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.

Fantastic rendering of the U.S. interstate system a la Beck’s tube map:

(via kottke)

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.

Ingredients

• 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

Instructions

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.

Nick Paumgarten has a short, funny piece on inattentional blindness in the 11/9 issue of The New Yorker.

Wow, the Litl webbook is lovely: physical and functional simplicity. Nice to see Linux under the covers of something that looks super-easy to use. Of course, it’s super-easy to use because it’s more appliance than general purpose computer, and at $700 a pop for something that does a lot less than a $700 laptop (you can get a decent one for that) they’ve set themselves a tough row to hoe. Very cool, even if I fear its doomed. Tell me when it’s $400 and I can host my own cloud. More info at the litl site.

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).

Great shot of Usain Bolt with a cheetah cub:

I knew I was premature to judge the earlier Avatar trailer. The new one looks much better:

Now THAT is a Halloween costume. The pumpkins further down are really cool too.

James Galea’s signature trick, 673 King Street:

Good week for algae. Not only will it be able to control your brain, it will be able to power your car. Pond scum, who knew?

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)