Richard Sambrook points out a very nice series of interactive posters BBC World News put up in the US:

Each one takes an image which captures an issue, offers a word on either side which sum up opposing attitudes to it and ask the public to text in their vote…

I'm somewhat surprised at the balance of votes in some of the images, but of course these were just snapshots; it'd be fascinating to know what the votes were by the time each poster was taken down.. Or, indeed, to leave them up for a while and observe how the voting shifted over time.

(I suppose the problem is that after a while the poster's impact would lessen and it would become part of the scenery, ignored by everyone but tourists. Perhaps you could have a rotation, with a particular image being displayed at three month intervals. Or perhaps this would just turn out to be a really cumbersome means of conducting an opinion poll, and one exceptionally vulnerable to flash mobs and bloc voting at that.)

[Via The Obvious?]

This Flickr slideshow makes the Shuho-do Cavern in Japan look positively otherworldly.

[Via Japundit]

There seems to be a lot of chatter about the scale of the universe this week:

• James Nicoll found a picture showing how the Sun compares to a really big star like Antares.
• This animation takes the comparison several steps further.
• And finally, Charlie Stross contemplated the implications for manned exploration and colonisation of the distances between all those large objects beyond the Oort Cloud. In other words, he did some maths, considered the chances that any current human society could mount the decades- or centuries-long engineering effort required to build a colony ship, discounted the quasi-religious arguments about "mankind's destiny" and came to some fairly depressing conclusions for anyone who hoped to spend their retirement years at their beachfront property on Mars, let alone further afield.

  So far Charlie's article has attracted some 450 comments, a majority affronted at the very notion that the human race won't one day live among the stars. Honestly, if you have the time and the inclination you really should get something to drink, settle down and enjoy the sort of bunfight that usually only appears on political weblogs these days. For those of you who lack the time to savour the 450-odd responses, one commenter helpfully summarised the arguments so far:

  "I don't know who you are, Mr. So-called Science Fiction writer, but you are a pessimist! You of all people should be pushing fantasy, not poo-poo headedness!"

  "I did not read your article, but you are wrong!"

  "How can you not understand that humanity will inevitably invent magic ponies, which will carry us to the stars on their backs?!"

  "Why are you so narrow-minded, Mister Physics and Numbers?! Leave the equations out of space travel: they don't belong there!"

[Animation of stars and planets via Progressive Gold]

Unexpected shadows.

[Via Qwghlm]

I have an on-off relationship with House, MD. Every season I watch a few episodes before the fact that the essence of the patient's storyline follows the same pattern every single week drives me to stop watching. Then something reminds me of how much fun it is to watch Hugh Laurie's character wind up every single person he encounters and I start watching again. Then the show goes off the air and I repeat the entire cycle the following season.

As it happens, this week I swung back into the "watch Hugh Laurie torturing his colleagues" part of my House, MD-watching cycle, so it's OK for me to point out It's not Lupus, which would look very fetching on a T-shirt.

[Via LinkMachineGo]

A couple of technical tips I picked up this evening that are worth sharing:

• It's entirely possible that every other del.icio.us user in the world already knew about this, but it was news to me.

  I use the standard del.icio.us bookmarklet to add a page to my bookmarks if I want to read it later, or if I want to add it to the list of pages I want to come back to and post about here. It's always bugged me that after clicking on the bookmarklet I'd then have to enter my 'to_read' or 'for_weblog' tags manually before saving the page to my del.icio.us account: I knew what tag I was wanting to add, so why couldn't the bookmarklet add it for me?

  A comment from piyo at this page (scroll down to the comment dated 1 April 2005) provided a bookmarklet that allows you to specify a tag to add, so that I can have a bookmarklet to automatically tag the page at del.icio.us with 'to_read' or 'for_weblog' or, indeed, any other tag I use frequently enough to not wish to enter manually. You can get the bookmarklet code by copying the source of this link, or else by simply dragging it to your browser's bookmarks bar/links toolbar.

  [Having added that link to your toolbar, remember to edit the link so as to replace YOURUSERNAME with your own del.icio.us user name, and if you want to use a tag other that read_later you should change the text at the end of the bookmarklet after "&tags=" accordingly. If you dragged the link to your toolbar, you'll also want to rename it from "this link" to something more meaningful.]

  With this bookmarklet I still have the option of entering other tags, or of marking the bookmark as Private, but if all I want to add for now is 'to_read' or 'for_weblog' (which is often the case when I first encounter a page I don't have time to deal with there and then) I just press enter and the bookmark is saved.

• Ever since I upgraded to the latest version of iTunes and downloaded non-DRM versions of the EMI tracks in my library, I've found that iTunes insists that I log in to my iTunes Music Store account when I launch iTunes, even though I was only playing music from my library and wasn't going near the iTMS in that session.

  Macosxhints reveals that iTunes stores a file listing downloads it thinks it needs to try to complete. If you know for a fact that you're not waiting for any downloads to complete then close iTunes and delete the file at ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Downloads/list.plist (or, for safety's sake, just move it to another location). When you relaunch iTunes it reverts to the correct behaviour, ie only asking you to log in to the iTMS when you visit the iTMS itself.

  [NB: this tip is for the Mac OS X version of iTunes. I don't know whether the Windows version suffers from a similar issue, or whether some variation on this fix would apply to that operating system.]

Reading Chris's Top Ten Buffy episodes, I felt a sudden urge to blast through a season's-worth of DVDs over the next few days. His eloquent commentary on some of the highlights from seven seasons of slaying did an excellent job of reminding me just how good the show was.

For the record, I'd have placed The Gift higher if it were my list, and I'd probably have thrown in some episodes from season 2 – at least one of Surprise/Innocence, Passion and the two-parter Becoming surely belong up there – but the truth is that there's not a duff episode in Chris's list. I have no idea what I'd drop to make room.

I may have to write more about this once I've done some homework…

James Nicoll posted this gorgeous photograph demonstrating gravitational lensing on a really large scale.

Adam Buxton performs a PG version of Fuck Tha Police. Very nice work.

[Via polymath blues]

I do believe I've worked for Bossthulhu.

[Via lupus-yonderboy, posting at MetaFilter]

Japanese TV has come up with a brilliant idea: a gameshow based on Tetris. Trust me, it's a lot more fun than you'd imagine.

I look forward to seeing ITV schedule Celebrity TV Tetris with Ant and Dec against Doctor Who on Saturday nights next year…

[Via defective yeti]

From the end of Stuart Ian Burns' review of Saturday's (excellent) Doctor Who episode:

Next week:  Captain Jack's back and I can't wait to hear how they're going to explain what he's been doing to a family audience. 

Sorry explain to a family audience what he's been doing.

This list of the best book-to-film adaptations nominated by a number of critics and writers contains the ingredients for one heck of a DVD-viewing session:

FRANCINE PROSE
THE GODFATHER (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Obviously, but by now it's come to seem as if it happened the other way round: the novel as novelization.

LUC SANTE
POINT BLANK (John Boorman, 1967) Boorman took a tough, stripped-down revenge thriller (The Hunter, by Richard Stark, one of Donald Westlake's pseudonyms) and added psychedelia, TV commercial imagery, and consumer-culture fatalism to make the preeminent American New Wave film— but just how many of those were there?

STEVE ERICKSON
THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949) Graham Greene's novella was more a glorified treatment, embellished in the film by, among others, Orson Welles, who wrote the "cuckoo clock" Ferriswheel soliloquy. What does it mean that the author named the immoral trafficker in black-market penicillin after himself (his actual first name, Henry, becoming Harry, and Greene becoming Lime)?

[...]

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (Peter Jackson, 2001–2003) I was never a huge fan of Tolkien's books, or of pure fantasy literature—I don't do elves—but a second viewing of the twelve-hour extended DVD version convinces me it's the classic everyone says. Although, with all due respect to Hugo Weaving,David Bowie (who wanted the role) as the Elf Lord would have been a nice touch (as long as we're doing elves).

J. HOBERMAN
MARS ATTACKS! (Tim Burton, 1996) Does subliterary count? This is surely the best movie ever made from a series of bubblegum cards.

I'd nominate Phil Kaufman's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. Unless the source material being New Journalism rather than a straight novel disqualifies it from consideration.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

According to the Mainstream-O-Meter my Last.fm profile reveals that my tastes are 41.29% mainstream.

I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a very precise number and clearly that's the most important thing. (The phrase "spurious degree of precision" comes to mind, for some reason…)

[Via wonderful electric]

The collections Photos from Bad Album Covers and Photos from Bad Album Covers – volume 2 are every bit as bad as you'd imagine. Hypnotically bad. Horrifyingly bad. And yet, it's impossible to look away, I swear…

[NB: several images in those collections - including the last two covers I linked to directly above - are most definitely Not Safe For Work.]

[Via MetaFilter]

I've seen a number of links this week to Project CatCamera but I only got round to following one today. I'm glad I did: it's surprisingly interesting to see a cat's-eye view of a neighbourhood.

[Via James Nicoll (and several others)]

The BBC reports on how British children are wrapped in cotton wool by anxious parents:

What has happened in the last 30 years or so?

The risk of abduction remains tiny. In Britain, there are now half as many children killed every year in road accidents as there were in 1922 – despite a more than 25-fold increase in traffic.

In 1970, 80% of primary school-age children made the journey from home to school on their own. It was what you did.

Today the figure is under 9%. Escorting children is now the norm.

We are rearing our children in captivity – their habitat shrinking almost daily.

In 1970 the average nine-year-old girl would have been free to wander 840 metres from her front door. By 1997 it was 280 metres.

Now the limit appears to have come down to the front doorstep.

[Via Bruce Schneier, via Avedon Carol]

The title of this movie of a demonstration of Microsoft's 'Seadragon' system is perfectly titled: it truly is a Ridiculously Cool Technology Video.

The video itself isn't especially cool – it's just a techie giving a presentation at the TED conference – but the technology he's demonstrating is amazing!

[Via Buzz Andersen]

From craigslist LA, A Memo to Straight Women Seeking A Gay Male Friend:

Hi there. I am a gay man living in Los Angeles. Let me just say that I have many women friends. And I applaud the open-minded, progressive attitudes most straight women seem to have nowadays.

However, I have noticed that we've crossed over into a place where some women are just a little too comfortable with homosexuality. "Too much tolerance" you say? I'll explain.

Honestly, I am flattered when a woman says something along the lines of "you're cute. Too bad you're not straight." That's nice to hear. I'm not going into some PC tirade over a compliment. You know what though? I only need to hear it once. My friend's friend says it every time I see her. She does the rubbing my upper back back, hands in my hair shit. And you know what I want to say? "LISTEN. My being gay isn't the only reason it would never happen." Like, back the fuck up. And she's also volunteered to be my beard at events. "Great, we'll time travel to the 1950s when people in LA last did that." [...]

[Via 3quarksdaily]

Tiny squinty monkeys! So cute.

[Via Progressive Gold]