Eclecticism

Sometime between September 3rd and September 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Print Story: Attacks, praise stretch truth at GOP convention: The AP fact-checks the RNC speeches. FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States." THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.
• Footnotes, Endnotes, and Parentheticals That Cost Me Marks on My Thesis.: (Admittedly, I didn't read it, but I'd like to think I got the gist from the movie.)
• Sarah Palin, VP nominee: [Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
• Cute meme-geeky easter egg in Google’s new webbrowser Chrome: This is what you see when you visit about:internets. This is freaking awesome.
• ObamaTaxCut.com: Barack Obama will cut taxes for over 95% of American families (even though more than half of American think he'll raise their taxes). What's your Obama Tax cut? Let's find out!

Sometime between 10:42 and 16:33, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Massive police raids on suspected protesters in Minneapolis: Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.
• Amy Goodman and Two Democracy Now! Producers Unlawfully Arrested at RNC: Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.
• Palin’s 17-Year-Old Daughter Is Pregnant: Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist for the McCain campaign, was surrounded by reporters and cameras as he walked through the media center next door to the Xcel Center in St. Paul, where the convention is taking place. Asked over and over when and how Mr. McCain found out about Bristol’s pregnancy, he repeated, “Senator McCain was aware” of it and called it “a private family matter.” He would not say when Mr. McCain found out or how, calling it a “private conversation.” “The fact is, John McCain had a thorough search and made the decision to add Sarah Palin to the ticket because he believes” that she “will change America,” Mr. Schmidt said. (Sadly, "changing America" probably won't involve re-thinking her "abstinence only" approach to sex ed, even with this demonstration of just how well that approach works.)
• Occasionally Plausible / And Kos I Just Don’t Care: "My problem with Kos is that it’s a cross between Facebook and a Star Trek convention. It’s impossible to navigate and just the second you think you’re getting somewhere you have to step over two guys coming to blows over the fine points of the Organian Peace Treaty." (While the time has come for me to start paying more attention to politics, I haven't had much urge to return to Daily Kos…and I think Pops just nailed why.)
• Tigh selects Roslin: For those who aren't total Battlestar Galactica geeks, that's the Republican nominee and his new VP choice Governor Sarah Palin on the left and Colonel Saul Tigh and Laura Roslin, President of the Twelve Colonies on the right.

Sometime between 12:12 and 17:19, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Tweet Scan for ‘little known fact palin’: Using Tweet Scan to track Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin. Works better than the Twitter Search version linked to in the Chicago Tribune post.
• On Twitter, McCain veep choice Sarah Palin already a folk hero: "Little known fact: the Northern Lights are really just the reflection from Sarah Palin's eyes." "Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin doesn't need a gun to hunt. She has been known to throw a bullet through an adult bull elk." "Little Known Fact: The Russians sold Alaska to America because Sarah Palin would not submit to autocracy." The above one-liners are just a few of the gems from the instant Twitter meme developed around the storied toughness of John McCain's vice-presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Some are making fun of the tales of her essential Alaskan-ness, some are celebrating it, some are doing both.
• Alter: Why Sarah Palin Is Likely to Belly-Flop: Happy birthday, Johnny Mac! You're 72 now, a cancer survivor, and a presidential candidate who has said on many occasions that the most important criteria for picking a vice president is whether he or she could immediately step in if something happened to the president. Your campaign against Barack Obama is based on the simple idea that he is unready to be president. So you've picked a running mate who a year and a half ago was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town of 8,500 people. You've selected a potential leader of the free world who knows little or nothing about the major issues of the day beyond energy. Oh, and she's being probed in her state for lying and abuse of power.
• Fall Down, Go Boom: Playgrounds have gotten safer, more streamlined, and progressively worse. Now innovators are taking them more seriously than ever. (This is something I've babbled about in the past.)
• Alaska governor Palin comes from small town to national stage: The selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate marks an extraordinary political rise for a 44-year-old Alaskan whose previous highest elected office — just three years ago — was mayor of Wasilla, a town near Anchorage with a population of less than 10,000. (Interesting choice — it caught me off guard this morning, and it's strategically smart — but it really does make his "inexperienced" argument a lot harder to defend.)
• Mullets: Party in the back not over yet: Beautician Julea Penland is campaigning to beautify Kitsap County "one mullet at a time" by offering "Free Mullet Removal." No one has taken her up on the offer. Sadly, she says, the people who sport the once popular hairdo either love them or are in "mullet denial."

Sometime between August 28th and August 29th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Portal to mythical Mayan underworld found in Mexico: Clad in scuba gear and edging through narrow tunnels, researchers discovered the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and what could be the remains of human sacrifices at the site in the Yucatan Peninsula. Archeologists say Mayans believed the underground complex of water-filled caves leading into dry chambers — including an underground road stretching some 330 feet — was the path to a mythical underworld, known as Xibalba.
• Flowchat of Things to Say During Sex:
• Intelligent Design: In Recent Scifi, Intelligent Design Is Truth: This is the truly proscience version of ID theory: The notion that humans will eventually live in an ID universe, where our bodies and everything around us is designed. Only it will have been designed by us, in the service (hopefully) of bettering humanity. We won't be the playthings of some third party entity whose motivations are unclear. In the end, we will become our own intelligent designers.
• Pegg: Star Trek Getting Back To What Made It Good: Every time Simon Pegg says a little bit more about the new Trek film, I get a little less skeptical and more excited. He's a master at giving good non-spoilery interviews and drumming up real excitement and interest for the film. Can't wait to see this!
• Goblin shark caught on video: The creature featured is a Mitsukurina owstoni, or goblin shark, which lives between 100 metres and 1000 metres beneath the waves. It gets its common name from the Japanese, who nicknamed it after their long-nosed supernatural creatures, the tengu. The coolest thing about it is its Alien-like retractable jaw, which seems to leap out of its mouth to catch its prey…

Sometime between August 25th and August 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Exclusive Excerpt: Stephen Davis’s ‘Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses’: Some think the legend of Guns N' Roses began in the nighttime Los Angeles of 1985, a distant echo of West Hollywood's neon-lit Sunset Strip. Others think it should begin ten years earlier, at the confluence of two Indiana rivers, the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, in the 1970s. But in this telling, the GN'R saga begins in gritty New York, in upper Manhattan, on a sweltering, run-down street in the late afternoon of a summer day in 1980.
• Nikon D90 plus hands-on preview: After a steady trickle of leaks and rumors Nikon has announced the successor to its popular D80 middleweight digital SLR in the shape of the D90. The D90 looks very similar, but underneath it's a completely new camera that's inherited advanced features from Nikon's pro models and user-friendly features from the D40/D60 range. Oh, and it's the world's first digital SLR with a movie mode. Oher features of note include a new 12.3 MP CMOS sensor, the D3/D300/D700's fab high resolution 3.0-inch screen. live view and continuous shooting at up to 4.5 frames per second.
• Next up: Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics: The Games, to be spread between dual Olympic centers in downtown Vancouver, where most ice sports will take place, and Whistler, home of most alpine events, will feel more intimate, friendly, and open, Furlong vows. The model Furlong most often invokes is the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which are remembered for the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded every event. A feeling of national pride seemed to ooze through the infrastructure, and Furlong believes Vancouver, one of the world's most diverse cities, can replicate that feeling in a Winter Games. « none %raquo;
• Don’t Look Back in Awe: Readers new to the [science-fiction] genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE 'Doc' Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it's out of print. A better recommendation would be a current author – such as Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, and so on. « none %raquo;
• Texas House Sucked Into Wormhole: Last summer, a condemned house in Houston, Texas was sucked into a small wormhole, its wooden facade slowly slurped though another dimension and spit out into an alley behind the backyard. This bizarre mashup of real estate and theoretical physics was created by local artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, who saw in the abandoned house an opportunity to remind people how fragile the fabric of spacetime really is. Below, you can look deep inside the wormhole and see where it comes out on the other end. « none %raquo;

Sometime between August 22nd and August 25th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema’s Ultrahigh-Res Camera: …that's what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it's easier to use and cheaper—by orders of magnitude—than a film camera. In other words, Jannard's creation threatens to make 35-mm movie film obsolete. « none %raquo;
• Fleshmap: Listen: Music: What do we sing about, when we sing about the body? The chart below, based on a sample of thousands songs, tells the story. The size of a circle corresponds to how often that part is mentioned in each genre. Click on a genre name to see a close-up that shows exactly what words were used. (Mild, but probably NSFW in most workplaces.) « none %raquo;
• Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop: To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics. « none %raquo;
• Superman: Man Of Steel: Warner Brothers Takes The Time To Make A Superman That Won’t Suck: Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov told the Wall Street Journal that the Superman movie the WB is envisioning will be cut from the same dark and gritty cape as Dark Knight. He wants to explore the darker recesses of Superman's soul explaining that "We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it." (Y'know, this just doesn't sound good to me. Apparently I'm one of the few who didn't think that the last Superman film blew, though, so what do I know? The thing is, dark works well for Batman and probably many others, but — to me — it just doesn't seem right for Superman. This really sounds like the studios deciding that "dark" was the only thing that made the Batman films good, when it wasn't so much the dark tone as the realism and the care taken with the project. Maybe they'll prove me wrong, but…I'm not optimistic.)
• Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem: sneak peek at glossary: Boing Boing's found a .pdf with a look at some of the glossary from Neal Stephenson's upcoming 'Anathem'. I've had this one on pre-order from Amazon, and I'm really looking forward to it showing up on my doorstep.

Sometime between August 20th and August 22nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Macs, Aperture a big hit at the Beijing Olympics: In the digital photo editing area of the Kodak Photographer’s Center—a massive workroom located in the main press center at the Olympic park—hundreds of photographers at a time assemble to file their images using high-end workstations and tech-support supplied by Apple (the same was true at the 2006 winter games in Turino, Italy).
• Does The New Business Of Music Change The Way Music Sounds?: If an artist and producer is making an album for their fans is it going to sound different than if they’re making it for a hit in the limited radio marketing channel? In most cases, yes.
• SourceForge.net: Torrent Episode Downloader: Meet ted! Your new way of downloading tv shows from the web. Add your favourite tv shows to ted and ted will automatically download torrents of new episodes! Ted checks feeds from TorrentSpy, Isohunt and MyBittorrent for new episodes of tv shows.
• Design and Branding Trends: Olympic Games: Today were taking look at the Summer Olympic logos from 1896 to 2012 London along with some noteworthy facts from each games and palette inspiration from some of the more colorful posters and logos.
• One-wheel getaway in Des Moines shooting: Under fire after stumbling upon some suspicious activity, a Des Moines man escaped his assailants — by unicycle.