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Stand By Me

Sailormom — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:09:05 -0800

Playing for Change - Peace Through Music (flash) is a documentary film by Mark Johnson. He traveled the world and recorded various musicians playing the song Stand By Me. Each musician was charged with layering a single song over the previous artist thus building upon it. Over thirty musicians globally participated in this project and not one artist knew the other or came in contact initially.
Bill Moyers talks with Mark Johnson, the producer of a remarkable documentary about the simple but transformative power of music.

[Insert clever lyric pun here]

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:57:58 -0800

Hall & Oates are suing their publisher, Warner/Chappell Music Inc., claiming the publisher failed to enforce the copyright on their song "Maneater" and sue an unnamed singer-songwriter (quite possibly Nelly Furtado) for infringement. The only problem is, Timbaland and Nate "Danja" Hills - the composers of the Furtado track - also work for Warner/Chappel Music. What happens when publishers don't protect songwriters from other songwriters working for the same publisher.

This is your brain in overdrive

wherever, whatever — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:21:34 -0800

Christopher Farmer of Opord Analytical has just posted his solution (PDF) to part 4 of the much studied "Kryptos" cipher. He's recently cracked Zodiac Killer ciphers thought unsolvable for nearly 40 years and has a theory (PDF) about the Zodiac Killer's possible identity that is hard to be ignored. Mr. Farmer freely shares his many discoveries on his website's forum board.

A beautiful truthful mind

twoleftfeet — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:45:31 -0800

Brain reorganizes to make room for math. But does math easily lead to truth? Is it really just beauty?

Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations

homunculus — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:23:08 -0800

Confirmed: Scientists Understand Where Mass Comes From. An exhaustive calculation of proton and neutron masses vindicates the Standard Model. Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations.

Blindspots

flatluigi — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:20:38 -0800

Blindspots is a continually-updated collection of movie reviews based around one very interesting concept -- how accessible they are to the visually impaired.
Movies that score high in accessibility include "The American President" (10/10) and "Ghosts of Mississippi" (9/10). At the other end of the scale are "101 Dalmatians", "Buddy", and "Spawn", each receiving 2/10.

Megaman the Movie

Caduceus — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:49:19 -0800

Speaking of robots, here is a trailer for Megaman the Movie, a low budget live action adaptation of the classic NES game. [sort of previously]
(Warning, the last link is experiencing bandwidth spikes, so may be down.)

Slightly higher def trailer here.

Pfft! You Was Gone

Knappster — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:44:29 -0800

What began as a gospel song became Archie Campbell's signature song on Hee Haw, with the help of Gordie Tapp and some surprise celebrity guests.

Ride the Roomba!

Del Far — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:25:56 -0800

Pets have long been afraid of anything robotic, whether it be R oo m b a or Robo tic Dog, but times they are a'changing and Pets are fighting back and have learned to overcome.

Cleaning Up.

gman — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:24:23 -0800

As the Bay Area looks to become the electric vehicle capital of America, the 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI won the Green Car of the Year Award at the LA Auto Show.

Infopornographics

puckish — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:58:56 -0800

Everything is prettier as a flow chart.
See, for instance:

The blogosphere, the relative permanency of visible and invisible worlds, your bike, U.S. interstates, the Maginot Line, moon cycles, Cubism, Enron, the financial crisis, the Apollo landing site, Lisa's cold, fertility, and Ninja Turtles.

There appears to be no rhyme or reason, other than a stringent belief in order and luck with google hits. From the thread author:

I find these by compulsively searching google images. A search might be one of these words (Weather, Perfect, Beautiful, Temperature, Flow, Process, Affordability) plus one of these words (Graphic, Graph, Infographic, Diagram, Chart, Plot, Map), then I just flip through the pages looking for any that are beautiful in either content or aesthetics.

Enjoy!

Broken Windows Theory Experiments

Foci for Analysis — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:56:25 -0800

A place that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy. And with good reason, according to a group of researchers in the Netherlands. Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave. They found that they could, by a lot: doubling the number who are prepared to litter and steal.

A story about a series of experiments on The Broken Windows Theory.
The paper The Spreading of Disorder (subscription required) by Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg was Published in Science, 20 November 2008. More information about the study in the Supporting Online Material (free access) page over at Science.

Redundant trainer

ericbop — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:41:19 -0800

Now we know what Mike Post has been up to lately. It's a treadmill. Powered by your feet. That you run on. Outdoors. On the road. Kind of like...running...on the road. The mind boggles.

The kids aren't on your lawn, they're in the house and don't even notice you.

Brandon Blatcher — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:40:15 -0800

Immersion

Got mad hydration in the troposphere

Tehanu — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:10:58 -0800

This weather forecast rap is one of many funny musical videos by GoRemy (website, blog). Some of his videos make fun of politics, and he was interviewed by Politico earlier this year. If he seems familiar, you may remember him from Hummus: The Rap or his question about taxes which was asked during the CNN/YouTube presidential debates.

The Disappearing Male

rageagainsttherobots — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:16:35 -0800

“The Disappearing Male” is a one-hour documentary about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system. The whole documentary is on Google Video.

Making Tracks

Kronos_to_Earth — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:35:37 -0800

"We were looking for pretty animals that have eyes, are coloured, or glow in the dark; instead, the most interesting find was the organism that was blind, brainless, and completely covered in mud." Some of the oldest fossil records may need to be reconsidered: Dr. Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas has discovered Gromia Sphaerica, a species of protist, making tracks....
'Finding Giant Deep Sea Protists', a video interview with Dr. Matz.

click...click...click....click

adamvasco — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 09:17:39 -0800

Agence France-Presse or AFP is the world's oldest established news agency.
AFP pays tribute to the International Festival of Photojournalism.
Check out the portfolios of photographers such as Olivier Laban-Mattei or Lionel Healling... or... or any of the others here all with captioned slide show.