Interesting Drug

Stevie Wonder performing “Superstition” on Sesame Street:

“Stevie rips it up for kids in the 70s:

Daaamn.

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Mark Jenkins Has Posted A New “Embed” Video:

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Huge intricate illustration done with MS Paint, a rudimentary drawing program:

“Huge intricate illustration done with MS Paint, a rudimentary drawing program. Here’s how the illustrator did it; it took him 100 hours.
Update: This one, while not as large, is quite a bit more intricate and took 500 hours to do…that’s almost 3 months of 40-hour work weeks. (thx, brandon)”

Super Mario bedroom:

“Cory Doctorow:

This bedroom has been elaborately redecorated to turn it into a replica of Super Mario World; the walls have been painted and green pipes have been affixed to the walls and ceiling. The effect is marvelous and makes me very jealous.

Link

(via Digg)

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Brand genericide:

“Harris Interactive recently released a list of products ranked by brand equity, a measure of the brand’s popularity with US consumers. Here’s the top 10:

1. Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil
2. Ziploc Food Bags
3. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Candy Bars
4. Kleenex Facial Tissues
5. Clorox Bleach
6. WD-40 Spray Lubricant
7. Heinz Ketchup
8. Ziploc Containers
9. Windex Glass Cleaner
10. Campbell’s Soups

Marketing can be a double-edged sword. The companies who manufacture these products have done a fantastic job in marketing these products, so fantastic in some cases that the brand name is in danger of becoming a genericized trademark. From the list above, I routinely use Ziploc, Kleenex, WD-40, and Windex to refer to the generic versions of those products, even though we sometimes use Glad products instead of Ziploc, Puffs instead of Kleenex, or another glass cleaner instead of Windex. If the companies on this list aren’t careful, they could lose the trademarked products that they’ve worked so hard to market so successfully.

Here’s a list of American proprietary eponyms, or brand names that have fallen into general use. Some of the names on the list are so old or in such common use (escalator, popsicle) that I didn’t even know they had been brands. Two current brands I can think of that might be in danger of genericide: iPod and Google. (via rw)

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TXTual Healing:

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Using cell phones and SMS messaging, TXTual healing allows people to use their mobile phones and SMS messaging to fill in the text of large speech bubbles that are projected onto walls and buildings. You can learn more about the project here.

(Thanks, Reevo)

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Cleese ‘retires from performing’:

“Comedy legend John Cleese says he will retire from writing and performing because he will never top Fawlty Towers.”

Rounded Corners in CSS:

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border: 2px solid gray;
-moz-border-radius: 25px;
width: 400px;
height: 200px;
padding: 15px;

[Original post | Comments]

Advertisement: Text Link Ads lets you buy ad links or sell them.

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[Cool] The Changing Face Of Michael Jackson - watch his face warp:

“(zipped.org)“

Six Hosting Companies Most Reliable Hoster in May:

“Six hosting companies share the spot of the most reliable hosting company site this month.

Learn more about Netcraft’s Web Application Security Testing”

Apache down, IIS up:

“Doctor Memory writes ‘Netcraft’s June 2006 web server survey is out, and it shows IIS taking a dramatic upturn, at the expense of Apache. One of the biggest reasons cited is domain registrar Go Daddy switching to IIS for the domains it ‘parks’. The report does go on to note that IIS is also making solid gains in active sites (including some large blog hosts), and further notes that it appears that large hosting companies are dropping Linux.’ Statistics are fun to play with, of course, but note that Apache’s market share is approximately 30% higher than IIS’s at the moment.

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Titanic model made from 5 million matches:

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This model of the Titanic is over 6 foot long and will end up being made from over 5 million matches [via] - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]”

Global migrants reach 191 million:

“Nearly 200m people have moved abroad to find work - a large increase over the past 15 years, the UN says.”

US branch of “Pirate Party” launches:

“Cory Doctorow:
Brent Allison, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, has founded an American branch of Sweden’s ‘Pirate Party,’ a political party dedicated to copyright reform:

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.

The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today’s copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today’s world. If you haven’t made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.

We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers’ legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

Link

(Thanks, Gwax!)

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US Senate blocks gay marriage ban:

“The US Senate blocks a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, backed by the president.”

U.K. music industry to sue AllofMP3.com:

“Inexpensive album downloads might sound good to customers, but royalties aren’t being paid, trade group claims.”

Mockingbird sings:

“The first biography of the reclusive Harper Lee shows that she contributed much more to ‘In Cold Blood’ than we thought.“

Zasterisk - Play Zork over the phone!:

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Wow! Here’s voice recognition and speech synthesis for playing Infocom games (like Zork) over the phone, this might be the coolest VoIP project ever - [via] - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]”

News Bloopers (Entertainment):

“Stuff that went wrong on the news.”

Your Money or Your Site:

“A group of hackers holds the Million Dollar Homepage hostage. By David Kushner from Wired magazine.”

Spammer settles suit for $1 million:

“Man accused of sending up to 25 million e-mails per day settles lawsuit with Microsoft and the state of Texas.”

[Interesting] What the Earth looks like from Mars:

“(NASA)“

Global Warming Expanding Tropics, Threatening To Drive Deserts Into Southern Europe…:

” The world’s tropical zones are growing, threatening to drive the world’s great deserts into southern Europe and other heavily populated areas, alarming new research suggests.

The study - based on satellite measurements over the past quarter of a century - shows that the tropics have widened by 140 miles since 1979. Scientists suspect that global warming is to blame.

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PirateBay tracker is back online:

“Cory Doctorow:

Notorious torrent-tracker site ThePirateBay is making good on its vow to come back online following the Swedish police raid on its servers. The site is back online, and promises that searches will be working today. The raid reportedly came as a result of US government pressure on the Sweden.

Link

(Thanks, Joel!)

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