04/08/08

This is the ninth installment in an occasional series of updates to recent kottke.org posts. Previous installment is here, from almost a year ago. Eep. Two still-active threads: will a helicopter on a treadmill take off? and my favorite kottke.org t ...

Photographer Eric Etheridge alerted me to a new series he recently started on his WordBlog called Photography: The Missing Criticism, "which aims to bring great writing on photography back into print". The series currently consists of a 1981 essay by ...

Crayon Physics is PC-only so I can't play it, but Magic Pen will do in a pinch. Don't start playing unless you've got a few hours to spare. (via waxy) (link)

Some poop in a cave in Oregon has been dated to more than 14,000 years ago and identified as human, adding to other evidence that humans inhabited the Americas before the well-known Clovis people. Other archaeologists agreed that the findings establ ...

The airplane on a conveyor belt question was just recently settled and we're confronted with a related question: will a helicopter on a turntable take off? The image is short on details and likely a joke, but let's assume that the turntable will matc ...

gleuschk : University Hill Transportation Study - see Final Recommendations: they'd create a new public square, re-configure Marshall Street, build a light-rail line (!), put in roundabouts, bus lanes, and bike lanes, and de-one-way-ify all the one-w ...

gleuschk : Users of Covers and Cozies, Ready-Made Souls in Platic Bags, Negligible Generalities | MetaFilter - Vladimir Nabokov discusses Lolita with Lionel Trilling on YouTube Tags : authors lolita nabokov trilling video youtube

jcgregorio : Crooked Timber » » Efficient markets (addendum) - Putting a stake in the heart of the free market fairy. Tags : freemarketfairy

gleuschk : Price of a bottle of beer in Zimbabwe - Worldometers - holy cow, it goes up $10 between the shelf and the cash register Tags : inflation money zimbabwe

joshua : another ec2 tutorial Tags : ec2

maybe I need one of these...

drool...

"Blogging doesn’t need to be a race. Really."

"If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose."

how to make mutt work with gmail... bu it's way slow for me

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)

10 impossibilities conquered by science: This article is about a lot of things that science has done, but the last one is something we’ve discussed at least twice before: teleportation. What’s interesting are the comments. The commentor ...

Dial D for Disruption: A good article about Asterisk, the open-source phone system. Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and ...

Slate's advice columnist Prudence answers a letter from a young man who's living with a friend's family for the summer, but can't stand how much his friend's mother blathers on.

One of the biggest surprises this April Fool's day was GameTap's release of Captain McGrandpa - Memory of the Forgotten. You download the game and when you go to play it, a launcher appears. You click on Play Game and your redirected to a thread on t ...

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Uwe Boll, the infamous German director behind such video game adaptations as House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege and Postal, has recently admitted that he would retire from making movies if enough p ...

TechDirt is reporting that the New Jersey e-voting troubles are even worse than originally thought. Apparently the "minor bug" which was supposed to be fixed is still not corrected, suggesting that Sequoia still doesn't know what is going on. "Ed Fel ...

Michael J. Ross writes "Web developers familiar with a particular programming language, such as PHP, typically turn to books and forums for assistance only when they confront a specific problem that they believe has probably been encountered by many ...

Will Foster, a Kettering University student, has built his own half sized Panzer tank. It took Will 2 years and around $10,000 to build his mini-tank and he says the process has been "a lot of trial and error...I'd buy a $200 part that didn't work, t ...

Researchers at Microsoft Labs are hoping to allow untrained singers to have their own automatic backup band in the near future. A new piece of software, "MySong", promises to take a sung melody and using a probability computation algorithm, generate ...

Jacob's ladder writes "Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripti ...

Authorities say more than 400 children have been taken from a polygamist compound and placed in state custody as they continue to investigate whether one of them had been an underage bride.

A coroner's jury returned the most serious verdict within its power Monday, ruling that Princess Diana and her boyfriend were unlawfully killed because their driver and pursuing paparazzi were reckless — behavior tantamount to manslaughter.

Wall Street turned lower Wednesday as investors worried that a sharp jump in oil prices could be another sign that consumers are under stress in an economy that is already showing signs of a recession.

Internet icon Yahoo Inc., under pressure of a three-week deadline from Microsoft to accept its $41 billion buyout bid, said Monday it doesn't oppose a deal with the world's largest software maker but wants a better offer.

Yahoo Inc. believes it's poised to revolutionize online advertising after years of being outmaneuvered by rival Google Inc.

Reuters - Harry's Bar, the famed Venice watering hole where Ernest Hemingway held court over hearty food and stiff martinis, is offering a discount to "poor" Americans suffering from a weak dollar and subprime blues.

LiveScience.com - Having a husband creates an extra seven hours of housework each week for women, according to a new study. For men, tying the knot saves an hour of weekly chores.

Police called to investigate a theft at a private railyard in Galesburg encountered a gory-looking scene when they climbed into the burglarized railcar, but it wasn't blood. It was ketchup — a lot of ketchup.

A New Zealand man has been accused of assault with prickly weapon — a hedgehog. Police allege that William Singalargh picked up the hedgehog and threw it several yards to hit a 15-year-old boy in the North Island east coast town of Whakatane on Feb. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton urged President George W. Bush on Monday to boycott the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies this summer unless China improves human rights.

There's a guy named Trevor Paglen. His obsession is military patches, the kind you wear on your sleeve. Many military programs are top secret and only identifiable by two things: 1. An undescribed line item on a Department of Defense expense report. ...

A jury at the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed returns a verdict of unlawful killing, blaming grossly negligent driving by the couple's chauffeur, Henri Paul, and the paparazzi who pursued them.

I’m delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere: Cory Doctorow:Clay’s book makes sense of the way that groups are using the ...

Over the years, we've watched as New York's Village Voice has hired (and fired) sex columnist after sex columnist (and no, we still haven't forgiven them for axing Rachel Kramer Bussel), but it looks like they're finally back on the right track&mdash ...

This is the ninth installment in an occasional series of updates to recent kottke.org posts. Previous installment is here, from almost a year ago. Eep. Two still-active threads: will a helicopter on a treadmill take off? and my favorite kottke.org t ...

Earlier today, I received an email from Steve Ducharme, the producer/ director of the Internet Power series that I digitized last month. "I produced, edited and narrated that video many years ago," he wrote. "Thanks for digging it out. I haven't se ...

The Makhmalbafs are an Iranian family of filmmakers, although Samira tends to get the most press. The House that Mohsen Built. Limbs of No Body by Mohsen Makmalbaf [very long!] June 20, 2001 Last year I attended the Pusan Film Festival in South Kore ...

Improv Everywhere turned a little league baseball game into a major league event. Jumbotron & all. Improv Everywhere has been linked on MeFi before.

Graphjam: Pop Culture for People in Cubicles.

Pay to play. The children of big-donor Harvard alums are systematically given preference over legacy offspring of lesser means. Additionally David Karen, now a professor at Bryn Mawr, concluded that alumni children at Harvard lose most of their adm ...

There are definitely ways that the Clinton campaign has annoyed me, but the "win Super Tuesday and its over" strategy really was a pretty good one and it almost worked. Politics is binary and there's big tendency to overstate the genius of the winne ...

Hug that war, Huggy Bear. BAGHDAD - Three American soldiers were killed in separate attacks Monday in Baghdad, the U.S. military said. That pushed the two-day American death toll to at least 10 nationwide.Two soldiers were killed in a rocket propelle ...

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...

First, a caveat, I am far from a financial expert, so I may have some of this wrong, if so, please set me straight. — — The cable news shows didn't do a good job of covering the Fed's bailout of Bear Sterns, and as a result there's a misu ...

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselved to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of y ...

.... witty flirtatious comment, but: too tired and i'm passing on the opportunity:) srsly tho? you rock. 23:25 i love when molly falls asleep nursing on the couch. for some reason i like it better than bedtime nummins in an actual bed. go figure ...

.... sometimes he clicks his ballpoint pen or taps it on the desk. But he soon settles to work again. Mr. Kevin gets along quite well with all of his classmates and students in other classes, and most of them like him very much. Authored by mimibo ...

You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It'll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother's and wrapped the Must ...

The summer internships at Fog Creek are already full, but Seth Godin, my marketing rebbe, has marketing internships. Paid! “The idea is to find a diverse group of motivated young people who want to join together to create a few really neat proj ...

still beta and an awkward UI, but some great exclusive video including the full-length Pixies reunion documentary  

Mechanical Turkers reconstruct a $100 bill using custom drawing tools for 1 cent per drawing  

for people who can't run BT or limited by their ISP, this sounds great  

complete clone of Crayon Physics, but still worth trying  

walkthrough available, if you need it  

Jakob made it look effortless, with quite a bit of planning  

from the fine people at BrettCorp  

Here's an online comic book about this history of LSD done up in the style of one of those hateful Chick tracts. Link (Via Grow a Brain)...

Jennifer Muir of The Orange County Register reports on the California Department of Motor Vehicles' "Confidential Records Program," which was created 30 years ago to keep DMV records of police officers private from criminals. The program has since ex ...

The driver of a four-person pedal-powered vehicle covered in an old Buick shell beat a traffic ticket ("operating an unsafe vehicle") in a Toronto court last week. It has no floor. No engine. No transmission. No signal lights. And as mentioned, tea l ...

Hot off the press... Creative Commons Announces New Leadership, New Funding San Francisco, CA, USA -- April 1, 2008 Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to expand the body of creative work available to the public for legal sharing ...

BradSucks sees a 750GB external hard drive for $159.97 CAD that says it holds 660 hoursdays of MP3s and does the math: * 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song* That's 15,840 hours.* That's 990 days o ...

It was with great trepidation that I checked out Battle of the bands for Wii. The logo alone left me feeling like it was going to be a cheap Guitar Hero knock off with it's heavy Metal pointy-ness. What I was shown when I actually played was a somewh ...

Give Gary Busey a green screen, some video game footage and whatever marvelous concoction of narcotics he must have on constant drip, and you get three new Saint's Row 2 trailers called Street Lessons With Uncle Gary. Sometimes funny, often scary and ...

Red, yellow and blue cars are on their way in a hurry to the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

AFP

Tinkerer Phil Ross is a one-man laboratory for geeky eco-art experiments. His illuminated hydroponic sculpture, ‘cultured’ living organisms, and clever splicing of ancient and future technologies aim to make controlled environments and ga ...

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who rang the first alarm bells over the ozone hole issued a warming about climate change on Saturday, saying there could be "almost irreversible consequences" if the Earth warmed 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees F) a ...

Blackwater, the controversial private security contractor, is using an unknown affiliate to register over two dozen aircraft.