I love San Francisco, but when you realize that the Castro Safeway and the Sony Metreon are landmarks, you realize that its a small city. It is the worlds best sleepy seaside town. One of the two landmarks has some architectural merit, the other is the Metreon, a failed attempt at a French style Mediatek – a multimedia library/art complex. In the end the Metreon, complete is a shopping mall, and now its being sold to a mall developer. Metreon’s shattered dreams via kottke
I put together a wists list of locations in Greenwich Village, which were frequented by Bob Dylan in the early 60s. Wists: Bob Dylan locations.
Wists maps launches Part of Wists rev 2 which I’m busy working on, Wists maps is being released early for a really cool showcase application which will be live shortly. What is wists maps? When you click on ‘add to wists’ bookmarklet and are in the edit screen before you submit your new item, there is a checkbox at the bottom, marked
The best blonde joke ever meme has resurfaced after a couple of years. You put a link that people are likely to click on – like ‘best blonde joke ever’ and this links in turn to the same headline which in turn links to it somewhere else again, recursively. Kafsemo has built an edge labeled graph
Yesterday I snuck out in the afternoon to see a documentary called Desert Wind, an unintentional comic masterpiece. Have you heard the one about the Belgian the Frenchman and the Canadian in the Desert? The plot of Desert Wind involves following 13 unlucky Frenchmen, Belgians, Canadians and Swiss as they traipse aimlessly around the Sahara Desert with their sickly looking Swiss therapist. It is presumably set outside and in the desert, since watching paint dry or grass grow would provide pretty stiff competition if you took the film seriously. For starters, the presence of the sickly man begs the question, wouldn’t a real guide rather than a metaphorical one be a less risky choice in the middle of nowhere, with no paddle? In the background are a bunch of bemused Berbers who serve as real guides but only get cameo roles on account of their lack of psychology degrees. The…
“Now, however, systems are being discovered and studied which are neither obviously living nor obviously dead, and it is necessary to define these words or else give up using them and coin others.” The role of viruses in the continuous evolution of life is further evidence of the fact that there is no finite line between what is alive and not. Years from now people will be putting stickers in Kansas schoolbooks saying that viruses are just a theory. Unintelligent Design – Discover Magazine – science news articles online technology magazine articles Unintelligent Design
supernova2 Explosions seem messy, the ultimate destroyers of order. What about the biggest explosions of all, the ones that are responsible for the creation of every single atom in our bodies? This picture shows what happens if you focus a laser with the same bursting energy as the entire continuous electricity supply of the USA on a pinhead sized representation of the elements within a star, in order to simulate a supernova. Amazingly, the model reveals fleeting, scale free structure reminiscent of a fractal.
They of the bushy eyebrows and general swarthy appearance. The usual answer when someone says you look like a famous rockstar is ‘I wish I had his/her money’. Somehow, Larry can’t say that. link » tags: [lookalikes] posted via Wists: permamark
Boo.com is relaunching in June. They have a fantastically witty strapline, presumably created by the people that Pajamas media originally hired, wait for it… “The Boo is Back” That’s right, the Boo is back, cos Boo.com was so successful the first time it was called ‘the Boo’ – boooolshit. You can almost hear the distant rumble of discount Aeron chairs. Boo.com
“Haderer published a 40-page book titled, The Life of Jesus. The book contained a cartoon of Jesus, depicting him as …a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis. Unbeknownst to him, the book was published in Greece. He found out when he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January, having been charged with blasphemy.” Of course there is absolutely no resemblance between Jesus and a pot smoking hippy. Cartoonist Faces Jail in Greece Over Jesus Cartoon – TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
There is a difference between blasphemy and the worship of false prophets. Islam fobids images of Muhammad, lest the images themselves become icons, taking away from the real person or idea. The religion supports iconoclasm by definition. A cartoon is designed to be just that, an iconoclastic image, so it is hardly likely to encourage worship of false prophets. The cartoon issue is blasphemy enhanced by a general taboo of figurative images. A similar kind of taboo, for example, would mean that if you were brought up in a ‘Judeo-Christian’ environment the idea of a manual depicting someone like Moses or Jesus performing various sex acts, which would be acceptable in less prudish Asian religions, would shock you. In fact it may even make reading the above statement slightly irritate you. I suspect that the irritation that is felt by people who inherit the Muslim meme is the same but…
After Carter first warned about energy problems in 1977 he installed solar panels on the White House roof. When Reagan took office, he removed the solar panels. 29 years later and the looming energy crisis is finally in the hands of both parties. In last night’s SOTU speach Bush said: “To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission, coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy.” Perhaps the solar panels should go back up? As it happens, Carters’ original panels were on a roof at Unity College, less than a year ago: “1992 when a Unity College administrator named Peter Marbach drove our old school bus down to Franconia, VA, to liberate them from a General Services Administration warehouse under the government surplus donations program. “ In February, they posted a message saying to call them: “If you are…