Newsmap is a very pretty tool for presenting a semi-graphical summary of what Google News thinks the day's big news stories are.

It's a shame it scales so horribly when there are lots of stories on view: some of those headlines are far too small to read. I know you can see a pop-up if you move your mouse over an entry, but I'd prefer not to have to move my mouse across a dozen 'smaller' stories just to see if they happen to interest me.

Still, Newsmap leaves you in little doubt as to what the newspapers are talking about, and it's good to see that you can pick a localised edition, replacing headlines about baseball and basketball with ones about football and cricket.

[Via The Copydesk]

GromBlog poses the question: does this picture make you feel drunk too?

To which I have two responses:

1. Yes, it does.
2. The people in that harbour are in for a nasty shock in about thirty seconds' time if someone doesn't pull up NOW!

James Gleick wrote an informative article on "namespaces." (NB: New York Times article – registration required.) It's primarily about internet domain names, but Gleick also draws comparisons with some other namespaces which require regulation, such as drug names and the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

Not that confusion over the rights to internet domain names is precisely a new issue, but Gleick's article is a decent overview of the topic. Not to mention informative: I hadn't heard of the case of BODACIOUS-TATAS.COM before reading Gleick's article.

[Via MISCmedia - see entry for 22 March 2004]

Over at defective yeti, it's time to get the new baby off to sleep:

I know the melodies to most of the classics, but I can usually only remember the first verse of words; after that I have to resort to improv. I figure it doesn't matter what I say, as long as I sing it softly and keep the beat. Unfortunately, this philosophies results in calamities like the Brahms Lullaby sung as:

Lullaby
And goodnight
La la blah blah
Blah something
I think this song
Is in German
Eins zwei drei vier funf
Bratwurst
[...]

The great thing about this strategy is that you can tailor your lyrics for the situation.

[Fifteen minutes and six made-up "Brahms Lullaby" verses later:]

No, for real
Go to sleep
Or we'll sell you
On E-bay …

[...]

Astronauts on board the International Space Station took this unusual view of the Tibetan Plateau. Somehow a shot from that perspective emphasises the sheer height of Everest in a way that pictures taken from satellites (which are typically much higher up than the ISS) or from the ground don't.

Excel as a database. It's funny because it's true. All too true… *sob*

[Via Infovore infobrief]

R Todd King has posted some amazing photographs of the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival.

The night-time shots are more spectacular, but the daylight pictures show off the detail work much better.

[Via MetaFilter]

Drop testing should only be undertaken by fully trained professionals.

Neil Gaiman for President! Vote early and vote often.

In truth, either presidential candidate would be fine. The deathmatch for Vice-President is much more interesting. Lord Vetinari would probably be best at the job, as long as he was a Dick Cheney-style power-behind-the-throne, but I can certainly see Eowyn in the job. Or Eddie Izzard.

[Via Neil Gaiman]

I'm indebted to pixeldiva for rescuing this wonderfully gruesome Armando Ianucci story from the depths of the Wayback Machine.

You've Got Wombles, Mate

Monday June 1

Woke up at 3am to interminable scuttling sound coming from my loft. Rang Council Pest Control Offices in the morning, and they sent a man round with equipment and small cages. He took one look upstairs, then came down and said "I'm terribly sorry, but you've got Wombles." I said that couldn't possibly be true, and he said: "Yes it is. Haven't you noticed your house has been that little bit neater recently?" I thought about this for a minute, and realised I was dealing with something greater than all of us. I asked the man to leave his traps and show me how to work them.

[...]

Trust me, it gets much stranger from there on in.

Over at shutterbug there's a really lovely set of photographs from a visit to a chinese garden.

I especially like the shot of the insect flying above the leaf; something about the combination of colours just appeals to me.

This copy of a post to alt.tv.twin-peaks includes all sorts of interesting information about what had to be cut from Fire Walks With Me to bring it down to an acceptable length for a cinema release. I had no idea that the original script included a couple of scenes which showed us a little of what happened to Agent Cooper after that horrifying last scene in the TV series. I really wish they'd made it to the cinema release.

I haven't seen Fire Walk With Me since its initial run in the cinema. At the time I was frustrated at the changes in the cast and found the film way too disjointed, but I think it's probably due for a reassessment. Perhaps I'll take another look at the film once Twin Peaks season 2 is released on DVD in September.

[Via Barbelith]

The Trixie Update: one day all geek babies will have sites like this, complete with a Trixie Telemetry section telling the world precisely how long it's been since the last diaper leakage incident.

About the only trick they've missed is that the RSS feed only includes details of their daily posts: there really should be separate RSS feeds for every one of the gauges in the Trixie Telemetry section.

[Via web-goddess]

Time for another adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, this time as an animated GIF.

For what it's worth, it seems to be an adaptation of Peter Jackson's films rather than the original novels: once again, the Scouring of the Shire is omitted. Worse yet, Eowyn doesn't so much as make a token appearance, never mind get to kill the Witch King!

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Idea Flood, which describes itself as an "intellectual property generation and holding company specializing in core Internet advertising and operating technologies" is threatening to sue several smallish web hosting companies, on the grounds that Idea Flood holds a patent on the thoroughly obvious idea of creating subdomains. (After all, ideaflood.com itself represents a subdivision of the .com Top Level Domain. Once you've come up with the idea of dividing up a domain, why is it not obvious to subdivide those domains still further?)

No doubt the claim will eventually go the way of BT's equally absurd claim to have patented the hyperlink, but in the meantime Idea Flood will presumably be hoping to pick off a few small fry who can't afford to hire a specialist intellectual property lawyer to defend the claim.

[Via Techdirt]

The with and wisdom of the Boy Wonder: a list of the "Holy ****, Batman!" phrases from a certain 60s TV series. Some of my favourites:

Holy armour plate

Holy bouncing boiler-plated fits

Holy Priceless collection of Etruscan snoods

That last one was particularly impressive, I thought.

[Via linkmachinego]

If Irvine Welsh had written The Lord of the Rings:

By the time ah arrive, nowt's goin on. Gimli n the woodland poof Legolas have finished aw ay the grub and there's nowt left over for ays.

"Aragorn!" Gimil calls tae ays. "Ye're late again!"

"Aye," ay smiles back. "Ah ran intae some Orc cunts and they started gittin wide wi us, likesay."

Gimli looks at ays but says nowt. Ah like Gimli, eh's awright. Tidy little cunt in a fight, like ays. Nae like that homo elf who'd rather keep ehs distance and shoot some fuckin arrows from afar.

[...]

Yes, I know: Lord of the Rings humour is so 2003…

[Via the null device]

I posted last month about my desire for a web browser which could display my browsing history as a tree diagram instead of a simple list. It looks as if someone who actually knows how to write a web browser has been thinking along similar lines: TrailBlazer is a web browser for OS X which creates just such a tree diagram, complete with scaled thumbnails of the pages.

Unfortunately, when I installed TrailBlazer this afternoon it worked fine until I asked it to actually display a web page, at which point it sat there with the beachball of death spinning away until I lost patience after ten minutes or so and killed the process completely. Still, it's good to see that someone has been thinking along these lines and the screenshots of the history feature look very good. With any luck either TrailBlazer – which, it should be remembered, is only at version 0.51 – will become usable, or else one of the developers working on a more functional browser will pick up the idea.

It wouldn't surprise me if the team behind OmniWeb 5 gave it a try. As John Siracusa notes in his comprehensive overview of the OmniWeb 5 beta release, the developers have done a fine job of rethinking some of the elements of the browser interface and look well on the way to producing a first-class alternative to Safari and the various Gecko-based browsers running under OS X. Having played with OmniWeb 5 for a couple of weeks, I really liked the ease with which tabs could be moved from one browser window to another, the fantastically easy-to-use site-specific preferences and the ability to save collections of pages as workspaces.

It was only the fact that OmniWeb was slightly less stable than I'd like (hardly surprising for a beta product) which stopped me from switching to OmniWeb full-time. When the first full release of OmniWeb 5 is out I'll give serious consideration to paying my US$30 for a registered copy.

[TrailBlazer found via The Tao of Mac]

Last night's excuse for the lack of posts was a trip to the cinema to see Starsky & Hutch. It's first and foremost a good-natured tribute to the original series, rather than a simple parody or an attempt to subvert or ridicule the original show's values. Rather than set the story in the present day, the writers set the story in the same era as the original series. So we're in the early 70s, with all the horrors of fashion and music you'd expect lovingly recreated. (The friend I saw the film with, who is in her early twenties, did ask me as we left whether people really dressed like that. I could not tell a lie, though I had to retort that in twenty years her generation's tastes in fashion and music are going to look every bit as quaint.)

The plot functions as an alternate pilot episode for the original TV show, showing us how workaholic, deadly serious cop David Starsky and the much more laid-back Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson first partnered up in order to take down a drug dealer who had created "New Coke": all the effects of ordinary cocaine, but completely undetectable by police sniffer dogs or (it was hinted) simple chemical analysis.

But in the end, the plot is irrelevant. The film isn't really about the plot, the script, the direction, the camera work, or even the horrible 70s fashions. It works because the amiable, relaxed partnership between Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson is just plain fun to watch, as is Snoop Dogg's fabulously laid back supporting performance as Huggy Bear. Sometimes they're playing for cheap laughs with slapstick humour, and sometimes Starsky and Hutch are simply getting on one another's nerves as they learn to work together despite their differences. In either case, they're worth watching.

In the end, Starsky & Hutch delivers a hundred minutes or so of amiable humour and a couple of really funny set-pieces. That's not a bad deal, particularly for those of us old enough to have fond memories of the show first time round.

Who wouldn't want a shoe with a built-in game console?

I take it that the idea is that when you're waiting for the ambulance after falling over and breaking your ankle you'll at least have something to take your mind off the excruciating pain.