I hate films with too many server-side scripts in them (via NTK)

Zeldman > The Andy Kaufman Effect

Rodeohead – a bluegrass medley of Radiohead songs (mp3) (via Adactio)

Onlineblog is made an official part of Guardian Unlimited (and goes all narrow in the process)

Today, the Bush administration followed their warning of possible terrorist attacks on US interests with the arrest of the British Muslim cleric Abu Hamza. It’s as if they sat down with a list of potential terrorist associates who happen to be in the public eye with the aim of determining who they can ‘get’ easily in order to take the heat off them for a while. Hamza possesses just the right kind of bad-guy profile to make the public believe that the coalition are slowly but surely removing the threat of global terrorism. Unfortunately, this will never happen, and I fear that arresting the likes of Hamza will only make the threat worse.

Gene is to Blame for Unruly Hair (my excuse for messy hair, ‘frizzled 6’)

BitTorrent To Release Michael Moore’s New Film Free of Charge

Viral Marketing Blog

The Camera Van (via a Slashdot thread about another, more modern camera van being used in New York)

Divide and Conquer – Why Apple has an iPod Division (I reckon Cringely’s on the ball with this one)

Bush falls off his bicycle (maybe an Al-Qaeda operative disguised as a Ranch labourer loosened the front quick-release)

The bizarre story of the Scottish programmer found dead in his car half a mile away from a box of deadly snakes reads like one of those conundrums popular with secondary school science teachers (in my case Mr Mainwaring, Physics). Here are a few ones I remember:

• A man was found dead in the bottom of a phone box. The only things with him in the phone box (apart from the phone) were a fishing rod and some broken glass. How did he die?
• Every day a man leaves his apartment on the 46th floor and rides the lift down to the first floor to go to work. Every evening at about 6 pm he gets in the lift, takes the lift up to the 38th floor, gets out and walks up the stairs the for the remaing eight floors until he reaches the 46th floor. Why?
• Two people were born within minutes of each other by the same mother, but they weren’t twins. How is this possible?

Fahrenheit 9/11 wins the Palme d’Or

Future for Web Standards Pondered

Michael Moore: The Message or the Money? (probably both I should think)

Can Star Wars: Episode III be saved? (Yes, I know articles discussing/panning the Star Wars prequels are usually as dull as dish water, but this one is excellent)

On Saturday May 22nd 2004, Radio 2 are broadcasting a documentary about Nick Drake entitled Lost Boy – In Search of Nick Drake. Who better, then, to present such a programme, than that most eminent of BBC radio broadcasters and expert on the music of the British singer/songwriter, Brad Pitt.

For beta or for worse?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Movie Blog

Digital Web Magazine Redesign (displaying a refreshing absence of the ubiquitous CSS drop shadow… almost)

Freedom 0 (Mark Pilgrim compares the licenses of Movable Type 3.0 and WordPress)

Astronomers think they have photographed a planet orbiting a distant star

Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut

The official Google Blog

You won’t get very far through your morning intake of weblogs and news sites without reading about the Blogger relaunch. But for all the talented people involved in the re-design and the clear amount of effort that’s gone into it, I’m unimpressed. The problem is that once you strip away the attractive design – the CSS smorgasbord of sliding door tabs, rounded boxes and drop shadows – very little has changed in terms of its user interface.

As a user of Blogger, I appreciated the way in which it made maintaining a web site so much easier; you could just concentrate on your writing rather than having to use HTML and FTP to make date headers and maintain archives. As a free and unique service, I was never going to complain about its regular downtime or the fact that its user interface was merely adequate rather than stunningly elegant and intuitive.

Now, under the mighty wing of Google – with their mastery of functional web interfaces – I expected Blogger to take a similar route towards setting new standards in web application UI design (much like Google has purportedly done with the Gmail service). For me, the fact that Blogger’s user interface remains largely unchanged is a disappointment and if Google wants to continue to own the most popular weblogging tool, I think they need to do much more than this seemingly superficial redesign.

BBC drops the ‘i’ from their web pages

Apple Quicktake 100 (Apple’s first digital camera from 1994. Guess it didn’t take off quite so well as the iPod)

Philip K. Dick’s typewriter and favourite mug (now that’s the perfect novel writing environment)

Named after the novel by Philip K. Dick, Electric Sheep is a screen saver that uses distributed computing (like SETI@Home) to produce beautiful animations known as Sheep. A new sheep is ‘born’ every fifteen minutes and distributed to all the clients running the software. (via Megnut)

Napster UK to be backed by Dixons (hmm… I don’t think iTMS will have anything to worry about when it’s finally launched in the UK)

A Step in the Right Direction (and a damn good read)

Maybe Michael Moore should just forget Disney/Miramax and release Fahrenheit 911 under a Creative Commons License and distribute it using Bittorrent. Maybe I’m on another planet.

• Disney Has Blocked the Distribution of My New Film… by Michael Moore
• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | Disney ‘blocks’ Moore documentary

“640k ought to be enough for anyone” – Bill Gates

DRUMS - In search of a file sharing solution

Apple to kick off WWDC 2004 with a preview of Tiger (probably to be released in the autumn, time to shell out once more)

In keeping with today’s Moon theme, here’s some interesting information I’ve learnt about why the Moon and the Sun always look bigger when they are low in the sky.

I’d never really given it much thought and on the rare occasion that I did, I assumed that it was the result of some kind of distorting effect by the Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, the atmosphere does distort the Sun and Moon slightly, as is evident when the setting Sun appears to bulge slightly and doesn’t appear as a perfect disc. However, this doesn’t explain why the Sun and Moon are so much bigger when they’re hanging low in the sky. The following explanation is much more interesting (although not 100% proven), and reveals the odd way in which we percieve distance and the space around us. One thing is for sure, when the moon low in the sky, it’s no bigger at all.

Imagine a plane in the distance and heading in your direction. At first it’s near the horizon, and because it’s far away, it’s very small. Eventually, it flies directly over-head and when you look up, it’s much bigger because it’s much closer to you. We’re used to things being smaller on the horizon than when they’re directly above us. That makes perfect sense to our brains because, of course, things get smaller the further away they are from us.

The Moon is another object that appears in the sky, but as it’s in orbit around the Earth, it stays a constant distance from us no matter where it is in the sky (more or less). Now this really confuses the brain because the rule of something being smaller when it’s in the distance does not apply here. When we see the Moon across in the distance, we expect it to be smaller… but it isn’t, so therefore it just seems bigger. It’s just one big optical illusion.

When you see a large moon low in the sky, try closing one eye and holding your thumb out at arms length towards it. The diameter of the moon is never greater than about the half the width of your thumbnail.

Just thought I’d share that with you.

Sources:

• The Moon Illusion, An Unsolved Mystery
• New thoughts on understanding the Moon Illusion
• The Moon Illusion, Hendrik Ball

Total eclipse to paint moon red