Barticus

via adamthinks.com

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:29:57 -0500

via adamthinks.com

Excerpt from "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs"

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:01:23 -0500

INTERVIEWER: Nice racing.

DINOSAUR RACER 1: Thanks.

INTERVIEWER: Where you boys from?

DINOSAUR RACER 1: Atlantis.

INTERVIEWER: I thought your people came from Mars.

DINOSAUR RACER 2: The Atlantis basin, yes, on Mars.

INTERVIEWER: What brings you to Tampa?

DINOSAUR RACER 1: We came to do high-speed stunts in double gravity.

INTERVIEWER: So how do you like Earth?

DINOSAUR RACER 1: Well, it’s not as awesome as Mars—

DINOSAUR RACER 2: My friend means to say that Earth is very awesome, but sometimes we get homesick.

INTERVIEWER: How intelligent are dinosaurs?

DINOSAUR RACER 2: We’re probably not going to win any prizes, but if you think about it, neither are you.

Please go read it in all its awesomeness - http://bit.ly/caVYU

Infographics from GOOD Magazine

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:29:09 -0500

Infographics from GOOD Magazine:

I’m a total geek for infographics :)

Wow.

Wed, 20 May 2009 09:05:49 -0500

Wow.

counterpunch (via wools)

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:17:17 -0500

counterpunch (via wools)

davemorin: The new Sprint ads are totally brilliant.

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:56:06 -0500

davemorin:

The new Sprint ads are totally brilliant.

explainingtwitter: This Sween character is a manifestation of...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:52:15 -0500

explainingtwitter:

This Sween character is a manifestation of a phenomenon related to hyper-local fame or notoriety. Having no well-known online persona outside of Twitter like Mr. Mann (see the prior entry), Sween nevertheless maintains an enormous presence on Twitter, with approximately forty-five million followers¹. The sparse information available indicates that Mr. Sween may in fact be Canadian², which may render my conclusions completely moot given that they will exist (necessarily so) outside of their nascent continental contextry.

The central conceit of the “tweet” in this case is the idea that Ninjas, which are black-clad martial artists who employ tactics of stealth to both defeat their opponents and avoid waking people up at night when they go to the bathroom, could partake in some of the worldy pleasures of the non-Ninja world (e.g., crunchy snacks) if that non-Ninja world consisted entirely of people wearing noise-canceling headphones³. Henceforth we refer to this world as Headphone-World.

But in a world like Headphone-World, with the rules of the game so casually muted⁴, what of the Ninja? With no need for audible stealth have we not removed from him or her his or her very Ninjaness, reducing him or her to merely one-dimensional specialists with hearing that is, relative to the headphone world, extremely acute? One would have to imagine that in Headphone-World a Ninja would be able to find better-paying work, leaving the vocation heretofore known as “Ninja Work”⁵ to be done by merely well-trained yeomen⁶. One wonders if there exists room in this crazy world at all for the highly trained specialist.

After all, Charles Barkley would defeat me one-on-one in a game of basketball regardless of whether I were blindfolded, correct?

Therefore once the layers of humor are peeled away from this “tweet”, one sees at its heart a portrayal of a bland crypto-utopian future against which many American capitalist objectivists have (rightly or wrongly) struggled. I will be paying particular attention to Mr. Sween in the future, as I find his ideas both challenging and rewarding.

¹ Est.

² I found Canadia in my one visit there in 1961 to be mildly unsettling, like chocolate Alka-Seltzer on an empty stomach.

³ Forgive, if you can, the built-in misunderstanding about how noise-canceling headphones actually function and pretend instead that they function like perfect earplugs. This absurd naivete on the part of the author, in fact, lends weight to the overall sense of whimsy this “tweet” presents, and so therefore must be considered an intentional oversight.

⁴ You see what I did there, right?

⁵ Ninja payscale information on the internet is highly suspect.

⁶ “Yeoman” in this case being someone with a two-year Associates Degree from a school within five miles of an accredited university.

More awesome Addressograph

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:32:35 -0500

More awesome Addressograph

Super sweet machine sitting in the alley downtown. EDIT: After...

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:31:00 -0500

Super sweet machine sitting in the alley downtown.

EDIT: After getting back to the office, I’ve determined that this is an Addressograph-Multigraph Graphotype 6300 Series used to make dog tags (among other things) circa WWII.

Cosmos available on Hulu

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:33:28 -0500

Cosmos available on Hulu:

Awesome! I’m a huge Carl Sagan fan, so I’m super excited that the full Cosmos series can now be viewed on Hulu!

The Dezurik Sisters make me smile. Definitely not enough...

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:10:18 -0500

The Dezurik Sisters make me smile. Definitely not enough yodeling going on these days.

I don’t have the words to describe how many ways this is...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:37:54 -0500

I don’t have the words to describe how many ways this is awesome.

Wow. This is real. Straight from the website of the Sean...

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:05:19 -0600

Wow. This is real. Straight from the website of the Sean Hannity Show. Is this really where we are right now?

What Kind of Revolution?

Greatest 101 questions of all time

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:23:00 -0600

Greatest 101 questions of all time:

What is OK short for?

The most popular theory is that OK comes from ‘oll korrect’, a deliberately misspelled writing of ‘all correct’. It was popularised in Boston newspapers around the 1840s when it was fashionable to go around spelling things incorrectly for humorous effect. Legend also has it that New York Democrats later adopted the abbreviation to promote their candidate Martin Van Buren – the initials ‘OK’ were derived from his nickname, Old Kinderhook.

Openness is good.

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:37:24 -0600

Excellent! The new Obama administration has issued a memo to all gov’t agencies, instructing them to take “affirmative steps” to make information public, and to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure”.

This is in contrast to the standing policy from Ashcroft instructing agencies to “disclose information only after considering all possible reasons to withhold it”.

If you ask me, this is a very good thing.

More info available frm the Electronic Frontier Foundation here: On Day One, Obama Demands Open Government

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:26:00 -0600

This makes me smile

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:00:00 -0600

This is uber-nerdy, but I do think that (in a small way) it exemplifies what alot of us are hoping for in this administration:

http://www.kottke.org/09/01/the-countrys-new-robotstxt-file

For the non-web-devs out there, a site’s robot.txt file is an optional file that is used to tell search engines what parts of your site to include or exclude from its indexes. The previous administration’s robots.txt file consisted of a mind-boggling 2400 lines of exclusion rules. Here is the full content of the new Obama administration’s robot.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

The new administration has thrown open the doors for search engines to index the whitehouse.gov again!

Advantageous

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:08:17 -0600

I just used Advantageous MP3 for the first time to buy an mp3 — very sweet. I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Instead of buying the track from iTunes, I get a 256k, non-DRM’d mp3 for $0.89 from Amazon. Definitely check it out.

Re: Fantastic Contraption Speed Run (via flagitious1) If you...

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:12:55 -0600

Re: Fantastic Contraption Speed Run (via flagitious1)

If you played Fantastic Contraption, then you will surely appreciate this.

This just made me want to cry.

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:07:06 -0600

This just made me want to cry.:

“Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA’s lifetime budget — combined!”