Another round of massive linkblogging to entertain you today. I’m catching up to the present, so some of these are probably a little fresher than the last batch.
How Far Will Army Recruiters Go?: What’s it take to sign people up to go serve in Iraq? You might be surprised. Surely all the people who support this war have kids they’d love to send over there to fight the good fight!
If You Could Teach the World Just One Thing…: Scientists respond to this survey of what one thing they would like everyone to know.
Brazil spurns US terms for Aids help: Our “help” comes with strings attached…strings pulled by the religious right.
Guess the Google: Can you guess what word, searched on Google Image Search, produced these images? Requires Flash.
The Self-Referential Aptitude Test: And yes, it has a solution.
Steve Jobs, Let my Music Go: Calibrate your Irony Meter with this post from Hilary Rosen, former Chairperson of the RIAA, where she complains about anti-piracy measures in music.
The American Patriot: Comic adventures of the true force behind our foreign policy! Unfortunately, he’s been on his way to Iraq for weeks now, so I’m not sure if this is still being updated.
Lost Destinations: A collection of abandoned sites, ripe for exploring…
Action Squad: …and the adventures of a group that does just that.
Merlin’s Lists of Five Things: Pretty funny collection of lists.
No Faith in this Force: Orson Scott Card talks a lot of crap about Star Wars.
A genius explains: An autistic savant tries to explain how he can instantly do math problems in his head.
Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Can someone find me a similar list of “harmful” books compiled by someone on the political Left? Incidentally, Communism is worse than Fascism.
Theory.org.uk Trading Cards: I’ll swap you my Henri Lefebvre for your extra Ulrich Beck.
The Science of Consistency: “Yet sometimes the editors and writers responsible for such series barely care about maintaining continuity, so busy are they with more mundane tasks such as writing entertaining dialogue and coming up with interesting new characters. That is why such universes desperately need the obsessive, crank-like fan, the fan willing to concoct rationalizations that make sense of the apparent continuity errors.”
My Email to Senator Obama: Has Obama drunk the Kool-Aid already?
Freakonomics: “A capuchin monkey must decide how to spend his budget of twelve coins. Two human research assistants are present (one wearing blue and one wearing red), and both hold a piece of food in an orange dish for the monkey to see. The red research assistant “sells” grapes and the blue research assistant “sells” Jell-o cubes, with each piece of food costing a coin from the monkey’s budget. The capuchin must make a decision analogous to a grocery-store shopper’s: how much of their budget to spend of grapes and how much to spend on Jell-o.”
The Monster Engine: Children’s drawings of monsters ant superheroes are re-rendered realistically, with awfully disturbing results.
Quote #111338: “Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word “wand” with “wang” in the first Harry Potter Book.”
Potemkin School: Our fake President’s fake wife visits a fake school.
Dalek ‘kidnappers’ demand Doctor: “Kidnappers” who stole a Dalek from a Somerset tourist attraction have sent its owners a ransom note – and the alien’s amputated plunger.
Ten Reasons Why You Should Never Accept a Diamond Ring from Anyone, Under Any Circumstances, Even If They Really Want to Give You One: An ad campaign is forever.
Paper pulls classic hoax on vanity publishers: Vanity publishing houses in France have been accused of gross incompetence after apparently failing to recognise the manuscript of one of the greatest French novels — Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
