Links posted in March 2008
March 31, 2008
Nationals Stadium opens. In other baseball news, my hometown Nats moved into their new digs Saturday night -- with great acclaim for every aspect but the guy who threw the first pitch. Fan reaction is largely positive, and it's safe to say that dean of baseball columnists Tom Boswell is on board. The Nats have followed the storybook ending of their opener with another win, giving them the best record in baseball. [more inside]
Joltin' Joe Dimaggio's 56-game hit streak, re-examined - I've heard it said several times that DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak was the most unlikely, and one of the most unbreakable, records in baseball. That claim has always rung false (or at least, unexamined) to me. Samuel Arbesman (a grad student from Steven Strogatz' group) actually sat down with the numbers and wrote a nifty little article for the NYT. [more inside]
Ask Languagelog: How much of our language do we use? - the answer is an unsatisfying "well, we can't even reasonably define what that question means, let alone answer it", but the exploration is fascinating.
Comparison of British and American Political Beliefs - surprising how much we disagree (and how much more I agree with them). See especially their detailed breakdown of specific political questions, or browse the whole thing.
NYT has an interactive gallery of Al Jaffee's MAD Magazine fold-in covers which is highly entertaining. There is also an article about his creative process. (via waxy)
March 30, 2008
Transexual man becomes pregnant reports The Advocate. Cue a long series of Republican scare tactics.
Google Maps' Street View comes to Austin
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Let the hunt for examples of Austin Weird-Keeping begin.
John Hughes' teens: Where are they now? - they've pretty much spanned the fame trajectory phase space. While performing due diligence, I found this 2005 gem in the vaults. It hasn't been updated in a year, but the last couple are stellar.
March 29, 2008
Paralles? Win4Lin? Have you used them? Are they easy? Which do you think is better? What if windows is already installed?
Discuss. [more inside]
March 28, 2008
Some of you may know that daughterofmischief and I have a running bet about whether The People's Republic of China will have free, fair, open elections before the release of this album. Well, the good people at Dr. Pepper have stepped up the margin on this one: If the album is released in 2008, then every American (except for guitarists Slash and Buckethead) will be given a free Dr. Pepper.
Come on, Axl. The soda of victory, laced with methamphetamines, rum, and horse tranqualizers, will taste so sweet.
Jean Lafitte [WP] So while on a wikiwander in Capt. Jack Sparrow's neighborhood, I landed on the page for Cpt. Jean Lafitte. I was passingly familiar with the story, but had never realized how bigger-than-fiction his bio reads. No attempt at a based-on-a-true-story-mostly biopic actioner for this generation? You're telling me Harvey Weinstein and Vinnie Chase couldn't make an artier Pirates of the Carribean out of this kind of source material? [more inside]
I don't know if you guys are completely bored to death with my foreign policy posts, but here's another one. I've become increasingly interested in Russia recently, which has been quietly reasserting it's diplomatic muscle around the world.
Vladimir Putin's switch to becoming Prime Minister of the Duma (Russian Parliament),his replacement as president by his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, and the transition of the country to what is essentially one-party rule has been pretty well documented. But that's not what I'm talking about today. [more inside]
March 26, 2008
The latest from the Web 2.0 world: Muxtape. With just an email as a signup, make yourself a personalized 12 song mixtape. The nerdy types are excited/impressed/befuddled that Muxtape harnesses the power of Amazon S3 to store and serve the songs you upload. Make yourself a mix-tape now before RIAA finds the site and shuts it down! Or all those Amazon S3 fees catch up to the creators! Or the site's popularity spirals so out of control that it isn't scaleable!
I know that three complete setlists already exist; post yours in the comments once you've compiled it!
March 25, 2008
Real outsourcing in India-
Elephants Film Tigers. Amazing stuff.
And Great Lyrics Quiz Rock Roll The - did you think the rock lyrics quiz thing was played out? Friend if my so very were wrong you. Identify these universally-known rock songs by their alphabetized lyrics...
(After the jump: my own attempt at a hip-hop version.) [more inside]
March 24, 2008
Eye-clops - Rob Cockerham has been having great fun with the Eye-clops, a childrens toy that blows an image up 200x and displays it on a TV screen. Since there's no way I would have already posted and then forgotten about it, I'm clearly linking again to point out the expanding gallery of zip-loc bags, yarn, secret big-brother monitoring schemes and bedsheets writ large that have gone up since.
March 23, 2008
Obama's Speech on Race - in Gen-X-attention-span friendly format. [more inside]
March 22, 2008
Hey cat nerds, here's a breed for the braver ones... I would so totally get one of these if I didn't have a bird and crazy cat allergies.
March 20, 2008
George Clooney Egogoogles for Esquire - hilarious interview; A.J. Jacobs shows George Clooney what the internet says about him, recording his impressions on everything from his Wikipedia page to a list of his ex-girlfriends to 2G1C. The best part isn't in the article... it's item #3, "Clooney's Private Parts" in the online-only sidebar. [thx kottke]
Launchball - Speaking of science+games... the top web award @ SxSWi went to Launchball, and after taking an illicit peek I can see why. Roughly quoting the whole of their acceptance speech, "We designed a game called launch ball where you learn science by launching a ball. And now we've won an award for it. Pretty remarkable, really. Thank you." It's as addictive as Portal or Lemmings or Tower Defense, but with a very well thought out science education component that enriches the whole thing. [more inside]
Physics Fun. So again I'm looking for creative input from the most creative people I know. The linked website is going through a redesign and there will be fun physics factiods included. Anyone have some fun physics factoids? Did you know that Newton loved fig tarts which is why in 1891 Nabisco named its new tart after him?
Be creative in moving a ball around. At the annual Game Developers Conference, it appears the buzz wasn't about the game-world's equivalent to the summer block buster, Gears of War II, instead everyone was a chatter about a neat little game that allows you to draw in objects to try and help you move a ball to a star shape.
I thought it was pretty cool. Check out the demo thats embedded in the news item linked above.
March 18, 2008
Arthur C. Clarke doesn't make it to 2010. Another visionary gone. Though I still find the space baby creepy.
March 17, 2008
"If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work." I mean, really, what more can be said? Actually, it's both geeky-educational and kinda funny. Completely SFW.
March 16, 2008
Have you felt like the month of March has come in too much like a relatively sane lion? Would you prefer it went out like a lamb struck with some kind of ovine (<--?) prion encephelitic disorder? Let me interest you in March Madness 2008. Our group name for the third annual AE March Madness is Go LOLcats and the password is physics. You'll first have to sign up with ESPN (or dredge your username and password from the memory banks) and then join the group.
[more inside]
March 14, 2008
March 12, 2008
Who Needs a Movie? Fred and Sharon don't, maybe you do.
Would it Kill you to Smile? - musings on the state of being "Bershon":
The spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you’re also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner.
CIA to root out Orc extremism Ah, homeland security, always on the ball. Thanks, open left
March 11, 2008
Yet another twist on Garfield comics. What happens when you just remove Garfield all together? Amazingly enough the strip is pretty damn funny. Man is that Jon twitchy.
Girls Are Yucky - This just reaffirms my suspicion originally made during the educational film shown at ExMFC...
March 10, 2008
Goddammit, Eliot Spitzer, what the fuck is wrong with you? Politics continues to be 99.9% disappointment.
Nice interview with Bruce Springsteen - who among other things will go to Rage Against the Machine concerts with his son (though leaving him in charge of mosh pit duties).
March 07, 2008
Infochimps.org - free redistributable datasets.
Exploring rich data is fun, but inding it, formatting it, tagging it with metadata is drudge work barely fit for a trained chimp. We need a site where you can find a century of hourly weather, every major league baseball game, decades of stock prices, or every US patent filing -- and where you can share back data you gather or enrich.
So here's infochimps.org, a community to assemble and interconnect a giant free almanac with tables on everything you can put in a table. Built by data nerds, used by data nerds, come find the information you need.
(This is the site I've been building the last few months. If the servers fling poo or you otherwise see something horribly broken please email me or post.) yay!
March 04, 2008
I've been seeing the old HBO pre-movie animation go around the interwebs recently so I thought I'd collect the related bits here:
- HBO has a dedicated youtube channel now and put up the old school movie intro which definitely got my blood rushing (I remembered the song note for note). As cynical-c and the sports guy both pointed out, any time this music played it was MANDATORY that you watch all the way through to see if the warning would come up with SSC (strong sexual content) or N (the ever coveted nudity).
- A behind the scenes look at the creation of that spot
- The music video for "DVNO" by Justice features a riff on the HBO promo plus tons of others that smell like VHS tapes to me (like Cannon films) and old TV shows (like Stephen J. Cannell at his typewriter).
Food Fight is a bizarre little video illustrating military conflicts since WW2 with combating food items.
March 02, 2008
My esteem for this man increases every day. "Asked about his favorite place on earth, Gil says this:
'I'm building it right now in my backyard: a replica of Hugh Hefner's pool, only a little better. It has a grotto and everything, but with flatscreen TVs, a kitchen and a bathroom. No bunnies.'"
Much more good stuff in link, including a little sump'in (little nuttin' actually) for the ladies.