Sun, September 5 02:36
Toothy tubes of hunger. (link)
Toothy tubes of hunger. SharkweekFilter. Good snaps.
Toothy tubes of hunger. SharkweekFilter. Good snaps.
Simplicity is highly overrated. Why people prefer feature-bloat.
Badass Japanese Precision Walking Competition. Craziness starts at 1:45, and just gets better from there on.
Social Networks and Data Mining: Where it is and Where it's Going
Telecoms operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as "influencers", these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short. Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated "network analysis" software. Instead of looking at the call records of a single customer at a time, it looks at customers within the context of their social network.
EA's new Medal of Honor video game allows players to take the role of Taliban insurgents killing American troops. In response, the US military has banned sales of the game on all military bases, including in privately run businesses (such as GameStop) present on bases. Military members (who game) don't seem too happy about the decision here. (More military member comments, some pro, some against, can be found here.) You can watch someone playing as a Taliban insurgent here. (Warning: MoH gameplay is rated 'M' for mature.)
It has gone by many names. "National Reactor Testing Station" (1949-1975), "Energy Research and Development Administration" (1975-1977), "Idaho National Engineering Laboratory" (1977-1997), the "Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory" (1997-2005), and now the "Idaho National Laboratory" (2005-present). It has been the site of more than 50 nuclear reactors, which has resulted in a fair bit of environmental impact. In 2000, the US Department of Energy published (and has since made available on the web) a history of the laboratory over its first 50 years: "Proving the Principle."
Classic Chicago Tribune Cartoonists, 1931. Leapin' lizards! We're in the movies! Excerpt from the documentary From Trees to Tribunes. You can get the whole documentary here at archive.org. Classic comic artists at their drawing boards.
Cartoonists in the video:
John T. McCutcheon
Gaar Williams
Carey Orr
Sidney Smith (The Gumps)
Frank King (Gasoline Alley)
Frank Willard (Moon Mullins)
Carl Ed (Harold Teen)
Martin Branner (Winnie Winkle)
Walter Berndt (Smitty)
Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie)
This Summer's Sexiest Images From Saturn. From a billion miles away, the Cassini spacecraft continues to send spectacular images of Saturn and its moons. Cassini has been flying since 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004 after flybys of Earth, Venus and Jupiter. Its mission was originally slated to end in 2008, but it got its first 27 month extension to witness Saturn's equinox. This year, it was given another life extension until 2017 to keep exploring until Saturn's northern hemisphere summer solstice. [previously]
In other news, as pointed out by shakespeherian, NASA has joined the Flickr Commons with more than 50 years of photos.
Comedian Robert Schimmel, a frequent guest on Howard Stern's radio show and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, has died a week after being injured in a car accident.
Robert Schimmel was a well known American comedian who was known for his adult humor and his willingness to incorporate any part of his life into his routines. Here is a 1994 Showtime special (Parts 1 2 3 4 5) which is decidedly NSFW. Other YouTube postings of his stand-up can be found on his own YT Channel.
"Rain is probably the most effective way to ... cause the ice to melt. So this was the first time you could see the surface actually lowering around you." A rare tropical glacier in Indonesia has dropped by a foot in the space of two weeks, as observed by a team sent to collect ice cores to study the effects of global warming. (Glaciers, previously.)
According to Wikipedia, tropical glaciers have been steadily shrinking or disappearing as of the mid-20th century. Though these glaciers account for a small fraction of the Earth's total freshwater ice, they provide a principal element of the water supply to tropical regions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report (PDF link) projects that freshwater supply from glacial runoff will dramatically decrease in the near future, and that this problem will be worsened by increased salinization of groundwater due to rises in ocean levels.
The War Within
After the not wise words by General McChrystal to Rolling Stone (previously) and the over-excited reporting of Colonel Lawrence Sellin's self-destruction via cranky email, the latest story questioning the state of affairs for coalition troops in Afghanistan comes from the Washington Post which highlights the antagonistic attitude and ideological differences between major allies working in-theatre together, the US and UK.
The acclaimed Los Angeles Times political cartoonist Paul Conrad is dead.
Paul Conrad was 86. He's perhaps best known for his cartoons mercilessly attacking Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both as governor and president (for which the LA Times' publisher received repeated complaining phone calls from both Ronald and Nancy). Conrad was also sued for libel by LA Mayor Sam Yorty in 1968.
Conrad's iconoclasm was part of an all-out effort by Otis Chandler to push the stature of the Los Angeles Times forward, helping to move it from what the paper in its own obit article describes as "a laughingstock in most of the country, because of its mediocre journalism and blatant Republican boosterism" to a nationally known, award-winning presence. Conrad himself won the Pulitzer three times.
A gallery of some of Conrad's work (from an exhibit at the College of the Canyons) is here (has a skippable Flash intro). Although he retired from the Times in 1993, he was working till near the end of his life; some of his recent cartoons are here.
Doug Marlette, another great political cartoonist, put it best: "He lifts the skirts of the powerful over their heads and shows their asses to the world." Pat Oliphant said that Conrad was "the grandest example of consistently A-grade, blue ribbon, USDA-prime righteous anger that I can ever remember seeing in a cartoonist's work in the 50-plus years that I have been doing this sort of thing."
(It should be noted that although the obit articles are saying that Conrad wound up on one of Nixon's many political enemies lists, he actually appeared on a list of George McGovern staffers and campaign contributors drawn up in 1972 by White House Counsel John Dean and submitted for investigation to the IRS Commissioner. Dean's claim to the IRS Commissioner was that Nixon had nothing to do with this separate list being drawn up, which claim may or may not have stood up to subsequent scrutiny.)
Three newly approved 'in vitro' toxicity tests using artificial human skin are reducing the need for animal testing of cosmetics and chemicals.
"...on July 22 ... the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — an international group that, among other things, provides guidelines to its 32-member countries on methods to assess chemical safety—officially approved three commercially available in vitro models of human skin for use in chemical testing. Specifically, the new guideline (OECD Test No. 439) stipulates that the models can serve as an alternative to animals in tests for skin irritation, one of several human health endpoints for which chemicals are tested. Similar 3-D models were approved for corrosion tests in 2004, leaving many hopeful that soon it may be possible to the assess the full spectrum of a chemical's effects on human skin—from irritation to corrosion—without using live animals."
CAPTCHA comics: for when typing two words just isn't enough.
Many many more in this thread, which is occasionally NSFW.
Also: how CAPTCHA is used to scan books.
In Defense of Jumping the Shark. The writer behind Fonzie's infamous, downfall-defining moment remains unrepentant. "More than three decades later, I still don't believe that the series 'jumped the shark' when Fonzie jumped the shark."
What do bottles of water used to torture people have in common with bottles of water provided to those in danger of dying of thirst? Jay Bybee. Guess which ones he likes. Scott Horton discusses the case of Walt Stanton and Jay Bybee's curious flexibility over bottled water's proper use.
Jay Bybee has been discussed before.
Pixel Sorting Mountain Trip
Other interesting endeavors from Kim Asendorf:
Sumedicina (Flickr set) - A short piece of science fiction told through infographics. (See also, laser cut implementation)
Spam Visualization - "Spam, unsolicited bulk messages, indiscriminately sent."
A browser version of Street Fighter 2 ?
Install the FUCK YOU cookie for free! (Real world implementation)
Yahoo search loop
more
Twitter Discographies summarizes musicians' entire careers in 140 characters, album by album. (SLT)
Nirvana: 1 "If all of your feelings of rage..."; 2 "...were overheard by everyone on earth..."; 3 "...you might feel ambivalent about that."
Sonic Youth: 1-3 noisy noises; 4-5 noisy songs; 6 desert island disc; 7,8 songy songs; 9-12 songy noises; 13-16 Phish for aging hipsters.
Oasis: 1 "Boys"; 2 "All Together Now"; 3 "It's All Too Much"; 4 "Nowhere, Man"; 5 "Misery"; 6 "For No One"; 7 "The End."
Red Hot Chili Peppers:1-4 Seinfeld theme prototypes; 5 why somebody had to invent AutoTune; 6 "sorry, Dave"; 7-9 somebody invented AutoTune.
Pat Jordan from the New York Times meets William Shatner: James T. Kirk TJ Hooker author Priceline Spokesman ("and shareholder") horse buff at a farm Starbucks Gas Station horse park Tony Roma's mall equestrian ground
"I always did assume they were laughing at me. Lately it's come to my attention they are laughing with me."A subtly poignant interview of a cultural
Professional hockey goalies usually wear intimidating custom masks, but HC Lada goalie/ Tampa Bay Lightening draftee Vasiliy Koshechkin, whose name is similar to the Russian word for kitten, decided to go in a different direction.
The Only Ones: Escaping Near Death : Sole Survivors from the fascinating first-person experience column in the Guardian.
It's worth noting that there are more first-person survival stories to the right of the main text. If you like this sort of stuff, We Die Alone and Touching the Void are two classics.
