Excellent Woot Contest!

Woot is running a contest this weekend: Create a mashup of two unrelated album covers for maximum comic effect. IMHO this entry should win hands-down:

Astronomy Picture of the Day is also Aviation Picture of the Day

A USAF C-17 Globemaster firing missile-decoy flares over the Atlantic.

This is just effing brilliant

Another Flash animation. It'll take a couple of seconds, and then you'll be completely charmed. If not, send me a stamped, self-addressed envelope for your money back. Got this from the Woot Web Woundup:

Animator vs. Animation


Oh, and I want to get the scooter for my first-grader:

www.ronpatrickstuff.com

Sick, Twisted, and Not Even New...

...but it was new to me. I tripped over it following links on the Wikipedia entry for Snakes on a Plane. It's "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny", a Flash-animated deathmatch featuring Godzilla, Abraham Lincoln, and thirty or forty other characters. The Wikipedia entry for it is almost as funny as the animation itself, with its dry, obsessively detailed analysis of each character's fate.

Thank You, Deepak Chopra

Here he succintly and eruditely puts forth the truth that should be obvious: We will continued military action will give us no lasting peace until we address the root causes of Muslim radicalization: Poverty and oppression.

The Crazification Factor and Kung Fu Monkey

A couple of good blog entries on Middle East strategy and our Dear Leader's take on it.

If "strategy" is the word.

The Crazification Factor

and

Wait, Aren't You Scared?

Dirty-Car Art

OK, this is your basic fantastic piece of creativity. Scott Wade lives on a dusty road. He's also an accomplished artist. So he creates visual art in the dust that is as far beyond "Wash Me" as...well, see for yourself.

Here's an example; this image is copyrighted by Scott Wade, so don't do nothin' nasty with it (and if he asks me, I'll take it down).

Spy Sub (aka Robot Wars Underwater)

My 14-year-old nephew Jack was completely charmed by this idea. As what right-thinking geek wouldn't be! Just think of the possibilities...finding the watch you lost windsurfing...finding the friend you lost windsurfing...and new horizons in Web cams! ("Now, ASIG Software brings you the view...UNDER Lake Mendota!")

(Click the image for the full-size readable version)





That thousand-foot Ethernet cable, though....messy, messy. I guess, absent a megawatt blue-green laser or a pair of high-bandwidth sonar transducers for cheap, I'm not quite sure what I'd use.

Also, "controlled and powered"? They're running bilge pumps off the NIC? Hmmmm...better keep a fire extinguisher handy to that laptop.

Go Get Pandora

I have no idea about the licensing or how any of this works, really.

But...an Internet radio station that learns what you like over time and plays similar artists that you might like? Ooo!

www.pandora.com

"...Then the terrorists have won."

This exceedingly well-reasoned paper (at the Cato Institute's website) points out in even-handed detail that:

1. The statistical risk of falling victim to a terrorist attack is miniscule


2. Alarmist caterwauling notwithstanding, chem/bio/nuclear tech is unlikely to change this


3. We do ourselves much more damage overreacting to overblown threats than the terrorists ever could

If ever there were a thinking person's rebuttal to Homeland Security hysteria and the rationale for war...this would be it.

CIO Magazine: Fed Anti-Terror Data Mining Efforts Won't Work, Waste Money

It's refreshing to hear something contrarian from the tech/executive press; not "Sure, just give us the contract", but "This effort is stupid, wasteful, and won't catch terrorists".

http://www.cio.com/archive/080106/antiterror.html?page=1

The Register has those doctored Reuters pix

You may have heard that Reuters dumped a freelance photographer who digitally manipulated a pair of pictures from the war in Lebanon for greater impact; one of an explosion, one of an Israeli F-16. They pulled the images from their site, and also purged their archives of 920 of his other pictures.

Here are the doctored images. Kudos to El Reg for its work on upholding worldwide journalism standards:

http://www.theregister.com/2006/08/08/reuters_pic_shocker/