I love this:

Via MicroWalrus

Posted at 06:30 AM in Music | Permalink

Source:
Hybrid Technologies AXP
Hybrid Technologies Building 220+ MPG Supercar With 'Wild' Horsepower: Exclusive First Look
Popular Mechanics May 28, 2008
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/automotive_news/4265910.html

Posted at 06:00 AM in Automobiles | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hysterical:

via boinkology

Posted at 06:05 AM in Humor, Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Thin Man is one of my favorite film series. Based upon Dashiell Hammett's book of the same name, William Powell and Myrna Loy make these movies a joy.

Posted at 06:46 AM in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Wow, Ben Stein is an even bigger jackass than I ever imagined. I swore off mentioning is crackpot economic analysis, but the guy has now completely jumped the shark:

Posted at 06:41 AM in Religion, Science, Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Very funny -- (go read the full thing)

8 Types Of Annoying People You’ll Find Inside Starbucks

8. Manager Who Refuses to Recognize the Words Small, Medium, and Large

7. Intern Who is Buying for the Entire Office

6. The Writer Who Wants You to Know They’re a Writer

5. Overly Happy Line Greeter/Order Taker

4. Complicated Order Guy Who Needs his Coffee Right The F*&K Now.

3. The Guy Who Hates Starbucks But Goes There Every Day

2. Study Groups

1. The Person Who Peruses the DVD Section As If They Might Purchase.

Posted at 06:54 AM in Food and Drink, Humor | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Trailer for The Beatles "LOVE" Album (November 2007).

It's a 78-minute soundscape and a fascinating reworking of 26 classic tracks by the bands original producer, George Martin and his son Giles. Available on CD and SPECIAL EDITION stereo + 5.1 surround sound 2-disc set. Both editions include a 28-page booklet with commentary about the tracks and their development.

The Beatles Home page

Posted at 08:42 AM in Music, The Beatles, Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Clay Shirky a asks, "What are you doing with your Cognitive Surplus?"

"She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity."

Source:
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus 
Clay Shirky   
Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008      http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Posted at 06:07 AM in Philosophy, Television, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Reuters:

Astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space and say it is strung along web-like filaments that form the backbone of the universe.

The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday.

Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter -- the protons and neutrons that make up atoms -- but there also is an even larger amount of invisible "dark" matter.

Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.

Source:
Missing matter found in deep space
Maggie Fox
Reuters, Science Tue May 20, 3:17 PM   
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080520/sc_nm/space_matter_dc_1

Posted at 06:13 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Wicked Cool:

Posted at 06:18 AM in Automobiles | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack