(My battery is offering me 21 minutes to post this entry which illness and wifilessness prevented me from posting Friday. Ready, set, go!)

The one thing a person who works in the news doesn't want when then go on vacation is for any news to happen.  So it was troubling on Friday when rumors of Fidel Castro's death were tearing up the Web. Such rumors aren't uncommon. Without paying very close attention I've seen similar "a reliable source tells me" blog posts ripple through the Web. Though I can't be sure, what appears to have made this particular rumor all the more potent was the assuredness of its reporting by renowned gossip blogger Perez Hilton.  As crazy as it sounds to get new on matters of state from a gossip blogger, there was something about the very fact of that craziness that gave the rumor a new level of believability. 

Something I notice about all the accounts that claim some first hand "reliable source" is that almost all of them cite increased preparedness by Miami police. I'm wondering if the whole thing was a case of police nearly creating a problem by trying to prepare for one.

The combination of the new season on Heroes approaching and the 18th birthday of Hayden Panettiere has put Miss Panettiere's name in a lot of headlines lately.  Removed from that hype, however, her Got Milk ad may be the best one ever.

New Harold and Kumar trailer.

No sooner has YouTube come up with an ad idea than someone comes up with a Firefox extension to block them.

The World's Highest Escalator would be cooler if it wasn't enclosed. Meanwhile, was this building constructed for the purpose of being an action movie set or what?

"Experts have found a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers." Interesting idea about applications to video games.

"So-called thermobaric weapons have been used by the US against suspected al-Qaida and Taliban underground bases. Combined heat and pressure kill people over a wide area by sucking the air out of lungs and destroying internal organs." Obviously I recognize the horror with which some people are linking to this story but from a more distant and cold perspective it's pretty amazing what the military is coming up with.

"NBC is getting into the ring with "American Gladiators," which has been revived by the Peacock for midseason." Could be cool if they don't let it devolve into a pro-wrestling variant, which is how I remember the old version.  (Obviously MSNBC.com is partly an NBC property. I have no inside scoop however. I did see Jimmy Falon in 30 Rock the other day though, which has nothing to do with anything, but celebrity sightings are always cool.)

The Daily Show the other night made a joke about the police ammunition shortage being connected to the war (specifically their correspondent doing a lot of gratuitous shooting into sand dunes just to feel manly) and it reminded me to look back for this link I'd noted.  Confederate Yankee not only explains the shortage more thoroughly but receives input from actual ammunition manufacturers. Remember that item about Google News allowing comments from those involved in the story? I imagine this is what it'd be like.

Design blog offers free Weight training workout sheet pdf. I'm not sure if this works if you pyramid both your weight and your reps, but still handy if you find yourself sitting at a machine and saying, "Crap, how much do I do on this machine again?"

This fake Zune phone ad is kind of mean but still pretty funny. I kind of like the idea of rotary on a cell phone.

Speaking of phones that do not exist, there's lots of enthusiasm for rumors of a Google phone.

The guy who unlocked the iPhone is auctioning "the second one" on eBay. What I'm seeing now are sites that are offering to do it for you.  I haven't checked them out and I'm not sure I'd know a scam from the real thing anyway, but if you've already done your phone phreaking homework and want your iPhone unlocked, try here or here.

Kevin Drum takes a novel, though not illogical, approach to assessing the surge by comparing this past June/July  to June/July 2006.

"A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration's Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president's remarks Thursday." Awkward!

Spirit Airlines CEO sends a "reply all" mail and accidentally tells the world what airline CEOs think of their customers. He basically points out that consumers aren't principled enough to do anything about their anger toward an airline ("[he] will be back when we save him a penny"). I'm not sure he's wrong about that.

Roll your mouse up and down the picture and watch the time of day change. Really neat but I can't think of what use it is. I'd like to see one with a clear sky and a view of the sun and/or moon so we can watch it move across the sky.

Speaking of cool photo stuff, I finally learned how to make these HD View images. The challenging part is that they're make with a command line tool, so you have to be familiar with what that is. The one thing I haven't figured out is how to put it on our server to show you what I made, but that'll be next.

Top 10 physically modified people - I thought this was going to be about photoshopped models or plastic surgery. "Modified" in this case refers to body modification, as in piercings and tattoos and its more extreme variants.

Ralph's Recommendation:

A Good Hunch -- Jumping Goat Challenge

Jump across floating rocks to escape each level.

This game offers a unique twist in that you control two goats, but your actions with the first goat determine what you can do with the second goat. It may sound complicated, but it's easy to get the hang of it.

Hope you have as much fun with it as I've had.
-Ralph

Woo Hoo! 10 minutes of battery left! Post!

It's a pisser to come down with a sore throat, fever and body aches on the day before you're to go on vacation for a week.  Of course, once at the beach its a little easier to deal with it. Funny how that works.

One happy coincidence is that just as I was thinking about what to leave up for a week this link rose through the ranks of popularity: 15 Web addresses for wasting time - view at your own risk

Meanwhile, I thought for sure I'd find an easy wireless signal here and that's not been the case.  I'm currently blogging from inside the rental car parked on some random residential road that finally offered up a signal I could piggyback on.  Once online I checked WiGle to see if there was something I'm missing and I'm not. Wifi deadzone.

Of course, when you read a story about an accusation of news photo Photoshopping (and if you're a Clicked reader who likes to follow these stories of media distortion of body images) you want to see it for yourself. In this case we're talking about French President Nicolas Sarkozy looking a bit more streamlined in his friend's magazine than in original news shots.  L'Express is making the accusation so you can see the photo comparison there.

The Google translator calls a love handle a "pad." I can only imagine what it says to French speakers when they try to translate "love handle."

NOTE: The article has a promotion for a Spencer Tunic slide show that includes one bare, if horizontal, breast. If you get in trouble at work for having this little boobie on your machine you have grounds for a maniacal rant.  For my part, you've been notified.

So You Think You Can Be President? This proposes putting presidential candidates through a reality show of fictional but relevant-to-the-job challenges. Viewers (voters) learn about candidates from their performance on the show instead of the current clearly flawed system to stump speeches, debates and media coverage. How many times have you watched survivor and thought, "Even if this guy doesn't win you know he's going to be flooded with corporate recruitment offers after this display of problem solving and management skills." Well, I always think that. If you don't like this idea, do you have a better one for getting a real sense of a candidate's character?

Speaking of unconventional reality shows, The Next Internet Millionaire looks like the Donald Trump show but the winner partners on an Internet venture.

Chad Vader does Chocolate Rain - hysterical.

The answer to the question of how Google expects to make money from YouTube is revealing itself.  "Semi-transparent animated 'overlay' ads" will appear at the bottom of sponsored videos.

Speaking of Google, the Web based Google Maps will now be embeddable like YouTube video.

Speaking of new Google maps features, Google Earth is adding Google Sky - I just installed it and it works really easily.  There's a button in the program that switches to the sky and the scroll and zoom around just like you do with the terrestrial map.

Speaking of getting a feel for space, the scale of the universe described in familiar metaphors.

Upon reading that the underground cities of Cappadocia, Turkey will outlast nearly everything else humans have constructed on Earth, this blogger does some extra legwork to learn more about the place.

"Deezer.com is now the first global website for music on demand with no restrictions: listening to all kinds of music is now free, unlimited, legal and accessible to all Internet users via a Web browser." Without having to sign up for anything I was able to search and listen to a full length song.  I had some buffering slowness but that was corrected when I gave the player some time to get ahead of itself. It even automatically played the next song on my search list. What's the catch here? Is this possible because it's based in France? Apparently they do pay out a portion of their ad revenue to artists. Checking the TechCrunch review, it sounds like I've got it right. The one thing I haven't found yet is how to link to an individual song. UPDATE: Found it.

Moan My IP - Nerdiest idea ever. A "sexy girl" moans the numbers in your IP address. Visually safe for work but it's sexy moaning out loud, so that part might not be work-safe.

My kid could paint that - My understanding about kids and art is that they have an innate sense of balance and composition.  My old art teachers would always bemoan the practice of teaching kids to circle off a corner of the page to indicate the sun. A semi-circle in the corner is a compositional no-no and as such, kids don't come up with that on their own.

New Advice: Don't Sit Up Straight - I was just reading a piece about how sitting saggy at work contributes to flabby abs. The advice I'm always happy to follow is that squirming is good for muscles, blood flow, calorie burning and to the extent it makes you look up from the screen, your eyes.

"CafeMom, a no-frills social network site for mothers, has raised $5 million in funding."

"Urban Ecological Subversion: The Art of Guerilla Gardening in Public Spaces" Wow, I didn't even know this had a name.  someone has been attaching coffee can planters on fences and sign posts in my neighborhood and I've jokingly called it "plantfiti" but I had no idea there was a such a thing as Guerilla Gardening. (Here's a Digg mirror of the site in case it's down.)

"Arsebook is an anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU HATE."

Folks are interested in a new Microsoft idea called Tafiti.  It's the search engine with some interactive Silverlight features.  I played with the site but since the point is to use the tools (the search engine is the same) watching the On10 clip was more informative.

Also drawing attention online is the announcement of HD Flash. "In other words, the quality of video has been substantially improved from the previous version of Flash Player 9." Thoughts naturally turn to both content and displays.

Speaking of Flash, Photos with Flash are superior to those without Flash.

Internet Commenter Business Meeting - The meeting participants act like blog/message board commenters (but not Clicked commenters, of course). NOTE: Coarse language.

"Montana Senator Max Baucus says he wants free college tuition to be offered for students majoring in math and science." That's straight out of one of those "...and the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale" bumper stickers.

The DeLorean will be back in 2008.  "Square nose, gull-wings and all" for nearly 60 grand.

Also via Jalopnik, Australians have apparently come up with a new version of the one-finger salute.

Beloit College's mindset list for the class of 2011 - It's a list of what the world looks like (or doesn't look like) to this age group.  Prepare to feel ANCIENT.

"Blogging isn't dead, it's just a subset of something much larger and more important." Hugh MacLeod expands on his Why we're all blogging less post. He makes the argument that new social tools mean that people who were blogging because there were no alternatives can now move out of the blogging realm (into Twitter or Facebook or whatever).

That may be the case for some, but it's equally likely that people aren't moving to new tools so much as adding them on top of what they already use - leading to what is being called the social graph problem. Count me in for wanting a central clearing site for all of my social apps. I'm already at the end of my attention span after logging into MSN IM, Blogger and Flickr.  Then I'm supposed to play with Facebook and Twitter? The funny thing is that I can see the advantages of those other tools but how many different times to I have to change my status to "out to lunch" before I get up from my desk? I understand most applications now have a way of rendering in Facebook and I know a lot of people who now use Facebook as their home page. I'm still working my way toward that.

Speaking of bringing outsiders into Facebook, their messenger now accepts outside e-mail addresses. That messenger has been the most useful thing for me so far.  It's like phone book for online contacts.  I've sent several messages to people who aren't even on my friends list (because who has time to deal with friends lists?) but who are friends and I needed a quick way to get in touch.

Speaking of who has time for Facebook, one Australian study puts the Facebook time suck at $5 billion bucks.

One thing I've finally made the time to add to my Facebook page is the NPR podcast app.

Speaking of streamlining your Web habits, The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now - The items on this list that I already do are so useful that I'm giving more serious thought to the others. Scheduled e-mail checking (#5) is an interesting idea.

Here's that guy who filed a complaint against Fred Thompson with the FEC. It turns out it's the same guy who brought the Mark Foley business to light. The way I understand his complaint, he says Thompson is campaigning with money that's supposed to be for exploring the possibility of campaigning.

"In what will surely be seen as a defining moment for the 9/11 truther movement, the History Channel has delivered a blow for sanity and rationalism by airing a superior documentary entitled 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction." I missed it.

I don't use Skype, so the headlines about them having service trouble didn't really register with me.  I did end up reading their explanation and found it interesting to think about. The problem was that Microsoft released some kind of security patch that required a machine restart. Everyone got the patch at the same time and rebooted at the same time.  The problem comes when the Skype customers have auto-sign-in when they restart.  So Skype got blasted with requests. "Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days."

Somewhere in my childhood I learned that there was bad stuff inside a battery and it was important not to break one open. So the recent spate of how-to videos that involve cutting open batteries are setting off all kinds of deep-seated mental alarms.

Remember that "Firefox is blocked" site last week? Not surprisingly it's been the subject of a bit of a backlash.

Will the new Google China blog search help Chinese citizens find censored material and ideas or will it help Chinese authorities track down subversive bloggers?

Ever see the Simpsons episode when Homer has an EZ Bake Oven plugged into the cigarette lighter jack in his car? Eat your heart out Homer!

A completely engrossing comic.  Note that it's long, so don't start it if you don't have a few minutes.

Speaking of comics, the coolest thing about this one is that when you go to the punchline URL you find they are actually soliciting photos of women in the shower playing electric guitar. (Totally safe for work right now.  Not sure what they'll do if they actually get some photos.)

Any guys out there looking for a clever way to propose marriage? Here's an interesting one.

Reddit has finally added a "media" channel for just pictures and videos.

Diet Coke is 99% Water (And That Is Now a Good Thing) - The idea is that it used to be an insult to say something is mostly water and now water is so desired that non-water advertises its similarity to water. Maybe it's a sign of my age then that I refer to things like decaf coffee and no-caffeine Coke as "brown water" in a bad way.

In case you thought those plastic snap-on spinning hub caps were the cheapest kind of fake bling you could add to your car, how about a giant magnetic fake sun roof?

Star Wars is bigger than Jesus.

Speaking of bigger than Jesus, I didn't know there was an anti-Santa movement.

Top three most expensive beers. Mostly noteworthy because number 2 is a Sam Adams beer.  I wouldn't have guessed that.

Superman's identity revealed (20 times) - I like the Candid Camera one.  What a cultural phenomenon that show was. There should be a cover about bloggers revealing his identity.

I didn't realize that if you don't live in an AT&T zone you simply can't have an iPhone.  Apparently if you're doing too much roaming they'll cut you off. With so many AT&T complaints, and now this hint of an iPhone underground, I've been wondering why people aren't signing up for European iPhone service. I wonder if there's any way for that to be practical.

I had never heard of The Jena Six until I was allowed to sit in on a Nightly News story meeting on Friday. Now I feel like I'm seeing it everywhere. I can't get past the early parts of the story's telling that mention, "According to the school's unspoken racial codes, however, that area was reserved for white kids..." I know kids form cliques and unofficial turf areas, but "unspoken racial codes" is hard to get my head around.

The Sunday talk shows ran clips of Karl Rove as a college student in 1972. It was part of a CBS newscast -a Dan Rather segment, ironically enough.  The Rove bit is at the 4 minute mark, but the who thing is a pretty interesting look at the foundations of modern campaigning.

[YouTube:BM0zJl9Bxk8]

Weird, scary and bizarre iPhone tales - I was going to pull out the individual ones I liked and just link to those but there are more cool ones than boring ones on the list.

One that isn't on the list is the guy charging money just to let people touch it. I guess supplies in some places are more limited than others.

Related: In discussing the ridiculous billing policy AT&T is applying to the iPhone, this blogger provides some tree to paper math. UPDATE: Hey look, he got an answer, sort of.

Speaking of the value of paper, "Flexible paper batteries could meet the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets, says a team of researchers."

One of these days I'm going to redo those categories in the right column.  I've been pretty good about checking the "games" box whenever an entry has a mention of a game or a recommendation from Ralph but those others I don't bother with. Instead I could probably make one for Doritos, one for lightning porn, definitely one for photoshopping imperfections from models and lately it seems like there could be one for busted news photos.  This week's feature is a woman holding up bullets she says were fired at her house in Iraq. The blog swarm is like meat in a piranha tank.

Speaking of fish in tanks, Really cool aquariums - Aquariums (aquaria?) are cool by definition. I currently maintain a terrarium for frogs but a reef tank has always been one of my "if I win the lottery" items. I once went to a store in New Hampshire that specialized in aquatic displays and they had fresh water tanks set up to look like the bottom of a northeastern pond.  They used native fish too, those kind of dull gray fish with just a little color and texture in the scales like sunfish or trout. The light was dark and filtered. Almost more like a living museum diorama, it was a great twist on the typical garish display.

In case you thought Google Street View was something new, check out Rand McNally's photo-auto maps (circa 1907).

"Americans these days use the media the way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination." In this case the quote is being used by Seattle Times editor David Boardman in a memo to staff about leaving their politics outside the newsroom.

Headline most seeming to be an Onion article and most depressingly not: Obama's Appeal to Well-Educated Not Conducive to Winning Nomination

Kind of related: The age of endarkenment

Speaking of the Onion, "Although many of its highways and bridges are in severe disrepair, the traditionally undemanding state of Minnesota isn't comfortable asking for more interstate funding, sources reported Monday." Yet another example of that site's amazing prescience - check out the date.

Speaking of supernatural vegetables, Seeing God in a slice of eggplant.

Amazing sandwich sculptures

Speaking of unusual art media, how about toothpicks and nails? (This feels like the kind of collection that was taken from somewhere else but it's the best grouping of this artist's work I could find.)

'Embrace the cheese' - Is a movie about dinosaurs strapped with weapons and sent off to battle a cool idea or a stupid idea?

Stephen King writes the last word on Harry Potter (a generally positive review).

"'Specially trained security personnel' will be watching passengers for 'micro-expressions' that will reveal treacherous agendas and insidious intentions at airports around the country."
Wouldn't it be cool if you really could specially train someone to recognize micro-expressions that would reveal treacherous agendas and insidious intentions? The special agents would experience life in slow motion, hearing the squish of every eye blink; the deepening dimples of a smile would groan like a twisted balloon.

The story of the Russian region declaring September 12th Conception Day drew a lot of titters but jokes aside, I wonder what would happen to a society if everyone had nearly the same birthday.

Top ten prison survival tips - I agree with the commenter who said these feel like they were written by someone who hasn't actually been to prison.  Of course, I haven't been to prison either so who am I to second guess?

I built a 535 ft. Slip 'n Slide - All I think when I look at this is "rash."

Speaking of unusual water recreation, insane wave pool in Tokyo. In the comments of the blog named on the clip a lot of people don't believe it's real. It looks real to me. I wonder how much water is displaced by that many people.  When they all get out is there an inch of water (or... ahem... whatever) in the bottom of the pool?

Speaking of undulating surfaces, "HypoSurface is the World's first display system where the screen surface physically moves! ... The surface behaves like a precisely controlled liquid: waves, patterns, logos, even text emerge and fade continually within its dynamic surface." If you click the "product" tab there are a bunch of videos to see it in action.  It's hard to tell how much noise it makes. Sounds a bit clacky.

I keep seeing links to photos from the recent Miss Teen USA competition, usually associated with an exclamation like, "That's a teenager?"  I don't know, some of them look like teenagers.

Following on the heels of the science tattoos from the other day, anatomy tattoos.

Lightning porn shot of the day! (Folks who've asked about tips on doing this, see his note about taking a lot of pictures.  He didn't just snap this because he saw lightning headed for the tree.)

We have not broken the speed of light. I don't know if you saw the article about the two scientists claiming they'd broken the speed of light. It was such thin gruel I didn't bother mentioning it here - the kind of science article that doesn't mention much of the science and instead gets all worked up about the possibilities "if it's true" or "if it works." Anyway, this blog focuses on the science to find out what they're really talking about (quantum tunneling).

Sometimes, worse than online games are these photo sites.  I lost some time to My Confined Space today. This one gave me a laugh. Not the thought of bad things happening to people in wheelchairs but the idea of putting the crocodiles at the bottom of the hill and thinking posting a sign will ensure that nothing bad happens.

"You've reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser." I'm not sure where this page is being used but the point is that Firefox can have features that so thoroughly block ads that some content providers feel like they're being robbed.

Cassette tape culture

"People with the surnames Morgan, Rackham, Bonny, Read, Kidd or Teach, are being invited to discover possible connections with the likes of Blackbeard and Calico Jack, in a series of events by English Heritage." I have a feeling that even if some of these guys did manage to procreate, they weren't likely in the kind of name taking relationship that would be useful to genealogists.

"Even if it is fake, it's a damn good CGI job." And when it comes to UFO videos, that's all we really ask.

Ralph's Recommendation:

School Invaders: Blast the Aliens
Bug-eyed aliens have invaded your school. You and your friends must blast them into puddles of green goo before it's too late!

This one's a bit challenging at first, but it gets pretty fun once you get the hang of it. Be sure to use your mouse to look around each room before you proceed, and don't try to go too far too fast.
-Ralph

It's always a challenge to find what the Web has to offer on breaking news in a country where English isn't the primary language - in this case a powerful earthquake in Peru, specifically Lima.

There's some interesting information to be found on the USGS site, with more specific details here.

I wasn't familiar with the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System but they've got a pretty fascinating page put together as well, including damage risks assessments and more maps.

Speaking of risks, this isn't directly related to the earthquake but it shows areas of concern with regard to global warming related flooding in Lima.  If the tsunami warnings come true, this is probably a fair projection of the areas of impact. (via this map site)

As far as I can tell, the best direct source for Peruvian news is a newspaper site called El Comercio. Folks are leaving comments and reactions there (in Spanish of course).  The front page has extensive coverage and a few videos and I see they're soliciting reader media so we may see some photos and video from the street. (I made the mistake of hitting the refresh page and now the site is hung up.  No doubt some heavy traffic headed their way.) ADDING: They've added a Twitter link to receive updates.  Great idea and a nice reminder to check out Twittervision. This will probably only work while the news is breaking but you can literally watch the world talking about the earthquake. Fascinating.

I'm checking this Lima blogger periodically for updates. Speaking of Peruvian bloggers, can someone explain what this one is saying about the light in the sky? "Sali a la calle y vi el cielo iluminado, como si un rayo hubiera partido la noche."

In checking YouTube I found this video of an earthquake in Peru from 1970. I'm not clear if that's real footage or some kind of dramatization, but I did find some details in Wikipedia. "Combined with a resultant landslide, it was the most catastrophic natural disaster ever recorded in the history of Peru." Comparisons will likely be forthcoming regardless of the outcome of today's event.  At the very least it put the public panic in context. ADDING: The more I poke around, the more it appears that Peru has a lot of familiarity with big earthquakes. The article on MSNBC.com now mentions, "The last time a quake of magnitude 7.0 or larger struck Peru's central coast was in 1974 when a magnitude 7.6 hit in October followed by a 7.2 a month later." And there was the one in 2005 and the one in 2001 (this model of the resulting tsunami is worth seeing).

By the way, I've been using Babelfish to help fill in on translation where my memory of Spanish class is failing.  Results are mixed.

I see Nightly News got their video from something called America TV but that video doesn't appear to have made it to their site yet.

Great coverage at Cronica Viva.

ONE MORE UPDATE: "One of the most peculiar things is that in spite of the intense movement, the connection to Internet continued working. Neither the MSN Messenger nor Skype succumbed." (That's in Bablefish's words with a tiny edit.) The blogger tells the story of talking to people in Santiago, Chile via IM who are trying to reach family in Peru and he was able to help relay their message.

[YouTube:6BEsZMvrq-I]

I looked for the original CSPAN clip with no luck.

I've been traveling out to Redmond and back these past couple of days so this is a bit of a catch-up post for me.

"A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations." I like this line from the article: "Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias." Of course that's because they're sharing secret coded messages through Wikipedia entries - or at least that's what's happening in my fantasy reading of that line.

So far the sorting of all the info that data-mining service has produced is in the early stages, so we can probably look forward to a series of "gotcha" headlines in the future from this operation. Tonight's spotlight seems to be on Fox News. There are a number of links floating around that point out bold and shameless edits made from a Fox News IP, but this link seems to have the greatest number.

I know some of the examples involve MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, but I don't point this out as a matter of cable news partisanship.  The Web loves "gotcha" stories. The Left loves to pull back the curtain on Rupert Murdoch. The combination has made for an actual Web storm.

Vote on the most shameful wikipedia spin job.

Speaking of gotchas, Senator Obama has the hive buzzing with this quote about Afghanistan: "We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there." Actually, what appears to be more offensive to some is that the AP has issued a fact check article defending the point. I clicked this fact checking of the fact checking. Also this fact checking which came before the AP's fact checking. And also this item on Obama displaying the unusual trait of not backing down when his statements are criticized.

"If you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom's, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else's computer simulation."

Yesterday's Rove reaction was too much for me to catch up on this quickly.  Check out the lead on yesterday's Memeorandum. You don't often see blog buzz like that.  Most fun to me were the "why he's really leaving" posts like this one. I don't doubt there's sufficient mainstream coverage of the whole thing that you don't really need supplemental blog analysis anyway.

Introducing good bloggers and companies to hire them - If you're a blogger who doesn't see any appeal in the traffic building tricks we read about so often with regard to making money from your blog (via ads) then you may feel more encouraged by what this guy's talking about.  Really it's like blogging as a writing audition.  He's informally putting writers (bloggers) in touch with companies who need content (remember the other day when we were squinting to see a trend?) or online representation of some kind. Includes a bit on what kind of money we're talking about.

I had to laugh at this description of Chris Matthews having a "Joe Namath moment." If I can find the video I'll add the link of him interviewing all of those "Obama girls" but suffice it to say, while I like Chris Matthews, he needs some coaching on dealing with the pretty ladies on the air.

The back of the toothbrush channels the water like a drinking fountain. Duh. How is this not standard?

"Why Are the New York Times and So Much of the MSM Neglecting a Vital Part of the Utah Mine Collapse Story?" Even ignoring whether the safety record of Bob Murray's mines is a vital part of the story (and it's hard to imagine why it wouldn't be) it defies understanding how a story can stay so prominent in the news for a week with no actual developments and yet all the media sitting around waiting for the next spoon feeding from Murray aren't exploring any other angles.  Nevermind the possible scandal, I'm just talking about keeping the story interesting.

For all of its recent accolades for opening its platform, Facebook has been suffering criticism for being an old fashioned "walled garden" (remember this was basically Kottke's point about it being the new AOL). It looks like there's some new permeability to that wall.

Built With: Find out what a site is built with. My first thought was that this would be handy for if you ever wonder what kind of blogware someone is using but it gives a lot more information than that.

"This is a brochure from the Kelsey-Hayes company advertising their easy to assemble fallout shelters for the home." This is probably missing the point, but there is some appeal in having a secret underground fort on the property.

"In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission." I would love to see what that permission would look like - or for that matter, how the ban would be enforced.

Probably not surprisingly, the story of the girl overdosing on espresso made the Seattle news while I was out there. Most unexpected symptom: "By noon she was feeling unwell and crying and laughing uncontrollably in front of bewildered customers."

The Story of the Falling Boat Photos - Strangely, I had a hard time finding the original photos this article is about. Anyone got a link?

We may have seen pieces like this before, but it's really soured me on those tear-jerker free new house shows to realize how the winners get slammed with taxes and upkeep bills they have no hope of affording.

It's been a while since we had a "cancer cured" headline of the day: Canadian team discovers gene that turns cancers off

"Scientists have concluded that the freshwater baiji dolphin, only found in China is now 'likely to be extinct' after an extensive 6 week study of the dolphin's habitat when they failed to spot any in the Yangtze river." It seems odd that we (humans) just kind of watched this animal go extinct. It's probably foolish to think that we can grab a couple of everything in some kind of special zoo, but it seems inadequate to just say, "See ya."

Here's the video of that new father being tasered while holding his baby in the hospital (and trying to leave.) It doesn't really tell the whole story but I can see how the security guy might have let his imagination get the best of him in thinking he'd pull a sudden sneak zap while the other guy caught the baby. Which isn't an excuse of course. Not tasering people holding babies is one of those rules that shouldn't even have to be written down.

*Note to RSS visitors, this is a largely linkless piece.

Since clicking on this item accusing CNN of deliberately avoiding an impeachment question in its YouTube debate, I've been thinking about what the debate questions would look like if they truly represented the interests of people who spend a lot of time online.

Given what we know about the themes of interest online, what would "the Web" ask presidential candidates.

Impeachment is the obvious one.  Impeachment talk is everywhere online and almost no where in the mainstream press. The context of the video above is interesting because it's about discouraging abuses by future presidents.  More common are accusations of war crimes or complaints that polls show that a lot of people don't like Bush and therefore Congress should move to impeach as part of representing the public will.

There would definitely be a 9/11 conspiracy question in there.  It would probably have a thousand itemized points and the question would be almost rhetorical in the form of "How can it be that both x and y are true, and even if they are, how do you explain z?"

There'd surely be a net neutrality question.  Something about whether the candidates believe huge sites like Google owe some of the money they make to telecom sites that support the Web's structure.

And from there we'd lead into a question or two about intellectual property rights, maybe something concrete like file trading or maybe something more abstract like if you pay for a song, shouldn't you be able to do whatever you want with that song?

Also in that category would be a question about patent law.  As the Web is tamed and tools are built, the big companies are trying to own every little idea, preventing small companies from developing tools on their own. (Or so the argument goes, as I understand it.)

Then someone would blurt a goatse photo.

Some religion questions would come up, but not the kind we usually hear that seek to determine whether the candidates can make themselves appealing to the Christian right with "values" talk or positions on abortion.  Instead we'd get something about protecting the rights of secularists and defending science and education and rational thought from religious influences.

There's a significant contingent of bloggers who are utterly fed up with the way Islam is never directly called out for its association with terrorism.  A true Web question would ask something about pressuring moderate Muslims about their extremist brethren. Lately it sounds like Giuliani is speaking to this audience.

What else?

Oh! Environmentalism.  The Web would definitely ask something about green energy, but not ethanol or nuclear. The environmentalism we see online is more innovative, more creative, and more radical.  Maybe something about new solar efficiencies but also something about banning cars or charging corporations to dispose of the packaging of the products they sell.

Media bias is a standard topic online.  Candidates might be asked about the recently resurrected discussion of the fairness doctrine. Otherwise maybe something about denying access to press outlets that don't report responsibly or something along those lines.

Vote hacking accusations are also more prevalent online than in the mainstream. A typical Web question might be, "If you lose, how comfortable will you be that you lost fairly?" Of course it might be asked as "I CAN HAS FAYR ELEXUN?"

What other topics are unique to or characteristic of the online world that would be bound to come up in an unfiltered list of debate questions from the Web?

Hey Will,

Clicked is my favorite time waster, er, learning tool EVER! Back in June you posted about lightning porn.  I loved it, and since then have been waiting for a chance to try that myself.  Here is my first attempt, a squeezed and stretched storm in Arizona:

[YouTube:Rfp3RHF37hU]

The still at 1:40 is lightning porn.  It's like he's saying, "Come to Daddy!"

Hope you enjoy it...

Janis
Sierra Vista, Arizona

Thanks Janis, that's great stuff.  I've been meaning to share some really great lightning porn shots I got last Friday:

I took a ridiculous number of them, at some points catching a chain with every snap of the shutter. I know I've mentioned it before, but the new animated, drag-able, zoom-able, transparency adjustable map from weather.com is really amazing. The updates are generally only ten minutes behind real time and I was able to watch the storms on the radar at the same time I watched out my window as they came in over New Jersey, crossed the city and the harbor and moved out over Brooklyn.

I don't know if it's coincidence or if the Freakonomics guys wanted to arrive at the New York Times with a splash, but their two part series, If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack? has really made some waves online.  While it does seem taboo to speak so openly in a way that almost sounds like plotting terrorism as opposed to fighting it, it's hard to deny the obviousness of what they're saying. I completely agree about the effectiveness of the D.C. sniper (and it makes me nuts when people keep saying there have been no terror attacks on American soil since 9/11 when the anthrax letters and the sniper were pretty significantly terrifying events).

I often find myself muttering "who needs terrorists when..." about problems large and small that would have the country in paroxysms of panic if there was any terrorism associated with them. Most of the ideas in the comments of the blog have to do with planting bombs, but I often think that terrorists could just drive around in unreliable cars on highways, bridges and tunnels and bring the economy to a screeching crawl with the traffic they create when they break down.

Speaking of the thin line between writing about crime and committing it, Crime author charged with murder after the police read his perfect plot. Hmmm... this would make a good book.

Lately it seems like every time I link to a good old fashioned blog gotcha it's pointing to Confederate Yankee, so it may be time to stop thinking of this as a Web phenomenon and just give this guy some personal credit.  In this case he's dogging that Beauchamp story and double-checking the double-checking the magazine did of Beauchamp's piece. What he finds is proof of the age-old truth that the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. To me, this item is particularly interesting in the context of the Google News comments story from yesterday. I wonder if this tank expert would qualify as a participant in the story. For that matter, I wonder how hard it would be to find another expert to contradict him. At which point I have a pretty good guess of how long it would take to for the whole thing to devolve into split screen counter-spinners like we see on cable news.

Speaking of pundit fodder, Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data - Like the above item, I like this one for they way the error was discovered. Scrolling through the partisan spinning in the comments is nothing short of dismaying, however.

New York Times court reporter refuses to appear on CSPAN - It feels like there's some subtext to this article but I don't know the people or setting involved well enough to pick up on it so I'll twist it for my own interpretive purposes instead: There's an emphasis in the article on the difference between speaking to a small audience and a national audience and the fact of having to "modulate" comments for a national audience. This points out an interesting contradiction in fashionable Web thought. On one hand it's very much out of fashion to imply that the unwashed masses are somehow not capable of understanding what is discussed among "insiders" of specific communities of interest. On the other hand, the whole point of the user generated content movement is that specific communities have better insight into their respective fields of expertise or experience so the media is well advised to be receptive to their contributions to coverage. So while mental alarms may sound when the actions of this report imply that she says one thing to her peers and another to the public, I don't really blame her. (Or maybe she just didn't want to be on TV.)

And just to cap the theme: Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations

"Virgin America launched its U.S. air service yesterday, and immediately staked a claim as the most geek-friendly airline yet invented." Did I miss the mainstream media coverage of this? The only thing I saw was that the first flight was delayed an hour because of weather. It seems like this is the kind of geek stuff that even non-geeks would be impressed with. Maybe Virgin didn't bother with much mainstream marketing, expecting online noise to do the work for them.

A TV-PC that helps you shave - It doesn't do the shaving, it turns into a mirror.

50 really good indie games - Some are free online.  I see Flow on the list. I've wasted a shameful amount of time playing that thing.

Light drawings - We've seen light graffiti and other tricks with laser pointers and slow shutters but this is much more artistic with a lot more effort. The rest of the blog looks fun too.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt defines Web 3.0. Not the "semantic web" answer we usually hear.

The piss screen is a driving game controlled by urine streams on controllers in a urinal. The idea is that if you do poorly you shouldn't drive home -- or if you do, you shouldn't steer with your penis.

Scientists tattoo themselves with science.

Omni directional treadmill - Not exactly the holodeck, but I can see the possibilities. Kind of reminds me of that Jamiroquai video.

Am I crazy or is this easy money? Google wants to pay you ten bucks a piece to enter your local businesses into their database. I could make a few hundred bucks just walking down the block.

Weirdo ice cream flavors - How do you say "Bertie Bott's" in Japanese?

How to make a tomato glow (and poisonous)

AT&T had already made a bad name for itself among techies when it announced that it would help scour bootleg movies from the Internet - their online standing already tainted by an earlier bit of net neutrality tap dancing - and of course the EFF lawsuit about AT&T spying on its customers for the NSA. The scab was picked again when it was announced that they'd be the exclusive service provider for the iPhone - and their subsequent performance did not put criticism to rest. And now they've been caught censoring criticism of President Bush in a Pearl Jam performance. They're working real hard to live up to that Death Star logo.

By the way, best anti-Bush Pearl Jam performance I know of is Masters of War on Letterman:

[YouTube:svHentyELXo]

[YouTube:gXyl39kgBh8]

If you bother to go to Barely Political you don't find much info other than that each girl has been given a name. I'd love to know if the operation behind all of this is making much money. They've definitely got the marketing side mastered.

Meanwhile, given the polygamy stereotypes associated with Mormonism, I can't imagine the Romney campaign is too pleased to be represented by three girls instead of one.

"The New York Times Adds Freakonomics Blog, MySpace Adds The Onion, Google News Adds Comments" - If you squint, you can almost convince yourself you see a trend.

That last item about Google News adding comments has been the subject of a lot of online discussion over the last couple of days. In short, Google will allow the people involved in a news story to add their personal remarks to it (separately, not in the story text). I really like the idea of adding first person elements to news stories. Of course, this is essentially the principle behind booking guests for TV talk shows. And, obviously, it's essentially what a reporter does to get a story in the first place.  That said, it's not clear that Google is going to be employing bookers or reporters to get this done: "...If you've been covered in a news article please send us your comments and we'll work with you to post it on Google News."

What makes the idea contextually interesting on the Web, aside from making more explicit the connection between news and "user generated content" by showing people in the news as users generating content, is the relatively recent discussion of whether the interview as journalistic tool had been rendered obsolete by the ability of literally everyone to state their own piece on their own terms. Essentially: Why risk being misquoted when you can give your own quote on your blog. (That discussion thankfully summarized neatly here by Jay Rosen.)

A twist worth noting about this new Google feature is that Google apparently doesn't want to share it with anyone. As you may know, Google News is nothing but news from other sites that they aggregate.  Anyone trying to aggregate Google's own contribution to original news gathering will be blocked from doing so.  Hmmm.

Other interesting points explored here: Q&A On The New Google News Comments

Here's a slightly old Kevin Sites piece on that guy who painted all those pictures on his belly.

"An 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth is now growing in a laboratory, claim researchers." This article needs to end with one of three possibilities: Dinosaurs, global plague, or Homer Simpson accidentally killing and/or eating it.

Ah well, at least there's freakish aquatic life to fuel my need to mix fantasy and reality.

I wonder how the people in Pakistan feel about all the casual talk among presidential candidates about acting on "actionable intelligence."

11 Super Awesome Photoshop Movie Effects - I don't often link to Photoshop tip links because Photoshop is expensive for folks who don't want to steal it so not everyone has it, but this is pretty interesting for looking at how movie effects are done even if you don't do them yourself.

100 Websites You Should Know and Use - A mixed bag.  Some I get and some not so much.

Learning Japanese with Akira Kurosawa - This is another one of those Mahalo links like the one we saw last time for learning French.  This time it's not about lessons though, it's about listening to the language and reading the subtitles. So it's more like exercises than lessons.

A fake demo of what copy/paste would look like as a feature on iPhone. I don't really care about iPhone or fake future features but this demo is so well done, particularly the end that I had to share it.

Commuter Click: "Since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare, conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's own troops. The triad of methods used to enable men to overcome their innate resistance to killing includes desensitization, classical and operant conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms."

At the beginning of the week, everyone was jazzed over an award winning animated short film called A Gentlemen's Duel and the link spread like wildfire.  Unfortunately, the lawyer letters also spread like wildfire and by the time I went looking for it all I got was pulled content messages and trailers (a trailer for a 7 minute film?).  So now it's pretty much a matter of chasing it around as it's re-uploaded and re-deleted.  That said, here's where I saw it.  Good luck. I'm a little squeamish about the slapstick violence against women, but the appeal of the film is the steampunk mecha battle.

Jimmy Justice has to be the nerviest guy ever. He confronts municipal employees who break parking and other traffic laws. I always assumed cops and other officials were allowed to break these kinds of laws so I don't give it much thought, but Jimmy and his fans think it shouldn't be tolerated. If you watch a bunch of the videos, it starts to feel like he just likes to beat up on meter maids, but in the wake of yesterday's Dateline video and the idea of DIY media as a weapon, this is a prime example.

Speaking of yesterday's video, Dateline isn't the only media outlet to make a fool of itself covering hackers. Folks online are getting a good laugh out of this dramatic local Fox News report.

Speaking of mocking mainstream media (assuming you think The New Republic is mainstream media), I haven't mentioned the story of Thomas Beauchamp, but since it seems to be over and once again has a lot of bloggers in a state of uproar, now is a good time to point it out.  In a nutshell: It started as an anonymous story describing some immoral behavior by U.S. troops (behind a subscription pay wall, which is another reason I haven't mentioned it).  Military bloggers and other warbloggers doubted the veracity of the story.  The writer identified himself and defended his work. An investigation was launched by the magazine editors and also the military.  Now he's signed a statement saying that it was basically bunk.  There's reams of blog material on the matter. I found this post by an Army lawyer informative, and this blog entry on the relevance of the story and the nature of blogswarms to be interesting.

Speaking of military legalities and pundit bloggers and blogstorms in a tea pot, among the stories that emerged from the recent Yearly Kos liberal blogger gathering was this video of a uniformed soldier who paid to attend the event for the purpose of trying to convince attendees of the success of the surge in Iraq. Helpful in understanding what the fuss was about is this piece on why (other than his obvious heckling) the panel member had a problem with the guy. Also helpful, this subsequent piece that helps explain the soldier's argument.

Speaking of headlines from Yearly Kos, here's the clip of the presidential candidate panel in which Hillary and others discuss accepting money from lobbyists.

Lastly speaking of Yearly Kos, "Why Do We Suck? and Other Questions Political Journalists Asked Themselves at YearlyKos"

The political season must be heating up for real because factcheck.org links are popping up again.

Speaking of politics, here's a "where the candidates stand" chart - (here's the source)

Speaking of political alignment, for what it's worth, this is the story that broke the news that Giuliani's daughter is an Obama supporter (as revealed by her Facebook page).

Speaking of social sites, Social bookmarking in plain English - It explains how Delicious works. Funny use of paper instead of graphics. Looks like the site has a few in the "in plain English" series.

Speaking of education in the basics, The College Student's Guide to File Sharing

Speaking of Web fundamentals, "When you search on Google through Googlonymous, it is Googlonymous that goes on Google and does the search for you, the only ip address that Google will see, is the ip address of the server of Googlonymous." This is basically the definition of using a proxy server.

Minesweeper: The Movie - Awesome.

Watching Jim Cramer freak out over the state of the market, I wonder if his co-host in the clip gets hazard pay. I'm imagining remix DJs everywhere sampling "We have Armageddon."

Circuitry snacks

Burbia - A fun site devoted to life in suburbia. (I'm self conscious about being over-focused on urban links, so hopefully this appeals to some who've felt left out.)

130 cats make more noise than I would have guessed. (See the brief video.)

"Believe it or not, there are still between 23-34 living veterans of WWI in the entire world."

Because I can't seem to post to Clicked without some mention of boobs lately (it's good for my Google search traffic), F Cup cookies promise that their fat will go straight to your boobs

Physicists have 'solved' mystery of levitation - It's difficult to see through all the empty promise "if the theory is true it could be possible to..." language but it sounds like the research is really about reducing friction in nanotechnology.

I keep seeing stories about China's hairiest man and the coming Olympics. Apparently he wants to carry the torch for a bit.  Digg users have noted that for all his hair he appears to be going bald.  Cruel fate.

Most depressing but potentially motivating comic of the day.

"Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated. " The idea is that the environmental impact of producing food to replace the calories you use to walk is greater than auto emissions in their example.  They don't mention the impact of producing gasoline, however. And what if there are berry bushes along the path you're walking? If you don't take it too seriously the article has some fun counter-intuitive arguments and sort of makes a good case for supporting local farming.

Barry Bonds' HR Record Tainted by Elbow 'Armor'?  I can envision each baseball team employing a technologist like James Bond's Q to come up with legal gizmos to help players. One day we'll have an all-steroids, gadget assisted baseball league.

"A 60-footer that goes by the name of Hydroptère is hoping to travel at over 50 knots (58mph) and become the world's fastest racing ship." See the video on the official site for the best sense of it. It has wings that lift most of it out of the water so it has less resistance. The photo makes me think of sci fi space pirate art.

Hysterical excuse for getting caught soliciting oral sex in a public park bathroom. (Totally safe for work.) What I don't understand about these stories is how soliciting sex in bathrooms even exists anymore.  Haven't these people heard of the Internet? I admit I don't follow the scene very closely (er... at all, actually) but I would have thought all of that kind of activity takes place online through escort services and outcall massages.

How to speak French - Advice and links to free lessons.

A quick mail:

Hey Will,
Have you checked out Chocolate Rain!  Funny video.
Thanks,
Dave

Will replies:  Thanks Dave, I saw a link to it but didn't know the story and skipped it. Thanks for the submission.

Two people sent the link to this "Gimme Friction" game. Thanks Eric and Keith.

[YouTube:nCvmkxO5hoQ]

As one person wrote to me in e-mail (along with this transcript link):

I think people are overlooking the obvious significance of this.  YouTube allowed a bunch of scruffy young convention-goers to turn the tables on the press!

That's what I found most impressive about it as well.  When I saw the video yesterday it has slightly fewer views but still more than a third of a million people saw it in the span of not much more than a day. Definitely the most literal taking back of the media I can think of.

Related BoingBoing coverage here and here. Including an excerpt from a Wired report that Defcon has a mole at Dateline.

In light of the spanking readers gave me earlier this week for not posting and facing a day's worth of non-Clicked related meetings, I'm posting the most coherent parts of my notes at the moment. A little disorganized but at least it's not fallow.

Ants use manners to cut through crowds - This reminds me a little of the traffic waves site, particularly the merging lanes page that tries to show that traffic moves better when it's orderly than when it's bunched. Every day that I drive out to MSNBC HQ in New Jersey (lately about three times a week) I use the two-laned Holland Tunnel which has an eight or ten lane toll plaza at it's mouth. The NY/NJ custom is to push your car as close to the car in front of you as possible, let no one in and whoever's front fender is farthest ahead at the merge wins (motorcycles are thankfully exempt from this game). And even though the animation on the page is supposed to show that it works, I can't picture in my head how any way is faster than everyone trying to get into the tunnel as fast as they can without crashing.

21 Amazing Facts You Didn't Know About Pigeons - I never thought much about pigeons until my son started to chase them every time we go to the park (or basically anywhere since pigeons are everywhere in NYC) and now I pretty much loathe them for the diseased filth I can almost convince myself is radiating from their dirty little bodies.  P.S. Regarding item 19, by coincidence I just saw a baby pigeon for the first time the other day.

(Click it and view the "original" size for the best look at it.)

"Clock time may be about minutes and hours, but Real Time is down to how we experience it, which differs from person to person depending on what we're doing."

"Hunted in reality, jihadists are turning to artificial online worlds such as Second Life to train and recruit members" The only part of this article that didn't strike me as ridiculous is the ease with which Second Life can be used to fence money.

Speaking of fakeness and terrorists, Researcher's Analysis of al Qaeda Images Reveals Surprises - The surprises part is arguable but it's really interesting to see them illustrate so clearly how fake photos can be detected.

"The fact is that Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us by earlier generations. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we behave as though we have no idea what is required to sustain the quality of our daily lives." Manages to wag a finger without getting partisan or naming names.

What NewsCorp owns. Impressive/scary even given this blog's parentage.

MySpace Nabs Lonelygirl15 Finale - This brief item almost makes me feel like I'm missing something for not following the Lonelygirl series more closely. The summary video is downright compelling.

"Beside the rectum is the ink sac, which allows a squid to discharge a black ink into the mantle cavity at short notice." You couldn't plan this shot if you tried.

"Never a good idea to attack the dude with the microphone." Kevin Smith gets a jerky question from the audience at Comic-con and after giving it a pretty straight answer he shreds the questioner for a minute and a half. NOTE: He does it with considerable vulgarity. Put the headphones on for this one.

Remember those dancing prison inmates we saw the other day?  The prison is called the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center and when you search YouTube for the initials you get a surprisingly long list of prison performances.

Electricity from body heat - Well yeah, sorta.  when you read the piece it explains that in order to get any good electricity you need to create temperature differences greater than simple human touch produces so instead they're working on super-efficient circuits so the little electricity the body can produce actually has a chance of doing something.

It seems like very couple of days lately we find a new candidate for worst tattoo ever.

I lost an unexpectedly large amount of time flipping through these comic strips. Mostly morbid and some are a little blue but funny and addictive.

The best skateboarder on two fingers. (Is the extreme lighting because there are visual effects of some kind -other than slo mo- going on or can this guy really do tricks with a little piece of wood?)

"A Castle Rock man died outside a movie complex yesterday when he hooked a cable from his neck to a concrete pillar, then sped off in his car." Damn.

"Presidential candidates ranked by time spent being interviewed on news programs on six major cable and network channels this year through July 15."

Right now I'm using two local blogs to lead me to ther local sources of citizen reporting on the bridge collapse in Minnesota.  Metroblogging Minneapolis has a pretty thorough link round-up and the community at MNspeak is sharing links through the thread here. I hope to have a narrower list of highlights like this one later this morning.

I'll have a bigger update in a bit but before this gets flooded or turned off, I wanted to share it.  It's the live traffic cam still pointing at the now mostly gone bridge.

UPDATE II: What else I clicked:

Flickr photos

• Diversey - Includes some long shots of the river rescue
• Mordac
• Twin Cities pool

Flickr tags (Usually Flickr will bundle tags like this into one group but I don't see a link for that yet.)

• 35wbridgecollapse
• i35w
• bridgecollapse

This is a collection of photos from different sources in a Slide.com presentation.

Minnesota public radio coverage

MN Stories has a bit of self-shot video.  Mostly gives a feel for what it's like to be a spectator there.

Wikipedia coverage

e-democracy.org also has a wiki, just links

The Star Tribune slide show is getting high marks from locals.

ONE OTHER: Tony Webster has been submitting his stuff to media so you've probably seen one or two of his shots on TV.  He's got them all in one place here.

Never let it be said that I don't come out of a lull without a good headline.

I'm not sure how old this is, maybe a few months, but it's new to me since I don't do a lot of fashion rating online.  StyleMob is like the "Hot Or Not" sites but you're rating the subject's outfit.

Speaking of my poor attention to fashion, I was looking at the picture of this clever origami ad when I saw the next one on the blog was for breast implants. Again, I don't often look at fashion magazines so maybe I'm out of the loop on this, but the only cosmetic ads I usually see are either for teeth or for liposuction.  Apparently in Colombia they're little more um... up front about breast implants.

Speaking of breast implants (and bear with me, there's a point to this), totally NSFW: Spot the fake breasts, I got 16 out of 20 which is not as good as I'd prefer but still better than 99% according to the closing screen.  The problem is that they're not presented very scientifically.  They all look like cropped porn photos.

Speaking of fake breasts and losing touch with reality, and really the point of my assembling this thread of links, could it be that watching porn actually makes men less interested in real sex with real women? The argument in this article is that contrary to concerns that porn would turn men into sex maniacs, the gap between the expectations set by stylized porn sex and the practical realities of actual sex with actual women is such that actual women are losing ground in their ability to draw the attention of men.  There's an interesting point about how a regular woman merely naked used to be a big deal and now faces all kinds of ridiculous porny expectations to achieve the same big deal.  Then it veers off to celebrate orthodox religious practices of covering women to the eyes of everyone but their husbands and... well... you can read it, it's only a couple pages, see how much you agree with.

Speaking of people having (or not having) sex, "students with IQs above 100 and below 70 were significantly less likely to have had intercourse than those in between." The piece goes on to point out that students at top colleges don't have as much sex and even students in the "smarter" majors don't have as much sex -or, as the piece puts it, "it would strongly appear that higher complexity majors contain more virgins than majors with lower cognitive demand." If you find the stats depressing, stop reading before you get to the analysis at the end.  There is no good news for nerds there except maybe for a paragraph about athleticism.

Ok, that's enough of that.  Moving on...

Charley the cat has a condition that makes him seem a little broken, but don't hold that against him.

I do not understand the insistence on electronic voting given its demonstrated vulnerability. And I don't understand why six months is not enough time to implement a new system in California, again given the demonstrated vulnerability.

And speaking of having enough time to tinker with the system in California, "Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California's electoral votes to the statewide winner."

Speaking of rigging votes, there is a campaign afoot to send the Spice Girls to Baghdad. You have to register and I can't see them doing it even if there were enough votes, but it's a funny idea.

"Once enough people have signed up in a given city we'll announce an official "picnicmob" day!" First you have to take a personality quiz so when you go to the picnic they can put you next to people who are similar to you.

You can get arrested for that - Apparently there's a book of ridiculous laws that are still on the books and this guy is blogging as he breaks as many of them as he can.

"The Haier WasH2O washing machine doesn't use any detergents." It breaks the water molecules and washes with ions (?).

Activist "gotcha" videos are inherently unfair, but since readers of Clicked are intelligent enough to see past that we can look at the underlying question as an interesting exercise.  This guy is asking anti-abortion protestors how women who have illegal (if the protestors have their way) abortions should be punished. The people in the video seem to default to the kind of Christianity I was taught growing up that emphasizes forgiveness over the kind of punitive justice our legal system deals in. I imagine they'd be less ambiguous about the doctors who do the procedures, however.

Speaking of odd legal debates, Homicide charges in helicopter crash a tough call - Remember last week those two news helicopters that crashed into each other while covering a police chase?  When I heard they wanted to charge the guy being chased for the deaths of the people in the helicopters I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard.  Reading this piece (which also includes a link to the video that was being shot when one of the helicopters crashed), I'm still not convinced the guy should receive extra charges, but at least I can see how they're trying to establish a sort of "none of this would have happened if..." precedent.

Why are we so scared of offending Muslims? This from the guy who wrote, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," so offending religious people is obviously not a problem for him.

"Photographs of signs that transcend their objectivity to reveal our humanity."

How to predict the weather without a forecast.

You may have seen the AP piece on MyDeathSpace, which is not a new site by any means, but I don't recall there being a map mash-up last time I was there. I see they've got the MySpace page of the girl who is being questioned in the castration death of her father. I don't know if that's getting any national play but it's making local headlines.

Ralph's Recommendations:

Speed Stacker: A Game of Timing and Focus
How high can you raise your stack of building blocks?

This one's really simple. Just stop each new row of building blocks directly on top of the previous row to build your stack. But if your timing is off, you'll start the next row with fewer blocks. Oh, and the rows start moving faster as your stack gets higher.

(If you're like me, you'll end the game thinking "Crap! I know I could've done better than that!" And then you'll start a new round.)

Good luck.
-Ralph

Will adds: I did exactly what Ralph did because it seems like this should be an easier game than it is. It's pretty novel actually.  I don't think I've played a one-button game like this before.

It's a funny thing that I don't feel the slightest bit self conscious when I write something that is seen by thousands or tens of thousands (or very rarely hundreds of thousands) of people, but when I don't write anything I feel really self conscious that all the world is looking at my fallow blog. No doubt there's a researcher out there studying the psychology of the blogger who's found this strain of paranoia (vanity?) a common trait.