Seals with Lawyers

Yikes! Could there be anything nastier?

The Navy Seals are suing AP for disclosing identities (publishing photos) of six Seal team members.

Link

on Creativity

Hugh "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" Macleod is a creative director who writes about the new, happy, fun, grim meathook realities of marketing and advertising.

Link via Creative Commons.

2005

Some of my 2005 "Food for Thought":



"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."
-- Joseph Campbell





"Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found."
-- Lao Tzu (ancient Chinese sage)

Headless iMac?

Rumors are flying about a $500 monitor-less iMac that may be announced at the January 11th MacWorld in San Francisco.

This makes sense and would be very cool but there's been lots of bad rumors flying around lately (like last weeks Spanish rumor/hoax that Apple was setting up a cell phone service).

Target Market for a sub-$500 iMac: Windows users (switchers), iPod users and me! I'd simply hook one up to my 42" gas plasma display and run a wireless keyboard, mouse and WiFi net connection :-)

If this comes to be and Apple has done their homework it should include some type of KMV switch or switchbox to accomodate monitors & keyboards people already own.

Apple says: "it'll never happen".

Link via Gizmodo.

Tsunami

Link to an animation of yesterdays Tsunami.

Link to update on the disaster from bloggers.

Additional update here.

Via BoingBoing.

UPDATE: The Turkish press is now reporting that the wave has claimed 55,000 lives from all effected countries. Link.

UPDATE: By the time you consider recovery / discovery efforts and the devastating effects of disease over the next couple of weeks this thing could claim 200,000 plus lives. One of the worst natural disasters in history.
I'm saying prayers for the lost souls and the devasted ones left behind.

UPDATE: Jesus. I hate being right.

Frankly, I'd be just as happy spinning at the same old speed for a few more thousand years.

UPDATE: How bloggers are helping.

SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY HERE.

UPDATE: As of (1/17/05) 170,000 souls lost and UN relief/recovery agencies have been finding 2-3,000 bodies per day... and think they will be for the next several days.

"Tell us about your balls Pete"

In spite of the wonderful Holiday tie in I think this is one of the best SNL skits of all time.

There's was a great follow up "NPR Delicious Dish" skit on a subsequent Baldwin hosted episode. The topic: "weiners" :-)

Link to MPEG video (57Mb).

A big mother

UPDATE:

Link to interior schematic
(see if you can find where they're going to keep the peanuts).


The world's biggest plane has started rolling off assembly lines and is expected to take its first flight in March 2005. The quarter-billion-dollar, twin-deck, four-aisle plane can carry 555 passengers. Thanks to its design's outsized wings, future versions of the economical plane may carry as many as 800 passengers.

Link to Airbus site.

Link via MeFi.

Ole! Santa

Deliciously bad... but I love this kinda stuff :-)

Link to MP3's (via BoingBoing)

Scared by Santa

Well, as the Church Lady used to say: "if you rearrange the letters what do you get...."

Link to the photo contest winners.

Happy Solstice

(AP photo from Time Magazine)

Let me be the first to wish all my pagan, Druid and other friends a Happy Solstice!

364 longer days ahead.

Holiday Mashup

Video mashup of Pulp Fiction with vintage Rankin-Bass holiday animation. Link (Thanks, Perry E. Metzger, also spotted on Adam Fields)

Link via Xeni's posting on BoingBoing.

iPhone Update

(Design Concepts)


Rumours that Apple is making their own phone (dubbed by the pundits the "iPhone") are flying around the net, backed up by reports that they're showing prototypes around to their partners. These rumours are probably true -- for one simple reason -- the iPod.

Link to Mobilewhack article.

Sky High (1/2 mile high to be exact)

A mind bending 160 floors, a half mile high (or 8/10ths of a kilometer, for math-challenged metric types) skyscraper, dwarfing Taiwan's current record holding Taipei 101 (1,671 feet) and making a mockery of the Sears Tower's 108 floors.

To be built by Samsung in Dubai, UAE.

Link via Gizmodo.

Westfalia concept

Scheduled to be an entry in the 2005 Detroit Auto show.
I suppose Philip Stark will be designing the bong for it.

A total "BoBo" mobile.

Montreal Design firm website here.
Great animation here.

What's a blog?

The Honorable Richard Posner chimes in with his answer:

"It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek's thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge."

Link via Corante.

Sea Legs

"Honey! I'm going to the Tim Horton's Drive Thru, you want anything?"

Link via Gizmodo.

Cartoon bones

Betty Boop, Pikachu, Fred Flinstone and many more! :-)

Link.

War

...is hell.

Poodle Fitness

This is (at the same time) scary, sad, a little disturbing and one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Link to video.

Farewell Pierre

A truly great Canadian.

I loved the way he pronouced Andrew Onderdonk's name in the CBC documentary film "The National Dream".

He will be missed.


A rather interesting video link here. (NSFW)

Transform This!

A very compelling and demograhically "spot on" car ad.
and the motion capture really kicks ass.

Link to video here.

"Let me be the first to welcome our new anthropomorphic rock star over lords"

"In designing GuitarBot, our goal was to create an electrified slide guitar that was versatile, responsive, capable of fast and slow playing, easy to control, with high-quality sound, modular and portable. We also wanted to extend, not simply duplicate, the capabilities of a human guitarist."

Now if we can just find a robot to replace Brittany....


Link via MetaFilter.
Link to video.

Corgi Art Gallery

Very cool Corgi Art Gallery.

Link via BoingBoing.

Rudolph at 40

A great story on NPR by Steve Inskeep on the Rankin Bass stop motion TV production of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" (a Canadian production I belive). The longest running, highest rated TV show ever. It took 18 months to create the 50 minutes of stop motion animation.

A link to the audio stream can be found on this page.

"Please Don't Eat The Daisies"

As long as these things don't grow up to become Killer Tomatoes this could be a very cool application for genetically modified plants.

When the plant roots come into contact with landmines... their color changes.

Link via BoingBoing.

Apple iPhone

This really does make a lot of sense.... I sure as hell would want one.

Link.

George Orwell or Woody Allen?

you decide.

Link.

How NOT

to pull a car out of the water.

Tune Backpack

I actually bult (or should I say "McGuiver'd") one of these for myself over 5 years ago using a North Face backback and a set of SONY sports Walkman speakers (probably around 5 watts each). I still use it... but exclusively for Skiing. I always felt that headphones on the slopes were dangerous. People on the chairlifts or Gondolas are usually very receptive... if not, the remote volume control is never far away :-)

Link via Engadget.

Geek Chess Set

but you’re not seriously going to waste money buying a chess set at a store when you could just make one out of whatever spare 50 ohm BNC, SMA, and N terminators with various BNC, SMA, N, APC7, F, UHF connectors and inter-series adapters you have around the house, are you?


Link via Engadget.

John Cleese TV

John Cleese is now performing at his ranch in California via his
web site which charges $50 a year for the privilege (though some of the content are free.)

Fed up with television executives, travels and studios, the Monty Python star set up the website as a vehicle for his humour and personal philosophy. He updates the site every day with new sketches, pictures of his home life and biographical information.

"It's like having a tiny TV station or a magazine. The simplicity is delightful," said Cleese last week.

Link.

Digital Video still too hard

Kinda what I thought, just based on talking to friends...

Link via Engadget.

Music Industry Business Models

Doc Searls on Mark Cuban's ideas about Music Industry business models.

Wireless iPod (patent)

Engadget has the scoop here.

A loud "Hallelujah!" heard from Rome

They sure didn't teach this when I attended St. Dominic's school in 1968!


Link.

New Map?

but the climates probably wouldn't change much, aside from your basic trends in global warming.

via CivicSpace Labs.

20 Reasons

Why you shouldn't post your picture on the web!

America: First in technology

but thirteenth in broadband adoption.

via LessigBlog

Mark with an "X" ?

"It's not the voting that's democracy,
it's the counting."

-Tom Stoppard


A view shared by these folks.

Hunter S. Thompson on the 2004 Campaign

One of my favorite Hunter quotes (on describing Hollywood) is:
"a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side."

His current Roling Stone article is here.

Jon Stewart aims for a killshot on CNN Crossfire

Jon Stewart rips into Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. A must see.


From BoingBoing:

The iFilm version currently has 99,228 views. Sites don't make Blogdex without 250,000 views. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe 350,000 is more viewers than the original Crossfire interview probably had. (I can only find that CNN averages 757,000 viewers during prime time).

Update: From the time I posted this until the time I finished an email with similar content, 40,000 people viewed the iFilm version of the Crossfire interview. Everytime I've checked BitTorrent, there have been more than 100 people sharing the file.

Another Update (10/16/04 7:56 PM): Leonard Lin is saying there are 4,000 BitTorrent seeds and his Apache server is now "handling 100+ simultaneous connections and avg'ing 7.0MB/s right now, 25GB/hr"

Yet Another Update (10/17/04 7:47PM): The Stewart/Crossfire torrents are now number 5 on Blogdex and has 291,863 on iFilm. The BitTorrent page lists 54,206 download, but I can't imaging how they're coming up with this number.

Download available here.

UPDATE: The NY Times comments on the incident here.

Way cool Sushi USB Flash Drives

Yakitori, sashimi, MP3's, digital photos, yum!

Link.

Finding Nemo

Very cool underwater digital camera housing.

Link via Gizmodo.

Mount St. Helen's web cam

Check out the US Geological Survey's live webcam.
Mmmmmm..... liquid hot magma!

WIPO... WIPO GOOD!

Good news from Geneva and recent developments at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

via BoingBoing.

Speed Blades

Best feature on this gadget:

no brakes.

Link.

Hand Shadows from 1859

Pretty cool.

Link via BoingBoing.

From LA to NY

Check out this French artist/musicians video of a trip from LA to NY.
Absolutely amazing. Link.
via MetaFliter