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links for 2008-03-25
3/24/2008 – 6:30 pm
The Vice Guide Travels to North Korea
3/21/2008 – 8:45 pm
Want to go to places no tourist ever dream of visiting? Like Chernobyl, Beirut, and Congo? Well, the VICE Guide to Travel is the the travel guidebook for you!
But even those places don’t compare to where Shane Smith and his team managed to go next: North Korea, the Hermit Kingdom.
The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At
the airport the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs.We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa.”
So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on…
Link - Episode 1 of their trip (scroll down the right-hand side “related videos” link for the rest of the installments) - Thanks Dave!
straight stolen from Neatorama
Giant Marine Life in Antarctica
3/21/2008 – 8:45 pm
Scientists who just returned from a survey of the Ross Sea near Antarctica have found giant versions of sea creatures, such as jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles and a starfish measuring 2 feet wide! Some of the 30,000 specimens collected could be entirely new species.
A 2,000-mile journey through the Ross Sea that ended Thursday has also potentially turned up several new species, including as many as eight new mollusks.
It’s “exciting when you come across a new species,” said Chris Jones, a fisheries scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “All the fish people go nuts about that — but you have to take it with a grain of salt.”
The finds must still be reviewed by experts to determine if they are in fact new, said Stu Hanchet, a fisheries scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.
(image credit: AP/NZ IPY-CAML, John Mitchell)
straight stolen from Neatorama
Animals Are People Too; They Like Getting Drunk!
3/21/2008 – 8:45 pm
In this 1974 cult favorite documentary by Jamie Uys, titled Animals are Beautiful People, there is a segment where they showed that animals are just like (some) people because … they like getting drunk, too!
… But after a few weeks the Merulas get overripe and they start dropping from trees. Then all of the animals wade in and gorge themselves on the rotting fruits. It starts fermenting in their tummies and turns into very a potent brew. So on the way home, things start happening to them …
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] to see how hammered animals look like! Thanks esa!
straight stolen from Neatorama
If you tell photographer Izaz Rony where you’ll be at a…
3/20/2008 – 8:45 pm
If you tell photographer Izaz Rony where you’ll be at a particular time, he’ll come and take your picture without you knowing it.
Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject. The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.
Andrew Hearst calls it “surveilling yourself”.
(link)
straight stolen from kottke.org
Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians
3/19/2008 – 8:45 pm
With this blog, consider every single topic known to man covered. Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians.
straight stolen from YesButNoButYes
Cows With Holes - Holey Cows
3/19/2008 – 8:45 pm
Oh my God! Are there holes in those cows? Yes there are.
Read more
In order to perform experiments on cows, scientists have developed a way to surgically make permanent holes in their stomachs in order to study their digestive systems. The holes are called fistulas, which make the cows fistulated. One can feed the cow, and then later catch the food while it’s digesting to see how it’s doing.
straight stolen from Blame It On The Voices
Hot Dogs For Homophobes
3/19/2008 – 8:45 pm
Homophobes are everywhere these days. They are a reality of today’s society, lets face it. And they need their own hot dogs.
Thanks Reea
straight stolen from Blame It On The Voices
Erbert and Gerbert Create Giant Air Vortex Candle Cannon
3/18/2008 – 8:45 pm
To celebrate their 20th anniversary, sandwich restaurant chain Erbert and Gerbert created a giant air-powered Candle Cannon to blow out the candles on their birthday cake.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the Candle Cannon was created.
straight stolen from Laughing Squid
So THIS is what happens when you push the fire button at a gas station!
3/18/2008 – 8:45 pm
straight stolen from reddit.com: what’s new online
In the middle of this interview with rapper DMX, it…
3/18/2008 – 8:45 pm
In the middle of this interview with rapper DMX, it becomes clear that he’s never heard of Barack Obama before.
Q: Barack Obama, yeah.
A: Barack?!Q: Barack.
A: What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?Q: Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
A: Barack Obama?Q: Yeah.
A: What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.Q: You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
A: I ain’t really paying much attention.Q: I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
A: Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.(via ah)
(link)
straight stolen from kottke.org
7,000 MPG Car Wins Eco-Marathon
3/17/2008 – 8:45 pm
Every year, Shell (yes, the giant evil oil company) puts on a little PR banquet in the name of vehicle efficiency called the Eco-Marathon. It’s part of the long-standing tradition of oil companies blaming car companies for the excesses of the fossil fuel economy while car companies just as joyfully blame oil companies.
Nonetheless, it’s a fun little event where teams get together and figure out how efficient vehicles really can be. And they can indeed be very efficient. By bringing the weight of the vehicles way down, putting them on high-pressure bike tires, and making the vehicles as obscenely aerodynamic as possible, these cars easily get thousands of miles per gallon.
The team from the French technical school St. Joseph La Joliverie went 7,148 miles on a single gallon of fuel…the Shell website is quick to point out that that's “almost ten miles per teaspoon”. Maybe the body isn't the most efficient vehicle after all.
In any case…it gives you a sense for just how much power is contained in a gallon of gasoline. It’s too bad we’ve been pretty much pouring it down the drain for the last few decades.
Via EcoModder
straight stolen from EcoGeek.org
Video: Boston Dynamics' Latest Big Dog Pack Bot
3/17/2008 – 8:45 pm
This new video of “Big Dog,” the amazing quadrupedal robot from Boston Dynamics, shows of its latest tricks: the ability to walk through snow and even over ice, catching itself when it slips and falls. Its normal gait is unnatural, but when it starts to scramble to recover it looks eerily real.
straight stolen from Boing Boing Gadgets
links for 2008-03-11
3/10/2008 – 6:27 pm
Internet Explorer 8 will have Firebug
3/6/2008 – 9:45 pm
Yes the web is awash with news of Internet Explorer 8. We’re like lemmings that way, it seems like every blog I read (116 says Google Reader) has some news of IE 8. Given the mad dash to the finish line for South by Southwest, I haven’t bothered to download or play yet, but I guess I’ll have to.
For me, the big news is that Internet Explorer 8 will have Firebug. Well, not technically firebug, but pretty much an exact clone. If you visit Microsoft Developer Tools and download their PDF, you’ll see that IE 8 will ship with a near exact clone of Firebug - which is great news if you’re trying to really push IE. I’m also happy that its being produced by the IE team, and not by a third party developer. The reason I’m happy is not because a third party dev couldn’t do an outstanding job (again, hat tip to Firebug), but because so much of the internals of IE is undocumented and secret, that I think the only people who could successfully implement this is the IE team.
If you look carefully, they actually got some really, really nice things in IE 8. For example, window.location.hash. This allows you to use javascript to redirect the user, but the page gets added to the cache and history. This allows the back button to work normally with “Ajax-ed” paged. Nice! There’s also a series of DOM-compliance bugs in there, and while it’ll mean little to me as jQuery shields me from the day to day trivia of that, it’ll mean a huge deal to jQuery itself (and other javascript libraries) and I bet we can expect a nice bump in speed due to native support for things that normally needed to be reconstructed (I’m looking at you CSS selectors and getAttribute/setAttribute).
The good folks over at Digital Web Magazine have more news in IE8 Beta 1 released!, including links to Jonathan Snook‘s smoketests. I’d like to extend my gratitude to the IE development team for its frank and open communication, particularly via the IE blog. While I’ve not dealt with them directly, all accounts are that they’re listening to the geeks.
straight stolen from DerekAllard.com
CodeSOD: Pretty Simple
3/5/2008 – 9:45 pm
“It should be pretty simple,” David M naïvely stated, “just look in the Agent_ProductLines table, right?”
“Uhhh,” David's coworker, James, replied in a slightly condescending tone, “no.” David was starting to get used to such responses. Nothing in his new job was “pretty simple” to simple to do.
“Okaaay… so how exactly can we tell if a particular Agent is allowed to a given Product Line”
James groaned. “Well as you know, the original database developer, wasn't really a fan of normalization, the relational model, or just plain simple common sense. In this case, he did not want to 'waste space' by creating a table just to store the Agent-Product Line relation.”
David sighed. He knew exactly what was coming up: some stupid comma, tilde, asterisk delimited string on the Agency table.
“Oh it gets worse,” James replied, “see, take a look at this column, the NVARCHAR(2000) one called strProductLines?”
David took a look. He was confronted with something far worse than a delimited string…
012-3100000100110000001000000103000001001100000-1011010101—0010011000000100000001000001001—00000500000010600010011000000100000001000001001100000010
“What the–”
“Here,” James said, cutting him off, “let me show you how it works.” He grabbed a pen and a pad of paper, and started to draw a little table …
ID 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 … Value 0 1 1 - 3 1 0 0 … “Wait,” David said, “you're telling me, the index of each character corresponds to the product line? And a one means that they can sell a product line?”
“Yes,” James replied, “but it's a bit more than that. '0' means they can't sell, '1' means they can, '-' means there is no such product with that ID, and '2', '3', '4' - all through '9', all mean different things. Like, '3' means that the agent has received training on the product line, but has not been approved to sell, and so on.”
David buried his face in his hands for a brief moment. “So how exactly can can I build this 'Find Agency by Product Line' feature?”
“Well,” James winked, “it should be pretty simple.”
straight stolen from The Daily WTF