Exposition d'Art contemporain dans le parc de Chaudfontaine (Belgique).

[Via Yay Hooray,¹ via FFFFOUND!]

1. Warning: other images on that page are very much NSFW. ↩

This is Halloween.

[Via MeFi user biddeford, posting this comment]

Isn't Sinead O'Connor overdue a massive, grovelling apology from absolutely everybody?

[Via Comment #25 by Lex on this Popular post]

An Anthropomorphized White iPhone 4 Is Confronted Regarding Its Inability to Be Shipped…

INT. EARLY MORNING, TODAY. THE LOBBY BAR OF A TOP-TIER LAS VEGAS CASINO RESORT

The WHITE IPHONE 4 is slumped back in a chair, alone, playing a table-top video poker machine embedded in the bar. He is up late, not early.

[...]

ORIGINAL IPHONE: Who do you think you are? You think all publicity is good publicity? You think you're the bad-boy star? Lindsay fucking Lohan with stainless steel frame and a glass back? There's a big difference between you and her. She's made actual movies, which have sold actual tickets. She had an actual career to ruin. What have you done, at all, other than embarrass yourself? You showed up at WWDC, let the press fondle you, take your picture. You've got sometimes-seen company units in the hands of employees on campus in Cupertino. But that shit isn't your job. Your job is to sell yourself to actual customers. And you know how many times you've been sold? Zero. You're not the rebel who's fallen down. You're the loser who's never done a damn thing. [...]

So good.

Nice T-shirt.

[Via ASCII by Jason Scott]

James Bridle has been thinking about what's missing from the current generation of ebooks:

[While...] traditional books are physical objects, that's not the core of our relationship with them. The truth is that books are essentially not physical objects, but temporal ones.

[...]

[The...] real problem with the ebook as it stands is that it denies us many of these temporal aspects, which produces a kind of cognitive dissonance. And there's a social layer that forms around this, another timeline of reading reviews and discussing with friends, that the ebook could actually exploit better than the physical book, if we work on it some more. We really need to look at how we address this temporal mode with ebooks.

[...]

Well, the thing I've been thinking about a lot, the thing I keep coming back to, is Bookmarks. Bookmarks in all their forms: as underlining, dogears, annotations, notes and references. User-generated tags and footnotes. A horrible phrase, but. There is something there. [...]

All of which, as well as being interesting in its own right, acts as a launchpad for Bridle's Open Bookmarks project:

Open Bookmarks is a project to discuss, develop and design an open framework for saving, storing and sharing bookmarks, annotations and reading data in ebooks. When established, Open Bookmarks will champion the new standard and support widespread adoption.

We want to work with publishers, software developers, hardware manufacturers, merchants, and anyone with an interest in the future of the book.

Here's hoping the publishing houses have learned something from the experience of their friends in the music and film industries. Something other than "wrap your content in as much platform-specific DRM code as you can find and hope for the best", I mean.

[Via Phil Gyford]

Rain falls on Uluru.

The phrase "awe-inspiring" might have been invented for just this purpose.

[Via MetaFilter]

Kate Beaton's Children of the Night: Dracula, with added shoe sales, turnips and Single Ladies.

[Via James Nicoll]

I get vertigo just looking at this photo of a climbing wall at Bjoeks, Groningen.

[Via jwz]

Is your club's owner a true billionaire?

Question #3: If your billionaire broke the law, would there be repercussions? A true billionaire is essentially his own country. He transcends the apparatus of any single state and acts as an independent principle of order, like gravity or a weird idea on Lost. Wherever he goes, he's three mean Beatles and the world around him is Ringo. If George Gillett woke up with a headache, a slippery flashlight, and a bloody corpse in a Donald Duck costume, he would feel the chill of a man who dreads the movements of justice. With pristine clarity, he would realize that somewhere in the world was a DA who yearned to take him down. If Alisher Usmanov woke up in similar circumstances, he would yawn, yell for his slippers, and note that the day was Tuesday. [...]

Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews is worth a look. See, for example:

The Wave, Susan Casey

[...]

There was far too much about surfing in Susan Casey's newest. But I did appreciate that she fleshed out more details on the tsunamis in Lituya Bay, which have always fascinated me. What do you do, psychologically, with a 1,720 ft wave? You can say, oh, well, it's like x times the size of y, but that's not particularly interesting. You can say, well, it's bigger than the wave in "Deep Impact" that took out Tea Leoni and her dad, but, really, it's so much bigger than that. It's like the sort of wave you see in your dreams, if you dream about waves. I personally mostly dream about graduate school, and suddenly realizing I have forgotten to go to graduate school, and being terrified and lost, and then I wake up, panicked, and realize that I have absolutely zero desire to attend graduate school. [...]

[Via The Awl]

Go and read Christopher Nieman's Unpopular Science: Whether we like it or not, human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.¹

1. Includes a plausible – nay, convincing – explanation for variations in the gravitational attraction of a fridge. ↩

From the New Statesman's interview with Bill Bryson:

NS: Baseball or cricket?

BB: Baseball. I understand cricket – what's going on, the scoring – but I can't understand why.

Joshua Casteel on Call of Duty: Gaming and Reality in Modern Warfare…

[Playing in 'The Pit', an introductory section of 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2' designed to get the player used to the game mechanics...] The reflexes come back to you. Pop-ups painted like Zarqawi and bin Laden spring up from behind concrete road blocks, sandbags, petroleum barrels, interspersed between pop-ups of fat old men with glasses who look like professors, and women in burkas and hijabs, and kids with backpacks. A few pop-ups that look like leftovers from the Eighties and Nineties – more IRA than al-Qaida – sometimes make it into the rotation. They stutter your trigger rhythms. But the civilian pop-ups, Irish or Arab, look as scared as the enemy ones look scary. That gut contrast is critical. You gotta stay general. If you stop too long to look, trying to spot the visual differences between a ski mask and a kefia, you're done. You gotta just see, like you're seeing with your stomach, so you're not looking, you're seeing, and once you're seeing, you're firing, which means they're dead and you're not. You can't trust details. The moment passes. And you remember. And it's not like you don't already know it, but you do have to remind yourself. This is just a game. So you remember: you did the real thing.

My deployment to Iraq, June 2004: I'm the only one to raise a hand when my convoy commander – a sunglass-wearing, steely-jawed stereotype of himself – asks who's never done this before. [...]

[Via Give Me Something To Read]

Black and WTF indeed.

I'd really like to see "Cold Faithful" on Enceladus, or the Loki Patera Planetary Park for myself someday. In the meantime, I'll just have to make do with the posters.

How the Facebook News Feed works:

The more digital our daily lives become, the more perplexing the questions seem. Will the growth of social media destroy our notions of privacy? Is democracy helped or harmed by the cacophony of opinions online? And perhaps most confounding: Why does that guy I barely know from the 10th grade keep showing up in my Facebook feed?

[...]

[With...] the mystery of that 10th-grade friend in mind, The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook's personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you're shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you "stalk" your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos? [...]

I don't use Facebook¹ but I'd always assumed that the whole point of a personal news feed was that it'd keep you abreast of what your friends are doing, not just whatever subset of their activities Facebook decides to show you.

I can see the argument that if the news feed was just a river of news showing every type of update all your friends shared with their friends – or whichever subset of their friends you fell into – then you could easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages, but doesn't that just suggest that Facebook needs to make it possible for you to sort or group the content of your news feed in some user-defined way, or to have the News Feed flag certain types of update? Or is this like Facebook's privacy settings: something it is possible to customise to some degree, but which most users will leave at the default settings because it's too complicated/inflexible to be worth the hassle?

[Via kottke.org]

1. I don't mean that as snobbery, some modern-day equivalent of "I don't watch TV", honest! I do have a Facebook account, but I've never thought it worth spending time on. I get that for a lot of people Facebook provides an easy way to keep tabs on the lives of friends who wouldn't dream of setting up a weblog or online journal, and that's just fine if that's what you want. ↩

10 Doctor Who Fan-Posters. I like the fourth poster best (but beware if you haven't seen Matt Smith's season through to the end, because it's a huge spoiler.)

[Via The Hickensian]

The Big Blog Theory is written by David Saltzberg, the science consultant on The Big Bang Theory. He posts about each episode, explaining the scientific background to some plot point or throwaway comment. See, for example, the entry on The Wheaton Recurrence:

Giant ants were the terror of the movie Them! (1954). Tonight Rajesh and Howard realize giant ants would be a cool new method of transportation. But Sheldon Cooper is right: unfortunately physics determines that giant ants cannot exist on our planet as we know it.

The evolutionary biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, won this argument already in his 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size". In his essay, Handane did more than observe elephants are larger than mice but explained, using physics, how changes in size demand changes in form.

A typical ant we know and love is about 5mm long and has a mass of about 5 milligrams. The giant ants you might like to have around would be 1000 times longer. Not just longer, but 1000 times wider. Not just wider, but 1000 times taller. To calculate the new mass of the giant ant we have to multiply these all together – a billion times the volume. At the same density, a giant ant would weigh about 5 tons. But its legs would only be wider in two dimensions. They are a million times stronger, but that is not enough – for a creature a billion times heavier. Before taking their first step they would break all their legs, leaving them immoblile and harmless. While mass increases as the cube of size, the function of its structure improves only as the square, hence the name "square-cube law".

Note to bug spray companies: Just make a chemical that grows ants 1000-fold in every dimension. That will stop ants in their tracks. That's sure to be a best-selling item.

[Via MetaFilter]

In 1916, a decade or so before he created Popeye, E C Segar was working in Chicago and missing his girlfriend Myrtle, so he wrote her a letter. Sweet.

(He and Myrtle married three years after he wrote this letter, and according to the IMDB they were still married when he died, nineteen years after that.)