Packaging FAIL

My very first personally constructed FAIL, thrown askew into the wilds of teh interwebs.

New embeddable widget from Hulu.com makes sharing shows & movies a snap.

Hulu.com continues to kick ass. Hulu allowed me watch all of Firefly over the holiday break from the comfort of my parents' guestroom, saving me from the horror of their cable-less househould (Disclaimer: I don't have cable at home either, actually).

Now they're offering embeds. Here's the Daily Show:



I'm not sure, exactly, why you'd want to watch here instead of on the main site. I'm not going to worry about it; this is one more step towards a more accessible form of ad-supported online TV. Hurrah.

Enjoy some Family Guy:

Dancing on YouTube is another "feelgood" online moment

Story about WhereTheHellIsMatt via A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No from Charles McGrath of the New York Times.

All in all, I vastly prefer the warm and fuzzy Internet memes much more than the excremental instances.

Sunset on Mars

Thanks to NASA for posting this pic of sunset on Mars as part of their image of the day series.

(Hat tip to Laughing Squid via Boing Boing)

Video from the BBC: Flying penguins reported in the Antarctic

This one premiered on April 1st, so the natural assumptions about its veracity apply.

It upholds the longstanding (and inspiring) tradition of grand hoaxes from the BBC.

Have I mentioned how much I love the i09 blog recently?

Apparently I've been blogslacking. Shocking. A friend pointed out that I share posts from a io9 on my linkblog quite frequently..

Guilty as charged.

I love this blog.

Posts like their Complete Guide to Science Fiction Season just make my life easier and more deeply enriched with the scifi goodness I've known and loved for the past two decades.

Tron, Sweded

My friend Snarles IM'ed me this link to Wired's Underwire blog with a video of a Sweded version of Tron embedded.

I'd watched it earlier this week but watching it again reminded me that I really should have posted it.

Geektastic. I enjoyed Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind much more than I expected to, given the New Yorker's tepid review. The website for the film, BeKindMovie.com has a similar quirky aesthetic. You can see Google sweded there, along with this helpful guide to sweding.

The future Eiffel Tower -- another reason to visit Paris again

The temporary observation deck will be made of carbon Kevlar webbing and be bolted to the existing tower, doubling the area at the available to sightseers.

Neat.

[Hat tip: iO9]

ping.fm, Tumblr, FriendFeed and getting microbloggy with it

I've been twittering much more recently, in no small part due to downloading Snitter.

The latter is a brilliant interface for Twitter.

As a result of that network, I've been turned exposed to any number of new (and exciting) social media services. Each service has made its mark by allowing the user to aggregate and mix multiple feeds from blogs, podcasts, photo services and video networks.

ping.fm, which allows the user to update multiple presence applications at once, just makes my life easier. Many thanks to Chris Brogan for the invite.

I'm trying out Tumblr, after getting tumblr envy one too many times.

Joining FriendFeed has allowed me to aggregate them all together and to subscribe to and comment upon other blogger's shared feeds.

I'm uncertain whether adding more services will save me time in the end or add needed precision to winnowing the important bits and bytes from each day's information glut.

I was impressed with the ease of sign in. Online interface design has come a long way in the past ten years. 

Cyberdonkey: "Big Dog" Robot from Boston Dynamics

Big Dog has been all over the Internet today. How can it not be?

The unearthly gait, buzzing operation and weirdly mammalian bounding of Big Dog are even more impressive in this outing with a payload and snowy hills to navigate.


Boston Dynamics and DARPA are well on their way to giving Skynet a hardy pet someday.

Playmobil Security Checkpoint. No, really.

My friend Dana forwarded me a link to the comment page on Amazon.com listing for the Playmobil Security Checkpoint today.

That comment section is about as entertaining as anything I've read this month. Hilarious.

There are one or two serious comments about using the product to teach kids about security procedures before heading to the airport. {chuckle}

The laughs kept coming, though... guess what "Customers Who Bought Items Like This Also Bought?"

Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science by L. Ron Hubbard
Scientology: A New Slant On Life by L. Ron Hubbard
Clear Body, Clear Mind: The Effective Purification by L. Ron Hubbard
Self Analysis by L. Ron Hubbard
Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought by L. Ron Hubbard

From this, we can gather that Scientologists love to play with plasticine security checkpoints.

I love Fridays.

Hexapus!

Hi, Henry.

[Image courtesy of AFP/HO/Blackpool Sealife Centre]

History's Greatest Replies, according to Dr. Mardy

This compilation is just priceless.

Some classics:

"Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee."
-Lady Astor

"Nancy, if you were my wife, I'd drink it."
-Winston Churchill

****

"What are you doing reading a Bible?" asked an astonished Thomas Mitchell, confronted by an irreligious man paging through the Good Book on his deathbed.

"I'm looking for loopholes."
-W. C. Fields

****

At a press conference, a reporter pointed out that $80,000 was $5,000 more than President Hoover's annual salary.

"Maybe so, but I had a better year than he did."
-Babe Ruth

BoingBoingTV: "Food Fight" -- an abridged history of war through food

Filmmaker Stefan Nadelman's stop-animation piece provides an abridged history of war (WWII-Gulf War II) told through the foods of the countries in conflict.

Funny, sad and in no way appetite inspiring, at least on this day. Brilliant in its own way.

[Hat tip to Jon Battelle]

John Cleese's Letter to America

Cleese is still one of the funniest men on the planet.

His letter to America is wonderfully droll, witty and more than a little damning.

Need a laugh?

Go read it.

A paper in Nature disputes the significance of the KT boundary event:

I've been loving the combined ScienceBlogs feed over the past few weeks.

Along with the new io9 blog, these feeds continue to feed a longstanding love for both science and science fiction.

Take together, they provide a great mix of what is and what could be.

Today's reading brought me to to Greg Laden's blog, where he comments at length on a new paper published in Nature that disputes importance of the KT Boundary Event in mammalian evolution. (See the abstract for The delayed rise of present-day mammals for more; full access requires registration or a trip to the (gasp) library.)

As Laden says:

The KT boundary event is the moment in time when a ca. 10 km. diameter object going very fast hit the earth in the vicinity of the modern Yucatan, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs (and almost everything else larger than a microwave). It has been suggested that this event resulted in (allowed for) the subsequent diversification of the mammals, presumably because the earlier extinction event opened up previously filled niches, into which the mammals evolved, and possibly because of dramatic climate change that occurred with this event.

One of the reasons that this study is important is that it seems to falsify this long-standing hypothesis.

This paper is thoughtfully discussed on Pharyngula and Sandwalk, and I recommend that you have a look at those sites.

I suspect some of my more geologically-inclined friends will find this interesting as well. I'm glad to see that our understanding of evolutionary history continues to, well, evolve, based upon new research.

eTrade's baby/clown commercial is still making me laugh whenever I see it

Never underestimate the creepiness of clowns.

Eric Schulman's "Wiki history of the universe in 200 words or less"

Brilliant. From the Science Creative Quarterly:

Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation? Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation. Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual reproduction. Fossilization. Land exploration. Dinosaur extinction. Mammal expansion. Glaciation. Homo sapiens manifestation. Animal domestication. Food surplus production. Civilization! Innovation. Exploration. Religion. Warring nations. Empire creation and destruction. Exploration. Colonization. Taxation without representation. Revolution. Constitution. Election. Expansion. Industrialization. Rebellion. Emancipation Proclamation. Invention. Mass production. Urbanization. Immigration. World conflagration. League of Nations. Suffrage extension. Depression. World conflagration. Fission explosions. United Nations. Space exploration. Assassinations. Lunar excursions. Resignation. Computerization. World Trade Organization. Terrorism. Internet expansion. Reunification. Dissolution. World-Wide Web creation. Composition. Extrapolation?

Dramatic chipmunk, meet dramatic lemur. Hilarity ensures.

Fail: when things *really* go wrong

Add another bit of Internet jargon to the my personal lexicon: fail.

From the Urban Dictionary:

"Fail: either an interjection used when one disapproves of something, or a verb meaning approximately the same thing as the slang form of suck."

Yup.

Even better, there's a new blog collecting images that catching failing in all its ignominy. Thanks, FAIL blog.

Love it. Funniest thing I saw today, by far.

YouBama and the citizen-generated campaign

I'm loving Google Reader these days. I can consume blog posts, podcasts and video much more quickly and easily than ever before -- and that makes me happy.

This past week, I've been able to enjoy sharing and receiving shared items with friends who are also rocking Reader within the interface. I can see the appeal of Google's approach to social networking and bookmarking.

Your email address book is effectively your network. Your shared bookmarks become a living stream of of your online consciousness.

Facebook may aspire to become our primary online destination -- the recent releases of Facebook apps into the Web at large is a major step in that direction -- but Google's communication and productivity apps are beginning to be linked in ways that reveal the wisdom of the crowds in new ways.

All that aside, I discovered YouBama today through my RSS feeds and TechCrunch's post... I'll be watching those feeds too now.

Online video just gained has yet another outlet, one independent from the campaigns, that just received an avalanche of coverage from Tech Crunch's coverage.

YouTube still dwarfs this site, of course, along with the rest of the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, it's noteworthy to see how much control the campaigns have now lost over "the message" -- and how enabled we have all become in sharing our own opinions.

Democracy is going P2P.

RIP, Heath

From the New York Times:

In a recent interview with WJW-TV, a Fox affiliate in Cleveland, about “I’m Not There,” in which he was one of several actors playing the music legend Bob Dylan, Mr. Ledger struck a philosophical note. He responded to a question about how having a child had changed his life:

“You’re forced into, kind of, respecting yourself more,” he said. “You learn more about yourself through your child, I guess. I think you also look at death differently. It’s like a Catch-22: I feel good about dying now because I feel like I’m alive in her, you know, but at the same hand, you don’t want to die because you want to be around for the rest of her life.”

I heard Heath Ledger had died through my coworker tonight at the annual meeting, watching the news ripple through the rows as it came in through a Blackberry news alert.

I wondered -- briefly -- why the news felt more meaningful than any of the other multitude of deaths that have occurred already in this new year, here in Boston and further abroad. We've been at war now for seven long years since 2001, during which time I've always known that other human beings are encountering untimely deaths around the globe. Cancers, heart disease, strokes and respiratory diseases are part of the U.S. experience. Malaria, dysentary, drug-resistant TB and other infectious diseases are unpleasant additions worldwide. The 57 million people that died in 2002 primarily passed from a combination of those causes.

So why does his passing touch me? As a devout movie watcher, his performances entered my visual memory in a visceral and lasting way.

I never felt "A Knight's Tale" or "The Order" or "Ned Kelly" were entirely his fault; "Brokeback Mountain" and "Monster's Ball" and even "The Patriot" showed his talent in a variety of meaningful ways. I enjoyed him in "The Brother's Grimm." Ledger's portrayal of the Joker in the new Batman movie, due on IMAX this summer, now takes on the unique resonance of the young actor's last performance, where he appears to fill some large shoes occupied until now by Jack Nicholson. I'm hopeful that the laughing, brilliant maniac portrayed in the trailer.

I hope the movie is a classic. Heath certainly was.

He leaves a two year old daughter and the promise of a brilliant acting career behind.

He'll be missed.

New year, old resolutions

I may be slightly behind the curve in posting a list of resolutions, but then I've had other priorities over the past week.

That being said, it was time for some housekeeping. I removed the widgets from my sidebar that were cluttering up the page and weren't adding much value to any casual user.

I've ditched the long blogroll and links to magazines, neither of which represent what reading these days. Instead, I've simply added the feeds of friends, near and far. For those interested, my linkblog and shared delicious bookmarks are still there to be explored.

Other resolutions:

• Exercise more
• Volunteer
• Tell my family and friends that I care about them more often
• Write daily with passion, precision and pithiness
• Pursue creative outlets in woodworking, painting, photography and Web design
• See the dentist, now that I've dealt with the doctor
• Better prepare my truck for offroad use and learn to get myself out of sticky situations in the backcountry
• Be a better editor, whatever the medium -- sound, video or text
• Read more, watch less.
• Fish smarter and earlier
• Be greener
• Become more involved and invested in social media
• Most of all, love myself and those around me; karma comes around.

I know that if I can persevere through the past year's challenges, 2008 will be a cinch. Here's to the year ahead.