Gallup finds out what "gadgets" Americans are using

In a pretty interesting poll, Gallup looked at what types of electronic devices are being used by different demographics in the United States. For example: 88% of respondents had a VCR, while only 83% had a DVD player.

What stood out was this quote:

A majority of Americans under age 50 say they have a video game system. This compares with just 18% of 50- to 64-year-olds and only 6% of those aged 65 and older.

"ONLY" six percent?? Who are these tens of thousands of seniors playing some Grand Theft Auto?

Mini-reactors!? that's awesome....!

So apparently, a company called Hyperion Power Generation (HPG) is marketing small reactors (only 1.5 m across) that can power up to 20,000 homes at a cost of only $25 million. That's a steal. Anyway, they sound pretty confident their "Hyperion Power Modules" are fool proof. These power modules will be safe underground and guarded, according to their website. I'm sure someone will manage to screw something up somehow though.

Monty Python musical at Husky Stadium

Interesting half-time show at my first (and probably only) UW football game.

Secret effort to make everyone buy a second G1?

TechCrunch details an interesting new application available this week in the Google Android market. The "Punch-O-Meter" lets you do an air punch, while gripping your $200 (or $400) phone in your hand, and will tell you the acceleration of said punch. Sounds like it can only lead to fun times, though. Nintendo watch out, the Wii has a serious contender in the punch-o-meter.

"Sound Like Thunder"

Just read a pretty sweet article on Nature.com, I guess some Chinese mad scientists have used a sheet of carbon nanotubes (CNT's) as a speaker. They've explained the sheet of CNT's produces sound the same way lightning produces thunder, by heating up the surrounding air, thereby, causing a change in pressure. The thermoacoustic effect these CNT's display apparently produces sound just as well as commercial speakers. Even more awesome, "The nanotube loudspeakers could be strechted to up to twice their original size without breaking and with little change to the intensity of the sound...". The applications these CNT loudspeakers could spawn in the future are mindboggling...can't wait.
Here's a video of an ipod connected to the CNT loudspeaker.
Enjoy the article and the video...

Singularity looms as CBS types with their mind

CBS plugs themselves into some pre-singularity tech. Definitely worth a watch (look out for another appearance of the chimp who eats with a robot arm... watch out because some day he may crush humanity with that same arm).


Watch CBS Videos Online

Matt's old house

Check out this pic of Matt's old house on 65th I took today.  Its seen better days.

iPhone is actually location un-aware

Check out this link at the O'Reilly Radar... The author is apparently displeased at the fact that iPhone applications can't poll for the location of the phone at any given time. The only time an app knows where the user is is when that app is open and being used. So if you want to be, I guess, notified that a friend is within a block radius, this is pretty much impossible (vice leaving the application open). This was one of the big reasons to get one of these types of phones, so now I'm pretty happy that I'm waiting for the G1 Android phone on October 20 (or maybe a different Android phone, now that the G1 is sold out for pre-orders).

Vice presidential debate tonight

Was watching the vice presidential debate, and couldn't stop staring at the back of the stage where a mysterious black box hovered over the stage. I guess I've gotten to the point where any artificial, CGI-created, thing in TV or movies just really stands out (unless it's just done really well, then someone is paying the big bucks so no one knows the difference).

So, take a look:
What does it look like to you? For a while I thought maybe someone had written some racist slogan on the wall and no one had time to clean it off, so they just covered it up with a computer generated... black square. It turns out, based on this image from the heraldonline.com, that its some kind of a hole in the wall. All the conspiracy theories that were bubbling up, and it turns out, I'm guessing, to be a hole for cameras.

FBI swoops in to protect Guns N Roses

Apparently someone put some songs from an upcoming album on their blog and, as reported here in the LA Times, the FBI arrested him. Probably not the slickest move to register your own domain name and upload pretty sought after songs on there.

"The site received so much traffic after the songs were posted that it crashed"

Guess he wasn't even that prepared.

Makes me wonder why people put their neck out to do this. Ignorance? I'm all for free music, but this just seemed not smart. Hopefully they won't dig through the server logs and start finding IP addresses, etc, and going after the downloaders.

Information Investigation: Seattle Bicycling

I took the opportunity of having my Summer internship downtown to investigate what kind of information sources are available for bicycle commuters. After having commuted in via bus a couple times (and twice via car) and using the sources for that (like the metro site and Google Maps) I thought I'd try something new.

Basically the information available falls into these categories:

1) Official publications

If you're trying to bike from an out-lying neighborhood into the "downtown" area of Seattle, one of your first sourced might be the Seattle Dept of Transportation's website. There's definitely a lot of information on here, but a lot of it is hard to digest for someone who's never done much "urban bicycling." Half-useful was this low-resolution map of the bike lanes around the city. In a convenient 7MB file, they shoved so much information into such a terrible layout that you're pretty much guaranteed to be misled (especially considering the map-key to the multicolored streets is available in a separate file).

For the statistics lovers out there, the site offers such interesting facts as

"Ratio of street to bike trail in Seattle: 45:1"

Hey... good to know.

Another stand-out is this guide to the new Sharrows program (Sharrows being short for "shared lane pavement markings" apparently). A program to increase the number of lanes where both bicycles and cars can operate in an effort to make confusing road symbols even more dangerous, the guide offers such useful advice as

"Follow the rules of the road as if there were no sharrows"

2) Unofficial publications

A Google search for "help Seattle bicycling" turns up over 4 million hits. If you're looking for some info on biking in general there is a lot to be had. On the other hand, if you, like me, were looking for the essentials of biking into the city you've got a lot to sift through. I never did find anything useful beyond some anecdotal advice about how not to get hit by a car, etc.

For example, veloroutes.org offers a map with weather info and allows bikers to tag it with useful, location sensitive, advice

"denny way heading east - get ready to climb some steep shit, just about all the way up to 15th ave "

There are, though, some interesting tools like bikely.com's mapping tool. Using a Google mashup, you can map your bike route, and tag it with information. Then you can share it with other people, and view similar routes. Apparently there is even a GPS-generated bike map you can use. Check my route out here.

3) Word-of-mouth

It seems historically, no matter how much printed and organized information is available, one of the most turned-to sources for any type of information are peers. In my case, some of my co-workers at my internship regularly bike into work from a similar area, so I asked them a lot of questions about routes and strategy, and I got lots of good advice.

4) Experiential

Nothing can replace learning-by-doing, and I have to admit that after I took my first full-length trip today I felt a lot more comfortable with it. Having ridden the first half last weekend, I felt much better about that part today. The second half, though, being new and unfamiliar, proved to be more stressful and at times dangerous. When moving through traffic at relatively fast speeds, its important to already have knowledge of whats coming, so you can establish expectations.

A lot of the road signage are there to help riders who are unfamiliar with the area, but unfortunately you don't see most of them until you're already doing whatever its telling you not to (such as riding in a certain lane, taking the wrong turn, etc).

Conclusion:

The importance of word of mouth and experiential information will always be a hurdle for new bikers to start commuting into Seattle. If someone isn't lucky enough to have a peer-group with good advice, or the time to feel out the route, they probably will continue to commute in whatever way they've been.

Also... biking is hard.

Matt continues to dance his crazy heart out. He's my hero in some weird way (but, you know, think of the carbon footprint?... nah) He wraps this one up in good old Gasworks, too.

If you're unfamiliar, check out all his videos at http://www.wherethehellismatt.com

On stage

This is a photo of where I sat throughout the Information School convocation ceremony. Right there on the stage I'm sort of in the middle of everyone's photos as they walked across to receive their diplomas (as seen here in someone else's photo...) Kind of awkward.

Nearly a DMCA take-down notice

The other day I finally got pegged for distributing music illegally. In an interesting twist, though, it was on the independent short film that I uploaded to youtube a couple years ago.

Universal Music Group (UMG) apparently has realized that some music they own appears in the movie Serious Coffee... they probably have used some of the state-of-the-art video sniffing type software to figure this out. The email they sent me (which is, by the way, also copy-righted, as you can see here) interestingly states that UMG is generally OK with my use of their music, and has deigned to allow me to leave the video up. In exchange for this I must allow UMG to place some sort of advertisements on the sidebar of my video page (or, maybe, the video overlays that youtube does). I suppose its not much of a concession for 30 second clips of relatively unknown songs to appear in a video which has been viewed fewer than 300 times.

At least I can have the joy of thinking that maybe somebody over at Universal watched my video and was vaguelly intrigued. I do wish, though, that I was able to find some orginal music ala Matt's Roosevelt Way. Maybe some day. I would like to see some network where Indie-type musicians can license their music (in exchange for free-publicity) to the online-movie "industry." It would be a good leap forward for both, I think.

Healthiest Beer

Was reading through Men's Health list of the 125 Healthiest Supermarket foods... when I got to the healthiest beer, though, it definitely wasn't what I suspected. Take a look

Frightening somewhat...

Here is the latest party fad... give it a look:

Google Books vs University Libraries... fight!

The Director of the University Library at Harvard, Robert Darnton, squares off against the travesty of Google Books, and how it promotes feeling-less empty books:

"It is important to get the feel of a book—the texture of its paper, the quality of its printing, the nature of its binding."

Meanwhile, as Google attempts to scan 15 or so MILLION books it simply isn't enough... as there are 500+ million books in the research libraries, and nearly 300k+ more a year. As though we should just give up and leave the 6 copies of his new favorite book to rot on the shelves... because digital books are guaranteed to be in an out-of-date format in a few years (and its so very difficult to change digital formats...)

"Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts. Now we know better."

Chinese protests

This past week, the Dalai Lama has been at the University of Washington, and there have been an interesting series of protests. Most notably, Chinese students who seem to be historically in-active in American politics, have shown up in big numbers to protest what they see as Anti-Chinese sentiment, and a mistreatment of the facts by Tibet and the American media. I was never really sure what this all meant...

There are a lot of issues under the surface here. China is one of the biggest, fastest growing, most prosperous countries in the world; but yet the US people seem to hold a certain stigma against the country as they reap the benefits with another hand. While we throw around phrases like "imperialists" and "human rights violators", the Chinese (government controlled media) does a pretty good job of stifling these stories. Meanwhile, the US has the same allegations against us (rightly so). Well, amidst all this, there are quite a few Chinese people in my class and they all seem really good on a personal level.

Point being, the NY Times put a pretty decent article about this up today, which shed some light on the issues. It still remains to be seen, though: is this just the process of disillusionment of Chinese expatriates with their gov't, or is this a valid rebuttal to US sentiment? (Some of the anti-Tibet arguments: the Daily Lami is a Nazi and China has put a lot of money into the infrastructure of Tibet) That last one reminds me of Iraq.... I think China and the US have a lot in common, so we should be better friends, no?

Helicopters make life better

School getting you down? (it is me...) Well, this great song by Guided by Voices should cheer you up. Off their latest album, they're echoing what is by now common knowledge: life would be better if you could just take a helicopter everywhere...

Guided by Voiced - Everywhere with Helicopter




(I was honestly looking for a music video.... hoping for some excellent helicopter shots... someday I'm sure)

Monster cables about to tuck its overpriced tail between its legs

Monster cable, the over priced over hyped, super litigious audio cable company has just been pwned by a small cable manufacturer Named Blue jeans cable. Monster sent off a cease and desist to Blue jeans in an attempt to force a lisencing agreement due to likely imaginary IP infringement claims. It turns out that the CEO of Blue jeans is an Ex lawyer with 19 years experience litigating cases large and small with an undeniable slant for truth, no matter the cost. Read his response to Monster here. Nothing like watching a massive company get slapped down by the little guy.

Daft Punk - Harder better faster stronger

She dances for you...

It's 3am and Youtubes down...where are your movies?

The quality people over at Lifehacker brings you Youtube fanatics in the crowd a way to download the new higher quality MP4 format that is being pilot tested by Google for their most popular videos. Lifehacker offers tips, scripts and snips of advice about grabbing the latest and the self made greatest. Don't let Youtubes maintenance cycle get you down ever again.



Technorati Tags: youtube

xkcd

Everyone who doesn't read xkcd's webcomic needs to start. Today's is so hilariously meta-comic (I almost feel embarrassed using that term, but it is) that you need to take a look here.

Polite Dance Song

I was looking for this song by The Bird and The Bee to show to someone (since its pretty decent... pretty catchy) and found the video... downright disturbing, definitely watch it to the end. The independent music industry seems to take the artistic-license to make some of the most out-there videos, the kind of stuff you'd never see on TV...

the passage of time....

Just read an interesting series of posts at the Cosmic Variance blog titled "Incompatible Arrows". It talks about the various ways time may or may not flow making use of various books by various authors, all excellent, to explain several cases. Each example is followed by deeper discussion in the comments. All very interesting.

Incompatible Arrows I: Martin Amis
Incompatible Arrows II: Kurt Vonnegut
Incompatible Arrows III: Lewis Caroll
Incompatible Arrows IV: F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is a test....

I'm testing out a new-ish extension for firefox called Scribefire that allows you to open a dialog box and post on the fly, instead of logging into your blogging software manually. So far so good. Once you set up your account it lets you add tags, images and other tasty menu items with hopefully few problems.Everything seems solid at the moment. Heres hoping it stays that way. I'll keep you updated as to the quailty as the days go by.


Technorati Tags: mozilla firefox software extensions

Random House!

Just posting up this pretty cool feature the Random House, Inc. website offers for some of their books' webpages. Here's a demo:




You can preview a book just click on its face and you get a pop-up window.

Recession follow up

In keeping with my earlier post about the economy... here is a forecast of the 2009 economic state, in video form:

CERN-mageddon

How would you like to be sued for bringing about the impending doom of mankind? The poor fellows over at CERN have been, according to this link via Slashdot. CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which has been working up the nerve to collide particles for a few years now, has been put on hold due to claims that it will rip a hole into the space-time continuum.

Good luck, hope you've got a good lawyer.

A life in charts 'n' graphs...

I firmly believe that as more of our lives deal in interactions with digital devices of whatever kind, and this results in excess recorded information, there will be unsuspected consequences. Specifically, once all this random and "unrelated" info is brought together for a person, it can make a great picture of who that person is. Nicholas Feltron's "Annual Report" is the sum of all the data he has collected about himself over the course of a year. Tying into my post about visualizing data from earlier this week, he has aggregated this info and put it down for the world to see in a collection of charts and graphs.

Most people have a tough time comprehending the overall trend of their lives. Its easy to worry about major catastrophes like plane crashes and murders, but the big killers such as over-eating and over-drinking can easily be ignored as they build up over time (check out this Schneier article on the Psychology of Security). If these were tracked for us (despite the privacy concerns... hopefully this would all be collected for our eyes only, not the insurance companies) and we could see how many calories we eat on an average day, or how many alcoholic beverages we drink, would this change our lifestyles? Similarly, we worry about major purchases like houses and cars while spending much more on evenings out and fast-food. It will some day be possible to collect all this information and let the individual "play" with it, in visual formats, to better understand it.

As a side-note, I bet this guy could get pretty annoying with some kind of notebook, marking down how many miles he traveled in a cab or how many photos he's taken on a given day.

...for Libraries

As a little follow-up to the book organizer thing: I was eavesdropping on a conversation between some Library Science students at school and they were talking about Seattle Public Library's new "tag cloud" and "read-alikes." Further discussion proved that these were in fact drawn from LibraryThing's "For Libraries" service. This service sells recommendation services, reviews, and user-defined tags to libraries, to help them improve on-site search.

Take a look at this example of Crime and Punishment, down on the bottom of the page you can see what they were talking about.

Anyway, the issue arose that LibraryThing doesn't make it super clear to its users that they are farming out this info they've just uploaded. In fact, the user is paying a fee to be a part of the site, so they wondered if there should be a kick back involved? As someone who just cataloged their collection, I don't really object to it, since you're making the information public and hoping it will be used by putting it on the site.

What do you think?

Recession for college grads

I saw a bit on CNN about how veterans have been having a tough time finding jobs post-military. The big run up was "it's not for the reason you think!" In the end, the reason they "uncovered" was that employers have developed a negative stigma against veterans because of all the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the news. It used to be if there were two equivalent applicants, and one of them was in the military, the military thing would be a sort of leg up on the other guy. Now its the other way, according to this CNN story, because the employer would "rather just not deal with all that."

I couldn't find the link on their site, but I did find this interesting story: you might think that because its a recession there are fewer jobs and hiring has cut way back. On the contrary, the recession has caused companies to scale back their higher-priced employees, forcing even more of the baby-boomer generation into retirement. These companies still need workers, and so they look to the recent college graduates as a sort of bottom-of-the-barrel deal. Sounds promising for those of us running through college (which will hopefully circumvent the first bit of this post). On the down side, though, if you look at the list of companies that are planning on hiring the most recent college grads this year? Walgreens, Enterprise Rent A Car, and Progressive Insurance. I have to wonder how many of these jobs are really terrible ones with no room for promotion? The sort of jobs that a high school grad would've been doing 15 years ago?

Finally, something else I noticed which is a nice trend. CNN.com has a link on their video section to "live video." This pops up a browser of the various live feeds that are going on at the moment. When I tuned in, there was a speech by Hiliary Clinton in NC, another by Bill Clinton in PA, and some trial going on. Also, you have the option of watching the live headlines. This is nice for people who might not have TV but would like to get a little bit of national news, especially when speeches or events are happening. Usually the major networks won't air the longer live news feeds. And, as I write this, another feed is added to watch a live gold course fire in Cleveland... don't mind if I do.

Data visualization

Ever since I saw a guy named Jeff Heer come to UW and talk about some of the challenges of data visualization, I've kept my eye out for good examples. The problem being, not every piece of data can be thrown up in some kind of bar graph or pie chart and be instantly clear. The guy who came was one of the people who created the name visualizer. This is a fun thing that made the rounds on the net a while ago where you can compare how common different names are over different years. A fun example: type in Adolph and see the popularity magically declines in the '30s. Hm. Or note how girls names beginning in vowels saw a huge dip in popularity but a recent resurgence. Point being, what are new ways to look at old data to "tease out the meaning"?

This is what I was thinking about when I saw a recent visualization in the New York Times showing movies and their grosses. Its not quite as interactive as the first link, but you can scroll across 20 years. Here, you can see the evolution of the summer and Christmas box-office bulge. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer movies seem to make up significant portions of the bulges. Its an interesting way to see the data, and if more raw data were interactive and displayed intuitively, it would be a way to rally the "information-overload" of our age into meaningful info.

Deadly combination?

If you combine some cheap pool and reasonably priced beers at Teddy's Tavern (where they don't seem to mind if you bring in some food)...


View Larger Map

...with some of the best burgers in Seattle at Primo Burger right across the street


View Larger Map

You're pretty much guaranteed a good time. Enough said.

(Really just wanted to try out the embedded Google Maps)

Money... Recessions

So, we were talking about what to do if you have a small surplus of dollars. This has become especially difficult, given all the gloom and doom talk of recessions and everything. Lifehacker linked to a thread about what is the smartest thing to do with money given the uncertainty of the market. This got me thinking about the options that are available...

Our idea was that was should perhaps try to invest "fake" dollars into some stocks, mutual funds, or what have you, for a month and see who can take $1,000 (or maybe $10k) the furthest given any options. An important caveat, I think, would be to include fees for buying, selling, and maintaining an account with which ever online stock site we choose (I only know of etrade's rates, and they're not cheap when dealing with smaller volume trades). It seems like the best way to do this is to use either Google finance or Yahoo finance and create a "portfolio" and track it for a while. We would each have to tabulate separately the money that isn't currently represented by a stock, and the fees, etc, we have "spent." Is anyone up to this? I think it would be interesting.

Mesh WiFi Networks

An interesting article in Slashdot today about a company trying to bring mesh wifi networks as an alternative to the regular bridge type. The link they give is about the company, Meraki, and their iffy business model. (Namely, they sent out some open hardware, and then locked it down, and charge people to use their "dashboard" software).

I've always been a big fan of the concept of a mesh network. This is where each wifi node piggy-backs the signal of all neighboring nodes. This is a great way to spread the Internet to a neighborhood without having to wire up a bunch of cabling, etc. A big limitation in cities is that only the telecoms have authority to string up any kind of land wiring between buildings, across private and public property. Anyway, some of the comments pointed to the Open-Mesh solution, which uses open source software and sells the hardware for pretty reasonable prices. It would be nice to get my hands on a few of these and try them out. Check them out here for $50.

Criminalize open WiFi users?

An interesting article on ars technica about WiFi. There have been a couple court cases where people using another person's WiFi have been accused of "unauthorized access to a network." I really believe that using an open WiFi network isn't a criminal activity, but in Maryland they were trying to pass a specific law making it a criminal offense. Luckily it got shot down, but it may be the beginning of a pretty bad trend.

Although I wouldn't be surprised if it will become a sort of non-issue. WiFi hotspots will probably go the way of pay phones before long. The Internet will be so ubiquitous that there will be no reason to guard your little connection. Every phone, laptop, etc, will be hooked into satellites, towers, etc, for pretty cheap. I'm looking forward to it.

The value of Youtube

If you haven't been following the news, there is an interesting situation happening where the press is blaming Barack Obama for some of the race-charged speeches his pastor has given. He's been attending this guy's church for something like 20 years, so I guess the question is whether or not these are the same things he believes.

The real interesting part, though, is how the Internet is coming to play in the story. As the Web began to spread, most people were proclaiming this as a new era of commentary and news sources. As though, with a billion blogs, you'll be able to get any side of the story that you want. Now there are some recent stats saying that most people are getting their news from fewer and fewer online sources, as the masses pass around the same snippets from AP, CNN, Reuters, or whatever. Well, I'd almost say that the best trend of the Internet isn't the greater number of sources, its the fewer sources. What people really need is a way to all see the same original set of facts (although these might not always be possible to agree on). But with the advent of Youtube, we've all got access to the same set of Original Documents. You can read any number of commentaries on the amazing speech Obama gave yesterday, but people are increasingly showing that the power of the Original Document can speak for itself. Nearly three million people watching this rather long video in only a few days is pretty amazing. This is the only way that Americans will experience a collective understanding, rather than a collective dumbing down:





Note, meanwhile, that instead of listening to me saying that Barack's pastor (Jeremiah Wright) is saying some stuff, now you can just as easily hear it for yourself:



The Internet... good stuff.

Science on Tap

By the way, wanted to throw this out there. There is a regular thing called Science on Tap wherein you can go to a bar, in this case Third Place Pub, on the last Monday of the month and can hear a little talk by a scientist. Seems like an interesting thing, and the next one will be on the 31st. Anyone interested? For some more information, here is a Flickr photo set from one a few months ago.

Good reads... dot com?

Aside from its insidious title, Goodreads, (which can, alternatively, be read as goo dreads) stands to become my favorite waste of time, and for my benefit, I hope it shall for you, too. Presumably, the site is for social-networking- however scuttled that motive appears beneath its exterior of bibliophilia. Indeed, the premise of the site is that the user catalog their personal library as a requisite to finding other users with similar tastes, ostensibly to befriend them and get book recommendations, (read "try to fuck them"). Goodreads is preposterous, of course, unless the user is earnest in their love of books, and utilizes the resources on the site to find other books which pique their curiosity or raise their ire, based on previous, shared interests. Lamentably, this site doesn't have the best tools for that function; however another site Librarything has a remarkable ability to match-up people with similar tastes and ailments or what-have-you. The exception to Librarything is that it limits the number of books which can be cataloged to 200, unless the user elects the $10 per annum subscription, which to any bibliophile reeks of extortion. Therefore, a better deal indeed, is the gratis membership to Goodreads, which is intuitively simple to command and plentiful in its recommendations, though not without effort. I have taken the liberty to post a few others, though I cannot vouch for them.
With exception to anobii, (Anobium Punctatum- book worm, get it?) the appellation of these sites is positively insipid! And this from the so-called literate segment of our society? Horse-cock!

http://www.shelfari.com/ http://www.anobii.com/ http://www.bookjetty.com/

Word on the street, Scrubs will be coming back on April 10th to wrap up their 7th and final season on NBC. Meanwhile, in somewhat more surprising news, ABC will possibly bring the show over for an 8th season. A pretty unusual move, but I'd like to see it. ABC has only the one good show with Lost, so they can use the boost. According to the National Ledger, shooting could start on Monday, and the show starting next Fall. Nice.

Seen here, the Janitor performing a short-living stand-up routine in 1984:

Double standard?

Here's an interesting case surfacing from Ryerson University. They have a long tradition of study groups helping each other with their Engineering related homework, but then when a student started a Facebook group to swap tips (and homework answers...) he got slammed and nearly expelled (147 counts of cheating for the 147 students who visited the group). CNN.com reports that the school has only given him a zero on the assignment in question, allowing him to still pass the class.

The point here is: are things that you do online of an inherently different nature? If you gamble online, or have an affair online, some act as though its of less consequence. If you post answers or trade TV shows online (compared to a study group, or giving someone a VHS tape) its a more severe offense? The next few years I'm sure we'll see a proliferation of these gray areas being pressed into the forefront. A technology can't fundamentally change the way we interact without forcing a shift in our comfort zones and cultural standards...

Sweater Day

Today is Mr. Roger's 80th birthday (or would've been if he were still alive). Apparently, to promote all around feelings of well-being, people are being asked to wear their favorite sweater (the video on their site clearly says it doesn't have to have a zipper like Mr. Roger's did, it just has to be important to you... thanks Mr. McFeeley, for your leeway).

If you're wondering why Mr. Rogers is more than a crazy old guy with toys, you should check out his Wikipedia entry. He was a tireless crusader for all things worthwhile, and he wasn't even a religious wing nut. I wish there were more people like him today. Need more convincing? Watch his 1969 testimony for the Senate, basically turning them around to continue funding PBS, which remains an institution to this day.



Finally, talk of sweaters can only remind me of the famous mid-90's "red-hooded sweatshirt." I was going to link to the original SNL version, but then I found this absurd time-capsule-esque clip from a 1996 HBO special. What were we thinking back then? Have a good first day of Spring.

The Ultimate Consumerist Guide To Fighting Back (Revised Edition)

This got a lot of press at when it was compiled but I'm going to link to it here in the hopes that the message will spread. Fight, fight for your right to...not be screwed by mega international comglomerates. Or even local, meany-peeny good for nothings.

Robocop... Part one... Part deux

Kill me. Kill me now.

I can't wait for the RFID future

So another one from the lovely folks over at boingboing via their TV division (now with shitty verizon commercials). Xeni et al shows us how truly weak the security systems for the new radio frequency chips on passports and the "neat" touch and go credit cards is. I just love me some security theater.

Semicolon subway

Maybe every news article should be an introspective examination on the use of punctuation in mass transit? The New York Times surprisingly interesting story about the semicolon and its misuse.

How to look good...with extra trying

So here are some beautiful resumes that help one stand out from the pack. I'm going to try one or two of these little gems for myself.Good luck to the rest of you and lets remember, if you are going out for the same job as me, I'll stab you in the face. Ya really.

Yee hah! The brand new american-made, tent cities! Where do I sign up!

Welcome to the new hoover-ville, 30's era depression slums people. Boingboing.net points us toward a BBC article about the new sub-prime shanty towns. So fun, so grand, so very sad.

A series... Of tubes?

A fine little article about pneumatic tubes as people movers from the folk over at damninteresting.com, a haven of ridicoulus and fascinating stories. Give it a looksy.

Tesla... begins today

Only 900 cars are being made... wish I could get my hands on one.

War is... cool?

I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks.
-GWB

More ads should be like this

Chester Cheetah has turned into a real dick. Thats what I like to see...

New NIN...

A purely instrumental electronic album.

The Greatest Clock in the World!

nuff said...