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slowfoxIf you only click on one link here, make sure it's Auto Tune the News over at YouTube (you need sound for this), which is an absolutely insane application of gratuitous technology, applying pitch-correction to politicians' soundbites to render the week's tidings in most tuneful fashion.
The Discovery Channel had this article about the development of coloured bubbles, which is kinda cool, but The Torygraph one-upped it with this photo of a bubble bursting, to sort out of take the prize for bubble-pic link of the week.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour was in the news a fair bit, due to it moonlighting as a gigantic lightning conductor. However, the Discovery Channel was on hand to explain why, actually, this might be a good thing - lightning being a possible source of life 'n all that. Not sure if the owner of this yacht would agree, mind.
A slightly over-interpreted story at The Register was trying to suggest that mebbe Galileo beat us all to everything, given that he supposedly discovered Neptune 234 years before it was 'officially' detected. It's one of those convoluted 'he may have recorded his sighting in a secret message which we've yet to discover' stories, though, so slightly less impressive than one might hope.
Devoted scholars of these pages will recall that I managed to successfully finish my reading of Stephanie Meyers' sparkly vampire Twiglet quartet - a hard fought battle between Ms Meyers' tomes, my sanity and the gag reflex, I can tell you. Anyway, The Grauniad had an illuminating article about how residents of Forks in Washington State getting a little sick of the Twilight fandom.
Demonstrating how two opposing ends of the social spectrum still remain driven by the same human urge to strive to attain ever greater heights, compare and contrast The Redneck Games against this Green and Pleasant Land's own The Chap Olympiad. I s'pose we ought also to mention the Wife Carrying Championships, too, although that frankly looks lot more like hard work...
Gadget news, and the security conscious of you will be relieved to learn that this USB drive will self destruct in 5... 4... 3.... Meanwhile, in possible the most pointless application of Parallels Desktop ever, here's an iPhone running Windows 95. That notwithstanding, though, it seems clear that the iPhone business model is something of a monumental success: three months after passing the 1 billion app download mark, Apple hit 1.5 billion. That is some growth curve.
On the other hand, Facebook appears to be experiencing a curve all of its very own in entirely the opposite direction: way back in 2007, Microsoft apparently bid c$15bn for it. According to The Register, the company was valued at $10bn in May, and this past week saw its valuation drop further to $6.5bn. (y'know, I'm old enough to remember the days when $6.5bn was considered a lot of money...</nostalgia>)
In news that possibly won't offer much comfort to CA residents, Discover Magazine points out that we're kinda 10 years overdue for a 'quake. Thought you ought to know.
Over in the land of gaming, Engadget informs us that Modern Warfare 2 is aiming to show us all how to do a limited edition release. Bundled, operational Night Vision Goggles FTW! I would say 'overkill', were it not such a dreadful pun ;-P
xkcd warned me, but still I ambled over to TV Tropes. And was initially a little confused, but then started clicking... found the Firefly page, followed some of the links there, got to the (lamentably incomplete) episode guide, and from there was linked to Crowning Moment of Awesome, and from there...
A good week for photojournalism: The Guardian's Week in Pictures, supplemented by their short photo set of Robbie Maddison's insane Tower Bridge motorbike jump.
Then there was this breathtaking image of a sleeping jewel wasp, some more Gruaniad piccage, and a cloyingly cutsie pic of rodents teaming up to present a mate with a flower here.
Maintaining the pictorial theme - although 'pictorial' is a bit of a stretch, expect sites like www.hid.im to take off soon, in the name of BitTorrent. Enterprising minds have worked out how to embed torrent trackers into .png images, presumably in a bid to obscure their nature from otherwise prying eyes.
It's been all over the interwebz, of course, but for the sake of completeness I have to mention the $23 quadrillion dollar pack of cigarettes if only so that I can state for the record that I approve of this tax-revenue generation exercise. Apparently the Visa glitch only affected a 'handful' of people - but what most tickled me was that the guy was trying to get the $15 overdraft fee refunded too...
Now, I was a bit behind the times with Keyboard Cat, but fortunately for stragglers like me, Rocket Boom are here with their 'Know Your Meme' analysis of said, so mystery no more! Yay :D
Latching on to the current affairs angle, amidst the build up to the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, The Times asks the pertinent question as to whether you would send your child to Hogwarts. The comments are rather fun.
The Telegraph, on the other hand, had this rather twitch-inducing video of a ladybird invasion in Colarado. *mild shudder*
UK'ers of a certain telephonic disposition may be interested to learn that O2 has finally embraced Twitter, announcing that SMS functionality is to be restored from August 2009, albeit with the caveat that users will be limited to receiving 600 Tweets/month (obviously, sending Tweets comes out of your allowance/charged as standard), but it was the whole 'do-everything-by-SMS' that made Twitter so compelling, so it's nice to see O2 follow Vodafone's lead on this.
That said, Twitter continues to have security issues raised: hopefully they've got all the scandals out of the way now... Having said all that DaniWeb are pretty frustrated with the media hype of the latest 'Twitter' exploit scandal, because the whole thing apparently relates to a member of Twitter's staff's Google Docs account being compromised, and not Twitter itself.
For those of us who think we've got it tough, here's a 1923 photograph to prove that we don't know how lucky we are: field-testing a bullet-proof vest: all in the line of duty.
And finally, Aussie Natalie Tran (I'm guessing from her Twitter ID) has a YouTubeaccount called CommunityChannel with some very neat,well-produced vids: I particularly liked her Meet Lonely Singles in Your Area spoof :-)
The Discovery Channel had this article about the development of coloured bubbles, which is kinda cool, but The Torygraph one-upped it with this photo of a bubble bursting, to sort out of take the prize for bubble-pic link of the week.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour was in the news a fair bit, due to it moonlighting as a gigantic lightning conductor. However, the Discovery Channel was on hand to explain why, actually, this might be a good thing - lightning being a possible source of life 'n all that. Not sure if the owner of this yacht would agree, mind.
A slightly over-interpreted story at The Register was trying to suggest that mebbe Galileo beat us all to everything, given that he supposedly discovered Neptune 234 years before it was 'officially' detected. It's one of those convoluted 'he may have recorded his sighting in a secret message which we've yet to discover' stories, though, so slightly less impressive than one might hope.
Devoted scholars of these pages will recall that I managed to successfully finish my reading of Stephanie Meyers' sparkly vampire Twiglet quartet - a hard fought battle between Ms Meyers' tomes, my sanity and the gag reflex, I can tell you. Anyway, The Grauniad had an illuminating article about how residents of Forks in Washington State getting a little sick of the Twilight fandom.
Demonstrating how two opposing ends of the social spectrum still remain driven by the same human urge to strive to attain ever greater heights, compare and contrast The Redneck Games against this Green and Pleasant Land's own The Chap Olympiad. I s'pose we ought also to mention the Wife Carrying Championships, too, although that frankly looks lot more like hard work...
Gadget news, and the security conscious of you will be relieved to learn that this USB drive will self destruct in 5... 4... 3.... Meanwhile, in possible the most pointless application of Parallels Desktop ever, here's an iPhone running Windows 95. That notwithstanding, though, it seems clear that the iPhone business model is something of a monumental success: three months after passing the 1 billion app download mark, Apple hit 1.5 billion. That is some growth curve.
On the other hand, Facebook appears to be experiencing a curve all of its very own in entirely the opposite direction: way back in 2007, Microsoft apparently bid c$15bn for it. According to The Register, the company was valued at $10bn in May, and this past week saw its valuation drop further to $6.5bn. (y'know, I'm old enough to remember the days when $6.5bn was considered a lot of money...</nostalgia>)
In news that possibly won't offer much comfort to CA residents, Discover Magazine points out that we're kinda 10 years overdue for a 'quake. Thought you ought to know.
Over in the land of gaming, Engadget informs us that Modern Warfare 2 is aiming to show us all how to do a limited edition release. Bundled, operational Night Vision Goggles FTW! I would say 'overkill', were it not such a dreadful pun ;-P
xkcd warned me, but still I ambled over to TV Tropes. And was initially a little confused, but then started clicking... found the Firefly page, followed some of the links there, got to the (lamentably incomplete) episode guide, and from there was linked to Crowning Moment of Awesome, and from there...
A good week for photojournalism: The Guardian's Week in Pictures, supplemented by their short photo set of Robbie Maddison's insane Tower Bridge motorbike jump.
Then there was this breathtaking image of a sleeping jewel wasp, some more Gruaniad piccage, and a cloyingly cutsie pic of rodents teaming up to present a mate with a flower here.
Maintaining the pictorial theme - although 'pictorial' is a bit of a stretch, expect sites like www.hid.im to take off soon, in the name of BitTorrent. Enterprising minds have worked out how to embed torrent trackers into .png images, presumably in a bid to obscure their nature from otherwise prying eyes.
It's been all over the interwebz, of course, but for the sake of completeness I have to mention the $23 quadrillion dollar pack of cigarettes if only so that I can state for the record that I approve of this tax-revenue generation exercise. Apparently the Visa glitch only affected a 'handful' of people - but what most tickled me was that the guy was trying to get the $15 overdraft fee refunded too...
Now, I was a bit behind the times with Keyboard Cat, but fortunately for stragglers like me, Rocket Boom are here with their 'Know Your Meme' analysis of said, so mystery no more! Yay :D
Latching on to the current affairs angle, amidst the build up to the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, The Times asks the pertinent question as to whether you would send your child to Hogwarts. The comments are rather fun.
The Telegraph, on the other hand, had this rather twitch-inducing video of a ladybird invasion in Colarado. *mild shudder*
UK'ers of a certain telephonic disposition may be interested to learn that O2 has finally embraced Twitter, announcing that SMS functionality is to be restored from August 2009, albeit with the caveat that users will be limited to receiving 600 Tweets/month (obviously, sending Tweets comes out of your allowance/charged as standard), but it was the whole 'do-everything-by-SMS' that made Twitter so compelling, so it's nice to see O2 follow Vodafone's lead on this.
That said, Twitter continues to have security issues raised: hopefully they've got all the scandals out of the way now... Having said all that DaniWeb are pretty frustrated with the media hype of the latest 'Twitter' exploit scandal, because the whole thing apparently relates to a member of Twitter's staff's Google Docs account being compromised, and not Twitter itself.
For those of us who think we've got it tough, here's a 1923 photograph to prove that we don't know how lucky we are: field-testing a bullet-proof vest: all in the line of duty.
And finally, Aussie Natalie Tran (I'm guessing from her Twitter ID) has a YouTubeaccount called CommunityChannel with some very neat,well-produced vids: I particularly liked her Meet Lonely Singles in Your Area spoof :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-20 01:03 pm (UTC)I had exactly the same experience, although I didn't discover the glorious Crowning Moment of Glory page. I've book marked it for a time when I have time to lose hours ...