No user-serviceable parts inside.
Name: The Rt Hon KJP
resistance is useless
today
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[ where Health and Well-Being meets Wealth and Hell-Being ]
Better living through human improvement.
[ corporate fallout detector ]
"The Corporate fallout Detector scans barcodes off of consumer products, and makes a clicking noise based on the environmental or ethical record (selectable via the "sensitivity" switch) of the manufacturer. It explores issues of corporate accountability and individual choice. Due to increasingly complex global supply chains, a single product we buy may contain parts made by various companies all over the world. We may agree with the business practices of some of these companies, while not with others. "
http://www.jamespatten.com/cfd/
"A cell phone ring tone appeared set to top the British singles chart today, outselling the new single by the band Coldplay by nearly four to one. "Crazy Frog Axel F", a ring tone based on the sound of a revving Swedish mo-ped, is the first tune being used on mobile phones to cross into mainstream music charts, Gennaro Castaldo, a spokesman for HMV, the British music retailing chain said."
"Music purists might not be too happy at the prospect of the "Crazy Frog" outselling Coldplay, but it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise when you consider its huge novelty appeal and the massive amount of exposure it is currently getting," said Castaldo."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/05/29/1117129942429.html?oneclick=true
Afterthought:
JP Sousa tended to write those awful tunes that US marching bands play. One of the more better known is Liberty Bell, aka the theme from the Monty Python comedy series. The Monty Python version generally ended with the descent of a giant foot or 10-ton weight: sadly, ring tones just go on and on and on....
[ stereo types ]
a nice application that lets you create new faces from old. Quite surprising.
http://www.ericmyer.com/green/stereotypes.htm
[ timelines, arranged on a timeline ]
When was the timeline invented? Was it by a social science teacher? Did anyone care?
A brief history of timelines.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/timelines.php
[ and on the third day...]
Some really, really gross christian products. Even includes a Jesus snowdome.
http://www.goingjesus.com/easter/easter.shtml
[ Schapelle Corby ]
Sadly, Ms Corby has been sentenced to 20 years in gaol. Many Australians believe her innocent of the crime of smuggling 4 kg of marijuana INTO Bali (really, why would anyone do that...)
The usual half-wit radio announcers seem to have decided that she was a victim of transport operation run by Australian baggage handlers. They then move to denounce the Indonesian judicial system (which at least gave her a trial, unlike our own system of detaining refugees). Cries of injustice abound
What is missing is the logical cry: for the names and trial of the baggage handlers, who have (by the conclusions of the media) deprived a person of 20 years of their life. Come on: where are they? And when will hey be tried? Or is it too hard to face the idea of a young woman's life being ruined by one of "our people" , when it is so much more convenient to assign blame to foreigners?
[ world's corniest romance novel covers ]
Take some covers of real romance novels, and re-title them.
http://www.worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/
"Lord of The Tube Socks" is one of the better ones, along with "Wardrobe Malfunction"
[ S P O R E : algorithmic art ]
Beautiful patterns generated algorithmically. Just beautiful. Not sure if these should be called art or nature. But they are certainly elegant. THAT sort of elegant ...
[ red is the new ... the new red, really ]
A new study of Olympic athletes finds that those wearing red have an advantage over blue-suited competitors.
"We find that wearing red is consistently associated with higher probability of winning," University of Durham researchers Russell Hill and Robert Barton write in the May 19 issue of the journal Nature.
The reason may have to do with hard-wired perceptions in the human brain that date back to more animalistic times, researchers say. (or, the particular limitations of athletes' brains, which is not out of the question...)
How can someone wicked walk around free
I see red, I see red, I see red (Split Enz, I See Red)
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050518_red_wins.html
[ a love story... a lonely man and the excavator of his life ]
http://www.mitchellrose.com/home.html
A wonderful set of short comedic films. The Deere John one is a classic. Perhaps it should be titled Dances with Machinery?
[ Outfoxed ]
There are over 8 billion web pages. OutFoxed uses your network of trusted friends and experts to help you find the good stuff and avoid the bad. (And a lot more, too.)
OutFoxed has a "trust" system that places more emphasis on information "approved" by trusted colleagues than untrusted ones. Very very clever...in fact it has similarities to the Page Rank system in Google.
This product is probably the first of a number of socially-based information tools, that might influence how we deal with information in the future. Interestingly, it really "mimics" how some people handle information now, in a non-computing sense. For example, we know that young people place much more emphasis on TV programs and their friends than on career advisors when it comes to thinking about possible employment. And many people place great emphasis on their peers and "celebrities", and little emphasis on 40 years of medical research, when it comes to smoking. So in a way OutFoxed is just applying a technology to that process (and I suppose people will still choose who they trust wisely or foolishly).
Essential Learnings relevance:
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[ Grocery Store Wars ]
Organic farming promotes itself with a Star Wars-based animation.
Use your fork, Luke.
http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html
[ Google parody ]
Remove that pesky content, leaving just the adverts...
http://j-walk.com/other/googlecb/
[ the world's social data, expressed in flags ]
Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years.
"We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.
The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc"
http://www.brazilianartists.net/home/flags/index.htm
[ without the Internet we wouldn't have this ]
International Hedgehog Registry. Is YOUR hedgehog registered?
http://hedgehogregistry.org/register.html
[ just because ... ]
"I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is imaginary. Please multiply by i and dial again."
Homework: locate the primary impossible colours, from which all other impossible colours can be obtained by mixing. Prove or disprove the existence of an additive identity element.
[ intractable song ]
For a friend:
"Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
Take one down,
and pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall"
(repeat).
[ too obvious: all the graph paper you could ever want ]
All the common formats of graph paper, as pdf's. Includes most commonly-used sizes, anda "build your own" tool . Also has an Asymmetric Graph Paper Generator (for knitting, where stitch width and height are different, you can design your own to whatever ratio you want), all the usual imperial and metric sizes, iso patterns, hexagonal, celtic knot paper, etc.
Most are in inches.
You may need to beat Acrobat into submission, so it doesn't re-scale your printout to fit the paper size. There is a "fit to paper" setting somewhere you can turn off.
http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/
[ Flickr tagging of photos ]
An interesting meme, from an information-categorising point of view.
Flickr is (as most people here would realise) a huge public photoblog. Almost by accident the tags chosen by people have formed a sort of folksonomy, a taxonomy built by normal folk (as distinct from one built by say librarians or archivists).
Now the data set is so large, patterns and themes are emerging.
For example: check out the photos tagged with "squaredcircle" http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/squaredcircle/
Or maybe those tagged as "purple" http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/purple/
Or metallic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/metallic Or insert any suitable term into that URL
Whereas things like Google image search rely on "accidental" tagging (usually by a single phrase such as an ALT tag),. Flickr allows multiple free tagging. The results are sometimes intriguing. Some might say that this "user tagging" exceeds "specialist tagging" in usefulness (for some purposes, at least). Certainly the sheer number of images allows pattern to develop.
Some people have commented that Gmail (Google's free email service) uses a similar way to organise information. In their approach you don't need to worry about hierarchical folder structures and hence where to file using a couple of key words or a tag.
For students, this has some potential from an information literacy perspective: it might be useful to illustrate an approach to managing information, and kids will readily understand it.
