Thanks, ken-ichi for originally posting about the Your Face blog.
Thanks to the artist behind this image, Damien Weighill.

link

Ahh… procrastination. Instead of doing my homework, I went to get coffee at the FSM cafe and noticed they have new boxes displaying the front pages of various international newspapers. I liked it, so I used the coffee buzz to write a little Flash app that does the same thing, similar to the displays at the Berkeley I-House Cafe.

Newspaper rotation
Standalone SWF (try full-screen mode in Flash Player)

The data comes from the Newseum.

Nikki Giovanni’s Convocation address:

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CISRO), Australia’s national science agency, has released a fantastic online interactive guide to fly anatomy. I love the magnifying lens, and I really love that the same body part remains highlighted as you switch between specimens, so you can see how different it looks across taxa. Metric tons of fun.

Via the LiveJournal Invertebrates Community

(c) 2006 BBC

What happens when Central American guerillas kidnap you and torture you for months? Why, you design a garden, of course! Briton Tom Hart Dyke and hist partner were hunting orchids in the Panamanian jungle when they were ambushed, accused of being a CIA agents, held in captivity, and threatened with death. As hope diminished, Dyke began composing a garden of fancy, planting all world’s plants he would never get to find in plots he wouldn’t dig.

Then, mysteriously, the pair was released. Since then, Dyke has set to work realizing his World Garden. I heard his story as a radio broadcast on the BBC World Service, and if you can dig up the show (I couldn’t), it’s great. His attitude toward it all is so light, almost glib, it’s hilarious, and heartening. You can read all about him and his garden at BBC.

(c) 2007 R. Stevens

Why do people love zombies so much? I reader of Diesel Sweeties thinks that

the popularity of zombies lies in the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots in western society, and in America in particular. Vampires are the monsters of the upper classes: aristocratic, powerful, and refined. Ghosts are the monsters of the middle class: stationary, repetetive, and jealous of privilege and their peers. Zombies are the teeming, hungry hordes of the poor and working class, locked in a cycle they cannot escape.

In light of the recent zombie marches on campus, I think this is something we need to question. Seriously, some pop culture researchers must have thought about this. And another thing, what category contains zombies, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ninjas, and monkeys? I’m sure there is one, I just can’t name it…

Just saw the RIAA’s top 25 list of universities that have received the most copyright infringement notices, and the MPAA’s version of the same list. An interesting follow-up to the stern warning from Berkeley the student body received a week back.

My alma mater doesn’t make the list, though the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (where I spent much of my middle/high school years) is way up there. Go Vols?

Berkeley isn’t even on the RIAA’s target list, though it does straggle in at #25 on the MPAA list (Stanford barely edges out UCB with 7 more notices). It is not indicative of “which institutions are the worst infringers”, though. Just the ones that have been caught the most, I suppose.

Patrick Blanc overgrows the vertical surfaces of buildings in the most beautiful way. What he creates is far away from any fancy horticultural show, his Vertical Garden could rather be called eco-art, or greener architecture consisting of a variety of plants trailing gently up any interior or outside wall. Imagine the Hanging Gardens of ancient Babylon but this time on modern concrete buildings.

Read the rest of the article at Ping. I’d love to see some of these on campus. Beats the pants off ivy. Nothing is more infuriating than ivy wearing pants…

Via The Affected Provincial’s Almanack

Splitter Hack

Originally uploaded by kaysov.

Each one of us had windows startup music blare in public places (like libraries) at least once or twice. Here’s a little hack to avoid it. Just keep a headphone jack splitter always plugged in.