Links

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

• Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion: "To kill some time in a diner, Teller was practicing his version of Cups and Balls, a classic sleight-of-hand trick popularized by ancient Roman conjurers. It involves a series of 'vanishes' and 'transpositions' as the balls appear and disappear underneath the cups. Teller hadn't brought any props, so he used wadded-up napkins and clear water glasses. Somehow, this made the trick even better. Although it was now possible to follow the crumpled napkins as Teller variously palmed them, squished them, and moved them from cup to cup, the illusion persisted. 'The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them,' he says. 'Giving the trick away gave nothing away, because you still couldn't grasp it.'"
• Star Trek: Spock, Kirk and Slash Fiction: "For decades, dedicated fans of 'Star Trek' have postulated a Kirk-Spock romance. A look at 'slash' fiction, 40 years later." For people who know of slashfic, this article isn't going to say anything new. What's most interesting to me is that it was written for Newsweek — not one of the places I'd generally expect to see an article exploring this side of fandom.
• SEO Joke, SEO, Joke, Search Engine Optimized Joke, Funny, Funny Joke: "So a CEO, a web programmer and an SEO expert are on a desert island. And the SEO expert says, 'You guys, I'm so thirsty. Is there anything to drink?' And the CEO says, 'I just drank the last of my water 30 minutes ago.' And the web programmer says…"
• The Star Trek Failure Generator: "Failure (No. 60441): The gravitational algorithms are unstable! // Fix (No. 637735822): Calibrate the primary hologrid with subcutaneous processors!"
• Star Trek Klingon Language Suite: "Standard issue for cadets at Starfleet academy, the Klingon language suite is an integral part of any officer's electronic reference library and has even been adopted by the Klingon fleet for use by officers interacting with Federation forces. Available for iPhone and iPod Touch, the Klingon Language Suite will beam you to the top of the promotion list – or increase the odds of would-be cadets' admission to the academy! "

Sometime between May 2nd and May 5th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: "If you've ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else's, you've probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device. Let's face it–it's not the most intuitively shaped appendage in all of evolution. But according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive 'tool' in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. You may be surprised to discover just how highly specialized a tool it is."
• The Biology of B-Movie Monsters: "Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from my favorite era, the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context–make people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large–and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood's approach to the concept has been, from a biologist's perspective, hopelessly naïve. Absolute size cannot be treated in isolation; size per se affects almost every aspect of an organism's biology. Indeed, the effects of size on biology are sufficiently pervasive and the study of these effects sufficiently rich in biological insight that the field has earned a name of its own: 'scaling.'"
• Cheap Thrills With Muppets Rawk: "For this show artists had to take an existing rock album cover and re-image it with Jim Henson's Muppets. You could use any Muppet and it the art had to be 12' x 12'. When I got to join in on this I searched a little bit for some cool covers. The previous show had some gems in them…I knew that I had to do something really cool. So when I ran across Cheap Thrills over and over in lists of the 'best rock covers ever'. Someone had to do this cover with Muppets! I wasn't sure if I could really do it, but I thought I'd bite off more than I could chew and do it myself."
• Stop Worrying About Your Children!: "In her new book, 'Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry,' Skenazy suggests that many American parents are in the grips of a national hysteria about child safety, which is fed by sensationalistic media coverage of child abductions, safety tips from alarmist parenting mags, and companies marketing products that promise to protect tykes from every possible danger. She by no means recommends that mom and dad chuck the car seats, but says that trying to fend off every possible risk, however remote, holds its own unfortunate, unintended consequences."
• Old Japanese Maps on Google Earth Unveil Secrets: "When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, they were already posted on another Web site, and a historical map of Tokyo put up in 2006 hadn't caused any problems. But Google failed to judge how its offering would be received, as it has often done in Japan. The company is now facing inquiries from the Justice Ministry and angry accusations of prejudice because its maps detailed the locations of former low-caste communities."

Sometime between April 28th and May 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• DJ Richie Hawtin ties Twitter into his setlist with Twitter DJ and Traktor: "The Twitter DJ application utilizes feeds from an updated version of Traktor's standard broadcasting technology to send 30 second updates during Hawtin's set of what's currently playing to a designated Twitter account, allowing anyone following the Twitter group to obtain a unique insight into how a DJ builds the atmosphere and dynamics of a set, track by track, and in real time."
• Ferris Bueller is Tyler Durden: "My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the 'Fight Club' theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron's imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves. One day while he's lying sick in bed, Cameron lets 'Ferris' steal his father's car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the 'three' characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all. It isn't until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane ('He's gonna marry me!'), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have." (Continue reading comments for more exploration of the theme.)
• How to Be a Successful Evil Overlord: "Being an Evil Overlord seems to be a good career choice. It pays well, there are all sorts of perks and you can set your own hours. However every Evil Overlord I've read about in books or seen in movies invariably gets overthrown and destroyed in the end. I've noticed that no matter whether they are barbarian lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists, or alien invaders, they always seem to make the same basic mistakes every single time. With that in mind, allow me to present…The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord"
• The Skinny on Using NASA Images: "The short version: All publicly available NASA images are on nasaimages.org, which is co-operated by the Internet Archive. It is most likely legal for you to use them for any purpose (commercial or otherwise) unless there's someone famous in the image. Keep reading for more detail."
• Practical Tips for Combatting Swine Flu in Your Home: "*There is always some flu around and flu is always killing some people. Even when a raw mutant flu manages to kill off more people than a shooting-war, flu has never ravaged whole cities as cholera or the Black Death can do. As awful pandemics go, flu is like the snotty-nosed little sister of awful pandemics. *So if you catch the new swine flu, you're very likely not gonna die. *But since it is a flu, you're gonna kinda WISH you could die. *You're not ACTUALLY gonna die unless your lips are turning blue, you have bad chest pains, you can't swallow water, you can't stand up, you're having seizures and you don't know where you are or what your name is. As this document suggests, you're gonna want to watch out for those symptoms."

Sometime between April 23rd and April 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Gallery: Flickr Users Make Accidental Maps: "Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged — stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites." Neat stuff. If you dig into the actual report (.pdf link), you'll find that Seattle is the 8th most photographed city in the world, and the Space Needle is the 8th most photographed landmark in the world. Go Seattle — we're #8! ;)
• Skin Deep Usability: On setting up a new Microsoft Surface touch-screen, "no keyboard or mouse" computer, and discovering (among other issues, like where the power cord goes, or what color 'rhodamine' is), that one 'undocumented feature' is that a keyboard and mouse are required to boot the thing: "The whole experience was probably best summed up by Amanda who, when asked why it was taking us so long to get the machine up and running, and why we all looked so unhappy, replied 'Oh, it's just so…Microsofty.'"
• Locks of Love Helps Disadvantaged Children Suffering From Medical Hair Loss: "Locks of Love is a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children in the United States and Canada under age 18 suffering from long-term medical hair loss from any diagnosis. We meet a unique need for children by using donated hair to create the highest quality hair prosthetics." I'm pretty sure I've got at least 10" of hair to chop, so this seems a lot nicer than just tossing it in the trash.
• Get Great Gadgets. and Keep Them. – Last Year’s Model: "We love cool gadgets as much as anybody else. We just want to be thoughtful about the stuff we've bought. Even the most cutting-edge, tech-savvy geeks in the world are choosing to hang on to their phones or their iPods that still work just fine."
• I Can Read Movies: I love, love, love the retro design of these film "novelizations". Beautiful work, and many are quite clever. Related, and also worth seeing: Harry Potter Redesign and Eight Films in Black and Red. Gorgeous work. This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish I was a graphic artist.

Sometime between April 18th and April 22nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Sports fans are weird!: The strangest sports tradition I've heard of leads to probably the best lead in of any article I'll read today: "Throwing the octopus is easy. More difficult is concealing the eight-legged creature until the toss is at hand, a skill that requires determination, luck and the ability to walk normally with 4 pounds of slimy cephalopod stuffed down your pants."
• When Worlds Collide: Spock Confronts the Ultimate Challenge: A six-page mini-comic prequel to the new Star Trek film, from May's Wired magazine (guest-edited by J.J. Abrams).
• Talk Like Shakespeare Day: "In recognition of Shakespeare's 445th Birthday, this Thursday, April 23, 2009, will be Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Shakespeare is a part of our everyday lives. He coined more than 1,700 words still in use in modern English and his plays influence the way we think about the world we live in. Get in on the act!"
• Doe v. Fortuny: Seattle’s Jason Fortuny (aka RFJason) ordered to pay nearly $75,000 for Craigslist sex ad prank: For the background, see Waxy's summary of the incident originally posted in 2006 when the actual incident happened, with multiple updates since then. The main link and Waxy's summary are both SFW, but many of the links from Waxy's post are NSFW. This was one of the most disgusting things I've seen someone do online, and I'm happy to see this judgement come down. Of course, this was only one person's suit against Jason — now that a precedent has been set, will more victims come forward?
• It Was a Dark and Silly Night: Gahan Wilson Meets Neil Gaiman: "…we have some new work by Gahan Wilson: he illustrated this short animated adaptation (directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe) of 'It Was a Dark and Silly Night,' a story by Neil Gaiman, the author of (among many, many other works) 'Coraline.'"

Sometime between April 8th and April 15th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Roger Ebert: Parrot asks, "What’d the frozen turkey want?": "For many laymen, a joke is a heavenly gift allowing them to monopolize your attention although they lack all ability as an entertainer. You can tell this because they start off grinning and grin the whole way through. They're so pleased with themselves. Their grins are telling you they're funny and their joke is funny. The expert knows not to betray the slightest emotion. The expert is reciting a fact. There is nothing to be done about it. The fact insists on a world that is different than you thought. The fact is surprising and ironic. It is also surprising–you mustn't see it coming. That's why the teller should not grin. His face shouldn't tell you it's coming."
• Philnelson’s Diggbarred: "This is a WordPress plugin version of John Gruber's DiggBar blocking code, with some options for the user. With Diggbarred, the user can customize both the message displayed and the styling of the DIV element that contains the message."
• Jam Out With Your Clam Out: "So picture it boys. Your hands are clammy with sweat as you approach the door. Before ringing the bell (Get it? Ring the bell? Gawd, I'm funny.) you wipe those sweaty palms down the legs of your pants. Your date's dad comes to the door, shotgun in hand and asks you a million questions, none of which you hear because over dad's shoulder you see her coming down the stairs. A smile crosses your face because you know tonight's The Night: you got That Feeling as soon as you saw her in this:"
• Uncomfortable Plot Summaries: Falling at various points on the Funny-Uncomfortable scale: "ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications." "BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill." "CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: Deranged pedophile big-business industrialist tortures and mutilates young children." "DOCTOR WHO: Elderly man serially abducts young women." "HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right." "LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property." "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: Woman with gold-digging mother nags wealthy man into marriage." "SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS: Layabout stepdaughter shacks up with seven miners." "THE GOONIES: Physically abused, retarded man finds love with overweight preteen." "TWILIGHT: Girl gives up college for stalker."
• How to Block the DiggBar: "…shortly after it was announced, I wrote code to block [the DiggBar] from Daring Fireball. If you attempt to view most pages on DF through the DiggBar, you'll be greeted with a special message just for Digg instead of the regular content of the page. Digg sends a tremendous amount of traffic to sites that make it to the top of their front page, but it's the worst kind of traffic: mindless, borderline illiterates. Good riddance, really."
• Truly Groundbreaking Marketing Research: Understanding Twitter.: "Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies."
• Penmachine: Yes, Master: "…it's true that these new Beatles CDs (and, with luck, eventually iTunes tracks) will be new digital re-masters, but they won't be the first ones. If you already have a complete collection of Beatles CDs from those 1987 digital re-masters, these new ones will probably sound different, maybe better. But they could sound worse."
• Now on YouTube: First Moving Image Ever Made: "In the latest effort to bridge the disconnect between the government and new media, the Library of Congress officially launched its YouTube channel Tuesday. The debut includes 70 historical videos from its vast collection, such as the first ever moving image (a man sneezing), 100-year-old films from the Thomas Edison studio and industrial films from Westinghouse factories."

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

• A Pirate’s Code of Conduct for BitTorrent: All of this is good, but Article Two is key, in my opinion, and why I have no issues with downloading TV shows, but have no urge to download films: "TV is to be downloaded, movies are to be attended when a man returns to shore. If ye aren't a Neilsen family, what you watch doesn't matter for ratings anyway. Since advertisers pay by rating, it's a theft-less crime. Movies, on the other hand, do see profits of gold and jewels. So support independent/foreign film in the theaters, and save the action flicks with high production values and many beautiful explosions for the big screen, too."
• How I Learned to Stop Being a Bitch and Love the Con: "Every year in early April a warm and happy buzzing grows in me not entirely unlike what a kid feels just before Christmas. The reason? Norwescon. I love it. I always have a great time." Nice post on Tor's website featuring photographs by yours truly!
• Bill Would End Civil Marriage, Create Domestic Partnerships: "Advocates for same-sex marriage plan to introduce legislation in the Maryland General Assembly today that would abolish civil marriage ceremonies now confined to heterosexual unions in the state and replace them with domestic partnerships for all couples. Under their proposal, all couples — straight or gay — would be on equal footing with secular unions. Religious marriage in churches, synagogues and mosques would be unaffected, as would existing civil marriages. The word 'marriage' would be replaced with 'valid domestic partnership' in the state's family law code. 'If people want to maintain a religious test for marriage, let's turn it into a religious institution,' said Sen. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Montgomery), the bill's Senate sponsor." Damn skippy. I'm all for this sort of thing.
• Giant ‘Hand’ Reaches Across Space: "In a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, high-energy X-rays emanating from the nebula around PSR B1509-58 have been colored blue to reveal a structure resembling a hand reaching for some eternal red cosmic light." Actually, I'm pretty sure the website goofed up and used the wrong picture. This looks like the right one to me!
• Alaska’s Mount Redoubt – the Big Picture: "Beginning March 22nd, 2009, Alaska's Mount Redoubt, began a series of volcanic eruptions, and continues to be active to this date. Ash clouds produced by Redoubt have pushed 65,000 feet into the sky, disrupting air traffic, drifting across Cook Inlet, and depositing layers of gritty ash on populated areas of the Kenai Peninsula and Anchorage, about 180 km (110 miles) to the northeast. Mount Redoubt has erupted at least five times since 1900, with the most recent event taking place in 1989. "

Sometime between April 1st and April 2nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Easy Auto-Download of TV Programs From Usenet: "After getting several threatening letters from Comast over the years, re: questionable Bittorrent activity, we've opted to obtain all our questionably legal materials from a 'safer,' medium, namely Usenet. All-in-all, Usenet is a pretty awesome way to quickly acquire media files without ever having to upload anything, and without anyone being on your back about it."
• Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites: "Check to see if your desired username or vanity url is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites. Find the best username with namechk."
• Family Guy == Unfunny: "I've taken the first half of a random episode off my PVR and edited all of the out-of-context things into a separate file, leaving us with a Family Guy storyline (unencumbered by random crap) and a bunch of random Family Guy crap (unencumbered by unfunny Family Guy storyline.) Everything that was in the first segment of the episode is in the two files; nothing has been lost except the opening credits. ¶ If you've watched both of these files, you'll have seen that the contents of the episode simply aren't funny (or as funny anyway) without the context-shift, meaning that it isn't the show or writers that are funny — it's simple juxtaposition that's making you laugh."
• Where Gadgets Go to Die: Facility Strips, Rips and Recycles: "With 15 locations in the United States, Sims Recycling Solutions is one of the world's largest electronics scrap recyclers. Pictured here is the 'demanufacturing' center of the company's Roseville, California facility, where workers disassemble everything from printers, cameras and computers to Jumbotrons for their reusable materials. The facility receives roughly 150,000 pounds of used electronics a day. ¶ Follow along for a photographic tour of the Sims facility, where you'll learn exactly what happens to unwanted gadgets as they're dismantled, their components sorted and their raw materials melted down for scrap."
• Wrong Tomorrow: "'But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.' What does this site do? It keeps track of predictions of the future by public figures. How does it work? When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate."