New term

I've learned a new term: technical death metal. That's technical in the sense of technical rock climbing, although I assume not knowing one's technique in technical death metal is less likely to lead to a plunging death than in technical rock climbing. I get the impression these bands are the Philip Glass's of death metal.

Plunging Death would be a great name for any death metal band, technical or not.

Interesting video hosting site

This is an interesting idea: a video hosting web site (like Youtube) that allows the viewing community to provide language translation overlays for each video. Everything you need to do the translation is provided on the web site, so you don't need to provide any software on your end.

Here's an example: the Monju sodium spill video that was recently released by Wikileaks:



Some of the translations whiz by at a fair clip (matching the length of time the original Japanese text showed on the screen), so you'll probably need to keep hitting pause.

I wonder how they stop the likes of Helen Marsh:

Tom Cruise

Here's the original:



Here's the parody:

Feh - too late

Based on a discussion of Wikipedia with some folks, I just checked out whether citationneeded.com was taken. Of course it was. The site even has a snarky bit of CSS to add to your Firefox userContent.css file to remove those offending words from Wikipedia.

This I Believe

NPR has an online kit to help you produce essays for their This I Believe series. I always thought the whole idea was kind of uninteresting and a pretty good example of what was wrong with public radio in the US (my fantasy public radio station simply rebroadcasts the BBC World Service 24 hours a day) but now I think they may be on to sometime. Here's my contribution:

The geniuses responsible for the fully edge-sealed clamshell packaging of consumer devices should be brought to the Apple campus, nailed to the wall of the packaging group's office and made to watch until they get it. This I Believe.

Time sink

Right now I have 18 tabs open in Safari, each one a link sent in my direction by my current obsession: BLDGBLOG. If you have an interest in architecture and a few weeks to spare, I couldn't think of a better way of spending it than reading BLDGBLOG.

Oh look: a new post! Need more input, Stephanie!