Wirestorm

Xeni Jardin:

What is the Venice Project? Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström built it with some of that $2.6 billion from selling Skype to eBay. Friis (who, by the way, is rather a babe) explains on his blog:

It’s simple, really — we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!

Link 1 (from October, when a private alphabetawhatever testing phase was live), Link 2 (from December, now that a larger beta has launched, with about 6,000 participants). Reuters item: Link. You can apply to participate in the beta here.

Xeni Jardin:

Contains three seconds of Oscar-worthy brilliance. Sadie, three two (!) years old, is interrupted in the middle of a Christmas-themed book report. Former Seinfeld has-beens, take note: this is how you deal with hecklers, though her response only works if you're *not* a robot. Link (Thanks, Susannah, and Sadie's mom!)

Filed under: Robots

We've seen mechanical devices creep through the inside of intestines, huge mounds of dirt, and even through the San Francisco Bay, but now a British deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV) is getting set to probe the depths of Antarctica. In hopes of uncovering more about the effects of glaciers on the ocean floor, as well as details about the living creatures that inhabit said areas, UK scientists are carting the machine aboard the RSS James Clark Ross as they head for the Marguerite Bay area on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The robot, dubbed Isis, will spend time on its inaugural January mission combing the seabed and channeling live video and pictures back to its captains via the built-in cameras, lights, sonars for acoustic navigation / imaging, and two remotely-controlled manipulator arms. Once the bot gets dried off (and thawed out) from its arctic expedition, the next tour of duty is already lined up, as Isis will head off to the Portuguese coast to do a bit more sightseeing. Of course, if you're interested in taking the £4.5 million ($8.81 million) creature out for a mission you deem worthwhile, it should be available for deep-pocketed renters soon after.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

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Filed under: Transportation

Look, we don't know the where, we don't know the when, and we sure as hell don't know the why, but there's no way that's going to stop us from getting a few chuckles in at Mr. Segway Crusader's expense.

Ryan: "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, et Segway. Amen." or, "O blessed art thou Segway firmware upgrade, which keeps thyself upright."
Paul: "Orlando Bloom's got nothing on this"
Evan: "Wilford Brimley found out a little too late that habitual consumption of Quaker Oats can lead to insanity."
Chris: "With parallel parking in 13th-century Bethlehem virtually impossible to find, Bill found his handicapped permit priceless."
Conrad: "Maximus Decimus Meridius Segwius."

[Via Fark]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

David Pescovitz:
Artist Cali Rezo's portraits are not digitally-manipulated photographs but rather tablet/pen illustrations drawn from reference photos. Amazing. From the "How do I work" section of her mostly-French language site:

I work with a tablet and a pen directly on the computer. Besides, my crafting is quiet "traditionnal":

I use photographics references (I shoot everything that moves… and everything that does not also, haha !). I start with a sketch (with my electronic pen, huh, not on paper, no, no, no !)( and I don't draw ON the photo). Then I paint the light and dark flat tints. And I tune the color tints and the finess of the strokes.

Link (via Drawn!)

Xeni Jardin:

Blogger and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Violet Blue shares this roundup of memorable moments in memehood with BoingBoing readers. Full text follows after the jump.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

The Top Ten Sex Memes of 2006
Violet Blue

Memes snake around and wind up on everyone's blogs, sites, get injected into inboxes and become just generally known by most without widespread recognition from a news or mainstream media site. They propagate, survive, spread and mutate, through a user-supported natural selection process. Typically — and especially with sex memes — they're too scary or NSFW to get any official traffic. And yet everyone finds out about them, and are fascinated for at least one solid minute. But the best part of sex memes, besides the weirdness and snarky wrong ironic humor? The gap between perception and reality is often a goatse-like chasm…

10. Celebrity Cooch Flash-A-Palooza
I'm just relieved that leatherface Joan Rivers isn't on the cooch-flashing bandwagon this year, but if trends continue through 2007, we'll be seeing that (no doubt) surgical wonder in no time. Pretending to flash your pantyless pundenda was the new black for starlets 85 lbs. and above and they made the webrounds like a coke-encrusted credit card in the Marmont bathroom. On the list: Pam, Paris, Britney (don't forget the "sex tape" — *yawn*), Lindsay… even D-list porn stars like Mary Carey gave it a try (and gets a double "D" for effort).

9. Boobs in a Box
Make him open the box. It came in late as a year-end meme entry, but the popularity of MC Slutsky's grrly nerdcore response to SNL's "Dick in a Box" (a la "Lazy Sunday") had the balls to stand firm and bust moves all over Timberlake's errant Yule log. Seriously, that shit really put my tits in a box.

8. George Bush Butt Plug
If I had a butt plug for every time this got sent to me, I'd have like five thousand pounds of butt plug in my hizzouse. A butt plug. In the shape of George W. Bush. Ha. Sigh.

7. Pinky Violence
Posted and re-posted in a variety of places, Pinky Violence videos were the explicit retro video snips of the moment when first discovered on video sharing sites. Featuring lots of disturbing sex and violence scenes, the ones most noticed focused on a female character with great tattoos and mad killing skills as hot-babe-with gun/sword, usually avenging her own (graphically depicted) rape.

6. Sex and Google Trends; Sex and Google Patents
Everyone did it with lurid fascination, then forgot. When Google's search) Trends tool was released, you can bet what people were most compelled to search for (after their sites and names, of course) — sex, anal, oral and otherwise. Same went for the newly released Google Patents, because Google just wouldn't be fun unless you could call up a n Anal Orgasm Monitor or Vibrating Tampon patent to pass those long afternoons spent in the cube farm…

5. The 500 Person Japanese Orgy
This one still surfaces on sex blogs around the world, to much curious explanation and bizarre conjecture. And it should — these explicit videos of a room full of (500?) Japanese women and men all neatly arranged in Yoga-class rows, having sex like no one else is in the room are… downright compelling, and confusing for a variety of reasons. So many questions. So much high-pitched squealing. So few answers. March of the Penguins, indeed.

4. The Seattle Craigslist Experiment Scandal
Griefers, unite — Jason Fortuny really did spoof a hardcore submissive ad on Craigslist for the sport of exposing every single person who responded to public scrutiny (and got at least one Microsoft employee in hot water), and it was all over the 'spheres, from Metblogs Seattle to the Bondage.com forums. The NYT never picked it up — likely because of the complex and explicit nature of the sexual content, but it spawned copycat griefer Michael Crook, who is still making bogus DMCA claims and drawing the EFF's ire.

3. A Series of (Fallopian) Tubes
Senator Stevens gave us the tubes with which we understand the Interwebs; a visit to this year's Hackers On Planet Earth conference gave us the truest form of tube-wrangling that only a hacker could inspire: the female physiological callback to one senator's obsession with tubeage. Then, of course, came the YouTube video.

2. Phonecam Subway Masturbator
As if some guy jacking off in your face on the subway wouldn't put any girl's tits in a box, this was the year public transit dick-waggers got a taste of the information age, yo. The lesson was this: wank at me, and I will make you a star, the star of douchebaglandia (read: I'll put your flappy bits on Flickr). What was worse, the cock-waggling dude in question only got two years' probation for his nonconsensual public sex acts, and claimed that his phonecam-snapping victim would "probably want to go out with me."

1. Let's Sexy Engrish
Some sites claimed it was a video of "prostitute lessons", others thought it was a serious educational video — while the rest of us just took it all in, sexy school settings, mangled adult engrish… the whole wonderful, enunciational-porn video. Boing Boing readers had a comment orgy, and the video was watched by many.

Horrifying bonus meme: Actual tentacle porn.
This was going to be a "number #11" on the list but like the actual goatse, the links are almost too awful to follow. But at your own extreme risk: this year saw a rising trend of passing (and surfacing) links to pages depicting Asian-style tentacle porn staged in real-life scenarios. (Following links lead to writeups on iron-stomached sex blog, Fleshbot.) Hot Octopus Love still gets tons of reposts, while other scary sites (like Genki Genki) increasingly have images snagged and reposted on shock-value blogs. Yikes, and…. ew.

David Pescovitz:

Located at CERN in Switzerland, this superconducting magnet will generate the magnetic field for a particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider, the shiny new particle accelerator slated to switch on next November. Among other experiments, the Collider may enable scientists to finally observe the Higgs boson, aka the "God Particle," the long-theorized particle thought to give all other particles their masses.

Link (via Scientific American)

Previously on BB:
• QTVR of Large Hadron Collider at CERN Link
• Betting on the big questions of physics Link
• Math proves you can stop table-wobbling by rotating Link
• Antihydrogen created at CERN Link

Xeni Jardin:
Snip from New York Times article by Martin Fackler on the downsides of extreme inbreeding of pets in Japan:

Rare dogs are highly prized here, and can set buyers back more than $10,000. But the real problem is what often arrives in the same litter: genetically defective sister and brother puppies born with missing paws or faces lacking eyes and a nose.

There have been dogs with brain disorders so severe that they spent all day running in circles, and others with bones so frail they dissolved in their bodies. Many carry hidden diseases that crop up years later, veterinarians and breeders say.

reg-free Link to story. Above, a mutant Japanese chihuahua bred so that its fur will have a blue hue. Eh, whatever. But how do they taste?

Mark Frauenfelder:

Sanjay Patel, (check out his doodles!) an animator at Pixar, sent me his delightful illustrated book, The Little Book of Hindu Deities. His style is a little Mary Blair, a little UPA, and thoroughly modern. This is my first introduction to the pantheon of Hindu deities, and Patel's descriptions of the cast of characters, which usually include illuminating anecdotes, are wonderful. It's a shame most schools in the United States skip over the Hindu gods when they teach mythology. What a terrific textbook this would be. Link

Filed under: Transportation

Our view has always been, if you aren't doing your best to save on gas for monetary and / or environmentalist purposes, you might as well go the other way and burn as much of the dang stuff as you can. Along those lines, and also adhering to the lines of "holy frick" and "so sweet," is Ken Prather's 1962 Volkswagen Bus, which features a mid-engine 355 small-block and a 7-inch chop job, after serving as a hippie van in a former life. This once mini-RV has been reduced to a two-seat hot rod monstrosity, complete with a steel rollcage, drag seats and a VW flower vase made of billet aluminum. Suicide doors, 10 mpg, drag parachute — count us in. Eat our dust, Mystery Mobile.

[Via Autoblog]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!