zompist bboard

Incidentally, where does that guys-on-Segways-with-machine-guns image come from?

Further excellent music link: While My Ukelele Gently Weeps. Highly recommended.

Actually, if you read the Wiki article, those plasma lamps can actually be pretty fucking dangerous. For example, they can interfere with the touch pad on your lap top, or cause a tiny burn on your finger if you hold it in just the right place for long enough. Pretty terrifying stuff, I'll grant yo...

So... what happens to the Nitrogen and Oxygen that is shot with the laser? The article doesn't really explain where the light energy is coming from. Well, it does: plasma emission. Which I believe is also used in some forms of spectroscopes, so presumably we're talking about very small, brief plasm...

Dudicon wrote:More than any other 3D projection system, this is the one I'm definitely keeping my eye on.

Wow. That is indeed really cool.

Here's some scans a colleague of mine made from a National Geographic article on Korea in 1919. Always useful to have reminders around of how the colonial/imperialist mindset commonly expressed itself; ironically, if this voice was presented in fiction today, the writer would probably be accused of...

Not appearing in commercials is a "human right"? For apes, "appearing in commercials" (or circuses or films) means "being held in captivity and forced to do unnatural things." I really want this one to catch on: the use of chimps in the film industry has led to a countless array of grating, stupid ...

The International Privacy Rankings of 2007 , surveying surveillance societies among the world's most powerful countries. The story of the not-so-lost Amazonian tribe whose pictures riveted the world for a few minutes a couple of weeks ago. It was, apparently, a publicity stunt meant to call attenti...

Some music and performance links: Beautiful and haunting recitation of the Qur'an by a kid who looks to be about ten or eleven. (There's a passle of related videos featuring child religious/artistic prodigies that you shouldn't miss, like this , this , and this .) Amusing little ditties like Tom Cru...

Eccentric Iconoclast wrote:The twenty funniest newspaper headlines.

I love "One-armed man applauds." Very Zen.

Tales of border brilliance from around the world. I'm particularly fond of the golf course that spans a national border. Isn't it rather quaint that, until not that long ago, these traits were all widely believed to be "uniquely" human? Bizarreness from Vancouver: right feet keep washing ashore , no...

And the Moscow Times says the flying dildo was the work of Young Russia activists . I'm glad to live in a country with mostly dull politics, but we do miss out on the fun stuff like this. The Kama Sutra for computer techs. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Campaign: What Went Wrong? From the point of view of...

I would really, really love to know what's going on here. (Probably NSFW.)

Deaf Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie gives a brilliant talk, with musical illustration, about listening with your whole body. The whole thing is about a half hour long and well worth making some time to listen to in its entirety.

Xephyr wrote:Not to nitpick, but just because something is POV doesn't necessarily mean it's "FPS-style".

Nit duly picked. In my defense, I'm also making an terribly clever reference to the content of the two videos.

A first-person shooter style commercial from Nike shows how effective lifestyle advertising can be. Interestingly, it's much the same technique used to make the infamous Prodigy music video Smack My Bitch Up (NSFW), which starts off with a shot of... Nike runners. (Not quite "starts off," it's a few...

LSD vs alcohol vs tree . All sorts of cool data visualization stuff to be had at Ben Fry's website . Includes a map that features all of America's streets (and only the streets), a dynamic performance vs. salary chart of major league baseball teams, and the extremely nifty zipdecode . (Special The-...

Delthayre wrote:FOX News is dumb

I know that that's not very clever, but am I wrong?

You're not wrong. Even if that "mistake" is intentional, it's still dumb.

African mystery meals.

I think the idiom Shm Jay is looking for is the curiously anachronistic "sex tape," which seems likely to endure well past the plausible involvement of any sort of tape in much the same way that children still make "choo choo" noises when playing with toy trains. (I also agree with Gabor that the wh...

Okay, now this is just messed up.

An Atlas of the human body, however, is super-cool. Albeit not for the squeamish.

A short summary of some of the world's shortest reigns.

Xephyr: it's like you were there, man!

Anyway ... why does everything ils write about Dawkins sound like he has some personal vendetta on the dude? Motherfucker ran over my cat. I do not forgive, and I do not forget. I'm including this link to the fictional country of Bergonia mainly in service to conworlders. It's an extraordinarily de...

Hey, like I said before, Dawkins vs. the Creationists: necessary service. Good for him. Even if he is a dick. (Oh, if Radius Solis is reading this: it occurs to me that Richard Dawkins-as-humorless-dick is the illustrative and chastening comparison you were looking for in this thread .) Pulp Fiction...

Juno: The Short, Honest Version.

(And from SomethingAwful: leaked Diablo Cody screenplay.)

So I guess what this means is that the gentleman in question has invented yet another thing to have pointless, divisive meta-arguments about! Shitty. (However, if you object to my choice of target, kindly note that the post in question was a response to Gabor's inquiry about an aside in another post...