Link fondue
In this week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes on the danger of relying too much on modern visualization technology, especially mammography. I was intrigued to learn that the U.S. Air Force made zero definite Scud kills in the first Gulf War, despite spending million of dollars on a device called the LANTIRN navigation and targeting pod.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now provides the National Digital Forecast Database weather information in XML format, for free.
The hot new getaway--Libya.
According to PNC Bank, over the twelve days of Christmas, the goods and services given to you by your true love were probably purchased offline, not over the Internet, and those 12 drummers drumming might have come from India.
A Kosher credit card that won't work on the Sabbath. I wonder, do you have to be Jewish to apply, or can gentiles play, as with JDate.
Netflix Friends, a service by which Netflix members can recommend movies directly to each other, is getting some blog-play. So frustrating that so many sites have developed all sorts of recommendation services, yet none of them connect. I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Amazon, IMDb, here on my website, but none of those connect. Someday, we'll have a standardized way to represent our opinions on movies in XML, and all these networks will link up via web services, and I'll actually have interest in signing up to use all these new services.
BTW, though I've grown disillusioned with numerical ratings for movies, I do enjoy looking at the demographic breakdowns of IMDb's movie rankings. For example, Alexander's most popular ratings, on a scale of 1 to 10, are 1 and 10. And nearly 70% of the votes for You Got Served are 1's; that might be the least user-acclaimed movie of 2004. Oh wait, no, the most user-panned movie of 2004 is Daniel - Der Zauberer, a German movie whose plot summary on IMDB reads: "Evil assassins want to kill Daniel Kublbock, the third runner up for the German Idols."
Odd tidbits
By the time they find out if cell phone EMF is bad for human health, it will be too late for those of us first generation guinea pigs. I just hope later generations appreciate the courage and sacrifice it took for us to plow forward in the face of such mortal uncertainty.
Footage from a tiny camera mounted to the back of an eagle
So that's what it looks like to fly like an eagle.
I'm not sure when this came out. Inspired by BMWFilms, Mercedes Benz made its own online shortmercials, including this one, The Porter. It doesn't seem possible that it would be about what it sounds like, but yes, it's about a hotel parking valet and includes this scintillating line: "I am no spy. I am no thief. I park cars." Sure, no one may take their Mercedes on car chases, as in BMWFilms, but to show a CLS just driving down the street and in and out of parking garages at about 30mph is far from pulse-pounding. Mercedes first short, Lucky Star, featured Michael Mann directing Benicio Del Toro, was at least hammy ("We're on you like white on rice") and humorous, in a cornball way (it's a faux trailer for a movie about a really lucky guy, which Del Toro is in real life, don't you think?). You'll have to scour the web using Google to find a copy--perhaps Mann and Del Toro ordered Mercedes to pull it.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now provides the National Digital Forecast Database weather information in XML format, for free.
The hot new getaway--Libya.
According to PNC Bank, over the twelve days of Christmas, the goods and services given to you by your true love were probably purchased offline, not over the Internet, and those 12 drummers drumming might have come from India.
A Kosher credit card that won't work on the Sabbath. I wonder, do you have to be Jewish to apply, or can gentiles play, as with JDate.
Netflix Friends, a service by which Netflix members can recommend movies directly to each other, is getting some blog-play. So frustrating that so many sites have developed all sorts of recommendation services, yet none of them connect. I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Amazon, IMDb, here on my website, but none of those connect. Someday, we'll have a standardized way to represent our opinions on movies in XML, and all these networks will link up via web services, and I'll actually have interest in signing up to use all these new services.
BTW, though I've grown disillusioned with numerical ratings for movies, I do enjoy looking at the demographic breakdowns of IMDb's movie rankings. For example, Alexander's most popular ratings, on a scale of 1 to 10, are 1 and 10. And nearly 70% of the votes for You Got Served are 1's; that might be the least user-acclaimed movie of 2004. Oh wait, no, the most user-panned movie of 2004 is Daniel - Der Zauberer, a German movie whose plot summary on IMDB reads: "Evil assassins want to kill Daniel Kublbock, the third runner up for the German Idols."
Odd tidbits
"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac."
By and large, law enforcement personnel in American end up sending impounded Macs needing data recovery to the acknowledged North American Mac experts: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidently the Mounties have built up a knowledge and technique for Mac forensics that is second to none.
By the time they find out if cell phone EMF is bad for human health, it will be too late for those of us first generation guinea pigs. I just hope later generations appreciate the courage and sacrifice it took for us to plow forward in the face of such mortal uncertainty.
Footage from a tiny camera mounted to the back of an eagle
So that's what it looks like to fly like an eagle.
I'm not sure when this came out. Inspired by BMWFilms, Mercedes Benz made its own online shortmercials, including this one, The Porter. It doesn't seem possible that it would be about what it sounds like, but yes, it's about a hotel parking valet and includes this scintillating line: "I am no spy. I am no thief. I park cars." Sure, no one may take their Mercedes on car chases, as in BMWFilms, but to show a CLS just driving down the street and in and out of parking garages at about 30mph is far from pulse-pounding. Mercedes first short, Lucky Star, featured Michael Mann directing Benicio Del Toro, was at least hammy ("We're on you like white on rice") and humorous, in a cornball way (it's a faux trailer for a movie about a really lucky guy, which Del Toro is in real life, don't you think?). You'll have to scour the web using Google to find a copy--perhaps Mann and Del Toro ordered Mercedes to pull it.