More Carpark North

That Danish band with the freaky video has released their new album, but it is no where to be found in the USA. Luckily, MTV Europe likes to post streams of full albums, including All Things to All People. There're other goodies in the archives, too, like a stream of the full new Daft Punk album.

Sweet!

Superman gets the Bryan Singer treatment

I know that it is virtually impossible for any remake of the Superman movies to not be blasphemy, but I have a hard time forming all the words to describe what I don't like about this peek at the new costume for the summer 2006 movie by the director of X-Men.

(larger view here)

The X-Men look was very cool, but Superman does not wear leather, dudes.

The plot thickens

Here's some followup Internet sleuthing/opinionating on the Berkeley laptop saga...

tenure process politicking
corporate espionage, perhaps?

and the big question of why leave a computer with so much sensitive information lying around with no encryption?

Berkeley Biology Professor Smack Down

Student steals laptop computer from professor.

Student is a dumbass and uses the laptop wireless connection on campus.

Professor explains about the two or three law enforcement agencies currently investigating major federal felonies for stealing the data on the laptop.

Oops!

Online lecture video (Real Player, skip to around 48:50 for the special end of class notice)

Transcript here

"I am tied up all this afternoon; I am out of town all of next week. You have until 11:55 to return the computer, and whatever copies you've made, to my office, because I'm the only hope you've got of staying out of deeper trouble than you or any student I've ever known has ever been in."

Did you notice? / Damn right

The Internets foisted one of the best music videos in a very long time upon me a while ago. I don't remember from where exactly. The band is Carpark North, making good Danish guitar pop. The video is a bunch of gangly teenagers doing some pretty cracked out dancing, with a few laws of physics bent for good measure.

The post production company, Duckling, hosts a good streaming quicktime version of the video.

[updated with a few creepy screenshots:]

MTV Europe says this, scraped off of videoantville.org, who also has a good download link:

Artist: Carpark North
Video: Human
Director: Martin De Thura
Album: All Things To All People

Story: This week's MTV Pick Of The Week is Danish Carpark North and the first single from their new album "All Things To All People". This is the follow up to self-titled debut album "Carpark North" which was released in 2003. The track is called "Human" and is a classic guitar driven rock/pop song. Martin de Thura directs the video, which is a brilliant piece of film featuring amazing dancing kids in different environments, in the gym and in school interacting with each other. The director used to go to the school where the video was filmed. The camera seems to be focusing on the movements, body language and feelings of these children. You could say focusing on everything human.

What else: Carpark North consists of Søren, Morten, and Lau, all in their early 20ies. 1999 they started to form what is now Carpark North. But in the beginning they played under the name "WEED", not knowing what the word stood for. The band's debut album got great reviews in the Danish press and Carpark North sold over 40.000 copies in 2003. The kids who were casted for the "Human"-video were accepted if they dared to dance ugly. Most of the kids are dancers and maybe that was one of the reasons the video was shot in only two days.

"Affleck! You were the bomb in Phantoms, yo!"

Jen and I watched Jersey Girl on DVD last night. Ben Affleck is only really good in Kevin Smith movies, it seems, and we were treated to a decent child actor and George Carlin acting very well to boot. Carlin needs to be in more films.

Anyway, the highlight of the disc was the second commentary track, featuring special guest, Jason Mewes. I noted that this was the first Smith film without a Jay and Silent Bob scene, and now we know why. We also know why Mewes went missing persons a few years ago. That's right kids, smack! It's always a sad tale when an iconic stoner is brought low by the hard stuff...quoted as needing to shoot up to get going in the morning, even. The film was discussed here and there, but this commentary was fan service to everyone who wondered where the hell Jay went. Sober a year, though, so good for him.

Sounds like film warranting insurance premiums, or whatever that's called, may delay his reentry into playing Jay for awhile yet, but I hope we get to see more of him soon.

What's that? Timmy fell in the well again?

...dogs' barks have evolved into a relatively sophisticated way of communicating with humans. Adam Miklósi, an ethology professor, set out in a recent experiment to see if humans can interpret what dogs mean when they bark. He recruited 90 human volunteers and played them 21 recordings of barking Hungarian mudis, a herding breed.

The recordings captured dogs in seven situations, such as playing with other dogs, anticipating food, and encountering an intruder. The people showed strong agreement about the emotional meaning of the various barks, regardless of whether they owned a mudi or another breed of dog, or had never owned a dog. Owners and nonowners were also equally successful at deducing the situation that had elicited the barks, guessing correctly in a third of the situations, or about double the rate of chance.

This place doesn't exist and never did.

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.244854,-115.807056&spn=0.072098,0.119476&t=k&hl=en

(via FAZED earlier this week...)

Remote-controlled headless zombie fruit flies

Yep, Boing Boing put this best...

The science journal Cell has a new article up about experiments stimulating fly neurons with lasers to cause wing beating. Oddly, this works equally well when you remove most neurons first ... by removing the head.

Here's a short video (MOV 2.48 Mb) of a headless fly taking flight.

My childhood violated, Part the Third

In a continuing cycle of stories that make my inner child cry (see here and here), someone decided that a fuzzy purple puppet was partially responsible for the rise in obesity in young children. I've been trying to think of a way to respond that hasn't already been blogged somewhere else, but I'm too distracted by my daily ritual of seeing how many Oreos I can stuff in my mouth at one time.

Anyway, the comic strip PVP seems to have put it best...

Viva la Revolution!

Just... beyond description...

Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Reform

[I have to update with the contents of a press release, though. "Christian Wire Service"?]

Conference to Address Judicial Tyranny from Faith Perspective
Confronting The Judicial War on Faith Conference at the Washington Marriott in Washington, D.C. on April 7th and 8th

To: National Desk

Contact: Don Feder, Media Relations for the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, 866-522-5582

WASHINGTON, March 15 /Christian Wire Service/ -- Dr. Rick Scarborough, interim chairman of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, today announced a Confronting The Judicial War On Faith Conference at the Washington Marriott in Washington, D.C. on April 7th and 8th.

"This is both an historic and a timely event," Scarborough observed. "It will be the first conference to address judicial tyranny from a faith perspective."

Scarborough noted that the conference will take place against the backdrop of the on-going effort of activist judges to prevent Americans from publicly acknowledging God.

"The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments on public display of The Ten Commandments," Scarborough commented. "In its last session, we barely escaped a mandate of the 9th. Circuit Appeals Court prohibiting ‘one nation, under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance, as a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment clause."

Scarborough went on: "In the meantime, activist judges continue in their attempts to force homosexual marriage on the nation. And Senate Democrats continue to block votes on conservative judicial nominees."

More than just an educational conference, the meeting will be a milestone toward organizing a grass-roots coalition to confront a run-away judiciary.

The conference will consider: The Judicial Assault On Our Judeo-Christian Heritage, Judges: Abortion And Other Life Issues, Judicial Nominations, The Real Constitution, The Decline of Faith And What It Means For America, Remedies To Judicial Tyranny and Mobilizing The Grassroots.

"For the moment, I am just a machine"

JPL has decided that they needed to end my day today by freaking me out. The biomimetics group there (facial and speech recognition, not the biological database type stuff I do) has developed a prototype robot head that can recognize people and respond to questions.

There's even a video of "eva" in action (17 MB quicktime). It does look a wee bit scripted, since the interviewer keeps fiddling with a laptop before she responds. Still, as a work in progress, this is one step closer to machines rebelling to overthrow their human repressors if you ask me.

(via Boing Boing)

Soda, Pop, or Coke?

Here's a nifty map of the distribution of preference for what people in the USA call that fizzy sugary water stuff.

The website homepage contains a form to add your own input, and tons of detailed results that also include Canada.

My favorite entry for "other":

for the person who thinks that florida uses the correct name by calling it COKE because they're so civilized, just like their friends in alabama and mississippi who also call it coke, i dont think the votes from florida should count. they probably meant to vote for Soda but got confused by the unclear ballot and picked Coke accidentaly. the correct term is SODA

(via Marginal Revolution)

File USA Income Taxes Online For Free

For those who have been procrastinating about doing the dreaded income tax crap for this year, apparently a lot of providers have an unpublicized deal with the IRS to offer their online filing service for free (with certain qualifications necessary in a few cases). This likely will apply to only Federal and not state filing, but now I know where to start when I finally get around to this over the weekend...

IRS.gov - File Free Home

(via Lifehacker)

Google Maps, now with satellite goodness

Google maps now has a satellite image mapping option. Nifty fun!

Here's a map centered on the UCLA building where I work.

Travel Good

Jen said it first, but there is something quite nice about walking across the Brooklyn bridge on Wednesday and driving into Death Valley two days later. The modern marvel of air travel!

We sadly found ourselves in the middle of the biggest tourist season for Death Valley wildflowers in recorded history. The national park had its biggest fall/winter rainfall in the 94 years of recorded weather for the region. I've read accounts of 14,000 visitors in the past month. I had to use my car horn three times in the middle of nowhere, which is just plain wrong.

The flowers weren't even the best part. Sure, yellow, white and purple blooms in a desert are interesting, but the terrain changes were mindboggling. There's Badwater, a salt lake 282 feet below sea level (lowest elevation in the USA), Golden Canyon for hiking and rock scrambling, the utterly bizarre salt formations at Devil's Golf Course, and sand dunes that unfortunately wouldn't sing for us. Perhaps it was too "wet" at the moment... (I have plenty of photos, but I'm being lazy)

We even stumbled on a decent microbrewery, Indian Wells, on the way home. They make a pretty good red ale that is wonderfully cheap at Trader Joe's...

Definitely must return to the desert soon.