Gulfstream: 2008

Yahoo Answers: What is the right age to start teaching my dog about sex?

“Everything I Know About Business I Learned From Poker.” From the CEO of Zappos. (Who, I just notice, have now strayed from shoes into clothes, electronics...)

Winning over hearts and minds: the CIA is offering Viagra to ageing Afghan warlords with multiple wives.

“A Guide to Understanding Flow Charts, Presented in Flow Chart Form.”

The Advertising Standards Authority is upset that the poster for “Righteous Kill” was displayed at Stockwell Station (site of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes) with the tagline “There’s nothing wrong with a little shooting as long as the right person gets shot.”

Airbus and Boeing each have 3700+ planes on their order books!

mySociety’s FixMyStreet app for iPhones: “This means that you can now walk down any street it Britain, and upon spying, say, a big pile of dumped mozzarella (real example) you can whip out your phone, snap a pic and upload it with precise coordinates to the relevent public authority. You don’t have to know who’s responsible, we’ll work that out, and with any luck you’re [sic] street will be fixed in no time.”

Interesting, sounds about correct actually: “Though Obama’s campaign savaged the administration as incompetent and radical, Obama’s personnel decisions have effectively ratified Bush’s defense and economic approaches during the past few years. At the Pentagon, Obama rehired the architects of President Bush’s current military strategy—Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Raymond Odierno. At the Treasury Department, Obama has hired one of the main architects of Bush’s current economic approach.”

“Cash-strapped American Airlines announced a new series of fees this week that will apply to all customers not currently flying, scheduled to fly, or even thinking about flying aboard the commercial carrier.”

Interview with the “notorious lawyer” Jacques Vergès, defender of war criminals. “A doctor must provide help, but as an attorney, you are not obligated to accept every client.” “If you meet a doctor who cannot look at blood, pus or open wounds, he is in the wrong profession. If you meet a lawyer who doesn’t like criminals or dictators, it’s the same thing.”

Really gripping: 999 (i.e. emergency services) transcripts. “All right, well done. How old is your mum?” “Um, I don’t know. She’s just like ... She’s just like she’s ... When I heard her make a funny noise, she was, like, just sleeping and she was, like, shivering about.”

Pretty in-ear headphones from Denmark. Not hideously expensive either—€55. (Audio-Technica’s ONTO headband-style headphones are also nice and surprisingly cheap (US$20), but very difficult to find outside Asia.)

True: “McDonald’s did away with its spoon-shaped coffee stirrers because people were using them as cocaine spoons.”

Chris Anderson on the Long Tail: “I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail.”

“If the read/write head [of a hard disk] were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth: The head would fly at Mach 800 At less than one centimeter from the ground And count every blade of grass Making fewer than 10 unrecoverable counting errors in an area equivalent to all of Ireland. ”

Barack Obama unlikely to be able to keep his BlackBerry (or even email of any sort) as President, due to legal requirements regarding record keeping (huh? you can’t just channel everything through a printer?) and concerns about email security.

Difficult to imagine how this came about: McDonald’s Japan is experimenting with two completely unbranded stores—there’s no McDonald’s logos or package anywhere.

The Age shows its class again. At the bottom of an article on Obama considering Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State: “Should Senator Clinton become secretary of state, she would not be the first woman to hold the position. That distinction goes to Madeleine Albright, who was appointed by the senator’s husband, president Bill Clinton, in 1996.” Yeah, and she wouldn’t be the second, either. Starting with Albright, the post has been held by a white woman, a black man (Powell), and a black woman (Rice)—appointing a woman is no biggie, and not worth drawing attention to.

The jaw-droppingly delicious Australian chocolate biscuit the Tim Tam is now available in the US at Target.

Apple a two-button mouse holdout for years because it’s too complicated (common justification, even if it’s not Apple’s), and now: “Pinch to zoom in and out. Rotate an image with your fingertips. Swipe with three fingers to flip through your photo libraries. Swipe with four fingers to show your desktop, view all open windows, or switch applications.”

Associating the colour red with Republicans and Blue with Democrats only became universal in 2000. (According to Wikipedia, NBC’s David Brinkley famously used the phrase “sea of blue” to refer to Reagan’s victory in 1980.) By contrast, the Donkey/Elephant associations date back to the 1870s.

Cartoon illustrating one difference between the 43 Presidents of the United States that have already had a go, and the 44th.

A surprisingly well-done McCain vs. Obama dance-off contest.

The NYC Board of Elections isn’t very helpful to people tyring to find out where and how to vote, with much bouncing between phone numbers and websites and email addresses.

Photographs of the director Roland Emmerich’s London house: “The American bedroom features a bed throw made from vintage army underwear, a headboard made from an aeroplane wing, and a Photoshopped photograph of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sporting a dressing gown and a hairy six-pack.” Under the stairs is a life-size wax model of Pope John Paul II reading copies of his own obituraris.

A nice desk lamp.

James Surowiecki ever bit as good a blogger as you might expect. Shame about the lack of RSS feed. [Update: A few people pointed out that there is one (linked from the left column), though feed autodiscovery doesn’t work, and the one linked from the right column isn’t what you want.]

The lens of the Panasonic LX3 camera (I own one) produces quite a lot of distortion at the wide end (24mm), which is transparently corrected in by both the in-camera software, and by the supplied raw conversion software. Panasonic isn’t very upfront about this. (A print ad claims the lens produces “minimal distortion.”) I think correcting distortion in software is sensible and justifiable from a technical point of view (it’s the results that matter), and will probably become more common in future, but the deceptive advertising has got to go! (I’m guessing the reason the negative has always been a miniature version of the final image in the past (sometimes this has involved quite a lot of effort and expense) is that it was too difficult to correct distortion at the point in time when prints were made—you’d need to know exactly which lens was used to take the picture, and be able to correct it optically. But since everything is digital now, and photos are “processed” on-camera the moment they’re taken, these things are less of an issue, and funky lens designs will become more common, at least on compact cameras.)

Video of Banksy’s Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill—eerie looking animatronic hotdogs, drumsticks, etc. in cages.

Red Bull Air Race pictures. I don’t understand how this exists, from both a public safety point of view and a commercial point of view. Eighty people died in the 1955 Le Mans disaster when a Mercedez-Benz 300 SLR jumped into the crowd and caught on fire, leading Mercedes to abandon racing until the 1980s and Switzerland to ban motorsport until 2007. Aircraft are both faster and less able to be restrained by safety barriers, and have a less than enviable safety record even at airshows, where they’re not trying to go particularly fast or dodge things. And: (1) how do you sell tickets, when the course is many kilometers long; (2) why do people buy tickets, when planes go quite fast and are competing against time?

Cycling is cool and all, but this is getting a bit out of hand. This beautiful ad is for tires.

Malcolm Gladwell, curiously covering much the same ground that another New Yorker writer (Brendan Gill) did in his book Late Bloomers.

Vice interview with an ex heroin dealer: “There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you’ve got 100 kilos of heroin in the trunk of your car.” (Maybe needs fact checking.)

Many unexploded WWII bombs still in Germany: “In the whole of Germany, more than 2,000 tons of American and British aerial bombs and all sorts of munitions ranging from German hand grenades and tank mines to Russian artillery shells are recovered each year.”

Artist created McCain/Obama New Yorker cover with Photoshop 3.0 and Macintosh OS 7. (But he must have another machine for email, right?)

Mail Goggles: Google Labs project that helps prevent you sending mail you may later regret, but requiring that you complete some math problems if sending mail late at night.

Probably the nice thing to do: Banksy is refusing to authenticate five works up for auction this weekend: “Pest Control does not authenticate street pieces because Banksy prefers street work to remain in situ and building owners tend to become irate when their doors go missing because of a stencil.” Also: “[Banksy] would encourage anyone wanting to purchase one of his images to do so with extreme caution, but does point out that many copies are superior in quality to the originals.”

Strange, funny, Sarah Silverman commercial urging her fellow Jews to go to Florida and convince their grandparents to vote for Obama (!). A campaign of the Jewish Council for Education & Research, which sounds all high minded and apolitical, but that I think was formed recently (2007?) as an Obama PAC.

Unusual betting behaviour at on Intrade is apparently pushing Obama contracts lower than they should be, and exposing arbitrage opportunities.

James Surowiecki: “All companies, of course, worry about how their stock is doing. But for most the stock price is a product of performance, rather than a cause of it. If Procter & Gamble’s stock plummeted tomorrow, people would still keep buying Tide. By contrast, if an investment bank’s share price tumbles, it not only wrecks people’s confidence but also can lead to credit-rating downgrades, which provoke a further decline in the stock price, and so on. The downward spiral can be stunningly fast and near-impossible to escape.”

Cigarette advertising is banned; can you advertise books that look like cigarette cartons? Tank Books publish “tales to take your breath away”; authors include Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Cambridge college Corpus Christi is getting a fancy new clock in the form of a monster that devours time, with many features inspired by the 18th C. clockmaker John Harrison. (Corpus Clock in Wikipedia.)

Lehman and AIG FAQ, from two of Levitt’s UChicago colleagues.

Google Search localised to pirate (“Advanced Search” is “Use Me Better Spyglass,” etc. (More info.)

Charts for stocks in the financial sector. Both Morgan Stanley (down 30%) and Goldman Sachs (down 20%) have seen better days. Both recently reported better than expected financial results.

Canon’s new high-end compact camera, the G10. Has dedicated ISO wheel—don’t think I’ve seen this before.

Small profile on the German camera company Leica, and their difficult transition to digital. “In the 1970s, the company invented the auto-focus lens but sold the patent to Japanese rival Minolta, reasoning that its customers knew how to focus.”

Vice Don’t: “It can be pretty hard to walk into a party if you’ve had a big fight with one of your friends or you know your ex is going to be there, but imagine how bad it must feel if you’re just a person who really sucks.”

List of dpreview’s camera reviews. If you scroll down a long long way, you get to “Average.” Six cameras (out of maybe 200) are “Below Average”!

Intrade’s political prediction market charts. McCain is ahead on these, too (50.8% to 48.8%.)

Panasonic’s new rangefinder-like G1 camera—interchangeable lenses like a DSLR, but without the pentaprism and mirror, and hence smaller and quieter. I’ve never understood why DSLRs even bothered to exist in a digital age. When images were recorded on film, it helped to be able to preview what you were going to get when you released the shutter via the SLR’s mirror and prism, but with digital, you can read the data directly off the sensor. For some reason I don’t quite understand, the fast autofocus technique used in SLRs (phase detection AF) can only be implemented with the SLR design but apparently the G1’s contrast detection AF (as used in all compact cameras) is almost as fast. (I still think I’ll get the LX3, though.)

Excellent timeline of the chain of events that led United Airlines’ stock to plunge from $12 to $3 on the strength of a false news story that it had filed for bankruptcy. (A old undated Chicago Tribune article made it onto the most viewed stories page via Google News.)

Profile of Crispin Porter + Bogusky (a few months old), the non-traditional ad agency behind Microsoft’s new (and quite good) Seinfeld + Gates campaigns (#1, #2).

“Let’s straighten things out, shall we? What you see in the photo above, taken in Copenhagen, is something we call a ‘cyclist’. Not a ‘bicycle commuter’, nor a ‘utility cyclist’. Certainly not a ‘lightweight, open air, self-powered traffic vehicle user’. It’s a cyclist.” See also Critical Miss or Critical Mass?: Critical Mass turns cycling into a political act in which the participants are activists wearing funny clothes, and otherwise unlike regular people. (Gay pride parades have a similar effect?)

Since January 2007 (when they started keeping records), Vladimir Kramnik (currently #3 in the world) has never won a game starting on black. It seems to be much more difficult than I expected for top players to win starting second: most of the other top players seem to be about 40% more likely to win starting from white, though there is a surprisingly amount of variation, with some players such as Viswanathan Anand ending up about even (wins 29% on white vs. 28% on black).

Unusual response from Stephen Hawking, in response to a question about whether he thought he’d get a Nobel Prize: “If the LHC were to produce little black holes, I don’t think there’s any doubt I would get a Nobel prize, if they showed the properties I predict. However, I think the probability that the LHC has enough energy to create black holes, is less than 1%, so I’m not holding my breath.”

Analysis of Google Chrome, pointing out that for quite a while, Microsoft have been legally prevented from deeply integrating IE into Windows: “Chrome, however, eases some of the pressure on Microsoft. If Microsoft integrates MSN search or other services tightly into IE, it will be harder for Google to cry foul -- Microsoft could point to Chrome, and any steps taken by Google to integrate their services into Chrome, as counter-arguments. In addition, any outcry from Google can now be characterized as sour grapes from a loser -- Microsoft can say, we both have browsers out there, they have one too, ours is just better, and let consumers decide for themselves.”

Since 1999 there’s been an actual Hanoi Hilton. Surprising facts about the original: (1) no North Vietnamese was ever charged or tried for war crimes (and the North Vietnamese claim such charges have no standing because they never signed the Geneva Convention); and (2) To this day the Vietnamese claim that no prisoner was tortured in Hoa Lo Prison.

Romanticising and beautifying the slums of Rio: artist JR (who was part of the street art exhibition at the Tate Modern) pasted women’s portraits on the outside walls of houses in the Providencia slum in Rio de Janiero. There’s more pictures on the site of the “Women are Heroes” project (Flash, and linking doesn’t work.)

London, from above, at night.

The Orchestra at the Sydney Olympics mimed: “The Sydney Symphony’s confession undermines those who have seen the Beijing faking scandals as evidence of a peculiarly Chinese quest for perfection.” If this is a “perfectly normal” thing to do, why not tell people about it at the time?

Sean Connery sleeveface of his own book!

The Catorialist, a parody of The Satorialist.

David Brooks: “ The Democrats are in danger of doing to Obama what they did to their last two nominees: burying authentic individuals under a layer of prefab themes.”

Surprising piece by Joel Spolsky in which he: (a) admits to being surprised that his Fog Creek employees—despite their private offices and dual monitors and free lunches—were unhappy; and (b) rather timidly argues that sometimes middle managers might be a good idea.

The Olympic sponsors, none of which I could definitively name, due to the puzzling lack of advertising on any of the venues or athletes.

Fighting in ice hockey—possibly informative to those not from North America. It’s against the rules, but attracts only minor penalties provided various “rules” are followed (only two at a time, no sticks, no gloves). (Videos of hockey fights from hockeyfightsdotcom on YouTube.)

The best jokes of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “I can’t believe Amy Winehouse self-harms. She’s so irritating she must be able to find someone to do it for her.”

The problem with any potential disqualification of gold medal-winning Chinese gymnasts on the basis of age is that it gives a gold medal to a gymnast who demonstrably isn’t the best in the world, and the best in the world is more interesting than the best European, best under-23, best without sight, best under a certain weight, etc. Younger is better because younger has less fear? That’s a poor excuse for Olympic-level athletes. (I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but it’s certainly odd (one oddity amongst many high-level sport oddities) that a sport has got itself into a situation where there’s a worry that the best in the world got that way via abuse.)

The Long Now Foundation’s modern-day Rosetta Stone: Genesis 1-3 in 1,500 different languages, plus associated information etched into a 3 inch disc, designed to last for 2,000–10,000 years. (They picked Genesis because it’s already translated into a lot of languages.) They’re hoping many individuals will pay $25,000 for their own disc (to ensure wide dispersal), and hand it down from generation to generation.

“Assortment of sculptures based on graphs and charts.” e.g. Consumer Confidence, 2006-07, brass, wood.

Excellent compendium of great Olympic moments on YouTube. (The uneven bars routines are particularly interesting.)

“What Makes for a Good Blog?” I didn’t realise people considered via links so important. I’ve never posted them here because they seem like a very crude way of allocating credit: finding and posting a link is often trivial (often it’s the source’s source who has done the work, for example). Also, people tend to use via links to attract attention or cosy up to other bloggers. I agree via links are sometimes interesting though, so I’ll think about adding them. (In contrast to an individual link, an entire blog does represent a significant chunk of work, which is why I have a blogroll.)

US airlines slide further into crapness: United is evidently eliminating free meals on (some) transatlantic flights. (Those out of Dulles/Washington DC.)

The Franklin & Marshall collegiate-style clothing brand got started in 1999, when a small Italian clothing company decided that it would be a nice to sell clothes bearing the name and logo of Franklin & Marshall College. They never contacted the college, and never sought a licence, but when the college eventually found out about this (via puzzled graduates travelling in Europe), they decided the best thing to do was licence the name (more from Wikipedia).

The Earth’s Facebook feed: “Georgia is no longer friends with Russia,” etc.

ABC News buries the lede: five out of six members of “Rudely Interrupted” are physically or mentally disabled, but the story about them being invited to play at the UN avoids mentioning this until the eighth paragraph. (Their disabilities are part of their identity; the about page on their site mentions this pertinent fact immediately.)

The “Peaceful Progression Smoke Alarm” from The Onion: awake to sounds of the rainforest; snooze capable. (A $7.99 empty gift box.)

Surprisingly pleasing Boba Fett/Flashdance stop motion video.

“The GoateeSaver cuts goatee grooming time by protecting the goatee and ensuring a perfect shave every morning.”

The Olympic torch, from 1936 to 2008, and some background to each of the designs.

Pretty good set of 10 Linux sysadmin tips, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Profile of a Cambodian marathon runner who lives on $50 a month, from a nice series of profiles of athletes “heading to the Olympics despite huge obstacles.” As the BBC is wont to do, though, the voice-over translation sounds like it was done by an earnest child striving mightily vary his pitch (see the passage beginning at 1:30), which endas up being quite belittling. (For better of for worse they do this pretty consistently to anyone that isn’t a statesman or famous—it’s not a developing country bias.) [text, video]

Surprisingly compelling mini documentary about Martin the Tailor, a guy who came to the states after being in a concentration camp in World War 2, now owner a garment factory (and suit-maker for Bill Clinton). Very well put together, and looks nice on Vimeo as well.

Negative, rather political review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: “But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. … Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was—guess what?—part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly.”

“Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.”

According to one measure, Firefox has just hit 50% market share in Indonesia, with Finland, Slovenia and Poland close behind. (I couldn’t find the data on the linked site.)

Feist on Sesame Street! “I love counting ... counting to the number four.”

Y Combinator’s “Ideas We’d Like to Fund.” Some great stuff here. “25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it’s a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.”

Is suppressing evidence the best remedy for police (or procedural) misconduct? The US is pretty much unique in this regard.

A documentary about the Trinidians from Queens who mod their bikes with thousand-dollar stereos. (NY Times story from last year.)

Brother Cesare is a 62-year-old Capuchin monk who is the lead singer of an Italian heavy metal band (with video).

“In architecture, a folly is a building constructed strictly as a decoration…”

“May We Mock, Barack?” Maureen Down thinks Obama is too earnest. Also, once upon a time comedians did have jokes about Obama. Dowd: “It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys.” Stewart: “Are you kidding me?” Stewart, Colbert together: “His dad was a goat-herder!”

The Betancourt rescuers not only posed as aid workers, but at least one wore a Red Cross logo. I don’t know why aid organisations weren’t more critical of this, since it directly jeopardises their work. (As well as being a pretty shifty thing to do.)

Some of the ways in which Google disambiguates queries, so that it can return what it thinks you want, instead of what you said you wanted. I actually wish Google would do less of this, or would at least tell you when the results are very sensitive to location or term order, etc. (The did you mean... system is fine.) A few years ago Google decided that the order of search terms was meaningful, and so now I sometimes enter various permutations of the same terms if it seems like Google is getting confused. I’d rather not have to run the same search across different versions of Google. Coincidentally, I discovered today that Google Maps reckons the Natural History Museum is on Park Avenue (about a mile away from where it should be).

The Pope substitutes u for you in a text message (his first?) to World Youth Day pilgrims. (It’s otherwise proper English.)

The only way iPhone-owning non-developers can get applications onto their iPhone is via Apple’s App Store, which makes it difficult for developers to distribute beta versions, or get users to run special debug builds of their software.

How true is this? (On oil price speculators:) “since no oil is ever held back from the market, these bets do not affect the price of oil any more than bets on a football match affect the result.”

The consequences of a rule that victory in overtime would be counted as a 2–0 result, and Barbados needing to win by two goals to advance to the final of the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup: Barbados, winning 2–1, score an own goal to force overtime, leaving Grenada a frenzied few minutes to score at either end. They fail, and Barbados duly win via a golden goal in extra time.

Smashing Magazine puts together some quite extraordinary spreads on design. (Mostly web design—this on, on tables of contents, is a bit of an exception.) Example after example, and not much text. I don’t know how they come up with so many good examples several times a week.

“I never would have made it this far in graduate school without the aid of marijuana.”

Prices for the iPhone 3G across different markets. Customers in some countries seem to be ripped off, but you can’t really tell without knowing how much the networks paid for 3G spectrum in the first place. I don’t know what percentage of operating costs goes toward paying for spectrum, but in some countries this must be significant: in 2000 in the UK, for example, five bidders bought 3G spectrum for a combined £22.5bn.

Mammoth vs. human vs. wikipedia. A strange cartoon thing. [pic] Update Someone has edited Wikipedia. Awesome.

Until today, Google’s homepage hasn’t had a link to their privacy policy. (I can’t remember where I read this but I think their argument was that more links hurt the user experience, and that if you want it you can Google for it.) Privacy groups have been complaining about this however, and according to this Marissa Mayer blog post, Sergey and Larry finally agreed that the homepage could link to the privacy policy—but only if the total word count didn’t change. So they took away the word “Google” from the footer and replaced it with a link to the privacy policy. (Includes the story about the angry user who sent mysterious emails consisting of a single number (the number of words on the homepage) to Google every time it changed.)

Thirty-year old pictures from the moon, and pictures of vehicles being tested for future missions. (Is driving on the Moon really that different that you need funny looking/complicated 6-wheeled vehicles where every wheel can turn independently? Make it small and light and lift it (1/6th gravity) if it gets stuck.)

WWE Wrestler Kofi Kingston is ostensibly Jamaican but actually comes from a family of Ghanaian intellectuals. A family friend: “Why would a person who is very capable of going to graduate school decide to jettison all that for concussion in the face?”

Google reckons they can now index (some) Flash. Any examples of this?

Dinner in the Sky: eat dinner on a platform suspended 50m in the air by a crane.

Browser stats from salesforce.com, a big site with lots of big business/enterprise customers: IE 6 52%, IE 7 31%, Firefox 2 14%, Safari 0% (rounded down from 0.4%), Other 2.5%.

Creepy robotic water snake. As with the Big Dog, does it move like a living thing because they were consciously copying living things, or because that turns out to be the best way?

Some great car driving stunts: 360° and 540° spins, synchronised slide parallel parking, changing a tire while up on two wheels.

Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno come up with some provocative “unthinkable futures”: “A new profession“cosmetic psychiatry“is born. People visit “plastic psychiatrists” to get interesting neuroses and obsessions added into their makeup.”

Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter from Flickr: “As you know, tin is in my blood. For generations my family has worked with this most useful of metals. When I joined Yahoo! back in ’21, it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation. I knew it was the place for me.”

MLB cameraman Tom Guilmette talks about his $94,700 camera and its nearly-as-expensive 9.5–700mm 1:1.7 lens. (Comments also worth reading.)

Pictures of a probably man-made mud volcano that’s been puming out 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools every day for the last two years.

Nice use of censorship bars: The BPA (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim), “Toe Jam,” featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal. Directed by Keith Schofield.

How to win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest: “Excepting first names, only nine proper nouns have ever appeared in a winning caption: Batmobile, Comanche, Roswell, Hell, Surrealism, Tylenol, Bud Light, Frankenstein, Kansas Board of Education” (As predicted, the winning caption pairs “an unreal image with a rather ordinary caption”.)

Google reader Easter Egg! (My Google Reader shared items.)

High-resolution images of that (previously-uncontacted?) Amazonia tribe shot who shot at a plane flying overhead with arrows.

Mariah Carey throws first pitch at baseball game in Japan, looks ridiculous (the throw, the clothes).

(Another cute shirt.)

Hit the “Gadgets” tab and select “Disable access keys” to stop Wikipedia doing surprising things when you hit Ctrl-P and expect the cursor to move up a line. (Still searching for a fix for WordPress.)

Culled from Flickr: “here and there I found some photographs which were quite good.” See also 12 Tips for Improving Camera Phone Photos.

“For some reason I always thought that taking him out of the water and putting him in a pair of sweats outside the drug store would divest King Neptune of some of his majesty and grandeur. I was wrong.”

Essay on the iconoclastic Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and his involvement in the making of an early parallel supercomputer.

“Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are either irrelevant or unknown in the context in which it is being discussed.” e.g. whatchamacallit.

Artist reckons he sent a suitcase filled with GPS equipment around the world in a route tracing out the shape of a head—very very unlikely I say.

Screenshots of TV.

Marketing, branding, and memory, told around a company called River West that acquires the intellectual property around “dead” brands: “In most cases we’re dealing with a brand that only exists as intellectual property … There’s no retail presence, no product, no distribution, no trucks, no plants. Nothing. All that exists is memory. We’re taking consumers’ memories and starting entire businesses.” Why we trust brands, even when it’s just their name that is licensed: “What you’re trusting is Stanley’s recognition that a badly made ladder with the Stanley name on it could be highly damaging to the Stanley brand. You are trusting Stanley’s recognition of the value of its brand and its competence in defending that value.”

Condé Nast acquires Ars Technica for $25m (rumoured). I don’t get Condé Nast’s fascination with tech sites (they also own Reddit)—shouldn’t they be buying The Sartorialist instead? Also curious: the two co-founders of Ars are pursuing PhDs in religion (Jon “Hannibal” Stokes; Ken “Caesar” Fisher).

Great series of articles on life and religion in the Middle East. (The two most recent articles on love and marriage in Saudi Arabia are especially good.)

The names given to the various positions animals can take on shields and crests and such.

Bracelets made from the focus and zoom rings of old SLR lenses.

If you send him your email address, David Horvitz will send you a photograph of the sky for every day of 2008. He also has unusual things to sell. e.g. “If you give me $10 I will take a photograph of a mailbox in New York, print it as an 8.5" x 11" full color laser jet print, fold it into an envelope, write where it is on the back of the envelope, and mail it from the same mailbox.”

Long post on what Microsoft is doing to try to acquire Yahoo, and how hostile takeovers happen in general.

Clay Shirky’s tantalising suggestion that perhaps TV is a temporary spare-time-filling measure, and that sometime soon we’re going to come up with something better, or realise that content creation is it. (There have always been a lot of alternatives to TV though…)

The XO Laptop comes with a 30 day warranty only??

The near-militant animal rights organisation PETA have announced a $1 million prize for the first to create in vitro chicken that is: (a) indistinguishable in taste from real chicken; and (b) sold at a competitive price in at least 10 states. This has to happen before 2012. According to the NY Times, this was a very difficult decision for PETA to make, with some within the organisation very opposed to fake meat in principle. (I don’t understand this even slightly.)

Perhaps the worst download experience ever, surpassing MySQL’s Query Browser, and the problems with Mono and OS X. Hint: scroll to the bottom of the “Details” frame.

“Some gay couples are having trouble obtaining divorces”: the laws concerning getting married and unmarried are not at all symmetric; getting a divorce while living in the wrong state can be very difficult. (Some states that are very against same-sex unions are also very against their anulment—I can’t decide if this is consistent or not.)

Aryan Outfitters: photo essay (+ some audio snippets) on the maker of high quality KKK outfits. I both like and don’t like the extremely detached way this is presented. “Ms. Ruth personally sews one robe a day. She works 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She has 1 to 3 helpers at times. … Here she puts the final touches on a red Klan hood.”

Download YouTube videos in MP4 format via a bookmarklet.

Six Masai warriors, in London to run the London Marathon for charity, give a difficult-to-believe interview with the Guardian: “I miss meat and blood very much. Not vegetables because they are food for a woman. There is milk here but blood is better because it gives energy. English tea with sugar is good and we tried Coco Pops, but the nicest food is croissants.”

Mesmerising champion pen-spinning videos, from the Pen Spinning Association Japan. (I think I’ve sorted these by rating.)

Impressive new UK coins. (One problem with the unified design is that it doesn’t deal very well with coins being added or removed from circulation, and in fact as of now the £2 coin is missing from the set. According to the FAQ, this is because the original design (and brief) excluded the £1 coin; it’s only getting the redesign because 7 coins fit neatly into the design concept.)

Famous photographs (e.g. Capa’s “Death of a Loyalist Soldier”), rendered in Lego. (Interesting details on how they were made as well.)

Surprisingly charming, inventive, A-Z alphabet pop-up book.

I don’t understand: the French Communist Party is still somewhat viable (seats in the National Assembly and Senate), and until the most recent elections governed Calais (pop. >100,000).

Search terms are replacing URLs as the suggested way to find out more about a product in Japanese advertising. (Requires that the site get indexed before the campaign, and somewhat susceptible to hijacking?)

Eclipse features that Richard Stallman would like to have in emacs. The astonishing thing here is that someone so intimately involved with one prominant editor has never before even looked at another prominent editor.

Odd hand-drawn stop-motion ad for the Russian Gmail apparently created by Saatchi Moscow demonstrating the various features.

Portraits taken as you go about your daily routine: “Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject. The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.” Susan Sontag: “There is something on people’s faces when they don’t know they are being observed that never appears when they do. … their expressions are private ones, not those they would offer to the camera.”

Distribution of the date of Easter (can occur between 22 March and the 25th April), associated article.

Video of Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog robot, moving like something made out of flesh and blood over rubble and snow. The slow-motion recovery from a slip on ice (around 1:40) is astonishing. Does it move like that because it’s programmed to mimic a four-legged animal, or because that’s the way you have to move if you have four legs?

Since MPs are technically forbidden to resign (since they theoretically serve at the pleasure of their constituents), they need to “resign” via the legal manoeuvre of being given one of two fancifully-named jobs that are considered to be “an office of profit under the Crown,” which then disqulify them from being MPs.

“2. No outside force can harm the coyote—only his own ineptitude or the running failure of the Acme products.”

There are no guns in the Lego world, but this is a problem that can be fixed. (Or, you could get a fully-equipped Lego terrorist.)

Fantastic extension for Firefox and Safari that shows Flickr, Facebook photo galleries in a fun, zooming full-screen interface.

“Frida Kahlo of the paintings has The Look. Frida Kahlo of the photos does not. Why?” (includes small photograph)

“The Charms of Wikipedia,” by Nicholson Baker. The first section neatly captures the charms of Wikipedia, and the last is a nice account of Baker’s attempts to save various articles from deletion (his chosen Wikipedia niche). (Baker’s user page)

The lives of circus performers: a newly divorced husband is contractually obliged to allow his ex-wife to shoot an apple off his head for the next year. (Clever PR stunt?)

In 2001 the Swiss ambassador to London invited graffiti artists to decorate the underground carpark of the Swiss Embassy, one of whom turned out to be Banksy.

Run-down auto repair shop converted into architects’ offices (pictures; associated story).

The world’s most northern things. (Splendidly idiosyncratic.) There’s a lot less stuff in the south.

One Trappist beer, Westvleteren, is regarded as one of best beers in the world, despite (or because of?) being available in very limited quantities (one case per car, no reselling allowed).

“An F-18 Hornet (left), B-2 Spirit (center), and two F-16 Fighting Falcons (right) sit on the flightline [tarmac?] at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.” (via Wikipedia)

How to Avoid Huge Ships (2nd ed), by Captain John W. Trimmer.

Head tracking via the Wii Remote to simulate 3D—relatively straightforward, and seems to work pretty well (skip to 2:40 for the demo).

Stuff white people like: recycling, expensive sandwiches, knowing what’s best for poor people.

Story on a well-placed semi-colon on some MTA signage is currently the most frequently emailed story at the Times!

Why do I have the third result for homosexualsex? Google you suck. (Not even remotely NSFW.)

Differences in consumption per person are much less dramatic than differences in income (in the US): “If we look at consumption per person, the difference between the richest and poorest households falls to just 2.1 to 1. The average person in the middle fifth consumes just 29 percent more than someone living in a bottom-fifth household.” (nice graphic)

Nice building: small weekend cabin in Mazama, WA.

Creative Review Blog on the new identity for the architects FaulknerBrowns.

Barack Obama’s official LinkedIn profile. I hope he keeps this updated if he becomes President. That would be amusing.

Strange little shop making and selling 1930s-style clothes.

Paul Keating, a former Australian Prime Minister, on Soeharto’s legacy. Keating was well-known for being friendly to Indonesia, and it’s interesting to read his account of its recent history (especially Timor), and his own personal involvement in it. (In 1998, two years after he left office, he went to Indonesia (evidently at the urging of Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong), to try to convince Soeharto to give up power gracefully. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen.)

Improv Everywhere’s “Frozen Grand Central.” (report)

The British Library is hosting a futurist dinner, with recipes from Marinetti’s 1932 cookbook, La Cucina Futurista. “Typical Futurist dishes included meat broth sprinkled with champagne and liquor and decorated with rose petals, or the deliberately obscene-looking porco eccittato, a whole cooked salami upended on a plate with coffee sauce mixed with eau de cologne.”

Carma Sutra, a “manual of sex positions for in-car entertainment.”

Dean Wareham of Luna’s personal, thoughtful, account of the end of his marriage.

You Suck at Photoshop #4—Photoshop tips (this one on the selection tool) from the depressed.

(pdf, French) The apology of Societe Generale chairman Daniel Bouton. A BBC news story translated one sentence as “This situation is perfectly unacceptable,” which sounds suspiciously unidiomatic. In French, the sentence “Cette situation est parfaitement inacceptable” which the robots at Google Translate convert to “This is totally unacceptable.”

Where the winners of major science awards have come from over the last 20 years. (Mostly the US, and mostly US citizens, too.)

US States ranked by the size of their capital cities relative to the largest city in the state. (Top five: Maryland, Illinois, Nevada, Vermont (capital of 7,954!), New York.)

Super-adorable cupcakes—the Super Mario sets (1, 2) are wonderful.

Diagram showing the various satellite orbits to scale. The ISS’s orbit (also that of the Space Shuttle)—as shown by the red dotted line—has not been exceeded since 1972, leading to James Cameron’s memorable description of current space travel as “like peering at a basketball with your cheek pressed against it.”

Encouraging productive conversation in chat rooms by requiring that ever utterance is unique.

“How To Actually Win A Fist Fight.”

(Six displays, side by side, from a page describing the graphics features of the new Mac Pro.) We’re going to need some new OS concepts and interaction techniques to deal with really big screens. It really won’t do to have to mouse over six displays to get to the File menu (note how the picture shows an image, not screens of applications)—or hit the “Start” button. Menu bars will need to be attached to applications; Docks, menu extras, system trays (i.e. anything in a fixed position on the screen) will need to go. Display-crossing mouse movements will be done via Spaces? Or touch-to-move? Who is researching this?

Technology marches on: Casio’s new US$1000 camera can do 60 frames per second at 6 megapixels per frame for one second, or full HD (1920 x 1080) at 60 fps continuously. (Also 512 x 384 @ 300 fps.)

Oil industry expert claims that the first time oil hit $100 a barrel, the buyer was an individual trader who bought the smallest amount possible, selling it moments later for a $600 loss and a story to tell.

Piece on typical mistakes made in the sign-up process. Mostly common-sense points—Mistake #8: Not Telling Users How You’ll Use Their Information—though there’s no harm in them being enumerated by a UI expert. (Strange that there’s no links to the sites being discussed, though.)

Surfing the modern web with Netscape 0.9b. (Not much of it works, though mostly because it doesn’t talk HTTP 1.1, or understand content type.)

Good, uh, “appreciation” of Facebook from Ben Brown: “Facebook’s crack engineering staff will continually release new applications and features that do all sorts of glittery things, but you must realize that this is to get you to spend more and more time on the site so that you are more and more likely to accidently be tricked into clicking on an advertisement.”