Biggest. Fireworks. Ever.

The shuttle program is 25 years old now and, ever since the 2003 crash of the Columbia, which was caused by pieces falling off, has had a much more touch-and-go feel to it—which is certainly attractive to NASCAR fans nationwide. As noted in the article, Shuttle fears over foam lost in blast-off (Telegraph.co.uk), the liftoff was not error-free, but the problems were well within expectations:

“‘This isn’t too abnormal,‘ said Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for spaceflight. ‘We fully expected to... [More]”

“Zuerst hatten wir kein Glück, und dann kam auch noch Pech dazu.”

'Ladder' in the SubwaySome artists in Bayview Subway Station, Toronto got together to create perspective art at a subway. The paintings are deliberatly distended in order to fool the eye into thinking that it is a three dimensional object. The picture of the ladder to the left is a pretty good example. I’m not sure how they make these—whether they really can draw the false persepective from their mind’s eye or whether they work from a sketch or design prepared beforehand. At any rate, these remind me of the... [More]

Map of World ReligionsWadsworth Religion Course Guide Religion Maps offers a colorful look at geographic distribution of world religions and religious sites in both the ancient and modern worlds. Leaving out religion is the Contemporary World Map, which shows all of those countries from the World Cup that no one could find. Note that the inside of Africa’s elbow seems to be especially conducive to football, as the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Togo are all neighbors there. Most interesting is the map shown in thumbnail to... [More]

The International Philosophy World Cup brought to you by Monty Python—Greeks vs. Germans in a knock-down drag-out battle of the philophosers on a football pitch. If the embedded video below doesn’t work, try this link to the video at YouTube. It’s a touch on the long side, but the closing flurry of announcing makes it worth watching the whole thing:

“The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the... [More]”

The last couple of days have been pretty lackluster for football, from the Holland–Portugal disaster, wherein 16 yellow cards and 2 red cards were dished out to the two out-of-control teams, to the Italy–Australia and Switzerland–Ukraine games, which treated us to over 200 minutes of scoreless football. 200 minutes of master class in defense and all of the buzz today is about diving in the penalty box. The day before, Germany took an early two goal lead and sat on it for a further boring 80... [More]

Attack #1Attack #2Attack #3Animator vs. Animation is a Flash animation that shows what happens when creative differences arise between the drawer and the drawee. In this one, an animator quickly becomes hostile to a freshly-minted stick figure drawing, which takes umbrage to the violence, using the environment (Macromedia Flash itself) to retaliate. It’s very cleverly done and very convincingly animated, giving the impression that the figure is actually fighting for its very life, using bow and arrow against an... [More]

The team should be congratulated for demonstrating such character. –Luis Figo

Ivanov did this 4 timesThe article Four off as Portugal send Dutch home (Eurosport) covers a match that looked more like ice hockey on grass than World Cup football. You have to have seen the match to realize just how ironic the quote above is, coming from Luis Figo, who was part of an extremely vicious Portugese side against the Dutch last night.

The two sides—both capable of very fine football—quickly became more concerned with producing and... [More]

An event with the lasting effect of the 9/11 attack was bound to spawn any number of conspiracy theories. The are thousands of web sites dedicated to poring over any material related to the attacks in excruciating detail. Most of the media is happy to accept the cleansed version offered by the government, which streamlined its message to maximize impact and effectiveness in using 9/11 as a cudgel with which to whip the American people into a savage frenzy. The reality is almost certainly much... [More]

The U.S. Bows Out With Honor (Time) highlights the last match in the 2006 World Cup for the United States, including the critical defensive error by Claudio Reyna that led to the first goal for Ghana and the questionable penalty call in the 3rd minute of extra time in the first half.

Questionable? No…that’s not it. Ridiculous? That’s more like it. Bruce Arena has this to say about it:

“I think we’d all agree it wasn’t a good call to have that in the 47th minute, after our team worked so hard to get... [More]”

Anyone who’s been in the business of web design for long enough—and does a good job of it—should be wholly familiar with the pie chart showing Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design. If the graphic isn’t available[1], the list is:

• Time spent actually designing anything (2%)
• Time spent trying to get the layout to work using only CSS before giving up and using tables (20%)
• Swearing (15%)
• Time spent trying to get the bastard to work in Internet fucking Explorer (40%)
• Time spent wishing a slow,... [More]

Totally Fake PictureThough it’s almost certain that the article, Chinese observers watch U.S. wargames, is supposed to grab the reader’s eye because those sneaky yellow bastards will stop at nothing to learn the secret to our military might. What’s far more shocking is what a truly mighty military it is. The numbers for the pentagon budget are often bandied around—by this site as well as any other lefty rag worth its salt—but it’s hard to wrap one’s head around what 500 billion dollars really buys. Take this... [More]

When even old grey elephant Arlen Spector stands up to protest domestic spying, you know there’s dissension in the ranks over at the GOP. Their normally single voice is splintering somewhat over this issue, as evidenced by this response from Dick Cheney to his outburst: Vice President Cheney Issues Diplomatic Response… (WhiteHouse.Org). Classic Cheney.

Visor on YmirVisor is a plugin for the Terminal from the same people that brought you Quicksilver, the navigation and search tool many people swear by. Basically, you install it along with another extension, SIMBA. Though the installer puts everything in the System/Library folder, moving them to ~/Library as indicated in the instructions works fine. You can configure the terminal window displayed by Visor with special settings; note that the screenshot has a semi-transparent window, even though the standard... [More]

Commodore PET 2001The Commodore PET (Wikipedia) first came onto the scene in 1977. Why is that interesting? As with most disciplines and careers, programmers like to engage in pissing contests to determine who’s suffered the most under the least expressive language under the most oppressive OS on the most restrictive hardware. One of the most important markers of experience is the “first machine I ever programmed on” metric. Many cut their teeth on BASIC on the Commodore 64; I cut mine on the machine to the left.

Until... [More]

Though he spent years on the Daily Show and has been on the air with his own show since last September, Stephen Colbert first leapt into the national spotlight when he as named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people and when he handed George Bush his ass at the Correspondent’s dinner a few weeks ago[1]. There are always a lot of videos of his show online; the following few from the last week are particularly good:

Phone Calls: Wiretapping

Stephen takes to the phones to ease people’s... [More]

Louis C.K. has a new show on HBO and Jon Stewart’s interview with is hilarious. Jon makes the mistake of asking him about his family and he tells him about his two daughters—but with a slightly different take than most proud fathers.

Louis: The one-year-old I don’t have an opinion about … she’s kind of boring. The other one is four years old and I love her very much, but she’s kind of a fucking asshole.
Jon: Does she watch the show?
Louis: I don’t care, she can kiss my ass.
Jon:... [More]

Sternest Meanings features an anagram robot, which is kind of fun. Anagrams derived from the names of our fearless leaders in Washington are succinct peeks into their very souls:

• Donald Rumsfeld = Muddler of lands
• Paul Wolfowitz = Foul zap low wit
• Richard Perle = Pedlar[1], richer

The most fearless leader of all has two interesting variations: the first tells us what we already know, whereas the second reveals a side he has not yet revealed publicly.

• George Walker Bush = Blush, war geek[2]... [More]

The US and Italy squared off tonight in match that started off with a strong American side attacking into an Italian defense that was simply absorbing everything. The Italy that played Ghana using the midfield was gone and the classic counter-attacking Azurri style was back. Though the Americans controlled the run of the play for the first 20 minutes, Italy capitalized on a perfectly executed set play to hammer a headball past star goalkeeper Casey Keller. The US deflated slightly after that,... [More]

Angola vs. MexicoThough there’s been some supremely good football in the first week of the world cup, there has also been some disappointing football. And then there’s the Angola-Mexico match. Now that was so bad, it was funny. The Angolans outclassed the Mexicans throughout most of the match, mostly due to their ability to string two whole passes together where the Mexicans were managing at most one. Mexico must have gotten the mistaken notion that they were good just because they consistently beat the USA.... [More]

WikiMatrix Home PageWikiMatrix doesn’t look especially amazing, but it has quite a few neat tricks that make it a very nice web application. It allows you to select multiple Wikis and compare them; this is a comparison of MediaWiki vs. Moin Moin. The chart is very nicely laid out and includes custom tooltips and a nice hover effect allowing you to follow along and compare many wikis at once. There is also the flagged feature on the left that makes it easier to show only the features that are interesting (it would... [More]

Cork’d is a web application for wine afficionados. Users build add to the global wine database, create lists of their reserves, their favorites and their buddies. It’s a classic web 2.0 collaborative social web site by Dan Benjamin (of HiveLogic and A List Apart) and Dan Cederholm (of SimpleBits). The colors evoke a bottle of red, and the simple decorations, like the filigrees used a separators provide a dash of style. The colors and graphics are flat and simple (it’s the web! 2.0! get it?) and... [More]

earthli.com tag graphThe article Websites as graphs introduces an online tool for creating art out of HTML code. The online version of the grapher accepts a URL and then retrieves and processes the page, tag by tag, building a graph, which displays the connections and nesting. The graph is built in real-time, but deliberately slowly[1], so that it starts with a few large nodes, then seems to zoom out as more nodes are added. As new branches lead to more and more clusters of nodes, the branches “wave” around to get out... [More]

Lance ArmstrongThe article Armstong cleared of doping charges (Sports Illustrated) brings a sigh of relief to anyone still biting their nails over whether Lance cheated when he won his first Tour de France. The conclusion of this latest bout of shipping 7–year-old samples of Lance’s urine around Europe comes not with exoneration of any wrongdoing, but of the inapplicability of the given evidence. Since it cannot be proved that the samples were not tampered with, they cannot be used as evidence. Furthermore, any results of tests... [More]

The gap left by Dan Brown’s writer’s block needs to be filled by something as you lie on a beach this summer. There are only so many different versions of Digital Fortress under various names and publishers you’re going to read until you notice that they’re all the same book and that he hasn’t magically written a new novel you haven’t heard about. In steps Playboy with its 25 sexiest novels ever written, which is chock full of books to take the beach with friends and family. It’s a pretty... [More]

Looking for all the comforts of living on a naval vessel while you’re confined to dry land? 28 Ways to simulate being in the Navy is here to help.[1] Some of the more helpful items are listed below:

1. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the outside world. Have a neighbour bring you a Time, Newsweek, or Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.
2. Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from... [More]

The following video, Death Star (YouTube), is a hilarious deleted scene that George Lucas intended as the opening scene for The Empire Strikes Back. When Mark Hamill crashed up his bike and scarred his face, he added the whole “Ice Planet Hoth” thing instead.

Truly hilarious and well worth watching!

“When in doubt, assume my tongue is in my cheek.”

While the Europeans are actually talking to Iran, as discussed in the article Iran nuclear talks continue (Guardian Unlimited), the US is deeply involved with an issue of similar earth-shattering import: the official language of the United States. To whit, they’ve decided that English is ‘national language’ (Indianapolis Star). So, while the Europeans are once again taking the pussy’s way out, the Americans are navel-gazing and pandering to the lowest common denominator while they wait for the bombs to start dropping.

Way to go... [More]

The next version of Microsoft Office looks to be quite a bit different from the last several releases, which were, on the whole, rather disappointing evolutions of the base products. Each version introduced more features without giving users any way of coping with “featuritis”—a term coined to describe Office. At one point, the menus started hiding unused features in an effort to appear smaller, but commands were still hidden in menus and the notorious nested dialog chains that hampered... [More]