Plans to Fix U.S. Rail Could End Road & Sky Gridlock - Well, Duh. Page 2 has a cool map that shows this isn't just an Eastern Seaboard idea.

Google's going to use its philanthropic arm to pursue renewable energy technology. I can't quite put my finger on it but there's something embarrassing about having to make a charity out of energy research.

How to let go of grudges and bitterness - I don't know if I've ever seen an article on this subject. Even with all the Christian influence in this country, we don't hear much talk of forgiveness. I mention this piece also because it came to mind when a reader named Kathy sent in: How to cope with Death. But they're not as similar as the titles suggest.

Mashable is holding a comment troll contest, which I learned about while reading their review of a site called Don't Censor Me. The contest is a funny idea but I don't share their romantic view of deleted and down-voted comments. P.S. Some of the best rude-on-purpose comments I've read lately are on the Hot Chicks with Douche Bags site.

Speaking of trolls, here's a clean round-up of those Democratic (or at least, non-Republican) questioners from the CNN debate. Remember, this isn't a question of tolerating differing opinions, the point of the debate is to help Republicans choose their candidate, not fight with Democrats (yet).

10 Semantic Apps to Watch - They make it clear from the beginning that semantic apps don't necessarily mean "semantic web" but there's some parallel and we know a lot of people expect the semantic web to be the next big thing so this is a good way to begin getting your head around the concepts involved. Lots of talk of "natural language."

I don't know if this story is big enough to warrant its own post but that armored car employee who's wanted by the FBI in connection with the 7 million bucks that went missing has a MySpace page here.  We might guess from the friends list and comments that this is his girlfriend. Some of you may not see any value in these things but I find the context they provide really enriching to the story. The song on his page alone conjures mental images of a frantic race to the border.

The expansion of obesity in the U.S. I wonder what a demographer sees in this. What makes the Bible belt lead the way?

Reading here about the fanatical freak-out in Sudan over this teacher and the teddy bear I saw that her daughter had commented on her MySpace page. Here it is.

I have a few offline chores today but here are a couple of games to keep you busy through lunch:

In Thin Ice you skate aroud the monsters to make them fall through the ice. (Nice easy left click/mouse movement controller.)

Anika's Odyssey is one of those click around puzzle games but I managed to complete it relatively quickly (I wasn't timing it but it was less than an hour for sure.)

[YouTube:2x2W12A8Qow]

My neighborhood is plastered with advertisements asking me to go online and invent a new Mountain Dew flavor. I still only drink the original kind, not even the diet and definitely not that weird red kind, so the idea of "inventing" a new one has zero appeal (made worse by the election fever bandwagon branding: Dewmocracy [gag]). But I had to laugh at what I imagined that brainstorming meeting to be like - a bunch of people in a room trying to figure out what the Web has to do with soda and how to take advantage Web 2.0 trends. It turns out the actual site is about a lot more than just inventing a new flavor, but that doesn't mean the idea is any better. (After wrestling with the site for a half hour I still wasn't able to get it to accept my registration so I can't speak to the game itself. I'll try again later.)

Lately I've been seeing a lot of examples of efforts to incorporate new "user generated" ideas that don't live up to their promise. Steve Outing explains why his grassroots user-generated niche sports company didn't sustain itself.

This left-wing blogger mocks the weak response to a Republican user-generated video campaign.

And I'm still a little bewildered by how the Molson campaign asking college kids on Facebook to submit party photos of themselves went wrong. If beer companies are going to kowtow to universities they might as well start selling milk. But as with the examples above, the lesson is clear that it's one thing to "get it" and quite another to do it.

Speaking of empowering the people, Naomi Wolf laments the lack of civics education and general democratic enthusiasm among young people.  This is a mainstream piece but it fits well with the disillusionment I expressed the other day with the way American politics are conducted. As closely as I follow local news, I confess I don't have any idea what it takes to run for local office and I'd sooner blog about my neighborhood than participate in its governance.

Futuristic green technology that will save us all of the day: A maglev turbine - The answer to my first objection: "The turbine uses 'full-permanent' magnets, not electromagnets — therefore, it does not require electricity to run." China is already building one but there's some activity in the U.S. as well.  In looking for info on the activities of the U.S. company MagLev Wind Turbine Technologies I found this press release, straight from the "you can't make this stuff up" files: "Maglev Wind Turbine Technologies, Inc. (MWTT) is pleased to announce that Mr. Laurence E. (Larry) Blow has agreed to join our company as Chief Consulting Engineer." How can you lose with a wind power company under the guidance of Mr. Blow?

Speaking of new technologies, Sense of touch restored for woman with bionic arm - They took the nerves in her shoulder that would have received signals from her missing hand and routed them to a spot on her chest.  Touch the chest and she feels it as though it's a touch to her hand. With the prosthetic arm they send pressure signals from the artificial hand to a mechanism that squeezes that spot on the chest, giving the sensation of touch-like pressure in the missing hand. And this is a real thing, not a "if the theory proves correct the implications are..." kind of item.

Speaking of mechanizing the human body, the video here on the Sarcos exoskeleton will make your head spin. Check out the part where the guy describes the robot suit that obeys your commands when you're in it but can be sent on its own missions when you're not in it. There's no mention of the possibility of one robot sending another one on a mission to find Sarah Connor, which seems pretty short sighted if you ask me.

Speaking of prosthetics (but only because this essay refers to Facebook as a "neural prosthesis"), How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook describes a problem I thought was exclusive to social lummoxes like me but I guess is universal. Actually, for me the problem isn't so much getting friend requests from people I hate as it is the range of the degree and nature of the friendship I enjoy with the people who send me requests. What do fellow local bloggers, long lost high school chums and former bosses have in common? Not a damn thing as far as I can figure. I've come to think of Facebook as a phonebook and friend requests in terms of whether I'm OK with that person being able to contact me easily. The only social application I'm really able to handle is Instant Messaging. I need to deal with friends one at a time. I'm not skilled enough to manage my own "network."

By the way, if you don't care about Facebook specifically but still want to be aware of the trend, the last few sentences of the above essay are what you want to know: social networking systems as they're designed right now naturally grow beyond their usefulness and the best solution for a user is to go to a new site and start over. "As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history." Worth keeping in mind next time you find yourself wondering how many new social networking sites there can possibly be.

Remember a while ago when I was disappointed to read a poor prognosis for the future of flash memory because I was looking forward to flash laptops? Here's a review of a flash notebook basically delivering on the promise of flash memory (except for the price).

NBC to Use TiVo's TV Viewership Data - As usual I don't have any first hand insight into this, in spite of this blog's NBC parentage, but I wonder if having this kind of hard data will change the way TV is programmed. I've always been amazed at how inexact the ratings system is for an industry with so much money at stake. Earlier this month we saw how a changing in ratings assessment methods resulted in a radical restructuring of New York City radio's list of most popular stations.

The time has come to mention the tree man.  I haven't seen any coverage of him in mainstream U.S. media but it's just a matter of time. "Tree Man" has some kind of virus that causes him to be covered in overgrown warts (for lack of a better term) that give the afflicted areas, especially his extremities, the appearance of tree bark. I had dismissed earlier stages of his story as online freak show curiosity but now it seems like every new development gets the viral relay treatment so before he's on the Today show and you haven't heard of him, meet Tree Man.

Speaking of viral phenomena I haven't mentioned yet, I was reading Helen's new piece on watching Web video and her mention of watching Two Girls One Cup video reactions. Recently the reaction of a Kermit the Frog puppet to the video scored high ranking on Digg.

NOTE: If you want to participate in the trend of recording yourself watching the clip for the first time then stop here (finding the very NSFW clip is up to you). The rest of this entry is written in white font so you can't see it against the background (RSS readers may not respect the font color).  Drag your mouse over the empty space below to see a description/spoiler of what the video is (and why you probably don't want to play the reaction game).

I'm not going to link to the video as it's arguably grosser than any other gross-out Web item we've seen yet, including goatse and the tub girl. It's not hard to find anyway. What I will do however is give you a straightforward description of what the video shows since every mention I've seen of it uses some coy phrase like "let's just say..." followed by something that does not come close to actually describing it. Two Girls One Cup is: One woman defecates in a drinking glass (the cup) held by the other woman who then sloppily eats the excrement. The two celebrate their soiled state with some messy kissing followed by vomiting in each others mouths.

This isn't quite enough for a full posting but since I'm logging off for a few hours there's no point holding onto them:

T-shirt slogans take on a whole new meaning in a mug shot.

Another brilliant advertisement for Guinness.

Funniest photo of the day - and it turns out there's video too. (I don't know why the video has an age warning, there's nothing graphic or sexual.) The funniest is at the very end when he crouches down in his dress looking miserable.

100 notable books of 2007

Everyday Normal Guy rap - NOTE: Funny but lots of MF bombs. I think they could make a ring tone out of, "I get nervous in social situations M-F-er!"

A lot of people wrote in that by the time they clicked the link to see that Mac/PC ad it was gone. Here someone put the whole thing on YouTube.

"What is the most fragmented that North America could have been?"  It's an alternate history map of what North America would look like if the unifying events hadn't gone that way.

What I clicked when I went through my backlog of mail this morning:

Will,
This is a very bizarre and shady story.
Take care,
G. Wrinkle

Will replies: G, that is the story that keeps on giving. Every sentence is more bizarre than the previous. I couldn't even recommend it as inspiration for creative writing because I don't think there's anything left to add. Amazing.

Rich points out a site that would have been good with yesterday's item about being a little too enthusiastic about the promise of stem cells.  This company wants you to store your menstrual blood. NOTE: Flash video/audio plays automatically when the page loads.

Rich also sent this one about a guy who refused to show his receipt to the security guard at the exit of a Circuit City and ends up calling the police and getting himself arrested. At first I was sure he was just a jerk but by the end of the story I understood his point.

Jan sends this snowflake maker.

I am sure you get lots of email from people who read your column, but I thought it would be great since you posted so much about the Virginia Tech tragedy to see/share this.
Thanks.

Eric sent this collection of lightning porn.

Will,
This Free Rice website will donate 10 grains of rice through the UN to help end world hunger for every vocab word you get correct. I found the link through the bbc.com news site.  I think it may be worth a mention.
Gillian

Will replies: Gillian, when this came out the link spread like wildfire but I resisted because I can't shake that scammy feeling. I looked around and I see a lot of other people who got the same feeling but also couldn't find any facts to justify the feeling. I think what bothers me is that grain isn't purchased by the grain, so to say that you've donated ten grains is already working from a dishonest premise. I'm even suspicious of the word game, it feels like busywork. Am I contributing to some kind of user generated dictionary? Anyway, like I said, I don't find any facts to support my feeling so I'll just shut up and share the link. Thanks. :)

If you like The Who, and you use msn.com or another site or a blog, you can find more great music at: http://www.seeqpod.com/music. Just type "The Who" or another favorite band in the search box and find their music freely with full playable tracks. To put the player on your page, move the songs to a playlist and click 'Embed,' then copy the code to your page.
All the best,
The SeeqPod Team

Will gesticulates wildly: I've been listening to this thing all morning and it's amazing. I don't remember why I was looking for The Who but I listened to Won't Get Fooled Again and Real Me and then just started adding stuff from the stream. Stuff I've heard of but never heard, stuff I never heard of at all. I didn't register or log in or do anything, it just starting making all this music, it's crazy! It loads the longs lightning fast, no choppy/laggy loads. Here's a NOTE: for ya: This thing can totally suck up a lot of your day without you realizing it because you'll find yourself peeking at the cascade of new songs every few seconds and adding here and there to the playlist. So far I've mostly just listened and haven't taken the time for a full exploration of what's going on here but it's definitely the most impressive music app I've played with in recent memory.

I saw this book as an opportunity to ask all of those otherwise rhetorical Constitution questions. I tried to recall every time I've thought to myself, "Surely this is not what the founders intended." And I tried to think of complaints I've heard about the Constitutionality of some of the actions by the Bush administration. The authors, Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes, found hope in the Constitution and it's principles but lately I've been feeling pretty pessimistic about the viability of our system. It's nice that the Constitution has a rule for how wars are declared except that we just go to war without technically declaring it so the Constitution doesn't seem very relevant. It's nice that the Congress is meant to check the power of the executive branch, except when they're a bunch of sheep too afraid of coming out on the wrong side of the latest buzzy legis-trend that they can't muster enough spine to do their Constitutional duty. And it's nice that the government is answerable to the electorate except that most Americans don't vote and it's questionable how many of those who do vote really know what they're doing.

Lane and Oreskes addressed these and other questions with intelligence and aplomb.

The mp3 audio can be downloaded here or else this page has a video link so you can listen through the video player with not very much load time (but with an ad at the beginning). And with the video player option you can check out my latest masterful videography with the critically acclaimed sitting-in-a-chair intro/outro.

Bacteria extract hydrogen at over 90% efficiency - It's funny to look down in the comments to see all the outrage. The idea is sold as producing no greenhouse gas because hydrogen burns clean, but the process to extract the hydrogen produces CO2. I remember reading a similar idea that had to do with getting energy from algae. Somehow the algae was used as fuel so a field of it was planted downwind from the energy plant. The CO2 output from the energy plant would end up feeding the algae and growing more fuel. (I can't find the article now but it was like this with a little of this.)

Speaking of new ideas, Six Ideas That Will Change the World - Not unfamiliar but not the same old ideas we see online all the time. This is part of Esquire's Best and Brightest series.

Cancer cure headline of the day: Cannabis compound 'halts cancer' (No, not the psychoactive part.)

Speaking of drugs, I clicked this item about Scopolamine, "The most dangerous drug in the world" and was interested to note that it's on a sobriety social networking site called Sober Circle.
I'm only passingly acquainted with the site, but the idea of applying
social networking to the addiction recovery community is a no brainer.

Robots Infiltrate, Influence Cockroach Groups - Long after the extinction of humans, Earth will be a battleground for the great robot/cockroach war... Actually it's about studying cockroach behavior and still pretty interesting. Tangentially, a bit of folk wisdom that seems confirmed by this story is that stepping on cockroaches can draw more cockroaches. It sounds like making your shoe smell like cockroach makes it more appealing to more cockroaches.

Speaking of making stuff up, Come on, writers, script your futures
- Though this is partly an excoriation of striking writers, it's also
good for the way it highlights new models of writers getting things
done. It directly addresses the question I asked the other day about
writers "simply taking their game elsewhere." Not only is this relevant
to the striking writers but also to everyone I've traded notes with
lately who sign their name with a NaNoWriMo number at the end.

A thorough going-over of that recent story about drawing stem cells from skin cells. Not only is the science covered in depth but the salient political points are touched upon in the conclusion. Namely:

"These cells are NOT useable for therapies…the immediate, practical applications that the electorate wants from stem cell research."

and

"Or we can just sit back and let the Japanese and Europeans and Koreans do it for us, which is OK, I suppose."

Morning listening: DJ Spooky's African remix

15 cool word illusions

Another typing speed test - This one is different because it's all common typing words, not a lot of trip-up words. My score improved with every try. Right now I'm at 282, position 9930. (Wait! 292 at 8474! But more wrong words.)

Top 20 Free Games of 2007 - These are the kind you have to download, not the quickie Flash games.

Everyone is noting that the Amazon Kindle sold out in five hours, though no one seems to know how many sales that represents.

[YouTube:IMaMYL_shxc]
This looked like yet another unfortunate taser incident - one more example of what we've already seen are nearly daily examples of questionable use of the tool - so I hadn't planned to even mention it. When I clicked it last week it had 24,000 views and only a hand full of local stories in Google News. The only thing that made the story of note was a mention that the release of the video to YouTube had caused an acceleration in the investigation - a rare admission by authorities.

On Friday I saw it as the very last item on my (New York) local news report, one of those three second "loog-a-dis" items at the very end of the broadcast. A re-check of Google News saw a growing collection of stories on the matter.

This morning the video has cleared 800,000 views and the description now includes links to mainstream media interviews. The definition of viral.

I'm pretty much the worst shopper ever so you don't want shopping advice from me but I do see a lot of people pointing to this Gizmodo thread on Black Friday deals. Also BFads.net and the Slick Deals Black Friday forum.

Digg has a new candidate page. In a pretty amazing feat they gave all the candidates Digg profiles and apparently the campaigns are actively commenting and digging stories. You can add them as friends and follow what the candidate (or their nerdy volunteer campaign person) is digging.  (P.S. Alan Keyes is running for president again?)

The Global Incident Map shows responses to terror related events around the world plotted on a Google map. Everything I saw in North America was a suspicious package or bomb scare or other false alarm but there were a few more sinister items on the other side of the globe.

It looks like this is essentially a Roomba for public bathrooms except for one strange twist: "In addition to cleaning, Lady Bird can engage in simple conversation with restroom users, thanks to microphones in its "antennae," speech recognition capabilities and a voice synthesizer." I've always thought the public restroom experience would be improved by a chat with a robot.

I keep seeing links about this new Mac/PC ad but I didn't get it until I watched it on this page. You need to be able to see the banner at the top of the page, that's what I'd been missing when I'd seen it elsewhere.

The lazy mailman photo is pretty good but better is the discussion thread of ideas on what the blogger should do.

Shameless Bollywood rip-off of the Matrix lobby scene - We could probably click forever on shameless Bollywood rip-off scenes - and even the scenes that aren't rip-offs are pretty funny - but what strikes me about this clip is that it looks like an amusement park ride. Imagine going on one of those studio tours and they put you in eye-protective dark glasses and give you a coat full of blank-loaded guns and you dodge through the scene while plaster explodes all around you. Take home a slow-motion video to impress your friends back home. I bet they'd get a hundred bucks a pop for that.

20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To

Did you see the folks at Jockey got people to have underwear dance competitions? If I had been in the pitch meeting I would have been the grump who said, "Who in their right mind is going to submit to a contest like that?" Wrong again. (Found via this story in the Times about using social strategies to market stuff.)

Songs included in Guitar Hero 3 see a dramatic leap in digital sales - It's not really too big a surprise that people buy songs they hear a lot, that's the whole premise behind the commercial radio playlist after all. I'm wondering if we'll see an increase in new artists who play music that is well suited to the game. What's the best kind of music for Guitar Hero, alt rock?

Nine Inch Nails have been struggling with getting their label to allow them to host fan-made song remixes on their official site. The first band to come to mind that actually does that is the Beastie Boys. They released a bunch of vocal tracks for remixing with the results shared by fans in their forum. Bjork celebrates remixes of her songs and has commercially released DJ remixes, but I don't see an official repository on her site, only on fan sites.

It's longer but not much more than what you've seen on TV.
[YouTube:C9P6KishWBA]
If ever you find yourself in the midst of a sensational international murder investigation and you have only one video in your YouTube account this is probably not what you want.

As you may have heard, yesterday Amazon presented their new eBook reader, Kindle. I have to give Amazon credit for sticking with their user review system for this launch because there are more than a few bad reviews on there. Of course, those are the ones I scrolled to first. It's funny that my first question is, "What do people hate about it?"

If you're looking for a more positive perspective on the Amazon page, try the Guy Kawasaki video review. He's jazzed that the device comes with wireless Internet connectivity so there's no "dock and sync."

Memetrackers are beginning to fill up with reviews and reactions from the online digerati. Steven Levy, who wrote this week's big Newsweek piece on eBooks, says it's not as ugly as it looks in photos, which is good to hear because it definitely looks ugly in photos.

BoingBoing's 15 things I just learned about the Amazon Kindle made me realize how far behind I am on eBook technology but the bigger take-away is the question everyone seems to be trying to resolve: what file types can it handle?

Robert Scoble rounds up more negativity. Lots of focus in the comments on the price - 400 bucks - being too high.

Jason Kottke is underwhelmed and focuses some on the blog subscriptions. I'm still a little confused by this. You pay to read some blogs on it but you can also navigate to other blogs for free?

On that subject this stuck with me:

"If a blog like Engadget is pretty much as good as a magazine (which I think it is), then why would people pay for one but not the other? That can lead you in one of two directions: charge for the blog, or don't charge for anything. We know which one Jeff has chosen — but is it the right one?"

This was supposed to be a quick list of clicks from the morning but then I lost track of time and the noon meeting happened and now I'm posting morning links in the afternoon.

Cloverfield - Another movie destroys NYC. It looks like Blair Witch Project meets War of the Worlds.

Here's that Chuck Norris Mike Huckabee ad. If you don't get it, they're making fun of the Chuck Norris Facts site(s). Then again, knowing that doesn't mean the ad makes any more sense. Maybe more informative is this ad in which Chuck and his wife offer some peculiar facts about teaching the Bible in school. After you watch that think again about who the audience is for the Huckabee ad. I'm thinking it's not the Web savvy youngsters who popularized Chuck Norris Facts.

The new campaign to support striking writers is to buy pencils and mail them to the media moguls who represent "the other side." The campaign has echoes of the peanut campaign to put Jericho back on the air. Something I've been casually mulling is whether it would be possible for the writers to simply take their game elsewhere. But what's amazing about the pencil campaign is that there are only 6 people who control almost everything on TV. I wonder how often those guys socialize with each other.

No matter how cool you think it is, you can't use your iPhone to fly a plane and owning an iPhone doesn't make you a pilot or even a meteorologist. I don't doubt for a second that the reasons given for many plane delays are utterly false but I'm skeptical about the veracity of this story because I can't believe a flight attendant would bother the pilots with second guessing from a passenger. The rest of it seems entirely plausible to me so I took the easy laugh.

US plans case against AP photographer - War bloggers are keeping a close eye on this one. The accusations aren't clear yet but many war bloggers are suspicious of local stringers hired by Western media who report from the scene of terror attacks. The accusation from some bloggers is that these guys are connected to the terrorists and get tips on where the attacks will be so they can help publicize the attacks. We'll see if this case makes that charge anything more than a blog rant. UPDATE: I switched the link out for the msnbc.com version of the story. Note that it has a link to a slide show of the guy's photos.

Video: Best first dance - Assuming this isn't some kind of comedy sketch, we can probably expect to see these folks do a tour of the TV talk shows.

One of the big social sites linked to this x-ray of a hand exploded by a firecracker but site as a whole is a scrollin' good time of anatomy art. ADDING: Chris in the comments reminds me to add this photo of the Israeli security guard who grabbed the live grenade. The photo has a warning for its graphic nature.  Chris, I don't think the two items are related.

Street Anatomy reminds me of another medical design blog I've seen but for the life of me I can't remember what it was called.  In the course of searching for it I clicked MedGadget which seems to draw heavily on the guidance of press releases but is still an interesting read. Today's item on CureHunter is cool.

We had a brief video segment on the site about an old photo that experts suddenly realized might contain an image of President Lincoln. The site with the photo is Civil War Photography.  I wish they had a higher resolution version.

My afternoon background music today is the Dave Matthews Band concert from last Thursday in West Point, NY but I don't have a link so much as a what-I-clicked story:

On Friday I was standing on the subway platform waiting for the ride home when I heard the train coming and before I knew what happened I had Jimi Hendrix's "Hear my train a comin'" in my head. By Saturday night I couldn't take it anymore and ended up poking around YouTube for different versions of the song.

This is the one I found most suitable to a Saturday night:
[YouTube:97ZNMhNiwyQ]
...though I think the twelve-string version is the best known and probably most popular.

The next in the series from that user inspired me to look for the actual audio recording of the show (A New Year's Eve performance in New York City: "Fillmore East 31.12.69 First Show") instead of listening to the YouTube audio, which is not the highest quality.

The search led me to, among other places, a community of Bit Torrent file traders called etree.org where fans trade "the live concert recordings of trade friendly artists." Jimi Hendrix (or rather, his estate) is not a trade friendly artist, but I saw a note that Dave Matthews Band had recently been re-added to the list.

Wanting to give the service a try I clicked the most recent show with the most seeders (for faster downloading) and most downloads (thinking that would be an indication of popularity). Twenty minutes later, without even signing up or registering I had a half gig of music in 20 songs.

It should be pointed out that die hard music fans and audiophiles deal in "lossless" audio formats, which is why those 20 songs are so huge. In this case the format is FLAC, Free Lossless Audio Codec. Not all media players can recognize a FLAC file. I seem to recall once having a specific FLAC player on my machine but currently I'm using the freely downloaded Winamp which manages to be easy to use without trying so hard to be helpful it becomes a pain in the butt like many more popular players.

This interview with Mark Tungate is a good example of what's so fun about talking to someone about their field of expertise. That buoyant enthusiasm is the reason I enjoy doing these "Voices" chats.

In this case the field of expertise is advertising. As I mention in the interview, the only real reason I pay attention to the ad industry is to guard against being manipulated and marketed-to, but Tungate brings a global perspective and sense of history that makes the industry feel less predatory.

The mp3 for download is here or else on the main landing page you can listen in the video player with less loading time.

(For those following along with the challenge of producing the video versions of these interviews, for this one I added a brief title screen to a couple clips of myself with the book. There's no slide show so it's just the book cover for most of the video.)

The only place I find anything approaching an uncut video version of Obama answering that woman in Iowa about terrorism is on this blog. If you know of a longer version or one that shows the questions better, let me know and I'll switch 'em out. (You know it's a pet peeve of mine when we have to take the TV person's word for it that he "lost his cool" or "got tough with a questioner" and we only get to see a couple of heavily-edited seconds of video.

Here's a story that's taken an unexpected twist: Not long ago a video was in circulation highlighting the fact that Fox News likes to find reasons to show sexy video and will do so no matter how inappropriate the context. It's the same thing I was talking about with that drunk girl Facebook story the other day. I didn't link to the video because attacking Fox News is a full time job for some people and hardly news in itself, and isn't their over-sexed style common knowledge? At this point I have to add a NOTE: that the video is kind of unsafe for work. It's a montage of Spring Break bikini contestants and that Paris Hilton car wash hamburger commercial. So it's a little like one of those late night Girls Gone Wild commercials.

The fact that I have to make this NOTE: has become the point in a new twist to the story.  Basically I've just told you that Fox News content is NSFW. And when the anti-Fox folks expanded on the theme and made a fake porn site called Fox News Porn they forced the hand of Web censors everywhere. They got an 18+ rating from YouTube and now they've been banned from Digg for containing adult content. And now, as much as I loathe even giving the appearance of playing into the "cable wars" theme, it's a story. Fox News is too pornographic for the Web? Fox News is unsafe for work? Obviously it's a question of quantity, but it's a clever campaign.

At first I thought this was a story about Ron Paul actually printing his own money, which it isn't, though it's close. The Liberty Dollar is an independently produced currency backed by precious metals. Lately they've been feeling pretty good about themselves as the value of the dollar has fallen and gold and silver have kept their value. I wonder what it was that finally triggered the FBI raid. It's not like the Liberty Dollar has been a secret all these years. Maybe they were looking like too good an alternative to the actual dollar? Or maybe it really was the attention brought by those Ron Paul dollars. (By all accounts I read, Ron Paul is not directly connected to the production of dollars with his face on them. He is supported by Liberty Dollar because he supports a return to the gold standard. This piece ends with a note about how the raid on Liberty Dollar has caused a spike in the value of Ron Paul dollars. I confess it would be a cool souvenir to have of the 2008 election.)

Speaking of "as good as money," There Will Be Blood about the early days of oil prospecting is generating a lot of positive buzz.

Shifting sands reveal World War Two fighter plane lost for 65 years

Keep an eye out for The Real News - 7 minutes of a lot of promises. If they deliver on half of these it'll be worth watching. That idea of a show about the history of what's in the news sounds smart. And double checking mainstream coverage for facts and context is also a good idea for a show. However, even with the global reach they plan I don't think anyone's going to watch it, let alone pay ten bucks for it, but best of luck to them. And what's that Montana correspondent going to report on?

An iPod disassembled with the parts suspended in resin but it still works.

This guy tells you how to build your own Apple computer. He even includes the software instructions. I'm not sure the parts on this one can be suspended in resin.

Ze Frank's site has a 3D snowflake maker. I'm not sure how old this is but we're getting into snowflake season.  You can actually build it while it's turning in 3D mode. I had a hard time getting the cuts to work the way I wanted in 3D though.

Grazr is a neat idea, though it doesn't really have much application for Clicked yet. The idea is that you can share a reading list or "favorites" list of links publicly. The best example I can think of is that I once spent a long time looking for free banjo lessons online. I keep all the links in a folder in my favorites/bookmark list. With Grazr I can store those links publicly and anyone else who wants to learn to play the banjo for free can benefit from the research I've already done.

This guy came up with a way to show in 3D how your tattoo will look on a body. The Photoshop trick looks like a better idea if you don't have something big like the sleeve in the example.

E-mail is dead again (or maybe just still dying)- We see this article periodically but this time it's got a stat about teenagers not using e-mail. It's not surprising if you're required to actively communicate online regularly but if you're the kind of Web user who surfs a little and checks mail once in a while, pay attention to this so you're not wondering why the only communication you're receiving is from penis alchemists and Nigerian royalty.

Speaking of being left behind, just when you thought you were cool for finally setting up a profile on one of the big social networking sites the cool kids have again moved on without you. Social Networking with the Elite - they're all on new niche networks that aren't open to the general public.

This guy seems to think that things under Bush will go so horribly wrong we'll need to turn into survivalists. I don't subscribe to that kind of Bush-panic but the list of what you'll need to survive is pretty interesting - especially because last night I watched the DVR recording of last week's Office with Michael trying to make it in the wilderness with duct tape and a hunting knife.

Hidden crime of 'wi-fi tapping': only 11 arrests but most of us are guilty - Only 11?? That's seems like a huge number to me. To be sure, spying on what someone's doing by tapping their wifi connection is wrong, but this article is about the simple act of finding an available signal to access the Web. The argument that it could cause police to arrest the wrong person for crimes committed on that signal only means to me that police need to find a way of getting more reliable information.

Stealing wifi seems like a moot issue when free public wifi zones are popping up all over the place. Who's the victim there? If someone downloads child porn from CBS's free system does Les Moonves go to jail?

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It may not be The Daily Show (or Jon Stewart) but it could definitely be called "The Daily Show treatment" when a person's or corporation's own words are used to make them look like a complete and total hypocrite.

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything - Ok, stop right there. If you're like me, that headline just created a little movie in your head and set off all kinds of little approving synapses in your brain, glad to see a little guy solve a big problem. If you like that feeling, stop now and move to the next item. If you're, again like me, a glutton for punishment and disappointment, you can take a look at the paper and realize that even though the title is "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," it's not really so simple once you look at it and realize you're not a physicist.

And furthermore, in the course of looking for the paper you find out that not only are you not smart enough to know what this guy's talking about but there are people who call this guy a "crackpot" and "cute" so what does that make you? And also, when you get a look at this surfer dude's background you see that it's not like some waste-oid took his lips off the bong and squinted through the haze and rasped, "I see everything."

Anyway, if, like me, your curiosity is a higher priority than your self esteem, you might use the same search you used for the paper to find an active and engaged community of theoretical physicists blogging and discussing and exchanging ideas. (Including the surfer dude himself in the comments of some of them.)

Also worth a read is the subsequent post by this blogger who doesn't mention the Telegraph story this time but surely has it in his mind in wondering about popularizing science. He doesn't answer his own question in the post but his commenters have a lot of opinions.

I wonder why they decided Persepolis was better as an animated movie than a live action one. Cheaper to produce I guess. The trailer on the Yahoo site is better than the one on the official site.

"The first Firefox 3 beta is just around the corner and promises a number of enhancements, including a reduction of the notoriously large memory footprint." Lately Flash makes my IE crash and since IE doesn't just crash one window but everything you've got open and I tend to have a lot open, I've been using Firefox a lot more. When my machine is slow to load pages and I see that Firefox is using an unusual amount of memory or even if I don't check but realize that I've been using Firefox for a long time without a restart it makes me subconsciously sour on the whole project.

Today's edition of real or fake: We've seen a lot of fake "wiggling cam girl gets caught by mom" clips, but this one has a ring of authenticity. NOTE: It's a wiggling cam girl, which means she's in too-small clothes revealing too-small underwear before dad comes in and loses it. No doubt coming soon to a "tut tut" morning TV segment near you. Dad enters at 22 seconds if you want to skip ahead.

Cut a bottle in half with string - The commenters at Gizmodo are credulous.

9 words that don't mean what you think (Includes some bikini photos which are safe for my workplace but maybe not for everyone's.)

Schadenfreude game review of the day. Note: A few curses but the guy talks so fast it's not likely to be heard by cube mates.

Yesterday I finished packing up my old work cube and I finally got permission to post my photos of the deserted old MSNBC building. Part of the design of the place is meant to make it feel dynamic. When you watch the new set now on TV you get a sense of a lot going on even though it's just some person sitting at a desk talking to the camera.  When you take all the people out there's a weird mix of that energy and also silent stillness. It's like one of those sci-fi movies where the character's sleep pod forgot to wake him up and he wanders the ship after the space plague wiped out the rest of the crew.

"The beauty company says it's helping improve young women's self-esteem, but its much-lauded ad campaign may not be sending the right message." The idea here is that the commercials are still encouraging us to judge the girls.  Truly empowered girls (and yes, this time we're talking about young females) should be allowed to want to change parts of themselves and you're not allowed to tsk your tongue or accused them of being fashion victims just because they want their appearance to represent them differently. It's like negative peer pressure versus actually giving girls a positive and constructive message. I hadn't thought about it that way but the article is pretty convincing.

"Hillary Clinton got busted for planting a question with an audience member in Iowa. But there's all kinds of hocus-pocus at "town hall" events." I don't understand town hall events at all. Even I've been part of productions with the TV folks ("Let's take a question from the Internet!) I didn't get the purpose. The basic themes on which candidates speak are already so defined, why does it have to be a "regular person" who asks about them. Even if they ask something novel there's no politician who won't bring the question to more comfortable territory anyway.  Here's an idea that just occurred to me: How about giving the regular people the follow-up question instead of the starter question. A real person would be more apt to be able to say, "But that's not how health care worked in my situation" or "You just totally dodged that last question."

Random brainstorm: Let's have a town hall where a candidate sits on the stage and the moderator plays a tape of them addressing one of the main themes of the campaign this year. Then the moderator turns to the audience and says, "What'd you think of that answer?" It'd be like a town hall debate.

Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies - Eye-tracking studies are when the eyes of visitors to a site are monitored for how their eyes move across the page. The intended audience of this piece is web designers but in the same way that reading about psychology can help you understand yourself, this makes an interesting read for anyone who spends time online.

Though I keep seeing headlines that the Wall Street Journal will soon be free online, in the mean time it looks like you can beat the subscription if you're viewing a story that's been Dugg. It's like how you could use the special link generator for NY Times links in your blog so they wouldn't expire. (We don't have to use this anymore, right?)

Ask 500 people - They ask a question and 500 answers are plotted on a map, color coded by answer.

This is just a press release but it tells about Gibson's new robot guitar. It tunes itself for you and switches to alternate tunings automatically. The site is well done and the demo video is pretty clear. Can you imagine that one day you'll be old if you remember how to tune a guitar by ear?

Speaking of "just a press release," Social change relies more on the easily influenced than the highly influential - The study is behind a subscription wall but even this summary is good food for thought (though you have to ignore the contradiction in referring to "highly influentials" when the study itself is saying they're not influential) and may be worth a trip to the library. The subject has been on my mind particularly since NBC did that "green week" last week. I can't stop wondering if that was really at all useful in convincing Americans to change. Every time I saw it on TV there was some actor or other figure head giving me a tip like, "Don't let the water run while you brush your teeth." (I'm still not sure what that has to do with Global Warming.) But could that be more effective than I realize in reaching the "easily influenced?"

Entertainment/fan blogs going dark in solidarity with striking writers

A summary of Ron Paul's proposed legislation in Congress. This blog is not exactly sympathetic to Paul's positions so the spin may be negative but it's still a pretty revealing list and paints a more vivid picture than headlines about how devoted his fans are. It might even be argued that the hype about his online hype has been a distraction from what he actually stands for as a candidate.

The New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year is the two-year-old "locavore." It's like carnivore or omnivore but local. I wonder if there's such a thing as a locansumer.

Fresh from our talking about political themes in comic books comes the news that Marvel is putting its archives online (for a fee). I don't know if I could get 60 bucks worth of use out of it but it would be great for catching up on story lines before you restart that subscription you used to pay for with your paper route money. "To help sell the experience to an audience unaccustomed to paying for content, Marvel will offer a free sampler of 250 titles." That in itself might be worth the pain of registering with the site. (In the course of writing this I tried to check it out but the site keeps timing out. I think they're getting slammed.)

USA Today also has a sidebar recommending some stories in case you spent your paper route money on something else.

I continue to be amazed at the turnaround in coverage of the Zune. This item on local artist engravings is so admiring it's almost embarrassing. Disclosure: Obviously Microsoft is part owner of this site. No one has told me to write about Zune but there's probably an internal link I can click somewhere to buy one at a discount - and given the recent press I just might!

If the hype around Glam is correct, you already know about this site, but I had never heard of it so I did a bit of clicking to get in touch with my stylish side.

I changed my mind about posting original links to the Meredith Kercher story because I watched a copy of the Amanda Knox YouTube video.
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It makes the whole story feel so much more personal. It's amazing that the whole world can march through a digital crime scene and not disturb anything (though tainting the jury pool is another matter).

I also clicked the Seattle Crime Blog's excerpts of Amanda Knox's "FoxyKnoxy" MySpace profile and spent some time in the Italian blogosphere.

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OMG!! I need to vote for him right now!!

The top ten arguments by global warming skeptics and the answers to their criticism.

Did Web Amateurs Impede Search for Fossett? This is the second piece I've read about the lack of success of group (crowdsourcing) search efforts. The idea is that you take a satellite shot of a huge area and parse it out to volunteers who look at their little piece and inform officials if they see anything worth following. When the idea was new it seemed like it would mean the end of lost-ness forever. But so far it hasn't worked and both volunteers and rescue officials aren't very into the idea anymore. In a somewhat more literary sense it has altered the definition of lost from not found to not findable.

All six Star Wars movies in one poster - Han Solo should be bigger.

Zombie Attack at Hierakonpolis - Did you ever see the Simpsons episode when Bart goes to the school for genius kids and they're all laughing at a math joke that Bart doesn't get? I felt like Bart reading this zombie item. Archaeology.org is not a joke site and it's not April 1 (when I usually fall for joke hoaxes) but there is no such thing as a zombie virus (yes, I looked it up). So the whole piece is a straight faced joke... I think.

"America's superheroes take on
preemptive war, torture, warrantless spying, and George W. himself."
This is a little long but if you're into comics (or if you used to be
into comics) it'll hold your interest. I always though it was odd that
Spider Man was such a huge movie in 2002 preaching "with great power
comes great responsibility" and yet that wasn't part of the public
discourse taking place that year as we marched to war. This article
makes it sound like comics got even preachier than that but since it
didn't impact the mainstream I'm more interested to know how it was
received by the comic reading audience.

Speaking of long reads, my Commuter Click is "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush." In this case I won't be printing it because I bought the magazine. I had a long train ride to take this weekend and heard there was a funny article in which Christopher Hitchens gets a make-over including a Brazilian body wax. (That's here, and yes, quite funny.) ADDING: Oh, here's where I read about it. It's a surprisingly thoughtful commentary on cultural feelings about body (particularly pubic) in both the West and Islam. A while ago there was a link circulating that had 50 years of Playboy Centerfolds organized by year. One of the most obvious trends was the abrupt arrival of the Brazilian. (The link and its mirrors appear to be dead and unfortunately averaging the centerfolds by decade doesn't demonstrate the point. -Totally safe for work.)

I say the above link was surprisingly thoughtful because usually stories of a sexual or nudity nature are thin excuses to show some skin and lure viewers/readers/clicks. Case in point is that Facebook group about drunk girls. The group itself, 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night, appears to have started with one of those e-mail joke lists you wish your spam filter to spare you from and then progressed to being like one of those drunk fetish sites. NOTE: Of the photos I clicked there was nothing more graphic than underwear but the whole theme of this makes me feel dirty so I didn't spend much time looking. Probably not safe for work regardless.

I don't know how popular the group was before last week but when the Daily Mail, which needs almost no reason to present scandalous and/or titillating photos ran a series of shots from the group with the headline, The ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics on Facebook, (ah, the old "look how shameful this is" gambit) suddenly it seemed like everyone was talking about it.

My colleagues at the Today show found a way to justify the story as well, tying it to the Facebook angle on that story of the murdered British student. (I was late to that story and by now the original links are dead, hidden or removed but copies and quotes are all over the place. Since one of the suspects is from Seattle, the P.I. has good stuff.)

Speaking of Facebook, Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page
for Your Website NOW! If you don't have a Web site your headline might
read, "Why all the sites you visit are nagging you to join a Facebook
fan club all of a sudden."

Still speaking of Facebook, remember I was looking for a zeitgeist of
Facebook links? I never found one but it looks like an upcoming voting
feature might make one possible.

Speaking of the Facebook News Feed, the Facebook News Network is exactly why I'm having a hard time getting into the whole Facebook movement in the first place.

Speaking of Facebook's stream of uselessness, I've been trying to catch
up on all the freaking out everyone's been doing about Facebook and
privacy. The issue is a new ad system called Beacon
that lets your Facebook friends know what sites you're surfing other
than Facebook. It highlights an interesting line in the sand for
Facebook's digital exhibitionists. People may like to share what sites
they visit but they don't necessarily want help doing it.
So when a Facebook user visits a Beacon site they get a message that
the page they're viewing is being submitted to their news feed to be
read by their friends. The note comes with a "no thanks" option but the
fact that the system seems built to tattle crosses the line. I've
visited the sites on the list and I have a Facebook account but I
haven't seen anything like what's described. I'm not sure why.
Instructions on blocking the whole thing are in this blog entry.

Speaking of sharing with friends, soon you'll be able to use AIM through Gtalk. Handy for me because the two IM apps I keep open are MSN and Gtalk. I almost tried Meebo
back when it was new but something about typing all my passwords into
one site made me nervous. Now that it's been around a while I should
probably give it another shot.

Seven grand for a roof mounted wind turbine including installation. Not on their FAQ is how to know if enough wind blows past your roof to make it worth it.

Speaking of wind power, Wingsuite mountain swoop. Who was the first guy who thought it was a good idea to jump off a mountain wearing a garbage bag?