer day in 1980.
• Nikon D90 plus hands-on preview: After a steady trickle of leaks and rumors Nikon has announced the successor to its popular D80 middleweight digital SLR in the shape of the D90. The D90 looks very similar, but underneath it's a completely new camera that's inherited advanced features from Nikon's pro models and user-friendly features from the D40/D60 range. Oh, and it's the world's first digital SLR with a movie mode. Oher features of note include a new 12.3 MP CMOS sensor, the D3/D300/D700's fab high resolution 3.0-inch screen. live view and continuous shooting at up to 4.5 frames per second.
• Next up: Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics: The Games, to be spread between dual Olympic centers in downtown Vancouver, where most ice sports will take place, and Whistler, home of most alpine events, will feel more intimate, friendly, and open, Furlong vows. The model Furlong most often invokes is the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which are remembered for the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded every event. A feeling of national pride seemed to ooze through the infrastructure, and Furlong believes Vancouver, one of the world's most diverse cities, can replicate that feeling in a Winter Games. « none %raquo;
• Don’t Look Back in Awe: Readers new to the [science-fiction] genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE 'Doc' Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it's out of print. A better recommendation would be a current author – such as Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, and so on. « none %raquo;
• Texas House Sucked Into Wormhole: Last summer, a condemned house in Houston, Texas was sucked into a small wormhole, its wooden facade slowly slurped though another dimension and spit out into an alley behind the backyard. This bizarre mashup of real estate and theoretical physics was created by local artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, who saw in the abandoned house an opportunity to remind people how fragile the fabric of spacetime really is. Below, you can look deep inside the wormhole and see where it comes out on the other end. « none %raquo;

Sometime between August 22nd and August 25th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema’s Ultrahigh-Res Camera: …that's what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it's easier to use and cheaper—by orders of magnitude—than a film camera. In other words, Jannard's creation threatens to make 35-mm movie film obsolete. « none %raquo;
• Fleshmap: Listen: Music: What do we sing about, when we sing about the body? The chart below, based on a sample of thousands songs, tells the story. The size of a circle corresponds to how often that part is mentioned in each genre. Click on a genre name to see a close-up that shows exactly what words were used. (Mild, but probably NSFW in most workplaces.) « none %raquo;
• Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop: To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics. « none %raquo;
• Superman: Man Of Steel: Warner Brothers Takes The Time To Make A Superman That Won’t Suck: Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov told the Wall Street Journal that the Superman movie the WB is envisioning will be cut from the same dark and gritty cape as Dark Knight. He wants to explore the darker recesses of Superman's soul explaining that "We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it." (Y'know, this just doesn't sound good to me. Apparently I'm one of the few who didn't think that the last Superman film blew, though, so what do I know? The thing is, dark works well for Batman and probably many others, but — to me — it just doesn't seem right for Superman. This really sounds like the studios deciding that "dark" was the only thing that made the Batman films good, when it wasn't so much the dark tone as the realism and the care taken with the project. Maybe they'll prove me wrong, but…I'm not optimistic.)
• Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem: sneak peek at glossary: Boing Boing's found a .pdf with a look at some of the glossary from Neal Stephenson's upcoming 'Anathem'. I've had this one on pre-order from Amazon, and I'm really looking forward to it showing up on my doorstep.

Sometime between August 20th and August 22nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Macs, Aperture a big hit at the Beijing Olympics: In the digital photo editing area of the Kodak Photographer’s Center—a massive workroom located in the main press center at the Olympic park—hundreds of photographers at a time assemble to file their images using high-end workstations and tech-support supplied by Apple (the same was true at the 2006 winter games in Turino, Italy).
• Does The New Business Of Music Change The Way Music Sounds?: If an artist and producer is making an album for their fans is it going to sound different than if they’re making it for a hit in the limited radio marketing channel? In most cases, yes.
• SourceForge.net: Torrent Episode Downloader: Meet ted! Your new way of downloading tv shows from the web. Add your favourite tv shows to ted and ted will automatically download torrents of new episodes! Ted checks feeds from TorrentSpy, Isohunt and MyBittorrent for new episodes of tv shows.
• Design and Branding Trends: Olympic Games: Today were taking look at the Summer Olympic logos from 1896 to 2012 London along with some noteworthy facts from each games and palette inspiration from some of the more colorful posters and logos.
• One-wheel getaway in Des Moines shooting: Under fire after stumbling upon some suspicious activity, a Des Moines man escaped his assailants — by unicycle.

Sometime between August 19th and August 20th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• FTC targets prerecorded telemarketing drivel: In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed such calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008.
• Adobe Flash ads launching clipboard hijack attack: Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which target Mac, Windows and Linux users running Firefox, IE and Safari, hackers are seizing control of the machine’s clipboard and using a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program. According to victims on several Web forums, the attack is coming from Adobe Flash-based advertising on legitimate sites — including Newsweek, Digg and MSNBC.com.

Sometime between 06:33 and 18:38, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Real Tr2n Trailer: Tron 2 Trailer Video Makes Pants Wet Worldwide: It's a tiny bootleg video, but I don't care. You can see that the 3D looks amazing, the new lightcycles are stunning (and move like real bikes), the world and the whole mood is Batman-like dark. And Jeff Bridges… well, he is Jeff Bridges. What can I say, he looks like a badass version of the Dude. "It's just a game!" he shouts. No, it's not. It's Tr2n. At last. (I'd completely missed that there's finally a sequel being worked on! Crossing my fingers that it's worthwhile….)
• Jack Cafferty: Is McCain another George W. Bush?: John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy…that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet. He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the "Straight Talk Express" for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he's reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner — short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly. I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.
• Why You Should Turn Gmail’s SSL Feature On Now: Because without it, anyone can easily hack someone’s account and in two weeks it is going to get even easier. Mike Perry, a reverse engineer from San Francisco, announced his intention to release his Gmail Account Hacking Tool to the public. According to a quote at Hacking Truths, Perry mentioned he was unimpressed with how Google presented the SSL feature as less-than-urgent. It is urgent, and here’s why. (I enabled SSL for my Gmail account today. If you're using Gmail, you should too.)
• Black & White Cheatsheet For Photoshop: Have you ever converted any image to black and white? If yes, do you remember how many different ways and settings are there? Photoshop itself has several ways (filters) how to make b&w images and each filter has many presets… Wouldn't it be great if you could have quick preview with different filters and presets? Well, You can.
• Olympics: Seeing More Than Medals: What is there besides the winners and the losers? What can I see beyond the peak action? Here's some of what I found… (Some nice photography a bit different than most of what's coming out of Beijing these days.)
• Three serious class acts:: When he died, Heath Ledger was working on Terrry Gilliam's next film, "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus." Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law are stepping in to finish the scenes Heath hadn't filmed yet — each appearing as his character in a different dimension — and all three are donating their earnings to Heath's daughter Matilda. Terry Gilliam: "They came, they did the work, they allowed the movie to be finished, they didn’t take money – the money goes to Heath’s daughter. That’s extraordinary! I am so glad these guys are so humble. That’s why they make a great addition to the film. It will be bittersweet seeing this movie knowing he was filming it only days before he died. "
• How many atoms of Jesus do you eat every day?: Taking the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation into account, where the eucharist actually becomes the body and blood of Christ: 3.06*10^18 atoms of Jesus per day. Also, the earth's _entire_ biomass will be made of Jesus in approximately 4.91 billion years.