Sick linkdump

Thursday, January 03 2008 @ 12:28    


world wide webYay 2008!  I've started off the year with a fever and cough!  I took the day off from work today and stewed in my juices for the second day in a row after yesterday's AD marathon.  Here's a short linkdump of some of the more interesting things I've looked at in the last 12 hours...

  • Cogitamus has listed the GOP field of presidential candidates along with their relative Buffy villains.  a few of these seem like a stretch, but it's a funny read if you know Buffy and you follow politics.  I'm so bookmarking this for next week's PSFR. (Thanks e_to_the_m!)
  • Spine sent me this link to a CNN piece on a particularly brilliant long tracking shot in the current film, Atonement.  The article talks all about the art and efficacy of long tracking shots in cinema history.  My brain is still reeling from some of the shots in last year's Children of Men.
  • American University's Center for Social Media has released a study that's all about copyrighted works and user-generated video content.  I haven't read it yet, but it looks like the conclusions are pretty fascinating.
  • File this under dystopia-is-now: the TSA will now be scanning our faces and detaining us based upon our "microfacial expressions."  They ask us about our travel plans and a machine reads our facial expressions.  If the machine registers fear (or something -- the TSA won't say what they are measuring for, exactly), we get detained for further questioning.  Making Light points out that Orwell called this a "facecrime."
  • I'm adding two new blogs to my blogroll today.  First there's the the new SF blog from the folks at Gawker, io9 (good research material for PSFR), and then there is the retro-future blog, Paleo-Future.  Both are right up my alley.
  • I tend to run hot and cold when it comes to mashups, but I'm consistently impressed by DJ Earworm, who is truly an artist.  He recently did a mashup that included all 25 of the top hits from 2007 (my bet is that this is a better single piece of music than any one of the tunes he's mashing).  Check out his other pieces, including this amazing mashup of Django Reinhardt and Paul Simon.  Genius.
  • Check out this awesome video of someone pitching a paper airplane out an apartment window in NYC, 300 feet up.  I was way into paper airplane designs when I was in middle school and would have loved doing something like this.