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 Massive cargo ships that can transport battleships, oil rigs, and power stations. The Bush administration has again slashed cancer research funding to enable corporations to control the speed of research and make more money. "We're at jeopardy of losing a whole generation of scientists, of cancer researchers, and that's undoubtedly going to have an effect 10 years down the line." Reports continue that the Bush administration is provoking Iran to have an excuse to retaliate.  Don't feel bad. [via reddit] Netflix upgraded my account over the weekend to add their streaming video service. While the selection of flicks available to stream is somewhat limited compared to their immense library, movies loaded pretty quickly and looked very good. The feature will be enabled on all Netflix accounts by June 2007. 1 in 8 drug prisoners in the U.S. are in for marijuana-related offenses, costing taxpayers over $1 billion annually. Nearly 800,000 pot-related arrests were made in 2005 bleeding taxpayers of over $8 billion in criminal justice costs. What. The. Fuck. Anna Nicole Kidman's bedside fridge contained methadone, Slim-Fast, and spray butter. Classy gal.  A dude gave a homeless kid a camera and film on the condition that copies of photos be sent after a while. Many of the images are stunning. If you want to make copies of your tunes, DVDs, or whatever, and they're crippled by DRM, here's a fairly comprehensive guide to disabling all of it. See also: BoingBoing's guide to defeating censorware. Top 10 gay animals. Everyone's thought of doing Thriller at a wedding, but these people actually did it. [YouTube] Technology is in the works for a full-scale house printer that squirts liquid construction materials into place to form floors and walls. It could complete a house 200 times faster than traditional methods. Imagine using soy- and grass-based filling. Researchers at MIT have trained a computer to recognize objects as a human brain does. Jodi Applegate at Fort Hamilton Parkway. [Flickr] [referenced YouTube clip]  A lost Leonardo painting could be hiding in Florence, painted on a wall about 1 inch behind another fresco. The technology to find out whether it's there does not yet exist. YouTube and their venture capitalist friends are selling every Google share they got in the buyout. The deal now positively reeks of fraud. New York club BED closed this week after last week's murderous bouncer incident. BED, Avalon, and Crobar have all closed in the last few months. The Morning News put together an extraordinarily comprehensive guide to etiquette in NYC. "A smart guest will consult the host on what type of wine to bring; a smarter guest will bring two bottles." Eddie Murphy pwned at 7th Avenue. [Flickr]  10 myths about Windows Vista that should be summarily dismissed. "All of the media that imported from my XP Windows Media Center computer, including recorded TV programs, played without a problem." Xeni Jardin posted a fantastic screenshot of how Wal-Mart's new digital download service renders in Firefox. To call it a mess would be compassionately inaccurate. The Pentagon has decided to send 20,000 homicidal astronauts to Iraq. "Gen. Petraeus said that the bloodthirsty astronauts would arrive in Baghdad armed with pepper spray, mallets, and rubber tubing, 'and they're not afraid to use them.'" These honeybees blinded a hornet with science. Then killed it. [YouTube] Visualizations On A Plane using faces from the SkyMall catalog. The demographics of the models are somewhat disturbing. [via kottke] The one and only Guitar Hero will be making its way to the Wii. [via Waxy] A list of the winners of the 2007 Plug Awards. Among the honored, Spank Rock for Hip Hop album of the year, Thom Yorke for electronic album of the year, Hot Chip for best album art, and Band of Horses got album of the year, whom I have never heard. Check out Alonso Rodrigo's wearable sleeping bag. Sloths!!! [YouTube] The national news networks react to the death of a bimbo celebrity. "Is Anna Nicole still dead, Wolf?" The Doomsday Vault that will contain samples of the world's crops should something, er, expected happen. The design has been unveiled by the Norwegian government. Characters from The Office rendered as Miis. The Chinese military has been harvesting organs from live prison inmates for decades, if not centuries. Maldroid - Heck No (I'll Never Listen to Techno) [YouTube] Labels: Sunday Reader  Disney has wrangled Annie Leibovitz to shoot celebrities in Disney character roles. At least the images are beautiful. It's time to start flying AirTran whenever possible. Their flight attendants are smart enough to kick a family off a plane that won't quiet their screaming child. Iraq has fallen apart so rapidly, most of the residents who supported democracy at one time have moved to other, safer countries. Now Iraq is just a throbbing civil war with no end in sight. "The moderates are mostly gone. My phone includes at least a dozen entries for middle-class families who have given up and moved away. They were supposed to build democracy here. Instead they work odd jobs in Syria and Jordan. Even the moderate political leaders have left. I have three numbers for Adnan Pachachi, the distinguished Iraqi statesman; none have Iraqi country codes." Aries Spears freestyles as LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Jay-Z. [thanks Ryan] [YouTube] Without the Limbic system in the brain, we would have no consciousness. Wired Magazine's redesign uses four new typefaces created by the indispensable type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones. After reading the first new look issue, it seems that many people may have trouble reading some of the articles in small type. Wider Angle co-conspirator Kaci and her parents took me to see David Copperfield in Cincinnati many years ago and his final trick was "flying." It's pretty impressive, but the system's limitations were pretty obvious. Here's how the rig works. Scuba diving cat has custom scuba suit. [YouTube] Still baffled by the Baby Einstein commercial in the middle of the State of the Union. There's a point at which a parent's encouragement of a child's interest in business might want to be redirected to slightly more healthy hobbies that won't disappoint the kids so severely. "With the news full of 20-somethings who are making millions of dollars with ideas hatched on their laptops and in their dorm rooms (as the founders of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook have done), more and more teenagers are hoping to become the C.E.O.’s of their own companies, without ever leaving their bedrooms." Public signs in Vienna will now include women as well as men. [via Cut N Paste] This bride is seriously freaking out about her hair. [thanks Jared] [YouTube] I prefer Blimpy sub sandwiches to the Blimpy Big Brother all-seeing military airship in space. A list of the 100 best fonts in the world, as listed German something German. [via kottke] Help Flavorpill build wells in Africa to help thousands of people get and stay healthy. Buy a $20 bottle of water and they'll match your gift, getting them 1/100th closer to a new $4000 well. The more bottles purchased, the more wells they can build. charity: water How to make beats. [thanks Kirk] [YouTube] Genetically modified plants could extract harmful metals from the earth in a process known as phytomining. [via We Make Money Not Art] The digital music forecast predicts major labels moving to a non-DRM mp3 format as standard in one to two years to reduce consumer frustration that has come bundled with everything restricted. Designing for the New York of 2106, partially flooded from rising sea levels. [via kottke] The iRec is a $180 dock for the iPod that records at 640x480 at 2.5Mbps and includes a timer.  An impossibly large floating crane lifts submarines out of the water and puts bridges into place. "Boom length: 132m. Lifting capacity: 3700 tons! It's Yoshida - [Japan's] biggest floating crane, built by Mitsubishi heavy Industries Division." Leggings for men? No. Absolutely not. Never. I'll be getting a computer with Vista Ultimate on it soon, but I'm concerned that the DRM concessions Microsoft has made for the OS have crippled it too much. Helvetica, the documentary, appears to be real. There was a screening of about 10 minutes of clips at Pentagram in New York. A model walking on a runway slipped and fell twice in roughly ten seconds. Newscasters from NBC4 in D.C. could not contain themselves, and rightfully so. As a Digg commenter noted, it looked as if she was walking on a marshmallow. Video in Windows Media. Bill O'Reilly floundering on The Colbert Report. [YouTube] The concern about organic foods being flown to other countries (healthier for the soil, worse for the air) is beginning to become mainstream. "Apparently the Soil Association, the UK’s leading organic certification body, has just launched a year long consultation into whether air freighted food should be banned from carrying the organic label." "Lord Mackay of Clashfern has protested against UK legislation that would make it illegal to refuse to give gay people equal treatment... He states, "What they are saying is if you are offering services you must be prepared to allow people to practise actions that you believe are wrong." Yes! Yes that's exactly what it means, you bloody idiot. It means precisely that you have to allow people to practice actions that you believe are wrong. Not in general. Not every action, but actions that cause you no damage! Get a job!" - Tom Coates at Plasticbag Lots and lots of products at the grocery store with fruit in the name or on the packaging have no fruit in them. I almost got some Minute Maid lemonade last week until I saw "0% Juice" in tiny type. Stephen Colbert destroying Bill O'Reilly on The Labels: Sunday Reader  Boeing recently showcased a full-scale model of their new 747-8 passenger jet featuring rounded, well, everything to make the cabin seem more inviting. Unfortunately the coach passengers still get about 3" of leg room. We give and give, but the oceans just don't seem to appreciate our tremendous generosity. "Some 200 tonnes of oil have leaked from a fuel tank on the stricken cargo ship MSC Napoli, beached off the Devon coast, coastguards have confirmed. The ship has also lost some 200 containers overboard, including two holding 'dangerous but low-risk' goods." When a photo or act is potentially tantalizing and arousing but not explicitly sexual, who determines what, exactly, porn is? "Sam's example, a 12-year-old Japanese actress named Saaya Irie, publishes pictures of herself in bathing suits and cute little outfits. Are we reading suggestiveness into them? Or are they making suggestions that we can't help but notice?"  Darren Firth has some astoundingly beautiful work up at his site Keeps Me Sane. This is his submission to the second edition of Grafuck, posted [via Design Is Kinky] Google wants to control the Internet when bandwidth use becomes so heavy the regular Internet is crushed. By building local data centers and connecting them with their incredible amounts of leased dark fiber, the most of any company, Google could take over our data. "By renting instead of buying, Google was able to acquire its fiber assets primarily in secret. The game was over before most of us even knew there WAS a game." Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit suggests that since Windows Vista's DRM could make commercial HD video look sorta crappy, that could be a great benefit to homemade productions. [via BB]  I had not seen this excellent photo/shop of the Pirate Keyboard. As mentioned previously on Wider Angle, Google had a little talk with publishers at the New York Public Library last week called Unbound. "The event was largely a response to Google's controversial Library Project and corresponding Book Search tool, which have met strong opposition from the publishing industry. At 'Unbound,' the tech-savvy authors, publishers and analysts more or less agreed that to grow and profit in an increasingly digital world, the publishing industry will have to expand its boundaries." iJigg is a cool place to listen to new music, but where to buy and download? You mean I have to Google it myself?  OMG! A DIY Wii laptop. It's so beautiful. Advertising/Design Goodness posted a very funny cartoon illustrating 8 types of creative critics/clients that we all deal with. I've had clients that were many of these types combined. What makes a product or design have an IT factor is closely related to tapping the dominant emerging cultural aesthetic right before its peak. "The Polaroid SX-70 camera, for instance, hasn't stood the test of time, and in most people's minds Frederick's of Hollywood Lingerie has been superceded by Victoria's Secret. But it says a lot that the single object in the book that looks truly dated is the one that was discontinued and then revived: the VW Beetle." Really?!? with Seth & Amy from SNL this week. [YouTube] The Jeep DLD (Digital Liquid Display) waterfall they licensed for trade shows. [YouTube] Labels: Sunday Reader  Pink tank over Amsterdam from Love, Peace, and Terror. [via BB] "FEMA has lost and/or failed to account for a sum of money that is almost half of Department of Homeland Security's entire budget and 130 times great than the amount of money that the Department of Homeland Security is willing to spend to secure the homeland." The government has become a corporation designed to exploit its employees and extort its citizen consumers. Beautiful robot routine from some breakers in Japan in a spot for Uniqlo. [YouTube] A lion hugs and kisses the person who saved it, freaking everyone else out fearing a mauling. Super cute video included. Homeland security won't let people ship products from the stores that support Dave Eggers's writing programs [like the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.] because they're too sinister looking, though they mostly contain normal air. Cingular officially changes back to AT&T branding this week, undoing their years-long campaigns reminding us that AT&T Wireless is Cingular. If I hold down the 5 button, it calls the Death Star. Outstanding musical college prank. [via OOMSA] Engadget, now the number one blog on Technorati, was slammed with 10 million pageviews on iPhone Tuesday. The porn industry has decided to go with HD-DVD and not Blu-Ray for high def DVDs. Important to keep in mind that porn standardized VHS and not Beta. Breathtaking Guinness ad showing evolution in reverse. [YouTube] McSweeny's List: Comments on My Short Story I've Received From My Creative-Writing Classmates. "The fact that this story exists is the ultimate argument against Creationism." [thanks Allyson] Stonehenge is not alone. "[N]ew discoveries suggest that many similar monuments may have been erected in the shadow of Stonehenge, possibly forming part of a much larger complex, experts say." The disposal of surplus sodium in a lake from 1947. [Google Video] It appears that Timbaland stole music from the Finnish demoscene. The iPhone will not run OS X, despite what Apple insists. The BSD based operating system on which OS X is built, Darwin, does not run on the Samsung ARM processors that are going in the iPhone. Google will be making a deal with the NYSE and the SEC to offer real-time stock quotes for free on Google Finance and the personal homepages. Pirate Bay is planning on buying the independent nation of Sealand. Donate to the cause and secure a citizenship for yourself.  Nicholas Feltron's personal annual report from 2006 is beautifully designed and surprisingly interesting for being so narrowly focused. [thanks Allyson] Cory Doctorow will be speaking at two events in NYC this week, Google Unbound (January 18, New York Public Library, 8AM-5PM) and Freeculture NYU (January 19, 5PM). In keeping with its excellent theater in New York's West Village, the Independent Film Channel is slowly undergoing a makeover as a groundbreaking, controversial organization that can push boundaries in television content and media distribution. Balls hitting people in the face. [YouTube] Stephen Colbert's "black friend" Allen (Jordan Carlos) writes that there aren't any non-white writers at either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. [thanks Maria] Fascinating and unsettling satellite photos of active and abandoned military planes, submarines, and ships in a very small area of Russia. Wow. Ten excellent foods to help fight high cholesterol. "Rich in both pectin and fiber, along with powerful antioxidants, including quercetin, catechin, phloridzin and chlorogenic acid, apples help lower bad cholesterol while raising the good kind." New Scientist posted a list of five impressive materials that act in unique ways and included video. "Dilatants - fluids that get more solid when stressed. The classic example is a mixture of cornflour and water - it's runny until you hit it when it becomes solid." [via kottke] Labels: Sunday Reader  The Simpsons and Futurama reimagined as Anime by spacecoyote at DeviantArt. The number 6174 is relatively interesting. Mathematically. Popgadget has some previews of products to be featured at CES this week. Engadget has dependably complete coverage of the massive expo in Vegas. Macworld is in San Francisco this week. Will there be an iPod Phone? Will it be called iChat Mobile? Will it look like a wider nano with a slideout keypad or have a full-screen touch interface? CDMA or 3G or both? I want it for Cingular, so I hope CDMA is an option. Will it have built-in wifi and bluetooth and come in 4GB and 8GB models? Will carriers subsidize the price or will it be affordable on its own? Will it have email capabilities and separate batteries for the computing/music and phone functions? Steve Jobs's keynote is on Tuesday. Disney lawyers forced a blog's ISP to shut down the blog after it posted audio clips of hosts on a Disney-owned station broadcasting hate. So the blogger sent letters to the station's advertisers so they know what's going on.  Cute overload. OMG! How can you conserve energy and keep your computer cool and quiet? Use a swimming pool for water-cooling your PC. The 50 greatest cartoons of all time with video links included. [thanks Mike] Nauru is an independent nation island in the Pacific Ocean that sustained vibrant life and forests atop phosphate reserves for millions of years. Over the past few decades, human residents have destroyed the entire island, leaving only talc-like windy grainy fog behind a thin and creepy layer of vegetation. They have an airport and require everything, including fresh water, to be imported. In order to pay for the stuff, since their resources are all but gone, they receive large sums for facilitating terrorists and organized crime. Lifehacker has some decent iTunes tips that you may not already use. I rely on smart playlists to fill my iPod with new stuff automatically. [via Plasticbag.org]  I would absolutely love a robotic pet. Introducing Pleo. Have you been to Amazon's new site Endless.com for shoes and bags? It has the same free shipping that Zappos does but doesn't carries Etnies, so that's a deal breaker for me. Your experiences? What makes great design better than really good is attention to every detail. Check out these reports on different types of the same thing at rbird. Coming in May to the garden of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in NYC: Design for the Other 90%. "This exhibition highlights the growing trend among designers to create affordable and socially responsible objects for the vast majority of the world's population (90 percent) not traditionally serviced by professional designers." [via Eyeteeth]  Ami Sioux has a new book out that is thoughtlessly unavailable in the U.S. called REYKJAVIK 64°08N 21°54W, the first in a five-part series. She asked people to hand-draw maps to their favorite places in the city and she followed them to photograph these special places. I am gasping with joy. Taschen is making their store in SoHo NYC permanent! The interior is designed by Philippe Starck, but it's still great. Their biannual warehouse sale is January 19-21. See you there. Element Labs has developed some beautiful LED designs. [via Core77] Feliz 2007 from Doubleyou. [YouTube via information aesthetics] Top 25 food hacks at Slashfood, including how to make bad vodka into great vodka using a Brita filter. (Vodka should not have a taste. Spending money on expensive vodka is a waste of your precious money.) [via Fark] Dark matter has been mapped in 3D across half a million galaxies. Manhattan buildings are really, really dirty. Most buildings around lower Manhattan and the village look this way. I can't imagine how the city would look if everything were cleaner. More like How to dance like white people. [YouTube via Allyson] Labels: Sunday Reader  Happy New Year to all! [Amazon's UK warehouse 3 days before Xmas] Please download my Happy 2007 mix over at Royal Sapien and my remixes of Imogen Heap's "Have You Got It In You" and "The Walk" right here. You can also find a tasty new streaming player at my record label's site, Olaris Records. The 50 best hacks for your life of 2006 at Lifehack. Citypages in Minn/St. Paul has a great roundup of the best DJ compilations of the year. In order for me to buy a DJ mix rather than simply download one, it has to be very carefully put together and incredibly produced. Do you know Peekvid?  What intern is responsible for this reprehensible piece of "advertising" for MSNBC? In one sentence, what would you tell the future? "1. You can't win. 2. You can't even break even, either. 3. You can't get out of the game." Some good thoughts in this top 10 mistakes in web design. "[I]t is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements." At SAME (So All May Eat) in Salt Lake City, you pay what you can afford for a delicious, healthy, organically grown meal. If you can't pay, you can weed the garden or wash dishes. A parrot has been shown to known over 950 English words, understands tense and conjucation, and can use prefixes and suffixes. "This was despite the researchers discounting responses like 'What ya doing on the phone?' when N'kisi saw a card of a man with a telephone, and 'Can I give you a hug?' with one of a couple embracing."  18th century bordello party in Paris. [via Waxy] Nowhere on the web are comments dumber than YouTube. Love xkcd. Prince Harry will be going to Iraq to serve in the Army. Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais at the BBC Radio 1 Christmas Party. Must have RealPlayer or Real Alternative. Ancient pyramids that dwarf their slightly more famous counterparts in Egypt have been discovered in Bosnia. "At 267 metres tall, the Pyramid of the Sun blows the Egyptian opposition into the weeds. If that wasn't enough, it is simply one of a number of pyramids located in the same region - there are also the Pyramids of the Sun, the Dragon and, most recently discovered, Love." The Daily Show on Time Magazine's Person of the Year. [YouTube] It turns out that it's really hard for black families to get nannies in cities all over the country. If you use short, wide glasses to drink from, you'll drink a whole lot more than if you use tall, slender glasses, and feel more thirsty. You Don't Know Jack is back online! They're now producing a daily game show free on their site, and it's just as good as ever. A year after producing her own curriculum to teach math at an elementary school, a 23-year-old teacher increased her students' test average from the 16th percentile to the 77th percentile. The PS3 is dead, and Sony may go with it. "As soon as people realized that you couldn’t make a profit with PS3s on eBay, they started returning them to the retail stores. It wasn’t rare to walk into a Circuit City or Best Buy the week before Christmas and find 3 or 4 returned Playstation 3s."  Install Orb 2.0 on your computer and stream all your media (videos, music, photos, documents) to your Wii in the Opera browser... free! "If you had a circle the size of the observable universe, and you wanted to compute its circumference with an accuracy equal to the size of a proton, the number of digits of pi that you'd need is only 50." Photoshop CS3 will not be 64-bit. The climate catastrophe of global warming has caused a fashion catasrophe of no winter season, which has caused a retail catastrophe for clothing stores with stacks of coats still lingering. "The NPD Group, a retail research firm, predicts that sales of outerwear will plunge at least 20 percent this holiday season, compared with last year..."  WiiKitty has dozens of cute kitties with Wiis. If you have a webcam, a corner, and a lazer pointer, you can use DAVID software to make a 3-d scanner. Gothamist has a beautiful photo spread of the Revere Sugar Refinery in Red Book, Brooklyn. Giant squid photographed alive! Studio360 asked Pentagram to redesign Christmas, and so they did. HOWTO: Fight. "Nothing will rattle your opponent faster than you screaming a steady stream of shit at him while you’re engaged in combat. The crazier you sound the better." Best of indie pop for 2006 from PopMatters. Tickle Me Elmo TMX on Fire. [Google Video] Labels: Sunday Reader  The equally terrifying and majestic Grand Canyon glass walkway will officially open in March. Hatriotism: Proving your patriotism by hating the people the government tells you to hate. [via A.Whole] Nintendo is replacing 1st generation Wiimote straps by mail since they have a point of failure. If you have one of the early ones and plan to throw your controller with the force of a thousand robots, ask Nintendo to send you new ones for free. The Wiimotion Flickr pool has photos of people playing with their Wiis. [via Wonderland] One of the best moments from Fresh Prince. [YouTube via Digg] Animation-inspired lessons from Walt Stanchfield, drawing instructor for Walt Disney Studios. "we should learn to get that first impression down right away – while it’s fresh, while it’s still in that first impression stage – before it starts to fade…" A new poll reveals that only 25% of Americans know they eat genetically modified foods in their diet. Male circumcision has a 50-60% preventative rate from acquiring HIV/AIDS. Richard Dawkins is the guest on The Late Late Show, RTÉ 1, Ireland. [YouTube] "[P]ressure is building for Texas Gov. Rick Perry to commute the sentence of Tyrone Brown, who was sentenced to life in prison for smoking pot. In 1990, when he was 17, Brown took part in a $2 robbery in which the victim was not physically injured, a crime for which he received 10 years of probation. A few weeks later, he tested positive for marijuana, and the judge not only revoked his probation but inexplicably resentenced him to a life term." "ALBANY, N.Y. — The son of Miami Police Chief John Timoney was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months [instead of 40 years] in federal prison for trying to buy 400 pounds of marijuana from an undercover agent." xRez has gigapixel zoomable images that are simply astonishing. Fish have been discovered that thrive on 350 degree water near underwater volcanoes with a ph balance equivalent to sulfuric acid.  You Thought We Wouldn't Notice keeps track of graphic design ripoffs. The Shower Project is one gay man's quest to shower with 100 women and document it to make his straight friends jealous. The new Al-Jazeera English network hosted Samantha Bee from The Daily Show to get some advice on being TV journalists. Video at HuffPo. Wiimote GlovePIE script for using the Wiimote to control Google Earth. Mr. Show: The Pre-Taped Call-In Show. [YouTube] Gawker posted a really well-rounded collection of overused phrases relied upon by bloggers and media types to seem hip. I cannot deny that I am guilty of some of these myself. Effective January 1, all outdoor advertising in São Paulo will be prohibited. A new type of nano-cable converts light into electricity. "The cables are 16 nanometres in diameter and several micrometres long. They resemble the light-harvesting antennae used by some bacteria and transform light into electricity in a similar way to the semiconductors in solar panels, albeit on a much smaller scale." Jason Kottke points to Regret The Error's top corrections of 2006, including, "She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that." Matt Damon as a shirtless Matthew McConaughey. [YouTube] The Apple iPhone will most likely be released in January and is rumored to be much like an iPod mini with a slide-out phone keypad. "Boeing's stolen laptop nudges the total number of lost or exposed personal records since February, 2005, past the 100 million mark, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's excellent data breach chronology website." [via 27B Stroke 6] The new beta of Photoshop CS3 is now available on Adobe's website. Use a valid Photoshop serial number to unlock and use it or find a hack that's already been posted to lots of sites. This is the first time Adobe has released a public beta of Photoshop. A beta of the interesting-looking Adobe Soundbooth is also available. Bill Clinton responds to a heckler. [YouTube] The rooftop 3-story penthouse atop the Pierre Hotel in midtown Manhattan is on sale for $70 million. xkcd drew a map of the Internet, all 256 /8 subnets in the ipv4 space. Old VCRs can be hollowed out to make all sorts of fun things, like a media center PC. Labels: Sunday Reader  Mini living room with working TV via Gizmodo. Avatars in Second Life consume as much electricity as Brazilians. "[L]ooking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That's the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles." The RIAA would like to reduce royalty payments to artists. "Record industry executives said there was nothing strange about seeking a rate change that would pay less to the people who write the music." Dividing by zero? Well, I never. BBC News seems to be taking this idea of nullity pretty seriously, overlooking that the concept has been around for years and still yields no real results. [via waxy] The Ultimate Rejection Letter. "After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department." [via reddit]  The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs random Family Circus cartoons with random Nietzsche quotes. Do not attempt to teach the customer a lesson. "Either you're going to make someone happy or you're not. Doing the 'right' thing is irrelevant." New Spank Rock mp3 - Lindsay Lohan. Hot. "It's like the theme song to our deepest wishes! Someone had to say it." Joe Rogan ably demonstrates how to shut down a heckler. [YouTube] [NSFW] In case you haven't yet read it, Lindsay Lohan's awesome email. "Our people. Also because I have such an impact on our younger generations, as well as generations older than me. Which we all know and can obviously see. People are just mean." Somewhat related to Lindsay Lohan but more related to Paris Hilton, the Chinese government's recent attempted public shaming of prostitutes and their clients backfired with a display many citizens found unnecessary and distasteful. How often do you read design magazines, and how thoroughly? Vote in the survey at BaDG. Personally, I flip through them sometimes but find more inspiration walking in NYC. A fire at a Moscow drug clinic killed at least 45 people because "the building has metal grilles on all the windows and staircases, and the ward doors are always locked for the night."  Beautifully functional yacht tables that rotate to serve twice the number of diners easily and comfortably. The engineering of the mechanism is art itself. [via BB] Here's a rotary reading desk from 1588. Diet Coke Plus will be launching in 2007 featuring vitamins and minerals added to the aspartame and caramel color. A moment with the Upright Citizens Brigade. [YouTube] Writers Dreamtools has remarkably thorough details about every decade from 1650 to 1990, from clothing to money to entertainment. So how's that novel you've been workin' on? [via kottke] The logo of the Max Planck Institute is continuously evolving based on a few factors, "employees = density, funding = speed, number of publications = activity. Different logos are being "bred" and then picked by fitness in relation to the parameters or voted for by the employees. Thus, everytime the logo is displayed on a website as an animated icon or printed out on a letter, it reflects the current state of the lab as a living organism." Even an obsession with life-sized dolls can get out of hand.  The Divine Fart is on display now in the lobby of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. [via BB] µTorrent and BitTorrent have become one. I'm not sure how I feel about that at all since BitTorrent is now in a relationship with the MPAA. Make a Wiimote into a drum set! Amazing. A Charlie Brown Christmas with the cast of Scrubs. [YouTube] [via Waxy] In French-speaking Canada, curse words are generally having to do more with the church than any sort of taboo act. "In America, you are so Puritan that the swearing is mostly about sex. Here, since we were repressed so long by the church, people use religious terms." "Peace Oil is olive oil produced in Northern Israel by a staff of Arabs, Jews, Bedouins and Druze working together." [via JS] If you've ever been curious how Google's PageRank system works, this is how. If you combine electricity, wine, and the strangest voiceover in promo history, you can make wine taste like it's older and, like, better. [YouTube] [via Gizmodo] Labels: Sunday Reader  A big gallery of Chris Ware stuff, plus his excellent cover for the Writers On Writers issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. [via MeFi] Spresent lets users create very decent Flash-based presentations to share or send for free. HOWTO: Make a 3d paper snowflake. Game demos will soon come to the Wii Shop to download free onto the console or an SD card.  Eboy's new digital poster for web2.0! [via waxy] Giving gifts that aren't really gifts is an art I'd never considered taking up but seems quite fun. "Traditionally, if you hated parents you gave their daughter a Barbie doll. Just one set of clothes, however. And no accessories, and no dreamhouse, and..." [via kottke] Wonderful random data generator to use for graphs, charts, application testing... Some fun codes for finding extra stuff in Wii Sports. Watch The Ben Stiller Show for free on AOL TV.  One Ms. Beth Garrison stitched this excellent salute to The IT Crowd. It looks like NBC just picked the show up and is "redeveloping" it for the US. Fingers crossed. [via BB, BB] People are stirring in the wings of The Daily Show. "Ben Karlin, Executive Producer of both The Daily Show and co-creator/EP of The Colbert Report alolng with Jon Stewart has allegedly just announced his resignation from The Daily Show. The Apiary also reports that Karlin will likely be replaced by Daily Show head writer David Javerbaum." Lee Hungkoo's Animatus is skeletons of cartoon characters. (See Slimmer Angle) 22 ways to overclock your brain. Beautiful Wii spot that's both a parody of and an homage to the PS3 ads. [YouTube] Labels: Sunday Reader  Book was completed over 36 weeks by four artists: two in Brooklyn and two in Belfast. [thanks Nancy!] Some communities just don't see the universality of the peace sign. [via reddit] Is Apple coming out with a tablet notebook or just a touch-screen iPod? Popular opinion in England and Scotland seems to lean toward dissolving the union. Eternal Hope at Daily Kos posted a fully referenced list of articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney and George Bush. Leet Speak. [YouTube] Mitch Hedberg quote generator. "I bought myself a parrot. The parrot talked. But it did not say, 'I'm hungry'... so it died." [via digg] Daily Dilbert without extra crap or ads. The Carlyle Group plans to make a $5.5 billion bid for ASE, the world's biggest microchip manufacturer. A map of active hate groups across the U.S. from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Poor families in the U.K. will get vouchers for milk and vegetables, but is £2.80 a week enough? Lasse Gjertsen [YouTube [thanks Phil!]] An open letter to Nintendo encouraging them to develop options for the Wii to make games more accessible to disabled gamers. The EPA will begin to regulate cleaning products that use nanotech. The Copyright Office created 6 exceptions to the DMCA (it's a start), including the right to copy video games that are on obsolete media. Penguin has launched a new book series that encourages readers to create their own covers. [via BB] Richard Dawkins speaks in Lynchburg, VA. [YouTube] ESA apologized to Kotaku over the embarrassing t-shirt incident. Many employers are becoming more strict about cubicle decor in modern sterile workplaces. "In July 2004 [Calvin Klein] executives decreed there could be no desktop displays of photographs, mementos, toys, awards, plants or flowers, other than white ones." Humans see 60 frames a second, so are we really equipped to drive safely? [via kottke] Google's Master Plan was erased from the famous white board, but photos were taken and the information was saved. [via waxy] The Daily Show: 10 Fucking Years - Funny Inventions [YouTube] Labels: Sunday Reader  There was no Sunday Reader yesterday because Allyson and I were in line for 12 hours at Nintendo World to score one of the first Wiis sold. Check out pics from the Times Square party that we attended initially before we walked over to Nintendo World. It's the funnest console ever. It would be a better idea to get your child a Wii than a children's tattoo gun. Michael Richards (of Seinfeld fame) was performing at The Laugh Factory in L.A. on Friday when a black man interrupted his act. Richards yelled for the man to be removed because "He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger!" "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass." He continued to unhinge himself as people from the crowd yelled "That's uncalled-for!" The more he yelled, the more people arose from their seats and left. Must be seen to be believed. I don't know if Richards thought this was funny, but it's so far from funny that you'd need a spaceship to get to funny from here. [via Digg] CNN published an awesome uber 1337 guide to new tech that's making the rounds. The Gizmodo headline says it all: CNN's Guide To Innovative Tech: DVRs, Cellphones, the Wheel and Movable Type. Four Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker covers this week by Chris Ware. [via kottke] Smoking pot impairs your memory for the short term, which tends to be why people smoke it to forget the world, but now we may know why. Synapses in the hippocampus (in the brain, not at Zoo College) fire in sync normally, but when covered in THC (the fun part in marijuana) they fire asynchronously, meaning that memory is retained with a lower level of success. While this could explain why high doodz forget what they're saying in mid-sentence, it could also help to explain why it's easier to develop new ideas and discover new connections. Rather than let K-Fed make millions from the infamous sex tape, Britney Spears may release it on her own for free to spite him. "Yep, nothing like sticking it to your ex-husband by giving away what diginity you have left for free." [via digg]  Check out the beautiful and brilliant Executive Coloring Book. LG has a spiffy new fridge that has an outside flip-out door for bottles of stuff like milk, OJ, or gin and vermouth and a jar of olives and a couple chilled glasses. Allyson made some delicious vegan crab cakes a few days ago that use tofu and wheat bread instead of crab. They taste fantastic and are super healthy. For their 50th anniversary, New Scientist asked dozens of great thinkers to predict the future. Grab a brandy, this will take a while. YTMND posted a hilarious video of Darth Vader on Wheel of Fortune. Explosions in the Sky will be performing in New York as part of the Wordless Music Series at the Society for Ethical Culture Concert Hall on February 20, 2007. Opening for them will be Ayano Kataoka and tickets are a very reasonable $15. Will It Blend? Major props to Blendtec, a blender manufacturer, for putting together a series in which they totally abuse their products to blend stuff that was never meant to be put in a blender. Making online gambling illegal in the United States will not make the gambling industry more legitimate. (Duh?) It's only driving the industry further underground, and when gambling in a browser can be totally rigged with no regulation, that's a disaster. "The Act has its teeth in the wrong ass." As totally awesome and limitlessly promising as nanotechnology is, the particles are so small that if they're accidentally inhaled or even looked at too closely, you sorta die. "There is some evidence that nanoparticles can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier." A new drug may make you younger, more fit, and more resistant to disease, and it doesn't seem to be a hoax.  The massive wire sculptures that make up telecommunications in Thailand slums are beautiful, sad, and scary. I won't be seeing any Weinstein films for the next four years because their rentals will be distributed exclusively through Blockbuster. No independents; no Netflix. Fuck 'em. [via kottke] The Dutch government would like to see burkas banned outside private spaces since it's, like, really hard to tell who's wearing them and that could be a, like, gigantic security risk. Would I be allowed to walk into government buildings and stores in a Spaghetti Monster costume that conceals everything but my eyes? Asteroid impacts could be responsible for gigantic tsunamis in our very recent past and may explain all those religious flood myths. "A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago." Eek! Larry King has never used the Internets. This could explain why I never listen to Larry King. Roseanne offered to give him a lesson, which he declined. Everyone knows that Gawker fired Valleywag editor Nick Douglas, but the NYT has the scoop on why. "We don’t report stories to 'finally get sued.' We report stories because we think they deserve to be out there. Whatever follows from them is whatever follows from them. Sarcasm or not, it’s quotes like these that could make us look really foolish — or worse — down the road." The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to decriminalize adult marijuana use with the blessing of the Police. "The marijuana legislation, which passed on an initial vote 8-3, would set nearly all crimes involving marijuana as the lowest law enforcement priority for city police and urges the district attorney to adopt the same policy when prosecuting criminal defendants." K-Fed tries to get George Bush to use MySpace in this great cartoon from Current. Arte Luise in Berlin has a different art theme for each room by different artists. I'll be staying here when I travel to Berlin. It's official: U.S. detainees have no rights. The United States is truly the global bastion of liberty. Labels: Sunday Reader  Santorpwned image from AP via Flickr. Goodbye Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum. Outpost Daria has listings of songs played in every episode of Daria. The music directors for Daria did a great job and the tunes still stand out. One Bank, a painful performance at a Bank of America company outing. [via waxy] Kiwi! A very cute thesis animation. Major League Soccer is lifting rules to allow star players onto teams. "The 'Beckham Rule' will give MLS teams the authority to acquire players outside the $2 million-per-team salary cap, which will be 'significantly' increased to accommodate the new policy." Brain scans may help explain what happens when people speak in tongues during religious ceremonies. “You’re not really out of control. But you have no control over what’s happening. You’re just flowing. You’re in a realm of peace and comfort, and it’s a fantastic feeling.” Sounds very similar to how one feels after eating crushed unshelled Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds, which contain LSA, a cousin of LSD. Kamibashi has beautiful hand-made string dolls from Thailand.  Medium makes creative stuff for creative people, and I covet many of their shoes. If you enjoy progressive talk radio, you'll love The White Rose Society, which archives lots of great programs for your free enjoyment. Their vast collection includes Mike Malloy, Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes, and Peter Werbe. A remarkably broad patent filed by the Yahoo! and del.icio.us people would limit the tagging of metadata to objects and ranking that data to patent licensees. Unlikely to be approved. [via kottke] The NYT has a lengthy piece about the Holy Caves of India. Rush Limbaugh was only following the ruling party's direction? "But there have been a bunch of things going on in Congress, some of this legislation coming out of there that I have just cringed at, and it has been difficult coming in here, trying to make the case for it when the people who are supposedly in favor of it can't even make the case themselves -- and to have to come in here and try to do their jobs." No, no he didn't have to, but he did anyway. [thanks Steven] The Found Footage Festival was recently in NYC at Caroline's. Volume One DVD is back in stock. Some performers pull out their best performances on Saturday Night Live. The Entertainment Software Association (the game ratings people) have threatened to sue Kotaku over a post they refuse to take down featuring a clearly satirical t-shirt that's quite funny. Beautiful gigantic panorama of Earth in Winter from NASA. Play Commander Keen for free online. Verizon launched a new company, Idearc Media, and asked Landor to work the same magic for its logo as they did for Verizon's. This is what happened. Grand Theft Mario. Labels: Sunday Reader  Colbert-O-Lantern via College Humor. MTVu Uber and YouTube launched within a month of each other with almost the same goal: get communities to build channels of their own video content. Obviously, MTVu Uber has done much better because they crippled their site and content with DRM. Look what happens when someone posts an MTVu video to Fark. "MTV's reign is Über. Über = over, in English. [...] No Firefox? No OS X Access? fark you, MTVU." If your vision seems a bit worse at the end of the day, it could be from looking down a lot. Your eyelid puts pressure on the cornea which changes its shape. Claire's artwork from Six Feet Under. [via kottke]  Dasparkhotel reuses sewer pipes as hotel rooms. Visitors get keycodes with their reservation and sign themselves in. [thanks Allyson] It seems a little strange that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has so little work from the last century. "Nothing by Beuys, Andre, Ruscha, Richter, Marden, Hesse, Serra." 1.6 million Iraqis have fled their country since the start of the war, with more than 1.5 million displaced and over 600,000 killed. Time's cover story this week is on electronic voting machines and their shoddy record of upholding democracy. Foxtrot's great Halloween voting machine costume comic. [via BB]  Diario de Sao Paulo has put together and beautiful new ad campaign. "The newspaper that goes deeper." Some logo revisions turn out a little better than others, and the new Clearly Canadian bottle design is mind-bendingly backwards and wrong. 30 percent of American teenagers drink energy drinks contributing to the industry growing by 80 percent last year. Saturday Night Live and Robert Smigel take on this season's Republican campaign ads.  A selection of banned advertisements in Italy. What makes funny? with the very funny Jimmy Carr. "A professional comic's routine may be based on true personal experience, but real experience doesn't tend to come conveniently complete with a punchline. That's why most comics are outrageous liars." Netflix has opened their dataset to developers and is offering a $1 million prize to a team who makes their recommendation system more useful and accurate. Much like its venture into music sales, Starbucks makes a good bookstore. Or at least a profitable one. "Starbucks has sold 45,000 copies of Mitch Albom's novel For One More Day (Hyperion) since it went on sale at the chain October 3, a week after the book reached bookstores. The figure accounts for roughly 12% of a total of 391,000 copies sold, as tabulated by Nielsen BookScan." [via ArtsJournal] New poll from Be A Design Group: of your font collection, what percentage do you actually own? (It's anonymous.) The New York Review of Books forces us to reexamine our definition of theocracy. "Bush told various evangelical groups that he felt God had called him to run for president in 2000: 'I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.'" [via A&L Daily] Stripping your flat of wallpaper is more fun in time lapse. [via plasticbag] Labels: Sunday Reader  Jesus via College Humor. Wired's Monkey Bites blog has extensive coverage of Yahoo! Hack Day and a rather fetching photo of Tom Coates, social web tech visionary. Studios have pulled financing for Peter Jackson's Halo movie after production costs exceeded expectations by over 30%. The fantastic Richard Dawkins on BBC News. "Religion means faith, and faith means believing something without evidence." [via reddit] I've been wanting to get new wrist cuffs to replace my pseudo-athletic wristbands. I may go with black velcro strips, but these customizable dot-matrix cuffs are pretty nifty as well. Simple has some beautiful all-green (not in color) shoes.  iBar is a beautiful interactive surface design/installation that is commercially available which uses projectors to illuminate objects or make patterns. I expect to see this at Ministry of Sound in the next two years. RiffTrax is Mike Nelson's new project that provides MST3K-esque commentary on other movies like Point Break, Top Gun, and XXX. Publishers rely on bestsellers to make a ton of cash, but spend most of their time on "okaysellers." Drug dealers are starting to trade in Euros instead of US dollars, an unprecedented shift from decades of depending on the stability of the currency of the United States economy. Michel Gondry directed Beck's new video for Cell Phone's Dead. Check out seasons 1 and 2 of Wonder Showzen for free on the new ifilm beta site. [via waxy] I accepted it a long time ago since I'm young, and it drives me crazy, but secrecy is dead. We have emails, security cameras, credit card receipts... "It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did." Some Democrats have put together Mac spoof ads that, surprisingly, work. Labels: Sunday Reader  Behold: the Hypnocube, one of the coolest art pieces you could ever wish to own. It's a 3x3x3 or 4x4x4 matrix of LEDs that dance and shift. Get a kit to build one or spend the money to have it done for you. Check out some videos. See also: Hypnotoad. E! is now running G4, the gaming channel. I don't think E! should be allowed to run water, let alone another media outlet. Panoramas.dk has a beautiful selection of QTVR panoramas to view in your browser. Start in France, visit Bali, and end up in DC. [thanks Fatimah] Dove made a spot for their Evolution campaign that shows what happens between reality and advertising. Features music by The Flashbulb. Leo Laporte is going to stop writing books unless he can publish them himself. "So thanks to all of you who bought my books. Perhaps we can gather someday at a local Denny's and reminisce. An even bigger thanks to the many, many more who put up with my endless plugging and still managed to resist the urge to buy. Never again will you have to hear, "buy my book," unless you happening to be watching the O'Reilly Factor. And if you are, you're getting what you deserve." Screw the content; is Bob Woodward's new book's cover design any good? Short answer: yes, with an if. Long answer: no, with a but. Air America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The FCC pulled a vote on the AT&T-BellSouth merger again. "The FCC represents the last regulatory hurdle for the two telcos to jump over before their $78bn marriage is sealed."  This is what Willie Nelson had in his bus when he was pulled over. "The 73-year-old Nelson was charged with possession of [marijuana and mushrooms] as were his older sister Bobbie Nelson, 75; Tony Sizemore, 59; Gates Morre, 54; and David Anderson, 50. [via BB] Putting trees on the sides of roads encourages drivers to slow down. "Sesame Street" has changed the world for the better in too many ways to count. The filmmakers behind "The World According to Sesame Street," a documentary airing on PBS later this month and coming to DVD the same day, listed seven profound effects the show has had on global culture. "The original cast [in 1969] included not only blacks and whites, but also Asians and Latinos, and it went on to include people with disabilities. Initially, some PBS stations wouldn't air 'Sesame Street' because it showed black people and white people walking down the street together holding hands." [via ArtsJournal] The Daily Show on presidential press conferences. From 43 Folders, Merlin Mann's top 5 completely obvious ways to improve your life dramatically. "You are the sole person in your life who gets to decide where your time and attention can go. Take that responsibility seriously by not wasting time on junk. You know in your heart what’s really important to you — does the current direction of your time and attention reflect that?" Disney is beginning to market luxury Mickey Mouse crap. They're opening a store in southern California called Disney Vault 28 that sells t-shirts that "will sell for upwards of $60 and a pair of jeans cost about $200. Cashmere throws carry a price tag of $540. Those prices compare to the touristy Mickey Mouse T-shirts that go for anywhere from $20 to $50," already a sad price range. This is a new venture after their abandoned Disney Store chain . "More than half of those stores were closed in 2004, and the last 313 shops were sold to the Children's Place." [via Wonderland]  This Lassa ad uses velcro to simulate the tire's traction on the road. "At first a black page with the copy “Parfect Handling” in the middle is seen. A little power should be used to turn the page. After turning, Lassa tire pattern is seen on the left page and a black velcro which symbolizes the road is seen on the right page. In the final page Lassa logo appears."  What would happen if all humans disappeared today? "[T]he fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery." Apple's Cube on Fifth Avenue was glowing red for the launch of the new Nano (RED), the device launched by Bono and Oprah that supports African AIDS relief and care via small donations of proceeds. "We’ve figured out a way to make 100% of the cost of your red nano go directly to relief in Africa. You simply have to skip buying the nano and donate the money directly to a grassroots organization working on the problem. After asking around a bit, IDEX seems a good place to start — see their South Africa and Zimbabwe programs — and they accept $250 donations online." Get on the trolley with this great list of 1920s slang. Colbert On Demand. All Colbert, all the time. And it's free. The BBC produced some pretty cool interstitials for BBC One, including one incredibly cool spot with hippos. [via plasticbag] A glowing no-spoilers review of Borat (due out Nov 3) from the LA Times. "The joke is not on the U.S. or Kazakhstan or even the fake Kazakhstan of Cohen's imagination. The joke is on petrified, inward-looking nationalism of all stripes." DVD culture is allowing millions more people to see excellent television shows, but when the networks rely on weekly viewership while the program is on the air, sometimes it's too late to save greatness that was overlooked due to lack of marketing or general ignorance. Fortunately, Comedy Central has seen that Futurama should be revived. "Four Futurama DVD movies are scheduled for release and they will be chopped into episodes for broadcast on Comedy Central in 2008." [via kottke] A very creative kid digitally beatboxing through video clips of himself. [via digg] Labels: Sunday Reader  The Declaration of Independence, not just for visiting anymore. Also a good read! "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:" The Sunday Reader is a little light this week because I haven't been feeling well and have had more work than hours to do it. Apparently Google wants to buy YouTube for gulp $1.6 billion?! Animal Olympics in China. Not funny, unfortunately. New York Magazine did a quick interview with Sean Lennon, who seems like a very cool cat. Check out The U.S. vs. John Lennon at a theatre or DVD player near you. I cannot recommend the music of The Flashbulb enough. "Pick any album out of this long discography and you’ll find that it has its own place, and sometimes its own genre." the show with zefrank Does talent matter? "Ericsson and Ward say their findings suggest that any novice can become an expert with enough of the right kind of training." Astronomers have discovered other Earth-like planets out in spaaaaaace. It's not that we can go if ours crashes, but they do exist apparently. In what could be described as the worst idea ever, a Wisconsin state lawmaker has recommended arming teachers and principals to protect against other crazy people with guns. I want whatever he's on, but I'm not sure I could handle it. 30 Rock, the new show from Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, and Alec Baldwin on NBC is really fuckin funny. Watch the pilot for free online. I viewed it while eating lunch and spit burrito on my desk, so be careful. This skit about sexual consent forms, while being a conceptual rip-off of a sketch from Chappelle's Show, is still really well done for long-form comedy and very funny. I wish people still insulted each other so creatively. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." -Oscar Wilde [via reddit] Wal-Mart will be starting a prescription drug program open to anyone, healthcare or not, where they will fill prescriptions with generic drugs (if possible) for only $4. This is going to have incredible repercussions that I can't even imagine. I want to feel that this will be good for consumers, but a corporation cannot be a solution to a national healthcare problem, and it's WAL-MART. Like Ronald Reagan, they are not to be trusted. Friends of gays should not be allowed to edit articles on WikiMedia, a hilarious FAQ. "The last and most active group of vandals is, unfortunately, overly proud friends and acquaintances of gays and lesbians. While being proud of one's gay acquaintances is a positive characteristic, Wikipedia is not the place to publicly announce a friend's sexual orientation or proclivities." If you have hiccups that won't go away, try putting your finger up your ass. "We suggest that this manoeuvre should be considered in cases of intractable hiccups before proceeding with pharmacological agents." Labels: Sunday Reader  The Wired NextFest was this weekend in New York City. Lots of photos from my Flickr stream, Allyson's Flickr stream, and videos in this post. 3D LED Display Cubes by James Carr & Associates. Have you heard the term "designism"? Vote for how stupid you think it is/sounds. A company that makes fire supression products burned down. Oh my. Jenny Lewis has an interview up at Pitchfork where she discusses being dissed by Too $hort. Not cool! [via stereogum] The globalization of culture has led to an artistic renaissance (lower-case "r"). "First, there is more of it — made in more styles and materials, by more artists who live, work and have exhibitions in more places — than ever before. Second, it doesn't fit into neat categories or hierarchies. Thanks to the Internet, the ease of travel and the growth and globalization of the art market, the days of a single dominant style are long gone." [via ArtsJournal]  Core77 has tons of photos up from the London Design Festival 2006. Bridge by Michael Cross is simply amazing and incredibly creepy. This is what waterboarding looks like. The Bush administration and Congress made this legal in the United States on Thursday. Dell has begun a program to recycle or reuse your Dell products for free or other computer products for very low cost, and they'll pick the stuff up at your house. Well done! The dashed or dotted line has many uses in design, most of them very spiffy. "I’ve had trouble justifying my excitement about this intricate visual detail, so I thought it would be good to collect a bunch of examples from over fifty years of information design history, to show it as a powerful visual element in ubicomp situations." [via kottke] More video of the stunning 3D LED Display Cubes. Bush: The Constitution is "Just a goddamn piece of paper." Language, Mr. President, please. [via digg] Otaku have sadly become a new target for muggers in Japan. [via BB] Cory Doctorow was robbed by airport security flying SFO to LAX this week. " A TSA supervisor took me aside and asked me why I was so upset. I said that my family left the Soviet Union to escape arbitrary authority, and the seizure of property by the state. She suggested that I send in a report to the TSA complaining, and I laughed and asked her how many of those people get added to the No-Fly List." In a story that is far less surprising than it should be, a roadway in Montreal collapsed on motorists over an hour after someone called the police to report chunks falling from the road. Police should have immediately closed the area, but they didn't. GM had some nifty interactive video water at NextFest. Nothing special, but fun to play with. Mike Judge's Idiocracy may eventually come to your city, but you'll have to do the hunting yourself. It has a $0 marketing budget from FOX, which is a shame. "If Office Space is about taking responsibility for your own happiness, Idiocracy is about something larger, namely our responsibility for our shared future. Like all the best dystopian fables, Idiocracy is a scathing indictment of our own society." Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cautioned against questioning the President during wartime. If the terrorists hate our freedom, our government is doing a super job making us safer. Opera's web browser (not Oprah) will be free for the Wii for a few months after the console is released. More from the No Surprises Here file: fast food chicken has carcinogens in it. "The group said every sample of grilled chicken products from the seven national chains 'tested positive for a dangerous carcinogenic compound called PhIP' during analysis at an independent laboratory." Dreamhost, the company I use for every site but this one merely because of a clerical error, is banning any sort of BitTorrent files on their servers. Users call foul. Suspicious Looking Device from JunkFunnel Labs is an object designed specifically to look as obtusely menacing as possible. "The Suspicious Looking Device is a bright orange box with a countdown timer on the top. If you touch it, it lets out a loud siren and then scoots away on a set of hidden wheels. Its entire purpose is to look suspicious -- it has no other function."  More genius design from the folks at Penguin, this time advertising for their audiobooks division by Y&R in Malaysia. Andrew Hearst designed a brilliant cover-wrap for The Weekly Standard that ran in... Vanity Fair. DIY design taken to a new level. Outstanding concept perfectly executed. I love local news. Labels: Sunday Reader  Just got back from seeing Michael Showalter, Zach Galifianakis, and friends at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We laughed so hard. My face hurts. And all for $7. [Photo by Allyson.] Cory Doctorow posted a fun infographic representing Disney's longing for eternal copyright. "I once was on a standards committee with a Disney TV executive who was convinced that every time Disney broadcasted an old show, the copyright clock started over for that program -- so if you put a 50 year old cartoon on TV, it would get another 95 years of fresh copyright." The Economist says what we all know: LEDs will replace traditional lightbulbs sooner than later. "Light bulbs are among the last devices that use vacuum tubes, an old technology that has been replaced in radios and most televisions." Kurt Vonnegut says what we all know: this is it. "I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. 'There is nothing they can do,' he bleakly answered. 'It's over, my friend. The game is lost.'" A top-tier group of government advisors tells the government what citizens already know: The FDA is badly broken. Among their recommendations, "The panel called for a moratorium on consumer advertising of newly approved classes of drugs until they have been on the market long enough for unrecognized side effects and risks to emerge." [via digg]  Dozens and dozens of photos of old children's toy and food packaging. [via BB] A device that creates thrust by redirecting microwaves using no moving parts could enable everything from fuel-less space travel to hovercars. Author David Feige was sued for calling a former District Attorney "dowdy" in his new book. Amazing. Even better is his reponse: "Leaving aside that I think she is dowdy, you can't actually sue people for that... She also seems to forget that truth is an absolute defense." Zing! "They rediscover bin Laden every two years right before the election. If you had a business strategy that worked all the time that was premised on scaring the living daylights out of people, you just keep doing it." -- Bill Clinton on Bloomberg TV. From page A11 of Thursday's Washington Post: "Former associates of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff had dozens of appointments with Bush administration staff members, according to Secret Service visitor logs..." "Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand." -- Mark Twain  If you're jonesing for some Simpsons or Futurama, enjoy every episode online. An $800,000 radiological survey was recently conducted in NYC and authorities found unexpected radioactive locations. "NYPD officials indicated that the survey was tremendously valuable because it identified more than 80 locations with radiological sources that required further investigation to determine their risk." For some reason, the RIAA can't find a lot of major artists to pay them their money. Gosh, that's weird, cause other people can find them. Pakistan's military dictator Pervez Musharraf was widely criticized for using his speech at the UN General Assembly and the following press conference with President Numbskull to hype his new book. "I would like to I am launching my book on the 25th, and I am honour-bound to Simon and Schuster not to comment on the book before that day," he said after being asked an altogether different question by a reporter. "In other words, buy the book, is what he's saying," said our President immediately after, just in case it wasn't clear. A bill that would allow public schools to strip search students without a warrant for any reason has passed the House and is on its way to the Senate.  Fishloft lets your fishies get a better view of the world around them, and you get to see them swimming above the water level. For some reason the number one request from universities who are thinking of using iTunes U (whereby Apple stores your audio and video data on their servers to make it easier to distribute to students and faculty) is DRM restrictions. "DRM in the classroom flies in the face of not only my general IP position, but everything I like to believe about academic freedom." Related: Yale will be posting many intro courses on the web for free. Right-wingers have been misusing the term "cultural relativism" to blanket criticize the anti-globalization argument, when the phrase actually describes the condition where someone finds fault in other cultures but is blind to the faults of her own. [thanks Steven] A former Diebold consultant admitted that more than 5,000 voting machines had their software switched the day of the 2002 election in two Georgia counties alone. Related: Maryland's governor wants to ditch e-voting machines for the 2006 election. [via reddit] An article from the Globe and Mail (now sadly behind a subscriber wall) details the frequently and tragically overlooked injury affecting thousands of soldiers in Iraq: traumatic brain damage. While a soldier may survive a bomb or explosion, when the brain slams against the side of the cranium, it begins a process of irreparably damaging itself, slowly eliminating function. Frequently the condition isn't noticed immediately because while some effects are obvious, others take weeks or months to surface. New evidence suggests that Neanderthals mated with modern humans and were not, as previously believed, a completely separated species. A book of Presidential doodles. "What the fuck is up with Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) and his freaky jack-o-lantern-head-contemplating-sacred-desert-bird doodle? If that's not a 'shroom-fueled Meat Puppets album cover, I'm a mindless idiot on the lake of fire." A Businessbib is a half-suit for video conferencing from home. When the RIAA sends someone a letter with a lawsuit, this is what they really mean. "If you would prefer not to be stripped of your home and dignity, please send us $3,750 in the return envelope. If your toddler has been named in this lawsuit, explain to them that the fruits of their labor as an adult will go to pay a debt that will ultimately lead to their death at a young age due to their inability to afford medical insurance. Toddlers never understand that, but they'll get the point if you make them cry." In what David Cross would call a "Fuck You to poor people," you can get $5000 marmalade with gold in it. A few decades ago, environmentalists thought they were doing a good thing by creating underwater reefs out of old tires. It turns out that they actually kill life and are now washing up on the beach. Here's a handy list of 50+ ways a manager can get valuable employees to quit. "Give advice on topics you are only partially educated in." "PARIS (Reuters) - A warm summer and late storms in the past few months briefly opened a channel in the Arctic ice big enough to allow a ship to sail to the North Pole, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday." Warren Buffet and some friends have pledged $50 million to the UN to create a stockpile of uranium enriched only enough to create power so nations would not have to enrich it themselves. Labels: Sunday Reader  Why does Banksy have a fully-painted, live elephant in an art installation with no water and no room to move? Unless I misunderstand the situation, that's a really awful thing to do. After ABC's 9/11 mockumentary lied about American Airlines, they are considering pulling their advertising from the network. Go figure. Up to 4% of the population may hear voices, and it seems most tolerate the phenomenon without seeking treatment. "Some even said they found the experience to be positive or inspirational." Taste in music is linked to drug use, proving that musical-loving Broadway fans like to get lots of sleep. "But followers of hip hop and dance music are more likely to have had multiple sex partners over the last five years and were among the biggest drug-takers surveyed. 'It comes out in the study that, in these types of music, fans score worse in various behaviours, such as criminality, sexual promiscuity and drug use,' said Dr Adrian North, who led the research." [via ArtsJournal]  Sex can be kinky, stylish, and beautiful in addition to raunchy. This multiple-sensation tickler can be yours for $95 from Kiki De Montparnasse. Cool Hunting has a rundown of some fancy new toys. (Here was their first edition.) Blake Ross, one of the developers of Netscape 7, calls it his biggest WTF ever. Great stuff. "Mozilla 1.0 came out in June with popup blocking, and Netscape 7 came out six months later without it, but offered, as consolation, 12 AOL icons on your desktop." This classic WTF about a failed server also caught my attention and stayed in my brain. Audi, BMW, and Subaru's respective ad agencies decided to start fighting via ad space. Much more creative than this very unfortunate placement. Do gay people swear differently than hetero people? "Some people say the word c*ck-sucker like it's a bad thing which, frankly, I have just never understood." [via Wonkette] Five very cool Michel Gondry videos. Coming as a surprise to no one, "applicants [for government jobs in Iraq] didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration." Owners of iPods and other portable devices are likely to buy more music than other people, but not with DRM. Most people still prefer CDs and MP3s. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at the Emmys. Borat responds to the Kazakh Foreign Ministry Spokesman's comments that he is a poor representation of the country to the world. By the way, for some reason, Kazakhstan needed to deny they would be discussing Borat with the White House. Now why would they need to make that clear? Drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more than non-drinkers. This is primarily ascribed to the networks one builds when drinking socially, so more contacts are available to present opportunities.  I would like this inflatable climbing iceberg and a swimming pool, please. [via BB] Asterisk is a really cool open-source VoIP platform that looks to be gaining popularity for its quality, stability, and free-ness. "Sam Houston State University (SHSU) is moving 6,000 users off a Cisco VoIP platform to an open-source VoIP network based on Asterisk. One big driver, of course, is cost. From the article: 'We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,' says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at SHSU." Woot Wine takes the concept of a great tech-related deal every day, for one day only, and makes it a week for groupings of wine. Matt Damon should get to know Jodi Applegate. He also needs being-a-good-sport lessons. And a couch to jump on... for all the wrong reasons. But damn, anger is hilarious. Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat shit and die. In case you don't pick up on subtleties, it's best to avoid the Amazon video service. Some people actually don't understand satire. For the rest of us, there's Mike Judge's new film, Idiocracy, which I'm sure will be gigantic on DVD. President Bush will not tolerate criticism. "It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective." More Stella here. Stores use all sorts of architectural tricks to control how you shop. "Zone Of Transition – The area just through the doors of a shop, which it takes a customer to acclimatise to the shop surroundings and truly enter the shop. Merchandise, baskets and promotions in the area are lost on the customer, who has not fully transferred from outside yet." [via Consumerist] Some people will go to amazing lengths to commission just the art they want. A hippo china service. Truly exceptional in every way. "Naturally, an effort like this must suffer questions of whether $400,000 was worth it and the inevitable comparison to real estate soon follow. Of course it was fucking worth it... it was spent hiring a photographer, painters and one of the five remaining porcelain companies that can still execute such a noble effort. There are valid discussions about distribution of wealth, but this is not one of them." A great story about a truly dedicated patron. Wives of some gangsters in Colombia are witholding sex until their husbands change their asshole-like ways. Surveys have shown that the males' favorite activity is having sex (what?!) so it is assumed by the women that their guys will buckle sooner than later. Bush: "We don't want the enemy to adjust." I think adjust means, like, change. Isn't the point of all this shit supposed to be to make the extraordinarily nebulous "enemy" change? Labels: Sunday Reader  This piece of BoingBoing reader mail made my week. "Stop praising,singing,loving,serving,and adoring that thing, that piece of trash,that thing that was made up and doesn't even exist, when you should be praising,singing,loving,serving and adoring the HOLY THE ONE AND ONLY GOD.Please belive me." Pick up The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at Amazon. From one of the reviews: "Come forward all of you lost people and discover the truth that will set you free." UPDATE: My mom via email: "You have converted me. I now bow down to [Flying] Spaghetti Monster... All hail pasta!" The DEA says that 98% of marijuana plants seized are untended and not grown for smoking, proving their efforts just shy of entirely useless. The Governmental Accountability Office also reported that the anti-drug advertisements on television make drug use seem a lot more prevalent than it actually is, which encourages kids to try them, and have had no effect on overall drug use whatsoever. The ads cost taxpayers $1 billion. Target is being sued under the ADA over the design of their website. A judge has ruled that sites that sell stuff and offer services are thus obligated to comply with the ADA guidelines for accessibility. While a small pain for web developers, I see this as a step in the right direction for the future of the internets. However, I think Target should be given the opportunity to redesign their template (it should have already been accessible) if they haven't been already.  These cut-out paper designs are language-defyingly beautiful. The delicacy, intent, concept, process, and aestheticism combine so perfectly so as to render each work a masterpiece. The EPA will be purchasing all of its power green as of this month. [via Treehugger] ABC is promoting "The Path to 9/11" as "The official true story" in ads outside the United States, as it will be simulcast worldwide. That presents a number of questions. First, how can they claim it's true in advertising when spokespersons have been saying most of the show, if not all, is fictional? Second, the word "official" instantly triggered a few alarms. I have been wondering why exactly ABC would sacrifice at least $30 million, probably over $40 million, to broadcast this fictional docudrama. And how? It's unprecedented. "Official" implies governmental approval, if not outright support, possibly financially.  Photos and video have surfaced of the Banksy vs. Hilton prank. A section of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 could make donating art to museums far less financially attractive than selling it, which could drastically reduce donations and, thus, the public's access to great works of past and future. [via ArtsJournal] Lore Sjöberg, one of my favorite writers at Wired News, devised some ultimate blog posts for many popular weblogosites in the blogohedron. "Kottke: Elwin Festerator is the unsung inventor of the curly telephone cord. 'I looked at a straight telephone cord, and I asked myself, Elwin, why can't that be curly? So I went out and got my brand-new curling gun, and I curled the hell out of it.' Related link: New Yorker article on the Olympic curling team." New Yorker article on Hayao Miyazaki reprinted at the New America Foundation. [via shey.net] Forget snakes on a plane. (I dare you.) Try cockroaches in a television studio. Weatherlarity ensues! "Geoplasma is planning to build a power plant in St. Lucie County, Florida that will generate electricity by vaporizing landfill trash and sewage treatment plant sludge with plasma arcs. It will be the first plant of its kind in the USA and the largest in the world. The power plant is expected to destroy 3000 tons of garbage, generating about 120 megawatts of electricity per day. The plant will also supply steam to a nearby Tropicana juice plant. The landfill is expected to be depleted in about 18 years. In addition, up to 600 tons of melted, hardened sludge will be produced each day and will be sold for road construction." [via Slashdot] Fiber optics are slowly beginning to replace fluorescent lighting despite their costly installation. They generate no heat and use much less electricity, which is only getting more expensive. "The Declaration of Independence is lit by a Fiberstars system because the light source does not emit ultraviolet rays or heat. 'We just did the Magna Carta a couple of months ago,' John Davenport, CEO of Fiberstars said." The minute Flavorpill mentions an event, it's instantly not worth going to. Is that what I am to glean from Lisa Rosman, "longtime contributor"? While attending SCAD, I remixed Freeland's "We Want Your Soul" and made a video for it for my Multimedia Design class. The assignment was to create a montage using iMovie. It's fairly obvious that I'm an obnoxious overachiever, but it's worked out for me so far. A rumination on what drives the impulses of men and women, it's one of the funniest things I've ever read. [via reddit] The Earth is 6,000 Years Old. Everything from xkcd is awesome. [thanks Jacob] There is some marriage advice (most marriage advice) that is stupid, trite, and wholly misguided. This is not such advice. If you want to make a marriage work, reading this would be a good start. "6. Headphones; separate closets." [via reddit] Shakira, despite her shitty music, should be credited for taking a history lesson in every new place she visits by a professor on sabbatical. That's quite a privilege to be able to do and really admirable; it almost instills faith that not all stars on the pop charts are aspirationally stupid. Classic stop-mo animation "Gumbasia" by Art Clokey (the Gumby dude!) is up on Veoh. [via waxy]  Dolphins are but swimming human children. "Not only do dolphins recognize their mirror images, but they can also watch TV. Language-trained chimps only learned to respond appropriately to TV screens after a long period of training. In contrast, Lou Herman's dolphins responded appropriately the very first time they were exposed to television." President Bush thinks all Jews are going to hell. This would be a concern if 1) we did not already know he thought this, or 2) there were any "afterlife" after the temporary learning state English language-speaking humans call "consciousness", the only purpose of which is to make decisions to ensure survival of the organism. You probably read, heard, or saw that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes finally published pictures of their adopted Asian baby. I support them 100%, but I think the kid could have landed better parents. At least he or she will be properly cared for by a competent staff. Lastly, in gadget news that could not be any more relevant to a Sunday afternoon unless it were a self-affixing cold compress, Asahi has invented v1.0 of its BeerBot. Hopefully v2.0 will come on command and be able to grab its own glass from the mini-fridge, but we'll take things one pour at a time. Labels: Sunday Reader  This poster is a great idea. I'll be making one tomorrow. at Flickr. Sunscreen is great only when you use it every day and only let it sit on the surface of your skin. Great. When the UV-reflectors that should sit on the surface soak into the skin, they reflect the UV back through the layers of skin, increasing the damage. Albert H. Gordon advises to avoid U.S. stocks. "After eight decades as an executive and investor that spanned from the roaring 1920s to the age of terrorism, Gordon says he's 'bearish' on U.S. stocks partly because of the $8.41 trillion national debt. He prefers shares of companies such as Canada's EnCana Corp., Wal-Mart de Mexico SA de CV and Petroleo Brasileiro SA." "Banksy has replaced [Paris] Hilton's CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For? He has also changed pictures of her on the CD sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog's head. A spokeswoman for Banksy said he had doctored 500 copies of her debut album Paris in 48 record shops across the UK."  1K Project II is cars as fluid, 1000 racing at the same time. [via waxy] Robots can taste now. T-Amp, the same people who make the amazing amplifiers powered by batteries, have a fantastic wireless amp that includes AC adapters. "All digital CD quality wireless stereo transmission with built-in error correction and 128x oversampling ensures your audio loses absolutely nothing in the translation. The built-in digital T-Amplifier delivers the sound of a tube amp with an incredibly clean 20 watts per channel." And it's $99. Use Tubesock (clever) to grab YouTube vids and save them to your iPod. [via digg] Speaking of tubesocks, "Since being introduced at TechCrunch, July 25 2006, Alexa now ranks PornoTube.com as the 253rd site on the Web (9/3/2006). PornoTube shares and rates X-rated images and video material. Another X-rated site, adultfriendfinder, is the 57th on the web." Some kids are working on an open-source version of YouTube powered by Amazon S3 and Drupal. [via unmediated] MySpace is allowing bands to sell their music on the site in mp3 format. This is the first great thing MySpace has done since they started.  South Park on the Crocodile Hunter. [via plasticbag.org] "WASHINGTON - Top oil and defence industry executives in the United States are raking in record personal profits on the backs of the U.S. wars following the terror attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 and sky-high oil prices, two think-tanks said Wednesday. [...] The top 34 CEOs combined have earned almost a billion dollars since the 9/11 attacks on the United States. This would have been enough money to employ and support more than a million Iraqis for a year to rebuild their country." Things I've Learned In August: "5. The things designers need to create projects sometimes seem strange to a lot of people. I was taking some items home from the office, and my wife opened the trunk of the car to see a pig mask, rope, easter eggs, and a pair of long black gloves."  A new book on Frank Lloyd Wright focuses on his unique design process, "in particular the role played by the apprentices, many of them gay men, who surrounded Wright at his Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. Nine years in the making, the book provides a sustained look at the Fellowship during the period when Wright produced the masterpieces of his late career: Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax building and the Guggenheim Museum." [via ArtsJournal] Sufjan Stevens has a Christmas box-set coming out with 5 EPs and a bunch more really cool stuff. Fun for the whole family, literally. Also, here's a new song called "Sister Winter". Nathalie Bissig sewed this amazing GNU costume to be worn while handing out copies of GNU/Linux. Labels: Sunday Reader  These photos of libraries from Candida Höfer's Libraries are magical and mystical. It looks like a great way to see the world and enrich the experience would be to travel to the planet's great libraries and take something from each. Just kidding. [via kottke] Open note: If you have a shop window near 6th Ave. in Midtown New York where most of the news channels are with their flat screens and news tickers, and you display a large television replaying MSNBC video from the 9/11 attacks as an exhibit, please clearly label it. It's very scary from across the street when you're on your way home after a night out. Win cool Hybrid gear and exclusive music-related stuff by emailing jacqui@distinctiverecords.com with the title of Hybrid's first album. This week a church decided not to allow black membership and a school bus driver decided that black people are once again excluded to the back of the bus. "These people have been told it's OK to hate again. That they should hate immigrants and gays and liberals and feminists and muslims and on and on. They're just taking the initiative and throwing in blacks. Both of these incidents are deep in the heart of RedStatistan, where hate is a political tool." Ministry of Sound Radio online has thousands of hours of DJ sets from the world's best DJs for free! I used to listen frequently several years ago but forgot about it. Check their schedule and listen again to almost any program. Congress voted that the IRS will be getting private companies to collect past-due taxes over $25,000 in value, raising the cost per dollar of collection from 3 cents to 23 cents. [via Rachel Maddow]  The N702is has the fanciest battery-level indicator ever. The liquid moves as you turn the phone around. The August 2006 promo mix from Royal Sapien is now available in the downloads section of royalsapien.com. An interview with Salon: "The author who predicted Katrina now forecasts watery catastrophe for New York, Houston and Miami in "The Ravaging Tide." After more than 160 years of using anesthesia medically, no one is really sure how it works yet. That's not terribly comforting. The Economist on the strategic defense that needs to be set up to battle Google, but seems unlikely to actually happen. "[A]ny merger between the three middle powers would be a “grand dramatic gesture” that would only hasten their decline. AOL's merger with Time Warner in 2000 is the relevant warning from recent history." [via shey.net] The Nation gets five experts to write about the American food system. "Right now, the school lunch program is designed not around the goal of children's health but to help dispose of surplus agricultural commodities, especially cheap feedlot beef and dairy products..." Labels: Sunday Reader  Apologies for missing the Sunday Reader yesterday. Diesel Heaven is heaven's only seven-star hotel. It's the ultimate in afterlifestyle. And no, I'm not being paid to post this. It's just beautiful. Google has relaunched Writely, an online collaborative or single-user word processor application that replaces the most bloated typing program ever, Microsoft Word. Oh, and it's free. "[It] saves its output as PDFs and even RSS feeds (subscribe to a word-processor doc!)... features collaborative editing -- multiple editors on the same doc at once -- and can be used as the editor for writing your blog, saving out to a post instead of a file on your machine." [via BB] This article on child porn online and the loopholes exploited to get around laws of government and human decency troubled me so profoundly that I couldn't post the Sunday Reader. I closed my browser and did something else. It's in the Times, but the story is stomach-churning. 50 common interview questions. [via reddit] When presented with the choice of delicious food or a branded rock for breakfast, children overwhelmingly choose the rock. Danger Will Robinson. (Bonus: the design for this section at MSNBC is the worst professional design I've seen on the web yet this century. Horror quickly turned to admiration and wonder.) Only citizens of Turkey are less likely than Americans to believe that humans evolved from other forms of life. Christian Fundamentalism, much more steadfast and assertive in the United States than anywhere else, seems to be the cause. What's more important? Government surveillance being ruled unconstitutional or a murder case from 10 years ago involving one person and a potential suspect? The media (still searching for a better, more accurate term - suggestions?) made their decision. "ABC devoted twice as much time to Ramsey as it did to the NSA story. More egregiously, CBS offered seven times as much airtime to Ramsey as it did to the NSA story, while NBC devoted 15 times more airtime." Margaret A. McGurk, my favorite former movie critic for the Cincinnati Enquirer, discloses why star-ratings are bullshit. "The very fact these 'grades' exist suggest to readers that there is some sort of objective standard by which any and all critics rate all movies. This ludicrous notion is so easily absorbed that even journalism professionals carp about "the critics" in the same way Fox News commentators carp about 'the media' -- as if there were a single, monolithic entity following some secret, authoritarian rule." AMERICAblog sounds off on Bush's reaction to the NSA court ruling. "I've had it with this idiot. We've got the president of the fucking United States of America lecturing a US court of law that it's supposed to reach decisions NOT based on the rule of law, but on 'the nature of the world we live in.' You God damn stupid fuck." [via reddit] Beautiful cover of Outkast's "Hey Ya." Cannot remember where I found this. Much like the rest of the alleged war on drugs, the United States' actions to curb coca growing in Colombia have done absolutely nothing. Labels: Sunday Reader  The Bush administration wants to change the war crimes laws so people in the federal government and the military would be immune from prosecution. Since virtually everything the United States has done in the Middle East is illegal, we should expect nothing less from them. Sony PlayStation 3 with Blu-Ray won't play Blu-Ray movies. WTG! More people are getting the news they believe from sources like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report because they don't trust the news media for even the smallest amount of truth. Video: Truth In Advertising. The sequal, The Reel Truth (part 1 and part 2) [via MeFi] The Consumer Electronics Association is tired of the RIAA limiting consumer options which thwarts innovation in the technology field. The RIAA sued a guy who died for file sharing. When they found out, they gave the family 60 days to grieve before they sue the kids.  Check the speed of your net connection with Speedtest Beta. I'll post an image of my connection at work. I thought the Flash app was broken. A student at West Point received the academy's highest honor for his thesis on why it benefits the military and the country for openly gay people to be able to serve in the armed services. [via digg] Personality differences in different cultures "that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules" may partially be due to infection rates by the protozoan toxoplasma gondii. Video: A FoxNews audience laughs at Lebanese people dying. It took me a few viewings before I could believe what I was hearing. Video Chaser: PS3 vs. Wii commercial spoof. Comic: Tom Tomorrow on the many reasons the innocent have nothing to hide if the government spies on us.  Penn Station got just a little more cringeworthy on Friday when it, um, rained inside. [Gothamist on Flickr via BB] A photograph of the sharpest man-made thing. You can see the atoms! [via reddit] Video: Behind the Typeface: a very entertaining look at the history of Cooper Black. [via plasticbag] If the liquid could be explosive, why are you dumping it together in a crowd? Video: Ze Frank on terrorism. "Bush today said this country is safer today than it was prior to 9/11. Personally, I don't think he knows. Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen. Many places around the globe have had to deal with a similar reality for years. India, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, to name a few. In many cases, these societies have pulled together and not allowed isolated acts of violence to tear at their fiber. Like disease and the forces of nature, it's a risk that we have to rationally come to terms with. The government's responsibility is to make sure that fear and terror are not disproportionate to the reality of the situation." Link to transcript. Video: Aziz Ansari as Clell Tickle, indie promoter. Mr. Ansari is one of my favorite NYC comics, and his digital shorts are some of the best. [via Waxy]  Is it satire if there's no reason? Is it parody if it's not funny? Is it plaigiarism if it's SO obvious? Unfortunately, the comments on Gawker were no help. If you're shopping for plane tickets, the comments at Lifehacker have great tips for finding good deals. [via kottke] A New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter became so depressed after losing everything in Katrina that he asked a police officer to shoot him. Note from Preston: "Not only did he lose his home, he lost every print and negative from every photo he shot over the last 20 years." [via Romenesko] A list of things every man should know about drinking. "47) Acceptable drinks for men: beer, wine, whiskey, cocktails that are neither sweet nor made with dairy or fruit other than lime or lemon or orange." While the comments at Slashdot are frequently informed and worth reading, the editor moderation system creates a news lag that lets other sites beat them on stories so bloggers link to other sites instead. A chronology of data breaches since the ChoicePoint incident. [via Time] Photo: This girl doesn't mind taking the subway anymore.  Photos: 3D painted rooms. Beautiful design and extraordinary execution. Have you heard? Gwenyth Paltrow is African. [via Gawker] Tom Coates on getting addicted to World of Warcraft, the anti-climax of finishing a game that requires so much time, and why I rarely play ones that take any level of dedication, "Perhaps the reason we think of games as a childish activity is because play in our youth is supposed to inform work in our adulthood. Perhaps then, a game that feeds on our desire to learn and our childlike instincts but cannot give us the satisfactions of creation or real dangers, is a con, a short-cut, a parasite. Perhaps adult gaming is nothing more than an opiate, designed to provide satisfactions and a sense of development or progress that the real world is unable to provide for most people, or that people are too nervous to fight for." Nicole Gordon makes amazingly beautiful mixed media pieces with vintage wallpaper and elements from almost every artistic era. Video: A Series of Tubes: the movie is a wonderfully lo-fi trailer mashup. Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile: the Pitchfork review. Sometimes the site serves up a great piece of writing. [via MeFi] Video: Stephen Colbert interviews Al Franken. Labels: Sunday Reader Welcome to the first edition of the Wider Angle Sunday Reader. It's like the Wider Angle link dump you're used to, but perhaps with a bit more to injest. So grab your notebook and a cup of coffee (or a couple martinis). The Oil We Eat is an essay published in Harper's in 2004 that will change the way you think about everything you eat. This had more of an impact on me than Fast Food Nation, which made me stop eating fast food altogether, and this article is only 7 pages. "David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years." [via kottke] Video Chaser*: Rather than deliver a snide and witty comment to shame her dumbass co-star, Jodi Applegate totally freaked out on a live news report on Thursday. This is the kind of clip that gets cherished for years. *a Video Chaser will be defined in the spirit of Xeni Jardin's unicorn chasers to that follow very graphic/disturbing images on BoingBoing. WikiMapia is a wiki project using Google Maps to describe the world. Scroll to various locations on the map, zoom in, and discover what's there. [thanks Allyson] "At least 56 people, more than half children, were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike that crushed a building, the deadliest attack of the campaign against Hezbollah." Video Chaser: The Daily Show: Stop calling people Hitler. The Chicago City Council has passed legislation to make big box retailers (those with stores in the area over 90,000 square feet and total annual revenues over $1 billion) pay their workers a living wage. Naturally, Wal-Mart has decried that this will hurt the workers and force them to close stores. That makes sense, as I found this in their 2005 Annual Report: "Our fiscal year ending January 31, 2005 was another record year for Wal-Mart. We topped $10 billion in net income for the first time in our history and added almost $29 billion in sales." How could they possibly afford to raise wages? I mean, where would the money come from? Wikipedia celebrates 750 years of American independence from The Onion. "At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world's oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that's 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven." At some Whole Foods, there are egg bar type places where you can find all sorts of weird eggs. Why? I have no idea. But Natalie Dee bought an emu egg, tried to fry it, wound up scrambling it, and created a detailed photo diary of the experience. [via BoingBoing] Weekly internet TV charts. Links to what everyone's been watching. Photos of the World Trade Center site on September 13, 2001. Virtually no one has seen images this detailed this soon after the attacks. [via reddit] Video Chaser: Will Ferrell has done another video in the style of White House West, this time for global warming. A couple weeks ago, my mom called me and asked what she should do with my boxes of baseball cards still in her basement. She said they didn't take up much space, so she wouldn't mind holding onto them in case they get valuable. I thanked her and suggested she do that, since a lot of them are of pretty good players. We both overlooked the fact that no one cares about baseball cards anymore. I'm not sure what I'll do with them now, but it seems that they're kind of worthless as anything more than the cardboard currency of elementary school. I don't make a habit of talking to the under-20 crowd because I find them hard to follow since they rarely discuss anything I care about. It was that way when I was in my teens, too, which partially explains why I had so few friends. I don't like cars, have only a passing interest in chicks, and shopping malls make me sad. But I digress. According to The New York Times, where I get my slang information now, apparently, kids are shortening words in conversation to make themselves sound like they have some sort of brain-decaying disease. "Awkward became awk, actually became actu, typical became typ, amazing became amaze and hilarious became hilar. Something utterly hilar, of course, became TOPOSH — Top of the Pillar of St. Hilar — but there was nothing TOPOSH about the situation. As the older sister, I tried to do my part. Sometimes that involved throwing my sneakers at her, and sometimes it was as simple as, 'Hey, Justine, you’re an idiot.'" [via kottke] The 5 trends that are shaping everything in the world. "We say that this is an ‘experimental’ financial system, because nothing like it has ever existed. Not that this is the first experiment with lighter than air money. No, the U.S. Treasury did not invent pure-paper money. In the modern era, it has been tried many times – but never with happy results. And never, ever on such a grand scale. Now, practically every currency in the world is backed by dollars. And the dollar itself is backed by nothing." [via reddit] The ugly truth about everyday life in Baghdad - a confidential letter sent from U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to Condi Rice on July 20. We focus on the civil war and deterioration of a region, but sometimes forget about all the other problems on a local level. Fuck. "7. Temperatures in Baghdad have already reached 115 degrees. Employees all confirm that, by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without. By early June, the situation had improved slightly. In Hal al-Shaab, power has recently improved from one in six to one in three hours. Other staff report similar variances. Central Baghdad neighborhood Bab al-Nu'atham has had no city power for over a month. Areas near hospitals, political party headquarters, and the green zone have the best supply. One staff member reported a friend lives in a building that houses the new minister; within 24 hours of his appointment, her building had city power 24 hours a day." [via reddit] Video Chaser: Back to the Future I and II synced up so you see both Marty McFly's simultaneously. Beautiful images of the former Penn Station in NYC. I was looking at this page this week after hearing once again how ugly the current station is under Madison Square Garden. Coindidentally it showed up on del.icio.us popular this weekend. "I came over here because I wanted to kill people." A profile of Pvt. Steven D. Green. [via digg] Video Chaser: Windows Vista speech recognition doesn't work so well... in a demonstration at their headquarters and replayed on CNBC. Labels: Sunday Reader |
 
  
July 2004
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