I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to see a headline like this: Cincinnati Superhero Patrols Streets Fighting Crime; 'Shadowhare' Among Nationwide Group Of Superheroes UPDATE: OK, not quite as exciting with the video version.

Slate presents a Facebook-style visualization of the Senate. It's meant to show how the senators vote with each other (or don't) with an eye toward Specter's lack of real connection to either party. (Nothing very Facebook about it though. Not sure that headline writer knows what Facebook looks like.) UPDATE: Ah! This is a Facebook-style visualization.

Rap Chop - Auto-tune the infomercial! (the edits around 1:52 are hysterical)

Visualizing the U.S. power grid (via FlowingData)

100 Amazing Futuristic Design Concepts We Wish Were Real - Oh... number 4...

Does having the White House photos in a Flickr stream make them feel kind of chintzy?

Does every animal have a flu? I was just remarking that these animal flus are like the Chinese zodiac or something. What's your flu animal?

Do you think TextsFromLastNight is real? Since hearing that "F My Life" got a book deal and Why You're Fat got a book deal I'm cynical about these Post Secret (also book deal) descendant sites. Does Cake Wrecks have a book deal yet?

Losing a couple hours this afternoon to being part of the interview loop for new interns. I haven't done this in years. I know there's no better way but the whole situation feels so awkward. I'm generally averse to being "judgey" but that's essential what's required of the process. I've read that the best interview question to ask is, "What do you do in your spare time" to get a sense of whether the person has a genuine interest in the subject matter and will therefore go beyond the job's basic requirements. But what kind of answer should I really expect from someone with a class load, no money and no experience? Free time?

Anyway, Clicked post will be late today. Running into another interview now...

ADDING: What's funny and kind of maddening about doing a series of interviews is that I suddenly became very aware of my own reactions and inconsistencies in how I treated the interviewees. Was I being discouraging to the one I suspected of being over qualified? Was I acting paternal to the one who seemed so young and naive?

I cannot even find the words to express how angry I am about this plane photo-op stunt. The fear in these people's voices and the sound of that plane. That is 35 seconds of time machine in that clip.Livid.

1976 Swine Flu public service ad

Wait a minute. Venezuela owned an island in the Delaware River??

"An intriguing implication of this study is that male judges rule differently when they're sharing the bench with a woman." Women keep men honest just by being around?

Do you mean to tell me that these are real actual human lungs breathing under a giant bell jar?

I am fully cognizant of the fact that beatboxing isn't much more than rhythmic spitting and sputtering and yet I can never resist watching.

Spider resurrections may have surprised scientists but I personally have performed a fly resurrection and I learned the trick from a magazine so I'm sure it's no mystery. In fact, the trick is meant to allow you to put a fly on a leash. You catch the fly in your hand and hold it under water, effectively drowning it (although maybe just making it too mushy to move or fly). Then tie a string around the fly and cover it in salt. The salt sucks the water from the fly and it revives. I managed the revival part but the fly slipped my leash so I didn't get the full fly-on-a-string thing to work. (Having typed this out I have a nagging suspicion that I learned it from an Encyclopedia Brown book. Does this ring a bell to anyone?)

Site to go back to when I have more time of-the-day: Half Bakery. Is this a site for people with neat ideas?

What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era. An almost related but not quite story: I have white friends I hadn't seen in a while who recently adopted a black baby. Where is the baby from, I wondered. Atlantic City, New Jersey. I had assumed white couple + black baby = international adoption. Duh. I think that makes me both a racist and stupid.

Is facemining the future of IMDB? (And is that the silliest underestimation of a technology ever?)

What do I do when I'm not posting to Clicked? Today it involved this 70's drum machine from this cool list. Also this one and wishing I knew how to play with this one. If it worked I'll share the results and other links later.
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UPDATE: 4/27
So on Friday I learned a few lessons worth sharing. The back story is that I pitched that auto-tune the news item to the Maddow show and they decided to do a segment about it as a light Friday night item. Like a fool, I suggested there might be some kind of Audacity plugin that would "auto-tune-ize" an audio file automatically. It turns out there really isn't, but I didn't know that at the time and put myself on the hook to produce something. Part of what threw me was this actually wrong but very right-sounding answer on Yahoo answers.

I went to Audacity first and picked up tons of free plugins and also the vst enabler. (VST = Virtual Studio Technology. There are other formats for virtual studio plugins but VST was the path I was on because of that Yahoo answer.)

I looked for the Antares Autotune plugin but it cost money so I tried the free version called Gsnap.

Gsnap didn't work but that wasn't Gsnap's fault, that was just because it didn't work with Audacity. I thought it was Gsnap's fault and downloaded the trial version of the Antares software.

Of course, that didn't work either and eventually I found a list of compatible hosts and realized I'd gone wrong with Audacity.

So now I needed expensive virtual audio mixing software in order to run an auto-tune plugin. Luckily many of them offer free trial versions. Working down the list on the Antares site, I took the 30-Day trial of Adobe's Audition 3.

Funnily, the trial version of Antares Autotune didn't work with the trial version of Adobe Audition but the free Gsnap I downloaded back in the beginning did. Then it was just a matter of learning how to use (and abuse) the effect.

The one thing I never really worked out was how to make it all more melodious. Some auto-tune software allows you to drag notes or draw a line on a screen that represents the key that the piece is supposed to follow. I probably could have chopped it into clips and assigned each clip a key like chord progressions but time was running out and what really ended up being an insurmountable obstacle was that the audio (taken from a clip of the show) had to match the video. So if I did anything to draw out syllables or change the pace of the audio, I'd have to do the same with the video. I'd already spent the day learning audio, there was no time to play with video software, so I just sent the pieces I'd made upstairs to the video editor and he made the final product.

This is the segment that aired.

This is my scratch pad project for which I used the free Movie Maker on my PC to pair the video with the audio.

Lastly, the basic way this amazing drum machine set-up works is that you set the bpm in the bottom toolbar. That triangle play button is what makes the whole thing go. The way to string it all together is kind of like the Yahoo Pipes interface. You drag from an output to an input and the software automatically draws a connector cable. So just make the noise maker boxes connect to the volume knob boxes and you're good to go.

Amusement of the day: I'm very aware of the risk of appearing smug or arrogant by mocking someone else, particularly when they're trying to make a political point that is tantamount to a tenet of faith, but Rep. Joe Barton thinking this exchange demonstrates him stumping Secretary Chu is just so ridiculous I took some pleasure in seeing the Twitter community bark at him.

This is probably going to be in all of today's news in one form or other but it's worth reading the actual piece. It's a powerful essay from the guy in charge of interrogating Abu Zubaydah before we decided to torture him.

I've been wanting to set news soundbites to a techno beat for the longest time. The obstacle has always been collecting the soundbites. These people do a really fun job with the addition of an auto-tuner. Here's the first one, a little catchier.

To my son who can't yet ride a bike but who will, if he's at all like his father, one day want one of these bikes: No.

Why there will never be a cure for cancer.

Whoa! Amazing! It's like a still-photo movie. Looks like you can choose your size here and pretend you're watching it on a fancy TV.

The panorama of the Detroit block, it was from this blog.

Woman sends stripper impersonator to highschool reunion as a prank- That is, the stripper was impersonating her at the reunion so she didn't have to go.

"The mystery why cybercriminals want a discontinued Nokia phone isn't getting any clearer." A good one to follow the books and magazines with secret messages in them - obsolete phones with secretly valuable alternative technology in them.

Face recognition comes to Flickr.- How soon before you can take a photo of a stranger's face, plug it into the Web and get matching photos along with the name and personal pages like Facebook? Relatedly, I was just reading about Google launching a "similar images" search.

Canon in D with Korean Break Dance

China is trying to bring some order to its language - particularly the characters used to name people. I don't have a strong opinion on whether Chinese needs to be more efficient but the idea that you can suddenly not have a name because the characters you use to spell it are declared obsolete and no longer part of the language kind of blows my mind.

Torture memos set to music might actually be better than the Paul Krugman song. I bet someone could do a nice cover of this.

"The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world." I understand that you're meant to use the timeline to narrow the range of offerings. I couldn't find an intelligent use for it so I just poked around and got lost for a while looking and maps and photos.

Jones' Good Ass BBQ & Foot Massage

This Rep. Harmon story is a classic case of something I might not have bothered with before working for the Maddow show but now I feel obligated to know what the heck it's about so I don't end up making a fool of myself. I'm glad I did though, the story reads like a creative writing exercise. Some of what I clicked: The Harman-AIPAC Story: A Timeline and Dem Rep Harman Did Urge Times Not To Publish Wiretapping Expose!

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire (by Mark Penn, who seems an odd person to write a story like this.) Later: And here's the response we knew was coming: Mark Penn's fuzzy pro-blogging stats

A good one for the trivia question list. Who is the the first domestic terror suspect named to the FBI's list of "Most Wanted" terrorists? Not someone I would have guessed.

"In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record — admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence — but not so much for convenience."

Composite photos of people on NYC street corners. I wonder if this is as easy as it looks.

Pinned Down, a Sprint to Escape Taliban Zone - This is a great story but the accompanying slide show takes on a different level of immediacy once you read this sentence: "Specialist Soto could not wait. After mortar rounds began landing, he and a photographer for The New York Times dashed down the bank, splashed into the chest-deep brown river, lunged across the current and crawled out on the opposite side."

What I like about services like Muck Rack is that you can see how worthwhile the content is more easily.

This story of the Wired magazine with the puzzle inside reminds me of the time David Blaine wrote a book that supposedly had a treasure map in it. (Which I'm learning from teh Google right now someone actually did solve.)

Sign Says IHOP, but Syrup Says Vermont - IHOP in Vermont has to use real maple syrup instead of brown sugar water.

All the ways the newspaper industry blew it.

1000 frames-per-second HD slow motion. Don't miss the bouncing jello at the end.

When we last checked in, our over-extended blogger had been reassigned to the NBC News Web Team, mostly dedicated to the Rachel Maddow Show. As such, personal surfing slowed to a crawl and overall surfing changed in tenor from trend chasing to harder news research and much more Twitter use.

I assume this blog has a readership of zero at this point, lacking any links on msnbc.com proper and having allowed any existing traffic momentum to run slack. And yet, maybe that's not such a bad thing for starting over.

There was a movie in the 80s that was shown on network TV and instead of bleeping the swears they dubbed in similar sounding non-curse words that had my friends and I calling each other "fuzzy nerds" for weeks. That principle applied to the most famous line in Snakes on a Plane sets a new standard for ridiculousness.

Famous philosophers arguing on a message board - NOTE: This is done in 4chan style, which is to say obscene, vulgar f-bomb dropping language.

In case you needed help admiring the skills of the snipers who took out the pirates and saved that kidnapped sea captain, this sniper game, nothing like reality, elucidates the challenges. (Thanks Matt.)

I recently noticed that the Google search results for Ana Marie Cox puts her Twitter feed above her blog and thought it might be an easy one-example sign of the times. A Wordpress blogware guy says no, blogging isn't slowing down.

An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country.

This sleeping bag suit makes more intellectual sense to me than a Snuggie but looks even more ridiculous.

Wicked long panorama of a block in Detroit.

Who's keeping track of all of the April Fool's sites? TechCrunch.