Marketing Terror / Managing Attention

A long and interesting hypothesis by Keith Olberman of MSNBC news via Kevin Burton's FeedBlog. Link to video.

Watching Lebanon

An interesting New Yorker article (and worthwhile read) by Seymour Hersh. Link

The London Plot

Here are a couple of interesting pieces on the foiled London bomb plot.
Both touch on the issue of "emotionally potent oversimplifications" and the effect they have on us all.
Personally, I subscribe to the concept of not being afraid.
Link to an interesting video piece by Ze Frank (adult language).
Link to a NY Times OpEd piece.
(via Dave Winer)

Got Art?

I just caught this browsing YouTube:
A girl takes a picture of herself every day for three years.

With the internet increasing in power and scope as a distribution platform, will user generated content like this lead to a kind of renaissance in art and communications?
You be the judge.

Ontar-i-ar-i-ario!

Here's some pretty cool vintage content (photos and videos) from the Government of Ontario, Ministry of Industry and Tourism's web page.

I'm pretty sure I sang this song more than once on the way to the cottage when I was a kid ;-)

Link to video. Link to main page (via Cory at BoingBoing).

Escher in Lego

Escher's "Relativity" in Lego.
Link via MeFi.

Mein Kitty-Kat

Here's a great web site that absolutely delivers on what it promises.
Link (via MeFi).
A great example of user generated content.

The NORAD Tapes

Vanity Fair has an amazing story on The North American Air Defence (NORAD) response to the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The web article also has interspersed audio links that let you hear actual conversations between ground controllers and F-16 pilots.
Link via BuzzMachine.

and here's a related post from a while back that may help you visualize air traffic density on any given day in the continetal US. Pretty amazing.

Open Access Advocate?

Call me a whacked out conspiracy theorist, but could this be the real reason Gates is stepping down from his role at Microsoft?
I'd sure like to think so...
(via Prof. Ed Felton's "Freedom to Tinker").

The Passion of the Mel?

Apparently.
Holy cow!

"The Lifehacker's Dilema"

by Dave Grey (via Merlin at 43Folders)

NSA spotting

Check out this screen grab from a Daily Show piece aired in late June. The premise: the NSA domestic surveillance would have been much easier to spot if people had only inspected their phone bills a little closer, check out the other line items:

Wal*Mart Nicht!

Wal*Mart bails on Germany.
Link via Buzzmachine and an update from MetaFilter.

iPod has "Four Year Life Span"?

Which is perfect — if you're a replicant :-)
Link to Gizmodo.

Tom Petty on NPR's "Fresh Air"

During my first days in University environment (specifically, 97 King Street West in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada -- don't look for it, it's not there anymore ;-) with a great group of guys I'm still friends with today, Tom Petty was a house favorite... and still is. Here's a great interview between Tom and Terry Gross of NPR's talk show "Fresh Air".
Link to NPR Fresh Air page.
Link to interview MP3 download.

Winning at any cost...

...has come to this?
I suppose the old adage about political elections ("it's not the voting that matters, it's the counting") sort of applies to sports ("it not the winning, it's the not getting caught").
"Landis Tests Positive for Doping" Washington Post
and New York Times story link via Paul Kedrosky.
UPDATE: Freakonomic's has this to say re:
cocktailing the night before a race.
UPDATE: and in further defense of Floyd...

CEO Geek-fest!

Mexens Technologies CEO, Cyril Houri, is interviewed by the MSMobiles tech blog. A fairly gruelling but truly outstanding technical conversation (read: "full on geek out" :-) about how the Navizon Wireless Positioning System works with PDA's, cell phones and smartphones as an augmentation / replacement for GPS positioning.
Link to MSMobiles.
Direct Link to the MP3 audio file (90 minute interview).

Blast from the past...

...and hopefully, this one won't hurt anybody:

Human League's "The Lebanon" -- linked via MetaFilter.

To boldly go?

The cast of classic Star Trek perform "Camelot" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An awesome mashup!
Link to YouTube via MetaFilter.

"Ain't it the Truth" Cory...

In a recent CBC.ca story Cory Doctorow writes:

" Wikipedia gets it wrong all the time. So do bloggers. But then, so do newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. The interesting thing about systems isn't how they perform when they're working to specification, it's what happens when they fail.

Blogs, Wikipedia, and other online media fail gracefully indeed. When a newspaper gets a story wrong, it can take 24 hours to get a correction out – if it corrects it at all. There's no ready way to link criticism of a newspaper article with the article itself. Certainly, you can't make the edits yourself.

But if you find an error in a Wikipedia entry, you can fix it yourself. You can join the discussion about whether a blogger got it wrong. Automated tools like Technorati link together all the different blogs discussing the same topic, turning them into a conversation. "

Link to CBC.ca via BoingBoing.