02/27/08

Nice collection of photographs of Pakistan's elaborately decorated motor vehicles. The most striking thing in Pakistan is the vision of trucks and buses completely covered in a riot of color and design. They might spew diesel fumes, they may take up ...

Why does the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa appear to be both smiling and not smiling at the same time? The smile part of the Mona Lisa's face was painted by Leonardo in low spatial frequencies. This means that when you look right at her mouth, ther ...

Is George Clooney the last movie star? The only one we have. Wow. There's one teensy-weensy problem, though, that nobody seems to have noticed. One tiny little thing missing from the George Clooney is the World's Biggest Movie Star storyline...nobod ...

Some bootleg scans of these were linked around the web last week, but here's the real thing: photos of current Hollywood celebrities photographed in scenes from Hitchcock films. Click on the photos to see the originals. (link)

I like Tilda Swinton and all, but her performance in Michael Clayton receiving awards bugs me. She was the only prominent woman character in the movie and was the only character who was insecure, emotional, and tentative. None of the other main chara ...

philgyford : Advanced Course - Spacelab 07/ 08 - The Fantastical - Photos from our class in which we made puppets and costumes on the theme of "the abyss". (I haven't finished anything for it yet.) Tags : abyss aureliankoch costumes lispa p ...

philgyford : Against go bag silliness « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird - I've seen a few links fly by about making up emergency "go bags". Adam Greenfield offers some less excitable advice from experience. (via ChrisDodo) Tags : adamgreenfi ...

philgyford : Redland Green School Overspend - The Report | James Barlow - Nice deadpan assessment of an apparently poor report into the £6.4 million overspend on construction of a new Bristol school. (via the Bristol Blogger) Tags : architecture bri ...

philgyford : Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online - Interesting articles on how a class of children played with Lego and how the teachers attempted to help them structure the play fairly. (via Haddock) Tags ...

joshua : Botanicalls Twitter DIY - #define MOIST 450 Tags : dev hw

kick ass

"Humans are creatures of habit, and Google was the best search at the time when most formed their internet search habits."

"I believe the term first arose in the Python community, as a derogatory term for a practice which that community tended to frown on. The Ruby community, on the other hand, has embraced the term and the practice with enthusiasm."

basically, "we're better because we're better..." that's a bit odd

Kevin has good luck with MySQL on properly tuned SSDs

The Sorting Algorithm Demo (495)

Easy Photo Wall on a Shoestringwire Budget » Curbly | DIY Design Community « Keywords: photos, home, decoration, wall (226)

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide (221)

(Note: If you’re reading this in RSS, it refers to an audio widget only available on the HTML side. Click the post title to go to the page which contains the widget.) Okay, here’s the first one. I hope it goes well. (And I’m pur ...

The Clbuttic Mistake: Absolutely love this. “Apple made the clbuttic mistake of forcing out their visionary - I mean, look at what NeXT has been up to!” Hmm. “clbuttic”. Google “clbuttic” - thousands ...

Forget best picture. How can any of us judge what should win the Academy Award for best editing? Hollywood editor Mark Helfrich walks us through well-edited scenes from this year's five Oscar-nominated films.

The Super Bowl Commercials are my favorite part! Here are my picks for my favorite commercials.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Prof. Johan Pouwelse of Delft University — one of the world's foremost experts on the science of P2P file sharing and the very same Prof. Pouwelse who stopped the RIAA's Netherlands counterpart in its tracks back in ...

oliderid writes to let us know that, even as the UK threatens ISPs who don't clamp down on P2P traffic, the rest of the EU is going the other way. (Here is a link with a a bit more technical detail.) Europe recently agreed to: "...spend 14M Euros to ...

alx5000 writes "In an interview conducted last week with Consumer Eroski (link in Spanish; Google translation), the father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov claimed that 'Free Software should have never existed,' since it 'destroys the market' by bringing do ...

DustyShadow writes "Slashdot previously discussed the $10,000 bounty (since raised to $15,000) that was put on the identity of the Patent Troll Tracker author by a law firm that represents patent holding 'shell' companies. After he received a threate ...

An anonymous reader writes "HB407 in Utah would create a child-friendly designation for ISPs that block out a range of prohibited materials. Google, Yahoo, and others are fighting the bill, but Rep. Michael Morley says, 'I think it's a positive thing ...

shaunco writes "Sometime around midnight on February 26th (at least for the SoCal users), TimeWarner's RoadRunner service started intercepting failed DNS requests, redirecting them to RoadRunner's own search and advertising platform. To see if this h ...

Florida's largest utility says equipment failure and a fire at a Miami substation led to power outages that affected up to 3 million people. Florida Power & Light is still trying to determine what caused the failure and fire. The company says such eq ...

Republican John McCain quickly denounced the comments of a radio talk show host who while warming up a campaign crowd referred repeatedly to Barack Hussein Obama and called the Democratic presidential candidate a "hack, Chicago-style" politician.

In an about-face, Senate Republicans on Tuesday agreed with Democrats to advance an anti-war bill because they said the debate would give them time to hail progress in Iraq.

The U.S. economy is wheezing so badly that even Internet power Google Inc. and its once-robust stock is looking haggard.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's telecommunications regulator said Tuesday that it had lifted restrictions imposed on YouTube over an anti-Islamic video clip, but rejected blame for a cut in access to the Web site in many countries over the weekend. ...

German treasure hunters began digging Tuesday for what they say may be plunder buried by the Nazis in a man-made cavern near the Czech border.

No good news today on the economic front. Consumer confidence plunged, the wholesale inflation rate soared, the number of homes being foreclosed jumped, home prices fell sharply and a report predicts big increases in health care costs.

Dayton police and U.S. marshals called for backup from animal control when they found two alligators instead of the suspected probation violator they were after.

An employee of an Auburn nursing home called firefighters for help on Tuesday because the toilets were exploding with steam. The fire department said there was a boiler malfunction at Regency Auburn Rehabilitation Center that caused a minor explosion ...

CINCINNATI, Ohio (Reuters) - With a week to go before Ohio's pivotal nominating contest, Hillary Clinton was fighting to hold onto a dwindling lead as rival Barack Obama worked to undercut her support, particularly among working class voters.

I was reading LWN where there were reports of security holes in a dozen different packages based off Mozilla's Gecko. Someone complained about the lack of a universal library that they should all use so that users would only need to update the librar ...

Talks to resolve Kenya's post-election crisis are suspended because of a lack of progress, mediator Kofi Annan says.

I’ve written a book, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which is coming out in a month. It’s coming out first in the US and UK (and in translation later this year in Holland, Portugal and Brazil, K ...

At risk of being "too insidery," later tonight a team of Gawker Media employees will be battling it out against other pathetic athletic writerly types in the opening round of the New York media bowling league. (Sadly, I did not make that up.) It was ...

Hebrew and Arabic Google will now more dynamically adjust from left-to-right/ right-to-left typing, depending on what language you enter, Google announced. For instance, if you go to Google Egypt and enter "hello world," the text will be left-aligne ...

Friendfeed.com just opened its doors for everyone... you don't need an invite anymore to use this site, which can act as your feed reader, social network, and twitter-style mini blog all in one. Here are some tips & tricks for Friendfeed: ...

Nice collection of photographs of Pakistan's elaborately decorated motor vehicles. The most striking thing in Pakistan is the vision of trucks and buses completely covered in a riot of color and design. They might spew diesel fumes, they may take up ...

ForumWarz is my newest obsession, a web-based game like nothing I've ever played. In short, it's a parody of Internet culture in the form of a real-time role-playing game. You play as one of three Internet archetypes -- the camwhore, emo kid, or tr ...

Harry Shearer finds footage that shows how some people act when the camera is off.

Garfield minus Garfield: "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?"

Last year, as McCain's campaign seemed stumbling into the grave, it applied for federal matching funds for the primary season. After Super Tuesday, McCain withdrew from the system. Or did he? If he didn't, he's capped at $54 million to spend till Sep ...

Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, "prolong capture shock," disorient detainees during interrogations–and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, a ...

Wingnuttery overload.

New low for dollar.NEW YORK: The dollar fell to a record low against the euro and hit a 26-year bottom against the British pound Tuesday before recovering slightly, as investors fretted about a possible fallout from weakness in the U.S. subprime mort ...

Something Awful eschews humor in this week's Comedy Goldmine for gibbering madness. "I know you were coming here expecting to laugh at the Comedy Goldmine this week. Well, you're screwed....

"It's the Bizaro Ethel Merman." "She's like a garbage bag full of fighting Muppets back from the dentist." "It's like the little exorcist girl stung by bees." "The first time...

A short film in which a Paris Hilton-esque socialite is revealed to be the architect of her own loopy attempts at notoriety, and who will go as far as she...

I started a chatroom for tonight's Democratic debate. — — irc:/ / irc.freenode.net/ #ohioDebate — — The debate starts at 6PM Pacific. — —

Warning: Spoilers follow... — — The best TV show ever, imho, is The Wire on HBO. — — I'm such a fan, I've bought all the DVDs and watched the series in its entirety three times. After the last season, the fifth one, which is w ...

....Bill of lading documentation is the most important foreign trade documentation, www.ibuy-sell.com is foreign buyers of the property according to collect evidence. Bill of lading by the ship under the ocean shipper instructions Chen Zhi, Chen Zhi ...

.... 09:04 internally debating the merits of building a snowman # 14:11 Just heard the best overdub ever: Flip this spit! # this "too lazy to actually post an LJ entry" update has been brought to you by LoudTwitter ....

From my February column in Inc. Magazine: “The bureaucrats in Washington had forgotten Newton's first law: An object in motion tends to remain in motion.” Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, gr ...

Neil Davidson has posted a preliminary list of some of the speakers for this year's Business of Software Conference. “So far I've lined up (in no particular order) Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Richard Stallman, Dharmesh Shah, Jason Fried, Steve Joh ...

backed by Merlin Mann, Leo Laporte, and Veronica Belmont; it's a geekgasm  

Adam reads new meanings into NES screenshots  

more powerful than the BFG  

in particular, I love this one  

weak interview, but interesting he's getting more attention; don't miss the Labyrinth scanlation  

too bad the Pulitzer excludes independent journalism outside of newspapers, online or off  

Asia loves Friendster, Russia loves LiveJournal, and Orkut still dominates Latin America  

The Shibuya Center-Gai Patrol is a volunteer group of people who patrol the streets of Tokyo wearing police-like uniforms and yelling and blowing whistles at loiterers, smokers, and other people who don't behave like salarymen or shoppers. The bring ...

A 39-year-old man was arrested in Tokyo when he tried to enter a high school wearing a long wig and a girl's school uniform. When students standing outside the gates started to scream at the sight of him, he dashed inside the school grounds, hoping t ...

Students at Lipson School in Plymouth UK returned from a one-week break to discover closed-circuit security cameras in the lavatories (They were "the round ones that can move," said one 15-year-old who saw them). After hundreds of students protested, ...

From Larry This site hosts this video to explain the launch of two exploratory projects -- first, a Change Congress movement, and second, my own decision whether to run for Congress in the California 12th. I have decided I want to give as much ener ...

Comcast has sort of admitted that it stacked the audience at yesterday's FCC hearing with paid seat-warmers. More here and here.Since over a hundred people were turned away, this papering of the house is not just a bad joke. Although it also is a bad ...

We really love the idea of a star-crossed Sony/ Apple lovechild that's left on our doorstep on a rainy evening—an elegant device that could play PS3/ PSP titles while integrating with iTunes. Of course, Apple's heralded multitouch could make it ...

Well you certainly can't call the folks at SouthPeak Games quitters. Despite low opinions from gamers and critics alike, they stand behind their persistent online RPG Two Worlds for all they're worth, announcing two new downloadable expansions for th ...

Coney Island is pretty quiet this time of year. I like it better this way.

AFP

So you are having a kid and the house is too small. Or mom is moving home and you need another room. So why do people have to move under such circumstances? When your hard drive is full you can plug in another, because they are all designed to be mo ...

The lucky sunny state of Arizona is about to become home to the world’s largest Solar Plant! Thanks to a just-announced contract between Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company (APS), the enormous solar plant called Solana will power u ...

Yahoo launched new features for website owners on Tuesday, making it easier for them to include photos, links and additional data from their sites into Yahoo's default search result listings.