It's funny how every holiday I tell myself I'm on vacation but not really on vacation yet. If I can just get online for a couple of hours I'll put up this one more post I have in draft with these few links I have left. And then I can't manage to squeeze "online for a couple of hours" from the holiday stone and a few days later I give up the hope and finally post my "I'm on vacation" message.
I'm on vacation.
Back in time for the new year.
[YouTube:V3CmXGKXOmk]
It looks like this is the guy who did the original Sunday Bloody Sunday remix too. Check out his profile for more. I particularly liked Blair doing Should I stay or should I go?
He doesn't appear to be the source for the hysterical Endless Love video, however.
[YouTube:vD0GHx980CU]
Roger Clemens has posted a YouTube video in which he denies using steroids. While it's certainly an idea whose time has come, it's interesting that he still intends to use 60 Minutes as a vehicle for getting his story out. What does that say about acting as your own lawyer in the court of public opinion?
No strong lead today but Hardball is half over so it's time to post what I've got.
In 1987 the Honda Civic got 57mpg. This article explains why that's no longer the case. The short answer is that weight is the enemy of fuel efficiency so if you want to ride in a cramped death trap then you can have great mileage. If you want leg room, trunk room and crash safety (not to mention extra bells and whistles) then you have to pay to haul them around.
Speaking of mileage, I don't understand this one at all. Some states want to set tailpipe standards higher than what the federal government is setting. The EPA says no. The only explanation appears to be that the EPA thinks its standards are good enough. The only thing I can figure is that the EPA has an interest in keeping all the states at the same standard for some reason.
Why Ron Paul fans like him so much. The best part starts at 3:30 when he explains to the news anchor why the question he's being asked is a ridiculous straw man.
The approaching primary elections are bringing a new wave of headlines to remind us of how messed up our election system still is:
You may be sick of this story by now, but CNet interviewed Lane Hartwell, the photographer from the viral video story.
In the new Duke Nukem trailer he lifts weights while smoking a cigar.
Do any of you find diamond ads to be sexist? I'm usually pretty sensitive about that sort of thing but I confess diamond sales never struck me as any more sexist (or generally stupid) as any other ad. The parody ads on this are really funny.
Amazing gallery of eyes - NOTE: If you're like me and you see long links like this and try to pick apart the URL to find the home page or other galleries, you will likely find some nudes, as I did. The page to which I've linked is totally safe, however. But don't let that scare you away from eventually finding time to explore Art Department which is rich with great images.
I've linked to one of these Zero Punctuation video game reviews before but they're really fun. Don't worry if you don't know video games, you'll still enjoy it. NOTE: Colorful language. But he talks so fast anyone who isn't trying to hear what your machine is playing probably won't notice. That can't be said for all of the reviews on the list, however so headphones may be the prudent choice.
The 10 Best Rollercoasters on Earth - The good thing about this report is that each one has a first person YouTube video of a complete circuit on the ride.
Not new but still cool, recipes for chain restaurant food. (No wonder I like that Chevy's salsa, it's full of salt and "liquid smoke."
Speaking of recipes, this was a good one in the Times yesterday: 101 Simple Appetizers in 20 Minutes or Less
10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Better Learning Gadget - Could be titled, "10 better reasons than iTunes to get an iPod."
Cool digital camera built into a scuba mask.
Along with his master list of year-end lists, Rex also publishes an annual list of Best Blogs That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading - We've seen a few of them here at Clicked. I didn't realize Reverse Cowgirl had restarted. A million years ago I was writing about porn blogs and my editor at the time ruled against linking to Reverse Cowgirl given the nature of the content. The blogger, Susannah Breslin, wrote a rant about corporate censorship and the ridiculousness of mentioning her blog but not linking to it and she included a little photoshop rendering of a corporate guy in a business suit with an msnbc.com logo for a face spanking a girl in a school girl skirt with a paddle. Heh.
This guy has made a recreation of posting Craigslist singles ads. That sounds mean but when you read the ads he posts you realize it's almost more like social commentary than prank. And then when you enjoy the responses he shares you won't really care one way or other.
Another New Yorker Commuter click: What will life be like if people stop reading?
Have you seen that Idiocracy movie on HBO yet? That's what I'm imagining.
An interesting twist to the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy story you can't avoid is that it appears to have leaked as a result of someone getting into OK Magazine's servers and taking a peek at their unpublished upcoming cover. UPDATE: "Getting into their servers" may be a little dramatic. Hearing the story from others, it sounds like OK's site published the cover accidentally just long enough for the image to land in a few RSS readers before they could yank it down again. (The phrase this blog used was "found to be on the server for..." which is actually a totally appropriate way of explaining that the source is legit. It was my own imagination that read it as "found on the server after I hacked into it.")
Currently playing with TheSixtyone.com, yet another social music site. The Web 2.0 feature of choice here is the vote up - or here, "bump." Interestingly they've mixed in a point system so there's a bit of a game to it all. As you know, the bottom line for me is always whether I get to hear full songs for free, and on this site you do, so thumbs up for that. Thumbs down for the fact that I don't recognize any of these musicians, but that's probably part of the point. This system is better than waiting for a corporate DJ to tell me what's a "hit."
I had heard about the movie Look being shot as though it's a compilation of candid captures from security cameras but that sounded like a weak gimmick to me so I didn't pay much attention. Now that it has opened in theaters I'm noticing all the positive reviews. Here's the trailer. NOTE: It starts with a girl in a changing room (of course). Any forbidden flesh tones are pixilated but for those first few seconds it feels a little like something you wouldn't want to be caught watching at work.
Google Talk adds translator bots. Just like Star Trek, it runs while you're chatting an offers a live running translation. There are no other Star Trek similarities, however. The way it works is that you arrange a group chat with the person who doesn't speak your language and the bot. Then just type.
At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star - In case you looked at the free online courses offered by MIT and were too overwhelmed to do anything but close the browser, it looks like a popular place to start is Professor Lewin's physics lectures.
By now you've heard that Peter Jackson is making two new Hobbit films. You may also recall that Jackson is good about keeping a production blog when he's making a movie. So... The Official Hobbit Movie Blog.
Perhaps the most refreshing "Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers" list I've read. Not polluted with stuff about making money or growing traffic. When was the last time you saw blogging advice that mentioned humility?
"Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks." No offense to Next Energy News but this article didn't inspire a lot of confidence so I poked around for some confirmation but everyone talking about this seems to be pointing to the same link. I also don't see it on Toshiba's nuclear site. Anyone know any more?
'Alarming Alliance' of Mafia and Street Gang Is Broken Up - Remember that headline next time you scoff at the premise of a late night cable movie from the late 80s starring Steven Segal and Ice T.
Here's the follow-up to yesterday's item about the viral video with the unauthorized photo. They recut the video with a new photo and a big list of credits. Problem solved. Sort of.
I don't see a perma link on this so in case it moves down, what you're looking for is a Facebook parody called pensionbook. I didn't get it until I read it closely. It's what happens when the Facebook crowd gets old.
A practical joke is being auctioned on eBay. He'll send crazy postcards from Poland to someone you know just to mess with their head.
Lately I've seen a few explanations in the British press of the American subprime loan situation. Here the BBC explains it with a series of charts and diagrams. And this TV interview show explains it with classic British humor.
The only thing we learn from the Forbes list of Web celebs is that there is not yet any such thing as a Web celeb.
Here's one for Clicked Court: A photographer spotted her photo as part of a video montage in a very popular viral video. Her reaction was anger that the photo was stolen for the work without her permission. As I recall, she ended up pulling all of her photos from Flickr as a result. I agree that it sucks to have a photo used without permission or even credit, but my attitude is basically waddayagonnado? The photographer's answer in this case was not just to pull her photos off Flickr but to send cease and desist letters to the video sites hosting that viral video. There does seem to be a general understanding in online culture than when you catch someone using your stuff without permission you're allowed to smother what they're doing with legal notices (or, as we've seen, the occasional prank). Michael Arrington sets the matter straight, pointing out that this video's use of the photo constitutes fair use. And copyright doesn't mean every little thing needs explicit permission.
By the way, I've got a personal example of a similar situation. See the photo in the title graphic under the map on this post? That's mine. I saw it by accident because it got a lot of traction on one of the big social sites. I did nothing. What would you have done?
Many blogs and sites were celebrating Chris Dodd last night. You may recall that he's been leading the charge to block legislation that would grant telecoms immunity from for helping the government spy on Americans. Last night he championed a filibuster and won the battle.
Speaking of politics blogs, I read this round up of conservative bloggers who are not keen on the idea of Mike Huckabee as the Republican candidate. I'd guess that a lot of the passionate Ron Paul supporters we see online are "Ron Paul or nothing" voters. On the liberal side I know there are a lot of anti-war voters who won't vote for Hillary. How soon before the Web helps break the partisan duopoly that pulls the strings on American politics?
Pitchfork has published its Top 100 Songs of 2007 list. Markedly different from the Rolling Stone list.
Not exactly a "cancer cured" headline of the day but still an interesting piece on the search for a cure: "Each day, Sam Hutchison swallows 44 pills, most of which weren't prescribed by his physician. They were chosen by Sam's father, who devised the treatment cocktail -- and tests many of the medicines on himself -- in a desperate effort to save his seven-year-old son."
Nanosolar Ships First Panels -This is a press release but unless I've been hitting the Kool Aid too hard it's exciting news. Low cost mass production of solar panels is what we've been waiting for to bring solar energy into the mainstream.
Elsewhere green... Congress Likely to Pass Incandescent Bulb Ban
(This post is mostly an excuse to share the new Batman trailer but I'm adding some of the other mostly-visual items in my notes. More substantial items will come later.)
The new Batman trailer is here. No one mentioned he'd be driving a sick motorcycle. This looks awesome.
Round 3 in that Crestock photoshop competition is up.
This old post about a beautifully designed bridge/bar in Austria led me to do a lot of scrolling and clicking through the Pompomist's look at architecture and design.
Santa arrested by Imperial Stormtroopers - Gizmodo does a good job with this satire report but the photo really makes me think the costume shop ran out of cool stormtrooper costumes for the convention. You're out of stormtroopers? What do you have left in stock?
I've seen some schools have something called "the tableau club" in which, I guess, students arrange themselves to depict scenes. This group of friends in Russia are drawing a lot of online attention for doing something similar.
My friend Matt travels a lot so he's looking into purchasing a Stow Away Guitar. Nearly as cool as the Gibson robot guitar we saw recently.
Competitive Knitters Battle To The Death In "Sock Wars"
The Simpsons folks have given Homer the photo-a-day treatment in parody of Noah Kalina's original. Disclosure/bragging/name drop: I have some affiliation with Kalina and met him socially last week. By virtue of my job I've met a lot of famous people but there's a special kind of vicarious glee in seeing someone you know Simpsonized.
I'm participating in the selection of this year's Favorite Website Awards. I got a note this morning that in the first round of judging I'm to choose three from a list of 12. I was a judge several years ago in the early days of The Weblog Awards and it was an utter pain in the butt because it required looking through literally hundreds of blogs. This way is not only fairer but it gives the bloggers a fair shake at being looked at relatively closely.
These are the 12 I have to choose from by early January. It's kind of an apples and oranges list; looks like a bunch of commercial ones. Let me know in the comments here which ones you like. Or, if you want to participate in a more official capacity, the awards also have a People's Choice vote.
Here's one of the more useful year end lists: Rolling Stone lists the 100 best songs of 2007, forcing me to face the sad fact that I'm woefully out of touch because I don't know half of these. Luckily, they all have "listen" links. The only bad part is that you have to install the Rhapsody player but I bit the bullet. ADDING: The other bad part is the cognitive dissonance you'll suffer when you see some of the questionable rankings of the songs you do recognize.
USASpending.gov has finally launched.
It's a site meant to make federal spending more transparent with an eye
toward holding legislators accountable (as required by The Federal
Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006). We can now
probably expect more blog-exposed scandals about who is benefiting from
federal pork.
Tech bloggers are atwitter over Google's latest toy-in-the-making, Google Knol. Apparently it's still in super secret mode but sample screens and descriptions have been released.
From what I've read it sounds like a more widely distributed Wikipedia. People write about what they know about and contribute to the database. It seems a bit odd that Google would want to make a new Wikipedia or duplicated the efforts of other companies who are already trying to do something similar. Additionally, Google already has a lot of places for me to write about what I know, most prominently Blogger blogs. Why would I fill out a Knol page instead? Nick Carr has the best explanation I've seen. He points out the way Wikipedia has risen to the top of search results on Google and observes, "I'm guessing that serving as the front door for a vast ad-less info-moshpit outfitted with open source search tools is not exactly the future that Google has in mind for itself. Enter Knol."
Yahoo has a new toy to offer as well. Yahoo Shortcuts looks at what you've written in your blog and shows you where you might add pieces from other Yahoo services to augment what you're about to post. I'm skeptical that the average blogger cares to add all of these bells and whistles to a blog entry but if you've looked at a story on msnbc.com lately you know that dressing up text with deeper features has become a staple of online journalism. Outside of that, if this marks a trend of services that automatically help us manage our various services and subscriptions and profiles and other Web 2.0 junk, I welcome it.
Speaking of online journalism, check out The Whale Hunt. NOTE: It's a photo story of a real whale hunt and sorry for the spoiler but they catch one. Which means the photos at the end are pretty rough for animal lovers or the generally squeamish.
Speaking of photos, Flickr now provides traffic stats for its "pro" users. (Pro users are people who pay for the service, not necessarily professionals. I think I pay like 24 bucks a year.) I put in for the stats on my account yesterday and saw that I got one click from something called FlickrLeech. FlickrLeech is a nice way to surf Flickr photos. Their tag line is "because paging sucks" and their solution to the problem of flipping through photo pages one photo at a time is to present a huge page of thumbnails. The photos are sorted by Flickr's "interestingness" algorithm so they're of a reliably high quality.
Game to kill off a Friday: Mutually Assured Destruction - Remember Missile Command? That's what this is, but with upgrades and an operatic soundtrack. Playing with the mouse is not as fun as the huge roller ball in the arcade game, but still a good time. (Did the arcade game have a huge roller ball control or did I just have little hands when that game was in the arcade area of the local roller rink?)
All day yesterday I waited for the Porn for Girls by Girls site to load and it wouldn't. Wow, I thought, this must be some amazing porn for it to be seeing such heavy traffic. This morning I finally got to see what the big deal is. It's a (basically sexist but not entirely unfunny) joke and totally safe for work.
Frank Pringle has found a way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything - This is billed as a solution to producing oil but to me it seems more like a solution to dealing with waste. The machine must require energy to zap all this stuff to turn it into oil and I can't imagine that energy is coming in any particularly green way. But if the result is that waste material is turned into something useful, it might be a good idea for places with a waste management problem - especially if incineration or some other solution requiring energy is already part of the plan.
Speaking of energy, Vampire Energy is the term for the energy used by appliances on stand-by or other off-but-not-quite-off modes.
Last time I looked at Newseum it was a gallery of newspaper front pages. Now they've got an interactive map so you can roll your mouse over a point on the map and see the newspaper from page from that location. (A little slow to load but it works.)
I've mentioned before that I bump into the Beppe Grillo blog online all the time and always struggle with translating it. The New York Times provides a welcome explanation of what's going on in Italy and why Beppe Grillo is such a big deal. In linking here I'm pointing to the video set in the story. Grillo blogs his appearance in the Times.
Could a morbidly obese goalie shut out an NHL team?
15 Can't-Miss Ways to Declutter Your Mind - It must be the season, I've been feeling muddle-headed all week.
"Pop-up Card Designer is a Windows application, which generates unfolded pattern of Pop Up Cards."
Speaking of cards, 30 Years of LucasFilm Christmas Cards
Is it paranoid or reasonable to worry about how you're going to look on YouTube if the security tape that's recording you getting robbed right now is published online? The funny thing is that by attacking the robber he probably made a better video than if he'd just stood back with his hands up. Maybe the secret isn't to make yourself look good but to try to be as boring as possible at all times so no one would ever want to share a video of you. I've seen stats on the likelihood that a security camera is capturing your image at any given time in particular cities or neighborhoods but I don't think anyone's managed to calculate the likelihood that any given action you take will be published on a video sharing site. (Thanks Michele.)
The Machine Girl trailer has Web clickers sputtering at the sheer density of coolness. Just as you say, "Aw, yeah" you have to interrupt yourself to say, "Aw YEAH." NOTE: Contains lots of blood spray, which I don't regard as unsafe for work but some people would want to be warned.
Less exciting: An Alien v. Predator sequel
The 25 Coolest (and Most Unconventional) Keyboards
"Holy Grail" of Graffiti Uncovered Amidst Condo Conversion - I know it's a pretty narrow audience that cares about graffiti art, but I was impressed at the idea of finding valuable and historic art on a wall in the course of construction.
Insane Car Battery Hack! A great parody of that string of DIY videos we saw of people cutting open batteries to find little batteries inside.
The Mountain Dew Christmas Tree - No virtual worlds or games or contests but totally user generated and totally cool and even a little trendy to the extent that DIY projects are popular online.
The N.Y. Times item about whether high school boys who have sex with their female teachers are really the victims of abuse is showing up paired with this global map of the average age of virginity loss. I think it's male and female combined.
Wikipedia's alternative explanations for the origin of the term "w00t" make more sense to me than the gaming (we own other team) explanation relayed by the Merriam-Webster folks.
The Facebook Marketing Bible - This is from the Facebook people so it's a little self-promotional, but in the same way that the viral video article the other day blew the lid off the idea of simply uploading a video to YouTube and watching it go viral, this shows that there's much more to Facebook marketing than just having a profile in the system.
"An A&E Billboard 'Whispers' a Spooky Message Audible Only in Your Head in Push to Promote Its New 'Paranormal' Program" As creepy and Minority Report as it sounds, I think that focused audio technology is neat. I'd love to see an outdoor dance club that is silent to the outside observer but everyone on the dance floor hears their own audio beam.
Google's 2007 Year-end Zeitgeist - I don't know if sociologists would agree but these stats feel like looking into the heart of mankind.
Web scandal of the day: "Junior" panties at Wal-Mart that suggest the commodification of girlie bits. I passed over this one because I don't really feel comfortable having an opinion about little girl underwear but I keep seeing the matter discussed online so it's worth noting.
Speaking of commodifying bits, Penthouse Buys Group of Social-Networking Sites - What makes this particularly noteworthy is that there was also a recent headline about Vivid (the porn maker) suing PornTube (a YouTube knock-off for porn). Taken together it looks like porn could be considering an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy. Like with other industries, the question is how to beat free porn at its own game.
Bacon chocolate chip cookies with maple cinnamon glaze - Best quote: "I've always viewed bacon as 'the candy bar of meats.'" Reminds me of my southern relatives who find a way to put bacon on everything.
The Ultimate Bootleg Experience is leading with Led Zep 2007 right now.
Awesome AOL commercial - "After their fifteen minutes are up, internet celebrities have to get on with their lives."
I'm having a hard time figuring what advice I would give the magazine industry with regard to my Commuter Click habit. I once bought a subscription to the New Yorker because I saw how often I was printing up their articles. But I never read the actual magazine so I let the subscription lapse. This week the Malcolm Gladwell item on IQ is my second New Yorker Commuter Click this week. So what's the lesson? Should the New Yorker come with perforated pages so I can tear out the articles and carry them in my pocket and throw them away at the end of my commute?
You know the year is coming to an end when...
Of course someone got a bit of video. I can't imagine this is going to be allowed to live online for free so click while you can.
[YouTube:QZxukPZ0pjA]
A new-to-me term we're definitely going to hear more often: Future-safe archives. When bloggers die, what happens to their Web content? It happens all the time on Clicked that in the immediate aftermath of newsworthy death we'll swoop in for a bit of insight, but what about longer term online legacies?
BoingBoing features a story about aerosolized pig brains being hazardous to your health and BoingBoing commenters have a field day.
Crestock's Photoshop Contest 2007 winners are transporting to say the least. Everyone seems to be linking to Round 2 because the winners were announced recently but scrolling back through the blog has some fun images to find.
Speaking of photo trickery, Photojojo today features how to use a lens from a pair of glasses as a fisheye lens for your camera. "The thicker the better."
Folks who've been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Tesla electric cars to the road will be interested to see work taking place on the company's first store.
Pretty much every xkcd comic ends up on the front page of Reddit and the cartoonist himself has been celebrated as a geek icon. Today's makes me realize that there's a whole new generation for whom "it's complicated" is sufficient definition of their relationship status. Gone are the days of "do you like like him or just like him?"
"Litroenergy is a patent pending designed light source material that emits light for 12 plus years- without electricity or sun exposure!" The last sentence is the best: "It's not the most harmful radioactive thing, but yes there have been some incidences in the past where the workers were poisoned who dealt with it." No prob! How can I strap it to my child?
My NBC colleagues have signed a deal with a service called SanDisk called Fanfare. I never heard of Fanfare or Take TV so I searched around to play with them. The idea is that you go to the Fanfare site where their partners' shows are listed. You download the shows you want onto the Take TV device, which is basically a fancy flash drive. Then you plug your Take TV into an adapter that is plugged into your TV and that's how you watch TV content from the Web on your TV. I only bothered to click this item because I think thumb drives would be a cool way to distribute content. I think it'd be huge if NBC offered the first two seasons of Heroes on USB flash drives encased in collectable Heroes action figures, for example. I think I've already shared my idea that bands should release music on cool little thumb drive sculptures instead of on CD. All that said, I don't really understand why Take TV is a good idea. If I want to watch Web video on my TV, I run video and audio lines out of my machine and into my TV, basically treating my TV like a giant monitor. Isn't that better than needing a middle-man device?
Speaking of middle-man devices, I see Vudu is going to offer TV too. That long-standing open question of which medium will eat the other: will we watch TV on the Web or surf the Web on TV seems to be looking for an answer in these ambassador devices.
Google has expanded its Street View to 8 more cities. If you live in one of them it's time to go check and make sure you weren't picking your nose on the sidewalk when the Google van drove by.
Breaking: VOIP on iPod Touch - The technicals of this go way over my head, but if someone is doing it, eventually someone will put it in a nice bundle. You'll recall the iPod Touch can surf the Web via wifi. If only it had a mic, you could make VOIP calls on it and have something like an iPhone without having to deal with a phone service provider. The aftermarket is working on it.
Just as I was considering giving Second Life another chance because of Mark Glaser's recent essay, I read one of those ridiculous over-reaching predictions that makes me want to dismiss the whole thing. "Dr Castronova, who has written a book on the subject entitled Exodus To The Virtual World, drew parallels to the 1600s when thousands of people left Britain for a new life in North America." Tsk, please.
6 Online Tools for Text to Speech you would not want to miss
Per Denny's comment on the Colorado shooter, after the Omaha shooter I saw Glenn's remarks on how the mall's "gun free" status left shoppers and workers unprotected from the rampage. They're followed here with more thoughts on the idea of making places that ban guns liable for the protection of people who shop there. (Glenn is a well establish gun rights advocate so he was a first click for me on the subject.) To Denny's point, here's Glenn's round-up on Assam. And I'll add that while I do think the story's coverage would have been different if it has happened on a week day (there's a difference between bias and the realities of news coverage), it's bound to make the heads of folks like Denny and Glenn explode to see that the hero headline went to the unarmed man who shouted insults instead of the armed woman who actually ended the ordeal. I know that's partly because they've got video of the guy, but the story of what she did is really remarkable.
Based on the round-up here I was able to find a few of Matthew Murray's posts here, here, and here.
Interestingly, "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can, especially..." is also an Eric Harris (Columbine killer) quote.
The New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas was published yesterday. I'm pleased with how many of them surfaced in Clicked over the course of the year.
Playing this morning: The Phish channel on imeem. I read that they'd completed their collection of major label deals so I signed up for a quickie account and tried a few of the suggested links. The full free playlist is down the left column a bit, not at the top center like you might expect. Next in the queue is Portal because I had this song in my head all weekend. (AFTER NOTE: None of the songs I found are like really like this one. Either I didn't find the right band or that song is an anomaly in their catalog.) (AFTER AFTER NOTE: Ok, I'm an idiot. Portal is a game, not a band. The song was written by Jonathan Coulton so now I'm listening to his playlist. By the looks of his site he's a fun performer. I love the series of photos from the performer's perspective.
Man proposes to girlfriend via Zune - It never occurred to me that the modern equivalent of the mix tape might be a pre-loaded mp3 player.
120 Self Promotion Ideas for Graphic Designers & Freelancers (Free or Almost Free) - I decided to include this one because self-promotion is the key to success in so many fields and most of these ideas aren't necessarily design specific.
In case being part micro-owner of a Football Club wasn't your thing, but you still want to participate in the group management of a company, Premium Cola may be just your thing.
Commuter Click: Atul Gawande with a look inside intensive care. I've interviewed him a couple times for books he's published. He does a good job revealing what the medical industry is really like.
The Wind Dam sounds more like a wind funnel. As much as I like the idea of taking advantage of naturally windy spots, but stringing up a huge sheet like that gives me pause.
While looking for more info on the odd new Japanese fashion trend of dressing in medical bandages I found out that I just missed the 12th Robo-One Grand Championship. How come Battlebots was never this cool?
The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos - "The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we don't get a video 100,000 views, we don't charge."
Hot in Google search right now: thermohaline circulation - The problem with Google trends is that it's not always easy to see what's causing the spike in popularity. Thermohaline circulation is the name of the churning of the ocean that results from different temperatures and salinity in the water. What it looks like to me is that the recent hurricane forecast says we're in an active hurricane cycle because thermohaline circulation is in the midst of a long term increase trend. But we've been warned that one of global warming's most catastrophic consequences is or will be a slowdown in thermohaline circulation. Can it be both ways? I appreciate anyone with some expertise weighing in on this one. ADDING: As it happens I have an oceanographer in the family. He speculates some of the hype is the result of a major geophysics meeting this week in San Francisco.
The woman who harassed a teen girl on MySpace until she killed herself is, not surprisingly, getting a real hard time from neighbors. The suggested justification is that the law doesn't cover her crime so the community has taken it into their own hands by "shunning" her and her family. I'm bothered that the language used to explain the lack of charges: "no charges could be applied under current law." The fact that the story involves a MySpace hoax gives the impression that technology has outpaced the law in this case and future law will hold people like Lori Drew to account. But what new law would be needed to cover this case that doesn't already exist AND that wouldn't be a complete nightmare for innocent people to deal with? A ban on misrepresenting your true identity online? A ban on the surreptitious observation of others online? It seems like all the bad things that happened in this story were real world bad things that wouldn't be legal just because they were done through the Internet. The story doesn't appear to require more laws restricting the use of the Internet.
I mention this because I've been watching folks online freaking out about a new bill called the SAFE Act. "The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000." Netizens are right to be concerned because Congress has a history of ignorant overlegislation geared more toward scoring cheap political points than making any sense. But as this article points out, ISPs are already required to report child porn. This new bill just sets up penalties for not doing so. What the bill doesn't require is that ISPs actively monitor the content on their system.
One legal matter than has been resolved: It's OK for Google to show you little pictures of naked ladies in the results for your searches for naked ladies.
Speaking of new laws for a new age, 'Lyrical terrorist' sentenced over extremist poetry
Did you see the story of that subway beat-down video? I didn't like to it when it was fresh because frankly there are better beat down videos out there. It's the kind of video that makes you wonder where these kids' parents are, and in a novel twist, the Daily News talked to the father of one of the girls and he appears to be an upstanding individual.
What's weirder, this human hamster cage or the fact that there's such a thing as "Dome News?"
Microsoft Embarrassed After Computerized Santa Brings Up Oral Sex With Young Girl - Sexually harass Sarah Connor.
Trailer for the new Grant Theft Auto 4 - It's becoming increasingly difficult to resist buying a game system.
Speaking of trailers, here's the new Speed Racer trailer. From here you can get a bigger version but the quality doesn't really support it.
And one more, the Prince Caspian movie trailer.
Julian Beever the 3-D sidewalk drawing guy has new pieces.
While I completely understand the scoffing and skepticism about the new corporate Blog Council, as a blogger who probably comes pretty close to qualifying for membership I can see why it could be useful to a lot of people. I'm not going to try to justify clueless corporations ignoring users and acting like, well, clueless corporations, and maybe my imagination is getting carried away, but I've been to media conferences where the lessons being shared by panelists don't apply well to msnbc.com. A lot of social ideas just don't scale well. Ten people talking is not the same as ten thousand people talking. And trust me when I tell you, people behave very differently when they think they're talking to a corporation instead of a human being. Heck, even a panel on how to explain what's going on online to colleagues who haven't been keeping up would be handy. So if the Blog Council is about adapting new Web ideas to their unique position, then great. If the Blog Council is about corporations trying to figure out how to fake their way through the social web or generally plotting world domination, then pfft.
Speaking of corporations, this War on Greed video could make a nice episode of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" if it wasn't for all those normal people they stuck in there. (If Brave New Films sounds familiar it's the site that did the Fox News Porn videos.)
Top 10 Craziest Star Wars Tattoos - NOTE: Includes one, maybe two, NSFW images. What's crazier than a list of 10 is that this is from a book of Start Wars body art.
The best things to do with your old computer - In this case "things" means art projects.
My favorite part of the Iran nuke program story is that intelligence experts were able to look at news photos and say basically, naw, they're doing it wrong.
Speaking of photos in the news, it's weird how much talk there is about photos of Jennifer Love Hewitt in a bathing suit. I guess it's because she actually addressed them on her site. These are the photos.
Still speaking of photos, Fake photos alter real memories. (And hey Dennis, look who's quoted in that last paragraph.) I promise I'm not trying to harp on the witness reliability issue but P.S. Chimps beat humans in memory test.
I played with this climate change interactive on msnbc.com for a while today. I really like this way of displaying information. It's a billion times better than a list of headlines.
Cute viral video animals supporting the striking writers.
This "Here comes another bubble" video seems to be taking the Web by storm - at least among people who have a financial interest in the Internet.
Speaking of resisting the hype, something that has folks really excited about social networking is the idea of contextual advertising. If you're pumping all of your personal information into your profile, the site should be able to present you with ads that are well suited to your interests. More effective ads means more money all around. It makes so much sense no one's really checking to see if it works. Except here.
Speaking of advertising and popping bubbles, this criticism of the way Facebook handles its public image is also rampant online. It's strange how just months ago all you could read was praise about Facebook and how they were opening their platform and what geniuses they are. Now, since the whole "Beacon" thing (that's the ad software that follows you even when you're not on a Facebook page and reports what you're doing online to your friends) all I see are items about how poorly they're presenting themselves. UPDATE: Oops, there's Zuckerberg now...
"What are the catch-all, quick-and-easy-dinners-that-still-manage-to-taste-decent that you keep on hand?" This is the question bloggers are answering when they participate in Works-for-me Wednesday.
New music service Beemp3 does a funny dance to stay on the right side of the law while surfacing free mp3s. Click on the music you want to hear and they give you a quick list of disclaimers including:
4. All music on is presented only for fact-finding listening.
5. You MUST remove a song from the computer after listening.
6. If You won't delete files from the computer, You'll break the copyrights protection laws.
Um... Ok. Check the box and get the songs for free. It worked for about half of the songs I tried. Not better than that SeeqPod site we saw the other day but it feels like the same technology.
R2D2 translator - For something so useless I played with it way too long. The only thing I can say about the translations themselves is that they do appear to have sounds assigned to words. You can hear the sound for bike in "red bike," "blue bike" and "green bike." I expected the counting sounds to be more patterned but I do hear a pattern in a series like "ten twenty thirty."
Here's another of those Bush administration timeline/overviews. This time it's a look at the Department of Homeland Security and how it spent its money. (Not pretty.)
I think this is fake but it's a good story and a good lesson. Remember that recent story of the girl who committed suicide after being bullied by an adult neighbor pretending to be a teenage boy? Pretty much every telling of the story makes the adult bully, Lori Drew, the bad guy. I've read that a lot of people had already figured out the name of the family and have been taken matters into their own hands, harrassing them. This is purportedly the blog of that adult telling her side of the story.
According to the blog she pretended to be a teenage boy to defend her daughter against bullying by the eventual victim. In the course of her act she became a ring leader in her daughter's peer group. Naturally, stirring up drama with 13-year-olds got out of control and went horribly wrong. The kicker is that we're now to believe that to tell her story she created yet another fake teenage personality pretending to be friends with the now-dead girl and arguing the defense of Lori Drew. And now that no charges are filed she's revealed herself behind this second fake identity and told her whole story. And now the Drew blogger is engaging commenters, trying to defend herself against criticism. Was this already a movie?
Drew's (real) lawyer was on the Today show yesterday by the way.
Did Morgan Spurlock Find Osama Bin Laden?! If he did, surely the U.S. would have him in custody or dead by now, right? Even if he's not required by law to report knowing where bin Laden is, he'd be run out of town on a rail if he found bin Laden but didn't say anything.
Christmas Wasn't Always Like This: It Used to Be Much Worse - In this case "worse" means secular.
Bill of Rights Under Bush: A Timeline - Remember a while ago I was wondering how long it would take after Bush's departure for folks to move on? I seem to recall taking a lot of heat for even asking the question so we don't have to rehash that but it did come to mind when I looked at this list. I have a feeling this is the kind of thing we'll see a lot of in the immediate Bush aftermath - lots of comprehensive lists and timelines.
"Photo-sharing for pictures taken where you are not allowed to take them." Like, for example, in a courthouse where the make you check your cameras at the security gate. Looks like mostly a lot of museums and art galleries. I'm sure their point is that the photo bans are foolish but a search for "bridge" pulls up nothing and a search for "tunnel" only had a couple so this doesn't (yet) represent the security aspect of photo bans.
How to Stop Downloading Fakes and Junk From BitTorrent - One tactic against piracy is to introduce bogus files to file sharing networks. One of the earliest examples that comes to mind is when Madonna bombed file sharing services with bogus versions of her new album, along with a brief F bomb dropping message. Anyway, this essay is specifically about torrents and ways to assess their authenticity.
Freakonomics conducts a seriously long interview with Bruce Schneier. I click links to Schneier's security blog pretty often so I don't feel especially compelled to read this, but the introduction says, "...his answers are extraordinarily interesting, providing mandatory reading for anyone who uses a computer." Hmmm... I use a computer...
The family of Web sites associated with the new Dark Knight movie.
Beware the coming WiFi router invasion.
I wouldn't spend 50 grand for it, but a hanging tent is a cool idea. I don't understand the hard wood floor part. Wouldn't that ruin the portability?
I have jury duty today. If anyone reading this is at the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, come say hello, I'm sitting in the back row.
So far I can't complain. The staff has been polite and helpful. I'm a little bummed they made me check my cameras but that's not the end of the world. If I don't get picked for a trial, this will be my only day of service and I won't have to come back for 8 years. Last time I had to do this it took a few days and came around every 4 years. Last time I did this they also knew pretty early in the day whether they'd need us or not, but it sounds like this one is going to take all day.
Meanwhile, there's free wifi so depending on how voir dire goes I may be able to get something done after all.
UPDATE: So far so good. I'm not on a jury but I was part of a larger group from which jury members are being picked, which means I get to sit in the audience and watch and listen to everyone tell their personal stories of court experiences and personal connections to law enforcement and other things having to do with the trial (an armed robbery). You know I'm the kind of person who like to look at the MySpace pages of people in the news so take that into consideration when I tell you this is really entertaining. I don't know how open this is to the public but someone with writing aspirations would do well to sit in on this just for the character ideas.
With regard to the comment below about Brookly being nicer than Chicago and only having to go every 8 years, apparently Brooklyn courts took a new philosophy of making the whole thing as pleasant as possible but also making sure no one weasels out very easily. That means there's a huge population to draw from so they cycle is much longer than it used to be.
I gotta go, I'm due in court. ;)
FINAL UPDATE: I'm not a juror. I came really close. I got all the way into "the box" but the judge dismissed me at the 11th hour for not believing in witnesses.
I know, that sounds ridiculous. Even the judge was a little incredulous, explaining to me that witness testimony has been acceptable evidence since the dawn of time. That's not a quote; I think he said, "...since the Magna Carta" or something like that, but as a fallible witness I can't testify to his exact words - and that was basically my point.
I had already tried to explain to the judge that I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep my personal experiences with cops and lawyers and the legal system out of my perception of the trial's events. I wasn't trying to be weasely but I'd been thinking about it through the lunch break: if I apply what I know about cops from the cops I know to an officer testifying in a trial, am I being unfair to the officer or just using my good sense as a human? Ultimately I allowed him to convince me that bringing a personal point of view was all part of being a juror and that wasn't the same as not being able to render a fair judgment.
But the prosecutor asked a question about whether we as jurors would have trouble with the testimony of only a single witness in the case. We couldn't know anything about the witness, just that there was only one. Again I had to speak up. I can't view one witness's testimony with the same regard as other evidence.
A few years ago the cable folks conducted an experiment in which a production assistant ran through the set and stole something off the anchor desk and then ran away - all live on the air. The challenge was obviously to test whether viewers could reliably describe the production assistant. You already know the outcome because we've seen a million of these studies with the same results. Eyewitnesses aren't reliable and if there's only one, I can't put as much stock in that testimony as I would in, say, a fingerprint.
But I don't base my view on hokey cable news experiments. Am I crazy for thinking that everyone knows by now that witnesses don't always see what they think they see?
And that's not to mention all the links we've clicked here in this blog that trick you into seeing what you're not really seeing or trick you into not seeing what you really are. Remember this video that made fools of us all?
I'm not saying no one can ever get anything right. Naturally everything comes with a context, but when you're answering questions in the abstract in the jury box you aren't afforded the luxury of context.
Adding to my bias is my own experience of having been mugged at gunpoint and being required to testify before the grand jury about it. The cops were great in my case. They caught my muggers very quickly and were very helpful over all. But they also helped me remember some of the details of my attackers, something I believe nearly all cops do for victims of crime. For reasons too lengthy to describe here, I'm confident I identified my muggers correctly, but sitting in the jury box today and having to answer in absolute that no part of my brain would suspect that a single witness had been helped to remember certain details that could not be corroborated by another witness was farther than I could make myself go.
What actually got me dismissed was when the judge asked what I would do if his instructions explicitly said that I should treat the witness testimony with the same weight as the rest of the evidence. I don't know if I understood him correctly but all I heard was that he wanted me to think what I don't think simply because he told me to. I don't remember if I answered with a flat "no" but I clearly wasn't giving the right answers so he cut me loose.
I don't know why I feel bad about being dismissed. One woman told the judge it was against her religion to judge other people, that was God's job. She was dismissed. Another woman told the judge she had trouble paying attention in general. Yes, it made school and work hard. OK, off you go. Did those women go home puzzling the meaning of fairness? Did they have to DVR Heroes and Tin Man while they wrestled with the nature of their faith in democracy?
What troubled me most as I left the courthouse was the realization that maybe I don't have as much confidence in the justice system as I thought I did. I know the system produces the occasional unfair result but on the whole I've always had a good feeling about juries. Could I still believe in the system without buying into one of its most basic evidentiary tenets? Worse, does it make me a leech on society to enjoy America's law and order but sorry, I can't actually participate because I don't really buy into that whole "witness" thing? At the very least I felt bad for copping out on the question of this particular guy's guilt or innocence. He may be an armed robber or maybe he isn't. Good luck figuring that out for the rest of us while I sit here and ponder whether the shape of my navel is fair.
In the end I'm sure I looked like a classic media dink - some annoyingly pedantic blowhard who has to make the whole thing about him and can't get with the program. By the time I got home from the courthouse my thoughts had drifted from the question of eye witness reliability to the possibility that my time in the media really has twisted my sense of the world. Has my immersion in conspiracy theories, counterpoint arguments and taser videos corrupted my sense of reality? Has the online celebration of the counterintuitive and the contradictory caused me to see the world through a backward lens in which people don't really see what they see and the only way to be fair is to strip away bias to a degree that only exists in the rantings of righteous pundit bloggers? Should there be a big NOTE: at the top of Clicked: warning, may cause a warped perception of the world that could hinder your ability to objectively participate in the duties and responsibilities required of citizens of a democracy.
I didn't get a chance to read this piece bashing the idea of a YouTube debate before the actual debate but we've already looked at reasons why soliciting questions from the public is ultimately a meaningless stunt. But given what we know now this sentence has a whole different meaning: "As Republican presidential contenders brace for Wednesday's CNN-YouTube debate, the executive in charge of the event is unapologetic about his decision to put mainstream journalists in charge of deciding which user-contributed YouTube videos the candidates will actually face on the air." I wonder if he wishes he'd let the stunt play itself out now.
At first I didn't understand the point of the Democrats' Flipper TV. Why archive an opposing party's candidates' stump speeches? But it looks like the point is to help bloggers spot that "macaca moment" that could derail an opposing candidate.
FoodTube - Exactly what you think it is.
Watchmen is nearly here. Getting a peek at photos of the set(s) created a stir online.
Video: Blogs in Plain English - I imagine most Clicked readers know what a blog is but if you don't or particularly if someone you know doesn't and you've been struggling to explain it, this does a good job in three minutes. This whole series is handy that way.
Tag Heuer plans watch phone for 2008
Online Consumer-Generated Reviews Have Significant Impact on Offline Purchase Behavior - We all know this already but I wanted to relay the funny story of choosing a restaurant for a special occasion and my wife chose one that she'd been wanting to go to even though it had some bad reviews in Menupages. It took a surprising amount of mental will to ignore those reviews even though they were by strangers whose taste (not to mention sanity) is unknown to me. Weird.
Here's a new one to me: Google poisoning - Hackers use search engine optimization tricks to get their junk sites to show up in your search results.
Not only is Definr an incredibly fast dictionary but it's faster to type than Dictionary.com, which is what I usually use. (And no pop-ups.)
"This is a guide that we have build for people to use to lose weight by playing Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii." Here's the introductory entry. As far as I know, Mickey DeLorenzo is the original Wii weight loss guy.
South Jersey Rock Festival to Rival Bonnaroo - One of my fondest college memories is spending a few days at England's Glastonbury Festival. In fact, I was just thinking of it the other day when I saw the Today show looking for people who are daring enough not to shower for three days. I must have gone 4 days that weekend and lived on beef jerky, Pop Tarts and truck food to boot.
An old clock in a national monument is broken. Enthusiasts get together, build a secret workshop in the national monument, fix the clock and then reveal their work to officials.
Ted and Anna get engaged on the set of Scrubs
I managed 95% on the booze test. I answered all but 2 on the first clue and those two on the second.
The International Space Station and the Shuttle Atlantis pass in front of the sun. (Your browser may resize this to fit your screen. See if you can make it the original size for most impressive viewing.)
A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff
The Smoking Gun has some information on the producer of that Two Girls One Cup video. I'm more interested in someone interviewing the women in the video. Even if the only question is, "What were you thinking???"
Autoblog is extremely discouraging of driving 219 mph on a public road but the sound on the video when that thing drives by is undeniably cool.
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