They shoot pictures, don’t they?: A subset of their top 1000 greatest films.
Monthly Archives: December 2005
The bonfire of the inanities
Portland Phoenix: For 2005, my annual task of reviewing the past year has been complicated by an old adage: oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Here I sit, tangled in a web that many people began weaving way back when the Gipper was protecting us against deadly pollutants released by old-growth forests. It was a jumble out there this year — one that defies linear documentation
And here’s the hard one …
The Guardian: Bad news for quizzers: the 101st annual quiz from King William’s College isn’t any easier than the previous 100.
OpenSSH cutting edge
Security Focus: Damien Miller: “We also implemented self re-execution at the c2k4 Hackathon. This changes sshd so that instead of forking to accept a new connection, it executes a separate sshd process to handle it. This ensures that any run-time randomizations are reapplied to each new connection, including ProPolice/SSP stack canary values, shared library randomizations, malloc randomizations, stack gap randomizations, etc.”
FM radio reception tips
Prairie Public.Org::: The best most people can do is an outdoor or attic mounting. You can buy outdoor antennas made for FM, but TV antennas work very well.
Ebert’s Best 10 Movies of 2005
rogerebert.com: Crash, Syriana, Munich, Junebug, Brokeback Mountain, Me and You and Everyone we Know, Nine Lives, King Kong, Yes, Millions.
Also rans: The Best of Youth, Broken Flowers, Cinderella Man: Downfall, Duane Hopwood, Good Night, and Good Luck, Match Point, North Country, The New World, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Pride & Prejudice, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Batman Begins, Bee Season, Cache, Capote, The Constant Gardener, Fear and Trembling, Firecracker, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Head-On, A History of Violence, Hustle & Flow, Last Days, Lord of War, The Memory of a Killer, The Merchant of Venice, Mysterious Skin, Oldboy, Palindromes, Proof, Saraband, Schultze Gets the Blues, Shopgirl, Sin City, The Squid and the Whale, The Upside of Anger, Turtles Can Fly, Walk the Line, The World, Grizzly Man, Aliens of the Deep, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Gunner Palace, March of the Penguins, Murderball, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Tell Them Who You Are, Touch the Sound, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Robots, Off the Map, The Weather Man, Keane, Duma, The Woodsman.
Factual error found on Internet
The Onion: The Information Age was dealt a stunning blow Monday, when a factual error was discovered on the Internet. The error was found on TedsUltimateBradyBunch.com, a Brady Bunch fan site that incorrectly listed the show’s debut year as 1968, not 1969.
The anatomy of web fonts
SitePoint: “For years, Web typography involved little more than choosing a typeface and font size. Unstyled Times New Roman was the norm, and the integration of established typographical techniques and rules was unimagined.”
Google Homepage API – developer guide
Google: “The Google Homepage API provides a way to put third party content onto the Google homepage. The main use of the Googe Homepage API is to create modules that users can add to their Google personalized homepages.”
Unusual technical images of equipment used in World War II
Cyber-heritage: Featuring technical cutaway drawings of submarines, ships, aircraft and arms, plus contemporary photos of and on mostly “S” Class Royal Naval Submarines
Researchers confirm lead as cause of Beethoven’s illness
Science Blog: “Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have found massive amounts of lead in bone fragments belonging to Ludwig von Beethoven, confirming the cause of his years of chronic debilitating illness. Beethoven experienced a change of personality and abdominal illness in his late teens and early 20s that persisted throughout his adult life. His abdominal symptoms and autopsy findings are both consistent with lead poisoning, Walsh said. There have been documented cases of deafness resulting from lead poisoning, but this has been a relatively rare occurrence. There is no solid evidence that lead poisoning was a cause of Beethoven’s deafness, Walsh said.”
Talking-head video is boring online
Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: “Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites, especially when the video shows a talking head and is optimized for broadcast rather than online viewing.”
Ankylosing spondylitis
drdoc on-line: “With ideal therapy, advanced disease and progression is reduced, through modification of the disease process and prevention of advanced spinal deformity, through education, regarding exercises and posture.”
Addressing and linking XML documents
WebReference.com: Part 1 and Part 2:
- How to navigate through an XML document using XPath patterns
- How to build powerful expressions using XPath patterns and functions
- What technologies come together to support linking in XML
- How to reference document fragments with XPointer
- How to link XML documents with XLink
RSStroom reader – toilet paper printer
The Adventures of Teapot the Cat: Yi Tien Electronics today announced a breakthrough news delivery system for the restroom. At a press conference, Yi Tien Electronics unveiled the rsstroom reader™, an rss reader for the restroom which prints directly to toilet tissue through RapidResolution® inkjet technology. Complete with wireless connectivity, the rsstroom reader™ will print out up to the minute articles from rss 2.0 and atom newsfeeds.
The war on Winter Solstice
Nanovirus: For thousands of years humanity had celebrated the beginning of days getting longer in a peaceful and celebratory manner: No longer. There is a war on. Historians generally agree that the Cult of Christ started the War on Solstice. They began by coopting the symbols of this most ancient of celebrations: holly, evergreen trees and the Yule log. Those cultists even moved the date of their god’s birth from summer to winter!
Earth’s north magnetic pole looks like it’s leaving Canada
SpaceRef: After some 400 years of relative stability, Earth’s North Magnetic Pole has moved nearly 1,100 kilometers out into the Arctic Ocean during the last century and at its present rate could move from northern Canada to Siberia within the next half-century.
Map of the world scaled by population
David Hume on religion
“Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.”
(Via Pharyngula.)
Harold Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech
Guardian Unlimited Books: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”