Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving (nytimes)
In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.
Do the neat perception experiment.

Doodling in math class

There's something both surreal and relaxing about this high-speed video shot from a moving train across a platform.

Deconstructing the Stones 'Gimme Shelter'

$6800 audio cables at amazon.. Don't miss the product reviews.

What Good is Wall Street? (NewYorker)

Other regulators have gone further. Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity”—a comment that suggests it could be eliminated without doing any damage to the economy. In a recent article titled “What Do Banks Do?,” which appeared in a collection of essays devoted to the future of finance, Turner pointed out that although certain financial activities were genuinely valuable, others generated revenues and profits without delivering anything of real worth—payments that economists refer to as rents. “It is possible for financial activity to extract rents from the real economy rather than to deliver economic value,” Turner wrote. “Financial innovation . . . may in some ways and under some circumstances foster economic value creation, but that needs to be illustrated at the level of specific effects: it cannot be asserted a priori.”
Turner’s viewpoint caused consternation in the City of London, the world’s largest financial market. A clear implication of his argument is that many people in the City and on Wall Street are the financial equivalent of slumlords or toll collectors in pin-striped suits. If they retired to their beach houses en masse, the rest of the economy would be fine, or perhaps even healthier.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.
Krugman, NYTimes, "There Will Be Blood"

Toilet paper roll art

"the" project

An interesting NYTimes interview with Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch (nytimes)
Most monopolists create a golden age that lasts a decade or more,  and then slowly they became more interested in being in power. AT&T became dangerous when they began to suppress technologies that might threaten their rule.

"Linotype: The Film" Teaser from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.
Linotype film teaser

Sons of Pong (boingboing)

Bill Moyers at the BU Howard Zinn Memorial lecture on how corruption has moved from a side-dish in policy to the main course.

from How Twitter Made Handwriting Cool. (telegraph uk)
A few years ago, a number of pencil bloggers announced that the discontinued Eberhard-Faber Blackwing 602 was, not to put too fine a point on it, the greatest pencil ever. A sleek black object with an oversized ferrule (eraser holder) and the charismatic epithet, ‘half the pressure, twice the speed’ embossed on its shaft, it was declared ‘the world’s best pencil’ by American author Joseph Finder. 

Pencil bloggers.  I'm beginning to think that this old blog isn't specific enough for these modern fetishist times.

Pontiac, as of yesterday, is no more.

Charlie Chaplin movie cell phone?
If only AT&T could deliver the coverage that this lady is getting in 1928.

Some impressive optical illusions

Sony is finally halting production of the cassette Walkman.
I was surprised to find they were still being made.

The xerox alto - first computer with a mouse a just went for 30k on ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320602942545&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT@

The MakerLegoBot is a lego bot that makes lego structures - in this case, a small house.

Project C-90 - the art of the audiocassette

Watch Jimmy McMillan, karate expert, beard enthusiast, and candidate for NY Governor representing The Rent is Too Damn High Party, debate.

One in five plants, one in five mammals, one in seven birds and one in three amphibians are now globally threatened with extinction.

This problem is a fact.  Another problem is that American Republican politicians, emboldened by anti-intelligence and anti-experience Tea Party ideals, are once again denying this fact.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy. 

Town in England turns off traffic lights.  Results surprise. (via metafilter)

Subway Science: A whistle-stop journey through modern science

UFOs coming today. (Yahoo "We'll print anything" News)
A newly-published 352-page book by a retired Air Force officer, Stanley A. Fulham, tentatively predicts October 13, 2010 as the date for a massive UFO display over the world’s principal cities. According to the author, the aliens will neither land nor communicate on that date; they are aware from eons of experience with other planets in similar conditions their sudden intervention would cause fear and panic.
The book, Challenges of Change (3rd ed.), reports this event will be the initial interaction in a process leading to mankind’s acceptance of the alien reality and technologies for the removal of poisonous gases from the earth’s atmosphere in 2015, if not sooner.

The Banishment of Beauty
part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGX0_0VL06U
part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIVaTCRyblM&feature=related
part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMA1rn7q7t0&feature=related
part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byRaMfoiJP4&feature=related

The Wood-stacker (designobserver)

Gap goes Helvetica?  I know they've never been known for breaking down doors creatively, but this is a new level of mundane, anonymous, generic.  Even their most bland striped sweater wouldn't be caught dead with helvetica.  Is this real?  And the gradient blue square looks like it's an unbalanced, tacked-on attempt at recalling their last square-centered logo.  Either that or it's a window that the letters are trying to jump out of.  Bad. Design.

Healthcare: how the Public Option was removed as an Option (salon)

But now, definitive evidence has emerged that this is exactly what happened:  a new book by Tom Daschle.  As Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress expertly documents -- both by citing to Daschle's book and by interviewing him -- the White House had negotiated away the public option very early in the process (July, 2009), even though Obama and the administration spent months after that assuring their supporters that they were doing everything they could do have a public option in the bill.

So, we get all of the political damage associated with the massive push for equitable healthcare for all Americans, but none of the benefits thanks to back-room deals that took place before a vote was ever called.  Special Interests style democracy in action.

Scale of the Universe

Fear and Favor (NYTimes Krugman)

Steal this Presentation

LIFE publishes circa-1965 Hell's Angels pictures

"U.S. should be able to shut internet" says Bush-era ex-CIA chief

"Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics"
The survey was on religion.
NYtimes article on American religious ignorance.

This is a News Website Article about a Scientific Finding (guardian uk)

"He ate too many hamburgers" (NYTimes)

Every election cycle, we're reminded by electronic voting machine vendors how rock-solid, tamper-proof, and secure their voting systems are, presumably at entering, storing, and counting votes.  One has now been hacked to play pac-man.

u, the first authentic Klingon Opera (on earth, presumably)
It's not over until the fat lady in the molded foam-rubber forehead piece sings.

Map + Best Streaming College Radio

A beautiful photo by Czech photographer Josef Sudek

A few new Banksy pieces from Wooster Collective

Rinx Records, publisher of fine roller rink organ music, has been in operation since 1950 by it's owner and sole performer, Dominic Cangelosi.  The original pressings of Dominic's vinyl skating records are in serious demand, but you can buy a CD of some of the hits.  Dominic still performs every Tuesday night at the Moonlight Rollerway Skating Rink.

I married a Mad Man (Chicago Mag)
An article on Draper Daniels, the real-life Don Draper, by his wife.

Woz tries out his self-tuning robot guitar by Gibson

Umbra

Umbra (HD - 2010) from Malcolm Sutherland on Vimeo.

October 30, Washington, DC:  Stephen Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive

Luck (in most cases, dumb luck) (via metafilter)

Plight of the Bumble Bee - an early Mickey Mouse (pencils)

5 worries parents should drop, and 5 they shouldn't (npr)
As for children, Barnes says that overprotectiveness will hurt them in the long run by making them less resilient. "We’re teaching them to be helpless," she says. "And because we’re so afraid of the world, we’re teaching them to be afraid of the world."
So, what’s a worried parent to do? Barnes has a simple prescription: helmets and seatbelts. Yup, that’s right, helmets and seatbelts. "I know it sounds boring," she says, but according to her research, making kids wear protective gear and buckle up in the car cuts kids' chances of death by 90 percent and their chances of serious injury by 78 percent.

Google Scribe: get autocomplete suggestions as you type
The "Daily Jive" sample is nonsensical: "daily jive with their own unique style of musical composition and performance of their duties"

Science analyzes move-busting.
"It's rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else," said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.
"Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it's not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That's a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That's a bad dancer too."

11foot8 is a website dedicated to a bridge, whose underpass of that height decapitates trucks of greater than that height.

We westerners (presuming, of course, that only westerners are reading this) are the weirdest people in the world (sociologically, at least).

Quantum Physicists dream up smallest possible refrigerator (science mag)

"My assignment for the day was to photograph Jerry Stiller in front of The Costanza House in Astoria, Queens. The home was only used for exterior shots on the show "Seinfeld" which Stiller played the character Frank Costanza.
As we pulled up to the house he decided to ring the doorbell not knowing if anyone would answer.
The result surprised all."

Fire Tornado.

Pop-Tarts World (?)

Every single Dr. Who time-travel, visualized

Google testing voice calling on Gmail.

Full-body scanners deployed in street-roving vans (Forbes)

Web of stories

Broke Philly resorts to shaking down bloggers

As far as band instruments go, the upright bass is very large.  The octobass (youtube) has it beat.

Jerzify Yourself.

There are about to be several million new guitarists.  All playing Squier strats.

Linguistics puzzles in multiple languages (via metafilter) from green to double-black diamond.
Even if you've never spoken or read the language, some of them can be derived logically, making for good puzzling.

The web is  not as dead as has been reported.

Jon Stewart on the Google/Verizon net neutrality hustle
His last sentence sums it up.

Michael Gagne's Sensology (youtube short)

Land, Speed, and  Bonneville, with a nice slideshow

Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain
There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.

High in the Andes, Keeping and Incan Mystery Alive (NYTimes)

The U.S. is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know (bloomberg)
To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.
Such a tax hike would leave the U.S. running a surplus equal to 5 percent of GDP this year, rather than a 9 percent deficit. So the IMF is really saying the U.S. needs to run a huge surplus now and for many years to come to pay for the spending that is scheduled. It’s also saying the longer the country waits to make tough fiscal adjustments, the more painful they will be.

Muro

Sharpie Liquid Pencil?  This changes everything.

Google, with Verizon, appears to be breaking their golden rule.
They're effectively skirting Net Neutrality, and setting up a play for cable-like commercial tiered service.  This is a slippery slope. 

Getting In (and Out of) Line (nytimes)

Pencil-tip sculptures

Maybe no Big Bang (maybe not even a little bang).  Maybe no bang.

Philip Glass's Sesame Street piece.

A guy gets seriously analytical about In-N-Out's Animal-style Double-Double, with excellent results.

Instructables has a laser wood-burning pen how-to.  Retina-searing fun!

 Papercut shadowbox pictures of Peter Slight

The Best Magazine Articles Ever (via metafilter)
(or at least according to kk.org's CoolTools)

"Call GoldLine... Pray on it... Trust the people at GoldLine"
Congress is finally investigating shady conservative gold dealer GoldLine which has allegedly used neo-con tactician Glenn Beck to advertise their services to manipulate markets by creating panic-demand.

Beach tar and oil glow under UV light (NatGeo)

Number Stations: Mystery over the Airwaves (npr)

A hidden world, growing beyond control (Washington Post)

The age-old question is finally answered.

How to Listen to Bob Dylan

Why a Progressive Presidency is Impossible, For Now (the Nation)
Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us. Sure, presidents can pretty easily pass tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful corporations. They can start whatever wars they wish and wiretap whomever they want without warrants. They can order the torture of terrorist suspects, lie about it and see that their intelligence services destroy the evidence. But what they cannot do, even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress behind them, is pass the kind of transformative progressive legislation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 presidential campaign. Here's why.

How Facts Backfire (boston globe)
In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Some great flash sound apps from Andre Michelle's #Laboratory

• Pulsate
• SuperEclipse
• ToneMatrix
• Karplus-Strong guitar
• ToneWheels
• ... and more

What air-guitar players do when they give up their instrument.

Mark Ryden paints 'Pink Lincoln' in time-lapse.

American Dream is Elusive for New Generation (NYTimes)
“I don’t think I fully understood the severity of the situation I had graduated into,” he said, speaking in effect for an age group — the so-called millennials, 18 to 29 — whose unemployment rate of nearly 14 percent approaches the levels of that group in the Great Depression. And then he veered into the optimism that, polls show, is persistently, perhaps perversely, characteristic of millennials today. “I am absolutely certain that my job hunt will eventually pay off,” he said.

Mark of a Masterpiece (NewYorker)

Blogger is finally letting me post again.