Posts by matt

For those of you who’ve suffered too long with ugly Firefox themes, I have great news. Someone has finally created a Netscape theme, both beautiful and attentive to detail. If you’re using Win XP, also install the pretty Media Center theme Microsoft has made available, and your desktop will be hott like Infangelina.

A Flickr photoset pairing prose with whimsical typography. Also, a Tetris valentine. (Waxtastic.)

This Lifehacker tip on tagging your songs in iTunes is actually hella handy. Most of my songs lack the metadata to make the “smart playlists” useful. I’m totally changing that right now.

Make a stun gun out of a disposable camera. Actually, though, don’t. But now you could. Although you might prefer to make your own home theater projector (will need magnifying glass and duct tape) instead. (Ferreterrific.)

And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

OK, despite it conforming pretty well to my Web 2.0 tired-ass design checklist, I actually think Yahoo!’s test of a new home page looks purty. And what is this about Yahoo! video games?

Every week it seems another story comes out about Google’s oh-so-mysterious plans for the “dark fiber” it’s been purchasing. Does anyone else suspect the reason for the proliferation of this story is the sexy, noirish sound of the words “dark fiber”? Would we have heard twice about this if the story involved Google exploring “wavelength-division multiplexing” technologies?

Have you ever been stuck looking for a retro music sample reminiscent of that peppy 1950s film style? Ask MeFi to the rescue. That is all.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Blink, has inspired two name-alike books mocking his argument (as it’s commonly understood) — Think! and Blank. The second comment in the MetaFilter thread on Gladwell’s latest essay called him “collossally overrated.” And although Rachel Donaldio doesn’t come right out and say it in her NYTBR profile of Gladwell, I suspect she might agree with the MeFi poster. With a Blink movie in pre-production, are we at the tipping point of the Gladwell backlash yet?

Gladwell’s response to the two books (e-mailed to FishBowlNY) is the best: “i’m slightly gratified that it took two writers to parody me. i’d hate to think i could be parodied by just one. :-)”

To ignite the public imagination with the possibilities of life on other planets, a group of researchers from NASA and SETI have created an elaborate scientific vision of what alien worlds might look like. Their projections appeared in a National Geographic special last fall, and are currently on display at the London Science Museum.

The scientists started out by imagining two Earth-like planets — “Aurelia” and “Blue Moon” — with some key differences in atmospheric density, orbit, etc. Then they performed some crazy advanced computer simulations and came up with super-detailed visions of the types of lifeforms that would inhabit these alternate worlds.

For example, the incredible denseness of the atmosphere on Blue Moon makes the evolutionary leap from sea animals to flying animals much more straightforward, producing a species of airborne whale-like creatures. Aurelia’s synchronous rotation means sunlight is a precious commodity, so trees become tree-animals, moving slowly on tentacles to maximize their exposure to the sun.

Tentacular tree-animals? Flying whales? Crazy, right?

Ha. Probe the Internet a little and you’ll find all sorts of folks criticizing the NASA/SETI scientists for being too conservative in imagining other planets. Carbon-based life forms are so boring, says the Fortean Times. Why not silicon, like on that one Star Trek episode? (Wikipedia’s rather critical entry on the project tells us the tendency for scientists to assume all life must be carbon-based is often called “carbon chauvinism.” New favorite thing.)

OK, I know I said I wasn’t generally a fan of science fiction, but if sci-fi SF authors all had hott interactive Flash applications (and a blog, no less!) to illustrate their visions, I think I could dig it.

An article in this month’s Wired about the project piqued my interest, which led me to the Nat’l Geo presentation, which is the main attraction. Make sure you watch the movies and listen to the audio commentaries.