November 2007 Archives

Bush's entourage, in graphic form.

There is some doubt as to this graphic being made by Reuters, but the numbers are accurate.

Via BoingBoing.

A nice article on the beauty and deliciousness of a well made biscuit de chocolat coulant: that finicky, all pervasive, but rarely executed correctly "molten chocolate cake" on restaurants' menus.

Yet, when actually molten, I know of no other dessert as capable of making most adults as gleeful as children...there's something about that self-saucing pudding-ness that's immensely satisfying.

(Thanks, Clarke.)

Update: added the link. Forgot it the first time around. Doh.

Sometimes, people do some touching things:

NASA's released a huge photo of Niagara Falls as seen from space. Whoa.

The Webby Awards runs down a list of the 12 most influential online videos, including perennials OK Go, All Your Base, and Star Wars Kid.

Verizon Wireless has pledged that it will open up its network and let any device and any application operate within it, as long as you pay for the bandwidth.

Hell has frozen over.

Flickr user foglera has posted a gallery of his awesome 8-bit videogame inspired perler bead crafts. Want!

Via Ripten.

Yes, I'm aware I did not post on Monday and it's the first time I skipped a day, but I promise to make up for it by posting double my usual two posts today.

Continuing my tradition of following lots of politics/heavy posts with cute breaks, I bring you, via Cute Overload, the purring kitty page.

Perfect for people like me who love the purring kitty sound but are either allergic or aren't allowed to have their own cats. (*grumble*)

The recent Australian elections, which ousted conservative Prime Minister John Howard, and brought in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, have led Rudd to pledge that Australia will ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Australia is the only other major developed nation besides the US to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

A UN committee of experts has declared that tasers are a deadly form of torture:

The UN committee made its comments in recommendations to Portugal, which has bought the newest Taser X26 stun gun for use by police.

Portugal "should consider giving up the use of the Taser X26,'' as its use can have a grave physical and mental impact on those targeted, which violates the UN's Convention against Torture, the experts said.

Via: Engadget.

Speaking of Election 2008, you may have heard of the debacle Barack Obama caused when he refused to wear a flag pin. Well, Lost Brain brings us the proper etiquette on wearing your own flag pin, so that you aren't "pegged as a terrorist."

The New York Times' Ward Sutton has a gallery dissecting the current and past campaign logos of presidential candidates. Some good design comments and snarky critiques.

The MPAA comments on the previously reported bill now in Congress that would threaten federal financial aid to a college if they did not police copyrighted works for the MPAA and the RIAA:

"When the government is subsidizing universities...and it discovers that those universities are spending a lot of taxpayers' money to build digital networks that are being used primarily to allow college students to traffic in infringing content, I think it's perfectly legitimate for Congress to say, wait a minute, if we're giving you money, we don't want it to be used to help college kids infringe copyright,"

Oh great, it's that stupid argument: "They have the fast Internets! They must be using it solely to infringe on our copyrights!"

Again, please tell your local Congressman to vote against this bill.

I knew there was a reason I didn't like NYU students, besides the horrible experiences I had with them in Union Square:

Two-thirds say they'll do it for a year's tuition. And for a few, even an iPod touch will do.

That's what NYU students said they'd take in exchange for their right to vote in the next presidential election, a recent survey by an NYU journalism class found.

Phillip Torrone, the editor of MAKE magazine, took some neat pictures of Tokyo's 築地市場 [Tsukiji Fishmarket], the largest fish market in the world:

Another stop on the MAKE tour was the Tsukiji fish market, it's one of the largest in the world and it's pretty crazy. You need to arrive before 4am to get a really good experience. There are hundreds of old-style bicycle with roller type brakes, I'm not sure why but they were all the same - they carried out boxes of fish to other trucks and beyond the market. As you move around the market it gets a little dangerous dodging extremely fast fork lifts, the skill the drivers have is pretty incredible.

A neat video on solutal convection by New Scientist, using cream and Tia Maria:

Once per year at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse they shut down the weak insipid modern (presumably electric) light and switch over the the 5 kerosene lamps and fresnel lens of the original, as it was 135 years ago.

Capturing a shot like this is tricky because the lens itself actually rotates, which looks great but is tough for long exposures. But for the first 5 minutes they leave it static to indulge all of the photographers who turn out and want this shot (this highly unique and one-of-a-kind shot of course).

Click to enlarge:

That is one powerful light.

Imagine these water guns today and how much panic they'd induce:

"The look! The feel! The sound! So real!"

The public transportation system here in Miami is less than optimal, leading to low usage and this "Only in Miami" moment:

According to Ignatius Carroll, a woman driving her three teenage children and a teenage friend to meet another family member were heading west on Northeast 13 Street around 7:40 a.m. in a Ford Explorer when they crashed with a bus heading south on Northeast First Avenue.

The bus driver and his three passengers were uninjured, but the driver was shaken up.

(Thanks Clarke.)

5 hurt as Dade bus, SUV collide [Miami Herald]

BoingBoing brings us pictures of an ancient Greek potty training device:

I was in Greece recently, and in the Agora in Athens there's a museum. There's an artifact in there that I just had to take a picture of! It's a potting training seat made from clay (partially reconstructed, from the looks of it). Who knew?

Click to enlarge:

Pink Tentacle brings us 自由国民車 [Jiyu Kokuminsha]'s list of the 60 top Japanese buzzwords in 2007, giving us some neat insight into what was at the top of Japanese people's minds.

My favourite is:

KY [abbreviation of kuki ga yomenai - 空気が読めない]: This is (not a reference to the lubricant, but) an abbreviation of the Japanese expression kuki ga yomenai (”can’t read between the lines” or “can’t sense the atmosphere”), which is used to describe indelicate or unperceptive people. Example: That guy is so KY.

It couldn’t be helped [shouganai - しょうがない]: In a June speech, former defense minister Fumio Kyuma said: “I understand the bombing (in Nagasaki) brought the war to its end. I think it was something that couldn’t be helped.” His controversial remarks were widely interpreted as a justification for the US atomic bombings. He resigned three days later under a firestorm of criticism.

Now to assimilate the list into my vocabulary for reference...

Solar Power Rocks brings us an unabridged bar graph comparing the cost of the War in Iraq versus energy R&D investments in 2007.

Tallest. Bar Graph. Ever.

/film has photos of the coolest theme home theatre ever:

Someone thought it would be a good idea to model their home theater after the Enterprise NCC-1701D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The result is super geeky, but actually rather cool. Named the best theme theater installation at CEDIA 2007, this Palm Beach County, FL home features motion-activated air-lock doors with series sound effects, and a “Red Alert” button on the Crestron TPMC-10 controller to turn all of the LEDs bright red and flashing. The system also features “one of the largest Kaleidescape hard-drive based storage systems” ever created, amassing eight servers with 3,816 DVDs.

Hit the link for an even more impressive accompanying bar.

Via /.

Food company Podravka hired agency Bruketa & Zinić to come up with a striking way to release their annual report: called "Well Done" it must be baked to be read.

Reuters has photos of a school in china that's been built in a cave:

Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts.

WARNING: The link will automatically resize your window. I hate it when sites do that.

If you've been following the news, you know the White House has been pushing to add immunity for the telecommunications companies that complied with the NSA's illegal wiretapping program to the FISA bills currently in Congress.

Good news! The House, and the Senate's Judiciary Committee have both passed versions of the FISA Bill that do not provide immunity to the telcos. Bravo!

Now we just need the Senate to pass it sans-immunity, and Congress to override Bush's veto (which I predict might happen.) Thankfully, Congress is certainly more willing to override him these days.

Congress Keeps Telecoms on the Hook for Illegal Spying [EFF]

Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Surveillance Bill Without Telecom Amnesty [EFF]

It's no secret that I love XKCD (and so does my Mother), so Wired has made me happy by doing a feature on Randall Munroe, the writer behind XKCD:

A geek with a paper cut does not bleed CH3, and every nerd has a heart lodged in his chest instead of a TI-85. Behind those thick polycarbonate lenses is a man of flesh and blood, a man who deserves to be loved. Don't believe him? He has the graphs to show it.

"I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights," says Randall Munroe, creator of the hugely popular comic with the unpronounceable title. "Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles -- normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations." In one comic, the hapless hero charts the size of his dating pool as he ages. "Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve," he declares, "is the girl for me."

I can only hope to reach the levels of insight that Randall has shown through XKCD.

As a follow up to yesterday's The Daily Show writers post, today we have writers from The Colbert Report chiming in:

Wil Wheaton has brought a wonderful and funny video, made by one of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart writers, explaning the writer's strike in the style of The Daily Show:

With guest appearance by John Oliver.

The Telegraph and New Scientist report on a new Unification Theory by a penny-less surfer and theoretical physics doctorate published recently called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything":

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

An interesting read, and when the LHC is finished next year, we'll see if the theory pans out against current favourite, String Theory.

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything [The Telegraph]

Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything? [New Scientist]

Cracked.com has a list of the 25 "most baffling toys" (mostly from Japan, of course), including the "Pee&Poo" plushies pictured:

Making toilet training fun and approachable is an admirable goal, but this seems like a good way for your child to develop an unnatural affection toward their own waste products. At a bare minimum, the sympathetic "Why me?" faces on the waste products will make flushing the toilet a psychologically jarring event.

Wired reports on the leaked Guantánamo Bay manual that showed up on Wikileaks.org last week:

A never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military's Guantánamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002.

The 238-page document, "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures," is dated