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.