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Thursday, October 27, 2005 Beatle's Rubber Soul tribute album out. Mostly covers by indie acts. You can hear the beginning of all the tracks via streaming lo-fi flash. Rhett Miller's, Ben Lee's, and the Fiery Furnaces tracks are not to be missed. A few full tracks over at myspace too. 1. Drive My Car – The Donnas 2. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) – The Fiery Furnaces 3. You Won’t See Me – Dar Williams 4. Nowhere Man – Low 5. Think For Yourself – Yonder Mountain String Band 6. The Word – Mindy Smith 7. Michelle – Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals 8. What Goes On – Sufjan Stevens 9. Girl – Rhett Miller 10. I’m Looking Through You – Ted Leo 11. In My Life – Ben Lee 12. Wait – Ben Kweller (featuring Albert Hammond, Jr.) 13. If I Needed Someone – Nellie McKay 14. Run For Your Life – Cowboy Junkies @ 07:50 AM CST [Link] Great j-pop power rangers parody. Its sort of a mash-up of Fight Club, the Usual Suspects, and the Power Rangers. @ 07:41 AM CST [Link] Position of moon and mars suggest Fitzmas will not happen today. Sydney Omar unavailable for comment. Oh well, at least Harriet "Palapatine" Miers is gone. Can you say stealth anti-abortionist? The right just shot themselves in the foot and I have the feeling that the White House is getting sick of their extreme right constituent blocs and religious special interests. These nuts are only helping the dems in 2006. But knowing the dems they'll probably drop the ball. Or to quote Glengarry Glen Ross: Blake: "I'd wish you good luck, but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it." @ 07:38 AM CST [Link] Gallery of found photographs. Not found exactly, the cameras were extracted from ebay or a garbage dump and the film was developed to reveal photos never before seen. Typical little slices of life, but interesting in that "Who are these people and what the heck are they doing" sense. I swear this set was some prelim work for pornography. @ 07:28 AM CST [Link] Fan produced Granddady video. This is really nice work. Its a basic program running on an old Apple //e. You know, back when computing was a gentlemen's pursuit. Nothing like two floppy drives and a monochrome display. @ 07:23 AM CST [Link] Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Bow down to the octacube! Don't miss the trippy flash animation on the page. Funny, I thought the fourth dimension was time, not another form of space. @ 09:35 AM CST [Link] The mp3 player toothbrush. Funny, this would be cool if it was someone's little basement hack, but as a commercial product it seems really, really silly. @ 09:33 AM CST [Link] The aliens in your head. Or Close Encounters of the I-Want-to-Believe Kind. But research by Professor Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College in London has suggested that this type of contact with alien life may be all in the mind. Prof French carried out the study by comparing 19 alleged "abductees" and 19 random volunteers. He found that in psychological tests, so-called "experiencers" scored more highly in a number of areas, including belief in the paranormal, a tendency to hallucinate, and "dissociative" tendencies which can lead to altered states of consciousness. @ 09:31 AM CST [Link] Best science photos of 2005 @ 09:28 AM CST [Link] Monday, October 24, 2005 New postsecrets up. I made a parody of one a little while ago hoping to get it on that page, but decided against it. I wonder how many of these are fake. Probably a fair amount. @ 04:12 AM CST [Link] Swedish parents name baby after google. Cute, but who knows where google will be in the next 5 to 10 years. Its like naming your kid Hot Bot, DEC computers, Commodore, BeOS, AskJeeves, or Netscape. @ 03:53 AM CST [Link] NASA due for shakeup. On the heels of NASA's proposals to replace the shuttle with a capsule spacecraft as the shuttle, even if fixed, could never make it to the moon and beyond. The larger question is how much space militarization can be expected from this. Probably quite a bit. Also: No sex in space, laptops full of porn not of the question. "Breakups can lead to violence and all kinds of things," agrees Carol Rinkleib Ellison, a psychologist specialising in sexuality and intimacy based in Oakland, California, US, who was not part of the NAS panel. "People are very primitive in their emotions around partnering and sex." Sexual harassment may also endanger a mission. In an 8-month space station simulation on Earth in 2000, a Russian man twice tried to kiss a Canadian woman researcher just after two other Russians had gotten into a bloody brawl. As a result, locks were installed between the Russian and international crews' compartments. @ 03:44 AM CST [Link] New book on religion has interesting ideas. A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport did some key research in the 1950s on various kinds of human prejudice and came up with a definition of religiosity that is still in use today. He suggested that there were two types of religious commitment - extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he defined as religious self-centredness. Such a person goes to church or synagogue as a means to an end - for what they can get out of it. They might go to church to be seen, because it is the social norm in their society, conferring respectability or social advancement. Going to church (or synagogue) becomes a social convention. Allport thought that intrinsic religiosity was different. He identified a group of people who were intrinsically religious, seeing their religion as an end in itself. They tended to be more deeply committed; religion became the organising principle of their lives, a central and personal experience. In support of his research, Allport found that prejudice was more common in those individuals who scored highly for extrinsic religion. The evidence generally is that intrinsic religiosity seems to be associated with lower levels of anxiety and stress, freedom from guilt, better adjustment in society and less depression. On the other hand, extrinsic religious feelings - where religion is used as a way to belong to and prosper within a group - seem to be associated with increased tendencies to guilt, worry and anxiety. @ 03:25 AM CST [Link] New Korean girl-band once all men. Oh those wacky Koreans. Or transexuals begin to get cultural acceptance. Pics and random commentary here. @ 03:21 AM CST [Link] Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody mixed with All Your Base. Granted, AYB is more than a bit stale, but this is pretty clever. @ 03:00 AM CST [Link] [Archives] Search entries: