Free (Audio) Books.
More and more authors are turning to podcasting to find their audiences after being rejected by traditional book publishers, it seems. Interested in hearing some of their stories for free (or if you’re feeling generous, a suggested donation of $9.99)? Check out PodioBooks, where there’s a tonne of free literature just waiting to be downloaded to your iPod.
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Larry David got ME $320,000! Thanks, Larry David!
Juan Catalan, 28, was arrested in the May 2003 murder of Martha Puebla, 16, outside her Sun Valley home, even though he told detectives that he was innocent and had been at a Dodgers game with his 6-year-old daughter at the time of the crime. Catalan’s defense attorney, Todd Melnik, went through footage of crowd shots from the televised game between the Dodgers and the Atlanta Braves, but he did not find his client. Then he learned that Curb Your Enthusiasm had been shooting at the ballpark that day. Sure enough, there he was on the cutting room floor, eating a hotdog.
Juan spent nearly five months in jail for a crime he did not commit � he filed a suit for police misconduct and today he was awarded $320,000. Catalan was not a fan of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" before his time in jail. "He is now," Casselman said. Well, duh.
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Is your fetus gay?
Is Your Baby Gay? Southern Baptist theologian Albert Mohler has come out to support stem cell research: If a biological basis [for homosexuality] is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.
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First Robotics
The FIRST (“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”) robotics competition has recently begun it’s 2007 competition season. The competition, which began and still enjoys it’s greatest popularity in the United States, challenges high-school students and mentors to design and build a (teleoperated) robot to play a game in six weeks. Founded by Dean Kamen, of segway, IBOT, the first home dialysis machine, and clean drinking water fame founded the competition in 1988 to inspire students to enter the engineering profession. Every year a new challenge is put forth, and this year’s game involves placing inner-tubes on a cylindrical rack in addition to lifting other team’s robots. A sizeable community has sprung up around FIRST, with much attention paid to Dean Kamen’s ideal of gracious professionalism which is like sportsmanship without the sports.
The 2007 regional competitions provide teams an opportunity to show off their work. If you’re interested in getting involved, or just watching the events, FIRST provides a handy Event Locator.
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Cranks of the Dark Ages
The dark ages of western Europe � nasty, brutish, and short — did nevertheless produce technical innovations in metallurgy, agriculture, and, as identified in the Utrecht Psalter, a groundbreaking simple machine: the crank.
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Shiny happy people
To Baldy Go: Thinking of shaving your head? Undergoing chemotherapy? Afraid you’ll lose a bet? If you want to see what you’d look like bald, the friendly fellow at BaldlyGo will baldify your picture, free of charge, whether you’re an average man, woman, teen or even a world leader. Here’s the demo for the private service.
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No vulgarians were harmed in the making of this post.
A handsome, though humble, little game: Sprout. The clear winner, in my mind, in this game design competition. (Though the sequel to Gateway is as eerie as the first.)
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Masturbating elephants for science
“One guy I know got a black eye from being hit by an elephant�s penis.”
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History in Miniature
Joseph Neumeyer’s Dynamic Dioramas has tons of cool photos of dioramas with miniature soldiers and ships from many different historical eras.
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Gummi Art
Artist Ya Ya Chou works in several materials, the most interesting being gummi bears. The Mommy, The Candelabras, and sculptures are nice, but the Bear Rug is not to be missed. The best piece is the Chandelier, which apparently is perfectly fine after two years.
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The Mile High Collection
“I’ve often been asked what when through my mind when I first realized that I had stumbled across the greatest accumulation of Golden Age comics ever discovered. Frankly, even after 25 years have gone by, it still gives me chills to think about staring at that huge closet stacked to the rafters with mint Golden Age comics. " In 1977, a 21 year old comic book dealer in Colorado named Chuck Rozanski got a phone call from a realtor who wanted to dispose of a "large" number of comic books in the basement of a house that was about to be sold. The owners of the house were eager to get rid of them, and Rozanski purchased the "greatest comic collection ever found" , consisting of over 18,000 mint condition Golden Age comic books collected by artist Edgar Church, for a bargain price (rumored to be as low as $1,800). Recently, just one comic book from the collection sold for $273,125. Rozanski used the proceeds to build Mile High Comics, now the largest comic book retailer in the industry. Amazing as the Mile High discovery was, Rozanski still believes that his "Mile High II" find was his best.
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You don’t know You Don’t Know Jack
You Don’t Know Jack playable online. "If 50 Cent was actually worth 50 cents when he was born in 1975, adjusting for inflation, what would his name be today?" Plus, see the topical daily DisOrDat, including: Is this quote from the Bible or Deathstalker III? Crayola color or award-nominated porn movie? Brand of computer software or member of the Justice League? (NSFW for insulting commentator and suggestive references)
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Music of golden proportions
Zelda and the Golden Ratio. A fascinating examination of the music from Nintendo’s Zelda games, and the recurring appearances of 0.618, the bisection point on a line at which the relationship of the shorter segment to the longer one is the same as that of the longer section to the whole line.
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I, personally, don’t laugh at this sort of thing.
Barfield is Garfield with banality largely replaced by puerility. As such, it’s a tad NSFW.
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P-p-p-p-p-please!
Who Delayed Roger Rabbit? Rich Drees lays bare the backroom bickering and production studio drama behind one of the 1980s’ most successful comedies. For an encore, Drees reviews the unproduced script of Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon. Weep for what might have been.
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There we go
Was working on some issues related to long rebuild times today, stupid unicode.
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Impacts of Climate Change
Impacts of Climate Change, the Potential Impacts to 2050 of a Mid-Upper Greenhouse Gas Emissions Scenario. From Global Business Network.
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Because Britney’s lack of hair is more important.
You would think that with 4,000 women and 200 girls together, along with hundreds of NGOs and representatives of 45 governments the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women would be well covered by the media. Sadly, it is not: this year only 10 journalists demanded media accreditation to cover the international meeting, while pro-life groups are more than happy to send delegates arguing that "governments should protect girls from the moment of conception."
The Commission however is no small event: it provided a legal frame protecting the rights of women and girls worldwide (those rights were officially adopted in the early 90s [!]). It also provides standards to which participant countries must try live up to. This blog takes us backstage, behind the CSW’s scene.
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Carved Eggshell Art
Christel Assante carves eggshells into extraordinary pieces of art. SculptorRon Cheruka , who goes by the nickname "the egg man," also works in the medium of eggshell, but he is not quite as talented in my opinion, a Salieri to Assante’s Mozart.
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Immigration limbo
“Dear Mr. Prime minister haper, I don�t like to stay in this jail. I�m only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I�m sleeping beside the wall. Please Mr. Priminister haper give visa for my family. This place is not good for me."
Two Iranian parents and their Canadian-born son Kevin have been detained in a Texas detention centre after trying to escape their torturous and dangerous situation in Iran.
Hear the interviews.
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The ozone layer was just jealous.
There are holes in the earth’s crust! It turns out that the ozone layer was just keeping up with the Jones’s; in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, there is a patch of several thousand square kilometers where the mantle is exposed. ‘The team of scientists from Cardiff University stress there is no need for the public to panic about the giant hole even though they describe it as "a gaping open wound in the Earth’s skin".’
The scientific team departs today to investigate the hole. They will be detailing their progress on a blog. And you can ask them questions about their project, which they may answer online.
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Creepy automated photo retouching software
PortraitProfessional is a software package that claims to automate the process of retouching portraits. In part it does so by perfecting skin tone and texture, much like Kodak’s excellent Digital GEM Airbrush plugin, but it also does something it calls ‘face sculpting,’ presumably reproportioning facial elements into some sort of ideal relationship. The effect in many cases is to give the subject a creepy, bug-eyed look that seems equal parts anime, Whitley Strieber alien, and those funny warped headshots made famous by (and with) Kai’s PowerTools. The reworked photo on the home page isn’t too extreme, but some of the ones in the sample gallery are downright disturbing. (And I can’t imagine how you’d ever explain to a subject why you rebuilt his or her face as if you were a plastic surgeon in some military hospital.)
RobDurdle.com 
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