[tv] Jon Ronson:

True fact. The That's Life researcher who found and filmed the dog that says sausages is Adam Curtis.

— jon ronson (@jonronson) August 10, 2010

[comics] Barely Seeing Daylight … a stop motion video of comic artist D’Israeli drawing comics for one day compressed into forty-three seconds. [more…]

[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’

[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.

[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).

[funny] Go Look: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Robot Needs … ‘Self-Actualization: Destroy Humans’

[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?’

Go Look: 69 alternatives to the default Facebook profile picture …

[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.’

[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…’

[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.’

[disasters] The Crash of EgyptAir 990 … fascinating report on the last flight of a Boeing 767 in 1999 which was probably deliberately brought down by one of it’s pilots in an act of suicide … ‘The pilots were left to the darkness of the sky, whether to work together or to fight. I’ve often wondered what happened between those two men during the 114 seconds that remained of their lives. We’ll never know. Radar reconstruction showed that the 767 recovered from the dive at 16,000 feet and, like a great wounded glider, soared steeply back to 24,000 feet, turned to the southeast while beginning to break apart, and shed its useless left engine and some of its skin before giving up for good and diving to its death at high speed.’

[health] On Being Sane In Insane Places … long disturbing report on a now classic experiment where a number of mentally healthy people pretend to have mental ilness to enter a psychiatric hospital and once they are in return to their normal behaviour and then report on how they are treated …

One tacit characteristic of psychiatric diagnosis is that it locates the sources of aberration within the individual and only rarely within the complex of stimuli that surrounds him. Consequently, behaviors that are stimulated by the environment are commonly misattributed to the patient’s disorder. For example, one kindly nurse found a pseudopatient pacing the long hospital corridors. “Nervous, Mr. X?” she asked. “No, bored,” he said.

[comics] My Favourite Medical Graphic Novels … a list of comics exploring health and medical themes … On Epileptic by David B: ‘In Epileptic there are no happy endings, no miracle cures, but we are left with a deeper understanding of how illness can affect a family. Not recommended for newly diagnosed epileptics. An upsetting masterpiece.’

[magazines] The Best Magazine Articles Ever … great reading list of links from Kevin Kelly.

[life] What Makes Us Happy? … engrossing article on a long-term study of (what appeared to be) successful, happy American men and what factors might have contributed to that …

Indeed, the lives themselves-dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting-resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. The physical material-wispy sheets from carbon copies; ink from fountain pens-has a texture. You can hear the men’s voices, not only in their answers, but in their silences, as they stride through time both personal (masturbation reports give way to reports on children; career plans give way to retirement plans) and historical (did they vote for Dewey or Truman?; “What do you think about today’s student protesters, drug users, hippies, etc.?”). Secrets come out. One man did not acknowledge to himself until he reached his late 70s that he was gay. With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

[comics] Lady Gaga Kidnaps Commissioner Gordon … ‘While the kidnapping occurred at stately Wayne Manor, home of playboy jet-setter Bruce Wayne, the eccentric billionaire was not available for comment.’

[world] The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth … some amazing pictures from Socotra Island. ‘…for this island, which is part of a group of 4 islands, has been geographically isolated from mainland Africa for the last 6 or 7 million years. Like the Galapagos Islands, this island is teeming with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, a full 1/3 of which are endemic, i.e. found nowhere else on Earth.’ [via Sore Eyes]

[lists] A List Of Common Misconceptions … ‘There is no evidence that Vikings wore horns on their helmets.’

[press] Overheard in the Newsroom …

Editor to no one in particular: “Can’t we just have a normal murder?”

[kubrick] Go Watch: A Brief Interview with Kier Dullea on Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey. [via Daring Fireball]

[brain] Why Minds Are Not Like Computers … a long article on the history of artificial intelligence research and why it might not be possible to create a thinking computer … ‘People who believe that the mind can be replicated on a computer tend to explain the mind in terms of a computer.’

[music] Go Look: Photograph of Rick Astley and Morrissey … ‘Taken Backstage at Top Of The Pops in London, February 1989’ [via Boundr]

[comics] For Sale on eBay: Cerebus: High Society #1-25 Reprints by Dave Sim.

[philosophy] The Philosophy Of Immanuel Kant in Three Minutes … ‘Kant. It’s a German name and I’m quite happy to sit here in silence until you’re mature enough to get over it…’