May 21, 2011
You've Worked Hard! Yay!
Jonathan Winters
Improv has never been as good as this.
Jonathan Winters on the Jack Parr Show.
and, on Johnny Carson.
and, with Dean Martin
and, with David Letterman and Robin Williams
and, roasting Ronald Reagan
and, with Steve Allen
False May 21, 2011 Doomsday prophet Harold Camping "deserts" devastated followers, church offers solace (PHOTOS)
False May 21, 2011 Doomsday prophet Harold Camping "deserts" devastated followers, church offers solace (PHOTOS) Doomsday prophet Harold Camping, who predicted that the End of the World would come on May 21, 2011, has gone missing ever since it became increasingly clear that his prediction is going to fail, even as local churches willingly stepped in to provide counseling and help to Camping's devastated followers.
Indie Pop
Overlooked '90s Indie Pop: The Cat's Miaow, whose single sentence wiki describes them as... "an indie pop band formed in Melbourne, Australia, in 1992." And Madison Electric, a band from Ann Arbor that played one show in a church basement before going their separate ways.
Fast Food Fights Back
Hambuster: when your lunch goes berserk. Vimeo; Warning, funny, violent, and gory as Hell, so maybe NSFW. Also available in 3D. [more inside]
Land of 10,000 Hates?
Earlier this week, the Republicans in the Minnesota House of Representatives asked Bradlee Dean to give the morning prayer. [more inside]
The Amoral Maze
Of spies, special forces and drone strikes
Warfare: An advancing front - "The US is engaged in increasingly sophisticated warfare, fusing intelligence services and military specialists" [more inside]
Is Mike Tyson's Face Open Source?
S. Victor Whitmill is suing Warner Brothers Entertainment for copyright infringement for using the design of a tattoo he created for Mike Tyson on a characters face in Hangover II. There is precedent for this action.
XyWrite
A famously fast, robust, command-driven text processor/file manager that publishers... relied on throughout the '80s and some do even now, [XyWrite] is an unrivaled writer's tool.
How Modern Spam Works
Through purchasing Viagra, herbal remedies, and replica watches, computer scientists explain how modern spam works. The spam business model consists of three components: advertising, click support (i.e., delivering the customer to an actual website), and realization (i.e., receiving payment and delivering the product to the customer). Different firms located across the globe carry out the various tasks. For example, the website domains are registered in Russia, the credit card payments are handled by banks in Azerbaijan, and the pills are sent from manufacturers in India. The spam business infrastructure appears to be organized around a small number of affiliate programs that coordinate the activities among the different firms. Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (A 16 page PDF). [via]
"The answer was to photograph the surface itself."
The postman who delivered a palace
The story begins in 1879. Cheval, then 43 years old, had been working as a rural mail carrier in the southeast of France for 12 years. Because his daily routine involved walking about 20 miles (32km), mostly in solitude, he did a lot of daydreaming. One day (perhaps while his mind was elsewhere), he tripped over a small limestone rock. He picked up that stone and over the next 33 years went on to build his dream, Le Palais Idéal, an amazing fantasy palace. [more inside]
More statistical hijinks on climate change
“certain styles of research were suggested to be prone to ‘groupthink, reduced creativity and the possibility of less-rigorous reviewing processes.’ Edward Wegman is a professor at George Mason and a distinguished statistician with a long career, a former winner of the ASA's Founders Award. In 2006 he testified before Congress on climate science, sharply criticizing the statistical methodology of Michael Mann's "hockey stick graph," which showed a sharp increase in global temperature in the last part of the 20th century. One section of Wegman's testimony concerned "social network analysis," and suggested that Mann's tightly-knit network of co-authors might have led to insufficiently aggressive peer review. USA Today reports that Wegman's testimony contained a substantial quantity of plagiarized material, and the peer-reviewed article derived from the testimony has been retracted by the journal that published it. John Mashey has compiled an obsessively thorough catalogue of the plagiarized text. (large .pdf.) [more inside]
Passing the sexual Turing test
Filtering out porn algorithmically takes audio into consideration. "Comedy shows with laughter were also sometimes mistaken for pornography, as the loud audience cheers and cries share similar spectral characteristics to sexual sounds."
'I'm a human being, God damn it! My life has value!'
Notes of a Screenwriter, Mad as Hell - The New York times on Paddy Chayefsky's notes for his screenplay of Network. I don't have to tell you things are bad...
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