Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
It’s not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.

That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: “What keeps you awake at night?” [full article]

Innovation: You Facebook, you tweet – now lifelog
It has been said before that an era of lifelogging, in which people will record and broadcast their daily lives, is on the way. But this time it might happen – people are already capturing many things about their lives and sharing them via social networking sites. The launch of the new camera and new research from Microsoft suggest people are ready to take the final steps. [full article]

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? [full article]

What a week and weekend. Most of all the Armageddon Expo decimated my bank account and I’ve got a lot of things bookmarked that I’ve neglected to post…

Dave McKean is making an animated adaptation of his own comic Cages. This is gonna be sweet and it’s one of my all time favourite comics for multiple reasons. [full article]

Some Hot Fuzz slash fiction from the actual creators of Hot Fuzz. [website]

Mild America is a Wellington band that Michelle Savill, director of Betty Banned Sweets is a part of. There’s some tracks available at their website here and definitely worth listening to.

Some of the images are pretty rough but make for essential viewing into the fallout of the international drug trade following a UN report after 100 years of drug control. Recommended checking out here.

Waikato cat thaws out after freezer ordeal
The cat, Krillen, was found by owner Sarah Crombie, 27, lying stiff and semi-conscious on a bag of dog food when she went to get a loaf of bread out of the freezer.

“I was looking in there and I heard this funny noise,” the Te Kuiti mother-of-two told the Herald on Sunday .

“It was sort of a ‘miaow’ but he was so half-frozen he couldn’t get the noise out properly, poor thing. So I look down and I see this grey fluffy thing sitting on top of the bag of dog food under a rack.” [article]

There doesn’t seem to be a code to embed it, but if you’re a fan of The Wire and by god you bloody well should be, there’s a great hour long interview with it’s creator David Simon to be found here.

Feeling the need to post a video, here’s one of my favourite scenes from the first season.

There doesn’t seem to be a code to embed it, but if you’re a fan of The Wire and by god you bloody well should be, there’s a great hour long interview with it’s creator David Simon to be found here.

Feeling the need to post a video, here’s one of my favourite scenes from the first season.

The US lets go of the internet – will anyone notice?
POLITICAL power is rarely ceded without good reason. So eyebrows were raised last week when the US Department of Commerce decided to relax its grip on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for the naming system that ensures that when you type a web address, your browser knows where to go.

In future, governments and other international organisations will be able to nominate staff to sit on one of ICANN’s three newly created steering committees, something the DoC had resisted for years. “What it really means,” says ICANN’s chief executive Rod Beckstrom, “is that we’re going global.” [new scientist]

Guardian gagged from reporting parliament
Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret. [guardian.co.uk]

Other points of interest include a great article/site I recommend checking out if your not a prude oppressive supressor is They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They.

And finally, one of the coolest fun things ever… Dead Fly Art. So twistedly bizzare, I love it.

New official video from Jack White’s new super group and still probably one of my favourite albums of the year…

Today is a special day in our history. Well… mine anyway. Part of the reason for the sporadic lack of updates is due to the fact that I’ve been slogging through the internet at home on a measley 30kb/s internet connection. That’s right. I now admit it. It’s been awful.

But after weeks, months almost of delays in doing so, the flatmate has finally arranged for the cap to be increased and I’m now floating in a nirvana of high speed internet again and no longer have to wait half an hour for a video to load up.

So expect this bastard child of a blog to be updated more often as it’s no longer a trauma inducing effort to wade through articles/songs/videos/photos just to find something interesting to post in the absence of having anything else substantial to write about in the meantime.

Will California become America’s first failed state?
Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state government is issuing IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong? [full article]

World’s largest dino footprints found
Found in the Jura plateau near the south-eastern city of Lyon, the prints are thought to belong to a giant vegetarian sauropod. The round prints are about one and a half metres wide, which palaeontologists at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) reckon were made by animals around 7.5 metres tall, weighing around 40 tonnes. [full article]

Cheap naked chips snap a perfect picture
HOW can image sensors – the most complicated and expensive part of a digital camera – be made cheaper and less complex? Easy: take the lid off a memory chip and use that instead. [full article]

Pirates hit navy ship ‘in error’
A group of Somali pirates has been captured after attacking a French navy ship by mistake, apparently thinking it was a harmless cargo vessel. [full article]

I’d almost forgotten about this story. Along with what he wanted on his tombstone, this is my favourite Alfred Hitchcock story…

‘Well, it was a quite shocking, I must say — there was blood everywhere!’ Alfred Hitchcock began suddenly from the rear of the elevator. We were in the New York St. Regis Hotel, heading down to the lobby. There was as light flush to his cheeks from the several frozen dauquiris he had just drunk in his suite. The elevator had just stopped and three people dressed for the evening had joined us, and immediately Mr. Hitchcock had started to speak, sounding as though he were in midsentence and projecting in that careful and familiar TV tone of his.

He went on, ‘There was as stream of blood coming from his ear and another from his mouth.’ The people had recognized him immediately, but now they seemed purposely to avoid looking at him. He went right on, gazing beatifically ahead of him as the elevator stopped again and another well-dressed couple came aboard: ‘Of course, there was a huge pool of blood on the floor and his clothes were spattered with it — Oh, it was a horrible mess.’

No one on the elevator, it seemed, was breathing. ‘Blood all around! Well, I looked at the poor man and and I said, “Good God, what happened to you?”‘ At that point the elevator doors opened onto the lobby, and Hitchcock said, ‘Do you know what he told me?’ and then paused. After a moment, and quite reluctantly, the other passengers moved out of the elevator and then looked back at the director as we walked away.

After several foggy moments, I asked, ‘Well, what did he say?’ and Hitchcock smiled benevolently, taking my arm, and said, ‘Oh, nothing — that’s just my elevator story.’

– Peter Bogdonavich, Who the Devil Made It, 1997