Twitch has the trailer for “hard boiled action-noir” The Perfect Sleep. Or you can head over to the movie’s official site and dig through the Flash interface for the larger version (worth it, great cinematography).

The NY Times has a couple good (but unfortunate) data visualizations up: The Geography of a Recession (related article) and Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller?

Neat sparklines plugin: jQuery Sparklines.

Two links ripped from Lone Gunman’s review of his first year: Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently and Conversations My Parents Must Have Had While Planning to Raise a Child.

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 little aggregator-driven coincidence. Yesterday brought me the Love/Hate mirror image t-shirt, and today this U R Fantastic shirt. If $40 is a little rich for your blood and you don’t care if it’s a “limited edition”, you can go for a $20 misprint. (via josh spear)

The winners of caption contest #179, plus my losing entry:

Not that it would have mattered, but I don’t think I made the fact that the patient’s insurance company roughed up the doctor explicit enough.

I dig this shirt and the highly specialized font it employs:

I thought maybe I could use TinEye reverse image search to track down a store, but no dice (very cool that it found all those matches, though). Feature suggestion for TinEye: after identifying pages where the image exists, let me then search the text of those pages (e.g. “store”, in this case).

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror nicely summarizes a great episode of This American Life, Ruining It for the Rest of Us. Conventional wisdom says that group dynamics trump the individual, but sociology professor Will Felps' work suggests one bad apple can be surprisingly damaging. In his experiments, groups with one bad apple were up to 30-40% less effective than the untainted bushels.

Wow, Cufón sounds like the money choice for text replacement:

1. No plug-ins required - it can only use features natively supported by the client\
2. Compatibility - it has to work on every major browser on the market\
3. Ease of use - no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases\
4. Speed - it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text

I’ve tried sIFR and typeface.js and neither quite fit the bill. Looking forward to giving this one a try. (via swissmiss)

Neil Gaimen takes note of a couple reviews for his new one, The Graveyard Book:

The New York Times made it an Editor’s Choice, but not The Boston Globe, in the first example of Thumper’s “if you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything” motto book-reviewing I can remember. The entire review is:

“I found the book ghastly, literally and metaphorically, and since Gaiman is a writer whose inventive genius I respect, I’ll pass on without further comment."

…which just left me wondering how something can be metaphorically ghastly. (“It was ghastly — and I mean that metaphorically!") and concluding that Liz Rosenberg is probably trying to use metaphorically as the opposite of literally, whereas what she actually meant was that it was ghastly in several senses of the word (ie. filled with dead things and ghosts and she didn’t like it one little bit). Ah well. I hope she likes the next thing, whatever that is.

Interesting article at The Economist applying the Dunbar number to Facebook.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

(via waxy)