Links

Sometime between 08:37 and 16:27, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version: "If you watched Sarah Palin's resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor's holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.'s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result."
• Woodstock Concert’s Undercover Lovers, Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, 40 Years After Summer of Love: The blanket-wrapped couple seen on the cover of the original Woodstock soundtrack album is still together. "They discovered it while at a friend's house listening to the album and passing around the gatefold jacket. First, Nick recognized the famous yellow butterfly staff in the left corner. 'It belonged to this guy Herbie,' Nick says. 'We latched on to him that day because he was having a very bad experience. He was tripping pretty heavily and he had lost his friends. After I saw that staff I said, 'Hey that's our blanket.' Then I said, 'Hey, that's us.''"
• Best Correction Ever?: July 17, 1969, The New York Times: "Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Issac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."
• Let’s Do the Time Warp Again! Offsite Time Machine Backups: "There's a new kid on the block with a different approach to offsite backup — Time Warp. This US$25 Mac application (free during the beta period) takes your Time Machine backups, compresses and encrypts them with 256-bit AES encryption, and then uploads them to your personal Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) account. "
• We All Shine on in New Proof of Bioluminescence: "Next time that someone says that you're glowing, check that they don't mean it literally. Researchers in Japan have finally managed to prove the existence of the human body's bioluminescence with these first-ever pictures of the body's natural shine."

Sometime between July 16th and July 18th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• ‘The Case of the Disappearing Orwell’ Is Not as the Blogosphere Would Have You Believe: "The idea that's spread through the Internet like wildfire is that this was an action at the behest of this publisher, who decided on a whim that they didn't want to publish it through Amazon any longer, and that Amazon caved and did what they asked. That's just not what happened, and it's rather unfair to Amazon for people to continue to spread the misinformation that says it is."
• Seattle Gay News: Vogue Night at Neighbours Underground: "'A hidden gem on Capitol Hill.' That's the way a patron dressed in black describes Vogue Night, an '80s, new wave, goth, and industrial night of dance at Neighbours Underground. The party is authentic, fashionable, and very sexy"
• Michael Jackson in 2000 in 1985: "What Ebony, in 1985, Thought Michael Jackson Would Look Like in 2000" Apparently, like Billy Dee Williams in Empire Strikes Back.
• NASA Releases Preview Partially Restored Apollo 11 Video: "To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA released partially restored video of a series of 15 memorable moments from the July 20 moonwalk. The source material for the restoration project is the best of the available broadcast-format video. Lowry Digital, Burbank, Calif., is significantly enhancing the video using the company's proprietary software technology and other restoration techniques. The video is part of a larger restoration project that will be completed in September and provide a newly restored high definition video of the entire Apollo 11 moonwalk. The completed restoration will provide the public with the highest quality video of this historic event."
• Unidentified Biological "Goo," 15 Miles Long, Creeps Down Alaskan Coast: "A gigantic smear of gooey, black biological material is making its way through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow in Northern Alaska. Eyewitnesses say it's definitely a living entity, though unlike anything they've seen before. The blob was first spotted last week, floating in Arctic waters. Big chunks of it – some as much as '12 miles long,' according to the Anchorage Daily News, are drifting through the sea. A helicopter tracked the spread of the goop for 15 miles and saw no end to it."
• Literary Mashups Meet Tentacles. Has All of Western Literature Been Leading Up to This?: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters: "As our story opens, the Dashwood sisters are evicted from their childhood home and sent to live on a mysterious island full of savage creatures and dark secrets. While sensible Elinor falls in love with Edward Ferrars, her romantic sister Marianne is courted by both the handsome Willoughby and the hideous man-monster Colonel Brandon. Can the Dashwood sisters triumph over meddlesome matriarchs and unscrupulous rogues to find true love? Or will they fall prey to the tentacles that are forever snapping at their heels?"

Sometime between July 14th and July 15th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Why America Is Flunking Science: "The experience of CERN is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today. It is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent — an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions. As science-fiction film director James Cameron has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists 'as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains.' That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture…. To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science — heavily influenced by politics and mass media — and that's a very different matter."
• Psychotic Letters From Men: Customer Disservice: "Every woman who's ever held any type of service or sales job knows about one of the major inherent hazards associated with their chosen profession. Namely, the unavoidable encounters with creepy fucking dudes." Oh, my lord. As if the posted stories aren't bad enough, there's all the stories in the comments. So, so, so many disturbing guys out there.
• How to Scan a Cat and Other Subjects: "MetaFilter became that rarest of online creatures: a booming online community that's mostly intelligent, mostly civil, and mostly functional. It's not just a good read, and it's not just popular and lively, but it actually makes one feel slightly better about being human. It might be the best site on the Internet. The trick is trying to explain why it happened." Happy 10 year anniversary, MetaFilter!
• Pinboard – Antisocial Bookmarking: Interesting looking Delicious competitor just getting started.
• Spectacular Dream Yachts to Set Sail: "So often we're teased with amazing renderings of things that could be but never will because they lack a bridge between blue sky and real world. The latest virtual tease, a pair of futuristic yachts rapidly rising in virtual visibility, breaks that convention. Designer Kevin Schöpfer plans to set sail in three years." If I were a mad James Bond villian, I would totally have the Infinitas as my base of operations. That's a gorgeous yacht.

Sometime between July 10th and July 14th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of All Time: "What do murder, pedophilia, suicide and a baby tiger have in common? They have all been used to sell stuff in these amazingly disturbing vintage ads! These are real, untouched advertisements from the good old days. It doesn't matter if it's lovely ladies or adorable clowns, somehow these old-time ad wizards found ways to traumatize us while pedaling everyday products."
• Top 10 Myths about Mythbusters:: "There's a rumor going around that Jamie is a human being. This is plain wrong. The show admits this one itself. Several episodes refer to the fact that Jamie is a robot — I mean, how else can he keep his shirts so well-cleaned and his moustache so well-trimmed? But believe it or not, there are people out there who are convinced that Jamie is in fact a human — Homo sapiens, just like you and me. This one is surely busted."
• Watchdog Group: Dozens of Active-Duty Troops Found on Neo-Nazi Site: "It is Facebook for the fascist set, and the typical online profiles of its members reveal expected tastes. Favorite book: 'Mein Kampf.' Favorite movie: the Nazi propaganda film 'Triumph of the Will.' Interests: 'white women.' Dislikes: 'anyone who opposes the master race.' But there's one other thing that dozens of members of newsaxon.org, a white supremacist social networking website, have in common: They proudly identify themselves as active-duty members of the U.S. armed forces."
• The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Round-Up: "After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn't Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?"
• DateLine: "DateLine is a small, simple app which displays a linear calendar on your desktop in a transparent window. It provides easy access to iCal by double clicking on a day. The background and text colors are customizable with support for transparency."

Sometime between July 8th and July 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Mythbusters to Test Star Trek’s Gorn Cannon: "Finally someone is going to put the Star Trek cannon to the test (that is 'cannon' with two n's). Mythbusters, the Discover Channel show that puts urban legends (and TV & movie magic) to the test, is finally going to take on Star Trek. Specifically they are going to test the feasibility of the cannon that Captain James T. Kirk built to defeat the Gorn in the original series Star Trek episode 'Arena'"
• "Harry Potter" Stars Felt Pressure to "Ace" Kiss: Dan Radcliffe's reaction to seeing his kiss with Bonnie Wright (as Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, respectively) in HPatHBP is great: "'I saw the film again a couple of nights ago at the premiere and … my God, my lips are like the lips of a horse, kind of distending independently away from my face and trying to encompass the lower half of hers,' Radcliffe, 19, said. 'So I apologize for that.'"
• Ritz Camera, Parent of Wolf and Waxman, Plans to Sell Remaining Stores: "Ritz Camera Centers Inc., which has been struggling to reorganize and save roughly 400 of its more than 800 stores, says it no longer has enough money to purchase fall inventory and continue operations. Beltsville, Md.-based Ritz Camera, which is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, says the lack of funds now forces it to auction off its remaining locations by the end of July." Wow, not good. Good luck to everyone I know at Ritz/Kits!
• Paste Without Formatting by Default: "Here's something I know affects plenty of users out there. Have you ever pasted text in a document or email message, only to have it formatted differently than all the text around it? Irritating, right? There's an answer, thanks to the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences." Thank you! Mac OS X's default 'paste with the source style' has been driving me up the wall for ages — I honestly can't think of a single time recently when I've wanted to work the way the system does by default. One of the weirdest, most brain-dead UI decisions in the Mac OS.
• Marvel Wants to Help You Look Stylish!: The latest in costume fashion from Marvel: Boys! Be The Hulk! Or Captain America! Or Iron Man! Or Ghost Rider! Girls…um…girls? Oh, girls. Here, have some lip gloss.

Sometime between July 5th and July 8th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Monsignor’s Confessional: Darkness That Exists Just for You: "Once a month, The Vogue would fill with people who joyfully attended the famous party. It provided them sanctuary and freedom, it was a place they could feel safe and comfortable while expressing themselves in any way they saw fit. The outfits ranged from fetish wear to costumes, pony falls to dread falls, bright colored hair to black hair, large amounts of make-up on both women and men. It was not uncommon to see guests dressed in corsets, dog collars, chains, or any variation thereof." I have a few sets of photos I've taken at various confessionals in my Seagoth collection on Flickr, including the final Christmas Confessional at The Vogue mentioned in the article.
• Introducing the Google Chrome OS: "Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."
• Sarah Palin’s 10 Most Awkward Media Moments: "If the soon-to-be-former Alaska governor's rambling resignation speech made some viewers wince, it was probably not the first time. Here's a look back at the soon-to-be-former governor's most cringe-inducing moments. And yes–we included the turkey." Listening to her speak makes my head go all asplodey.
• Fiction World Rocked as Woman Claims No Sexual Attraction to Neil Gaiman: "At a recent book signing, Joan Green, 24, stunned her friends when she admitted that upon meeting Neil Gaiman, she did not find him attractive. 'He was nice and all,' she confessed a few minutes after getting a copy of American Gods autographed. 'But, he's not, you know, my type.' One of Green's friends, speaking anonymously, said, 'She's lying. Everyone thinks he's dreamy. Everyone. Even Hillary Clinton.'"
• Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Sometime between July 1st and July 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Giant Squid Caught in West Seattle: "A Puget Sound resident reeled in what is believed to be a Humboldt Squid Friday in West Seattle. Rodney Sarkees estimates the squid was roughly 8 feet long, and roughly 80 pounds. It took two people to lift. Sarkees released the squid back into the water after catching it. Fish & Wildlife later captured and relocated the squid. Officials told Sarkees it was a Humboldt Squid – the largest they'd seen in the area." Okay, yeah, I don't think I'll be swimming in the Puget Sound at any point in the foreseeable future.
• Keep Khan Out of Star Trek 12: "I had been meaning to write this 'keep Khan out of Star Trek 2 (or 12, rather)' blog post for a while now — but honestly I thought Orci and Kurtzman were just kidding about including him. The script for the next Trek, at this point, consists of a few Gorn cartoons on a cocktail napkin, and they're barely batting ideas around. So it's easy for them to hint at all sorts of fan-favorite stuff…. Why not? Anything's possible at this point, and it doesn't do any harm to answer 'maybe' to every question. And of course, if the fans get particularly thrilled about one of these trial balloons, then that tells them something. But now, it sounds as though the Fringe co-creators may actually be considering resurrecting Khan, who's still sleeping in his little suspended-animation capsule in their revamped timeline. So just in case they're really serious about this, here's a list of reasons why a new Khan would be a terrible, epically bad idea."
• Water Seeping Through Howard Hanson Dam Is Picking Up Speed: Oh, my — I'm glad we live on the third floor of our apartment building! "The speed at which water is seeping through a flank of the Howard Hanson Dam has, by one key measure, increased since January, and the people who operate the dam don't know why. Nobody's saying there will be large-scale floods for the first time since the dam was built, but the weakness in the dam abutment — the side of the valley against which the dam was built — means the Corps of Engineers may have to severely restrict how much stormwater the dam can hold back for the next several winters. And that could mean more water flowing through the valley below, raising the risk of flooding for the cities of Kent, Renton, Tukwila and Auburn."
• The Blue and the Green: "You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. So I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals. Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. So they are mostly green with a solid splash of blue."
• The Puppet Show: Creepy-cool: photos of children to make them look like puppets, dolls, or ventriloquists dummies, depending on your interpretation.

Sometime between June 30th and July 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Slow Reversal of Periods and Quotation marks: "In the past, total integrity of the greater ideas within a missive was required, hence, something set off in quotation marks framed the complete thought, including a period or comma. But as technology advanced, the need of technical speech developed. Here, total integrity of the letters themselves is required. A trailing character within a quotation, required by grammatical tradition, could introduce unnecessary error to the data." I've been using this style (formally called logical punctuation off-and-on for years when the situation called for it (especially, for instance, when writing URLs or code).
• The Boys Club: I wish that I'd one, discovered this post when it was posted, and two, had the time to actually read through the many, many comments, but this is MetaFilter's discussion about Pixar's lack of female lead characters (a recurring thread on my blog).
• 16 Bitchin’ Commands and Shortcuts for Twitter: "I love a shortcut, and regularly make use of a range of keyboard shortcuts on Twitter. There are more of them than you might imagine. As such I have aggregated a bunch of commands to provide you with one handy cut-out-and-keep / 'bookmark on Delicious' guide. "
• Fallen Princesses: "I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues."
• Supervolcano May Be Brewing Beneath Mount St Helens: "IS A supervolcano brewing beneath Mount St Helens? Peering under the volcano has revealed what may be an extraordinarily large zone of semi-molten rock, which would be capable of feeding a giant eruption. If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park."

Sometime between June 26th and June 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• LANL Scientist Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light: "Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow. Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. "
• Picasa Web Albums – Pride 09: Steve Barta's shots of the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" — the seagoth contingent in this year's Pride parade. Looks like a good turnout! I missed it this year, but should be back out with everyone next year!
• Fake Photojournalism Wins: "I think what they've done is not to make brilliant photojournalism, but to make brilliant art. There was certainly a significant price to be paid for that art, or perhaps many prices: the reputation of the award, the reputation of the judges, even their own reputations perhaps–and only time will tell–but they've surely made some brilliant statements about the nature of such imagery, called into question the cliched nature of the traditional canons recognizing that work, and made us all pause, even if just for a moment, to consider what photojournalism really is."
• Giving Up My iPod for a Walkman: "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
• "A Barkeeper Entering the Kingdom of Heaven": Did Mark Twain Really Hate Jane Austen?: "Twain marveled that Austen had been allowed to die a natural death rather than face execution for her literary crimes. 'Her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy,' Twain observed, apparently viewing an Austen novel as a book which 'once you put it down you simply can't pick it up.' In a letter to Joseph Twichell in 1898, Twain fumed, 'I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.'"

Sometime between June 12th and June 24th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Michael Bay Finally Made an Art Movie: "Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one."
• Roger Ebert on the new Transformers film: "'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination."
• Dear Pixar, From All the Girls With Band-Aids on Their Knees: "I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don't the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn't you have chosen something — something — for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys? Or more to the point, why couldn't your first female central character be as specifically drawn as the women and girls (and girl robots, etc.) you're already writing as secondary characters?"
• 16volt Release Entire (7 Album) Back Catalog for Free: "16volt is releasing their entire back catalog for free. You simply go to their site at www.16volt.com/downloads and grab all you want. People who think a donation is the correct way to go can donate money which the band will use for touring expenses. The reasoning behind this release is explained by the band's founder and front man, Eric Powell: 'We have decided to give our whole back catalog away for free. We wanted to open up the opportunity for anyone and everyone to hear the band. We have heard so many times for whatever reason, oh yeah we have heard of you, but we never heard you. Well now there is no reason. There is no barrier to entry.'"
• Mixxx | Free Digital DJ Software: "Free, open source DJ software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux / MIDI controller support / Superior mixing engine with recording, vinyl control, and more / Written for DJs, by DJs" And, unfortunately, as many things are these days, Intel-only, so doesn't do me any good.