Totally insane: we might be living in a giant cosmic hologram. Staggering. Read the whole thing. And I thought the discovery of the quantum physics underlying photosynthesis was mind-blowing.

This is the Only Level. Totally fantastic. It doesn’t look like much, but so addictive. It took me 18 minutes and 14 seconds to complete, with 122 deaths. Don’t read any instructions, just see if you can figure it out.

More fascinating stuff from the OkCupid numbers crunchers: The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures. For example, does showing ripped abs help a guy get messages on the dating site? How about boobs for women? And how do those number change with age, and do they change the same way? All kinds of questions like that. Great stuff.

(For the guys, it looks like doing a one-arm handstand in front of the Eiffel Tower while reading Tolstoy with your other hand (and therefore not making eye contact with the viewer), with your washboard abs “accidentally” exposed due to gravity is the way to go. Diminishing returns on the abs as you approach 30 though.)

Genius, 12-section comic, Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable, with each of the 12 sections being both hysterical and the gospel truth.

Fantastic post on terrorism, which opens with a band-beating metaphor:

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

So, so good. Read now.

This is old news, but new to me. The folks behind the OkCupid dating site have a weblog where they analyze all kinds of interesting dating data. We all know that looks matter, but their number crunching is still fascinating.

Update: See also Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back. Heck, just subscribe to the OkTrends weblog and read it all.

Upular: “composed using chords, bass notes and vocal samples from the Disney Pixar film Up.” Totally new and original sounding, yet still capturing the feel of the movie somehow. I love the shift at 1:28.

This one might be the graphic of the year for me. National Geographic has a brilliant visualization of healthcare spending, life expectancy, and doctor visits per country. Here’s a taste, but you gotta click through to the full version to find the US on there (the red line below should give you some idea):

Sigh!

Update: Here’s Andrew Gelman’s version.

Alma is a terrific short film by Pixar animator Rodrigo Blaas, available on Vimeo for a limited time (I don’t know how long, catch it now). (via waxy)

Octopuses continue to climb the ladder of awesomeness. Check out the footage of this fellow who totes around a coconut shell to use as a hiding place.

(via discover)

Wow, very impressive, here’s the “Trinity Help” scene from The Matrix, done in stop-motion with only Legos (although I’d really recommend clicking through and watching the bigger version instead):

The side-by-side comparison is also great. Finally, here’s the LegoMatrix site.

(via kottke)

I will try not to link to every new thing he writes, but David Thorne is too damn funny to resist.

Jon Ronson’s fantastic parenting story starts like so:

My eight-year-old son, Joel, comes into my office to ask if there’s a worse swearword than fuck. “No,” I say.

There’s a silence. “You’re lying,” he says.

“There’s none worse than fuck,” I say.

Joel narrows his eyes. “I know you’re lying,” he says. He leaves the room.

(via tmn)

David Thorne’s correspondence with Blockbuster over late fees is a riot. I’m probably the last person to have heard of this guy though, as apparently he hit it pretty big a year ago with the seven-legged spider exchange (see news stories here and here).

I can’t remember how this came up recently, but Terry Tate Office Linebacker is still the best series of sneaker commercials not made by Nike.

I don’t think anybody has topped this Fannie Farmer waffle recipe from 1896. Light and airy with just the right crisp. Don’t be put off by the fact that you have to make it the night before. It only takes 10 minutes tops, and it’s oh-so-worth-it:

• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1 package active dry yeast
• 1 stick butter
• 2 cups milk
• 2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1. In a large bowl, put the yeast in the warm water, and let stand for five minutes (or just while you complete steps 2 and 3, roughly the same thing).
2. Melt the butter in a pot.
3. Add the milk to the pot and stir it around until warm.
4. Pour the milk/butter mixture into the yeast/water mixture and add the flour, salt, and sugar to it. Mix it up. It will be kinda watery; don’t worry.
5. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand at room temperature overnight.
6. In the morning add the eggs and baking soda, stir it up, and get waffling!

P.S. Makes something like 8 or 9 waffles on our round iron.

P.P.S. You can do straight margarine/butter and soy milk/milk substitutes for the dairy allergic. Not quite as good, but still yummy.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs his Alexander Hamilton rap (as if sung by Aaron Burr) at the White House Poetry Jam:

I had thought Professor James Fzz’s Steam Robot was going to be my favorite Halloween costume, but I Eric Testroete’s Papercraft Self Portrait just snunk in and swiped the title (scroll to the right to see the additional photos and construction details).

Andre Agassi on hating tennis. He had to face the dragon (a souped up ball machine modified by his father that would shoot at 110 mph) at seven (!) years old:

My father has deliberately made the dragon fearsome. He’s given it an extra-long neck of aluminum tubing, and a narrow aluminum head, which recoils like a whip every time the dragon fires. He’s also set the dragon on a base several feet high and moved it flush against the net, so the dragon towers above me. I’m small for my age, but when standing before the dragon, I look tiny. Feel tiny. Helpless.

My father wants the dragon to tower over me not simply to command my attention and respect. He wants balls that shoot from the dragon’s mouth to land at my feet as if dropped from an airplane. The trajectory makes the balls nearly impossible to return in a conventional way: I need to hit every ball on the rise, or else it will bounce over my head. But even that’s not enough for my father. Hit earlier, he yells. Hit earlier.

My father yells everything twice, sometimes three times, sometimes 10. Harder, he says, harder. But what’s the use? No matter how hard I hit a ball, no matter how early, another ball comes back. Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball—yet I can’t step on a ball, because my father won’t bear it. Step on one of my father’s tennis balls and he’ll howl as if you stepped on his eyeball.

Holy crap.

A little post-Halloween link: introducing Steam Robot sidekick to last year’s Dr. Steam. I really need to put more (any) work into my Halloween costumes.

Monumentally sad and depressing. Chris Jordan photographs dead albatross chicks, killed because their parents fed them our plastic garbage:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

For example:

We suck. (via josh spear)

So cool, the how and the why of controlling neurons with light. First, the why. Current methods lack precision:

Drugs and implanted electrodes can influence the brain, but they are terribly imprecise: Drugs flood the brain and affect many types of neurons indiscriminately. Electrodes activate every neuron around them.

This is bad for researchers, because practically every square millimeter of the brain contains a mess of different kinds of neurons, each specialized for a particular task. Drugs and electricity set off cascades of unwanted neural activity. Side effects.

It’s bad for patients, too. Cochlear implants, which let the deaf hear by shocking the auditory nerves, produce fuzzy sound because the electricity spreads beyond the neurons it’s aimed at. Deep brain stimulators for Parkinson’s patients allow them to walk and speak but may cause seizures and muscle weakness. Electroshock can help depression but often results in memory loss.

But if you can shine a light on just the section of the brain you want to fire (or not fire) you can get great precision. Of course, neurons are not light sensitive. At all. The solution? Insert genes from plants, which ARE light sensitive, into the neurons. How to do that is yet another cool thing, as is the potential Parkinson’s treatment, but I’ll leave that for the article.

Quang Phuc Dong on the special grammatical weirdness reserved for “fuck.” Even if you don’t want to read the whole thing, at least hang down there until the Lyndon Johnson examples.

Report: Majority Of Newspapers Now Purchased By Kidnappers To Prove Date.

There is a man standing in this picture, not behind anything, hidden only by the paint he has applied to himself:

Here’s more of Liu Bolin’s work. (via tmn)

I love DJ Steve Porter’s Press Hop. “Not a game not a game not a game…”

This is easily the best Ultimate Frisbee highlight reel I’ve seen, all clips collected from 2007 Nationals. (via catch)

This may be old news, since the WSJ piece on yo-yos ran in July, but check out this angiogram of yo-yo pro Dave Schulte’s hand, in particular the lack of circulation in his index finger due to crushed veins:

So I had a look around to see what kind of yo-yoing could wreak such havoc. Looking into competition, my head was turned by two divisions; 4A, where the yo-yo isn’t actually attached to the string (!) and 5A, where you don’t loop the yo-yo around your finger, as it instead has a counterweight on the other end. YouTube has HD video of the 2008 Asia Pacific 4A champion and the 5A champion.

(via tmn)

Inhuman. Usain Bolt breaks the unbreakable record again, by a ton. 19.19 in the 200m. The gap he opens up in this race, oh my.

I’m sure I’m catching this on the tail end of the wave, but Bobby McFerrin’s audience-based demonstration of the pentatonic scale is fantastic.

Inspired Bicycles just vaulted onto my top five Parkour videos list. Having “bicycles” and “Parkour” together doesn’t seem right, but there’s really no better way to explain it. I wouldn’t have imagined some of that stuff was possible. Really great. (via waxy)

I had a couple relatively funny spam subjects in a row containing the word “pants,” so did a quick search of the 3,000+ or so spam GMail caught for me recently. 16 feature “pants”:

• Hold the enormous manfullness in your pants.
• Suddenly you feel that your pants have steel inside them.
• Your pants will be in order all the time.
• If you think that power in your pants is not good enough, check this pill out.
• US senator crapped his pants!
• A big equipment in your pants brings big fruits for hot chicks to pick up.
• You feel like a giant comparing to the midget in your pants?
• Feel your pants expand with the new formula
• The vigor in your pants will be unbreakable.
• More inches in your pants – more attention from female friends.
• Get king-kong in pants
• Change the turmoil in your pants with the blue pill.
• Now you don’t have to turn off the lights when you take off your pants.
• Chicks will be at a loss for words when you take your pants down.
• Unzip your pants knowing that you have a real treasure there.
• Your little friend in your pants is capable only for visiting toilets.
• The hard friend in your pants will look up into the sky.

“Manfullness,” I must work that one into my vocabulary.

“Are your pants in order all the time?” really wants to be a new way of asking somebody if they’ve got their shit together.

“Suddenly you feel that your pants have steel inside them.” Oh no… Can’t. Bend. Knees…

I do NOT want to know what medical condition “turmoil in your pants” alludes to.

At least a couple of these would make for good fortune cookies.

Best Sesame Street outtakes ever: Ricky Gervais and Elmo. Also, from Gervais’s blog:

Did Sesame Street which is possibly the most fun show I’ve ever done. There were loads of outtakes but the producers are worried about releasing them as they may get the show taken off air.

and…

The next day I did my appearance on Sesame Street which I am honestly considering declaring a career high light.

Kevin Clash is amazing. He totally holds his own, and stays in character. Can’t wait for the episode to air!

I know I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but ThruYOU is incredible. Nothing but YouTube videos mixed together to create new (and fantastic) songs. I like to leave it open in another tab while I work because the music is so good.

I’ve only tried the Readability bookmarklet on a couple NYTimes and New Yorker articles, but it works flawlessly so far. A keeper. (via kottke)

I’ve tried to ignore Pixar’s gender problem because their movies are so damn good, but this post makes that pretty much impossible. It’s not about any one movie, but about the body of work as a whole. Consider Finding Nemo:

Father/son bonding film featuring a male clownfish (Marlin) and his son (Nemo). I’m all for movies about fathers and sons and, in fact, this is my favorite of all Pixar movies. Still, Nemo doesn’t put female characters front and center, and it probably shouldn’t, considering the subject matter. If it were only one male-dominated movie in a well-balanced oeuvre, I wouldn’t have a problem. Female characters: Nemo’s dead mom (Coral), Dory, Peach, Deb, Darla.

Ally score: 2/10. Points for having an important female character. Not too many, though, since she is squarely in the selfless helper/moral center role. Should I give points for making 2 of the 8 fish in Nemo’s tank female? Should I just be happy that any are female and not quibble on the 25% issue? Also, the elementary school teacher fish is male. Maybe because he’s a science teacher.

I’m still going to see Up in theaters, and will take my daughters, dammit.

“Great, now I have guilt!”

(via kottke)

Congrats to Kate Winslet on the long overdue win, and more importantly for making this Extras clip even greater in the process.

Every time I hear something about Shaquille O’Neal he just sounds like a fun guy. And as of today, he is responsible for the best Twitter story to date.

I confess, I usually skip the fiction in The New Yorker, but how could I pass up a mere 1,500-word alien invasion?

I happened to remember the expression, “I’m your huckleberry” out of the blue today. Val Kilmer put the expression back on the map doing his Doc Holliday in Tombstone years ago. It didn’t occur to me then to wonder what it meant, but thanks to Google now I know:

“Huckleberry” was commonly used in the 1800’s in conjunction with “persimmon” as a small unit of measure. “I’m a huckleberry over your persimmon” meant “I’m just a bit better than you.” As a result, “huckleberry” came to denote idiomatically two things. First, it denoted a small unit of measure, a “tad,” as it were, and a person who was a huckleberry could be a small, unimportant person—usually expressed ironically in mock self-depreciation. The second and more common usage came to mean, in the words of the “Dictionary of American Slang: Second Supplemented Edition” (Crowell, 1975):

“A man; specif., the exact kind of man needed for a particular purpose.

What a great expression.

Great: Why I’m Happy, Why I’m Not Satisfied.

This couldn’t be much cooler, Josh Silver has come up with an approach to mass-produce glasses for the poor in developing nations, no optician required. Genius.

[ Be sure to read the final update at the end of this post! ]

I've really been enjoying AutoHotkey (AHK), a tool that lets you execute macros, text expansion, custom keyboard shortcuts, etc. My favorite feature is the text expansion, where it watches what you type and when it recognizes an abbreviation you've defined it will expand it automatically, no matter which application you're typing in. So "ttyl" could be automatically expanded to "talk to you later" in an e-mail, instant message, Word document, browser forms, etc. Very handy.

Anyway, you've probably noticed Word has an "AutoCorrect" feature where it corrects common misspellings on the fly. For example, "teh" gets instantly corrected to "the". I was thinking it would be great to use AHK to get that same functionality in any application. I had slowly been adding my own most common typos to an AHK script, and it worked great, but then I thought it would be nice to have a more comprehensive list. Enter Wikipedia, and its lists of common misspellings! I grabbed the machine-readable download, parsed it, commented out the ambiguous entries (see comments in the script), added in my own person gotchas, and loaded it. Cross-application AutoCorrect! Here's a zip file containing the script if you want to give it a try:

• wikipedia_autocorrect.zip See UPDATE 5 below for the script's new home.

You'll need AHK installed, of course. And note the "Hotstring" feature this technique uses is only available on Windows NT/2000/XP or higher.

UPDATE: Adam at Lifehacker linked this up, thanks! He notes I could have compiled this for non-AHK users. I probably should have, but didn't because I just assumed folks would want to add their own common misspellings. But if you just want to run it without installing AHK, Adam has made a compiled version available via his post. Very cool.

UPDATE 2: I updated this script to include Tara Gibb's enhancement (see below) and a few more of my own common misspellings. The enhancement lets you highlight a misspelling and hit WIN+H to easily add the correction to the script (so it's self-updating). A nice way to flesh the script out with your own spelling foibles (another reason to not run the compiled version provided at Lifehacker, as this feature won't work there).

UPDATE 3: Quite excitingly, Chris Mallett, the author of AutoHotKey, found this script and linked it up! He also made a couple improvements, which are now reflected in the script available above. I tossed in a few more of my personal common misspellings while I was at it.

UPDATE 4: Reader Shane submitted a pile of Word AutoCorrect words for inclusion, so I folded those in (after removing duplicates). Thanks Shane! While I was at it I also folded in a bunch more of my personal misspellings. In all, there's probably around 700 more entries in the latest version.

UPDATE 5: Chris Mallet and the AutoHotKey community have taken this script under their wing. Specifically, Dewi Morgan has made some terrific improvements, cleaned up the code, and added many more words. I think that version should be considered the definitive version, and is available at the AHK Other Downloads page. Very cool!