June 2007
128 posts
1-800-GOOG-411: now with maps
Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager, and Mike LeBeau, Software Engineer In case you hadn’t heard, a few months back we launched 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) in the U.S. It’s a free telephone service that lets you search for businesses by voice and get connected to those businesses for free. Today, your GOOG-411 experience just got better: during your call to GOOG-411, just...
Survivor: Brooklyn
Grant Stoddard (pictured) saw little islands (also pictured) as his plane flew above New York, and from that a seed was planted for possibly the craziest idea we’ve heard, well, this week: he wanted to live on one of these islands for a few days to, you know, test his wilderness survival skills while still having a clear view of the Empire State Building. After running the idea by a friend,...
Ha! Ha! Ha! I Can’t Believe How Funny This Sitcom...
Ooh! Here comes the best show on television! I wonder what kind of hilarious antics these so-and-so’s get into this week. Ooh! Ooh! Here comes the… (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
New publicly released data shows that some NYC...
New publicly released data shows that some NYC subway lines are exceeding maximum capacity, both in terms of the number of riders per car and the number of trains per track. (link) (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
#312; In which an Officer exercises Vigilance
Thanks to everyone who came out to the most-excellent MoCCA Art Festival! It is always a great experience meeting fans, winning over new fans, and fielding bizarre inquiries from people who have no idea what I am doing or why I would do it. I always bring one of my old 19th-century books for display and without fail I get someone who couldn’t care less about comics but who wants to buy...
Punctuation bookends
Cory Doctorow:
I’m pretty hot for these quote-unquote bookends, made of concrete with a synthetic rubber cover.
Link
(via Grow A Brain)
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
MySpace, Facebook mirror class divisions in US...
Cory Doctorow:
My friend danah boyd — frequently featured here — is one of the best social scientists working on social networking sites today. She’s just published a working draft of a paper called “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” which posits that well-to-do, stable American teens with “good prospects” end up on Facebook,...
Aurora viewed from space.
Aurora is a crown of light that circles the Earth’s poles. This photo was taken from the IMAGE satellite and shows the aurora australis (southern lights). Link -via Reddit
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
'Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah' To Be Adapted Into...
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
POLITICS: Coming Soon: War With Iran
As a nation we are practically forcing Bush and Cheney to attack Iran because of our relentless dislike of the administration. If we liked them they might actually listen to us, but we don’t, so they won’t. Bush and Cheney both know that if they build up false reasons to attack Iran, then follow through; Bush will get a bump in the polls. That is how America works.
Currently all signs point to...
POLITICS: Asshole Fuckface Round Up
There are an enormous amount of assholes in the world but only a few make the cut and land up on the FearTheReaper Asshole Fuckface Round Up. Here are this week’s winners:
Rudy Giuliani.
Since 2002, Rudy Giuliani has employed childhood friend Monsignor Alan Placa as a consultant at Giuliani Partners. The great thing about Placa is that he is an accused child molester. A grand jury report...
Insufficient Postage
Forgive me Internet for I have sinned, it’s been one week since my last confession blog post. And now it’s been about three seconds since I last blasphemed. This time I have a legitimate excuse (no really). Thursday morning my parents and sister came into town, and so most of my non-work time was filled showing them the sights and being a filthy tourist. And even though they left...
Binary marble adding machine
Mark Frauenfelder:
Video demonstration of a brilliant and elegant wooden adding machine that uses marbles. Link
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Theremin Cover Version of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy
Randy George of The Ether and Aether Experiment recently produced an amazing cover version (plus music video) of the Gnarls Barkley song “Crazy” as played on a Theremin, specifically a Moog Etherwave Pro Theremin. What a great jam, I think I’ve watched this video over 10 times now.
This video is an experiment to see how rapidly the theremin can be injected into the world’s collective...
Why Do Retirees Buy Such Big Houses, and Other...
The Cornell economics professor Robert Frank (not to be confused with the excellent Wall Street Journal writer Robert Frank, or the great photographer Robert Frank) begins a semester by asking his students to ask and answer a real-world economics questions in 500 words or less. He has now compiled these essays in a book called The Economic Naturalist. It is a great deal of fun, and interesting....
A Web App To Find Web Apps. No, Really.
Web 2.0 has finally gained so much mass that it when it dies, the workers will have to cut a hole in the side of its house and extract its rotting corpse with a crane.
Simple Spark is a search engine that helps you find Web 2.0 applications to suit your lifestyle. Do you live in your mom’s basement, coding a YouTube clone between shifts at the Waffle House? There’s a web app for...
Librarians
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Jason Hall: Standing in the rain. First in line to see John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton (via Twitter / Jason Hall)
Seventh Harry Potter Hacked?
Someone claims to have hacked the Bloomsbury Publishing network, and has posted what he says is the ending to the last Harry Potter book.
I don’t believe it, actually. Sure, it’s possible — probably even easy. But the posting just doesn’t read right to me.
The attack strategy was the easiest one. The usual milw0rm downloaded exploit delivered by...
BEIRUT - new album & 2007 Tour Dates
Did anyone notice a member of Beirut playing a horn with The Citizens Band when they opened for the White Stripes at Irving the other night? I could be wrong.
Zach @ Primavera sound 2007, 9:00 am soundcheck (more about that)
Back in May it kind of leaked out that Grizzly Bear-fan Zach Condon and his band Beirut would be playing three NYC shows in September, but the tour dates I just received...
Apple uses big-handed model to "shrink" iPhone
Mark Frauenfelder:
Lars says
When I viewed the new iPhone site something struck me: did Apple change the dimensions of the unit?
A quick comparison of the official Apple photos revealed they’ve just changed handsize.
(Wikipedia has an interesting page on forced perspective by the way)
Link
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Five things you might do with “all that ass”
open a modest home ass business
serve hot meals of ass to the less fortunate
hold a weekend “Ass Sale” on your lawn
make colorful ass gift bags for the holidays
give sympathetic testimony for recovering hump drunks
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Ted Nugent sucks so bad....
…..they can’t even give the tickets away (to his June 24th Nokia Theatre show — password=catscratch) (thx Ondal) (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
An average human being gets 400 miles per gallon...
An average human being gets 400 miles per gallon at 3 mph. “A 155 lb human walking at 3 mph will burn 246 kcal/hour, or 82 kcal/mile. Feed that human one gallon of gas in potential energy — 31,548 kcal — and he’ll have enough energy to walk for 128 hours.” (link) (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
1st Edition Harry Potter Book Expected To Fetch...
A student is expected to make up to £15,000 when he sells his rare first-edition copy of the first Harry Potter book to help pay his way through university.
Toby Rundle’s hardback copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is one of only 500 produced in the first print run of the book in 1997.
The book, which originally cost £10.99, will help pay for a lot of his student...
Lauryn Hill, Boyz II Men & MC HAMMER playing...
MC Hammer has a blog?
@ Wingate Field, Brooklyn, NYC in 2007 - FREE July 9 - MC Hammer, Doug E Fresh, Slick Rick & MC Lyte (Old School Night) July 16 - Fred Hammond (Gospel Night) July 23 - Boyz II Men & Ruben Studdard (an evening of Smooth Grooves) July 30 - The Mighty Sparrow (Carribbean Night) Aug 06 - Lauryn Hill Aug 13 - mystery night Aug 20 - The O’Jays & The Spinners...
Titanic lamp
David Pescovitz:
Designed by Charles Trevelyan, the Titanic is a lacquered wood, cotton, and steel lamp inspired by the sunk ship. It’s £259.00 from Hidden Art. Link (via Sensory Impact)
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Dynamic Abstraction: computer generated art with...
Understatement: Joshua Davis creates some really incredible artwork in Flash.
By combining vector primitives, a carefully chosen color pallete, some deterministic rules, and pinch of random(), the images are generated in Actionscript at runtime. Each time the software is executed, a unique image is created, though it maintains the same guiding principles of other iterations of the same...
Photographs of very complex highway intersections....
Photographs of very complex highway intersections. A couple of the photos (the last one in particular) look fake, but cool nonetheless. (via quipsologies) (link) (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
O HAI GOOGLZ
…I CAN HAS PRIVACY?
photo: Google maps!
capped and submitted by: Lucky’s neighbor
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
CELEB: Cloris Leachman is Not Afraid of You, and...
Now that the Tony-winning juggernaut that was musical version of The Producers has finally bid adieu to Broadway, you can’t really blame Mel Brooks for taking another trip to the well with Young Frankenstein: The Musical.
You also can’t blame Cloris Leachman, one of the surviving cast members of the original 1974 movie, for auditioning to reprise her role as Frau Blücher (insert whinnying...
AT&T Promised To Offer $10 DSL; It Didn't...
At the end of December, AT&T proposed a bunch of “concessions” to the FCC in order to get approval for its merger with BellSouth. While there was a last minute protest, as a few people noticed that the fine print contained a few surprising nuggets, the FCC wasted no time (literally, it was just a few hours) approving the merger on those concessions. One of the concessions was...
The Perfect Crime 2
Last time Cloak & Dagger pranked someone, they asked Ben Gibbard for Colin Meloy’s phone number. This week, it pays off when Cloak & Dagger rings up Colin and ask him about the formative sexual experience that inspired “The Chimbley Sweep” and his inspiration in writing “Billy Liar” from Hillary Clinton’s perspective. He’s a good sport about it...
Marmaduke's owner-lady found a membership...
Marmaduke’s owner-lady found a membership certificate to something called the “Bone of the Month Club” in the mail and naturally assumed it was Marmaduke’s. In reality, the certificate was made by Marmaduke and intended for her, a relatively cute and clever new tactic in his never-ending quest to subtly communicate to her, in the only way he knows how, that he wants to...
Steve Jobs: A man in a hurry
In his profile of Steve Jobs, John Heilemann doubts the sustainability of Apple’s digital music business, which is what the geeky blogs will focus on. But the article, in this week’s New York magazine, hints at another more shocking question, that neither it, nor the rest of the press, will ask outright: what if the legendary Apple founder, who had surgery for pancreatic cancer in...
Things Coming Up
Just an update on some things in the pipeline. First the stuff I know for sure:
Thursday 6/21:
I’ll be a guest at Dave Hills’ “The Dave Hill Explosion” at UCB in New York. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing yet, probably playing some music and pretending to be funny like Dave Hill. Word is, Hodgman is also a guest. www.myspace.com/davehillexplosion eventful.com/events/E0-001-004842389-5
...
Toothpaste For Dinner intensive cuss training
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
The rules of unicycle quidditch and juggling...
The rules of unicycle quidditch and juggling quidditch. (link) (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Temporal anomalies in time travel movies, an...
Temporal anomalies in time travel movies, an investigation of how time travel is represented in movies like Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys, and Back to the Future. (via joshua) (link) (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Silhouette Art Out of Trash
Tim Noble and Sue Webster put together amazing piles of trash that project eerily fluid and intricate silhouettes upon the wall. Their work reminds me a lot of the festering trash heaps of my apartment, except with a purpose more aesthetic than lazy, disgusting and disease-ridden.
The Shadow Hot Heads Under Silent Wings [Panther House]
(via Jason’s shared items in Google...
Marmaduke creator Brad Anderson is proving he is...
Marmaduke creator Brad Anderson is proving he is still relevant in the 21st century by tempering his usual blend of phantom humor, obtuse logic and shit-blisteringly shameless recycling with a reference to a hit television program of which he possesses a vague awareness. (via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Second Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner
On April 1, I announced the Second Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest:
Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take...
CULTURE: Pearl Needs to Get Her Drink On; Bill...
Bill O’Reilly is out of his god-damned mind. Of course, we already knew this, perhaps to the point where it’s commonplace and his particular brand of crazy just becomes white noise in the background. Every so often, however, he says something that makes me sit up and say, “What the fuck, Bill?”
Remember Will Ferrell’s viral video masterpiece The Landlord? Surely you...
Yes Men crash oil expo, propose turning corpses...
Cory Doctorow:
Master pranksters The Yes Men crashed the Gas and Oil Exposition 2007 in Calgary this week, impersonating a rep from the National Petroleum Council at a keynote in which they proposed to convert people who died from climate change disasters into fuel.
After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to “huge global calamities” and disrupt oil supplies,...
one continuous line movie
one intriguing & continuously hand-drawn line.
[link: youtube.com]
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
since pi is universal, any sufficiently-advance...
about - archive - cast - comments - sexy exciting merchandise - messageboard - search - reader art - links
previousJune 14th 2007next
Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0
June 14th 2007:
I got some emails from people who were confused as to who Morris is yesterday! THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR HAVING RECURRING CHARACTERS. In any case, if you haven’t...
Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot
The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.
Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists...
may the sanctity of the sink prevail
(from midgy in madison, wisconsin.)
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Nerds Take Over Military Base With Computers,...
(via Jason’s shared items in Google Reader)
Like 'Beef', Without the 'B'
Tonight’s scheduled enjoyment was none other than Mr. Eef Barzelay, of Clem Snide fame. Though I’m not sure how much longer he can keep billing himself as “of Clem Snide” since he’s been touring solo for a while now. But Wikipedia tells me they have an album coming out some time this year, so that’s encouraging. But anyway, I saw him tonight, at Joe’s...