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21 August 2010
[movies] Is Christopher Nolan the new Stanley Kubrick?‘Kubrick made films about paedophilia, military justice, atomic obliteration, urban violence and the Vietnam war; his emigration to England was partly fuelled by the desire to avoid controlling Hollywood types. Nolan is – at present, anyhow – a confirmed establishment figure; nothing he’s done has caused the smallest ripple of disquiet. This may change, but with another Batman film in the works I can’t see it happening just yet.’
20 August 2010
[internet] Human-flesh Search Engines in China … fascinating look at online vigilantes in China who use the internet to track down perceived wrong-doers and punish them … ‘Chali was moved by the powerful feeling that Wang shouldn’t be allowed to escape censure for his role in his wife’s suicide. “I want to know what is going to happen if I get married and have a similar experience,” Chali says. “I want to know if the law or something could protect me and give me some kind of security.” It struck me as an unusual wish – that the law could guard her from heartbreak.’ [via Sore Eyes]
19 August 2010
[funny] Hyperbole and a Half: This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult‘I did three things yesterday! Now I’m supposed to keep doing things? It’s like the things never end!’ [more…]
18 August 2010
[tumblr] Go Look: Crap At My Parents House‘The goal of Crap At My Parents House is to pay homage to all of the weird crap that everyone’s parents have…’
17 August 2010
[food] Food Bloggers visit an Aberdeen Angus Steak House‘Foul, expensive food, served incompetently in dreadful surroundings, Aberdeen Angus is a restaurant with no redeeming features. But then I imagine most of you suspected that already; the really nasty surprise on Friday was just how bad, not just passively mediocre but actively wicked their modus operandi is, and just how successful they are at exploiting naive tourists…’
[funny] Go Look: For Sale – Cobra MK III ’86‘Spent 525 credits on a fuel scoop…’
[tech] 1975: The First Digital Camera‘This is a prototype digital camera Kodak produced way back in 1975. The “toaster-sized” system relied on a cassette tape for recording data. The digitized images took 23 seconds to record to tape which then had to be played back using a specialized system…’
16 August 2010
[kubrick] Photo of Stanley Kubrick on the set of A Clockwork Orange‘It’s unusual to have someone’s feet so prominent, but it doesn’t take away from his expression. He was the least lazy of men, but there’s something very relaxed about the pose.’
[funny] Go Look: How The Male Angler Fish Gets Completely Screwed‘Oh God, what the shit is this?!!!’
15 August 2010
[internet] What’s the carbon footprint of… the internet?‘If we decided (somewhat arbitrarily) that half of the emissions from all these laptop and desktop machines were down to internet-based activity, and then add on the emissions from the data centres that make all this online activity possible, then the internet would clock in at around 1% of all the CO2 emissions released from burning fossil fuels. Put another way, the internet releases around 300m tonnes of CO2 – as much as all the coal, oil and gas burned in Turkey or Poland in one year, or more than half of those burned in the UK.’
13 August 2010
[iphones] 10 Unlikely iPhone Insurance Claims‘Juice from a defrosting piece of meat leaked into it ‘
12 August 2010
[quote] ‘Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out, and it retcons the last one like it never happened. There’s still Jesus, but he’s not the main character anymore, and the messiah hasn’t shown up yet. Jews like the first movie but ignored the sequels. Christians think you need to watch the first two, but the third movie doesn’t count. The Muslims think the third one was the best, and Mormons liked the second one so much, they started writing fanfiction that doesn’t fit with ANY of the series canon.’Think Of It Like A Movie
11 August 2010
[tv] Jon Ronson:

[comics] Barely Seeing Daylight … a stop motion video of comic artist D’Israeli drawing comics for one day compressed into forty-three seconds. [more…]
10 August 2010
[funny] Go Look: Rocket Propelled Chainsaw … for when you absolutely, positively need to kill every zombie in the room.
[comics] Name Five Extended Moments In Comics History You Wish Had Been Documented On Film As They Were Happening … some intriguing choices from readers of The Comics Reporter‘Dave Sim’s life from issues 1 to 300 of Cerebus’
9 August 2010
[lifeblog] It’s not a lorry with a crane – it’s a Urban Grabloader Concept.
[ants] Invasion … Tom Junod on ants and what it’s like to live on top of a colony of Argentine ants

…what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out – what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you – is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.

8 August 2010
[brains] Brain Drain … the New Yorker takes a look “neuroenhancing” drugs …

Alex remains enthusiastic about Adderall, but he also has a slightly jaundiced critique of it. “It only works as a cognitive enhancer insofar as you are dedicated to accomplishing the task at hand,” he said. “The number of times I’ve taken Adderall late at night and decided that, rather than starting my paper, hey, I’ll organize my entire music library! I’ve seen people obsessively cleaning their rooms on it.”

[space] Lutetia: The Largest Asteroid … fascinating comparison of the size of the largest asteroids so far visited by spacecraft (from Astronomy Picture of the Day).
7 August 2010
[funny] Go Look: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Robot Needs‘Self-Actualization: Destroy Humans’
6 August 2010
[comics] The Complete D.R. & Quinch … a review of one of Alan Moore’s early works from 2000AD … ‘It’d be hard today to convey the level and nature of the excitement readers felt in 1984 when a fresh new talent – an author – blew into the company town, overhauling a run-of-the-mill commercial comic, revitalizing it completely and, in the process, making it utterly his own. Who was this guy? Where had he learned to write like that?’
5 August 2010
[movies] Inception Music Comparison … (slight spoilers) … [more…]
[tech] On Tablets …some thoughts on iPads, magazines and tablets computers from Lee Maguire‘That was my first thought: This seems ideal for my technophobic mother. She refuses, point blank, to touch keyboards. When, as a kid, I got my first computer she asked me if I knew what all the buttons did. “That’s not an answerable question,” I told her, “the function of the keys is contextually dependant. Any key can potentially do anything.” Whoops, turns out that sort of revelation is not an effective way to cure the older generation’s fear of computers.’
4 August 2010
[comics] What is Doctor Strange’s birthdate? .. The internet’s resident Doctor Strange expert Neilalien on the rumour that Alan Moore and Doctor Strange share a birthday on 17th November … ‘From Doctor Strange #176’s cover, we get November. The tombstone is oh-so-conveniently cracked where the year should be.’
[life] He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died‘By May 4, 1997, it’s clear that he has cancer…’
3 August 2010
[fake] Go Look: Photo Tampering Throughout History‘Photography lost its innocence many years ago. In as early as the 1860s, photographs were already being manipulated, only a few decades after Niepce created the first photograph in 1814.’