Shanks
Inmates had the DIY thing down long before the neo-Marthas at make:

The Erosion Sink
Must be hell to clean, but if you're buying designer sinks, it's likely that you're not the one doing the cleaning.

Just don't slide across the hood, Luke Duke-style.

from the always-good ModernMechanix

Boycott Circuit City. Sickening corporate behavior.

"I don't think that I've got the stomach To stomach calling you today"
Ahhh, belt it, emo man-child...
The 20 worst lyrics evah. thx, pete.

"Smart" electronic sunglasses let you change the color with the twist of a knob (vid demo (I'm sure there's a good reason why the lab-guy needs to wear rubber gloves while handling sunglasses))
(via slashdot)

Some odd, but very well-executed illustration by Ben Kehoe

[Police State] NYPD spied on anti-Bush groups prior to 2004 RNC
It also spread to events in cities hundreds of miles away or months ahead of the convention, such as a group of concerts in October 2003 by Bands against Bush. The newspaper said that the majority of those who came under scrutiny had no intention of breaking the law.

Going overground. (metropolis)
neo-subversiveness in advertising

Paper cuts by Jad Fair and David Fair of the proto-punk band Half-Japanese

Inventory: 26 Songs that are just as good as short stories (onionavclub)

Yet another horrible guitar archive

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade. (NYTimes, reg. req.)

War on photography
"Are you taking pictures for personal use or a company?"
"Well, it depends.. probably personal, but I suppose if someone wants to run them, they can... why?"
(getting in my face) "You ever hear of September the 11th?"
"Uhhh, yeah, but I'm not sure what it has to do with this."

Betrayed: The Iraqis who trusted the Americans most (new yorker)

New Musical Experiences at CityOfSound
is a large and well-thought essay on music, media, technology, perception, and experience

Early Chinese Buddhist sculpture (via gmt+9)

Junior Murvin - Police and Thieves

The news coming out of Iraq is starting to look less like reality and more like a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Now, our tax dollars are being spent on fake raids to cover inspections on buildings that our tax dollars rebuilt because our tax dollars funded blowing them up in the first place. What's next? Burning the buildings down again with gasoline-soaked piles of U.S. currency?

Some amazing Mark Ryden stuff at Hi Fructose

Animation ID: Fantastic blog dedicated to golden-age cartoons and animators

Anymore, the anniversary of every single thing must be duly noted. UFO Death-cult rehashed.

[Overheard today on 12th and Arch: Bum-lady to bum-lady]
"Where you want to get cracked?! Up the side your head or right in your back?"

There is no correct answer to this question.

A letter that perfectly sums up why I will never purchase any DRM-diseased music, movie, e-book, or e-whatever.
(via /.)

"You don't understand," I said, "These files were not copied or pirated, I actually purchased them."

"Well" she responded, "You didn't actually purchase the files, you really purchased a license to listen to the music, and the license is very specific about how they can be played or listened to."

Now I was baffled. "Records never came with any such restrictions," I said.

She replied, "Well they were supposed to, but we weren't able to enforce those licenses back then, and now we can"

Next Sudoku? (interactive puzzle, from NYTimes article)

Cool perl one-liner to test an n's primeness
[jpmurray~]$ perl -wle 'print "Prime" if (1 x shift) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/' 8179
Prime

Why you need a chaotic business
Good advice, unless you're launching a shuttle or stuffing parachutes or something.
See also this on productive slobs

Expiration dates (strangely, via coudal)

KFC wants the Fish Snacker to be officially sanctioned for those days when Catholics don't eat meat but when they apparently have zero problem shoving a nasty frozen deep-fried chemical-blasted hunk of cholesterol and salt and fat and binding agents and mystery gunk made by one of the skankiest junk-food purveyors in America into their bloodstreams. You know, just the way Jesus intended.

Wait. Fish Snacker (TM), you say?

Little people street art blog
Little handpainted people - left in London to fend for themselves.

Worst NCAA D-1 Mascots (drivl)

I always thought the 248th dimension might be a little less hippy-rug-like (nature)
The creation of this map, which took 77 hours on a supercomputer, resulted in a matrix of 453,060 ? 453,060 cells, containing more than 205 billion entries — "all related in intricate and complex ways"

Colors in motion (flash)

The Fireladders of Soho
(via metafilter)

Ricky Gervais goes to Africa

Google's amazing Gapminder demo - showing world income and life expectancy. Uses recently acquired Trendalyzer.
Change the income scale to linear from logarithmic for a more disturbing picture. Also, playing the timeline says something interesting has been happeneing in Luxemborg since 1990.

Photographs of American Indians, by tribe and geographic location

The Iraq Effect: The Iraq war has increased terror sevenfold worldwide (mojones)

The Effort Effect (Stanford Magazine)
Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine—and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor. Students with learning goals, on the other hand, take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn. Dweck’s insight launched a new field of educational psychology—achievement goal theory.

No pulling dents on this

Awesome screencaps from neo-con echotrons at FoxNews (from Welcome to Pottersville).
And some advice on how to stop them.
Personally, I think that although well-intentioned that mind-share claimstaking is largely a financial game and needs to be fought by greater-than equal and opposite action. As the past 7 years of shameless cheerleading of the Bush administration's often illegal and always immoral antics have shown, no amount of complaining stems the tide of this nonsense.

Some good W prints at kenyonb

Very cool flash painting at fladdict

Rolling Stone expert panel on possible Iraq outcomes
This is a dark chapter in our history. Whatever else happens, our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment [laughs]. If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference.

University of Delaware Post Card Collection
The Daily Jive's Alma Matter has a nice post card collection
(via gmt+9)

Perhaps my pickup lines need work (McSweeneys)

Cheap balancing skateboard
(via hackaday)

Public Broadcast Shopping Cart

The Coulterization of the American Right (salon)
American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination.

A flickr set of 19th century shipping posters.
(via drawn)

The Number: Excess deaths in Iraq caused by the U.S. invasion.
The war examined from the standpoint of a public health catastrophe

America gets killed off. Captain America, that is.
Bring him back to fight Bush.

The encyclopedia of pipe-organ stops. Wow.
Download a virtual pipe organ

Spam Subject Line Museum (via Bifurcated Rivets)

Reversal of Fortune (mother jones)

Here are the numbers we have to contend with: Given current rates of growth in the Chinese economy, the 1.3 billion residents of that nation alone will, by 2031, be about as rich as we are. If they then eat meat, milk, and eggs at the rate that we do, calculates ecostatistician Lester Brown, they will consume 1,352 million tons of grain each year—equal to two-thirds of the world's entire 2004 grain harvest. They will use 99 million barrels of oil a day, 15 million more than the entire world consumes at present. They will use more steel than all the West combined, double the world's production of paper, and drive 1.1 billion cars—1.5 times as many as the current world total. And that's just China; by then, India will have a bigger population, and its economy is growing almost as fast. And then there's the rest of the world.

Trying to meet that kind of demand will stress the earth past its breaking point in an almost endless number of ways, but let's take just one. When Thomas Newcomen fired up his pump on that morning in 1712, the atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We're now up to 380 parts per million, a level higher than the earth has seen for many millions of years, and climate change has only just begun. The median predictions of the world's climatologists—by no means the worst-case scenario—show that unless we take truly enormous steps to rein in our use of fossil fuels, we can expect average temperatures to rise another four or five degrees before the century is out, making the globe warmer than it's been since long before primates appeared. We might as well stop calling it earth and have a contest to pick some new name, because it will be a different planet. Humans have never done anything more profound, not even when we invented nuclear weapons.

Red Sovine, Trucker musician.
Much more on Red at wfmu's blog.

Poetic Terrorism and Guerrilla Art in the 21st Century (turbulence)

New Commodore

DirtyCarArt
From today's nytimes.

Good TV: Ian Sevonius from the Make Up talks with Ian MaKaye from Fugazi
Part 1 of 4. Others to follow.

Last night I went over to a little club in Trenton to hear Jello Biafra give a 'spoken word' performance that was pretty amusing. The guy is (obviously) a genuine freak and it's good to see he hasn't mellowed with age, although he's under the delusion that everyone else is as hellfire-outraged as he is about earth-shattering subjects such as his relationship with former bandmates (kids were generally like 'whatever dude, just sharpie my Frankencrist). He's got no shortage of material. It was 90% political commentary, which was generally great, and while he had his targets set on anti-environmentalists and Republicans in general, he didn't spare the Democrats any wrath either. With the non-topical stuff, he came off like an overwound crank. God forbid somebody gives him Powerpoint or he'd be a real menace. The other cool thing was the crowd and 'scene' there. Definitely an 80's underground punk feeling to the whole thing, which I haven't seen in a long time.

Lowlights from my failed hidden-camera show (McSweeneys)

The Hole - video powered by Metacafe
Robotic Beer-Launching Fridge

The Impossible Triangle, rendered in AutoCAD (youtube)
History of the Impossible Triangle. Others have tried.

Tricks with Google Maps
I'd like to know what this is.

DHS releases internal passport rule.
All right, Democrats. Put your money where your mouth is and get rid of this piece of garbage legislation.

Beautiful black and white photography at Outofcontxt

Top 10 modern delusions. (Guardian)
Dylan wrote a great song about #1.

Conceptual art: a shape for every human on the planet

Last fall, at a small gallery on West 22nd Street in New York, the artist Allan McCollum exhibited his new system for producing unique two-dimensional shapes. Developed using vector files on his home computer, McCollum organized a “system” to produce over 31,000,000,000 different shapes and has, to date, set aside 214,000,000 for creative experimentation.

But that’s not all. McCollum aspires to an unprecedented scale with this system: his goal is to make enough shapes, assuming a population of approximately 9.1 billion by the year 2050, so that everyone on the planet can have one.

Send the YOUR FACE blog a photo of your face, and he'll draw and post it. (apparently with 70's facial hair)

New York Bridges slideshow
historic photos of NYC bridges from the NewYorker