eclecticism

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.

Sometime between 06:12 and 14:58, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Sports: 25 world records broken at Beijing’s Water Cube | swimming, world, record, phelps, lzr - OCRegister.com: [During this Olympics, the] Water Cube pool has produced 25 world records, the most at any Olympics since Montreal in 1976. Six world records were broken Wednesday, equaling the record for most global marks set in a single day at the Olympics. The Beijing Games were so fast that 14 times in eight events an athlete or relay team swam under the existing world record and didn't win gold. (This article's just about swimming, but it touches on something I've been curious about: is there a World Record for most World Records set at a single Olympiad? It seems like we're seeing new records set in nearly every event we watch.)
• On your marks, get set, Lego! Welcome to the Olympics where everyone’s quick off the blocks: As the world watches the Beijing Games, enthusiasts from Hong Kong have unveiled their own Olympics — built entirely from Lego. More than 300,000 Lego bricks and 4,500 Lego people were used to create the display, by the Hong Kong Lego User Group.
• 7 Astounding Yet True Facts About Say Anything…: FACT: The boombox scene gets all the attention, but according to Ione Skye, if she hadn't been dating Anthony Kiedis and Cusack hadn't been in love with someone else, they would've gone home together after they filmed the sequence where Lloyd teaches Diane how to drive. Ah, the romance of stick shift.
• Glenn Miller Orchestra - “Do You Wanna Dance?”: Wedding the Miller big band style and DeFranco’s top-notch soloing to go-go dance rhythms, lush easy-listening atmospherics and Command’s trademark high-tech aural experience, the album is no mere nostalgia trip for aging jitterbuggers. Rock fans will delight as this august organization tackles such teenage hits as “Cinnamon,” “Sunny,” “For Once In My Life” and “Love Child.” Naturally, the ubiquitous McCartney-Lennon catalog is represented, not once but twice, with “Hey Jude” and “A Little Help From My Friends.” In fact, there’s not a MOR track anywhere to be found on this album — it’s all strictly Top Forty. Do YOU wanna dance?
• Telstar Logistics: Flight Report: Airborne in an Emirates A380 at SFO: It was the kind of offer Telstar Logistics cannot refuse: "Please join us for an exclusive opportunity to experience and fly on Emirates’ cutting-edge A380 aircraft during a two hour ‘demo flight’ and reception," they said.  So we said, "Sure! Sign us up!"

Sometime between August 14th and August 18th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Sunday Morning’s Lightning Storm: Video from King 5 of the lightning over Auburn and Kent that woke Prairie and me up on Saturday night/Sunday morning.
• Now Diving: Sir Isaac Newton: High-tech televisual bells and whistles have carried couch-based Olympic watching way beyond the mere reality of being here. Thousands of cameras are catching the action in China — every one of them high-definition. Yet for a feat of engineering magic that dazzles as it baffles, nothing beats the DiveCam.
• The Phelps-Cavic Photo Finish [UPDATED]: On the one hand, we're getting tired of Phelps and the hype. On the other hand, this really was an incredible moment to watch.
• Bigfoot Hunters Fail to Produce Creature’s Corpse: The trio now say the body is in Biscardi's possession in an "undisclosed location," pending scientific tests. Biscardi named two scientists he's contacted regarding his find: Curt Nelson of the University of Minnesota, and Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford University. "There's also an Igor and a Dmitri coming from Russia," Biscardi said. "They're very prominent in the Bigfoot world."
• Trying to figure out the scoring of gymnastics could make you crazy: Here's all you need to know: A perfect "10" (remember Nadia?) is now a perfect 16.9 — or somewhere thereabouts; The old "10" standard is gone, retired, locked up and hidden away…in its place is a two-pronged scoring system which is, at least theoretically, open-ended, meaning there is no limit to what you can earn — a score that might be truly ginormous; A gymnast's "A" score begins at zero, you get different fractions of a point for various maneuvers, ranging from the common hair-flip/giggle (.1) to the flaming-sword-swallowing-full-frontal-fakie-double-half-caff-three-hitch dismount (.7), and you get more fractions of points awarded for the maneuvers performed in various combinations. It's believed that the most "A" score points a gymnast could possibly cram into a program, given current time limits — and current points at which a gymnast's body would actually explode, or perhaps break in two — is about 7.0.

Sometime between August 12th and August 13th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• His own Olympic trial: 24 hours of viewing: Starting at midnight Tuesday morning, and going until midnight this morning, I plopped down in front of the TV with my laptop for a marathon session of sports. Just me and the Games, with no regard for sleep, fresh air or proper hygiene. One would think that such a masochistic task ultimately must lead to a decent into madness. But there's really only one way to find out.
• Unsubstantiated but interesting info on what Return of the Jedi might have been: Ah, obviously you haven't heard the back story of Return of the Jedi. No, I don't mean the bit where it was called Revenge of the Jedi. There's more. I'll cite nothing because I have no idea where this information leaked from, and you can take it with a grain of salt because I heard it years ago. But apparently the original story for Jedi worked like this…
• Young Guns: A new brand of gangster grows up in a killing culture: "Seattle's gang problem is small, compared to other cities, but it definitely holds its own," he said. "It's a bunch of teenagers - I would call them delinquents - that have adopted a gang name or identity, and that identity automatically falls into a structure of rivalries that those members must participate in. To these young people, their identity as a Sureño or a Crip or a Blood is as serious as someone else's identity conflict over religion. Like the Shiites and the Sunnis - that's an identity conflict. The irony is, they're all the same. They're all Muslims. You're all young people from Seattle."
• Maperture: Combining the power of Aperture and Google Maps (the mapping engine you know and love), Maperture is a powerful, new edit plug-in that makes geotagging your photos a snap.
• The Anchorpoint Essays: Welcome to the largest and most comprehensive look into the biology and behavior of Internecivus Raptus: the deadliest Xenomorph that human-kind has ever encountered. (This is, by far, my favorite site relating to the Alien franchise. Lots of incredibly detailed and well thought out essays about the aliens' biology and physiology. I was afraid it had been abandoned a couple years back, but it's still up and under active development. Awesome!)
• Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”: Kontra’s law: A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

Sometime between August 11th and August 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Olympic opening uses girl’s voice, not face: A 7-year-old Chinese girl was not good-looking enough for the Olympics opening ceremony, so another little girl with a pixie smile lip-synched "Ode to the Motherland," a ceremony official said - the latest example of the lengths Beijing took for a perfect start to the Summer Games.
• Deconstructing Dr. Horrible.: This post contains mad spoilers. I also warn that I am going to take a funny, silly, amusing show and be boringly, depressingly serious about it. If your response to these sorts of nitpicks is 'durr it's just a show' — you're right. So don't click.
• Part of Olympic display altered in broadcast - Gadgets- msnbc.com: Part of the elaborate Olympics fireworks show broadcast to the world in the opening ceremony was altered, done digitally in 3-D computer graphics, according to several news reports. While the dramatic display [of giant footsteps 'walking' across the city] actually happened as portrayed on television, members of the Beijing Olympic Committee said it was necessary to replace live video with computer-generated imagery because the city’s hazy, smoggy skies made it too difficult to see, according to The Beijing Times, which first reported the story.
• Olympic Fail: Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird’s Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting: Okay, so this really isn't a major thing: the BSOD was on one obscure section of the Birds Nest for less than a second and was barely visible. Still, it's good for a little bit of nerdy amusement.
• Turn your change into apps (or music): Coinstar's change-counting machines now offer Gift Certificate options that don't charge the 9% counting fee — and one of the options is for Apple's iTunes Music Store. Dig in your couch, find those pennies, and turn 'em into music or iPhone/iPod Touch applications.

Sometime between August 7th and August 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Famed Utah rock arch collapses: The arch is along Devils Garden Trail, one of the most popular in the park. For years, the arch has been a favorite stopping point for photographers. Henderson said the arch was claimed by forces that will eventually destroy others in the park: gravity and erosion. "They all let go after a while," he said Friday.
• Internet Memes: A slick timeline of Internet memes and in-jokes. I'm pretty impressed with how far back it goes.
• Watch the Olympics Online - Wired How-To Wiki: The 2008 Beijing Olympics will happen while most Americans are sleeping. While NBC, the games' official media outlet in the United States, will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web, the only way to truly ensure you won't miss too many record-breaking moments is to spread yourself across the web and take advantage of the many video outlets online.
• I made it longer because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter.: This bookmark's for me — the original French and a translation of a passage by Pascal in 1657 that all to often applies to my own writing…enough so that before my weblog was titled 'eclecticism,' it was 'The Long Letter.'
• Bremerton baristas banned from wearing pasties: I'm trying to decide if this headline is clumsy or inspired, given that it appears to say that the baristas will now be going completely topless!

Sometime between August 6th and August 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Olympics | You can get Games fix on TV, Web: The hype for NBC — which paid a tidy $900 million for the right to station 106 commentators in Beijing this month — is all about total hours: 3,600 in all. That's more coverage, the network likes to point out, than the combined total of all previous Olympic Games up to this point. It's three times the amount of Athens coverage in 2004. We'll take their word for it. But the vast majority of those hours are events broadcast either on NBC's broad palette of cable stations, or on the Internet, where a whopping 2,400 of those 3,600 hours translate to streaming on nbcolympics.com.
• Wash. letter carrier going full kilt ahead: A 6-foot-tall, 250-pound letter carrier is campaigning for the right to take off his pants. Dean Peterson wants the U.S. Postal Service to add kilts as a uniform option for men. (He's certainly got my support! Wouldn't mind mounting a campaign like this myself, but at almost one full week into my new job, I think it's a bit early to rock that particular boat.)
• Greyhound pulls ‘bus rage’ ads: Greyhound Canada said Tuesday that it is in the process of pulling a series of ads in an extensive, cross-country campaign featuring the slogan, "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage." The company made the move in response to last week's gruesome beheading murder on an eastbound Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Man., which claimed the life of Tim McLean, 22. (I'm sure I shouldn't think this is funny, but — at least in my mind — there's a certain amount of dark humor in it.)
• Beta beat: Pukka 1.7: An update to Pukka (which I use for posting most of my daily "neat stuff" links when I'm on my home 'puter) to add some new features and deal with the update to Delicious (including descriptions up to 1000 characters!).
• Best Seat in the House | Olympics: Planning, Packing, And Panicking.: Neat rundown by the Seattle Times' photographer for the Olympics of the gear he's bringing. Man, would it be fun to have some of those toys…esp. the three Nikon D3 bodies!

Sometime between July 31st and August 6th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Trading Places: The demographic inversion of the American city.: In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city—Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center—some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white—are those who can afford to do so.
• The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products: ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote…ACME has set the standard for excellence.
• Canada bus passenger stabs, decapitates seat mate: A traveler aboard a Greyhound bus repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated his seat mate, pausing during the savage attack in central Canada to display the head to passengers who had fled in horror, witnesses and officials said Thursday.
• EW Previews Star Trek Comic Con Posters - With First Cast Photos: The first official images of Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Uhura (Zoë Saldana), and Nero (Eric Bana). By the way, look closely at the eyes. (Yes, I'm two weeks behind. But wow does Quinto look perfect for Spock!)
• Ballantine Books to Publish Book Inspired by the Webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield: The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison. (Jim Davis gets a lot of cool points in my book for allowing this to happen.)

Sometime between 13:09 and 13:51, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• A Word for That:: grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.
• A twist in high-flying mystery: In the Northwest's most enduring mystery — who was D.B. Cooper? — about the only thing we've ever been certain of is that the legendary skyjacker was a he. What if he wasn't?
• Register to Vote in Washington State: In theory, you can update your address online, but that's not working right now. Meh.
• Robin Williams comedy filming in Wallingford: The new independent comedy is "World's Greatest Dad," in which Williams plays a high school poetry teacher who finds his son dead under embarrassing circumstances involving a "freak masturbation accident." (Um…this is a comedy? Sounds hilarious so far.)
• NASA/JPL Climate Time Machine: This series of visualizations show how some of the key indicators of climate change, such as temperature, sea ice extent and carbon dioxide concentrations, have changed in Earth's recent history.

Sometime between July 14th and July 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Recent Volcanic Activity - The Big Picture - Boston.com: Some days it's hard not to link to every post at this weblog. Gorgeous shots of recent volcanic eruptions, including some incredible photos of Alaska's Mt. Augustine (the 8th photo on the page looks like something out of a fantasy movie).
• July 16, 1945: Trinity Blast Opens Atomic Age: The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description.
• Joss Whedon Waxes Dr. Horrible: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a direct-to-the-web musical from Joss Whedon, tells the story of an evil wannabe villain who vlogs, bungles experiments and takes regular lessons from a voice coach to finesse his evil cackle.
• Aurora Feint: One of the best iPhone/iPod Touch games I've seen yet, and it's completely free! This is going to suck up a lot of my free time….
• Cube Runner: My favorite iPhone/iPod Touch game yet. Temporarily offline at the Apple Store, but should reappear soon.

Sometime between 11:50 and 17:00, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Blackbird that can mimic the sound of ambulance’s siren makes family’s life hell: He can ring like a mobile phone, peal like a car alarm, wolf-whistle and every morning as the sun rises he lets out a wail that sounds exactly like an ambulance siren.
• Citizen Camera: Neat idea: tie disposable cameras to a few different locations with a note telling people to have fun, then walk away. Pick up the cameras a few hours later, and see what's on 'em.
• McCain encourages adoption, unless you’re gay.: Mr. McCain, who with his wife, Cindy, has an adopted daughter, said flatly that he opposed allowing gay couples to adopt. “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption.
• Building demolition based on old Japanese game: Kajima Corporation, a Japanese construction company, demolishes high-rise buildings from the bottom up. They install giant hydraulic jacks on the first floor, break up all the building material on that floor, then lower the jacks and repeat the process.
• FoxTrot does Webcomics: I recognized all three of the webcomics in this FoxTrot strip, and currently read three of them.

Sometime between July 9th and July 14th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Greatest Sideshow Video Ever Made: The Greatest Sideshow Video Ever Made was shot at the Moore theater in Seattle in 1992. The oddball cousin of Seattle's grunge music scene, the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow mixed vintage sideshow acts with novel stunts never before seen.
• A Web of Geeks, Every One of Which Knows a Lot about Something: Vegging Out vs. Geeking Out. Romance as the MSG of film. The bifurcated careers of Lucy Lawless, Sigourney Weaver, and Hugo Weaving. Characters making smart decisions vs. stupid decisions. Neal Stephenson discusses Sci-Fi/Speculative Fiction…
• iPhone BookShelf: BookShelf is an easy to use electronic book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Available through the AppStore, BookShelf installs easily on your mobile device.
• Snack Foods That Sound Like Sex Acts: Immature, yes. Really damn funny, though.
• Wonderlic Test: I'd never heard of this before, but just took it yesterday. The average score is 24. I don't remember exactly, but I'm very sure my score was at least a 36, perhaps as high as 40. Apparently I'm a smarty-pants!

Sometime between July 8th and July 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Octopuses given Rubik’s Cubes to find out if they have a favourite tentacle: Scientists believe the intelligent sea creatures have a preferred arm out of eight that they use to feed and investigate with. They are now testing this theory with a month-long observation project in which the octopuses will be given food and toys…
• New Nikon D700: Extreme weather photographer Jim Reed was asked to test-drive Nikon's D700 during the 2008 storm season. The following gallery contains fifteen assorted images from the record-setting period.
• Getting your point across: Wei Shengchu, 58, a supporter of traditional Chinese medicine, poses for photos in front of Beijing Railway Station with his head covered with acupuncture needles depicting 205 national flags and an Olympic torch, 7, 2008.
• Ayluro → Corkboard. ⌘C and ⌘V are so 1984.: This is the first clipboard replacement/enhancement software I've seen that catches my eye. Could be handy.
• Exposure: Exposure brings the wonder of Flickr to your iPhone and iPod touch. If you like great photography, Flickr has the images and Exposure brings them right to your mobile device.

Sometime between July 4th and July 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Brendan Fraser lays out the 12 steps to an action movie’s success: Parents should know their children and what they're capable of watching. Every kid is different.
• How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand: Ultimately, it's not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with "proper" language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. It's that Chinglish will be just as proper as any English on the planet.
• Michael Bay’s Rejected “The Dark Knight” Script: Michael Bay Presents, in Association with Michael Bay Productions, and Michael Bay, Director: Michael Bay's The Dark Knight by Michael Bay. Featuring dialogue scripted by Michael Bay.
• No Matter How It Is Sliced, It Is Still Bologna: Downtown Anchorage split into four districts: Historic, Arts, Convention…and SoNo. For 'South of Nordstroms.' Really? That's…funny and sad at the same time. Nordstroms must love the free advertising, but what if they ever get bought out?
• A bike for the final frontier: It’s not new by any means, the picture being from the 1982 San Diego Comic Con, but it is worthy of sharing since it shows that nerd evolution has been at a stand still for almost 30 years.