How to get students to attend your next lecture:

Next time, I'll talk about Adolf Hitler, whose big problem – besides being a bloodthirsty persuasive paranoid genocidal psychopath, that is – is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels.

David Lynch's A Goofy Movie.

So wrong, and yet so right.

[Via Needcoffee.com]

Cadbury's Gorilla vs Cameo 'Word Up'. So good.

[Via GromBlog]

Fred Clark has a theory:

The paper today ran an item in the national briefs about a new White House report on Social Security:

The Bush administration said in a new report Monday that Social Security is facing a $13.6 trillion shortfall in coming years and that delaying reforms is not fair to younger workers.

The full-length AP report doesn't provide much in the way of supporting evidence for that claim of a "$13.6 trillion shortfall," except to say this number was arrived at by calculating a cumulative deficit into "the indefinite future." Apparenty, in order to come up with a sufficiently scary-sounding large number, they projected the deficit expected to arise in 2042 over the next several centuries, extending a demographic bubble (the Baby Boom) into a permanent, never-ending trend.

The Treasury report also seems to be based on the assumption that, over the next few centuries, America's population will not grow but, rather, contract.

Scary thought: What if the Bush administration knows something the rest of us don't about the next 300 years of America's future? [...]

David Margolick on an iconic photograph:

During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America. [...]

[Via 3quarksdaily]

This training video for distributors of the weekly freesheet ShortList is pretty much an insult to the intelligence of all involved.

(Or, just possibly, the posting of the video on YouTube is a bit of viral marketing for said magazine. Which will, nonetheless, take 10 points off your IQ with every viewing.)

[Via Where Did It All Go Right?]

Nerdy, but adorable:

It was the crossword puzzle fan's version of getting his marriage proposal plastered on a stadium Jumbotron. [...]

[Via Qwghlm]

The World In Only 7 Pictures.

[Via kottke.org]

Hole Punch Clouds must be among the strangest cloud formations ever seen.

In yesterday's Observer Mark Kermode reported on watching some TV drama for the first time in years:

In the late Nineties, I adopted Noel Coward's fabulously snotty maxim that 'television is for appearing on, not for looking at' to justify my increasingly frequent stints presenting movie documentaries and cropping up on arts programmes such as BBC2's Review (now Newsnight Review). The latter, which requires contributors to look beyond the boundaries of their specialist subjects, proved an invaluable lifeline because it meant I got to watch some really great TV shows under the cover of professional necessity. After all, this was work. Thus I got to enjoy Shameless without any sense of shame and to be reassured by the likes of Robin Hood that television could still be just as crap as ever.

Then came the challenge. After the worst summer of movies on record, in which my usually enjoyable stint standing in for Philip French as this paper's film columnist had seen me groaning through Hostel Part II, Shrek the Third, Die Hard 4.0 and other such bores, The Observer demanded that I finally put my anti-television snobbery to the test. The mission: to shut me in a room with a truckload of DVD box sets representing 'a cross-section of modern TV' and see whether, at the end, I could still sensibly claim that cinema had the upper hand.

It's a pity that Kermode's survey of the best modern TV had to offer over the last several years didn't include more SF. Admittedly he did enthuse over Life On Mars and Doctor Who, but as he's a pretty genre-friendly critic I'd have been interested to hear his thoughts on shows like Heroes and Firefly and the revived Battlestar Galactica, shows that took advantage of the serial format of the TV show to do the sort of extended story arcs that are impractical in feature films.

[Via feeling listless]

I should probably just post a link to xkcd every day and be done with it.

[Via tanpiover2, posting to a comment thread at James Nicoll's LiveJournal]

You learn something new every day: the proportions of the classic Chanel No 5 perfume bottle are derived from the shape of the Plaza Vendome in Paris.

[Via Monoscope]

I trust the bank that came up with this system wasn't using it to track users' account balances:

Developed internally (and not to be confused with commercial products with the same name that for all I know are good), VBDBs gave the user total control over the data using a VB-powered Excel spreadsheet.

VBDBs worked via the following workflow:

1. User opens Excel spreadsheet.
2. Spreadsheet automatically populates with data from the production database.
3. The spreadsheet automagically deletes everything from the table in the production database. Seriously.
4. User messes around, making data changes and playing with forms.
5. User closes spreadsheet.
6. The spreadsheet checks if the table has data in it; if it does, it gets deleted again (like in step 3). Seriously.
7. Excel populates data in the spreadsheet into the production database.

I just hope they had really good backups, preferably with new sets taken at very short intervals. And that they aren't my bank.

Mashup maestro Mark Vidler has made virtually all of his Go Home Productions back catalogue available for download. Definitely worth firing up a BitTorrent client for if you have any appreciation at all for the genre.

BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting a six-part adaptation of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:

Dirk Gently has an unshakeable belief in the interconnectedness of all things but his Holistic Detective Agency's only success seems to be tracking down missing cats for old ladies. Then Dirk stumbles upon an old friend behaving bizarrely, and he is drawn into a four-billion year old mystery that must be solved if the human race is to avoid immediate extinction.

The words of Douglas Adams, back on Radio 4, adapted by the production team behind the last three phases of the Hitchhiker's saga; I'm just going to have to overlook my dislike of star Harry Enfield and listen in, aren't I?

A New York story:

Very late last night I found myself in the City Hall subway stop with 8 other stragglers waiting for a non-existent R train. We were all spread out across the platform, all standing, but after half an hour everyone had migrated to the benches and we were all sitting in a row. Nobody had anything to read, cellphone service wasn't working, and most unusually, no one was attached to an ipod.

After a few minutes a very tall girl with long brown hair who I would later learn was a Parsons design student, broke social convention, turned to her fellow benchmates, and said, "My God, wasn't today beautiful." At first she just got a few quiet affirmations,"yeah, gorgeous", "best day yet" etc, but then a young woman in a business suit again broke social convention and revealed personal information: "It was so nice, when I woke up I decided I didn't want to feel miserable about anything, and broke up with my boyfriend. I ditched him at 7:30 in the morning. He didn't know what hit him." This revelation shattered the dam of silence [...]

[Via kottke.org]

NASA's latest Astronaut Recruitment advert paints a rosy picture:

The open positions require extensive travel on Earth and in space. Possible destinations may include, but are not limited to, Texas, Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, the International Space Station and the moon.

Imagine how dispiriting it'd be if you'd gone through the recruitment process, only to look back a decade or two hence and realise that the most exotic place you'd visited on that list turned out to be Kazakhstan.

[Via Unspeak]

I haven't seen or heard a word about Richard Kelly's Southland Tales in ages, so it's good to finally see a new trailer.

I still have no real idea of what the hell the film's about, but it certainly looks intriguing enough to get me in the cinema once it finally shows up over here in December. How could I not want to see a film by the guy who made Donnie Darko employing the talents of [deep breath] The Rock, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Miranda Richardson, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Smith, Wallace Shawn, John Larroquette, Justin Timberlake, Bai Ling, Janeane Garofalo and Christopher Lambert?

[Via Fimoculous.com]

More mice than you have ever seen in your entire life. I promise you.

[Via With Leather, via MetaFilter]

In London the seriously rich are finding new ways to improve their property:

As prices in the plushest parts of London continue to soar, billionaire Russian oligarchs, private-equity traders and hedge-fund managers are engaged in a multimillion-pound game of one-upmanship as they vie with each other to dig ever bigger, wider and deeper extensions. Behind the white stucco fronts and redbrick exteriors of Belgravia and Chelsea, London’s super-rich are digging down and building outwards and upwards – and making use of the latest, priciest technology to do it.

Want to keep fit? Why not install an underground squash court – there are several under the streets of west London – or put in a climbing wall? How about a tennis court? One multimillionaire is believed to be considering building one. Fancy a swim? The latest must-have feature is an adjustable-height swimming pool. At the flick of a button – because everything is remote-controlled – the bottom can be raised or lowered by a giant hydraulic jack, forming a deep swimming pool for the heavyweight millionaire or a toddler-friendly paddling pool for his offspring. Optional extras include a retractable glass roof or a discreet cover that will slide over the pool, creating a ballroom or banqueting hall. It doesn’t have to be modern or minimal – one house in Mayfair has a Roman-style pool, complete with wonky columns.

Several owners are apparently competing to build a 4-metre-deep pool – double the maximum depth so far in the capital. One home in north London even has a bespoke chute covered in a special slippery paint, which enables the owner, who loves swimming first thing in the morning, but hates the fuss of dressing, to step out of bed and slide straight into the water a couple of storeys below. [...]

I've got to admit, that last feature sounds like fun. Though as a non-swimmer I'd probably use it to get myself down to the breakfast table, Wallace and Gromit-style.

[Via BLDGBLOG, via The Sideshow]