January 31, 2005
Brian Lockett's various museums
The Goleta Air & Space Museum/ Goleta Natural History Museum While looking for hot spring photos, I found this virtual museum. It is loaded with amazing shots of warbirds in flight
and the latest in space travel On the other hand some very well done nature photography.
Including desert panoramas This is all the work of one man.
poppin in the rain
I for one welcome our self aware spam bot overlords.
breaking CAPTCHAs. In this case the programmers were able to use software they had already designed to analyze images of people.
At least they'll know what to serve it with
China's Latest Innovation: Fish Wine
The French used grapes, Russians fermented potatoes, Koreans put ginseng in their drink and Mexicans distilled cactus plants to make fiery tequila.
Now China has made wine out of fish.
The French used grapes, Russians fermented potatoes, Koreans put ginseng in their drink and Mexicans distilled cactus plants to make fiery tequila.
Now China has made wine out of fish.
We've even got broadband, but we use rope instead of string for that.
Web design guru versus the telemarketers: designer Andy Clarke has posted his experiences with vendors of telephone services, windows, kitchens and advertising, as well as selected lines from other encounters; if the web-design thing doesn't pan out he may have a future in comedy...
Relief takes wing
You can give airline miles for tsunami relief. Link goes to a Goggle tsunami info page. Full airline links are inside.
hahah!! history repeats itself.
United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in [insert country]'s presidential election despite a [insert terror group] terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from [insert besieged capital city], 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the [insert terror group].
....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President [insert idiotic Texas Republican]'s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in [insert besieged country]. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in [insert date], to which President [insert idiotic Texas Republican] gave his personal commitment when he met [foreign puppet politician], the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.
Dateline? Sept. 4th, 1967.
Fact-Checked with archived NYT links at Daily KOS.
....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President [insert idiotic Texas Republican]'s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in [insert besieged country]. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in [insert date], to which President [insert idiotic Texas Republican] gave his personal commitment when he met [foreign puppet politician], the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.
Dateline? Sept. 4th, 1967.
Fact-Checked with archived NYT links at Daily KOS.
Failures of vision corrective surgery.
Surgical Eyes - source of info about complications and their treatment from Lasik and other vision correction surgeries.
Hypothesis as thought-crime
Hypothesis as thought-crime...Now, however, a new brouhaha has erupted [at Harvard]and it seems impossible that Summers [the president]will emerge from this one without serious erosion of his moral authority. The trigger was a statement he made at a conference, suggesting that the reason there are more men than women in the mathematical sciences at top-flight institutions has to do with a small statistical difference in inate ability, which becomes a pretty large disparity when one looks at the 'high end' of the respective distribution curves...
The fatal words did not set forth his main theme, but merely constituted a brief aside, thoroughly hedged and qualified. Nonetheless, they touched off a firestorm of indignation, the most striking aspect of which was the intemperate response of a number of feminist scientists, who offered no counter-arguments, but simply declared the whole idea misogynistic and therefore forbidden intellectual territory.
Tickets, please.
TV Tickets! A great gallery of tickets to TV show tapings, some going back to the 1950s. Includes some fascinating commentary by Mark Evanier.
Yet more travel photography.
Plan your escape route. [flash]
Pokemon causes cancer
Pokemon causes cancer. Looks like they're not just limited to epileptic seizures anymore.
(via Gamespot)
Link Spammers
Interview with a Link Spammer. [via] Get to know one of the scummy linkpimping bottomfeeders who abuse our referrer logs and weblog comments, then take measures to protect yourself. AnnElisabeth.com has much more (just keep scrolling), and of course, check your own weblog software for rel="nofollow" updates.
Build a fort! Build A THOUSAND FORTS!
Remote control helicopter videos
Almost there
Quicktime virtual reality panoramas of thousands of picturesque places in the Western United States and Canada. Feast your eyes on The Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Yosemite, Mossbrae Falls, Monument Valley, a Ghost Town, the Cascades, Palm Canyon, Joshua Tree, Las Vegas, Redwood Forests, poppy fields, palm groves, and Bumpass Hell. (via Highways West) (previous Mefi appearance)
Handling Porcupines, Trolls, and Other Online Vermin
New new thing or more of the same?
10 most important ideas of 2004: blogs and the Internet highlights some interesting views on the relationship of blogs to mainstream journalism. In light of the recent discussion relating to that topic, it is interesting to see some new views emerge.
BecauseYoureLazy
M & M Sorter Because you're Lazy
Tracy Boulian
Tracy Boulian's sports photography is dramatic, humane, sometimes eerie, and sometimes simply beautiful.
World's Smallest PacMan Game
World's Smallest PacMan Game [Flash, sound]
barhopping to the nth degree
NYC man pledges to visit 1000 bars in 2005. That's an average of about three per day, and as of yesterday he was already up to 135. Pray for his liver.
Judge backs Guantanamo challenge
Judge backs Guantanamo challenge A US judge has ruled that special military tribunals being used to try hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are illegal.
Vision without Sight
Esref Armagan is an accomplished painter, and has been blind since infancy. Brain scans show he uses his visual cortex while drawing, but not while imagining an image (as a sighted person does.)
Amazing mind-reading (?) web site
Pretty slick mind-reading trick... Perhaps wizened MetaFilter readers will see through its inner workings, but to me, this site just looked like magic. The page vanishes after a minute of disuse, so you may need to link more than once.
(My first post on MF.)
Good type feels good
Thinking with Type The online companion to the book of the same name offers a nice little online primer on the finer points of typography, including my favourite new online game: Dumb Quotes. Remember kids: only you can prevent poor kerning.
Bastard Nation
"Why is my birth certificate a state secret?" asks Bastard Nation. The group's fight for unconditional access to non-falsified birth records - start with The Basic Bastard, including a history of sealed adoption records in the USA - has enemies, which of course include Fox's "Who's Your Daddy?"
World Social Forum open source software gathering
Pushing the open source agenda to the international stage. Brazilian Pop superstar / Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, Grateful dead lyricist John Barlow and others participated yesterday in a World Social Forum gathering in Alegre, Brazil to urge a free open source software policy in the developing world. An open source constitutional discussed previously on metafilter here.
We got Tom Brokaw at ABC and we can get you.
"You have the audacity to call me intelligent.” We covered Spongebob promotes the gay here. Now comes an amusing coda: a catfight between the Dobson forces, who started an anti-media email campaign, and Keith Olbermann, who printed and ridiculed said email. Dobson's people claim victory because Olbermann spent so much time on them, and Olbermann, a trifle defensive about the secular media, makes more fun.
SBC to Acquire AT&T for $16 Billion
SBC to Acquire AT&T for $16 Billion or Death to the Deathstar "Luke, I am your father![pdf] " -Noooooo... oh wait, now I own you.
stems cells-->neurons
Make Poverty History
MakePovertyHistory. "The gap between the worlds’s rich and poor has never been wider. Malnutrition, AIDS, conflict and illiteracy are a daily reality for millions."
This seems like an interesting endeavour, with people like Nelson Mandela involved, as well. I'm a bit of a cynic about this because one of the biggest endorsements has come from Gordon Brown. He's a known quantity, and I wonder if this is another P.R. run to bolster his international credentials.
Oh, and there's a possibility it could be blocked before it gathers enough steam -- so much for Soft Power.
37 degrees of separation
Mapping couplings at a high school Sociologists graphed the romantic and sexual relationships of 80% of an entire high school (832 out of ~1000 students). The research indicates that high schoolers lack sexual alpha-persons resulting in partner maps that are mostly long lines rather than the more hub and spoke like maps common in adult maps.
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