Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Pop Music 2010.

It all starts with the Billboard Hot 100.

Then DJ Earworm gets a hold of it, and mashes it up.

Then Mashable notices and publishes an article: Mashup Combines This Year’s Top 25 Songs.

The result:

PS - you can get the MP3 from a link on the DJearworm.com site.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Exploration & Exploitation Movies

I've been reading The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - the story of Percy Fawcett's final doomed expedition into the Amazon jungle searching for a fabled lost civilization. It's a good read so far. I was channel surfing yesterday and came across The Fourth Kind, a 2009 horror film that claims to be based on true events, but fakes the documentary footage that is mixed into the movie. I thought The Blair Witch Project was the originator of this style, but it turns out that Cannibal Holocaust did the same thing way back in 1980. From the Wikipedia description, Cannibal Holocaust seems like a combination of Blair Witch and Lost City of Z.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

A bunch of Stuff

Here are some links:
Jimmy "Neil Young" Fallon & Bruce
Calendar girl
Electronics kits under $100
Jet Lag May Cause Stupidity
Twitter Reputation scores
Roku get Hulu Plus Support
Snoop sticks - track your friends with a USB drive
Math is the key to a (financially) successful marriage
Idiocracy the allegory for our times
5 Fresh Places to Find Online Video (but where are the 5 stale places, Miller Lite?)
How do you expect a company that can't spell "light" to make a good beer?
Startup Bubble or Startup Boom?
Barack Obama: Great president or greatest president ever?
Altoona boots the PA East West High School All Star football game
Oh, PLOT holes
10 best dystopian novels

Monday, November 8, 2010

Friday, September 17, 2010

Civilization V is coming

On Sept. 21, Civ 5 will be released. Casey Johnston thoughtfully wrote up The history of Civilization: 20 years of Wonders for Ars Technica. While I'm not even sure I have a computer that will play Civ V, I am hoping to get to play within the next few months. I still enjoy BTS, though, so that will have to keep me occupied for the time being.

Friday, June 18, 2010

How to Rescue a Crashed PC

PC Mag has an online article about recovering a crashed computer. This is one of those things that you need rarely, but when you do...

Maybe I'll be able to find it when I need it.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Dead Hand

Here's a scary one. The Soviets set up a system to automatically launch a nuclear 2nd strike if their leadership were removed by a first strike. I came across Dead Hand (formally called the Perimeter system) in some speculation about the termination of broadcast by UVB-76. This lead me to the Wikipedia article on the Dead Hand. The whole thing seems like a bad Russian imitation of Skynet. Apparently, it may not have been totally automatic - there was a sort of Mechanical Turk in a deep underground bunker that could send a low frequency radio signal to initiate the responsive launch. Last year, Wired said that the system was still in place.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Risks of terrorism

From Terrorist Attacks and Comparable Risks, Part 1: As can be seen, annual terrorism fatality risks, particularly for areas outside of war zones, are less than one in one million and therefore generally lie within the range regulators deem safe or acceptable, requiring no further regulations, particularly those likely to be expensive. They are similar to the risks of using home appliances (200 deaths per year in the United States) or of commercial aviation (103 deaths per year).

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Weirdness

Confusing sign - OK - I stole it from fark (if linking to the site without attribution can be considered stealing). Here are the fark comments, just to be fair. Also, the story appeared on Jaunted.com, too, in a slightly different format. With a google street view of the stretch of road from jaunted, sans protitute sign.