Sunday video fun — fireworks display

Honoring the end of a holiday weekend, here’s the NYC fireworks display from this year.

If that’s not enough to satisfy that fireworks itch, here’s a link to a YouTube search for “fireworks display.”

The Rove legacy

If anyone wants to start pointing fingers at the broken GOP, Karl Rove isn’t a bad place to start. He pretty much took a fragile three-legged stool and busted it apart. His fifty percent-plus one strategy guaranteed the Republican brand means nothing. The religious right branch received just enough lip service to scare away the libertarian wing, and Rove’s attempt to embrace the Latino vote only served to unleash a virulent backlash within the party that ensures that vote is solidly Democratic for at least one generation.

Here’s a quick interview with Paul Alexander, a biographer of Rove.

From the link:

Republican leaders have described the Bush brand as “toxic.” Party insiders view Rove harshly. “I think the legacy,” Ed Rollins told me for my book, “is that Karl Rove will be a name that’ll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it, as opposed to an example of how to do it….I think, at the end of this, the party will be weaker in numbers in the Congress, numbers of governors, numbers of state legislatures, and numbers of Republicans. He did little to attract young people to become Republicans. Anybody who’s a Republican today became a Republican during the Reagan era. Nobody who’s come of age during the Bush era will stand up and say, ‘I’m a Bush Republican. I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a Bush Republican.’” What’s more, John McCain, an otherwise attractive candidate, will have to distance himself from Bush significantly if not completely in the fall in order to have a chance of winning.

POPaganda on public television

I’m not going to tell you how to vote, but I would heavily suggest hitting this link and voting for POPaganda.

I’m sure the other two films are wonderful, but my loyalties lie with Ron and his amazing artwork.

From the link:

	POPaganda: The Art & Subversion
	Director: Pedro Carvajal A profile of the artist and activist Ron English who dares to hijack corporate advertising by using familiar words and images to create confrontational art with a message.

Post number …

… 500. Woot!

I started this blog early this year. This post marks the 500 mark. And in exciting news, this blog will soon be distributed through the Newstex “Blogs on Demand” syndicate.

Thanks for the support and do keep on reading. You can expect more of the politics, technology and business, with a little extra … mix I strive to post.

Blog glossary

If you’ve ever wondered about some of the blog-specific words and phrases out there in the blogoshpere, look no further. Here’s a great blog glossary courtesy of Samizdata.

Parsing the future of the World Wide Web

Here’s cool bit from Technology Review with short responses from a number of luminaries when asked where the Web will be in five to ten years.

A sample of the responders:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the Web; Cambridge, MA

Vint Cerf
Vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google and co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet; McLean, VA

Richard Stallman
Main developer of the GNU/Linux system and founder of the Free Software Movement; Cambridge, MA

 

George Carlin, RIP

Stand-up comedian George Carlin has died at 71 of heart failure.

His work the last few years was a lot of the old crank and not quite as funny, but he delivered many classic lines and honed some of the great comedy routines of the last forty-plus years. His voice and (strong) opinions will be missed.

From the link:

Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.

Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the 1978 case, Federal Communications Commission vs. Pacifica Foundation, the top U.S. court ruled that the words cited in Carlin’s routine were indecent, and that the government’s broadcast regulator could ban them from being aired at times when children might be listening.

Moodstream by Getty Images

Moodstream is an odd/interesting multimedia online tool from Getty Images. It’s probably better for you to just try it out than for me to attempt a description.

Here’s what the creators have to say:

Moodstream is a powerful brainstorming tool designed to help take in inspiring, unexpected directions. Whether you want images, footage or audio, or just need a stream of fresh ideas, tweak the Moodstream sliders to bring a whole new creative palette straight to you.

Ready? Stream. Create.

New display tech and low-cost wind power

From KurzweilAI.net.

This display tech really gets beyond an interactive touch screen. I’ll look forward to see what game developers can do with this sort of distance interactivity once this technology becomes cost-effective for the home.

A Display That Tracks Your Movements

Technology Review, June 20, 2008 Samsung and interactive advertisingcompany Reactrix Systems plan to bring 57-inch interactive displays to Hilton hotel lobbies by the end of the year. These displays can “see” people in 3D standing up to 15 feet away from the screen as they wave their hands to play games, navigate menus, use maps –and interact with ads.   Read Original Article>>

A new wind turbine from BroadStar breaks the $1per watt barrier. It looks like there’s real headway being made in both solar- and wind-power efficiencies.

BroadStar Achieves Breakthrough In Low-Cost Energy Production With New Generation Wind Turbine

Energy Daily, June 9, 2008 BroadStar Wind Systems’ new AeroCam wind turbine is the first to break through the $1/watt cost barrier, the company claims. Designed with a low profile on a horizontal axis with multiple blades, it automatically and interactively adjust the pitch or angle of attack of the aerodynamic blades as the turbine rotates, thereby optimizing its performance, like a bird’s wings. It enables distributed power generation in almost any setting, including densely populated urban areas and unconventional sites such as commercial developments and corporate campuses.   Read Original Article>>

Midwest under water

The flooding along the Mississippi River in the Midwest is shocking. Hopefully all the affected communities will get a break in the weather soon and can begin the rebuilding process.

From the link:

Since the flooding began, 20 levees have been breached — 11 of them in the St. Louis area — and as many as 30 more remain in peril. Estimates of the damage to farmland throughout the Midwest ranged from 2 million to 5 million acres of crops, pushing corn prices close to a record price of $8 a bushel. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is said to be planning a thorough review of the damage later this month.

Reverse graffiti

This is extraordinarily cool:

David Pray’s short video about reverse graffiti artist Paul “Moose” Curtis’s San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel project. Curtis creates his work using stencils and a pressure washer to create images in pollution, grime, and filth. The effect is stunning; making for a beautiful work of art while at the same time making a pointed statement about man’s impact on the environment.

The Reverse Graffiti Project[YouTube] : Wooster Collective

Go check out the YouTube video. Very amazing, and very innovative, urban art.

Saturday video fun — “I got dumped for Obama”

According to the YouTube description, “A response to Obama Girl. Inspired by true events. “

 

Real life imitates art, the Boondocks version

It looks the actual R. Kelly child prostitution trial turned into something very close to the “Boondocks” episode on that trial.  The fictional animated show is a great social satire. Sounds the real-life trial was more a farce.

From the NRO (second) link:

Great Moments in Jurisprudence   [Mark Hemingway]

Incredibly, R&B singer R. Kelly was just acquitted on 14 counts related to child pornography after a videotape of him surfaced some years ago in which he could be clearly seen micturating on and fornicating with 14-year-old girl. That’s bad enough, but here’s the kicker from his attorney’s closing arguments:

Showing the jury a studio photograph of the alleged victim on a large screen, he then told them that if they were going to find Kelly guilty of 14 counts of child pornography, “you are going to have to call (the alleged victim) 14 times individually and collectively a whore.”

Barely audible, he whispered, “My momma told me when we were kids, ‘if you ain’t got something nice to say about someone, don’t say it about her.”

He concluded his argument saying, “How are you 14 times going to call her a whore?”

Now hold up. R. Kelly shouldn’t be found guilty for videotaping the the sexual abuse of an adolescent girl because it would ruin her reputation?! What is this? Saudi Arabia?

 

The internet is changing our brains

Just read Nicholas Carr’s piece in the July/August 2008 print Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The article raises some very interesting points, most importantly bringing into sharper focus the relatively new neuroscience idea that our brain continually changes, improves and otherwise re-wires itself. This is counter the long-held belief that once you reach adulthood, your brain is permanentlyset. Sort of like concrete poured into a mold. Instead the medium a malleable, and the mold is constantly refiguring itself.

The larger concept is the internet, and its unique structure, is affecting the way we access and process information. Certainly true. I’ve included an excerpt from the article about how acquiring a typewriter affected Nietzsche’s writing.

I completely understand this idea. When writing for business or media I use the computer keyboard, but when writing fiction I often will write in longhand. It’s a different experience and it slows my thinking down forcing me to contemplate each word a bit more. Sure I do some fiction at the keyboard, but much of that writing is done with pen set to paper. And my journal of many years is one hundred percent longhand. Something about the pen, or pencil, scratching across the page still appeals to me. Plus I like looking at the large stack of spiral-bound notebooks holding my thoughts dating back twenty-plus years.

From the article:

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

It’s the end of an era

Deadspin editor Will Leitch is quitting to join the staff of New York Magazine. I don’t read Deadspin as often as I once did (I even own a “You’re with me leather” t-shirt), but read through today and found Will’s announcement from a couple of days ago.

Will’s almost three years atop the site he founded was a good ride. Who can forget Carl Monday or Dee Mirich. Or the Bill Simmons comment page take-down on ESPN the very first day of comments. Simmons’ Page Two work still doesn’t allow comments because of that Deadspin reader fueled rampage.

Will says he’ll still post at Deadspin after starting his contributing editor position. It just won’t be the same.

From the first link:

We started this site on September 8, 2005, with a simple headline: “Welcome to Deadspin. We Come With a Pure Heart and Mirthful Disposition.” We think that’s still pretty much true; we try to keep our disposition mirthful at all times. But sometimes that’s more difficult to do than others; this is one of those times.

It is with heavy heart — yet mirthful disposition! — that we announce that our time as Deadspin editor is about to draw to a close. After almost three years of plugging away around here, we are leaving as editor of Deadspin on Friday, June 27. We have accepted a job as a contributing editor for New York magazine. We’re excited about it, but, obviously, this has been our baby and our life every day for three years — which is about four decades in blog time — and we’re too emotional about the whole thing to get into much more detail about how we feel about the whole matter.

We’ll still be writing for the site, even after we’re not the editor anymore, so you’re not gonna get rid of us that easily. (We kind of love it here; we have nothing but manhugs and fistpoundsfor the Gawker crew, and vice versa.) We’ll go into the details more over the next few weeks, but we’ll just leave you today with a simple quote of “It’s probably time,” and then try not to dribble tears on our keyboard.

Saturday video fun — the Celtics’ Gino

For the NBA finals, here’s the scoreboard favorite from Boston — “Gino” from a 1977 American Bandstand episode dancing to “Shake your Booty” by KC and the Sunshine Band. His moniker comes from the overly tight Gino Vannelli concert shirt he’s sporting.

Sadly for Boston fans, and maybe something of an omen for the series with the Lakers, the Wall Street Journal tracked down “Gino” (probably subscriber only link) and found out his name is Joe Massoni. Sadly Joe died at 34 in 1990 from pneumonia. As it turns out the shirt was so tight because he borrowed it from the tiny chick to his right in this video according to the WSJ story.

But in better days, he was a disco king on Bandstand:

More Singularity and living 3D nano-microscopy

From KurzweilAI.net. Ray Kurzweil talks about the Singularityon NPR and a new technique allows for nano-level microscopy on living cells.

Will We Recognize The Future?

Science Friday, June 6, 2008What happens when the rate of technological change becomes so fast that the fundamental nature of what it means to be human changes too? On Science Fridayon NPR (June 6, 2009 at 3 PM), host Ira Flatow talks with inventor, technologist and futuristRay Kurzweil about the idea of the Singularity — what happens when technology advances so much that it’s impossible to predict what happens next. Will artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology be able to completely reshape what it means to be human? This is a call-in radio show.   Read Original Article>>

Pretty on the Inside

Technology Review, June 5, 2008University of California, San Francisco and Ludwig Maximilians University researchers are using a new technique called 3-D structured-illumination microscopy to view living cells with 100 nanometers resolution. Cells prepare for division by condensing their DNA into chromosomes (Lothar Schermelleh, Peter Carlton) The new microscope illuminates cells with interference patterns. When a fine cellular structure reflects this light, it changes the pattern slightly. The microscope collects it, then software interprets the changes and creates an image. The inner workings of living cells have previously been impossible to resolve with optical microscopes, which are limited to a resolution of about half the wavelength of visible light, around 200 nanometers. Electron microscopy has the resolution, but can only be used on dead cells.   Read Original Article>>

Spectrum Singularity special

IEEE Spectrum Online has a special report on the Singularity.  I haven’t read much of it just yet, but looks pretty cool.

Vernor Vinge pens one article.

Here’s an excerpt:

In that event, I expect the singularity will come as some combination of the following:

 

The AI Scenario: We create superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) in computers.

 

The IA Scenario: We enhance human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces—that is, we achieve intelligence amplification (IA).

 

The Biomedical Scenario: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological operation of our brains.

 

The Internet Scenario: Humanity, its networks, computers, and databases become sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

 

The Digital Gaia Scenario: The network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

 

The essays in this issue of IEEE Spectrum use similar definitions for the technological singularity but variously rate the notion from likely to totally bogus. I’m going to respond to arguments made in these essays and also mine them for signs of the oncoming singularity that we might track in the future.

Bo Diddley, RIP

Man, there’s been a spate of entertainment and arts deaths recently — I’ve run multiple RIPs and I certainly haven’t covered most of the significant events.

Bo Diddley, the man with the square guitar and a true rock & roll pioneer, is dead at 79. He’s probably better known for the guitar shape than of his actual music. A great artist and a great innovator. Bo, take your rightful spot in that celestial choir …

From the link:

In the 1950s, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewisand a few others — helped reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building it on the templates of blues, southern gospel and rhythm and blues. His original style of R&B influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

Update: Here’s a link to a few relevant YouTube clips assembled by Reason’s Jesse Walker.

I’m going to guess this result ..

… was not part of Scott McClellan’s memoir calculus. The one-time press secretary has raised some pretty serious charges. If the Bush 43 administration used any measure of the ridiculous political calculation that only war-time presidents can be considered “great, impeachment is the only real option. The cost in lives — both US and Iraqi — and in national treasure is never worth a project in vanity. Sounds like something Iraq’s previous leader, or maybe North Korea’s “dear leader” would gin up.
From the link:

“The admissions made by Scott McClellan in his new book are earth-shattering and allege facts to establish that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby – and possibly Vice President Cheney -  conspired to obstruct justice by lying about their role in the Plame Wilson matter and that the Bush Administration deliberately lied to the American people in order to take us to war in Iraq. Scott McClellan must now appear before the House Judiciary Committee under oath to tell Congress and the American people how President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and White House officials deliberately orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people.”  

Dick Martin, RIP

Dick Martin, co-host of the awesome goodness that was “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In,” has died at 86.

During Trio’s all-too-brief stint on DirecTV I had the joy to watch “Laugh In.” Brilliant comedy and satire. The flying fickle finger of fate has come to rest on Martin, but I’m guessing the laughs go on.

Memorial Day weekend video fun — La Di Da Di

Someone found this blog searching for “Slick Rick.” I have no idea which post ranked that high in search results, but in honor of that random webizen, and to make the holiday weekend a little bit slicker, here’s the original …

(And yes, I know Rick D isn’t Slick Rick, but if Rick D isn’t slick himself, the definition of “slick” needs an amendment.)

 

And for a holiday bonus, here’s Snoop Dogg with a somewhat portly Doug E. Fresh …

Enjoy.

Deconstructing …

… one of the more pernicious anti-Obama emails making the rounds. Anyone who’s received the “Celeste & Loren Davis” anti-Obama email and doesn’t realize it’s utter bullshit needs to head to the Snopes page and do a bit of catching up. (In fact, if you regularly receive crazy emailed claims, bookmark the snopes.com home page and check in often for the latest hoaxes making the rounds. It’ll do both you and your email circle a world of good.)

Now for the good stuff on this mail — over at the New Republic, Douglas Wolk put together a hilarious deconstruction of that bit of lunatic hate prose cast over the land by Celeste and Loren.

From the TNR (second) link:

Keep that in mind, and the message’s apparent errors and inconsistencies start to fall into place. In the seemingly counterfactual, hateful sentence “Obama IS a muslim and he IS a racist and this is a fulfillment of the 911 threat that was just the beginning,” the slashless “911″ isn’t a reference to September 11, 2001; it isn’t even slang for “emergency.” It’s a reference to the total number of parallel dimensions. The “Obama” they’re talking about here isn’t, of course, the Christian politician from our world who gave the “A More Perfect Union” speech in March; it’s the alternate-universe version, who is naturally our Obama’s opposite in every way–sort of like Ultraman, the evil Clark Kent of Earth-3. He also comes from a universe in which “Muslims” are some sort of bloodthirsty invaders who support the dimension-resequencing scheme, a bit of meaning-reassigning linguistic play along the lines of Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet.

 

Q&A with George Soros

The May 15, 2008, New York Review of Books had an interesting interview with financier George Soros. They covered financial regulation, currency, the housing crisis and the global economy. The interview even touches briefly on politics.

This interview is a great read to hear a highly educated opinion on all those subjects. For those who see the name “George Soros” and only think of the man who pumped tens of millions into the 2004 election to attempt and unseat Bush 43, this interview might open your eyes a bit.

He’s not Democratic ideologue. Maybe for a bit more market regulation than I prefer, but after these last few years beginning with the Enron debacle it’s hard to argue for a completely free market. And he’s certainly made a whole lot more money out of all the markets he discusses than I have – and most other people for that matter.

Here’s two samples from the interview.

… on the 2004 election:

Woodruff: A larger question on the campaign—you gave, I believe, something like $23 million in 2004 to various Democratic efforts: MoveOn.org and candidates. Far less than that so far this year—why the change?

Soros: Well, because I think that was a unique time when not having President Bush reelected would have made the situation of this country and of the world much better. I think now it’s less important. And, in any case, I don’t feel terribly comfortable being a partisan person because I look forward to being critical of the next Democratic administration.

… on his philosophy of market regulation:

Woodruff: What of your book and the philosophy that comes of it?

Soros: In human affairs, as distinguished from natural science, I argue that our understanding is imperfect. And our imperfect understanding introduces an element of uncertainty that’s not there in natural phenomena. So therefore you can’t predict human affairs in the same way as you can natural phenomena. And we have to come to terms with the implication of our own misunderstandings, that it’s very hard to make decisions when you know you may be wrong. You have to learn to recognize that we in fact may be wrong. And, even worse than that, it’s almost inevitable that all of our constructs will have some kind of a flaw in them. So when it comes to currencies, no currency system is perfect.

So you have to recognize that all of our constructions are imperfect. We have to improve them. But just because something is imperfect, the opposite is not perfect. So because of the failures of socialism, communism, we have come to believe in market fundamentalism, that markets are perfect; everything will be taken care of by markets. And markets are not perfect. And this time we have to recognize that, because we are facing a very serious economic disruption.

Now, we should not go back to a very highly regulated economy because the regulators are imperfect. They’re only human and what is worse, they are bureaucratic. So you have to find the right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work, while recognizing that they are imperfect. You need authorities that keep the market under scrutiny and some degree of control. That’s the message that I’m trying to get across.

Robert Rauschenberg, RIP

One the titans of the art world, American Robert Raushenberg, has died at 82.

From the link:

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”

Friday video fun — cool metronome clip

Great example of momentum resonance effect … (Go check out Phil Plait’s awesome explanation of this video.)

Hat tip: Boing Boing Gadgets

Reason mag interviews Peter Thiel

Here’s an interesting Reason interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and angel investor of Facebook. They discuss libertarianism, The Singularity and the ongoing progress of science.

From Ronald Baily’s introduction:

I first met Peter Thiel—co-founder of PayPal, angel investor in Facebook, founder of the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, adviser to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and self-described libertarian—at a party in his San Francisco home last September. Perhaps 100 digerati wandered through Thiel’s sleek Marina District townhouse, chatting amiably over wine and canapés in rooms filled with up-to-the-minute abstract art.

The party launched the second annual Singularity Summit, held at the nearby Palace of Fine Arts during the ensuing two days. The Singularity, a term coined by the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1983, refers to the eventual technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. Just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to describe the center of a black hole, Vinge observed, our attempts to model the future break down when we try to foresee a world that contains smarter-than-human intelligences. The Singularity Institute takes it for granted that exponentially accelerating information technology will produce such artificial intelligences; its chief goal is to make sure they will be friendly to humans.

In 1987, while studying philosophy at Stanford, Thiel helped found the libertarian/conservative student newspaper The Stanford Review. As a law student at Stanford he was president of the university’s Federalist Society. After working briefly for the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, Thiel switched to trading derivatives for Credit Suisse Financial. In the mid-1990s, Thiel transformed himself into a venture capitalist and a serial entrepreneur. He returned to California, where he has backed a number of startups. In addition to PayPal and Facebook, Thiel has invested in the social networking site LinkedIn, the search engine company Powerset, and the Web security provider IronPort.

Thiel also joined the culture wars by co-authoring The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1996), and was an executive producer for the 2005 feature film Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley’s politically incorrect novel of the same name. Besides backing the Singularity Institute, Thiel pledged a $3.5 million matching grant in 2006 to the Methuselah Foundation to support its anti-aging research agenda.

I interviewed Thiel between sessions at the Singularity Summit.

Sunday video fun — Bauhaus, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”

Spent a bit of time at Edgefest today supporting a gig by Proud Wine. An up-and-coming neo-psychedelia band fronted by a relative of mine. The bulk of the bill is emo and screamo, however.

In that vein today’s vido goes back to the days when emo was just simply goth, and some of the skinny boys wore skirts.

The standard? Peter Murphy, Bauhaus and “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

 

Saturday video fun — It’s …

… peanut butter jelly time!

Yeah, I did two videos in a row. This is a classic.

Slo-mo water balloon popping

This is one cool video. A high-speed camera catches a water balloon popping in slow motion.

(Hat tip: the Daily Dish, via Wired)