Month: August 2008

Sometime between 06:12 and 14:58, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Sports: 25 world records broken at Beijing’s Water Cube | swimming, world, record, phelps, lzr – OCRegister.com: [During this Olympics, the] Water Cube pool has produced 25 world records, the most at any Olympics since Montreal in 1976. Six world records were broken Wednesday, equaling the record for most global marks set in a single day at the Olympics. The Beijing Games were so fast that 14 times in eight events an athlete or relay team swam under the existing world record and didn't win gold. (This article's just about swimming, but it touches on something I've been curious about: is there a World Record for most World Records set at a single Olympiad? It seems like we're seeing new records set in nearly every event we watch.)
• On your marks, get set, Lego! Welcome to the Olympics where everyone’s quick off the blocks: As the world watches the Beijing Games, enthusiasts from Hong Kong have unveiled their own Olympics — built entirely from Lego. More than 300,000 Lego bricks and 4,500 Lego people were used to create the display, by the Hong Kong Lego User Group.
• 7 Astounding Yet True Facts About Say Anything…: FACT: The boombox scene gets all the attention, but according to Ione Skye, if she hadn't been dating Anthony Kiedis and Cusack hadn't been in love with someone else, they would've gone home together after they filmed the sequence where Lloyd teaches Diane how to drive. Ah, the romance of stick shift.
• Glenn Miller Orchestra – “Do You Wanna Dance?”: Wedding the Miller big band style and DeFranco’s top-notch soloing to go-go dance rhythms, lush easy-listening atmospherics and Command’s trademark high-tech aural experience, the album is no mere nostalgia trip for aging jitterbuggers. Rock fans will delight as this august organization tackles such teenage hits as “Cinnamon,” “Sunny,” “For Once In My Life” and “Love Child.” Naturally, the ubiquitous McCartney-Lennon catalog is represented, not once but twice, with “Hey Jude” and “A Little Help From My Friends.” In fact, there’s not a MOR track anywhere to be found on this album — it’s all strictly Top Forty. Do YOU wanna dance?
• Telstar Logistics: Flight Report: Airborne in an Emirates A380 at SFO: It was the kind of offer Telstar Logistics cannot refuse: "Please join us for an exclusive opportunity to experience and fly on Emirates’ cutting-edge A380 aircraft during a two hour ‘demo flight’ and reception," they said.  So we said, "Sure! Sign us up!"

Sometime between August 14th and August 18th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Sunday Morning’s Lightning Storm: Video from King 5 of the lightning over Auburn and Kent that woke Prairie and me up on Saturday night/Sunday morning.
• Now Diving: Sir Isaac Newton: High-tech televisual bells and whistles have carried couch-based Olympic watching way beyond the mere reality of being here. Thousands of cameras are catching the action in China — every one of them high-definition. Yet for a feat of engineering magic that dazzles as it baffles, nothing beats the DiveCam.
• The Phelps-Cavic Photo Finish [UPDATED]: On the one hand, we're getting tired of Phelps and the hype. On the other hand, this really was an incredible moment to watch.
• Bigfoot Hunters Fail to Produce Creature’s Corpse: The trio now say the body is in Biscardi's possession in an "undisclosed location," pending scientific tests. Biscardi named two scientists he's contacted regarding his find: Curt Nelson of the University of Minnesota, and Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford University. "There's also an Igor and a Dmitri coming from Russia," Biscardi said. "They're very prominent in the Bigfoot world."
• Trying to figure out the scoring of gymnastics could make you crazy: Here's all you need to know: A perfect "10" (remember Nadia?) is now a perfect 16.9 — or somewhere thereabouts; The old "10" standard is gone, retired, locked up and hidden away…in its place is a two-pronged scoring system which is, at least theoretically, open-ended, meaning there is no limit to what you can earn — a score that might be truly ginormous; A gymnast's "A" score begins at zero, you get different fractions of a point for various maneuvers, ranging from the common hair-flip/giggle (.1) to the flaming-sword-swallowing-full-frontal-fakie-double-half-caff-three-hitch dismount (.7), and you get more fractions of points awarded for the maneuvers performed in various combinations. It's believed that the most "A" score points a gymnast could possibly cram into a program, given current time limits — and current points at which a gymnast's body would actually explode, or perhaps break in two — is about 7.0.

Sometime between August 12th and August 13th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• His own Olympic trial: 24 hours of viewing: Starting at midnight Tuesday morning, and going until midnight this morning, I plopped down in front of the TV with my laptop for a marathon session of sports. Just me and the Games, with no regard for sleep, fresh air or proper hygiene. One would think that such a masochistic task ultimately must lead to a decent into madness. But there's really only one way to find out.
• Unsubstantiated but interesting info on what Return of the Jedi might have been: Ah, obviously you haven't heard the back story of Return of the Jedi. No, I don't mean the bit where it was called Revenge of the Jedi. There's more. I'll cite nothing because I have no idea where this information leaked from, and you can take it with a grain of salt because I heard it years ago. But apparently the original story for Jedi worked like this…
• Young Guns: A new brand of gangster grows up in a killing culture: "Seattle's gang problem is small, compared to other cities, but it definitely holds its own," he said. "It's a bunch of teenagers – I would call them delinquents – that have adopted a gang name or identity, and that identity automatically falls into a structure of rivalries that those members must participate in. To these young people, their identity as a Sureño or a Crip or a Blood is as serious as someone else's identity conflict over religion. Like the Shiites and the Sunnis – that's an identity conflict. The irony is, they're all the same. They're all Muslims. You're all young people from Seattle."
• Maperture: Combining the power of Aperture and Google Maps (the mapping engine you know and love), Maperture is a powerful, new edit plug-in that makes geotagging your photos a snap.
• The Anchorpoint Essays: Welcome to the largest and most comprehensive look into the biology and behavior
  of Internecivus Raptus: the deadliest Xenomorph that human-kind has ever encountered. (This is, by far, my favorite site relating to the Alien franchise. Lots of incredibly detailed and well thought out essays about the aliens' biology and physiology. I was afraid it had been abandoned a couple years back, but it's still up and under active development. Awesome!)
• Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”: Kontra’s law: A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

Sometime between August 11th and August 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Olympic opening uses girl’s voice, not face: A 7-year-old Chinese girl was not good-looking enough for the Olympics opening ceremony, so another little girl with a pixie smile lip-synched "Ode to the Motherland," a ceremony official said – the latest example of the lengths Beijing took for a perfect start to the Summer Games.
• Deconstructing Dr. Horrible: This post contains mad spoilers. I also warn that I am going to take a funny, silly, amusing show and be boringly, depressingly serious about it. If your response to these sorts of nitpicks is 'durr it's just a show' — you're right. So don't click.
• Part of Olympic display altered in broadcast: Part of the elaborate Olympics fireworks show broadcast to the world in the opening ceremony was altered, done digitally in 3-D computer graphics, according to several news reports. While the dramatic display [of giant footsteps 'walking' across the city] actually happened as portrayed on television, members of the Beijing Olympic Committee said it was necessary to replace live video with computer-generated imagery because the city’s hazy, smoggy skies made it too difficult to see, according to The Beijing Times, which first reported the story.
• Olympic Fail: Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird’s Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting: Okay, so this really isn't a major thing: the BSOD was on one obscure section of the Birds Nest for less than a second and was barely visible. Still, it's good for a little bit of nerdy amusement.
• Turn your change into apps (or music): Coinstar's change-counting machines now offer Gift Certificate options that don't charge the 9% counting fee — and one of the options is for Apple's iTunes Music Store. Dig in your couch, find those pennies, and turn 'em into music or iPhone/iPod Touch applications.

Sometime between August 7th and August 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Famed Utah rock arch collapses: The arch is along Devils Garden Trail, one of the most popular in the park. For years, the arch has been a favorite stopping point for photographers. Henderson said the arch was claimed by forces that will eventually destroy others in the park: gravity and erosion. "They all let go after a while," he said Friday.
• Internet Memes: A slick timeline of Internet memes and in-jokes. I'm pretty impressed with how far back it goes.
• Watch the Olympics Online: The 2008 Beijing Olympics will happen while most Americans are sleeping. While NBC, the games' official media outlet in the United States, will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web, the only way to truly ensure you won't miss too many record-breaking moments is to spread yourself across the web and take advantage of the many video outlets online.
• I made it longer because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter.: This bookmark's for me — the original French and a translation of a passage by Pascal in 1657 that all to often applies to my own writing…enough so that before my weblog was titled 'eclecticism,' it was 'The Long Letter.'
• Bremerton baristas banned from wearing pasties: I'm trying to decide if this headline is clumsy or inspired, given that it appears to say that the baristas will now be going completely topless!

Sometime between August 6th and August 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Olympics | You can get Games fix on TV, Web: The hype for NBC — which paid a tidy $900 million for the right to station 106 commentators in Beijing this month — is all about total hours: 3,600 in all. That's more coverage, the network likes to point out, than the combined total of all previous Olympic Games up to this point. It's three times the amount of Athens coverage in 2004. We'll take their word for it. But the vast majority of those hours are events broadcast either on NBC's broad palette of cable stations, or on the Internet, where a whopping 2,400 of those 3,600 hours translate to streaming on nbcolympics.com.
• Wash. letter carrier going full kilt ahead: A 6-foot-tall, 250-pound letter carrier is campaigning for the right to take off his pants. Dean Peterson wants the U.S. Postal Service to add kilts as a uniform option for men. (He's certainly got my support! Wouldn't mind mounting a campaign like this myself, but at almost one full week into my new job, I think it's a bit early to rock that particular boat.)
• Greyhound pulls ‘bus rage’ ads: Greyhound Canada said Tuesday that it is in the process of pulling a series of ads in an extensive, cross-country campaign featuring the slogan, "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage." The company made the move in response to last week's gruesome beheading murder on an eastbound Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Man., which claimed the life of Tim McLean, 22. (I'm sure I shouldn't think this is funny, but — at least in my mind — there's a certain amount of dark humor in it.)
• Beta beat: Pukka 1.7: An update to Pukka (which I use for posting most of my daily "neat stuff" links when I'm on my home 'puter) to add some new features and deal with the update to Delicious (including descriptions up to 1000 characters!).
• Best Seat in the House | Olympics: Planning, Packing, And Panicking.: Neat rundown by the Seattle Times' photographer for the Olympics of the gear he's bringing. Man, would it be fun to have some of those toys…esp. the three Nikon D3 bodies!

Sometime between July 31st and August 6th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Trading Places: The demographic inversion of the American city.: In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.
• The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products: ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote…ACME has set the standard for excellence.
• Canada bus passenger stabs, decapitates seat mate: A traveler aboard a Greyhound bus repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated his seat mate, pausing during the savage attack in central Canada to display the head to passengers who had fled in horror, witnesses and officials said Thursday.
• EW Previews Star Trek Comic Con Posters – With First Cast Photos: The first official images of Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Uhura (Zoë Saldana), and Nero (Eric Bana). By the way, look closely at the eyes. (Yes, I'm two weeks behind. But wow does Quinto look perfect for Spock!)
• Ballantine Books to Publish Book Inspired by the Webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield: The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison. (Jim Davis gets a lot of cool points in my book for allowing this to happen.)