Wednesday, January 28, 2004

101 Dumbest Moments in Business


Posted by MacDood
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Business2.0 presents its yearly "101 Dumbest Moments in Business." Some pretty funny ones in here.

In September, retail chain Urban Outfitters begins peddling Ghettopoly, a Monopoly knockoff. The top hat, shoe, and car are replaced with a machine gun, marijuana leaf, basketball, and rock of crack cocaine. Reacting to protests, Urban Outfitters pulls the game from its stores.

Link [Boing Boing]

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Tin robots in impressionistic oil


Posted by MacDood
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Eric Joyner's gallery of his impressionistic oil-paintings of tin robots is endless fun. He sells a bunch of them as prints.



Link



(Thanks, Brian!)




[Boing Boing]

100 reasons abstinence is doomed


Posted by MacDood
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Guideposts For Teens, a pro-abstinence org, has posted a list of 100 things for teens to do instead of savagely shagging one another. It is a very, very lame list.




6. Play hide-and-seek in a cornfield... (if a body meet a body comin' through the rye)



9. Pray together. (Jesus Jesus Jesus, don't stop)



10. Do a crossword puzzle... (What's a four-letter word for -- oh, nevermind)



21. Watch your favorite Disney movie... (Dude, this is totally one of my major turn-ons)



34. Color eggs -- even if it isn't Easter... (yes, that's right, encourage them to fetishize the reproductive cells of chickens)



100. Wash your parent's cars. (Ohhhhh, soapy t-shirts)



Link



(Thanks, justpat!) [Boing Boing]

Thursday, January 22, 2004

HOWTO: Find Mt. Everest from Space


Posted by MacDood
link
Mt. Everest, the tallest and most famous mountain of our planet, exhales a fascination which goes up all the way to the ISS. That's easy to believe after taking a peek at this spectacular shot. However, that doesn't mean finding Everest in an easy task. To quote NASA: Space is a good place to ponder the world's extremes and nature's variability. For example, photographing the highest point on the planet is a favorite target (and a long-standing challenge) for astronauts orbiting the Earth. Despite Everest's planetary stature, it is not an easy peak to locate while zipping over the mountains at 7 kilometers per second. Luckily for us, the nice folks at JPL have made a step-by-step tutorial on finding Mt. Everest from space. Now, where do I sign up for those tickets? [Kuro5hin.org]

Robot imagery gallery


Posted by MacDood
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Nice little gallery of images of robots from album covers, advertising, funnybooks and stock photos.



Link



(Thanks, Zed!)

[Boing Boing]

Space Mountain car and other cool disneycrap for auction


Posted by MacDood
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Disney's just posted a ton of cool crap at their eBay auction site. Pick of the litter is definitely the Space Mountain ride capsule, but I'm also partial to the Pirates of the Caribbean movie prop shirt, the Haunted Mansion movie Knight maquette and the PeopleMover car.



Link




[Boing Boing]

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Martian


Posted by MacDood
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Mars picture [Inessential.com]

Sunday, January 11, 2004

Mecha for sale


Posted by MacDood
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You can buy a Japanese rescue-mecha: "it's 10m wide with its arms fully outstretched, is powered by an onboard water-cooled three cylinder direct injection diesel engine, has a maximum speed of 3Km/h, and carries seven 680,000-pixel CCD cameras with a separate monitor for each camera. If no whiny 14-year-olds are available to pilot it, it can be remotely controlled (with a dummy plug in the cockpit, presumably)."





Link



(via /.)




[Boing Boing]

Saturday, January 10, 2004

Wireless prank - Burger King customers told: 'You are too fat to have a Whopper'


Posted by MacDood
link
"Police believe teenage pranksters are hacking into the wireless frequency of a US Burger King drive-through speaker to tell potential customers they are too fat for fast food. Policeman Gerry Scherlink said the pranksters told one customer who had just placed an order: 'You don't need a couple of Whoppers. You are too fat. Pull ahead.'" Link (Thanks, Jim!) [Boing Boing]

Amazing Heinlein discussion on Electrolite


Posted by MacDood
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Comment: for you heinlein fans out there---

Respected science fiction critic John Clute reviewed Heinlein's long-lost, unpublished novel, For Us, The Living, for SciFi.com, giving it a rave -- saying that this was the kind of science fiction that, if it had been published in its day, might have actually yeilded a generation of futurists who more-or-less accurately described the present-day-future.


The 140-comments-and-still-going discussion of this on Electrolite is just about the most fascinating literary/political/historical discussion I've ever read. You've got heavy-duty writers, ex-space-program people, major editors, Heinlein trufans and assorted others really digging into this idea: how much did Heinlein get right, what did he get wrong, since when are sf writers supposed to predict the future anyway, how did his politics change and how did he change politics? Meaty stuff.




As I said in another thread on another Nielsen Hayden's blog, I recently re-read "Friday," and then immediately picked up "For Us, the Living" and read that next. "Friday" was published in 1982, and FUTL was written in 1937-38. In both novels, Heinlein writes about a world-spanning information network. The 1982 "Friday" version looks a lot like the Internet of today; Heinlein's characters sit at "terminals" and "punch" requests for information -- they can get everything from the history of the city of Memphis, Tenn., to musical recordings, to astronomical data. One character removes a "portable terminal" from her purse and punches for her family financial records, which she can examine in depth while sitting out in the garden.


Change some of the buzzwords there and you have an accurate portrayal of the Internet in 2004.


Heinlein's Internet ca. 1938 AD was way cool for fans of retro futures: users called operators on videophones (I forgot what Heinlein called the videophones) and the operators sent documents on their way via pneumatic tube; the tubes could reach from one coast to another. Whoosh! (Why doesn't the world have long-distance pneumatic tubes, dammit?!) At one point, a character in the 2085 wants to look up a newspaper article from 1938; she calls the operator and has a photostat in her hands within a few minutes.



Link [Boing Boing]