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Friday, May 13, 2005 New Spoon album out. Reviews look pretty positive. Hope its more like "Girls can Tell" than their last release. Spoon is an interesting band as well as an interesting phenomenon. They're the indie band that doesn't necessarily like indie music. They're the breakthrough band that has not and probably will never break through, even with a high-profile piece in Time's "Whats Next" issue. Still, theyre a good indie/power-pop/emo/whatever band. See also: Decent Pitchfork interview with Spoon frontman Britt Daniels. The first half isn't really an interview as much as a semi-creepy fanboy-ish "tell me what records you like" Q&A. I sometimes worry about those pitchfork people.
@ 04:26 PM CST [Link] New Mr. Wiggles. Definitely not safe for work or most people. Me? I love the cheap disgusting gags. While I'm at, I might as well link to the onion's take on the new texas cheerleading law. The third comment down is the money shot. @ 04:15 PM CST [Link] Time flies for old star wars actors. This may not be of interest to anyone but me, but its a bit odd to see how badly Billy Dee Williams and other actors from the trilogy have aged. Obviously, they should be older seeing as its been 20 years since those movies were made, but its kind of like a reality check for the rest of us. I don't think the cane he's holding is purely for fashion. Even more odd, Frank Oz doesn't seem to have aged a day. He's almost always been this graying old man to me. Also, Gene Wilder was recently promoting his memiors on the Conan O'Brien show and he seemed very much out of it mentally if not suffering from some disease. Youth is rarely wasted on the young. See also: Antioxidents really do help with longevity. In this study. With mice. Standard cavaets all around. @ 04:09 PM CST [Link] Thursday, May 12, 2005 Michael Shermer on why people think a water-stain and a grilled cheese sandwich are miracles. Its all about pattern recognition, selective thinking, and wish fulfillment. Not much of a surprise, but tell that to the line of people outside an underpass off Fullerton. Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition (Google key words for visuals): the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.See also: This simulacra gallery. Don't miss the kitty's ear. @ 04:08 AM CST [Link] Photoshopped symmetry. There's something very unnerving about this gallery.
@ 04:01 AM CST [Link] Firefox 1.0.4 out. It fixes all those nasty security bugs you've read about. Also: New version of the Azureus bittorrent client. You are getting your TV shows from btefnet.net aren't you? @ 03:52 AM CST [Link] Star wars opening to cost the economy millions. These studies seem more than a bit disingenious. Afterall, when was the last time you saw something about how much religious holidays cost the economy? Or the first "beach day" of summer? Or when Lynard Skynard comes to town and all the baby boomers get out of work early to make it to the stadium on time? Or the opening game? Or hang-over day after cinco de mayo? I guess the double standard of picking on geeks is alive and well while the sacred cows of religion, race, baseball, and dinosaur rock remain protected. @ 03:50 AM CST [Link] No more cell phone usage in cars in Chicago. Unless you've got a hands free setup. How did this get passed without some kind of debate or at least a few news articles? I just heard of it now. Not that I think it would have made much of a difference. This law was pretty much inevitable. But hands free systems may not be a solution at all according to these guys. Gateway legislation to banning the cellphone in the car? Perhaps. But its definitely a chill on the 'anything goes' school of cell phone use. @ 03:45 AM CST [Link] Tuesday, May 10, 2005 Boat almost built. (current snapshot) Remember those open webcams as revealed by simple google searches? Looks like these boat builders are almost done. Hell, its almost out the door. When I first found this cam they were barely started. In fact, I wasn't even sure they were building a boat. Original photo:
See also: Metafilter user explains what kind of boat this is. See also: Link to live cam. @ 08:03 AM CST [Link] New Perry Bible Fellowship comics. Well, new to me. I haven't visited in a long while. Must. Remember. To. Bookmark. This.
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See also: Positive reviews for Episode 3. @ 06:15 AM CST [Link] Monday, May 9, 2005 Dan Gillmor warns of google privacy issues and recommends to "flush your google cookies." Guess whose google privacy tutorial he linked to. Yeah ok, I'm a shameless, but I really like getting linked to by people I've read before. Gillmor is pretty much correct on this, but I don't think his warning is as dire as it should be. The google web accelerator isn't some piece of software that runs on your computer thatmagically speeds up an already fast connection, its a proxy. A proxy is a server all your web traffic goes through. Now considering google is a datamining company, do you really want them to be able to analyze every bit of data you send and receive? This is a spyware writer's wet-dream. To their credit they don't try to cache encrypted pages (using https), but everything else is. If people really want a faster experience they should really consider the cost of privacy. Not to mention, all this pre-caching stuff is neat, but blocking ads or installing something like flash-block goes quite a bit towards speed boosting without the nasty privacy issues. Most web speed issues can be traced to spyware, downloading large multimedia ads, and loading plug-ins. @ 01:20 PM CST [Link] University of Missouri professor uses a program to grade his papers. So what happens when students start fighting back with better AI to generate papers? This sounds like it has potential for a William Gibson-like "My AI is better than yours" pissing contest. Is there some shortage of student graders at U of M or something? I can picture the app now: I want a grade paper on for the University of grading system for a student. @ 09:43 AM CST [Link] Incredibly harsh pitchfork review of the new Weezer album. Then again, this is a pitchfork review. They tend to be too cool for you, me, or even Fonzi over there. Judge for yourself, you can stream it from myspace. When did every band suddenly get a myspace page? @ 09:35 AM CST [Link] Will the US harbor an anti-Castro terrorist? Something tells me "no," but it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Afterall, if the past few years have shown us anything its that conservatives aren't capable or just aren't going to vote for the other guy or go third-party en masse. If this move upsets the Cuban-American voting bloc, well, so what? I'm sure Karl Rove can win them back without effort as they're not going to vote Democratic anyway. Same with the Christian conservatives. After the major loss of their ten commandments momument in Alabama, still no creationist indoctrination in schools, and the Shiavo nonsense they will continue to vote GOP in lock-step. Although, I have to admit the formation of a third-party "Crazy Conservatives" would probably be the most entertaining thing to happen in politics in a long time. I can almost hear them now...."We demand Posada be given immunity by Jesus himself!!"
@ 09:27 AM CST [Link] Sunday, May 8, 2005 Expressionless girl. This has probably made the rounds already, but its a great little animated gif of a girl in many different photographs with the same, somewhat creepy, expression on her face. The gypsy women all say if you stare into it for too long then it will lead you to madness! Or they would if I asked. @ 08:38 PM CST [Link] [Archives] Search entries: |
