Better Book Titles cuts to the chase:

This page is for people who have trouble slogging through the information on book jackets or feel intimidated by the title and cover itself. How many times have you perused the cover of a novel only to rub your sore eyes and realize you've learned NOTHING from the book's title?!

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

See, for example, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or various works by Tom Clancy or Moby-Dick. Worth watching.

[Via The Bygone Bureau, via The Awl]

Beware the Sufi crocodile.

The AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cable – a snip at just US$6,800 a pair – have attracted a fine set of snarky customer reviews. See, for example, this epic:

616 of 624 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I have only a little time…, November 15, 2010

By Whisper (CA USA) [...]

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.

DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the… whispers… began.

Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.

No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!

WHY CAN'T I FORGET THE WORDS???

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

Do not use the cables!

[Via Making Light]

Is this the most inhospitable smokers' lounge ever built?

The best part of this request for a recess in the middle of a trial is the judge's response.

[Via Crooked Timber]

The customer is always right insecure:

RESTAURANT | WILMINGTON, DE, USA

Me: "Hello! I'm [name] and I'll be your server today. Are you ready to order?"

Customer: "No! You can't serve me! You're prettier than I am! You're damaging my self-esteem!"

Me: *pause* "Well, you can request another server, if you like?"

Customer: "Yes! Get me another server. Someone less pretty!"

(Another waitress comes out. She's perfectly good-looking, but visibly older than the customer whereas I'm younger, so we figured that would be okay.)

Waitress: "May I take your order, ma'am?"

Customer: "No no no! I asked for someone who isn't pretty! Doesn't this place employ ugly people?!"

(In the end, after deciding that even the male servers were far too good-looking, she left us feeling flattered, but very confused.)

Autocorrect is evil.

[Via Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews]

ESA's latest batch of photos from Mars Express includes some really nice shots of Phobos. This one is particularly neat.

A profile of James Schamus, writer/producer of various Ang Lee films, CEO of Focus Features and part-time film academic:

There really isn't anyone else like Schamus. There's no precedent for a real academic – he's a professor of professional practice in Columbia's School of the Arts, a teacher and scholar who has served on the editorial board of Cinema Journal – to have a first-rate career as a writer, a producer and an executive in the film industry. As Tim Gray put it: "There have been a couple of film scholars who wrote scripts, but he's the only person in the business I've ever seen who said, 'I can't go to Cannes because I've got to work on my doctorate.' I liked his book about Dreyer, but I understood about a third of it." The book, based on Schamus's dissertation, is a study of the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Gertrud," a film that Schamus has described as "the single-most obscure Scandinavian formalist failure."

[Via Long Form]

The Human Jukebox. This poor man is going to be so sick of Rick Astley by the time he's done.

[Via Memex 1.1]

As a young historian, Sheila Fitzpatrick spent quite a bit of the late 1960s deep in the Soviet archives:

[...] On another occasion, I found prewar telephone directories, listed by title, in the catalogue of the Lenin Library. They used to publish such things every couple of years before the war (though not after), and it occurred to me that one way of estimating numbers of Great Purge victims – a topic of great speculation and few hard data at the time – might be to compare the lists of Moscow telephone subscribers for 1937 and 1939. I did not, of course, order only these years ('1937' on a library slip always rang alarm bells), but finally the volumes I really wanted arrived, and I set about painstakingly copying out every tenth name for a random sample. I think they saw what I was doing: for the next decade, whenever I tried to order telephone directories, I was told they were unavailable, lost or had never existed. But by this time, I had learned patience and the wisdom of Soviet citizens that nothing is for ever. When perestroika came, I got my telephone books back.

All this affected my formation as a historian: I became addicted to the thrill of the chase, the excitement of the game of matching your wits and will against that of Soviet officialdom. How boring it must be, I thought, to work on British history, where you just went to the PRO, and polite, helpful people gave you catalogues and then brought you the documents you wanted. What would be the fun of it? Knowledge, I decided, had to be fought for, achieved by ingenuity and persistence, even – like pleasure, in Marvell's words – snatched 'through the iron gates of life'. I thought of myself as different from the general run of British and American scholars, with their Cold War agenda (as I saw it) of discrediting the Soviet Union rather than understanding it. But that didn't stop me getting my own kicks as a scholar from finding out what the Soviets didn't want me to know. Best of all was to find out something the Soviets didn't want me to know and Western Cold Warriors didn't want to hear because it complicated the simple anti-Soviet story.

A Gallery of Fluid Motion. (Slides 4 and 7 are especially striking.)

Imagine how much hassle it would be to have to install modern software from 3.5" floppy disks.

[Via Daring Fireball]

A New Yellow Line.

Scientists Confirm Existence of 'Kirby Krackle':

All this time we've though Jack Kirby was a graphic innovator of unmatched genius, it turns out he was just tapping into the Universe.

As pointed out last week by comics creator Rick Veitch, scientists have made an incredible breakthrough in the study of antimatter that yielded the first ever creation and capture of antihydrogen, which looks almost exactly like the ubiquitous "Kirby Krackle" visual effect innovated by the legendary comics artist many decades ago. [...]

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit.

[Via MetaFilter]

Analysis of data gathered by NASA's Fermi gamma ray telescope has revealed that there's much more to the Milky Way than meets the naked eye:

"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."

[Via James Nicoll]

I'd forgotten just how many genuinely entertaining films the late Dino De Laurentiis helped bring to the screen:

• Flash Gordon
• Conan the Barbarian
• Manhunter
• The Dead Zone
• Army of Darkness

Four Decades of Police Box Modifications is geekery of the highest order:

Not everyone realises that the TARDIS in Doctor Who has changed many times, and those that do many not realise quite how much it changed. Then again, maybe the differences are only visible to those amongst us who don't get out enough – Those whose lives are enlivened by doing diagrams such as the one above showing the main TARDIS props to scale. I am unhealthily delighted by creating such diagrams, and if seeing such a diagram delights you, then read on.

I did (obviously.)

[Via The Great Escapism]

Lance Mannion makes a very convincing argument that Martin Freeman is the perfect person to play Bilbo Baggins:

[Freeman's...] Arthur Dent did not prepare me for his Watson.

He, Freeman's Dent, did prepare me for Freeman's next big movie role though. In fact, he made it seem like perfect and inevitable casting.

After all, Arthur Dent is a hobbit. [...]

Do go and read the whole post: it's well worth five minutes of your time.