Tag Archives: Friday Links

NASA made a cinematic trailer – for the space program. Narrated by the voice of Optimus Prime. Watch “We Are The Explorers.”

A real-life six-legged all-terrain robot big enough to ride in? Yes please.

A deer slap fight. Yes, it’s a real thing. This is what you miss by not living in the Midwest.

And now: COMICS!

I rarely read Dilbert, or any print comics, anymore. But when they hit the Singularity and Isaac Asimov in the same comic? Even I can’t resist.

xkcd calls out Adobe.

SMBC demonstrates the quickest way to convert someone to Christianity.

And finally, Two Guys and Guy hits us with a double whammy.

THIS CONCLUDES LINK SHARING HAPPY HOUR WE SHALL RECONVENE MONDAY

ThinkGeek’s April Fools’ Day prank was fantastic: a Batman family car decal set. Only question: why is this a prank and not a real thing I can throw my money at right now?

The classiest damn flash mob I’ve ever seen. If the people will not come to Star Wars, bring Star Wars to the people!

I don’t often link to the webcomic Nedroid, but it’s glorious. Here’s proof.

And PvP tackles racism in its own uniquely insightful way.

By the way – remember that unspeakably awful book I linked to last week? The Bible: The Miniseries: The Novel? I actually saw that, in real life, a couple days ago. At a local Kroger, available for $20.

Faith in humanity = lost.

*watches Star Wars flash mob again*

Faith in humanity = restored.

Have a supremely suave weekend, Hypothetical Reader. See you Monday!

Ian McKellan is marrying Patrick Stewart! …to a woman. Yes, the legendary Sir McKellan is presiding over the equally legendary Sir Stewart’s wedding to jazz singer Sunny Ozell. No word yet on whether he’ll appear as Ian the Grey or Ian the White, but early rumors indicate that Patrick will be showing up bald.

We all know that college students cheat, but you may not realize just how much time and money goes into it. This man writes student papers, for a few grand each, as a full-time job. See how deep the rabbit hole goes. My good friend Zeev sent me this article. He said it was fascinating, and he was right.

Profound inspiration for the aspiring artist.

Sometimes, you find something so ridiculous, you just don’t know what to say.

A Story of God and All of Us is a novel, based on “the epic ten-hour miniseries” The Bible. Which is based on, you know, the Bible.

So somebody read the Bible and said, “You know what this needs? A TV miniseries.” And then they watched their own miniseries and said, “If only somebody could put this in book form.”

Head. Hit. Keyboard.

The Amazon reviews are glorious. You know a book is bad when it gets five-star reviews ironically. One reviewer says: “The talent of someone like Mark Burnett is what the Bible needed. He has shown his skill time and time again with successes like The Apprentice, The Voice, Shark Tank and of course Survivor which, at the time of this writing, is in its 26th season.”

Says another: “I any case, I give this book two thumbs way, way up! If you’ve spent your entire life wondering if there is a God that you can put in a box, consume in small, easy-to-chew quantities and exploit in order to feel some arbitrary (albeit fleeting) sense of meaning and happiness, this is the book for you.”

Yeah. Moving on…

For those budding artists not yet fully inspired by the links above, the Onion’s got you covered. Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life. What more could you hope for?

Two Guys and Guy explores the complex logistics of giving a shit.

And finally, SMBC applies the principles of statistics where they’re most needed: children’s birthday parties.

That’s a wrap, Hypothetical Reader. Hope your weekend achieves such heights of self-actualization and neurological bliss as you had not suspected were possible. See you Monday!

How does a hacker propose to his girlfriend? Easy: he hacks her copy of Chrono Trigger so it asks her the question while she’s playing. The, uh, “boss fight” starts at 4:40.

The great thing about Linux is that it’s open-source, so anyone can make their own version. That’s right…anyone. Meet “Red Star OS,” the official operating system of North Korea.

What’s Nietzsche Family Circus? Simple: take a random Family Circus cartoon, replace the caption with a random quote from Nietzsche, and you’re good to go. Really, I don’t know why no one thought of it sooner. Since it’s all random, some are better than others, but it doesn’t take long to find some real winners.

And finally, PvP knows how to keep it romantic.

This concludes the week of bloggery. Enjoy your weekend, and see you Monday!

Somebody asked Randall Munroe a simple question about a hair dryer. His answer includes the phrase “nuclear potato cannon.” Must be doing something right.

The New York City soft drink ban was shot down – for now. But if it’s ever reinstated, don’t worry – SMBC has you covered.

PvP gets to third base. Uh, sort of.

This concludes our broadcast. Have an überweekend, and I’ll see you again on Monday!

Here’s North Sentinel Island: home to a tribe untouched by civilization. I don’t just mean they keep to their traditions. I mean, to this very day, they have virtually no contact with the outside world. They never leave, and they shoot visitors with arrows. No outsiders have explored the island, and because it’s covered in forest, nobody knows much about it. We think there are around 200 people there, but that’s just a guess. They have their own language, which nobody else knows. Even their political status is unclear: they’re kinda-sorta part of India, but there’s never been a treaty, so they’re in geopolitical limbo.

I suppose they don’t mind.

Whenever there’s a blizzard, some poor reporter is always sent to the middle of it, trying to act like there’s anything to talk about besides look at all this snow. Finally, in this video clip, a reporter admits the truth. “I’ve run out of things to say. It is snowing and it sucks here. That’s pretty much it.” Amen.

We all know those irritating people: the ones who are nice, successful, personally fulfilled, and have no real flaws. God, we hate them. Finally, The Onion calls them out on their shenanigans. Now, where did I put that cheeseburger?

This week is finito. Enjoy your weekend, and see you Monday!

Did your parents ever put hydrogen peroxide on your cuts as a kid? Did it burn like a mofo? And did they happen to mention that hydrogen peroxide doesn’t actually disinfect cuts? Yeah, turns out, it’s good for killing bacteria on countertops, but not so much on skin. It can even inflame the wound, making it take longer to heal. H₂O₂ sucks, pass it on.

The next time someone insists that video games – or TV, or some musical genre – will unravel America’s moral fiber, just remember, people say that about every new thing. Everything? Everything. According to author Geoffrey Nunberg, paper mail in the 1850s “was alarming to moralists who complained that the postal system in general promoted promiscuity, illicit assignations, and the distribution of pornography.” Maybe the sky is not, in fact, falling?

So, this exists: ProgrammerRyanGosling.tumblr.com. “Hey girl, did you lose a timestamp? Because I’m pretty sure it’s DateTime.Now()”

Sinfest offers its take on the “Sensitive Dudebro Coming of Age Film.” It’s sad how many movies can be reduced to these four panels.

Meanwhile, QC takes on weddings. This happens to me every. Single. Time.

Thanks for playing along, Hypothetical Reader! See you Monday, and have a weekend of mythological proportions.

First! The results of the survey:

Cool! Thanks to everyone who answered. Of course, it’s still my blog, so I’m still going to foist my poems and stories on you. (Suffering builds character.) But I’m glad to see so many of you interested in the philosophy and AI, since those are very near my heart as well – and I always worry I’m boring you when I wander into those topics. I’ll take this as a mandate to filosofize moar.

On to the links!

Strange doings are afoot in the world of Excel, and Spreadsheet Oddities has them covered. My favorite? In Excel 2007, bring up Help and search for “pray” to find this:

Sadly, this little gem has been removed in Excel 2010.

Is this the face of Skynet? Johnny Depp will play a powerful, worldwide artificial intelligence in the upcoming film Transcendence. Release tentatively set for 2014. No word yet on whether he’ll shout “Why is the RAM gone?!”

And finally: PvP this week was simply brilliant, and since it’s Friday, you deserve a double helping. Don’t say I never gave ya nothin’.

Buckley out.

Funny story. After my Memory of Light postmortem last week, I was contacted by Esther Bochner, publicist for Macmillan Publishers, who has an audiobook of the novel. She wondered if I’d be willing to share a clip of the audiobook with my readers. In fact, I would. The clip is about five minutes long, from the beginning of Chapter 3. You can download the mp3, for free, right here. If you like what you hear, you can always grab the full audiobook.

I listened to the clip myself, the first time I’d heard any of the Wheel of Time audiobooks (or realized they existed). The cool thing for me was learning how the names are pronounced. I’d been saying Mazrim Taim as “TAME,” but it’s “tah-EEM.” Live and learn.

An Australian website reports that, for Adobe’s Creative Suite Master 6 Collection, it’s actually cheaper to fly to the U.S. and buy the software, than to get it locally in Australia. That’s messed up.

Meet Ten Thousand Cents, the online art project that is all about the Benjamin. They took an image of the $100 bill, broke it into 10,000 tiny rectangles, and crowd-sourced the drawing of each one. Since they paid each micro-artist a penny for their trouble, the whole $100 bill cost them $100 to make. It’s fun to browse.

Watch a time-lapse video of the recent snowpocalypse in Connecticut. So…much…white…

And finally, Two Guys and Guy has a good role model for editors of aspiring writers.

Have an exemplary weekend, Hypothetical Reader. See you on Monday!

Need to unwind? How about a long, relaxing bath of crude oil? This is a real thing in Azerbaijan. The article claims that the bath “looks, smells and flows like used engine oil.” Yes, well.

For a show that’s all about nerds/geeks, The Big Bang Theory hasn’t gone over especially well with its featured demographic. Criticisms vary, from “it’s making fun of us” to “the laugh track is too much” to “it’s sexist.” Ryan Somma mounts a vigorous defense of the show, and though I don’t agree with everything he says, he makes some good points.

Speaking of geeks: 20 Kick-Ass Programming Quotes. #9: “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.” -Eric S. Raymond

Penny Arcade in classic form, mainly for the last two panels, which made my wife laugh even more than me.

SMBC explains Fourier transforms, as only SMBC can.

And finally: an old favorite I rediscovered recently, the comic Spooner. He’s stopped drawing them these days, but dig through the archive, and you can still find some pretty good stuff.

Have a stupendous weekend. See you Monday!