adrian is rad

I’ve been really enjoying going through and reading a number of the pieces on this list of best of journalism 2009. Possibly my favorite is the Michael Lewis piece on the financial collapse of Iceland.

I’ve seen very few of the Superbowl ads but I liked this NFL ad with music from the Arcade Fire.

So the One AM Radio is having a contest with their new song (found here or at the myspace page) and I’m trying to put off some other work, so I’m going to enter. The contest: Ok, let’s do this: the first person to transcribe all the lyrics correctly will get a prize. Type them out, and post them on your facebook page, your blog, website, or something like that, and send us the link.

It’s a good song, by the way. I recommend checking it out.

Oh oh oh oh oh (4x)

A old photo of your new lover
That you discovered in a book she left
Shot in some sun-drenched piazza
Or whatever in Rome or where ever it is she went.
There a sly glint in her eye
And you can only guess at what it might have meant

There’s a world without you.
There’s a world without you.
Oh oh oh oh oh (2x)

A new photo of your old lover
That you discovered to your chagrin
It’s been so long since it all went sunder
That you stopped wondering where she’s been.
Her hair’s changed. Her clothes are strange
At a party where the likes of you would never get in.

There’s a world without you.
Yeah, there’s a world without you.
There’s a world without you.
Yeah, there’s a world without you.

You don’t want the news if you’re not a part of it.
Even if it’s true you still fall apart a bit.
You don’t want the news if you’re not at the heart of it.
Even if it’s true.
Even if it’s true.

You don’t want the news if you’re not a part of it.
Even if it’s true you still fall apart a bit.
You don’t want the news if you’re not at the heart of it.
Even if it’s true.
Even if it’s true.

There’s a world without you.
Yeah, there’s a world without you.
There’s a world without you.
Yeah, here’s a world without you.

Oh

Oh oh oh oh oh (8x)

As far as I know, the only person to design multiple nation’s flags is Frederick Brownell who designed South Africa’s and Namibia’s.

Any reasonably class covering manufacturing engineering will talk about Toyota and how they’ve created a process that’s really helped them launch ahead of many other car makers. They’ve long inspired me. This NY Times Magazine profile of Toyota reminded me of that.

Management theorists who study Toyota’s production system tend to say that it is difficult to replicate, insofar as the company’s methods are not simply a series of techniques but a way of thinking about teamwork, products and efficiency. Still, some aspects of the system were clearly visible in San Antonio. In the Tundra plant, there is no real inventory of parts, which is a hallmark of Toyota’s approach. Once a truck chassis begins its run on the factory line, an order goes out to, say, an on-site parts supplier that provides seats for the interior. At Avanzar, an independent company located in a large workroom adjacent to the assembly line, I watched workers build a car seat from scratch. They chose a raw steel frame with springs, put it on their own minifactory assembly line to add padding, then leather, and then they transferred it (via pulley, over a partition wall) to the Tundra assembly line, where it was installed in the truck. If the front seat had not been ordered 85 minutes earlier, it would not exist.

It reminds me of a Forbes profile of Honda I read a couple years ago.

Of all the bizarre subsidiaries that big companies can find themselves with, Harmony Agricultural Products, founded and owned by Honda Motor, is one of the strangest. This small company near Marysville, Ohio produces soybeans for tofu. Soybeans? Honda couldn’t brook the sight of the shipping containers that brought parts from Japan to its nearby auto factories returning empty. So Harmony now ships 33,000 pounds of soybeans to Japan. An inveterate tinkerer, Honda also set up a center nearby to develop better soybean varieties and improve agricultural processes.

Fantastic out-of-the-box thinking!

The New Yorker’s Platon shot many of the world leaders when they were in NYC for the UN Meeting a couple months ago. Not all the photos are great but it’s a great collection all together.

–

I never knew that Norman Rockwell staged photos of his ideas and then painted from the photos. The photos are obviously very meticulously produced. Check out some side-by-side comparisons.

This is really strange:

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I really like these vintage Japanese baseball cards.

I returned to the Einstein’s Fish logic puzzle that I got stuck on a couple years ago and solved it.

Oops. I just realized I solved the wrong Coudal puzzle. The original one I got stuck on was Lunch, not Einstein’s Fish. Oops. Give me a few minutes here.

Update: I figured out Lunch as well. It took a lot less time than Einstein’s Fish. (I was also a bit warmed up after Einstein’s Fish.)

Post on, and filled with, profanity after the break.

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Talk about Afrigadget,

You can buy the book here, William Kamkwamba, who was then about 14, made a windmill to provide power for his family based on a picture in a library book. A pretty good interview with him above.

(Kamkwamba is now in school in Jo’burg.)

I really like this design. I seriously considered getting the original poster of this design when I first heard about it but I was slow off the mark–they were part of a limited edition print (though he’s since reprinted it)–and $75 was enough that it made me pause for a while to consider whether it was worth it.

The other day, though, I noticed that he’s made a shirt of the design. $30 is steep for a shirt, but compared to $75 for a poster, it seems like a reasonable price. I ordered it.

According to wikipedia’s list of statues by height:

1. Statue of Liberty depicting Lady Liberty. Located in Liberty Island, New York, it stands 46 m (151 ft) tall.
2. Our Lady of the Rockies depicting Mary. Located in Butte, Montana, it stands 27 m (88.6 ft) tall
3. Golden Driller depicting an oilman. Located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it stands 23 m (75 ft) tall.
4. Tribute to Courage depicting Sam Houston. Located in Huntsville, Texas it stands 20.5 m (67 ft) tall.
5. Dallas Zoo’s giraffe statue depicting a giraffe. Located in Dallas, Texas it stands 20.5 m (67 ft) tall.
6. Christ of the Ozarks depicting Jesus. Located in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, it stands 20 m (65.5 ft) tall.
7. King of Kings depicting Jesus. Located in Monroe, Ohio it stands 19m (62 ft) tall
8. Praying Hands depicting praying hands. Located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it stands 18.2 m (60 ft) tall.
9. Vulcan statue depicting a Vulcan (mythology). Located in Birmingham, Alabama, it stands 17.1 m (56 ft) tall.
10. Jolly Green Giant depicting Jolly Green Giant. Located in Blue Earth, Minnesota it stands 16 m (52.5ft) tall.

Not a very impressive list, I think. I mean, the Jolly Green Giant and a statue of a giraffe are within our top ten?

Absolutely ridiculous is the planned and partially completed Crazy Horse Memorial Statue, which when/ if completed will stand at 172m, placing it as the largest statue in the world. Then again, it was started in 1948 and the designer died in 1982 so who knows if it will ever be finished.

click for larger

I noticed this a couple weeks ago when I needed to take something to the local Fedex Kinko’s (or Fedex Office or whatever it is they call it now). Fedex quotes their directions to one second precision! That’s ridiculous!

And not is their precision not right, but their accuracy was way off: this route took at least 9 minutes. Try it for yourself if you don’t believe me.

Fedex, look at the situation before you just tell your algorithm to round to the nearest second.

Nerd hero Richard Feynman explains how trains stay on the tracks and how they go around corners without a differential.

Thanks to dug for sending me this.

Here are a few links I go back to time and again and tell people about, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted:

• The LA Times had a really interesting article about a large ship repo man. Things get complicated when you have to repossess container ships.
• A Dutch guy did a series of photos of soccer fields in Europe (starts a couple images in–no direct link). There are some spectacular backgrounds. It has inspired my own photos.
• Some people play old-time baseball in Golden Gate Park. Pitchers are called hurlers and they’re not allowed to throw any pitches developed after 1886.
• Baby Evil Eyes is one of the funniest videos on youtube:
  

To try to prescribe language for everyone is futile but within a journalistic institution it makes sense. The Economist Style Guide has a section on solecisms. It’s pretty interesting and informative.

Still, some of it is obvious:

Simon Pure is the real person (or thing), and has nothing to do with Caesar’s wife or driven snow.

Duh, right? And how about this one:

Soi-disant means self-styled, not so-called.

In all seriousness, though, some are quite useful:

Continuous describes something uninterrupted. Continual admits of a break. If your neighbours play loud music every night, it is a continual nuisance; it is not a continuous one unless the music is never turned off.

Are there any other style guidelines online? I didn’t find any in a brief look.

Today I found the Wikipedia:unusual articles page. It’s an awesome way to sink many hours.

Leck mich im Arsch is a canon by Mozart. Yes, it translates to “Lick Me in the Arse”. It’s cited by some as evidence that Mozart may have had Tourette’s.

The Metric Marvels was created by the same people who did School House Rocks! It was not as successful. Did you know that Pres. Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act that made “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” in 1975. Wow that’s gone well.

Resignation from the British House of Commons has not been legal since the 1623. To resign, MPs have to get appointed to an office under the Crown.

There’s one single-arch McDonald’s sign left in the US. It’s in Pine Bluff, AR.

Joyce Hatto was a pianist whose husband issued a number of recordings in her name that were stolen from other recordings and altered slightly.

Eric Moussambani was a swimmer from Equitorial Guinea that competed in the 2000 Olypmics. He took twice as long as anyone else to swim the 100m…and he still won his heat.

Scottish law allows for a third verdict besides conviction and not guilty: not proven.

And, finally, there’s an incredibly titled North Korean propaganda film called Let’s Trim Our Hair in Accordance with Socialist Lifestyle.

This is pretty funny.

the Cats’ Inn: Grooming includes such options as:

Basic Bath
Panty Shave
Tummy Shave
Shave Mats
Nail Trim
Soft Paws®
Lion Cut
Body Shave

Wow.

I found Newsweek’s Secrets of the 2008 Campaign 7-part series of articles really fascinating. The basic gist was that both campaigns allowed behind the scenes access on the condition that the info wasn’t published till after election day. It’s pretty interesting to see the candidates as human and, for the most part, more decent than their advisers and handlers.

Also, there are even some funny parts:

At one point, Mark McKinnon, a media adviser who had worked for Bush-Cheney ‘04, described the difference between the Bush campaigns he had worked on and the McCain campaign as the difference between the Royal British Navy and Capt. Jack Sparrow’s ship in “Pirates of the Caribbean.” McCain loved the comparison. He began making guttural pirate noises, punctuating his jokes and one-liners with “Aaarrgh” and occasionally greeting reporters with this oddly cheerful growl. PIRATES FOR MCCAIN T shirts (complete with skull and crossbones) eventually sprouted on the backs of campaign volunteers and even a few reporters.

Start with chapter 1.

This web game where you have to do various geometric things by eye–finding midpoints of lines, convergence of three lines, sides of a parallelogram–is pretty addicting, at least for me. My natural talents apparently, lie more in bisecting angles than finding the center point between three edges of a triangle.

Wow. What a world we live in.

I saw the craigslist headquarters in the the Inner Sunset yesterday. I was pretty excited.

Here’s my photo through the bus window. The ladies on the bus looked at me very strange for taking this photo.

Don’t read on if you like knowing things and you don’t have time to waste. Seriously, Colin, stop reading.

Via Ken Jennings’ blog is Sporcle a trivia-set game site. It has games where it asks you to name anything from the planets to Time people of the year.

I did as expect in some and worse than I expected in others. I got all the US States but blanked on much of the Balkan region in the countries of Europe. (And West Africa is hard).

I did much better on the MLB teams than the NFL.

not an “international” spelling bee. So why are we letting Canadians in it??

It’s about time we stopped letting those canucks in there. What’s next? Red coats??

I think I need to start a petition…and a website… Keepthenationalspellingbeenational.com

I haven’t talked about him in a few years but I’ve been following Oscar Pistorius, the young South Africa double leg amputee that runs fast enough to compete in able-bodied events. His goal was to compete in the 2008 (able-bodied) Olympics.

I was just expressing my consternation last week to a friend that he’d been banned based on his carbon fiber lower leg prosthetics “giving him an advantage” and being against a rule that appeared to be written by the running governing body solely to ban him.

Well, unexpectedly, he got reinstated on Friday. He still needs to cut half a second off of his 400m time before the Olympics to qualify, but if he does, he’ll be able to compete.

Check out this video of him competing in Rome. The ground he makes up starting in the last turn is pretty amazing.

My brother pointed out a a Firefox extension called YouTube Comment Snob that hides youtube comments that fail criteria like “user-defined threshold of spelling errors (using Firefox’s spell-checker), excessive punctuation, and excessive capitalization.”

Awesome. Do they make that for the whole internet?

In case you haven’t seen it. There are even shirts.

In our modern world, borders still change. I find this fascinating. Particularly this list of territorial disputes. I mean, there’s even a dispute between Georgia and Tennessee.

One of the most ridiculous things is the territorial claims of the Republic of China (Taiwan, in common terms), illustrated well in this wikipedia graphic:

In many ways the real crazies seem to hang out on this list of active autonomist and secessionist movements.

According to a report in the Register, this is apparently a reoccurring problem.

Swedish police are quizzing “people of limited stature” with criminal records following a spate of robberies from the cargo holds of coaches – possibly carried out by dwarves smuggled on board in sports bags.

I was discussing this with my 6′ tall” friend, Andy and this was our conversation:

Andy: I could not do that job

Adrian: be a midget robber?

Andy: yup
that would be difficult for me

Adrian: yeah
you’re a little tall

Andy: oh yeah, that too
I was thinking that I just abhor thievery

Do you remember these? No, I’m not talking about that song, but about Oreo Big Stuf Oreos:

These things were like a big cookie sandwich with what I remember to be fully 6mm of oreo cream in the middle. They apparently had 13g of fat and 316 calories each. They must have had 20g of trans fat each (and, yes, I know that math doesn’t quite work out).

I thought about them the other day because they were the reason I learned that you weren’t supposed to touch food you were offering other people. I took one out of the packaging and offered it to our babysitter as my parents were still getting ready to leave and my mom said something like “She’s not going to want that if you’ve touched it” and offered her one which was still in the packaging. (I don’t believe she wanted either, actually, but this was 22 years ago, so what do I remember?)

This is what the internet was made for. Example:

SO ALSO IN KINDERGARTEN I APPARENTLY THOUGHT THAT THE KIDS IN MY CLASS DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT COUGARS FOR SOME REASON, BECAUSE I DEFINITELY MADE A SWEET COUGAR QUIZ WHICH I INSISTED ON GIVING OUT TO THE CLASS THE NEXT DAY.

WHAT COLOR IS THE COUGAR? GOLD? NO! BROWN? NO! RED? NO! THE ANSWER IS TAWNY.

There are many, many stories like this.

California has weird license plates. You can your ham call letters, a press photographer plate, an Olympic Training Center plate, a Veteran plate (anyone, in fact, can get a “veteran” plate)

One of my favorite things is the requirements for a horseless carriage plate:

These special plates are issued, upon request, for motor vehicles with an engine of 16 or more cylinders manufactured prior to 1965, or any motor vehicle manufactured in 1922 or before.

Huh?

when people you know turn up in google news:

Most of the pressure seems to be on Pandit however.

but I still laughed. Any dance based around the Tide To Go pen wins some points in my book.

Colin wiil (or should!) like the dance moves around 0:48 in.

Australia is my new favorite country.

— google.com ping statistics —
3371 packets transmitted, 1963 packets received, +36 duplicates, 41% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 220.423/3869.926/29006.648/4186.343 ms

Most of the time, my pings were in the 1 to 10 second range. 41% packet loss! Ridiculous!

Today was pretty good. I’m glad I came to Kaohsiung. More on that later.

As of now Google News is putting stories about the aftershocks of the earthquake at the Calaveras fault in the sports section. Nope, wrong San Jose earthquakes.

One of the weirder wikipedia pages: list of people who have disappeared.

The older ones are full of mystery and are pretty interesting. The newer ones are largely kidnapped kids; kidnapping kids is not interesting or fun; kidnapping kids is sad.

Gawker has a piece about blog cliches. It’s pretty funny/ damning:

Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar.
Likely originating in the reverse (”worst [x] ever”), this clich still has a deathgrip on the media, in all its sincere and sarcastic permutations. It’s usually taken to mean a state of permanent, perpetual bestness, which is of course unsustainable. Sooner or later, something will not be the best [x] ever, and this phrase is a perfect example.

[undesirable counter-example], not so much.
…

Oops. I might do that…

The other piece that’s similar but less funny/ more precise is Gothamist’s What Not to do With Your Blog from a couple years ago.

Both make me think about how I write my blog.

Possibly the best japanese game show, or any game show. A foam board with a shape cut out in it moves toward you. You have to fit through the shape or you get knocked into a pool of water. Unexpectedly hilarious. (From Melissa.)

A bunch of inmates in the Philippines do the Thriller video. It’s meticulous and awesome. We’ve seen it at a wedding and in a movie but this may be the most impressive. (From Dave)

Michel Lauziere performs “The Toreador Song” from Carmen on 300 some bottles, hitting them with sticks attached to his roller blades. Very cool and I never would have thought of doing it this way. (From Andy)

Google SMS is awesome. You simply text what you want to GOOGLE (466453) and it texts you back almost instantly with what you need.

Traveling in Boston last week, I used this a lot. (It should be noted that I have unlimited text messages.) Don’t know where that bar was? Text “the littlest 02116″. Is my flight on time? Text “AA 631″. What time is that movie showing? “Eagle vs. Shark 02139″. What’s that froyo place’s phone number? “Ankara Cafe Boston”. What’s the weather going to be the next day? “Weather 02139″.

All of these things got me the exact information I wanted quickly. I’m impressed!

From metafilter:

5 seconds of pure fun!

Extreme ironing competition. It is what it sounds like. Some great ones in there.

I was totally right. I saw one of those minature personalized license plates yesterday and bought it. It was pretty excited. I never see “Adrian.” My roommate said that “Adrian” had to be in the top 50 most popular names. How to resolve this? The Social Security Administration to the rescue!

Their site will show you top 20, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 names for any year back to 1880 (1880’s most popular names? John for boys, Mary for girls). In the year I was born, 1980, Adrian was the 115th most popular male name with 2,387 total Adrians that year.

The top 10 names from that year:

1. Michael
2. Christopher
3. Jason
4. David
5. James
6. Matthew
7. Joshua
8. John
9. Robert
10. Joseph

You can also check out the fads, how a particular name changed in popularity over a period of time.

After the jump how “Adrian” has varied since my birth year.

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Miranda July’s new website for her book No One Belongs Here More Than You is lo-fi (so to speak), reminding me, actually, of spultek’s old website which was scanned from a hand sketch. She made the entire website by taking photos of a “whiteboard.” It’s a good idea and great execution.

Miranda’s the same person who wrote, directed and acted in the quirky and funny 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. I’d recommend it.

My radio show will be at the same time this quarter: Wednesdays 10p-midnight (PST (or PDT?)).

Meanwhile, if you want to read me ranting about music in a different forum, you can check out my music blog.

Update: Here’s this week’s playlist

And here’s the NEWSPECIALFUN:

I Once was Canadian – 4-12-07 (mp3)

Wikipedia has everything. Including Bristol Stool Scale.

[Update: Graphic removed; it was too...graphic.]

A couple guys (professorial types) in Bristol wrote a paper on it. Goodness.

I noticed today when I logged in to Netflix that they had a new option “watch now.” They have a whole lot of movies that you can stream and it’s included in my subscription.

It’s a win for them (server bandwidth << shipping costs + wear/ depreciation of DVDs) and a win for me because I don’t have to wait…

except they don’t support mac.

Keep trying, Netflix.

Were there help desks before computers?

Well executed!

Those google people are CRAZY.

I noticed the other day that there was a new option on my google map, traffic.

Looks like I should take the 280 and avoid the 101. It’s a bit slow around 92.

[I just learned it's about three weeks old and it's only available in 30 cities so far. When's the Bay Area going to get google transit anyway?]

From the same people that brought you that spectacular bouncy-balls-in-San-Francisco Bravia ad (which, incidentally, first alerted me to the amazing Jose Gonzalez) comes another amazing commercial. It’s basically a building demolition/ fireworks display, except done with paint.

The commercial is pretty great by itself, but go ahead and watch the making of as well. The actually did all of that (as they actually dropped a quarter of a million bouncy balls down the hills and streets of San Francisco). There’s something really cool about doing something that would be a little cheesy with computer graphics instead with real materials, people and dollars (or pounds, as the case may be). The Brits seem to have the corner on that market, starting with that ridiculous Honda ad a few years back.

Daytrotter has some mp3s of a recent in-studio by Elvis Perkins. They’re four songs, all originally on Ash Wednesday. The voice recording is a bit boomy but they’re otherwise good.

I haven’t talked about music much lately. I’m about to unleash a slew, so steady yourselves.

NPR has Arcade Fire’s performace from last Saturday at Judson Memorial Church in NYC both streaming and download. The first few minutes are a bit rough fidelity-wise because the band starts the show in the audience for the first song.

Also heresay has mp3’s from the Friday Judson show, all split up nicely.

I understand writing stupid things in wikipedia, but sometimes people write really, really odd things. For example, someone ammended hair:

Sometimes the hair can become transparent. I don’t know how this happens but it just does. Beware of transparent hair, and if it does happen to you quickly use your own urine as shampoo.

Of course, it has since been editted out.

(Thanks to Jesse for this. I can’t link to him anymore because he abandoned his blog.)

I found a site which is a nice bike route maker. In a lot of ways it’s similar to runthere.com (or many others, I’m sure), but it does a few nice things that are important to cycling; in addition to the total mileage, it’ll tell you total and net elevation gain, average grade and max grade and show you a nice elevation profile. It also gives you the current weather conditions. Apparently it’ll show you where steep grades and even show you photos along routes but I didn’t run into either of these features actually in use. I found the interface a little slow at times, but nice otherwise.

It uses google maps, so it probably works everywhere, but lists a dozen or so cities, probably because it has weather information, etc coded for those.

people dance the thriller dance at a wedding!! funny!

holy crap. I think this is the best blog post I’ve seen, possibly ever. Well, done, Wax.

it’s awesome having fast internet again. my mind has a problem slowing down to dialup speeds.

Notice anything new about the page?

Look to the right over there…

After Randy’s comment on my post about being inspired to keep track of some life stats for 2007, I was further inspired to put up some of the stats in more or less real time. So there they are. Are there any other stats you want to see? The full list of stats that I’m tracking:

• emails sent (home/ work)
• miles travelled
• wikipedia pages read
• beers consumed
• work days
• photos taken (digital/ film)
• albums purchased
• concerts attended
• books read
• movies seen (theater/ netflix)
• hours of TV
• haircuts
• shaves
• miles biked
• miles ran
• miles swam

Originally I was going to do this literally updating every time you loaded the page, but that made the page really slowly (even slower than it loads already), so I decided to write up a caching system where it only loads the new data every six hours. I might adjust this if it makes sense to.

The script checks to see if the cache is older than 6 hours old and if so pulls some data from a google spreadsheet. Otherwise, it writes the old data into the html that you see on the right. I’ll probably write up a full post or a instructable of how I did all this sometime when I have more time.

I’m going Web2.0 all over this place!@

There are a few links I’ve been meaning to put up. Things I find interesting but I don’t want to add to the sidebar on the right.

Random links:

• designverb: a blog about design related topics, largely product design and the like. fairly interesting stuff.
• rbally has a nice Cat Power show from Berlin for download [update: rbally seems to have taken this down/ broken]
• youtube has a great chemistry lab safety video explosion. (dylan, are you seeing this?)
• bitsandpieces silly college humor, but sometimes entertaining
• wikipedia has a list of African countries by GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) per capita. South Africa’s on top, but barely. For reference, the US is 3rd in the world for GDP (PPP) per capita at about $42,000.
• oregon trail is it possible you haven’t played this game? there are even shirts about it. And you can download an emulated version
• Tom Wilson I feel like I should add him to my list of best producers. He did Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Velvet Underground and more

[This was going to be one post with the above part 1 and below part 3, but it was too much, so I split them up]
There was recently the kottke best links of 2006. Here are some of my favorites from that list (including some I’ve seen/ linked to before):

• How to Care for your Introvert (from 2003; describes a lot of people I know and, well, me) and a current interview with the author
• David Copperfield gets mugged but doesn’t lose any property because of…slight of hand!
• old timey (WWII-era) color photographs of America
• the JFK assassination Zapruder film, stabilized even stranger and freakier
• songtapper tap a rhythm, it tells you the song. didn’t work as well as I wanted, but still interesting
• shiny mud balls only from Japan…and a how-to!
• Amateur a non-piano player or drummer makes a music video with himself playing those two instruments with clever editting
• a photo essay of female soldier in Iraq
• free historical sounds (as mp3s) “I Have a Dream”(MLK) to “Luckiest Man on the face of the Earth” (Lou Gehrig)
• Sheep Market 10,000 sheep drawn by online workers via Amazon’s odd Mechanical Turk service
• crazy aerial photos that look like tiny model cities
• Lake Peigneur disappears a 14″ drill bit made a lake and much of an island disappear
• 1964 New Yorker article on Dylan
• hilariously bad movie pitches
  

  Idea #1:
  What if the Internet Turned into a Were-Wolf

• Photos of European football (soccer) fields very diverse and often in gorgeous settings

There were a number of the links on that kottke best links of 2006 list that I had already seen, but I’d enjoyed.

• Simpson’s beginning, in live action (British made)
• when indie yuppie took off (a term/ concept created by Vice records honcho Adam Shore and pushed by stereogum
• Wes Andersen’s odd AmEx add don’t leave home without it
• how to get a human customer service representative at a lot of companies
• a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo gets trashed on flickr
• a picture of eyes above an honor-system drink payment box makes people more honest
• easily mispronounced domain names whorepresents.com? still hilarious
• Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious ‘Unnecessary Censorship’ video put bleeps where there weren’t any before and it makes things very funny
• devastating photo of a homeless heroin addict in the Tenderloin (where I often go to the Great American
• Aries Spears rap impressions
• Noah takes a self-portrait everyday for 6 years and makes a video of it interesting, haunting eyes

I don’t really get into webcomics much, but I’ve been really enjoying xkcd “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

It’s pretty geeky stuff, generally. Some of it reminds me of jokes friends would make in college (like thing jwerberg said about the Apollo 11 space shuttle and it having the same computing power as a TI-85 “and that thing can’t even do tan 90!”)

There are some of my favorites.

I may relate a little too much to some.

Some are at the heights of geek humor while others are just sort of random.

And then there are the ones about love.

I’m fascinated by little perculiarities in our world. There’s a country, which is soverign over a city, which is only 0.2 square miles in size. That’s 108 acres, much smaller than a large urban park. (Also of note with the Holy See/ Vatican is that there are various Vacitan enclaves on separated from the Vatican and surrounded by Italy, including Castel Gandolfo and Patricrchal Basilicas, but they’re sort of like embassies with extraterritorial status.)

People also seem to be fascinated that Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), where my mom spent much of her youth, is completely surrounded by South Africa. Well that makes a lot more sense to me than Büsingen which is a German town completely separated from Germany and surrounded by Switzerland. It is separated by about 1km from the rest of Germany.

It’d be kind of cool to live there though. You get alternate addresses and telephone numbers if you want people to call or write to you in Germany or Switzerland. You also get to live and work in Switzerland without a visa after living there for ten years.

There are a couple entertaining videos that I found or ran across in the recent times:

Aries Spears impressions while freestyling. This is a guy doing impressions of LL Cool J, Snoop Dog, DMX and Jay Z while freestyling. It’s pretty dang impressive, though I’m not familiar with DMX at all and only somewhat familiar with the other three. I’m still very impressed. (A couple things of note: a) that’s Live 105, in SF and that’s the same studio where I did the college dj of the week thing and 2) it appears Woody, one of the hosts, is a Steelers fan as he’s sporting a hat and a Willy Parker jersey). (via stereogum)

Peyton Manning Mastercard Priceless Ad. I can see how you might not like Peyton Manning, but man, I love this commercial which started running last year. They have a second, similar one this season but it’s not as good. I laugh every time I see this one.

[Update:] Oh man, I found another Peyton priceless commercial and it’s hilarious too. Also, there’s a blooper commercial from the first Peyton video and the making of (including the actual commercial at the end) a third in the series.

Over two years after its completion, I finally posted my Coke Can Birdman Costume on instructables. Part of the motivation was the Halloween Project Contest.

Beck and Devendra are Friends

If you haven’t seen them there are some funny or awesome videos floating around.

The band Ok Go managed to make one of the most entertaining videos (QT WMV) I’ve seen recently simply with a few rented treadmills and a borrowed video camera. That is some serious choreography. They also choreographed a back yard dance routine for one of their other videos (QT WMV). It’s not quite as entertaining, but it’s still fun.

Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager has a title that speaks for itself.

The “Chinese Backstreet Boys” are a couple Chinese college students who record video of themselves while animatedly singing along to Backstreet Boys songs. I Want It That Way is pretty great while As Long As You Love Me is more for completists.

one way over the wall and one jumping diving

Dave Eggers writes about the World Cup. Very entertaining as alwasy.

The Baseball Card Blog for those of us who spent too much time and money on baseball cards as a kid. They’re currently on #5 on their best baseball card sets ever. I have a few packs of #5: 1989 Upper Deck. It was the year my family went on a New England road trip and we went through Cooperstown and saw the Baseball Hall of Fame. I picked up some of the new Upper Deck cards there. I hope #1 is 1987 Topps, the one with the wood grain. I loved those cards.

My friend Leo’s been working on a website called Runthere for a while. It’s pretty cool. The function I use most is mapping out a route and finding out how long it is. I’ll also show you the elevation profile for the same route.

He’s recently added a feature where you can save and, optionally, share routes around you. You can also find routes that other people have saved.

It’s a pretty slick site. I’m impressed. He’s a mech e, like me, and didn’t have a whole lot of programming experience before ME218, just like me, but I’m struggling to make a php website for the radio station and he’s made this pretty cool site.

I’m thinking of starting a new periodical post with the wikipedia articles I’ve read in the last few days. You know, make this an actual web log of sorts. I read quite a bit of wikipedia.

Upper St. Clair (my home town(ship)—check the demographics of USC out. Pretty sweet, huh? 94.56% White, 4.02% Asian) to Bethel Park to Mt. Lebanon to Pittsburgh Light Rail.

brooklyn to brooklyn neighborhoods to williamsburg to hipster to argot. new york city to bronx to bronx neighborhoods (which one’s yours, jdawg?). staten island (wouldn’t it be funny to live on staten island?). alameda, california (an island off of oakland).

eye glasses to halo effect.