Cheeky Boys Help Dad With Painting the House

If you're a parent you've been there (well not always that far!). Satellite Navigation is becoming popular and apparently people are trusting it too implicitly. There have been crashes reported in Germany and the UK and people making unsafe turns, because "the satnav told me to".

Tired Car, I Hate Websites That...

English Russia has a funny picture of a desperate car being taken in for insurance. I hate websites that are "jazzed up" by a little music. I'm playing my Yeah Yeah Yeahs cd and browsing at the same time. I click on this link and yeeuch. Photographs of the NYPD at work in the late 1970s by Leonard Freed (recently deceased). Another article in the New York Times about Freed with a small picture of his that I remember from a great exhibition of American Photography I went to see at the Barbican Art Gallery in the 80s.

Xbox and Wii Madness Road Painter

Waaah! Everybody is getting XBox 360s! Oh, and Wii madness is about to hit. This will change the way people use these games; I think they're very keen to get all sorts of new audiences involved (hence the range of different players in those videos). Apparently since the launch of the wii in Britain "Nintendo wii" has overtaken iPod as the most searched for toy. There's a review of the Wii here on the Register site with comments from readers (one has invented a new word - here comes the wiikend!).
Update: Looks like the wii is beating the Sony Playstation 3 in early sales in Japan. Another clip on the Daily Feed says that the Wii has sold 3.19 million consoles, half the total sales of Xbox 360s so far.
This is either the work of a sublimely indifferent road painter, or a Bhuddist road-painter (could they be the same person?)

Shoe Bomber

An article about the daily life of Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" in a maximum security prison in the US. The Open Document Format is announced; see the Wired article. I posted a link previously to a lovely picture of a snowflake and now I've found some more at a website dedicated to snow crystal photography and research. There's also a "snow crystal primer" with interesting points about snow formation.

Make a Paper Snowflake Map Game

Instructions on How to make a paper snowflake at WikiHow. Map game - see how many countries you can place.

Spend Some Dialog Time; Abuse by Proxy

You could spend a lot of time with this dialog! There have been a number of cases in the US where someone impersonating a policeman has called a restaurant (usually a fast food restaurant) and told the manager to detain a member of staff or customer. Because the manager believes the caller, they do as they are told. The caller then instructs the manager to put the victim through all sorts of humiliation and abuse, including rape. It's quite shocking what people will do when they believe in the authority of the person telling them what to do. I knew about this affect because I've heard of the psychlogical experiments, but I hadn't heard of this kind of abuse by proxy over the phone before.

Gothic Posters, Be Careful When You Sell Your PC

Morbid, gothic posters by Franciszek Starowieyski, a Polish poster artist. Oh. My. Goodness. A story from Scott Granneman on The Register about the perils of being careless with your data when you sell your computer. Phew.

Cost of Ink, non-attack advert, Female Circumcision

Have you got an HP printer? I've got a 960c and the cartridges cost a bomb. There's a graph here which compares prices. That made me laugh. This is a clever political advert. Not seen that trick before. It's good to see a political advert that isn't a personal attack on an opponent.

A conference about Female Circumcision in Egypt; not a common subject in the news. The conference included some muslims who spoke against the practise.

Update: Since I wrote the above, there have been developments.
Scholars at the conference agreed that Female Genital Mutilation (also called "Female Circumcision") was un-islamic and should be treated as abuse. Sweet progress.

Autistic Savant Global Orgasm

The strange things kids write is a cliche, but these suppposed real high school essay quotes made me laugh out loud, so who am I to complain? Numbers 23 and 24 were really making me shake and "The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while" is short enough for me to remember. I remember a television programme about Stephen Wiltshire some years ago. He's an autistic savant. He has a particular skill, which is that he can look at a real scene for a few minutes and later draw it in great detail. This programme puts him through a (video link) huge test - they take him in a helicopter for a ride over Rome, then he draws a huge panorama of Rome from memory. The programme-makers check the details and he is amazingly accurate. Oliver Sacks wrote about the guy in his book "An Anthropologist on Mars". Here's an article in the Guardian about Daniel Tammet, another autistic savant who can also do extraordinary things, but he's unusual in that he can describe what goes on in his head when he does it (check out the descriptions of handling large numbers and remembering pi to a record number of places). If you feel a little rumble on December 22, it may be because of a worldwide campaign to add enough positive energy into the energy field of the Earth to reduce the worldwide levels of violence and agression. It is hoped that this energy will register on the monitor system of the Global Conciousness Project. Perhaps the impression will be a huge phallus (nsfw) - my first nsfw link, though you have to click on the picture to see... the... enlarged version ;-)

Breathtaking ski-gliding, Interface Design

Whoooa! (video link) Breathtaking video of ski-gliding down the Eiger. This site called Joel on Software is cool. He wrote an article arguing about the "Off" button in Windows Vista. It's a good design argument.

Animatee Fights Back Paranoia

The guy who does the animations of a stick character that fights the animator has put up (animated film) another one - great fun. Aaargh no, paranoia! There are (video link) secret pictures of the Twin Towers before and after the attack on the $5 and $20 notes and the word "Osama" even appears (well not actually, or even remotely).

pipes, aircraft carrier, dice, storms

Great picture of some pipes. This is an aircraft carrier in a pond in China. The World is revealed through Google Maps! Apparently "Dice Stacking" is a skill that requires some dexterity. Looks pretty difficult! Flickr gallery of storm shots. Very dramatic

Cat's Tongue Who Wants to be a Millionaire

Amazing picture of a cat's tongue. Slashdot programmers' slip-up which meant you couldn't post comments for a while. A contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" uses his Phd "Cognitive and Neuro-Science" (or Psychology) skills to help him win the $1 Million prize. Great invention but I don't want to talk about it!

Sculpture, Photoshop, Real Beauty

Cool (or not!) sculpture by the beach. This is a sculpture of a tree made from a book. Photoshop tutorial that goes through age-reducing techniques (not excercise and healthy eating!). That reminded me of this Flash Movie from the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty that I'd seen before but not bothered to share for some reason

Singing Drive Thru'

Funny set of pictures that are not what they seem. Some guys decide to do a special kind of order at a McDonalds drive thru. The Story of the Mac (Apple Mac) with accompanying posters

Budgie Rage IPod Compensation Unfair but Funny

Try this 20 Questions site, it's fun. I tried a budgie and the site got it in 18, even when I gave some (apparently) wrong answers. Green Rage is coming. The Seven Stages of Owning an IPod are explained in cartoon form here. If you're an Apple fan, here's a compensatory (video link) Apple ad on YouTube. But then I want to just add this other (video link) anti-Mac rant. This guy's funny.

Victorian Google Discovery

Review of an interesting - sounding book by Steven Johnson about two men trying to piece together information about the spread of cholera through part of London in Victorian times. This Steven Johnson looks an interesting guy. Here's a fascinating idea about how to gather meaning from word groupings in Google Page Ranks. The authors call it "Automatic Meaning Discovery".

Colbert resigns and traffic lights abandoned

Steve Colbert resigns in (video link) disgusted response to the American Public's appalling desertion of the Republican party. Then he gets into his car and is inspired by his driver to get back into the fight "The Democrats have only been in power for a few minutes and they've already got us stuck in this unwinnable war!" Here's another contribution to an argument I've heard before, which is basically that if you make motorists feel more vulnerable they will drive more carefully. There's a dutch traffic planner who says that getting rid of traffic lights has made his town safer. An older Wired article about this here.

Storm Beautiful Advertisements

Amazing storm chaser pictures Beautiful shot of a snowflake Story of Friendster, the social networking site that was overtaken by MySpace. Creative Advertisements from different countries.

"At Least Dogs Are Not Pigs Like Cats Are"

One night in the pub discussing the old question "Cats or Dogs", my friend Heather came up with this priceless gem. Actually now she has a cat. But what is this dog thinking?