Link Banana

There’s something about this “Anthropomorphic Cannabalism” Flickr set that’s undeniably good.

(via Boing Boing)

If, like me, you’ve always wondered what technological wizardry allows for The Daily Show’s impressive ability to amass clips of political and media foibles, the answer is: very little. An explanation from a former researcher:

It’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era. Some Philips boxes, some Sonys. And because there’s a limited number of remote codes, when a staffer operates one, he has to hold the remote directly against that box’s IR receiver so that the beam doesn’t hit any of the other boxes (i.e., so he’s not inadvertently controlling multiple boxes at once). No joke!

(via Boing Boing)

Though I think giving Nigeria’s active but low-budget film scene an “-ollywood” is tacky, these are some interesting (and graphic) photos of it.

(via Boing Boing)

Jasmina Tešanović was neighbors with the recently apprehended (accused) genocider. Its interesting, but not terribly surprising:

To judge by the chatter on my B92 blog and the phone messages I get from my friends: as I long suspected, “Europe’s Osama bin Laden” and I have been neighbors. We shared the same food, saw the same beggars in downtown Belgrade where he had been hiding all these years, a genocidal butcher disguised as a New Age quack.

A journalist who lives close to me sent me an sms: Karadzic must have been drinking beer with our gypsy neighbor in the street. As we all suspected, or as some of us surely knew: Karadzic was hiding from justice behind our names and our daily lives, using the Serbian population as his living shields.

For a broader perspective on the Karadzic arrest, try this Economist story.

I may have come to expect a broad spectrum of odd behavior from local politicians, but some things still surprise me:

Oklahoma County, Oklahoma Commissioner Brent Rinehart is facing a tough reelection campaign.  He’s been accused of abusing his office for personal gain, and will go on trial in the fall on felony campaign finance charges.  But apparently, this is all a conspiracy of homosexuals, liberal do gooders, and good ol’ boys to force Rinehart out of office.  Rinehart lays out his case in a comic book he’s sending out to voters, which—you may be surprised to learn—he wrote and illustrated himself.

The title link features a few pages, but you can also view the thing in it’s entirety as a PDF.

(via Boing Boing)

Three random things:

• Feist performs a version of “1 2 3 4” — the song made famous by iPod nano ads — on Sesame Street. (via Austin Kleon)
• Chris Blake made a music video showcasing the Google results for “biggest regret.” (via Boing Boing)
  
• The word count of popular songs has increased. It was 176 in the ’60s, 436 last year. The untested consensus (to which I assent) is that it’s mostly due to the increased popularity of rap and hip hop.

Though I question the statistical value of these numbers, Mother Jones’s list of party identification by occupation is full of interesting thoughts. Consider, for example, that 65% of plastic surgeons identified as Republicans, but only 28% of pediatricians.

(via Boing Boing)

A recent study found that an afternoon nap is the best way to prevent you from… taking an afternoon nap? Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like an absurd study:

When the volunteers did nothing, they fell asleep within nine minutes on average when tested at 3:30 in the afternoon. Sleeping late kept people awake only a minute longer on average than did doing nothing. Caffeine worked better, keeping people awake for about 12 minutes longer on average.

But nothing beat a nap. After a 20-minute nap, people nearly doubled the amount of time it took to fall asleep when tested later in the afternoon, indicating that they were no longer sleepy. None of the measures impaired people’s ability to fall asleep at night.

(via Boing Boing)

Calling to mind this story, a British website paid people to stand on the street with “If you ask me for a £5 note you can have it” sandwich boards. They report surprisingly low acceptance of the offer.

(via Boing Boing)

File this one under “surprisingly compelling.” May I recommend the slideshow?

(via Boing Boing)

I’m not sure what makes these so compelling, but they are. Perhaps this is it:

Unlike European anatomical drawings of the time, which tended to depict the corpse as a living thing devoid of pain (and often in some sort of Greek pose), these realistic illustrations show blood and other fluids leaking from subjects with ghastly facial expressions.

(via Boing Boing)

There’s something about these unfinished Egyptian hotels that may be even creepier than abandoned ones.

(via kottke)

Also of note, Disney World’s Ghost Resort.

The artist explains:

Last year I redrew my mother’s entire high school yearbook from 1968—over a thousand heads. Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible.

I’ve published the project as a book called Excelsior 1968, which I debuted at last summer’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. You can buy the book from my new online shop, and you can see entire thing over at Flickr.

(via Boing Boing)

National Geographic’s got some interesting pictures of fascinating animals found in the Antarctic. Just go look at them.

(via Boing Boing)

I’ll leave the explanation to Boing Boing:

German photographers Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta have a show of their extraordinary before-and-after-death photos opening on April 9 at the Wellcome Trust in London. The photos are marvellous and wrenching, the difference between flesh animated and the empty vessel gigantic and unmistakable, even when the before-death shot is of someone terribly ill. Life’s marvellous and inexplicable.

This completely pointless (and if memory serves, illegal), but I found Spock Lincoln rather amusing. Click the title for more.

(via Boing Boing)

This is a pretty interesting little tool. It maps how (geographically) the world is seen by some prominent newspapers and their editors-in-chief.

(via Boing Boing)

Biologically, this isn’t that hard to believe. Socially, it would be difficult at best.

How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child—I am so lucky to have such a loving, supportive wife. I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family.

(via Boing Boing, who followed this with Bad Questions to Ask a Transsexual)

So found Cornell researchers:

This research shows that meaning-based memories are largely responsible for false memories, especially in adult witnesses. Because the ability to extract meaning from experience develops slowly, children are less likely to produce these false memories than adults, and are more likely to give accurate testimony when properly questioned.

(via Boing Boing)

io9 put together an alarmingly uncomprehensive report card for the physics and space movies. It’s still entertaining though.

(via Boing Boing)