This is a repost of a jaw-dropping, crazy, amazing observation of manta rays jumping well out of the water. Apparently no one is sure as to why these rays jump, but this blog, where the youtube videos were found, talks about it some more:
Links
Fogonazos Blog
Crazy Galapagos diving videos linked from this page
Vids
No jumping here, I just find this video absolutely beautiful
Do you think the strawberry stem is supposed to be the L?
Happy Vaentine’s Day from your friends at Googe!
A lovely creation on the power of XML and all that follows it in our 2.0 world by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University.
It’s cheerleader-y, but I don’t mind that actually, after months of trying to critically deconstruct what’s wrong with Web 2.0, it’s nice to be reminded of its history a little bit, what’s good about it, and how far we’ve come. It’s not even that I believe that it’s inherently much easier for the average individual to create a web document today than it was 10 years ago, but rather that the documents that are created now are more X (colorful, complete, modular, mappable, etc…) and that perhaps people are more inclined to share information in this way. This is a nice reminder of that.
The content of the video aside, its a wonderful example of how narrative is growing and changing, able to incorporate more and more, unlike the painfully plodding instructional/promotional videos of 20 years ago (See the brilliant Eric Fensler (of GI Joe remix PSA fame)’s lesser known works Don’t Mess with Illinois and Sales and Company Image Seminar Tape #7 for humorous amalgamations of said painful plodding). If forms like video games are opening us to new ways to think about narrative (as I believe they are), this might bring us closer to some of the promises about hypertext creations that have long been in the works and rarely fulfilled outside of the art realm. And of course, that’s the whole point of the video, right?
Originally posted at Savage Minds
Shared by DJ Ripley
Hooray, Science Scouts! Now those of us who are scientifically inclined can proclaim our affiliation without actually being practicing scientists. Did I mention there are totally awesome badges? Here are mine:
“Inordinately fond of invertebrates” is probably my most relevant badge.
In the old days of Safari 1.x, Apple’s web browser for Mac OS X, there was a hidden WebKit preference value named WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay, which controlled how much time the browser would wait before it started to render the page. This was so that some content would have come in for the browser to render, so that you don’t have weird graphics glitches as the page and CSS loads. If you tuned this value lower, Safari would render the page as soon as it gets pieces of the page, leading to a perception of “speed”, even though the actual page load time was the same.
Initially this required the Developer Tools or a Terminal invocation via the defaults utility, but then a small shareware economy of GUI utilities grew, promising to “accelerate” or “optimize” Safari render speeds, with packages like SafariSpeed. Turns out that ever since Safari 1.3, WebKit developers had deactivated this preference key, so the trick was rather useless. Interestingly enough, some people felt the speed up anyway.
So a preference that was designed for purely cosmetic purposes in the first place managed to, even in death, soothe the users’ need for speed.
Any placebo effects with software that you’ve experienced? Is there a place for these kind of tricks in user interface design, if only to get the would-be tweakers and l33t hax0rs to pipe down for a while?
via Surfin’ Safari
Among Obama, Clinton, Biden, Huckabee, Brownback, Edwards (McCain and Giuliani dont have one yet), Obama ‘08 seems to be most web 2.0-ish website AND democrat websites, in general, seem to more 2.0-ish than republican websites. Has blue always been ahead on the technology curve? I don’t know. Another observation on Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s flickr campaign accounts: Joe Biden has tonnes of photographs with he almost always posing and looking into the camera (also the camera uses a lot of flash) while Obama has got a great photographer shooting him in action making him look iconic and history-maker as in the one here.
omgourpartyisawesome. K7 receives incoming comestibles. The Go Team goes. Germans converse. Alana spies, not so subtly. Neal is Drunknealbot. Ken-ichi is in the stream. He has the Canoe of Consciousness. Ivan contemplates the mysteries of Airtunes. MCD dominates. He is a dominatrix. IN Scrabble. A scrabble of pure speed. He has trix. Hence, Dominatrix. Alana refuses to even play. What does she dominate? Drinks. She rulz them. Daniela … has only one El. So I am told. Scrabble resumes. Scrabble! At a party! What is this?! Kevin searches for the trap door. Hannes finds the secret level. In the kitchen. “Yay, giving up your dignity for the greater good of Man. Neal thrills, or is thrilled. Regardless, he is lurching toward me. In a menacing manner. Google would be proud. What? Who will moonwalk down the stairs. Wait, moonwalking is impossible in the third dimension. So sayeth Neal. If we weren’t blogging we would be at a different party. @learn hannes as chi-mo’er with moves. Hannes wins. Officially. Aaaaannndd I am done. With blogging. For now. YES!
As you might have heard, Queen Mary 2 was in San Francisco this past weekend. QM2 is the tallest ship ever built and for that reason the tallest ship to have ever passed under the Golden Gate. (I suppose this implies that the Golden Gate bridge is tall enough to allow _any_ passenger ship to pass underneath.) Here are a couple of photos.
Check out all the “groupie” boats in the second picture. I got more pictures of this event here if anyone cares to procrastinate more.
In case you are not familiar with the Tron Guy meme, go here to learn more than you want about it.
This is ridiculously difficult to beat.
x to fire
z to jump