According to a recent study by the Dutch Center for Insurance Statistics, traffic accidents and incidents such as fire and theft actually occur slightly less on Friday the 13th (in the Netherlands).
Ironically, there are also less incidents of killing sprees involving the undead in hockey masks.
This month’s issue of Wired magazine ran an article about MegaPhone - turning big-screen billboards into giant game screens, your cellphone becomes a game controller, and all you have to do is call the phone number posted on the screen and you’re playing video games on the side of a building.
Recently, Palo Alto based product engineering firm MindTribe has placed a 65″ plasma screen in a front window with the same idea in mind. You dial the phone number on the screen and you are now playing a version of Tetris while standing in the middle of the sidewalk (and it’s free). Bonus: if you get a high score, your snapshot goes up on their website.
In the 7th century BC, Sappho - poet and resident of the Greek island of Lesbos - wrote of her great love of women, and thus the term “lesbian” was born.
As well as the ancient Greek sport of hot girl-on-girl pillowfighting.
The 100,000 current residents of the island of Lesbos are now taking it back - citing that the use of “lesbian” to denote female homosexuality violates their human rights, as the “original Lesbians.”
There’s a bad “Who’s on First” comedy dialogue waiting to be written about this - it starts with “Where are you from?”
As many of us had wished-upon those (bastard) classmates who were “successful” in high school: a recent study showed that 29% of high school seniors who were “doing well” failed to become financially independent by age 26, and 20% failed to meet their expected life goals at age 26.
Dr. John Schulenberg, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor:
“We used to think that if things were going well in high school, they’d continue to go well.”
Ha. Ha.
(via Susan, via Psychology Today)
(photo: AP)
Though technically they aren’t “lost” - they know exactly where they are - this population near the Peruvian/Brazilian border has had no known contact with the “outside world” until last month. Recent aerial photos taken in May 2008 offer the first proof of their existence and provide some clues to their way of life.
Some new facts about this recently discovered tribe:
• They don’t like airplanes.
• They aren’t very good at hitting airplanes with spears or arrows.
• They aren’t interested in maintaining front or back lawns.
• They believe that orange bodypaint is “the new black.”
(via Neatorama)
These days, with the proliferation of the internets, libraries and all things bookish have had to get creative to keep readers interested, let alone attract new readers. Enter the New Zealand Book Council. In what can easily be described as, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” logic, the NZBC has created www.readatwork.com
It’s a website that displays a windows desktop, except all the folders are filled with literature in PowerPoint format. You can literally read Animal Farm on PowerPoint slides. Now you can stick it to your boss and actually claim to be productive at the same time!
Mark Twain anyone?
Instead of just 1 mashup this month, you instead get 7. That’s right, seven. I present to you The Shoot Back Mixtape - a collaboration with troublmedia.com.
Three police officers shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him on the eve of his wedding night, and wounding his two passengers, later determining that all 3 men were unarmed. From the night of this social atrocity to the not guilty verdict 10 days ago, emotions have been fierce. Sadness. Anger. Frustration. Disgust. Fear.
Download The Shoot Back Mixtape, a collection of voices and speeches that convey the public discontent following the not guilty verdict awarded to the police officers who killed Bell.
Here’s the first track to whet your appetite. In the words of a protester speaking for Sean Bell: “It’s not about what you do today, but what you do tomorrow.”
Wanna see something scary?
The ice cap over the North Pole is almost gone as of this year, seasonal ice is all that remains.
The Earth is balding - maybe we can do a ‘comb-over.’
The upshot: my apartment might become beachfront property in the next decade!
To drum up excitement for the upcoming Olympic games, and to tap into the audiences that watch Lost and still remember (enjoy?) playing Myst, a new online game called The Lost Ring emerged in late February. The New York Times recently featured an interesting article about the hidden sponsorship of the game, players around the world, and the relatively cheap cost of orchestrating worldwide phenomena. (Interestingly enough, the article was written on April Fools Day, so it’s unclear whether anyone took the review seriously).
Here’s the trailer that started it all:
The game apparently started with 50 bloggers who knew all those sleepless nights spent online had finally paid off, but has now gotten big enough that there are wikis, podcasts and players collaborating around the world to piece together the story and pick up hidden clues left in cities around the world. The game will culminate during the opening ceremony of the Olympics with some sort of tie-in. You can catch up and join in the fun at The Lost Ring Wiki.
(thanks Alexis)
So frozen yogurt had its golden era in the early 80’s - when jogging and aerobicising and ABBA were all the rage - but fell into mediocrity and disinterest by the end of the decade.
In 2005, L.A.’s Pinkberry resurrected frozen yogurt for a new generation by catering to health-conscious hipsters: organic frozen yogurt, made on the premises, and mixed with a range of interesting toppings such as kiwi or Cap’n Crunch. In L.A. (and later New York), Pinkberry became the place to be seen.
The rest of the nation is finally catching up . . . organic frozen yogurt joints are cropping up throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. On any given Friday night in Palo Alto, Fraîche frozen yogurt is standing-room-only.
Pope Benedict XVI signed an official decree yesterday, that Easter Sunday will be celebrated a second time this year. This is not the first time that the Catholic church has done this - in 1521 and in 1790, Easter was also celebrated twice. This year, Easter will be celebrated on March 23rd and on April 6th - perhaps why many stores continue to carry Easter items for over a week after “Easter I.”
This odd “Second Easter Sunday” is based on a technicality regarding how Easter Sunday is determined by the Catholic church - the closest Sunday to the full Moon closest to the Spring Equinox: this year (like 1521 and 1790), the full Moons before and after the Equinox are precisely the same number of days, hours, and minutes away from the Equinox.
A Bonus: a second round of chocolate bunnies.
(Reuters link)
(photo from René Rondeau)
Earlier this month, researcher/historian David Giovannoni (at First Sounds) discovered the earliest recording of a human voice, from the archives of the French Academy of Sciences. According to records, this sound recording was made by inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860 - 17 years before Thomas Edison. The recording was made on Scott de Martinville’s “phonautograph” which records sound onto a carbon (smoke)-blackened paper. Though his machine successfully recorded a human voice, Scott de Martinville had no means to play back the recording. This recording was scanned, processed, and converted into an audible clip at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
HERE IS THE AUDIO CLIP of Scott de Martinville’s recording - it is a 10 second passage from the French song “Au Clair de la Lune” (I also added a modern recording of the song for comparison).
(via ABC Science)
In what is almost comical enough to be an article from The Onion, The New York Times breaks down a study by none other than “Dr. Grim,” a Czech scientist who correlates beer drinking and a lack of success among scientists in publishing academic papers. What is particularly interesting is that Dr. Grim correlates not just the fact that a scientist drinks beer with his or her success as a publishing author, but finds that the more a scientist drinks, the less success he or she has in publishing. Choice quotes from the article include:
Matthew Symonds, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne who has also studied factors affecting scientific productivity, called the results remarkable.
“It’s rather devastating to be told we should drink less beer in order to increase our scientific performance,” Dr. Symonds said.
and
In spite of his study, Dr. Grim, who said he would on occasion enjoy more than 12 beers in a night, is not on a campaign to decrease beer drinking among scientists. Why not? His answer: “I like it.”
The quality of writing at the New York Times has clearly never been higher.
(via SteveB; via NYT)
Once again, technology is put to good use: Atlanta bar owner Rufus Terrill has created the anti-vagabond “Bum Bot 2000.“
It has a 2,000,000 candlepower floodlight and a water cannon capable of 200 lbs of pressure. The object of this robot is to chase away vagrants, prostitutes, and pushers in his neighborhood. Many of Terrill’s targets are the “sort of people” drawn to a local emergency homeless shelter - he hopes to let them know they aren’t welcome to plague his public streets anymore. The camera feed on the Bum Bot 2000 is projected onto a big screen TV in Terrill’s bar, so patrons can watch prostitutes and hoboes get sprayed with water. This unstoppable security droid may have only one weakness, that hopefully the swarthy homeless will never discover: pushing it over.
Suggestions for a better name for this robot:
•Hobotron 2000
•The Roomba Wet T-Shirt Machine
•BumFighter X1
•Bigot-tron 4000
•The Hobo Soaker
•Go-Starve-Somewhere-Else-O-Matic
•The Hookernator
•Ho-Bot
•D!ckhead with a Watergun 9000
I want to invent “Drunkbot 3000″: it will regularly cover the floor of Terrill’s bar in vomit.
Linkety-link: L.A. Times
(via Susan)
This is Robert Echeverria.
He’s 32.
He weights 500 pounds and is 6′ tall.
He’s a gang member.
He stars in a YouTube video where he scams a Del Taco restaurant in Rialto, California.
His bail is set at $125,000.00.
Link: Press-Enterprise story
Bonus Round: What is it about Del Taco that makes people want to act like d!cks (and then brag about it on YouTube)?
People acting like jackasses at Del Taco:
•Chair-throwing fight at Del Taco.
•Fernando fights some guy at Del Taco.
•Climbing a Del Taco.
•Saying obscene things to a complete stranger at Del Taco.
•Two girls get kicked out of Del Taco for running around like a couple of idiots
(via Susan)
Recently seen while channel surfing (Actually, I saw this just minutes before flipping to Alyssa Brown smashing her face):
In addition to the mispelling, what a pertinent set of statistics for Fox News to be displaying…
Perhaps a few steps up from the level of RottenNeighbor.com, CrimeReports.com combines Google Maps with local law enforcement reports (still not available in some areas).
[Update from Heywood]:
If you, like me, tried this out and it isn’t yet available for your neighborhood, invite your police chief. Just a few clicks.
Just when you thought that Google had done everything and then some, they go and announce a new move today: a partnership with Matsushita of Japan and YouTube, to bring Internet video to conventional plasma TVs.
IPTV has been touted for years now as the future (anyone remember Microsoft’s $425 million acquisition of WebTV in 1997?), but this move in particular, more than any other, could actually stand to have an impact in this space and inspire other content providers to interface with the solution. Sure, Microsoft has moved further into IPTV with MSNtv and lately, the Xbox 360, but to utilize these and other services, one has to buy hardware.
What will be interesting with the gTV, however, will be to see if what this looks like in a more concrete, developed form: will Google’s efforts be in the vein of the iPhone and Internet video, where only YouTube and other Google content (Picasa, for example) can be consumed through these TVs, or will other Internet video be available, such as Joost, Hulu, and network content? The possibilities seem endless, so it will be interesting to see the extent to which copyright concerns and other business partnerships (or potentially the lack thereof) affect the final product and consumer experience.
(via CNN Money)
Check it, folks– today Sony announced that the PSP’s next firmware update will include Skype, allowing PSP owners to make cheap Skype calls over WiFi. There haven’t been many details released yet, but the upgrade should be available late this month.
This is obviously a good move for consumers in the sense that it’s a step further toward wireless openness and thus, cheaper calling, but it’s also an interesting step for the PSP as a possible step toward becoming an iPhone rival: an all encompassing communications and media device (once you’ve installed a 3rd party web browser, of course). And with the PSP, you’ve got gaming quality and diversity that an iPhone simply can’t and will never be able to compete with.
Clearly, the PSP can’t be your full-time phone as you’re tethered to WiFi, but at home, school or the office, you’ve got got an extremely cheap VoIP phone. Perhaps we’ll see a future partnership between Sony and members of the Open Handset Alliance? (FYI, Sony is not currently a member of the Google-led OHA.) It seems that in light of Android and other developments, there likely would be demand for a touchscreen, Skype- and CDMA-enabled PSP, should Sony decide to produce it in the future. I’d certainly be interested…
(via Engadget)
Not Guilty - Johnny Haze: