As we’ve seen before, searching Google is a popular and private way to express your deepest insecurities, while also getting to see that others out there are having the same worries. For instance:
Lotsa folks are unsure what other people think of them, and are trying to find out. Is it possible to drill down a little more, perhaps do a little demographic analysis? I think it is… Keep reading →
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Google Game
Tagged: Google Game, google suggest, insecurity, men, women, tiger woods, lil wayne, eminem
nytimes.com
In case you missed it this weekend, the Times did a great piece in the Arts section chronicling the cinematic history of the werewolf genre. Witty and informative. Notably quotable, in the section of potential weaknesses of Benicio Del Toro’s new flick Wolfman:
…the unlikelihood that adding layers of latex to Mr. Del Toro’s face and putting fang-filled dentures in his mouth will make him more intelligible.
The story also gives ups to Teen Wolf, one of my all time favorite movies. Be sure to check out the online interactive feature, too, which includes videos such as the Teen Wolf trailer:
Um, in the liquor store scene they totally changed the voice over. Just sayin.
→ 1 CommentCategories: Unhappy Media
Tagged: ny times, teen wolf, videos, werewolf
I received this comment yesterday from a devoted reader:
eddie // Thursday February 4, 2010 at 5:04 pm
no review of the bloated eric clapton shilling for t-mobile. oh look, its buddy guy calling, i wonder if any other irrelevant people will call.
Wouldn’t want to disappoint, Eddie, and indeed I’m pleased to take a moment for this ad.
Bloated is right. And I’ll tell you what really grosses me out about this commercial: seeing Clapton-of-today’s puffy mane-framed face while hearing his voice say “I get off on.” Ew. There’s really an age at which one shouldn’t be allowed to say stuff like “get off” anymore. Whatever it is, he’s past it. As a consumer, I wouldn’t want to think of Eric Clapton getting off every time I get a call from a fading Blues musician. Doesn’t help none that the phone is called MyTouch. [shudder]
And while we’re on the subject of mobile endorsements by once-desirable celebrities succumbed to severe edema…
So where did all those minutes go, dough boy? Are they lost forever, along with all those offers for projects that aren’t humiliating? To wit:
“This… this is just not right.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Luke.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Gadgeteering · Shoot the Messenger
Tagged: at&t, edema, eric clapton, luke wilson, mytouch, t mobile, tv commercials
I guess it’s official: The Internet has killed formality. Today we add another awesome resignation to the annals of unprofessionalism, and watch executive dignity go the way of the Full Sentence. In the wake of an Oracle takeover, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz tweeted his way out the front door:
Of course we all must know that this is not actually how he tendered his resignation, despite BoingBoing’s assertion of such. Though, it’d be a lot cooler if he did.
[via NYT via BoingBoing.]
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Gadgeteering · Information Stupor Highway · Write and Wrong
Tagged: haiku, jonathan schwartz, oracle, quit, sun microsystems, twitter
The technopundits spent months (years) hot under the collar waiting for the dawn of the iPad. And now that it’s here it’s caused a dizzying deluge of excitement commingled with bewildered disappointment and acrid bemusement. I’m gonna go ahead and jump on that last one. Never been a big Kool Aid drinker.
So, here’s a phrase I never thought I’d say: Hitler was on the money. Behold.
Adolf makes a great point I forgot to bring up in my earlier post: No Flash support. No Flash support?! How’s ol’ Jobsie going to make an essentially dedicated web-surfing device that doesn’t support Flash? It’s baffling.
And on a related note, a pretty nice little graphic of Apple product evolution: (source unknown)
Don’t you love the way SJ’s peeking out from behind his soon-to-be-released iSorry?
[Thanks, Dror & Jeff]
→ 5 CommentsCategories: Gadgeteering
Tagged: apple, evolution, hitler, ipad, isorry, videos
For this week’s game we’re going to take it down in two parts. The top result doubtless has caught your attention by now, but we’ll return to that shortly. First, let’s tackle the seven items I’ve labeled a-through-g:
a. See (b.)
b. See (e.)
c. See (a.) & (b.)
d. See (c.)
e. See (f.)
f. Rewrite your resume, see (a.)
g. See (f.) & (c.) & (a.)
Now, click through for more on Canadians, and why you can’t have one.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: Google Game
Tagged: canadians, christwire.com, dr laura schelssinger, google suggest, west wing
CNN reports today that women in Haiti have barred men from food aide sites. Seems the not-so-gentle men were pushing and fighting and causing unruly scenes, and are no longer allowed to collect emergency relief rations.
If you’ve studied the Classics, or are a freelance tech writer with too much time on your hands, perhaps you’re familiar with Lysistrata, by Greek dramatist Aristophanes. In the play, a bawdy, excessively double-entendre’d, proto-Benny Hill political comedy, women are fed up with their men’s propensity for war, which is tearing the country asunder. So, led by a loudmouth named Lysistrata, they take over the Acropolis and citadel and promise only to relinquish them once a peace accord is assured.
Lysistrata
…the women have taken the Acropolis. Athene’s Citadel is ours!…
Let’s hurry inside the Acropolis and help the others shoot the bolts.Kleonike
Don’t you think the men will send reinforcements against us as soon as they can?Lysistrata
So where’s the worry?
The men can’t burn their way in or frighten us out.
The gates are ours — they’re proof against fire and fear — and they open only on our conditions.Kleonike
Yes! That’s the spirit — let’s deserve our reputations:
Up the sluts!
Way for the old impregnables!
In truth, their strategic position is not the real bargaining chip. The ladies achieve leverage through sex, and the withholding thereof until an agreement is reached. (To be sure, it’s not easy on them, either; Aristophanes’ women are as horny as they are Hellenic.)
Men in Haiti can certainly empathize to some extent with the leader of the men’s chorus in Aristophanes’ play:
I won’t be played to revise, re-do,
amend, extend, or bring to an end
my irreversible credo:
Misogyny Forever!
–The answer’s never.
[Above translation by William Arrowsmith and Douglass Parker. Sometimes the translation feels fatuously over-the-top. For a free download of the work by other translators (I assume) try Gutenberg, or EServer.]
→ 2 CommentsCategories: Unhappy Media
Tagged: aristophanes, cnn, haiti, lysistrata
OK, OK. I cave. I have to talk about the iPad. I get it. On my failure to address last week’s most impactful appearance of an important public figure, I’ve not much to say. iPad? My bad. And I reckon this will make me a heretic among my tech brethren (a heretech?), but I pretty much don’t give a hoot. In a word: yawn.
It’ll be interesting to see how the technology is adopted and its release marks a crucial starting point for a new wave of netbook-obliterating, better-than-e-reader devices, but I don’t see an iPhone-esque groundswell/sea change (choose your geometaphor) happening just yet. It’s way better for reading than a Kindle, they say (I haven’t had a hands on), but it’s not like we’re all toting those puppies around. Otherwise, it seems like an oversized iPhone. An oversized iPhone that doesn’t take pictures. Or, you know, make calls. Yet still has a pricey 3G plan with famously spotty service to go along with it.
And as for other sad similarities, how the hell did they let this thing out of the box without multitasking functionality? You know how you can’t play music with the Pandora app on your iPhone while look something up on Google? You won’t be able to do that on the iPad either. Truly idiotic. Hey, check out this cool little ‘puter — it does one thing at a time!
Surely we’ll be revisiting the long-heralded tablet, and in the meantime I’d be remiss if I didn’t jump on the wagon and bring you MadTV’s prescient iPod/iPad spoof circa 2006:
→ 1 CommentCategories: Gadgeteering
Tagged: apple, ipad, madtv
Thanks to the reader who found the site by searching
“mountain dew mead.”
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Information Stupor Highway
Tagged: mead, mountain dew, reader appreciation
Analyzing 35 million citations from 7,000 journals, researchers at the University of Washington and the Santa Fe Institute have traced and plotted changes and fluctuations in the prevalence of various fields of scientific study over the past decade.
Among the most notable observations are the branching of broad study areas into more specialized, standalone disciplines, and the emergence of newly defined fields, such as neuroscience (which was, indeed, an interdisciplinary concentration when I majored in it — or something like it — as an undergraduate in the nascent millennium):
The alluvial diagram illustrates, for example, how over the years 2001–2005, urology gradually splits off from oncology and how the field of infectious diseases becomes a unique discipline, instead of a subset of medicine, in 2003. But these changes are just two of many over this period. In the same diagram, we also highlight the biggest structural change in scientific citation patterns over the past decade: the transformation of neuroscience from interdisciplinary specialty to a mature and stand-alone discipline, comparable to physics or chemistry, economics or law, molecular biology or medicine.
Also worth remarking: the conspicuous lack of progress in the field of making graphs that don’t give you a migraine.
→ 1 CommentCategories: Lab Results
Tagged: PLoS, research, santa fe institute, science, university of washington
