Blippy demonstrates that for some people, we really are what we buy:

Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying.

Automatically share your favorite purchases from iTunes, Amazon, Zappos, Visa, MasterCard, and more.

Just so we're all clear about this, the idea isn't just that Blippy will post details of what users have bought: it'll display where they bought it and how much they paid for it.

Please, $DEITY, let this be a satire on social networking.

[Via MetaFilter]

Having been diagnosed with breast cancer, Barbara Ehrenreich found herself being urged to look on the bright side of life:

[Perhaps...] the most pernicious notion she encountered was the common idea that a positive attitude will actually help fight the cancer. Drawing on the scientific literature, Ehrenreich convincingly rejects this as pure dogma. Staying positive may help your immune system operate more successfully, she argues, but unfortunately the immune system counters foreign disease-bearing microbes, and cancer cells are not foreign, they are the body's cells gone mad.

So forget the chanting and the meditation, forget the unburdening of toxic feelings, because you might as well believe that your cancer cells can be removed through telekinesis.

The feisty Ehrenreich never did get "positive," but she did get royally pissed off. And luckily for the world's other grumpy old bastards, she survived to write this witty and insightful book.

Bright-sided exposes the intellectual and spiritual emptiness that lies at the heart of America's obsession with positive thinking. If you've ever been lured to an Anthony Robbins seminar under false pretences, or suffered through a "team building exercise" led by a grown man with a ponytail, or been trapped in a hospital waiting room and forced to watch Oprah, then this book will make a lot of sense.

The British version of the X-Files is no more:

The government has shut a unit which has investigated UFO sightings for more than 50 years, judging its resources better spent on more earthly threats.

[...]

"The MoD has no opinion on the existence or otherwise of extra-terrestrial life. However, in over 50 years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom," it said in a statement.

Sceptical readers will note that they don't say that UFOs don't exist, just that there's no threat to the UK. Is this because they've found no evidence of alien visitors to UK airspace, or <paranoia level="maximum">compelling evidence that the government has already signed a non-aggression pact with an alien power?</paranoia>

[Via Blood & Treasure]

Something to listen to on iPlayer¹: Shelved:

Shaun Ley recounts how the political circumstances of the late 1970s resulted in three of the most popular TV series' of the time – Dr Who, Secret Army and The Professionals – each having at least one episode scrapped after filming.

[Via TV Today]

1. For those of us in the UK. ↩

Introducing iBox 2G:

The fastest, most powerful way to satisfy your greed and simultaneously kill a complete stranger.

Martian sand dunes are surprisingly colourful. (See Phil Plait's post if you're wondering why the this bit of the Red Planet has all those bluish-gray streaks.)

[Via Bad Astronomy]

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away: galaxy collision switches on black hole.

Cassetteboy¹ brings us The Web for Beginners.

[Via The Technium]

1. Previously linked to here and here. ↩

Bopaboo plans to let people sell used MP3s:

[Bopaboo...] – still in private beta – now allows you to keep the music files after someone else has purchased them, although you can sell each song only once. First, the service's spider figures out what music you have on your computer, and uploads the songs into an account. From there, you can sell your collection to the Bopaboo community at large, at prices determined by a demand-based algorithm, generally lower than what the same music costs on Amazon or iTunes.

Given that the music industry's preferred strategy is to try to get laws passed that force ISPs to monitor their users' internet traffic for unlicensed content, or at the very least to stigmatise any transmission of media files over the internet that doesn't involve buying from a reputable online store, I'd be astonished to see the major labels greet a scheme like this with any great enthusiasm.

In any case, I'm not sure I'd trust the company to keep the data collected by the service's spider about the contents of my hard disk to itself. I'm not suggesting that Bopaboo are intentionally acting as a data collection service for the music industry, but it's easy to envisage a scenario where Bopaboo – whether as a consequence of doing really well, or of failing to make a go of their original business plan – ended up wholly or partly owned by a conglomerate with media interests¹ and all that lovely data about the contents of users' hard disks, tied to details of their user account² being combed for unlicensed files, false positives and all. Then the lawyers' letters start arriving, offering you the choice between paying compensation and going to court, where you can spend even larger sums on lawyers…

Or am I just being paranoid?³

[Via The Browser]

1. Think Last.fm starting out as an independent company and ending up owned by CBS. ↩
2. Including bank or credit card details that can be linked to a real person. ↩
3. Can you be too paranoid about the music industry? ↩

I think this picture of NGC 660 is comfortably the clearest image of a polar ring galaxy I've ever seen. It's like something from the cover of a 1920s science fiction magazine.

Meet Willie Van Groundskeeper.

[Via FFFFOUND]

Apparently, sales of an old popular physics book by John Gribbin have soared in the USA since a copy of the book was pictured lying in the footwell of Tiger Woods' car in the aftermath of his recent domestic altercation.

Can someone please describe for me the train of thought that leads someone from knowing Tiger (or his wife) had a copy of a physics text in their car to their seeking out a copy for themselves? If it was a book on golf, I could understand golf fans wanting to read what the greatest golfer of modern times was reading, but a book on physics?

I really don't understand people sometimes…

Courtesy of Marina Hyde, a peek inside Team Tiger's crisis room:

Gillette guy: [...] Can I get an idea of the facial scratches? Anyone? We always tell our ambassadors at spokesmodel school to scream: "Not the face! Please not the face!" at the first sign of any danger, so we feel it's important to get a handle on whether Tiger followed through on his training. But on the upside, that would be the only potential sticking point for us. We're not bothered about the rest. We saw David Beckham through a couple of, uh, metaphorical hydrant collisions.

A Jesus Venn diagram.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Best. Billboard. Ever?

[Via GromBlog]

If this story of a futures trade gone awry isn't true, it damn well should be:

As the senior trader at ̠xecor, Brad made it very clear that no one Р"not even His Holiness, the Pope" Рshall question his trades. After all, Brad makes complex trading decisions that no one else could possibly comprehend. Sometimes he buys high and sells low. Sometimes he holds in a decline. Sometimes he refuses to sell at any price. Brad works in mysterious ways, and if he said "do it", then it better get done.

Just this once, it might have been better if it hadn't got done.

Fun as it is to poke fun at a Master of the Universe when he comes a cropper, this particular foul-up isn't really down to Brad at all. It's a reminder of the importance of the Robustness Principle, as expressed by the late Jon Postel in RFC 793: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

Sinful!

Who Watches the Watchmen Cookies. Very nice.

Also, I should mention how pleasing it is to see the Orbyn brand back in action. I wonder: is Robyn's the most nomadic British weblog of the last decade? Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone else I've been reading all these years whose blogging has had so many online homes.

That's not a criticism, you understand: if anything, the fact that I've kept following Robyn's blogging through all those changes of address is a sign of how much I've been enjoying what I've been reading.¹

1. And now I'm sounding like some sort of blog-stalker, so I think I'll shut up! ↩