Archive for July, 2009
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »You May Already Be A Wiener
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 21, 2009 by admin in Holidays
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009It’s National Hot Dog Month, but frankly, I think PETA’s winning the PR battle with their suggestion to put something different between your buns
 Lettuce pause for a moment to ponder PETA’s tofu tube steak suggestions |
Whenever someone asks me if there are any foods I don’t eat, I always forget to mention hot dogs, because, er, frankly, I don’t think of them as food. Although I’ll eat one once in awhile, I put them in the same category as Twinkies or a McMeal Deal: a thing I will chew and taste and swallow if there’s no actual organic matter around. But ignore my foodie pretensions. This is America, and it’s National Hot Dog Month, for cryin’ out loud. So grab a white bread bun, some French’s mustard, and stick a wiener in your mouth. To make sure you’re doing it up right, download a copy of the 2009 Hot Dog Month Planning Guide (6.1MB PDF), and to satisfy your appetite for tube steak knowledge, grab a copy of Frank Facts About Hot Dogs while you’re at it. They use appetizing phrases like “meat trimmings”, “stainless steel choppers blend the meat”, and “processed intestines” to further seduce you. And did you know that Americans will eat about 2 billion hot dogs this month? If we did our math correctly, those hot dogs laid end-to-end would reach 189,393 miles, which is about 4/5 of the way to the moon. So, while July 22 is National Hot Dog Day, I think the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council needs to hire a new PR firm. Although they had enough savvy to create a Facebook Fan Page and a YouTube channel PETA already seems to have stolen their thunder by protesting on Capitol Hill July 16. And since we’ve given so much time to wieners and dogs today, let’s give equal time to breasts and monkeys with the Breasts Not Animal Tests game. I scored 33,375 points, but the breasts just came too fast at the end. Got any interesting hot dog or sausage links to share?
Getting A New Angle On Things Is Easy When You’re From The Fourth Dimension
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 20, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, July 20th, 2009A kid from A-Square confronts his spheres and talks about hypercubes to help give your otherwise two-dimensional morning a new perspective.
A Three-Dimensional Representation Of A Four-Dimensional Object |
Although we originally started our Monday Demotivators to add a little dimension to your Monday morning, we’ve fallen a little flat this week; all we have is this simple game in which you guess the shape of a three-dimensional object as it passes through your two-dimensional field of view. This game will be familiar to anyone who’s familiar with the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Are You A Porn Addict?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 19, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, July 19th, 2009If you’re an American male, this is almost a stupid question. But why don’t you take the quiz anyway.
Here’s Some Good Porn |
As a moderately computer-savvy person, I often get calls for help when someone’s computer gets infected with a virus that hijacks their homepage or causes porn site popups. As a joke, when I get a call like this my first question is: “Is there a male between the ages of 13 and 75 in your house“? Because without fail, the caller is either male themselves or is a woman with male children, a husband, a dad, or a boyfriend in the house. Although I have no formal research to back this up, I’d feel comfortable saying (although if you’re a woman, you’ll be uncomfortable hearing) that 3 out of 5 American males have seen more Internet porn than they’d like you to think, and of the other two, one is an asexual ascetic, and the other has seen more than the first three combined but doesn’t care what you think. So is Internet porn bad? Unfortunately, the people that seem to ask this question the most do it out of their own morality-based discomfort with it, rather than a balanced look at how it really impacts current attitudes. Much like substance abuse (or anything else fun in life) studying sexuality in a scientific fashion is beset with a lot of obstacles. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that clinical research, surveys, and direct observation are all problematic. For an example, look at these PBS Frontline survey results and note not only the basic figures, but the fact that the vast majority of respondents are males, 21-30 years old. A classic example of “volunteer bias”. I thought I was alone amongst my more open-minded friends in my perception that Internet porn has been having a serious negative impact on our culture until Read the rest of this entry »
Twittergate – The Biggest Scoop That No-One Cares About
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 18, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, July 18th, 2009The same public that doesn’t care about Twittergate probably doesn’t care about the ethics involved.
 TechCrunch’s Twitter Documents? A Little Bluerbird Told Them |
To me, the most interesting thing about the recent leak and subsequent publishing of secret internal documents from Twitter was not the information revealed about Twitter – we all know they fancy themselves to be in a deathmatch with Google and Facebook – but how TechCrunch’s decision to publish them raises once again a slew of questions about journalistic practices. The death of Walter Cronkite on Friday was a timely sort of metaphor for the kind of questions to which I’m referring; Cronkite’s famous We Are Mired In A Stalemate broadcast during the Vietnam war was a symbol of everything I admire about great journalists, and why, in decades past, I might have actually wanted to be one. TechCrunch’s decision to publish is an excellent 21st century example of 19th century British newspaper and publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe’s statement that “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising“. After pointing out that Twitter is their largest source of outside traffic after Google in June, TechCrunch has turned around and bitten the hand that feeds them. Which raises a couple of interesting questions: Are they somehow upholding some value of journalism by informing the public, or are they merely capitalizing on a tremendous traffic generator? And will it backfire? While this is in fact one of the biggest stories no-one cares about (it was barely even a hot topic on Twitter, ironically), it still highlights one of the key problems faced by journalism which is outlined in one of my favorite books of the past few years, The Elements of Journalism
Can Movies Be Made Without Corporate Capitalist Greed?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 17, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Friday, July 17th, 2009Crowdsourcing is one of many popular new buzzwords gaining traction, but will it work for movies?
A few years ago, my friend Terry Osterhout had a great idea: a zombie movie called “Hybrid”, completely produced with user-submitted material. Although a lot of buzz was generated, the submissions never really poured in. I think he was a little ahead of his time; crowdsourcing seems to be the hot new thing now, thanks to the rise of social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter. We recently wrote about the crowdsourced video for the the Japanese pop band Sour’s song “Hibi no Neiro”, but there’s much more afoot: after considerable success launching the project “Live Music” (see the clip at left) via Facebook, the project is being backed by Sony and Intel for release this fall. There’s also This Movie is Broken, a movie about the Canadian band Broken Social Scene and (this will turn out well) Star Wars Uncut which slices “Star Wars: A New Hope” into 472 separate 15 second clips, to be filmed by 472 different users. This kind of “socialist filmmaking” can have beautiful results, as when Israeli artist Kutiman Remixed YouTube or when a non-profit assembles a project like Playing for Change. But can this kind of project really shape up without a healthy injection of capitalist greed? The most successful project like this so far has been Live Music, and as this CartoonBrew article points out, it’s heavily funded by corporate sponsorship. I guess there’s always crowdfunding as an alternative. This Mashable article asks if it is in fact the future of journalism. There’s been a lot of talk about Free Stuff lately, and I have to say: few know better than I how little people who like your work will pay you when you don’t directly charge for it.