We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint (NYTimes)

Photographer Francois Roberts depicts the bones of human skeletons arranged in iconic forms in "Stop The Violence"

The Tea Party's Toxic Take on History (slate)
The media for the most part has shown itself afraid to challenge the insidious distortions of language and history Tea Partiers promote. In the last few weeks, several news outlets have been propagating the meme that Tea Partiers are "just regular folks." And certainly some are. But if you examined the ideology that shows its face, the one that is apparent in sign carriers and blog commenters and cable spokespersons, you find something disturbing.

So you need to Grow a New Head?...

Where is my milk from?

Watching Tea-Party mouthbreathers struggle with basic logic is always fun.

What's special about this number?

Please do not change your password (boston globe)
Particularly dubious are the standard rules for creating and protecting website passwords, Herley found. For example, users are admonished to change passwords regularly, but redoing them is not an effective preventive step against online infiltration unless the cyber attacker (or evil colleague) who steals your sign-in sequence waits to employ it until after you’ve switched to a new one, Herley wrote. That’s about as likely as a crook lifting a house key and then waiting until the lock is changed before sticking it in the door.

A great Programmer Competency matrix (Indian Geek)

Solar path filmed on pinhold camera over 6 months (gizmodo)

Hank Williams Sr.: 2010 Pulitzer Winner

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears "natural" today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land (NYTimes Review of Books)

Classic Albums: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

 Amazing letterhead collection (via coudal)

Gummy Shot Glasses

Stealing Mona Lisa (vanity fair)
If anyone else noticed during the rest of the day that there were four bare hooks where the Mona Lisa usually hung, they kept it to themselves. Incredibly, not until Tuesday, when the Louvre again opened its doors to the public, did anyone express concern over the fact that the world’s most famous painting was missing from its usual place. When an artist set up his easel in the Salon Carré and noticed that the centerpiece of his intended work was absent, he complained to a guard, who merely shrugged. Like Picquet the day before, the guard assumed the Mona Lisa had been removed to the photographers’ studio. But the artist persisted. How soon would it be returned?

Let's say you're the first human ever to make alien contact.
A handy reference guide.

100 meter photo
To create We’re All Gonna Die – 100 meters of existence, Simon Hoegsburg stood on a railroad bridge in Berlin for 20 days, photographing strangers.

Drum Machine museum

I'm not sure the world needs a bladeless fan, but it's pretty cool from an engineering perspective alone.

[Signs of the Coming Apocalypse XII] In what can only be described as meth-fueled insanity or marketing-to-fat-people-genius, KFC has decided to replace the bread in their bacon, glowing orange mayo, cheese, shit sandwich with 2 pieces of FRIED CHICKEN
Not a Yes-Men prank.  Not an April Fools joke.

La Fete (HD - 2010) from Malcolm Sutherland on Vimeo.
La Fete

Heatswell disposable coffee cups

Teabonics

A Grand Unified Theory of AI MIT News
In probabilistic AI, by contrast, a computer is fed lots of examples of something — like pictures of birds — and is left to infer, on its own, what those examples have in common. This approach works fairly well with concrete concepts like “bird,” but it has trouble with more abstract concepts — for example, flight, a capacity shared by birds, helicopters, kites and superheroes. You could show a probabilistic system lots of pictures of things in flight, but even if it figured out what they all had in common, it would be very likely to misidentify clouds, or the sun, or the antennas on top of buildings as instances of flight. And even flight is a concrete concept compared to, say, “grammar,” or “motherhood.”

Toyota accelerating?  Maybe blame cosmic rays.
If this is anywhere near possible, a little redundancy with parity-checking should be in order on those single-bit operations.  I'm surprised that single-bit operations even exist in high-level automotive control functions.

Photoshop's content-aware fill feature is amazing.

When a Philips is not a Philips and so much more... 
Instructables guide to Screw heads

From the Age of Labor to the Labor of Age (reuters)

Last Supper helpings have grown (via /.)

Over the course of the millennium, the Wansinks found that the entrees depicted on the plates laid before Jesus' followers grew by about 70%, and the bread by 23%.

Any advance word on the Old Country Buffet version?

Add your name as a cosigner to Health Care Reform!

Tea Party scumbags mock and torment a Parkinsons Disease sufferer at a Rally.
Bob Herbert NYTimes mentions the incident in his article 'An Absence of Class'
The American Conservative movement is showing its true stripes once again.

With a freer hand, the Republicans would have done more damage. George W. Bush tried to undermine Social Security. John McCain was willing to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and thought Phil Gramm would have made a crackerjack Treasury secretary. (For those who may not remember, Mr. Gramm was a deregulation zealot who told us during the presidential campaign that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”)
A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country. Back in the 1960s, John Lewis risked his life and endured savage beatings to secure fundamental rights for black Americans while right-wing Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were lining up with segregationist Democrats to oppose landmark civil rights legislation.
Since then, the right-wingers have taken over the G.O.P. and Mr. Lewis, now a congressman, must still endure the garbage they have wrought.

Young Me, Now Me (zefrank)

The interior design firm Wonderwall has a pretty nifty web page.

A year on from its brush with Armageddon, the financial services industry has resumed its reckless, self-serving ways It isn’t hard to see why this has aroused simmering rage in normally complacent, pro-capitalist Main Street America. The budget commitments to salvaging the financial sector come to nearly $3 trillion, equivalent to more than $20,000 per federal income tax payer. To add insult to injury, the miscreants have also availed themselves of more welfare programs in the form of lending facilities and guarantees, totaling nearly $12 trillion, not all of which will prove to be money well spent.


Wall Street just looted the public on a massive scale. Having found this to be a wondrously lucrative exercise, it looks set to do it all over again. 

Indefensible Men, by Yves Smith

Acrylic on flesh (flickr)

A good NYTimes Magazine article on Wire writer David Simon's new HBO series, "Treme".

Record grooves on an electron microscope

The first .dom (symbolics) was registered 25 years ago today.

Flame!

Tobacco Baseball Cards (1090-1911)

Index of  Great Character Actors

Nathan Fowkes watercolor and gauche landscape illustrations (via drawn)

Signs: The Most Useful Things You Pay No Attention To (slate)
Most people, when they think about it, can point to signs that have failed them: the hospital complex that felt like a labyrinth or the exit they always almost miss. But the truth is that signage today is far better than it's been at any other point in history. A century ago, sign design wasn't a profession to speak of; the signs that guided riders and pedestrians (there weren't many drivers yet) tended to be informal and ad hoc. As the automobile took off, the world found it needed traffic engineers, and it was these men and women who were the first to think seriously about sign systems. America put national standards for road signs in place in 1935.

Compass Table.

America, the fragile empire (latimes)

We Can't Wish Away Climate Change (Gore, NYTimes)
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

Far Out: Heimo's Arctic Refuge
An online doc about one of the last people living off of the land in Alaska's interior Wildlife Refuge, originally established by the Carter administration in 1980.
(via boingboing)

The ArchiPod

The Bankruptcy Boys
Paul Krugman on the GOP strategy of doubling down on their 'starve the beast' bet, inviting fiscal catastrophe.

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

RAMPANT: no other word comes close to capturing the mood of America’s conservatives as several thousand of them gathered in Washington, DC, on February 18th-20th for the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference.
(the economist)

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle (Rollingstone)
There's even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn't call the cops is known as the "Cool Off."

Hunt for the worst movie of all time. Good writing on bad movies

How a New Jobless Era will Transform America (Atlantic)
If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

How Christian Were the Founders? (NYTimes)
A longish article on the Founders intentions on church-state separation, School-board archconservative activists, and re-writing history to serve an ideological agenda.

Citigroup is planning crisis derivatives, which would pay out in time of crisis or collapse (provided, that is, that Citi would continue to exist to make the payout)

Colbert Winter Olympic Poster (pdf)

What Republicans Believe (dailykos)

World's scariest ski slopes (sfgate, with video)

How to fall 35000 feet.

The NYTimes is starting a column on math today. They start with the basics of number theory. Now's the time to get in.

The Largest Disco Ball ever made.
Video:

La Maîtresse de la Tour Eiffel | 2009 from Michel de Broin on Vimeo.

Interview with artist Jamie Wyeth

Buddy Holly recorded a phone call with his record company trying to get a release on songs that weren't going to be released. Record company acts like greedy jerks.

For fellow Lost fans out there... A collection of 7 retro-styled Lost posters

Consollection

Bobsled split pants

A History of Evil

If you haven't been to Sodaplay in a while, it's worth a trip back.

"I made this. You play this. We are enemies"
yep, that's the title. Odd online game.
If it's your bag, there are more art games of this nature on the site.

Orbox B - a cool little flash game that requires no explanation

Boingboing is 10
Happy B-day, boingboing!

"Like..."

A great set of Popular Mechanics space-age cover illustrations from the 50's. Some of them, amazingly impractical.

Great, great video of a 5 year old tearing it up on a drumset.

Top 10 Places you can't go (via metafilter)

RIP Art Clokey (via boingboing)

Not sure why I love this short film, but I do. Maybe because none of the architectural spaces so carefully filmed actually exist.

Bacon or beer can

Brilliant

MoveYourMoney

Sharpie on styrofoam cup illustrations

The largest (26-gigapixel) picture in the world. zoomable.
Unfortunately nobody seems to be doing anything interesting at the time and location this picture was taken.

A chart that sums up the past 10 years (nytimes)

The twisted-copper POTS telephone line is going the way of the TV antenna.

57 Business Cliche's find-it picture

I Just found the amazing Khan Academy site (video tutorials focusing on math and science) from an article on sfgate.

It began with long-distance tutoring in late 2004. He agreed to help his niece Nadia, then a seventh-grader struggling with unit conversion, by providing math lessons over Yahoo's interactive notepad, Doodle, and the phone.

Nephews and family friends soon followed. But scheduling conflicts and repeated lectures prompted him to post instructional videos on YouTube that his proliferating pupils could watch when they had the time.

They did - and before long, so did thousands of others. Today, the Mountain View resident's 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he's helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can't afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.

"With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time," Khan, 33, said. "I can't imagine a better use of my time."

A nice animated video for Bob Dylan's "Little Drummer Boy"

Man returns library book due in 1955, gets out of a $1750 late fee by taking advantage of their Amnesty program

History of Kustom Bicycles

Ugly Christmas Lights is open for your submissions

Jim Denevan makes freehand drawings in the sand

Time-lapse construction of a shipping container office building in R.I.

UA law prof to underwater mortgage borrowers: Ditch your mortgage in good conscience.

White contends that far more of the estimated 15 million U.S. homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages should stiff their lenders and take a hike.

Doing so, he suggests, could save some of them hundreds of thousands of dollars that they "have no reasonable prospect of recouping" in the years ahead. Plus the penalties are nowhere near as painful or long-lasting as they might assume, he says.

"Homeowners should be walking away in droves," White said. "But they aren't. And it's not because the financial costs of foreclosure outweigh the benefits."

Nytimes: Dubai's Improbably Tale
Photos of Dubai's development bust.

Unbelievable card flourishes (via boingboing)

TimesOnline picks the 100 best books of the decade.

Looks like someone is porting the Commodore 64 classic M.U.L.E. game to an online version.

Fantastic Mr. Fox concept art