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

• Octopuses given Rubik’s Cubes to find out if they have a favourite tentacle: Scientists believe the intelligent sea creatures have a preferred arm out of eight that they use to feed and investigate with. They are now testing this theory with a month-long observation project in which the octopuses will be given food and toys…
• New Nikon D700: Extreme weather photographer Jim Reed was asked to test-drive Nikon's D700 during the 2008 storm season. The following gallery contains fifteen assorted images from the record-setting period.
• Getting your point across: Wei Shengchu, 58, a supporter of traditional Chinese medicine, poses for photos in front of Beijing Railway Station with his head covered with acupuncture needles depicting 205 national flags and an Olympic torch, 7, 2008.
• Ayluro → Corkboard. ⌘C and ⌘V are so 1984.: This is the first clipboard replacement/enhancement software I've seen that catches my eye. Could be handy.
• Exposure: Exposure brings the wonder of Flickr to your iPhone and iPod touch. If you like great photography, Flickr has the images and Exposure brings them right to your mobile device.

Sometime between July 4th and July 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Brendan Fraser lays out the 12 steps to an action movie’s success: Parents should know their children and what they're capable of watching. Every kid is different.
• How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand: Ultimately, it's not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with "proper" language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. It's that Chinglish will be just as proper as any English on the planet.
• Michael Bay’s Rejected “The Dark Knight” Script: Michael Bay Presents, in Association with Michael Bay Productions, and Michael Bay, Director: Michael Bay's The Dark Knight by Michael Bay. Featuring dialogue scripted by Michael Bay.
• No Matter How It Is Sliced, It Is Still Bologna: Downtown Anchorage split into four districts: Historic, Arts, Convention…and SoNo. For 'South of Nordstroms.' Really? That's…funny and sad at the same time. Nordstroms must love the free advertising, but what if they ever get bought out?
• A bike for the final frontier: It’s not new by any means, the picture being from the 1982 San Diego Comic Con, but it is worthy of sharing since it shows that nerd evolution has been at a stand still for almost 30 years.

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

• VW’s ~230 MPG car: Cool, cute and efficient…I'd love to have one of these!
• iTunes K-12 launches with resources for students, parents: Yesterday, at the National Education Computing Conference in San Antonio, Texas, iTunes K-12 was announced as a service on the iTunes Store, similar to that of iTunes U, but aimed at primary and secondary education.
• The importance of focus and quick tips on how to get it right: Focus is about a lot more than simply sharpness or being able to see what you are looking at. It can enhance a subject by making it stand out from or blend into its surroundings, it can draw you in, and the right focus can create an emotional connection.
• Ignore reply tweets and SEO URLs with Twitter Tools WordPress Plug-in: If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools, you will want to make the following changes to his code. The first one beautifies your tweet-post URLs by not splitting words at the end. The second keeps reply tweets (’@username’) from becoming posts in your b
• Seattle Gothic Pageant Presents – More Goth Pride Photos: More photos collected by stillbourne.

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

• Obama to expand Bush’s faith based programs: I've got to admit, this is disappointing and worrying. On the one hand, I can't see myself voting for McCain or 'throwing away' my vote on a candidate who has no hope of winning. On the other hand, sometimes I really don't like what Obama's doing.
• Seattle Gothic Pageant Presents – GOTH PRIDE 08!: stillbourne's roundup of Goth Pride photos (so far). I really need to get to work on mine…
• Photos of last night’s heat lightning storm over Seattle: I missed it, so these photos are great to see. Most impressive (to me): the first two shots are two views of the same lightning strike, from different viewpoints. Really cool.
• World’s fastest man: Tyson Homosexual: Apparently, [rabidly anti-gay website OneNewsNow] have set a filter to change many instances of “gay” to “homosexual,” which is how Tyson Gay, who set a record in the 100-meter dash this weekend, changed his name.
• Eye on the Universe  (July-August 2008): [Harvard Magazine] asked a few [astronomers] to choose their favorite images, photographs that have been important to advancing humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe.

Sometime between June 27th and June 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Top 10 Strangest Anti-Terrorism Patents: Technology has always played a big role in fighting terrorism. Some inventions are truly useful and will undoubtedly save lives, whereas others are so bizarre that one wonders how in the world they got patented.
• The best God joke ever – and it’s mine!: Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" (Obviously, that's not the whole joke. Click through and keep reading.)
• Metafilter looks at ‘Christiane F’, or ‘Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo’: We watched the film in my high school German class, and though I've not seen it since then, I've never forgotten it. Probably a prime reason why my experiments with drugs never went as far as shooting up.
• Presbyterian assembly votes to drop gay clergy ban: The denomination's General Assembly voted 54 percent to 46 percent today to drop the requirement that would-be ministers, deacons and elders live in "fidelity within the covenant of marriage between and a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness."
• The Presurfer: Oops!: Some ladies wanted to thank George Brownridge. They soon realized their mistake and the next day this advertisement appeared.

Sometime between June 26th and June 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Perfect multi-column CSS liquid layouts – iPhone compatible: This series of website layouts use percentage widths and relative positioning, and they work with all the common web browsers including Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch.
• What’s the Best Pixar Movie of All Time?: I agree with the bottom one and the top three, but would rejigger the middle a bit.
• George Carlin’s Last Interview: I’m not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans’ choices…people mistake it for a personal anger but it’s more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we’ve settled for.
• AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates ‘Infrastructure for a Police State’: [Wednesday]'s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive immunity to the telecom companies and  endorses an all-powerful president. It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution.
• Spokane man accidentally shoots self in face: Police say when someone expressed concern about the gun early today, the man attempted to prove it was unloaded by pointing it at his face and pulling the trigger. (Can you get stupider than this? Oh, probably, but geez, people!)

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

• Albanian Custom Fades – Woman as Family Man: For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men.
• He let them down. He ran around and hurt them.: "Robert" had just pulled off the most epic rickroll in intertubes history. The author of the game had never really intended for it to be a game at all. He just thought it would be funny to put up some creepy notes and see what sort of attention they got.
• The Big List of Things I Like About LibraryThing: I've been using LibraryThing for quite some time now to track my book collection and what I'm reading. This post has a nice roundup of some of LT's best features.
• Olympic start gun gives inside runners an edge: Runners in lane eight got off the mark on average about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane one, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates to about a metre's difference at the finish line.
• Chrysler will offer wireless Internet access in 2009 models: "With the added Internet connectivity, drivers and passengers will be able to get such devices as laptop computers and Nintendo Wii consoles online." Terrifying, though there's a certain dark humor to it. Steering wheel in one hand, Wiimote in the other
• The Fly: The Opera: Directed by David Cronenberg, music by Howard Shore, and conducted by Placido Domingo. No, I'm not kidding.

Sometime between 07:42 and 13:30, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Really clever advertising campaign for Breeze Excel laundry detergent:: Send detergent samples through the mail wrapped in t-shirts. After the mail has thoroughly munged up the t-shirt 'wrapping', the recipients wash the shirt with the included sample.
• An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant: "The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11."
• Religious Groups’ Official Positions on Same-Sex Marriage: Although the Episcopal Church has not explicitly established a position in favor of gay marriage, in 2006 the church stated its “support of gay and lesbian persons and [opposition to] any state or federal constitutional amendment that prohibits same-sex
• NYT: Reporters Say Networks Put War: Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television "with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad." He said CBS correspondents can "get in there very quic
• Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less.: 1984: WINSTON: Don't tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism. EVERYONE: Surprise! We're the Party. WINSTON: Oh, rats.
• Others’ grass not so green after drunken drive on lawn mower: "The first thing that went through my mind was someone was stealing our mower. And then I thought, wait a minute, we don't have a riding mower."

Sometime between June 23rd and June 24th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• June 24, 1947: They Came From … Outer Space?: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier. It's the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold's description of what he saw, leads [to] the term flying saucer.
• Bob Dylan On Abraham Lincoln: Tracing the origin of Bob Dylan's Abraham Lincoln quote: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool ALL of the people ALL of the time."
• Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard: There's a bunch of pretty high-level (Low-level? Technical bits.) geek stuff in here, but it's a nice overview of what's coming with Snow Leopard. The slimming down of apps is impressive.
• Neighborhoods Map – Neighborhoods Program – City of Kent, Washington: Oddly, Kent doesn't seem to be as well divided into discrete neighborhoods: there's just Kent, and a few small areas within designated as neighborhoods. Our new apartment isn't in any of them, so I guess we don't get a neighborhood?
• Seattle City Clerk’s Neighborhood Map Atlas: I use this a lot when tagging images I upload to Flickr. Click on a larger region to zoom in to more precise neighborhood boundaries.
• The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design: Paragraphs are punctuation, the punctuation of ideas. After selecting a typeface, choosing the right paragraph style is one of the cornerstones of good typography. This is a brief inquiry into paragraph style for the Web.

Sometime between June 21st and June 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Edgy comic George Carlin dies in L.A. at age 71: "The world is a big theatre-in-the round as far as I'm concerned, and I'd love to watch it spin itself into oblivion," he said. "Tune in and watch the human adventure."
• Return of the ’70s Weirdos: Bob Greenberg (center of old photo, in red sweater), then a programmer and now a tech and financial consultant, had won a photo portrait in a contest and used it to commemorate the soon-to-be disrupted group. The picture was shot in a shopping mall.
• Edith Macefield, 1921-2008: Ballard woman held her ground as change closed in around her: The Ballard woman who captured hearts and admirers around the world when she stubbornly turned down $1 million to sell her home to make way for a commercial development died Sunday of pancreatic cancer.
• Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe’s The Big Picture: The idea's simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you've opened a window to another world.
• How scientists are bringing dinosaurs back to life with the help of the humble chicken: just like in the hit Steven Spielberg movie, these men and women are intent on cracking the genetic code of the dinosaurs and opening the possibility of bringing them back to life.