Yes, it’s CSS naked day! Actually, it’s CSS naked 48 hours so that it overlaps with every timezone.
Anyway, it’s a little thing to promote web standards or some such hoo-ha, and it sounded like fun. So TBOTCOTW will look like 1996 for the next couple of days.
Popularity: 48% [?]
One of the dumbest lack-of-context freak-outs ever. At least she took down the picture of Balko labeled “pig/Antichrist.”
Her friend FloraFauna in the comments doesn’t seem to be much brighter… best case is that she’s being completely nonsensical. Because implying that the guy who’s done so much on the Corey Maye case is lacking in humanity, is, to put it mildly, a touch unreasonable.
Popularity: 46% [?]
Hard to believe that a guy with this kind of Internet usage has a girlfriend, but based on the dropoff on February 14th I think he does.
Either that or he spent Valentine’s Day quietly crying himself to sleep after a bath and a whole box of Russel Stover’s.
Popularity: 12% [?]
When I first saw the story about the 1860 audio recording on Reddit I thought it was kinda silly… why would someone build a recording device when there was no complimentary gadget to play back the sound? But after I thought about it it seemed like a pretty difficult chicken and egg problem: How do you either invent a recording device without first knowing how to read the output or build a phonograph without knowing what the input looks like?
Turns out that wasn’t the issue. The phonautograph was never meant to be played back at all, it was just supposed to create visual interpretation of sounds. That makes the work these researchers did even more remarkable.
It also reminded me of an episode of MythBusters I recently saw. In it they busted a myth that sound could have been inadvertently recorded onto pottery that was decorated by dragging a piece of straw across it’s surface (the theory was that the straw could act like a recording stylus, vibrating to the sound and leaving the audio info in the groove). They were unable to recover any sounds using professional audio recovery tools; I’d be interested in seeing if the phonauthograph scientists could find anything. They had to develop some sophisticated new tools to extract audio from visual images and I wonder if those would work better than the Mythbuster’s glass stylus.
Popularity: 13% [?]
But still pretty damn stupid. Enjoy your hour of darkness, ecofreaks.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Did you know that the Soup Dragons’ song “I’m Free” is a cover of the 1965 Rolling Stones’ track off December’s Children (And Everybody’s)? Me neither, even though both were on my iPod.
Hell, based on the cover version I never would have guessed it was written by Jagger and Richards, and I initially thought the Wikipedia had made a mistake (it wouldn’t be the first time). But after listening to both… yep, they’re the same song.
Popularity: 5% [?]
You know, I usually find wine and food criticism a bit boring, but any wine critic who recommends drinking beer when it’s really hot and thinks that a $28 bottle of wine is “egregiously overpriced” is alright by me.
Popularity: 4% [?]
