Watch this video. Luckiest. Baby. Ever!

[Via Daring Fireball]

Please don't be concerned if you can hear a faint whirring sound in the background while listening to the Portsmouth Sinfonia's performance of the Also sprach Zarathustra.¹ It's just the sound of the late Stanley Kubrick doing about 10,000 r.p.m.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Best known to filmgoers of a certain vintage as the music that played over the title sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. ↩

The Planetary Society Blog has some spectacular photos of a meteor burning up over the Netherlands earlier this week.

50 Years of Space Exploration would benefit from a decent key explaining some of the colour coding, but even without such frills it's still pretty wonderful.

Be sure to download the large version.

[Via James Nicoll]

The Grammar Nerd Corrective Label Pack: obnoxious, yet essential.

[Via The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, via iamcal]

When it comes to answering a question like "How Safe is the HPV vaccine?" a picture really is worth 1,000 words.

This unofficial Lolita cover contest attracted some fine work. Whilst I can appreciate the merits of the winning entry, I preferred the second-placed submission by Aleksander Bak, a.k.a. the scrunchie.

[Via The Bygone Bureau]

Courtesy of a post at The Edge of the American West, a lovely passage from Garry Wills describing the dilemma Reagan's advisors were confronted with when he contemplated agreeing to Gorbachev's proposal to scrap the superpowers' nuclear arsenals:

Sophisticated workers for the president had to search their souls. They resembled a crew of absentminded mini-Frankensteins who had fiddled at separate parts of a monster for benevolent but widely varying purposes, only to see him break the clasps and rear himself up off the table in a weird compulsion to do some monstrous Good Thing that none of them had ever believed possible.

Twenty years on from recording Flood, They Might Be Giants have contributed a Track by Track Guide to Rolling Stone:

"Dead"

Appears to be one of TMBG's most abstract and personal songs. It's about being reincarnated as a bag of groceries ("I didn't apologize/For when I was eight/and I made my younger brother/Have to be my personal slave").

Linnell: "There's no real little brother; we would never confess something like that in a song. I think I ripped the vocal interplay off from the Proclaimers. There, I said it. Let the lawyers emerge, feathered helmets and jousting spears at the ready … The dreamlike relationship between returning expired groceries and returning from the grave after you expire appealed to me."

[Via Pajiba]

Seeing all these 'Under Construction' GIFs, rescued by Archive Team from Geocities before it shuts down, in one place¹ made me feel thoroughly nostalgic for the mid-1990s web.

There's a pretty good MetaFilter thread about that page. As a bonus, Archive Team organiser Jason Scott popped up in the MeFi thread to post the story of the Geocities user who posted this GIF.

1. NB: there are almost 1,000 animated GIFs on that page – your web browser might well slow down a bit while you're viewing it. ↩

What if Gordon hadn't lost an eye…

Today he is one of the most familiar celebrities in British life, a sporting legend whose mellow Scottish charm as a team captain on A Question of Sport has won new generations of admirers. Even the embarrassing scenes on Celebrity Big Brother a couple of years ago – that poodle business with Rula Lenska! – have largely been forgotten. It is funny to think that, for Gordon Brown, it could all have been so different. [...]

It's no What if Gordon Banks had Played? or Thaxted, but it's not bad.

[Via The Browser]

I wish Kelly Clarkson would record a studio version of her cover of Seven Nation Army.

[Via Idolator]

The finalists in the Nikon Small World Competition are all striking, but the second image – the Atherix ibis aquatic larva – is both striking and utterly terrifying.

As one MeFi commenter put it:

That Atherix ibis larva looks like something I should be bowing before and presenting gifts of blood and souls.

[Via MetaFilter]

Royal De Luxe, the people who brought The Sultan's Elephant to London in 2006, have just helped Berliners celebrate the 20th anniversary of reunification by presenting The Berlin Reunion.

That last link is to my favourite picture from the event, but do check out all the photos on that page: the whole extravaganza looks to have been another remarkable feat of art and engineering at play.

Perhaps it would be best if we just shut down all online banking systems now:

New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim's dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.

The sophisticated hack uses a Trojan horse program installed on the victim's machine that alters html coding before it's displayed in the user's browser, to either erase evidence of a money transfer transaction entirely from a bank statement, or alter the amount of money transfers and balances. [...]

Alternatively, and more realistically, banks need to start routinely requiring confirmation of transactions via some means not involving the user's web browser: ringing the user on a preset phone number to confirm that they authorised any transaction to a new recipient, or any transaction over a certain value.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Mark Pilgrim shares with us his Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Tony Ross' "Distributed Extensibility Submission":

It is a common practice for authors, tool vendors, and library authors to want to extend languages to represent additional information that can’t be adequately described by the standard grammar. [...] Here are a few examples that apply to HTML:

[...]

• A HTML document editor adds information about tool settings so that a subsequent editing session can continue with the same settings.

We would very much like Word's "export as HTML" output – which is so proprietary that it has spawned an entire cottage industry dedicated to "cleaning" it – to validate.

Superhero Facebook Status Updates:

Bruce Wayne is glad to see the new law requiring skylights in all buildings was passed.

Edited to add the best contribution from the MeFi comment thread:

Adrian Veidt: I DID IT!
Posted 35 minutes ago

[Via MetaFilter]

Gabocorp bragged that This is not your everyday site. They weren't kidding.

P.S. How the mighty have fallen…

[Via feeling listless miniblog]

A Koi breeder in his element, by Michael Cogliantry.

[Via swiss miss]

In the middle of a broadly sensible Michael Wolff article about why Rupert Murdoch wants to make internet users pay for their news, a couple of surprising factoids:

Murdoch believes that The Sunday Times has certain franchises so valuable that he will surely be able to capture a paying audience. Jeremy Clarkson is one of News Corp.'s strongest cases. Clarkson, who writes a column about cars, is a veritable British institution – everybody consults Clarkson before buying a car. He is [...] now responsible for 25 percent of timesonline.co.uk traffic.
[Emphasis added]

I can just about believe the statistic about the proportion of traffic Clarkson attracts to the site¹, but does he really have a significant influence on private² car purchase decisions?

[Via The Browser]

1. Ironically, given James Murdoch's recent diatribe against state-funded broadcasting, a good portion of Clarkson's fame is a consequence of his appearing on the BBC on a regular basis, but that's a topic for another post. ↩
2. I assume that corporate fleet buyers pay no attention to Clarkson's motoring journalism. ↩