Basically just add this to the end of the video URL:
#t=0m56sSimple and awesome.
Those aren't random letters and numbers. Put the minute number before the letter 'm' and the seconds number before the letter 's' to direct people to the portion of the video you desire.
Just in time for Halloween comes Disaster Girl. Disaster Girl is a picture posted on JPG magazine by David Roth, which shows a mildly disheveled little girl looking mischeviously at the cameraman while Fire Engine 38 attempts to control a suburban house structure fire in the background. David tags it, "She's just an innocent bystander. Or is she?"
Buzzfeed ran with the idea and started a photoshop contest. My favorite ones are the subtle jobs that add that "Where-is-Waldo" aspect to the silly picture. Someone has gone and animated it. Meme-tastic.
DNA sequences, medical records, and other personal information with the research community and the general public.
Kongregate is a hub of gamers and gaming online. It includes some brilliant ideas that differentiate it from other gaming websites: it allows you to gain levels by accumulating points! To accumulate points, you have to be active in the Kongregate community, either by playing games and completing achievements, rating games, developing and uploading games or reviewing games. It's a ton of fun and there are thousands (literally) of free flash games rounded on this site. Hours of fun when you have nothing better to do :)
Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks is a self-explanatory webpage by Lore Sjöberg. It's short and sweet. Here are two: Footprints in the Sand
Bonus: Waste Land Limericks.
Recurring Science Misconceptions in K-12 Textbooks is a poorly laid out, but wonderfully written site about how all the things you learned in science grade school are wrong. Including "facts" about space gravity, the shape of rain drops, and sound.
I'd Like To Have Been In That Meeting... Harry Potter is a 3-minutes and 20-seconds long comedy video spoofing Harry Potter by the The Dawson Bros. It was animated by Richard Whitelock and voiced by Dan Benoliel and Jonathan Donahoe. It's magic.
Drunk Pumpkins is a silly collection of jack-o-lantern pictures on Flickr and Buzzfeed.
Childish? Yes.
But so's your face.
I'm posting this more for completeness, as promised earlier. A Better Mousetrap 2008 is an update on the same eponymous episode of PRI's This American Life (TAL) which aired in 2006. This is episode # 366, aired on October 10th, and the small economy bit is tacked on at the end. Meh.
Alex Blumberg returns (in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast) with the latest in the financial crisis.
[Edit: "NPR's This American Life (TAL)" changed to "PRI's This American Life (TAL)"]
The Term Paper Artist is an article by professional term-paper-mill writer, Nick Mamatas, about the seedy underbelly of pseudo-academia. He dishes on who buys his services, explains how he slogs through boring papers, and waxes philosophical on why students need his services in the first place.
Enjoy the exerpts:
"In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college. They must buy model papers simply because they do not understand what a term paper is, much less anything going on in their assignments.
...
The second type of client is the one-timer. A chemistry major trapped in a poetry class thanks to the vagaries of schedule and distribution requirements, or worse, the poet trapped in a chemistry class. These clients were generally lost and really did simply need a decent summary of their class readings — I once boiled the 1000-page New Testament Theology by Donald Guthrie into a 30-page précis over the course of a weekend for a quick $600.
... The third group is perhaps the most tragic: They are well-educated professionals who simply lack English-language skills. Often they come from the former Soviet Union, and in their home countries were engineers, medical professionals, and scientists. In the United States, they drive cabs and have to pretend to care about "Gothicism" in "A Rose For Emily" for the sake of another degree. For the most part, these clients actually send in their own papers and they get an edit from a native speaker.
...
The secret to the gig is to amuse yourself. I have to, really, as most paper topics are deadly boring. Once, I was asked to summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three). Then there was this assignment for a composition class: six pages on why "apples [the fruit] are the best." You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers — several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups....
I know why students don't understand thesis statements, argumentative writing, or proper citations.
It's because students have never read term papers.
Imagine trying to write a novel, for a grade, under a tight deadline, without ever having read a novel. Instead, you meet once or twice a week with someone who is an expert in describing what novels are like."
Touché. It's a pretty interesting read, which makes me believe again the power of daily writing. Even if all you write is crap. In conclusion, paper-buying is a land of contrasts.
Wiki Sky is an online, detailed sky map. They have a tutorial on how to use the zany buttons.
Currently they only provide the map of the space objects located outside of our Solar System. The map is generated automatically using their database with the positions and basic characteristics of space objects.
In oder words: blah blah blah, physics nerd-ery, blah blah blah, outer space geekery.
"The Obama campaign is famous for its ground game. The question is, does it have a post-game ground game? It's time to consider what happens if Obama goes into the election with an insurmountable lead in the polls, and ends up losing thanks to manufactured chaos at the booth."
7 Spectacularly Skilled High-Speed Photographers is an article on the Web Urbanist. It showcases the work of Johnny Chung Lee, Hannoc, Jasper Nance, Boris Bos, Peter Wienerroither, Martin Waugh, and Stefan.This is probably what Superman sees every day.
Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson—the two guys who reported our Giant Pool of Money episode—are back, in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast. They'll explain what happened this week, including what regulators could've done to prevent this financial crisis from happening in the first place. You can learn more about the daily ins and outs and join the discussion on the Planet Money blog.They break it down pretty well. Stay tuned for the third part which aired Friday, Oct. 10th when it becomes available online.
Digsby...Overall, B+"
(Guest written by Jsos, forwarded from Felicia D.)
The Financial Crisis, as Explained to My Fourteen-Year-Old Sister is an article on The Bygone Bureau by economist and Magic-the-Gathering-nerd, Kevin Nguyen. 
Pixel Girl Presents is an award-winning site where you can download wallpapers and icons. They have Mac OS X and XP icons, Icontainer iconsets, desktop images, as well as tutorials, articles and links.
(From Guy)
This is currently at the top of most favorited article on Metafilter.
Zeer is an online food consumer guide. Not a restaurant-food guide, but a food-that-you-find-while-grocery-shopping guide. 
The Money Meltdown (TMM) is a site that explains everything you need to know about the U. S. money crisis of 2007 through ?.
The Giant Pool of Money is a radio episode (#355) of NPR's This American Life, where Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson explain the giant pool of money, U.S. housing crisis, and why we're in such a poor financial state."What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money."I loved this episode, mostly because I don't know anything about money. This episode broke down the financial crisis in easy-to understand chunks and charming (or sad) vignettes. If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, or are an over-achiever, check out the transcript.
"Glen had five cars, a 1.5 million dollar vacation house in Connecticut, and penthouse that he rented in Manhattan. And he made all this money making very large loans to very poor people with bad credit." Glen said:
"We rolled up to Marquee at midnight with a line, 500 people deep out front. Walk right up to the door: Give me my table. Sitting next to Tara Reid and a couple of her friends. Christina Aguilera was doing some, I’m-Christina-Aguilera-and-I’m-gonna-get-up-and-sing kind of thing. Who else was there? Cuba Gooding and that kid from Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive. What was that kids name? Fabian Barabia? We ordered 3, 4 bottles of Cristal at $1000 per bottle. They bring it out, you know hey're walking through the crowd, they're holding the bottles over their heads. There's fire crackers , sparklers. You know, the little cocktail waitresses. You know so you order 3 or 4 bottles of those and they’re walking through the crowd and everyone’s like: Whoa, who's the cool guys? We were the cool guys. They gave me the black card with my name on it. There’s probably 10 in existence. You know? And that meant that I spent way too much money there...Wow.
We looked at loans. These people didn't have a pot to piss in. They can barely make a car payment and we're giving them a 300, 400 thousand dollar house."
YouTomb is a site by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation."We created Scrapblog because we wanted to go beyond sharing our photos and videos online. We made Scrapblog drag-and-drop-easy so that everyone can tell their stories and create beautiful multimedia scrapbooks.(From Guy)
Our goal is to enable everyday people to express themselves online in a creative way. We've been developing Scrapblog for over two years. However, what you see online today is only the beginning."
Roflrazzi is the latest lolz-themed website by the I Can Has Cheezburger (ICHC) people, world record-holders in riding the 15-minutes-of-net-fame through to eternity. Basically it's a new lolz celebrity macros site. Bold words + familiar scenes = win.
Posts
All Comments
