The Dave Barry linked to Duckman's Asian Slip 'n Slide post today from his blog.

and I discovered "WhatThefont.com". This has to be the best little idea I've seen in a while. Try it out with this URL to the Pandora logo:
http://www.pandora.com/images/logo_pandora.jpg

I went to see The Day the Earth Stood Still expecting to be very disappointed but feeling like I had to see it as a good SF nerd. [some spoilers ahead] ... more inside ...

Cooking, wrapping, rum-balls and dish washing. A couple glasses of champers and I'm ready for my long Christmas nap. BUT ... I've agreed to go to the midnight mass with my in-laws. I'm pretty sure they know I'm an atheist - but they want me there anyway. I might throw a shout out to St. Sagan from the pews. It's about 84 degrees here in Brsibane. That's not Christmas weather for me.

To be honeest Christmas gets less fun every year - the kids love it, but I just wind up tired and slightly durnk.

Anyway - I wanted to wish a merry christmas, Festivus, kwanza, solstice, chanukah and ramadan to all Sifters. February will be three years of VideoSift - sometime it feels like 3 months. Be well and love the ones you're with.

I got this in my email box today. Although they are being coy - I think this is means they will be offering Virgin Galactic flights redeemable via frequent flyer points. The image in my email was called "VEL-729-Galatic-eDM.jpg" that's got to be a big hint

We've closed Dwigger effective immediately. After a nice initial splash in the media - traffic kind of dried up. Rather than let it turn into a spam link dump we decided to shut it down.
... more inside ...

The first blog I ever read regularly was this excellent photo weblog called Hunkabutta. I followed a young Canadian family's life as they adjusted to living in Japan. It had really great, quirky photos of the Tokyo area and slice-of-life anecdotes about fitting in to the culture. A couple of years ago, the story ended with the family moving back to British Columbia and I stopped visiting.

Although it was a one-way vicarious experience, I really connected with the family and felt like I knew them. So, on a whim I visited the site again today and it was a blow to the gut to read in the comments that they had divorced and were with new partners. I didn't expect to feel bad about it - but I did.

I like his final word:

To some extent you can't fight it -- people will believe what they want to believe. If they can make FDR the cause of the Great Depression, they can do anything. But one thing progressives can do is make sure that the story of the Bush administration is told, in all respects. There's going to be huge pressure from the usual suspects to let bygones be bygones, to forget about everything from torture to reckless disregard of financial warnings. But I want truth and reconciliation across the board, and progressives have to make it clear that it was an ideology, not an act of God, that made this crisis possible.

What a completely original and cool game. It's a good one for the kiddlies too as it's cute and has a lego aspect to it.

Finishing the demo led me to this interesting inverview with the creators of the game - which in turn led me to this video for a decidely un-kid-friendly but fun looking game, Brütal Legend. (Dig the Ronnie James Dio - and style that is reminiscent of Heavy Metal, the movie)

I've been reading Accelerando - a SF book by Charles Stross and thinking about the Singularity. (great Wikipedia article)

The basic idea of the singularity is that when we can create an artificial intelligence that is as intelligent as a human, that AI will be able to bootstrap itself up and create other AIs that make us look like nematodes. The world would be populated by vast intelligences that could change the way we exist. Some say that humans would be co-opted and merged into the digital intelligence (as in Stross's novel). Some say we would be made redundant.

The singularity could be just a human archetype asserting itself in techie atheists. If we don't believe in God - we still need to have some kind of judgment day.



^A real possibility.

Compassion, mercy and real altruism are human perversions that don't fit into the natural world. Why should we expect vast machine intelligences to have any interest in keeping us around? We would be like the husk of a discarded cocoon.

We had a couple of bush stone curlews nesting in our front yard. The mom sat on the eggs non-stop for about 5 weeks. We felt humbled by the dedication. Each time we pulled out of the driveway the mom would be sitting there, rain or shine.

Two chicks hatched during the middle of the worst storm Brisbane has seen in 20 years.

The mom ate them both and flew away.

Anyway - sorry to be a downer - but sometimes I feel like all of my perception is filtered by primate instinct. We expect mothers to raise their young, we expect our children - biological or technological - to respect and love us.

Prepare for the geek rapture, and repent!

I was watching MSNBC today and they had an ad for "bath tissue". I had forgotten that was the euphemism for TP in the US. Australia likes scatological humor - the toilet joke is king in the land down under - and I don't quite get it. What's funny must be more nurture than nature.

Just found this neat picture modification site through Metafilter.

A video over at HacknMod shows an iPhone booting Windows mobile. Why you would want to - I don't know - but it shows the flexibility of the iPhone - don't think you'd find many Windows mobile devices capable of running the iPhone OS.

I was thinking about hanging on for the gPhone, but after the luke-warm reviews of the HTC model and the recent release of Google Earth for the iPhone, I might have to take the plunge. Is the douche nozzle issued with the iPhone - or do I have to purchase it separately?

I like Science Fiction. I like flim. Why can't Hollywood make a decent SF movie anymore? I left this movie feeling very angry- feeling like I've just been pandered to by someone creating films for the mentally retarded.

I can just imagine the writer giving the pitch:

"So, there's this explosive crystal see and the mom is wearing it around her neck- it looks like a diamond pendant but actually it's got enough firepower to blow up a football stadium ... and the A.I. in the pentagon has arranged for the mom's son - Timmy and his band camp - to play the national anthem during the State of the Union. When the High F is reached the harmonic resonance frequency will detonate the diamond pendant blowing up the president.

Oh and there will be an AI like HAL - only all shiny and shit."

Who gives something like this a green light? I almost walked out after the lady fell in a pool of "liquid nitrogen" and emerged as if she'd just swum a few laps.

The AI was very flashy. In fact the computer screens it runs on looked to have been created in Adobe Flash by a Learning Annex drop-out.


This was the crappiest in a long line of crappy SF movies coming out of Hollywood. Are they really writing for dumb, dumb people or are there other forces at work?

Along with the stockmarket crash - we could use a Hollywood crash. For film makers to make do with 10% of the budget. So for Science Fiction, good writing and acting are relied on. Hire real Scientists and Science Fiction authors. Get Margaret Atwood, John Varley, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson.

Get those people to make your movies - and give the viewers credit that they don't come to movies for unbelievable car explosions and fake computer jargon.

As I'm sure you remember, Maatc started his escalopteur career here on the Sift. Lucky should gets full credit for the coinage of the word. (My helilator just didn't catch on)

Choggie submitted the term to Urban Dictionary and now the term is sweeping the world. Now, Maatc has been interviewed on German radio about the move and the word! I didn't get much of it - we need a translation.

Paul Krugman's take on the current financial crisis is very well put together.

Here we are at the brink of congress blithely signing on to authorize hundreds of billions of our tax dollars in an ill-conceived, poorly thought out plan. Sound familiar?

I'm a mediocre player and I'm fine with that - but I get a lot of satisfaction out of getting a good strum going and hitting most of the chords while singing with other people. Chordie is a fantastic resource if you like to play in front of your laptop.

Not only does it give you chord diagrams next to the song, but you can instantly transpose a song to any key you want from a select box. I also use the "auto-scroll" feature to save me from stopping a song half-way through to move the page down.

At the risk of revealing myself as an Old, here's my Chordie song book from Delicious. Many of the links have been transposed to a comfortable key for me. (if I ever start a band I'll call it GC/DC).

We're getting a lot more inbound links from larger type news organization to the Sift. I think this is for two reasons:

1. There's a recognition that posts on VideoSift actually have better longevity than posts on a video site, because they are actively curated and dead videos replaced.

2. The quality of the discussions around our posts are top notch, and above the blather found on many sites.

Just today, Slate linked their article on Meghan McCain to a comment by our own Dignant_pink. Today we've also had a link in from Germany's Spiegel to this post by mas8705

Also in the UK's Guardian today.

We launched Dwigger on the weekend and it's gone kind of nuts.

First we got a great write-up on Mashable. About 12 hours after that we hit the front page of Digg and Delicious. Our shared VPS completely buckled under the load. We're ordering a new stand alone box to rival the Sift's now.

The most surreal thing though is an article in Today's Mx magazine in Brisbane. MX is a free newspaper that all the train and bus commuters read on their slog home. There's a nice review article on Dwigger in big bold letters "DWIGGER IS BIGGER THAN TWO". So I'm in this crowded train- and all these people are squished in around me reading the article! The Internet is a big and small world. Sometimes it feels like a big prank.

from Brian Houston
to Rommel Santor
date Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 11:55 AM
subject How about
mailed-by gmail.com

How about VaroCMS for "Intresting Tweets"
For submission, you just paste in the URL to the Tweet, and we slurp it up and format it, then standard voting and commenting.

Comment replies could optionally link to your Twitter account and update as replies to the tweet.

-------------------------------

That's how it started. I can't believe that was only July 25th. It's a testament to the flexibility of VaroCMS and our code meister that it's been less than two months since the idea first came up.

The name ... I know rhymes with a certain N word, but then so does Trigger, Tigger, Digger etc. Can I just say that it's darn hard to find a domain name that has some relevance to what you're doing?

What's the relevance of Dwigger? Well, it's Digg + Twitter = Dwigger. We thought that would be the easiest way to describe a threaded commenting community based around voting for Tweets.

I like green. We wanted to stretch VaroCMS to make a site that looks very un-VideoSiftish. The colors are from here.

Lastly, the logo. We had read that the Twitter logo is made with a font called Chickens. So we bought it and put a big thick stroke on it.

It would be great to get some feedback on Dwigger, your thoughts or gripes. Head to the Dwigger blog and let us know.