The Mariana Trench To Scale. Wow, I hadn’t appreciated just how deep that was until now. (via kottke)

This Conditioning Research handstand tutorial link brought the Bar-barians blog to my attention, which “keeps track of all of the developments in the Bodyweight Scene, with a special focus on all of the pull-up crews in NYC.” A month or two ago they posted two 2009 highlight videos, Top 10 Moves of 2009 and The Top 10 Strongest Moves of 2009, both filled with impressive feats. If you don’t feel like watching all 20 minutes (although I think it’s worth it), here are my favorite parts:

• Cleive: behind the legs clap pushups at 4:48 (1st video).
• Cruz: muscle-up hurdles at 5:33.
• Rick: slow muscle-up with obstacle at 9:16.
• HFK: 1-arm coffin at 5:35 (2nd video).

Pretty sure HFK stands for Hannibal For King, featured in this unbelievable video.

Coincidentally, if you are inspired to improve your pullups, the Jason Ferruggia post, Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Pull Ups also came across my newsreader today. Sound advice.

Alphabet Shoot. Got up to level 26 so far.

Pretty safe to say Kick-Ass isn’t going for a PG-13 rating! (nsfw):

I don’t really think this is why people pirate DVDs, but this is still a great graphic illustrating one way that the movie studios punish their paying customers. So true.

(I think people generally pirate movies because they want them for free rather than paying for them. I think people rip movies they legitimately own for a lot of reasons, this being one of them.)

Everybody is talking about the Esquire feature on Roger Ebert. I haven’t had time to do more than skim a bit, but I’ve printed it out for the bedside. Sure to be excellent.

Update: Ebert’s reaction to the piece.

I may just link to every OkTrends post. Fascinating, as usual. This one is preaching to the choir as far as I’m concerned, but The Case For An Older Woman needs to be made.

Men are idiots!

Sorry to be a downer, but I hate to be depressed all by myself: An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification.

One Button Bob is reminiscent of—and just as addictive as—This is the Only Level. Took me 747 clicks.

The Onion: Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian.

Merriam-Webster has a great video on how unreliable the “i before e” rule is. Stupid English!

I had posted a little something yesterday, but thought it deserved a slightly fuller treatment. Browser tabs are awesome, as all browser makers now recognize. I run three Firefox extensions that play nicely together, and make for a tab experience I love, especially since I tend to have lots of tabs going all the time:

1. Tab Kit: among other things, this allows me to run the tabs vertically down the left hand side. While it takes getting used to, it’s much better than across the top. Since monitors are wide but web pages tend to be “tall”, you naturally have room on the side if you’re running at a decent resolution, and even with a ton of tabs open you can still see the title of each tab (unlike across the top, where the space for tab titles shrinks with each new tab). It also supports tab grouping and sorting and a bunch of other tweaks.
2. BarTap: one problem with keeping a ton of tabs going is how long it takes the browser to start up and load all the pages at once (assuming you have FF set to restore your tabs). BarTap solves this by displaying tabs (with the page titles) for all the tabs you had open, but it doesn’t actually load them until you visit them. MUCH faster to start up when you’ve carried over a bunch of tabs. (via rob)
3. Close Tab by Double Click: self-explanatory.