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January 31, 2005
Today's Links
Rich Bailey, inventor of the wacky and lucrative Billy-Bob novelty teeth, hopes to use his notoriety for a nonprofit campaign to encourage flossing throughout the country.
New at the Patent Office: Method and apparatus for making sushi rolls
Random Live Webcams found using a customized Google search.
Posted by Hamish at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2005
Today's Links
RESEARCHERS MAP THE SEXUAL NETWORK OF AN ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL
"For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought."
If you look at the chart, you can see one guy who had sex with 9 girls in the 18 month term of the study, one girl who had 6 partners, and one gay pairing and one lesbian pairing, both who had straight couplings as well. Fascinating. Also goes to show - the big ring in particular, how if protection wasn't being promoted, venereal disease could spread like wildfire in a high school.
This is what happens when a Los Angeles class attack submarine collides with an undersea mountain that wasn't on their nav charts. Don't these guys use sonar any more? or MRI? You can see how the sea pressure compacted the metal around the impact zone once it lost its integrity.
The New Yorker's 1978 profile on Johnny Carson - by Kenneth Tynan. A quote from the article of Orson Welles: "The studio is his native habitat. Like a character in a Harold Pinter play, or any living creature in a Robert Ardrey book, you have invaded his territory. Once you are on Carson’s turf, the onus is on you to demonstrate your right to stay there; if you fail, you will decorously get the boot. You feel like the tourist who on entering the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, was greeted by a guide with the minatory remark “Remember, Signore, that here it is not the pictures that are on trial.”
A Linux user intentionally infects the Windows emulator on his computer to see what would happen. Interestingly enough, only one of the virii was able to affect Linux through the emulator, and the rest had only passing effect even on the emulator. Seems Linux is safer than Windows even when it's running Windows!
Dick Cheney attended the Auschwitz memorial in Poland with other world leaders in a truly standout fashion: while everyone else was respectfully wearing black overcoats and other reserved garb, he showed up in a green parka with white fur, and a black toque. The parka even had his name stitched in it like a preteen camper. Pic.
Posted by Hamish at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2005
Today's Links
Via BoingBoing, here's a Warner Bros. Cartoons Filmography and Title Card Gallery. Awesome.
Tim Burton's 'Corpse Bride' will be released in time for Halloween 2005 - the trailer has been released at trailers.apple.com. Featuring the voice of Helena Bonham Carter! Oh, I melt...
McSweeney's Internet Tendency has a bunch of lists...
The "how to have Dungeons and Dragons themed sex" guide. at waferbaby's pocket guru.
Miceland features tips and tricks on how to get yourself photographed with the 'characters' strolling about at Disney's theme parks.
Following up on Jalopnik, I offer "Mister Jalopy's Hooptyrides" - another site devoted to blinged-out fantastic automotive conveyances...
Further proof that Matt Groening, creator of Life in Hell, The Simpsons and Futurama, is one of the coolest guys in the universe - He did a brochure for the Macintosh during the eighties.
DownhillBattle.org sent sponsored lumps of coal to the RIAA for Christmas. "We found this piece of igneous rock mixed in with the coal. Very light and porous-- definitely not coal and too good for the RIAA. We took it out."
Squashed Philosophers: Condensed versions of 'the books which defined the way The West thinks now' - which, considering the way The West thinks now, is entirely appropriate.
Posted by Hamish at 08:59 AM | TrackBack
January 25, 2005
Today's Links
Copyright law is a frequent interlocutor in the world of rap music. Law.com reports today that two rappers are battling in court over two songs: "Back that Ass Up" versus "Back That Azz Up." Ass lost to Azz - and it would appear that proper spelling lost out as well. Fo' shizzle.
Google and Yahoo have started caching video from television and independent sources. I would like some warning before they bring the Google A.I. online - SkyNet, anyone?
A concept car website: Jalopnik
Salon's obit for Johnny Carson - by Jack Boulware.
The BEAST's 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2004.
The Wikipedia entry for Doctor Who is awesome.
also,
A Wiki guide to unusual Wikipedia articles. I like how the Avro Arrow is included as 'unusual.'
Apple's new Mac Mini is already being put to a variety of uses.
I'm a big fan of pixel art - isometric low-res (72dpi) images... And there's an online community whose visuals are entirely pixelated - Habbo Hotel, owned by Sulake Inc. (Link goes to corporate website). Some really good Pixel Art out there: Eboy, deviantART, Design Overlord,
Pixelfreak's Isometric pixel art tutorial
Mark's Pixel Art Tutorial
The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art
The Complete Guide to Pixel Art For the Completely Ambitious
Penguinpedia's Basics of Pixel Art
Posted by Hamish at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2005
Today's Links
Cory Doctorow has a good piece over on BoingBoing regarding an announcement by a consortium of electronics manufacturers (Sony, Matsushita, Samsung & Philips), agreeing to a new DRM system they have developed to prevent illegal copying. His position is that any DRM serves only to inconvenience legitimate customers, while being a mild amusement and challenge to serious industrial pirates.
New at the Patent Office:
- Golf Ball with temperature indicator
- Anti-Snoring Apparatus
- Chocolate Polymer Snacks
A good collection of photos of protests at the W. Inauguration last week.
Posted by Hamish at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2005
Today's Links
Apparently some US Conservatives consider cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants to be a homosexual icon. They're wrong of course - [but if he was, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that :) ).
JibJab continues its awesome work with "Second Term".
Macintouch has a good performance comparison of the new iMac Mini versus its bretheren in the Mac line.
Posted by Hamish at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2005
Today's Links
Why HP's practice of region-encoding their printer ink cartridges is bogus - earlier this week an employee of HP defended the practice on the basis that it protects the company against currency fluctuations - i.e. the rise of the Euro against the Dollar. This fellow explains how HP's logic in this case is pretty flawed unless they are deliberately trying to gouge their customers.
BuckFush.com has a Special Report on Inaugural Balloons- and the handling thereof should you happen to be upwind of DC tomorrow morning. "Don't tie long strips of aluminum foil on your balloons. This is very dangerous, because if one of your balloons was accidentally blown from your hands, these bits of foil would make the balloon have a radar cross section of a 747. You wouldn't want the Air Force to think the skies over Washington were filled with commercial airliners, especially in the no fly zone."
Michael Wolf Photography has a terrific site devoted to his pictures of urban architecture density in Hong Kong.
Posted by Hamish at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2005
Today's Links
It's up to over 40,000 signatures: The Stop Ashlee Simpson Petition - asking her management and label to retire her for 'horrible singing' and to 'stop recording, touring, modeling[sic] and performing.'
Amateur image processing of Huygens probe images from Saturn's moon Titan.
Photos of Bill Gates from a 1983 issue of Teen Beat. Of course, he was 28 by that point - not really a teen, but he certainly looked like a (nerdy) one...
The Columbia Law School has started a hub for collecting materials and cases relating to Copyright - The CLS Arthur W. Diamond Law Library Music Plagiarism Project. A fascinating work-in-progress collection. Some examples: The band ZZ Top were sued by La Cienega music over their song "La Grange", but lost because their song, "Boogie Chillun", had gone into the public domain due to a registration error. ZZ Top then turned around and sued Chrysler Corporation for the car company's plagiarism of "La Grange" in an ad for the Plymouth Prowler.
According to the United States Capitol Police, the following items are prohibited from the Inaugural Ceremony for W: "Firearms, weapons of any kind, ammunition (either real or simulated), explosives of any kind (including fireworks), knives, blades, or sharp objects (of any length), aerosol sprays, coolers, thermal or glass containers, mace, pepper spray, sticks, poles, pocket or hand tools (such as a leatherman), packages, backpacks, large bags, duffel bags, suitcases, laser pointers, posters, signs, placards (including supports structures), animals other than guide dogs or service dogs assisting handicapped individuals, strollers, chairs, umbrellas, alcoholic beverages, and any other items at the discretion of the security screeners that may pose a potential safety hazard."
Posted by Hamish at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2005
Today's Links
Interesting graph charting Apple's pricing of their products and how the iMac Mini and the iPod Shuffle could signal the "tipping point" to break Apple into the double-digits, marketshare-wise.
The bizarro-iPod world... Wow. Trippy. (movie file)
Humanclock.com - pictures of time recorded from all over the world - made into a real-time clock.
This is so cool. Portrait Illustration Maker.
I want one! Darth Tater. Coming in February. The Wookie SuperSoaker looks pretty snazz too but Tater takes the cake!
This Wired article talks about the hidden jewels available at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. What I found most interesting, being a citizen of Toronto, was the bit with Sue Johanson, alias "Talking Sex With Sue", Canada's answer to Dr. Ruth Westheimer (although Sue does it better) - that mentions she's now marketing a line of vibrators - some of them home-made. This Washington Post interview from October also mentions the toys.
Price Harry was seen recently at a costume party wearing a Nazi uniform. Obviously in jest but still very offensive. Of course the tabloids had a field day with it - now his father Prince Charles is ordering Harry to go take a trip to Auschwitz to view the reality of the situation. Not a bad idea. No word on whether he will be forced to wear a dunce cap during the trip.
Posted by Hamish at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2005
Today's Links
Hardy's Restaurants uses Fisting to promote hamburgers. Slate article on the suggestive nature of the fast food chain's recent ad campaign.
Mechanical Marvels of the Nineteenth Century - a collection of images and information on Victorian-era robots. Terrific!
Compare and Contrast: "Rathergate" versus the Occupation of Iraq. The comments are just as revealing as the table.
The War Against World War IV: Good article on Bush's selective casting of the War on Terror.
Posted by Hamish at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
January 12, 2005
Today's Links
This is cool. The St. Andrews Face Morpher. Input your own picture (straight-on headshot) and watch as this thingy morphs it into a variety of different looks and styles.
Follow-up to yesterday: iPod Shuffle, iWork, iMac Mini, iPhone, OSX 10.4... a busy day for Apple indeed. It remains to be seen if they can pull this off but early indications would have it that this will be a good year for my favourite computer company.
The JPEG image format, while very popular, has resisted attempts to further compress it - it is already a 'lossy' compression of image data - meaning images lose some integrity when saved as JPEGs relative to their origin as a RAW file. Not for long. The makers of Stuffit say they have come up with a way to compress JPEG files by as much as 30%. This will make a huge difference in bandwidth charges on the web for image-serving sites. Allume is proposing a new image format - SIF, to take advantage of the new compression routine. See the white paper here. For reaction, the /. discussion is quite informative.
A large collection of images from the USGS Digital Data Series 21, a four CDROM set from the 1990's. All images are public domain - some of them are real gems.
BoingBoing has a link to a site devoted to Ernst Haeckel, one of mother nature's most imaginative artistic interpreters. His incredible drawings of sea creatures and plants are just fanstastic. There's a link on this page to a 270mb PDF of his Forms in Nature book - a 396 page tour-de-force of nature drawing. His drawings make Audubon's look dull. Beware, the page is a little slow to load (no doubt due to boingboing effect for the rest of the day) but I highly recommend the big download if you have the bandwidth.
The technicians at Segway have come up with the next step - a concept (at the moment) replacement for those annoying four-wheel ATVs - the Centaur. There's a really good quicktime demo on this page as well.
Posted by Hamish at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2005
Today's Links
MacGuardians, a German Mac info site, has pics and news from the Jobs Keynote - apparently they did a keynote early for European viewers? Here's the link to the page as translated to English by Google. iPod Micro (1GB, Flash Memory, $99US and the $499 xMac, as well as an Apple/Motorola Cell iPhone, and iWork, the $49US Office simplification replacement (more like Appleworks).
ars technica's Guide to Ripping and Encoding Music. Quite useful - there are a lot of users out there who seem to think they can just Rip.Mix.Burn. and away they go - but there are good ways and bad ways to do it.
The Riches of Google - required filings with the SEC have outed the millionaires at Google - since the company's IPO, approximately 1000 out of 3000 employees of Google have become millionaires (on paper). You can watch the trades by company employees at this page on Yahoo.
In other Google news, they're celebrating their Google Groups service (previously DejaNews - before Gg bought them) having 20 years of UseNet posts stored online. The link goes to a page with significant moments in Usenet history.
ganns.com's Winners of the I Look Like My Dog Contest. Awesome.
Clerks' Director Kevin Smith's much-anticipated *by those who care* guest appearances on Degrassi. Jan 31, Feb 7, Feb 14th. He gets in with Caitlin! Ooooh! What will Joey think! Oooh!
Posted by Hamish at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2005
Today's Links
Columbia House is branching out into the adult video club business. It was only a matter of time before they realized adult=profit.
CS Monitor has a good story on how American Restaurant chains are 'translated' into China - in ways that might surprise the average Westerner.
This is interesting - Saturn's moon, Iapetus, is shaped like a walnut (sorta) - it has a ridge going around its equator. Images here at the Cassini-Huygens pages.
SalaryClock.com - input your annual salary and watch as a real-time clock ticks your income... In the time it took to type this entry, Steve Jobs earned about $1,000. I earned... nothing yet.
Posted by Hamish at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)
Pictures of Apple's New Product
Posted by Hamish at 12:13 PM
January 07, 2005
Today's Links
HOME TAPING IS KILLING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY and it's fun - Downhillbattle.org is a website devoted to combatting the music industry's delusional conflict with its customers. They offer t-shirts, stickers, posters... all the tools you need to spread the word. This shirt (which I purchased two of) is a play on a shirt the music industry brought out in the eighties to combat the sale of cassette tapes. We all know how bad cassette tapes were for the music industry...
US sees growth in CD sales market - up by 2.3% for 2004. And 140 million digital tracks were legally downloaded last year as well. Album sales in the UK are up 3% for 2004 as well. Coupled with the fact that filesharing of music is as popular if not more so than ever before... it makes you wonder if the problems the music industry has been having are due more to consumer malaise and tightened pocketbooks than a desire to defraud the music cartels of their precious profit margins...
"How the music biz can live forever, get even richer, and be loved" - text from a speech by The Register's San Francisco bureau chief, Andrew Orlowski, speaking to music industry representatives at the In the City convention in the UK.
LOCA Records bills itself as an open source music label. They've got some good stuff going on!
Other links:
This one's just a fun site all 'round: Thighs Wide Shut (just a little obsession with actress Elisha Cuthbert...)
I'm not sure who designed it but there's a rentable outdoor game available from many party rental operators called the Tsunami Dual Slide - a 30 foot high water slide that, while it looks quite cool - and a lot of fun -probably isn't going to get a lot of customers this year... There's a WMV at this page you can look at to see it in action...
Amazing!!! A Day in the Life of AP - not Associate Press, Aerial Photography. " conceived and performed by members from around the world of the aerial photography forum on rcgroups.com. Each entrant for this project agreed to post a photograph taken on January 1, 2005 using their radio controlled aerial photography aircraft. Along with the photo was posted pertinent information such as location, weather, aircraft, camera and in most cases a description of the event. When the situation did not allow for an aerial photo, such as bad weather, a ground photo was allowed."
Nearly unbelievable: finewaters.com is a site billing itself as "The voice for bottled water connoisseurs and their accompanying lifestyle." I didn't know this until I read about it in a book this morning, but there is an actual occupation in some restaurants and hotels called "Water Sommelier". Here's the Wikipedia entry on Bottled Water and an extensive study on bottled water quality by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Posted by Hamish at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
January 06, 2005
Today's Links
It's about time: the LA Times has dropped the daily comic strip "Garfield", the assembly-line, unoriginal, boring work of Jim Davis Inc. When I was younger, I developed a mild craze for Garfield in his first couple of years of publication - I have the first four or five Garfield collections to prove it. But Davis really took the commercial success of Garfield and ran with it. It's long been suggested that he doesn't even draw the strip any more - leaving that drudgery to his staff. I'd like to think it's produced by a computer. Slate has a good article on the strip that reveals the crass nature of Davis's enterprise. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Garfield. Here's a page devoted to hating Garfield.
American Radioworks has a page devoted to looking back at the Y2K controversy - was it really a disaster averted? What are the longterm effects of the efforts made to circumvent the millennium bug?
This is neat... the Cyborg Name Generator. Mine is "Hydraulic Artificial Machine Intended for Sabotage and Harm".
Posted by Hamish at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2005
Today's Links
This fellow has figured out that the present level of US aid for tsunami relief, $350 million, represents just 42.27 hours of the cost to date of the War in Iraq (currently $130 Billion). "Just to put things in perspective."
moneywallet.org - I think this guy's been reading Tufte's Visual Display books.. How to make a wallet out of dollar bills. The diagrams are awesome.
/. has a link to a good interview with Macintosh Pioneer Andy Hertzfield - some of the discussion on /. is pretty amusing as well.
Extreme Whale Watching. The commentary is amusing, probably more so if you understand Japanese.
Posted by Hamish at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)
January 04, 2005
Today's Links
Media Matters' Top Ten Most Outrageous Statements of 2004. Example: Rush Limbaugh on the Abu Ghraib photos: "I'm talking about people having a good time, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?"
Lake Superior State University (Lake Superior is a State?-ed.) 2005 List of Banished Words:
ex. "BODY WASH – “Also known as ‘soap.’”
If you ever wondered who the heck answers the phone when you dial the phone number from the 80's song by Tommy Tutone, "867-5309 Jenny", this guy has saved you the trouble.
US Physicist creates "Rational Calendar" - every date falls on the same day of the week each year. To cover the leap-year situation, a 'leap-week' is inserted every 5 to 6 years, named after Sir Isaac Newton.
BBC News' 100 Things we didn't know this time last year. Crows don't like the taste of windshield wiper blades - and Brussels sprouts have 3 times as much Vitamin C as do oranges.
If it was possible to legislate the use of these in public places... Portable Cell Phone Booths.
Posted by Hamish at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)