Links

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.

Sometime between June 8th and June 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The grand strategy of Al-Qa’ida can be thought of as auto-immune warfare:: "Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US."
• Clove Cigarettes to be illegal: Well, now what are all the goths and gothlings going to smoke at the clubs? "This one's been pretty much under the radar, but HR 1265, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will ban 'harm-reduced' cigarettes (those labeled 'mild' or 'light') and flavored cigarettes. It also puts tobacco regulation under the FDA. This bill just passed the Senate and President Obama has said that he will be signing it into law. Here's a few tasty excerpts: Prohibits a cigarette or any of its components from containing as a constituent or additive any artificial or natural flavor (other than tobacco or menthol) or any herb or spice (including strawberry, grape, orange, clove, cinnamon, and vanilla) that is a characterizing flavor of the tobacco product or tobacco smoke."
• 30 ROCK Is a Rip-Off of the MUPPET SHOW!: I've never seen 30 Rock, but now I want to… "Tina Fey's 30 ROCK is currently the most acclaimed comedy series on television. It's won numerous Emmys and Golden Globes and I think Pulitzers. Critics and audiences alike love the show and its lovable zany characters, and consider it one of the most original comedies in years. And I guess it is original…if you've never seen THE MUPPET SHOW. Because, my 'friends' (in quotes because I don't know or trust you, please don't be offended), Tina Fey's 30 ROCK is quite obviously ripping off Jim Henson's beloved TV show. 'You're crazy', you say? 'Wow, now with the insults. This is why I don't trust you', I respond. And the I hit you up with so many facts you HAVE to concede I'm absolutely right."
• Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames: "June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of 'It's alive! Go get your name!' posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook."
• Yub Jub Means "Devour the Weak": An Authoritative Study of Ewoks, From the Field Notes of Davo Atten-Boru and Pladdo Cardigun, Exo-Naturalists.: "After several cycles of exhaustive fieldwork, we can unequivocally report that Ewoks are not the naïve companionable canopy dwellers initially reported by Alliance military sources, but rather a singularly violent, cunning species, driven by perpetual internecine combat and territory acquisition."
• Sprinkle When You Tinkle: "See, commonly women will say, 'Can't you aim straight?' unaware that the aim is completely irrelevant to the path the wee decides to take once leaving the body. As I said, this is true for both ladies and gentlemen. Ladies don't realise this happens because they don't watch themselves wee. Yet, their wee sprinkles out into the gap between the seat and the rim of the porcelain of the loo."

Sometime between June 1st and June 5th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Goths in Hot Weather: "There's one thing that troubles me about our cheery friends: what to do they do in summer? All that makeup, long black leather and rubber must get very sticky. I think we should show our respect for these poor unfortunates, struggling to stand out from the vanilla crowd despite blazing temperatures and sunshine that puts the rest of us in shorts and vest tops. Join me in celebrating the majesty of the Goth, who, eschewing any practicality whatever, still has the commitment to don a full length leather trenchcoat, stupid New Rock boots, and half a Superdrug counter of makeup. All hail the Hot Goth!"
• Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen: "Twenty years ago, on June 5, 1989, following weeks of huge protests in Beijing and a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, a lone man stepped in front of a column of tanks rumbling past Tiananmen Square. The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses."
• Creating New Documents: "There is a very basic problem with this arrangement: How do you create new files? On the one hand, since you use the Finder to manage your files, it would make sense to create new files in the Finder – right where you actually want them. On the other hand, since each individual application typically has at least one unique type of file, the Finder can't create new files – only individual applications can."
• Geotracking Your Photos With the AGL 3080: "Small and unobtrusive, all you need to know is that if the green light is blinking, it's recording GPS data. It's one of many similar devices, such as the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr and Sony GPS-CS1KASP, that all function in virtually the same ways — they are either on or off, recording data or not, and they tend to do a pretty good job."
• What Plagiarism Looks Like: "Some enterprising readers (faculty? student-journalists?) have gone through the dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan, highlighting every passage in Meehan's that can be found, word for word, in Boening's. Neither the University of Alabama (which granted Boening and Meehan their doctorates) nor Jacksonville State University, where Meehan is president, has chosen to take up the obvious questions about plagiarism that Meehan's dissertation presents. As another recent story suggests, plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer's status rises."

Sometime between May 26th and June 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• On the (Rebooted) Final Frontier: "It's one thing if you want to pick on the movie itself — there are certainly visible seams in the plot, though really I think that if you're going to complain about the scientific validity or the military verisimilitude of Star Trek, you are simply in the wrong theater to start with — but the criticism that baffles me is the one I keep seeing about 'disrespect.' As though it's the act of rebooting itself that's the problem. To which I can only reply, are these people all nuts? Star Trek's entire history in all media over the last four decades has been nothing but revisions and reboots. Hell, the original Kirk-and-Spock version was actually a reboot after the first pilot failed to sell."
• 15 Sexist Vintage Ads: "We've come a long way since advertising was so offensively sexist. Right?"
• Seattle Police Dispatched to Zombie Walk: "This is a startling example of the blinders we wear as geeks. We saw this guy, mentally acknowledged that it was a really cool costume and then didn't think anything more about it. Neither of us had any clue at first what the police were doing there. In our minds there was absolutely nothing amiss and it took both of us several seconds of having the police shouting to realize what they were getting so worked up about. Oh right. There is a guy with a gas mask carrying a rifle with grenades strapped to his jacket standing in the store."
• Confessions of an Introverted Traveler: "We introverts have a different style of travel, and I'm tired of hiding it. Oh, I'm always happy enough when interesting people stumble into my path. It's a lagniappe, and I'm capable of connecting with people when the opportunity arises. And when the chemistry is right, I enjoy it. But I don't seek people out, I am terrible at striking up conversations with strangers and I am happy exploring a strange city alone. I don't seek out political discourse with opinionated cab drivers or boozy bonding with locals over beers into the wee hours. By the time the hours get wee, I'm usually in bed in my hotel room, appreciating local color TV."
• Meme Scenery: "So I had this silly idea to isolate the backgrounds from famous Internet memes, removing all the subjects from every photo or video. I'm pretty happy with the results. Like Jon Haddock's porn sans people, these photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something's amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history. Can you name all 22?" (I got ten of them…)

Sometime between May 25th and May 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• California High Court Upholds Same-Sex Marriage Ban: "The California Supreme Court upheld Tuesday a ban on same-sex marriages that state voters passed in November, but it allowed about 18,000 same-sex marriages performed before the ban to remain valid. The 6-1 ruling was met with chants of 'shame on you' from a crowd of about 1,000 people who gathered outside the court building in San Francisco."
• ‘Buffy’ in for Feature Relaunch: "A new incarnation of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' could be coming to the big screen. 'Buffy' creator Joss Whedon isn't involved and it's not set up at a studio, but Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment are working with original movie director Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, on what is being labeled a remake or relaunch, but not a sequel or prequel. The new 'Buffy' film, however, would have no connection to the TV series, nor would it use popular supporting characters like Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike. Vertigo and Kuzui are looking to restart the story line without trampling on the beloved existing universe created by Whedon, putting the parties in a similar situation faced by Paramount, J.J. Abrams and his crew when relaunching 'Star Trek.' "
• 14 Cars Damaged During WA Couple’s Stripping Game: "Troopers have arrested a man and a woman suspected of damaging at least 14 vehicles by throwing rocks onto them from a railroad trestle over Interstate 5 near Lakewood, Wash., as a part of a bizarre stripping game. Investigators say the couple was playing a stripping game, the rules of which involved Madison shedding a layer of clothes for every left headlight the two managed to bust. The same rule applied to Sizemore and right headlights."
• May The Force of Others Be With You: "Let it be said, my friends, that the early drafts of Star Wars should be a rich source of encouragement to every aspiring screenwriter the world over – because they royally sucked. They are of the same low, amateurish quality that may be found in many first screenplays…. (Thus, many scripts and new writers have the potential to reach Star Wars heights.) Had Star Wars never happened, had Lucas…theoretically asked me to review his script for him, I'm not sure I could've even finished reading the darn thing."
• Is It OK to Run an Illegal Library From My Locker at School?: "I now operate a little mini-library that no one has access to but myself. Practically a real library, because I keep an inventory log and give people due dates and everything. I would be in so much trouble if I got caught, but I think it's the right thing to do because before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I'm doing a good thing, right?"