Video | Trailer – Religulous

This looks promising. It comes out October 3rd.

Links: Official site | IMDb | Wikipedia |

Politics | Vladimir V. Putin: Neo Con

An excerpt from Vladimir V. Putin: Neo Con:

…His strategy was cold, it was clear, it was thoughtful and purposeful, and it was very definitely his own. Reagan knew intuitively that the Soviet Union was tottering. But he did not want to fight the Soviets, he wanted to bring them to the negotiating table. To that end, he used little, if any, overt force against the Soviet Union. Instead, he developed what in Pentagonese was known as “competitive strategies.” In plain English, this meant, “Spend ‘em to death.” Reagan’s aim was to force the Soviet Union to spend money, allocate resources, and occupy technical talent that they either had better use for elsewhere or didn’t have. (The best Soviet scientists and engineers were world-class, but they had no real depth, no bench strength.) Supporting the mujahedin in Afghanistan was one way to deplete them. The Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars-perhaps the most successful weapons system never built or intended to be built-was another…

Apart from a khm, ’slightly’ overly pro-Russian attitude, the article is incredibly insightful and well written! It’s not the shortest thing you’ll ever read, but it’s truly worth your time and effort!:)

(via: seattlepi.com)

Random stuff I found this week (cos I’m too lazy to post everything in separate posts)

USEFUL STUFF

• [Nano] Faster, Cheaper DNA Sequencing
• [Future] ‘Pre-crime’ detector shows promise (Minority Report, take two!)
• [Nature] An Arctic Sea “Foaming” with Methane: What Now? (the most disturbing thing I’ve read in a while!!! More here)
• [Man-made] Scientists Develop Plastic-Producing Bacteria
• [Astronomy] TED Talks – Peter Diamandis: Taking the next giant leap in space
• [Psychology] [Politics] Massively-Multiplayer Decepticon (yeah, and elephants can fly in mid-air air:P)

ENTERTAINMENT

• The Evolution of Mobile Phones 1985 – Today
• Record-Breaking Tower Tilts More Than Pisa
• Test your color IQ (I got an 8 out of a 100)
• The mating habits of the water shrew
• Rubik’s Mirror Blocks: The Cube Taken To New Dimensions of Trickiness
• The Great Dog Escape (you’ve gotta see it to believe it…and turn off the annoying music:P)

WEEKLY TRIBUTE

A small tribute to Google. As much as they’ve been receiving some bad PR lately, they’re my personal choice of email, calendar, news aggregator, homepage, freeware 3D modeling, and I better stop before I sound like a really bad salesperson!

Also, they’ve

• recently celebrated their 10′th birthday
• unveiled the open-source mobile OS Android, which will hopefully be a match to the iPhone’s V.I.P.-ish politics!!!
• launched Google Moderator, Project 10^100, an energy modeling plug-in for SketchUp, and are constantly improving and inventing
• begun lobbying to open up unused broadcast spectrum, which we’ll probably hear more of in the near future
• seriously started considering of deploying their supercomputers out to sea or finding alternatives to lower their costs
• and are pretty much in-our-face whenever we use the net. Free of charge!

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(via: all the usual and unusual blogs and sites that I’ve got in Google Reader)

Prediction | More ‘rapping-about-science’ videos

Wanna learn-by-rap?

Thanks to this video a whole lot of people now know about the Large hadron collider (and if you pay close attention to the lyrics you even know what it does) and the whole is-the-world-coming-to-and-end affair’s gone so far that the LHC has practically become our bastard love child of some sort…Think of it this way: when the people at the LHC declared they have to close it down till spring 2009 due to equipment failure, everybody instantly spread the online word as if we were talking about the iPhone’s next widget or sth. When’s the last time you were this updated on your local particle physics facility?

Now comes this video, only this time the topic is astrobiology. Surprisingly cool, actually!

See a pattern?:)…

Sure the LHC videos’s got more than 3 million views due to huge publicity spawned by panic, and this video currently isn’t even near the 6 figure number, but it’s apparent that with presenting difficult topics in a fun and easy-to-understand way you can’t go wrong (yeah, somebody give me a Nobel prize right now!).

MY PREDICTION:

• before the LHC boom fades away we’ll see a couple more of these rapping-about-science videos (not that difficult a prediction really, but as far as I know I’m the first to make it:P)
  
• the “Astrobiology 2008″ video will become a mild hit, comparison to the LHC videos will be inevitable, as it will be with all future videos of this sort
• if enough memorable clever and fun educational videos are made, people will start talking about implementing similar methods into our school systems for better teaching/learning results (which hopefully will occur regardless of everything I’ve said so far!)

So whattcha waiting for? Got a freakishly mind-blowing thing to share with the world what we don’t already know about? Well, get movin’ and make a song out of it. As long as it’s got rhymes, we’ll love you for it:)

Then chop chop!…or rather, hip hop;)

(via: Astrobio.net)

Audio | Laid back

I’m relaxed. Some seriously good news today!:)

• Aim ft. Stephen Jones – Good Disease

• Jorge Ben Jor – Chove Chuva

• Jose Gonzalez – Down The Line

Random stuff I found this week (cos I’m too lazy to post everything in separate posts)

USEFUL STUFF

• [IT] Mash-up makers move into the mainstream (Mashup – the philosophy of mixing the best of (at least) two worlds!…Ubiquity anyone?)
• [IT] Google Launches Audio Indexing (like effing finally! It’s still got a long way to go, tho)
• [Future] Can PRT, or Podcars, Replace the Automobile? (perhaps a Minority Report-ish trend coming our way)
• [Economy] A Conversation with Yvon Chouinard (this guy sure knows how to treat his employees)
• [Man-made] Getting Electricity From Outer Space
• [Psychology] Software spots the spin in political speeches (or how we all better learn to be truthful)

ENTERTAINMENT

• The Grinch: Human Slingshot For Snow and Surfboarding (W…T…F…)
• Zoom into Concrete (also zoom into other materials)
• In a Tangle of Young Lips, a New Sex Rebellion is Brewing in Chile
• Mini Rooftop NYC + HWKN (looks like a blast on a Friday night)
• The short – but eventful – life of Ike (hey, if it’s nature fucking with us it’s entertainment!)
• Drum and bass (as one comment says: buy this guy some drums!)

WEEKLY TRIBUTE

A small tribute to Diigo. Actually, a BIG-ASS one!!! The only downside is that I haven’t been using this since my first contact with the world wide web. Brings together the best of del.icio.us, social networking, Clipmarks, The Awesome Highlighter, etc, and is simply the best social bookmarking research tool I’ve come across.

One day’s usage and it’s become simply irreplaceable in my book. Hiiiighly recommended:)

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(via: all the usual and unusual blogs and sites that I’ve got in Google Reader)

Audio | Drum’N'Bass

• Matrix ft. Goldtrix – Trippin’

• The Prodigy – First Warning

• Aphrodite – Heat Haze

Random stuff I found this week (cos I’m too lazy to post everything in separate posts)

USEFUL STUFF

• [Eco] Chicken Manure to power 90,000 Homes in the Netherlands!
• [Future] Automated Construction System To Change Face of Home-Building (mental note: it’s fun to be right:P)
• [Nature] [Astronomy] Bill Stone: Journey to the center of the Earth … and beyond! (from caves to cosmos or how this man’s favorite color is definitely black!)
• [Economy] [Politics] When the wind doesn’t blow (ups and downs of wind power)
• [Man-made] [Nature] Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos (physics galore…really fun stuff:))
• [Psychology] Banned Self Hypnosis Video (had to repeat it to get it and just ‘let go’…surprising and impressive)

ENTERTAINMENT

• The Faces Behind The Simpsons
• Gait may be associated with orgasmic ability (forget make-up, ladies! Learn to, khm, walk properly:))
• Rare banned Bush speech
• Insane Stretchable Skin Man
• 70 Amazing Houses from Around the World (great stuff with a lot of effort put into it)
• Racism in the Elevator

WEEKLY TRIBUTE
A small tribute to relevant issues (2) and quality journalism (2).

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(via: all the usual and unusual blogs and sites that I’ve got in Google Reader)

Audio | Hans Zimmer

Lately I’ve become to re-appreciate the man! When he misses he’s forgettable at worst, but when he hits the bullseye, man does he do it with style:)

Links: Official site | Wikipedia | IMDb

• Crimson Tide (1995) – Roll Tide (You’ve heard it in countless movie trailers and probably never gave it a second thought. Zimmer’s definitive work of genius and arguably the most influential movie score of the 90’s. The song that got me into loving movie music!)

• The Thin Red Line (1998) – Journey To The Line (one of the most profound war movies deserves an equally matching score)

• The Dark Knight (2008) – A Dark Knight (Zimmer is SOO money again, baby!)

Random stuff I found this week (cos I’m too lazy to post everything in separate posts)

USEFUL STUFF

• [IT] Enable Chrome’s Best Features in Firefox
• [Eco] Bike-Sharing Goes Global: 5 Programs You Should Know About
• [Economy] Negative Momentum: Newspaper Ad Revenues Gaining Downhill Speed (Even Online Is Declining)
• [Man-made] Spore (it’s finally out & I hope it lives-up to the hype it’s created in the last two years!)
• [Psychology] Stop Rationalizing and Make Hard Decisions: Learning from Dr. King (short and to the point)
• [Sociology] [Psychology] Why Young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in “Guyland”

ENTERTAINMENT

• Microsoft Patents Page Up and Page Down
• Scientists get death threats from idiots over possible apocalypse
• Elephant cured of drug addiction (if this ain’t ROFL material, then I’m the Pope so help me FSM)
• Six Degrees of Separation Is Now Three
• Awww…crazy celebrities, drugs are for fridays and saturdays, weekdays it’s botox only!
• R.I.P. movie preview guy

WEEKLY TRIBUTE
A small tribute to conspiracy theories, big brothers, small print, corruption (yeah, this one seems more like a small-fish local matter, but it just might change a thing or two in EU’s policy on arms deals) and Eric Arthur Blair who saw through it all.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain! (Harvey Dent)*

*The best quote I could think of comes from a friggin movie I recently saw…something definitely ain’t right in this spinning dirt-ball we live on

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(via: all the usual and unusual blogs and sites that I’ve got in Google Reader)