Links posted in September 2007
September 29, 2007
Meet The Defuser - Austin Police Detective Jarret Crippen recently won Stan Lee's superbly cheesy reality show, "Who Wants to be a Superhero?". Last night, Vanalyn and I were lucky enough to join the Staple Pop podcast's roundtable interrogation of Det. Crippen (a hell of a guy, BTW).
Hear him share thoughts on his character's origin, what Stan Lee smells like, life on the set, and the Don't Tase Me, Bro controversy.
MLB Rookie Hazing Week - on the last week of the baseball season, veteran players make the rooks dress in silly costumes. Enjoy this year's crop, including the Devil Ray noobs <injoke>as that one team from bowling league </injoke>.
September 28, 2007
Ubelievable journey and awesome story. Dunno if someone's already posted this, but the bikeriders among us will love it.
Good fun in West Virginia. Please note that apparently cutting wood is a favored past-time of WVirginians. [more inside]
DIY Traffic Calming - Rob Cockerham uses a Fisher-Price radar gun (it actually works) to quantify various traffic-calming schemes.
September 27, 2007
The awesomest thing I saw at this year's ACLFest? Certainly, it was Batman. I haven't been able to find much about him online, apart from a few passing references and a 6th-street sighting by Natedogg, but I have the pictures to prove it... see [more inside]
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture CMU's 'Last Lecture' series asked speakers: "If you knew you were about to deliver the last lecture you'd ever give, what would you say?" Last week, 47-year old Virtual Reality pioneer Randy Pausch, dying of pancreatic cancer and with only few months to live, gave his last lecture as a Last Lecture (5 minute video).
Highlights:
- "Brick Walls [artificial obstacles] are there for a reason. The Brick Walls are not there to keep us out: the Brick Walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
- "Wait long enough and people will surprise you. When you're pissed off and angry at someone, you just haven't given them enough time. Just give them a little more time, and they'll almost always impress you."
- "I thought this was the coolest environment I'd ever been in, and instead of saying 'I want to experience this' I said 'I want to make stuff like this."
- "I had a deathbed conversion: I just bought a Mac"
- Once you've achieved your childhood dreams it's time to start helping other people achieve theirs.
The lecture is stirring, poignant and inspirational. I streamed the full 1.5-hr lecture yesterday, and I can't recommend it highly enough. [more inside]
Two articles about Roger Federer:
Both start off talking about tennis but wind up discussing something much deeper.
Cracked Magazine's 8 Most Needlessly Wordy Wikipedia Entries - commentary is pretty funny.
Halo3 + MIT = way nerdy hack. Can this man save us from the Covenant?
September 26, 2007
Physicist fun on Questionable Content. "Can I watch? Action at a distance always turns me on."
You can find plenty of YouTube videos of famous guitar gods shredding some sweet licks. But none are as hot as this series all posted by one guy. Don't miss the angry/confused comments on every page. If you can't settle on one might I recommend Carlos Santana shreds which features the awesome "instruments only play when on screen" technique.
September 24, 2007
UHaul Box Exchange - like Craigslist but /just/ for moving boxes.
National Organization for Rare Disorders - apparently some pharmaceutical companies mitigate costs for the (really expensive) drugs that treat rare disorders, a fact not widely known even among health-care providers. If you know anyone who has an 'orphan' or rare disease, and their insurance refuses/incompletely covers the medication, point them to the National Organization for Rare Disorders.
A friend has been paying $250/mo out-of-pocket for a medicine not covered by his crappy insurance; none of the doctors he consulted knew about the program.
September 21, 2007
This is why we can't have nice things. Linkspammers took advantage of a little-used feature ("trackbacks") and stuffed the poor little AE database full of 150MB of linkspam. I cleared it out, disabled the feature (which I'd done, and then undone without knowing it) and now things should be more worky again. Except for trackbacks -- that's gonna stay busted for the forseeable future.
September 19, 2007
Hey baseball dorks, now's your chance to decide what happens to barry bonds' famous ball. You can have it sent to the hall of fame untouched, sent with an asterisk branded on it, or have it shot into outer space.
The Grey Lady throws open her archives to Hoi Polloi - Kottke mines some gems.
This weekend marks the 90th meeting of Rice University and the University of Texas on the football field. mrflip casually mentioned at lunch that JFK made his famous "put a man on the moon by the end of this decade" speech at Rice on the eve of the 1962 game. Text and video of the speech is available here (youtube) but let me point out the most important part.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Rice and UT tied in that game 14-14 (Rice's overall record with UT is 21-67-1).
September 18, 2007
Going with the in crowd can lose you your toenails! I just hope they don't find anything wrong with "the shorts"!
Real life Piña Colada scenario! Except that, when it happens in real life, it ends in divorce. Sing it with me! [more inside]
September 17, 2007
First WoW death? So how about next weekend you guys (and you know who you are) make a play date in meatspace and play disc golf or something? [more inside]
September 14, 2007
Review of new Cocktails We need to try these sometime:
- A Lindsay Lohan: Same recipe as a Shirley Temple, but substitute tequila for ginger ale and cocaine for the cherry.
- Mix equal parts Rémy Martin, Möet & Chandon champagne and Cointreau. It's called Le Rem-Moet-Cointreau -- thousands of TV viewers reached for it during this year's Tour de France.
- The Mitt: An appletini, poured down the sink and replaced with Southern Comfort and bourbon.
September 13, 2007
IF YOUR PAGE LOOKS WEIRD PLEASE HIT SHIFT-RELOAD
It's always bugged my that the AlkalineEarth (MetaPhilter) code doesn't handle lists, blockquote's or pre's correctly: it inserts newlines even where they don't belong. So for the people who know what that means, you can now do so safely.
[more inside]
The Google Lunar X prize. $25 million to the first private capital team to put an autonomous rover on the moon and drive around a bit. This is the start of a new space race, for sure.
I'm strangely (for me) looking forward to the TV shows' annual return from Capistrano. I hear some people have cancelled their cable and are using subscription programs to seamlessly pull in exactly what they want, when they want it (and in high resolution). I wouldn't know anything about that except to say the media companies should quit their antediluvian grousing, curb their greed, and invent these things before somebody else does (and at a fair price for what is otherwise free). Enough rant...
Inside are premiere dates for some shows I know the AE community have been enjoying. Please ring in with your recommendations for this Boob Tube edition of "It's the Tits". [more inside]
Prank War that escalates like the Wheaton Metro stop -- the latest one involved 50,000 people, hundreds of dollars and a team of collaborators. That and the first two are best, but at least skim the others in order to watch the one-upmanship unfurl.
September 12, 2007
What we would have been subjected to endlessly had personal computers existed in 1945.
Pro Wrestlers' Grim Cycle: Pain, Drugs And Doom. In the steroids debate, you may hear someone broach the canard that sports should embrace steroids: "Just let'm all juice up; then the playing field is level". This article showed me how horribly wrong that argument is.
To put that mortality rate into context, Meltzer compares pro wrestling -- which has had roughly 1,500 male competitors in the past quarter-century, he estimates -- with pro football. If the same ratio of NFL players in the same time frame died before reaching age 50, more than 430 current or former players would have died prematurely, he said.
September 11, 2007
Story tenuously related to the link: Soku and I got to talking about what things from our generation will be gently mocked as completely outmoded by the next generation. This was prompted by habcous's internet meme link and the brief realization that we all recognized many of those things. Will our generation be tagged with going gaga over the "Internet Star"?
In any event, soku and I didn't want to be remembered as being from the generation that popularized the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world (and hopefully that falls to the kids a decade or so behind us). And to illustrate this vain hope, here is an article about a freshman orientation at NYU that could be called "Making Acquaintances Without the Use of a Computer Intermediary". I know I'm from a different generation because the very thought that it could be necessary makes me groan.
Nice photoessay of the 10 worst cars of all time as voted by some rich collectors and whatnot. The quotes are fun. The study was prompted by one guy noticing that hipsters are driving the prices of "nerd cars" up.
The A-List. The in crowd. The cool kids. The scene makers. The straws that 'ster the drink. Who are they? This photoessay explores the question. (PS You may find #25/33 particularly interesting.) [Thx, Vanalyn] [more inside]
September 10, 2007
In what might be described as the "We Didn't Start the Fire" of Internet memes, I give you "Internet People" by Dan Meth. [more inside]
I'm not quite enough of a tennis geek to fully appreciate this, but this guy Novak Djokovic (besides being good at tennis) does spot-on impersonations of other players:
- Nadal and Sharapova
- Roddick, Hewitt and Sampras
- a locker room command performance incl. Nadal and Federer
A selection of originals to compare:
(By the way -- you know what's hard to find? Video of Sharapova actually, y'know, playing tennis. Also: tennis videos w/o Eurotrash soundtracks.) [thx Kottke]
This administration has decimated our freedoms to speech, and travel, and assembly, and press, and due process, and fair representation in congress, and (...) -- but there's one thing they'd never touch, right? Freedom of Religion? Surely the American Taliban holds that sacrosanct, right? Wrong, and stop calling me Shirley.
September 09, 2007
World Beard and Moustache Championships 2007 were recently held in England. In a sport traditionally "dominated by German beard clubs", Team USA made a strong showing. The next one will be in Anchorage 2009 -- surely two years of celibacy is worth these prizes!
September 08, 2007
Time Machine Firefox Add-On transports you back to Web 0.1. Remember when every web page featured an "Under Construction" notice? And a midi-playing autoload? And a list of stuff you were a fan of? No need to visit MySpace: with this Firefox add-on, every webpage will harken back to the vernacular design of the Geocities and Hamster Dance era. [warning: add-on site has flashing text, autoload midi and kickass animated gif's.]
September 06, 2007
Shattered Expectations is the Onion Sports version of fantasy football. Instead of picking winners each week, you get points for QBs that throw INTs, kickers that miss FGs, and defenses that allow the most yards. I want everyone to join the group "Schadenfreude" (pwd: physics) and get some smack talk going.
By the way, the time investment is minimal, you just click a few check boxes once a week (the picks are fairly constrained). It's a lot like the March Madness brackets in terms of ease-of-use. Also, it seemed a little bit crashy right this second but I'm hoping it's just the crush of signups after they sent out an email. Also, there is some money involved if you get lucky and/or do your research.
I randomly stumbled on a nifty little video feature named Zero Punctuation today. I don't know how to describe it except to say it's hilarious fast-paced video game reviews. There are only four at this time but start now and you can say you were a fan way back when.
Hopefully this will cause major problems for the administration!
Cheebus help us!
September 05, 2007
Etsy
= cafepress + stitchnbitch + cuteoverload - internationalmale.
Match the following products to Alkaline Earthlings: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6.
Which floor for the Annual Yuck Dr Visit in the Shanghai Gynecology Hospital? No beating around the bush (hah!) with this sign. Of course, you'll need a Cisco Engineer and not an MD if you need for glue the sex rubber mat for linking a fast ether lord fucking net ascending. HeartyBeefcakes sent along this roundup of adventures in machine translation; the last one is, I believe, current public policy in Detroit.
Another game of Humiliation: Writing-Style genus - Grade yourself against the Economist Style Guide. [more inside]
September 03, 2007
This story from the town where my parents live easily verifies every supposition you might have about Wisconsin: excessive (public) drunkenness, comical antics, and people who won't keep found money because it would disappoint their mothers. Read every quote aloud in your head in a crossed Chicago/Fargo accent for maximum comic effect.
September 02, 2007
Wikirage
- what's hot on wikipedia;
WikiScanner - who's caught on wikipedia;
Intellipedia - what's not on wikipedia.
Tom Lehrer called hers "the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read" - a promising composer in her own right, Alma Lehrer had relationships with, in her time,
- Jugendstil painter Gustav Klimt, famous for works such as "The Kiss" and "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (current record holder, highest price paid for a work of art);
- Classical Composer Gustav Mahler
- Architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school of design;
- Poet Franz Werfel, author of Forty Days of Musa Dagh and Song of Bernadette;
- Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka;
- ... not to mention Composer Alexander von Zemlinsky and theater director Max Burckhard.
September 01, 2007
This is a cool website called Wakoopa.com and it allows you to show your friends what software you've been using. You put a small little file on your computer that tracks the software you've been using and posts it to the website. I'd be interested in seeing what software you all use throughout the day.