It was bad enough when toads around the world were declining in numbers.
Now they’re exploding?
Well, at least we may have finally figured out why they’ve been declining in recent years.
Day: October 8, 2005
Linkpharm:
- From Invisbile City, Semapedia:
Using Semacode Nodes, real-world objects such as a museum, a statue or anything that exists in the real-world and which happens to have a Wikipedia.org article written will be tagged with their according Wikipedia article URL.
In theory, I think it’s a pretty interesting idea. In practice…well, I’m sure results will vary, but right now it looks mostly like pieces of printer paper taped to buildings and statues, where they probably won’t survive a light rain or heavy wind, if they aren’t taken down almost immediately by the people who own those buildings and statues.
- From Backwards City, a new law in Indiana that would require marriage as a legal condition of motherhood and the Bible as the well kinda-sorta-maybe true word of God
- From Gawker, the frightening prospect of Amy Sedaris as the voice of a talking penis and proof there are worse places to live
- From Boing Boing, guided urban and rural tours run by role-playing game designers, roleplaying games as socializing tools, some rather anti-social honeybees, smart spacecraft skinpublic domain books read aloud, and the possibility that a world of robot pirates may not be too far off.
- From Waxy Links, a couple of music links with Van Morrison’s Contractual Obligation Album and the party party, where you’ll find mp3 mashups of George W. Bush singing hits like “White Lines” by Grandmaster Flash and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” by U2.1
- From Maximum Verbosity, an unfinished time machine for sale
- From Bookslut, the ten stupidest utopias, books based on video games (which I think I was hitherto unaware existed), some great questions and answers with Bill Watterson, and the national poetry map
- From Warren Ellis, brothers fined for keeping ‘pet ghost’2 and dolphins taught to sing the Batman theme. On the off chance that these are the same ones thought to have been let loose by Hurrican Katrina3, maybe they tried to burn down stately Wayne Manor.
- From William Gibson a 1946 film on despotism. See how many parallels you can find to today’s America! Or let someone else do it for you. (Note, I couldn’t get that second clip to play, but then again, Real Player does suck.)
- From Bruce Sterling, news of a virus that disrupts visits to pornographic websites by displaying messages from the Koran
- From the Mumpsimus, free new books
- From Mark Evanier, some of Tom Lehrer’s earliest works
- From Reuters Oddly Enough, Bruce Lee as symbol of unity in Bosnian town and psychopaths as the best finanacial traders
- And from I really don’t remember where, Is Gwyneth Paltrow a Genius?, exploring the mathematics of the new movie Proof, and Islam in Sci-fi Literature
1If you really like this sort of thing, there’s also Dictionaraoke.
2I worry this is just a misprint and that it was actually a pet goat. Of course, there’s probably a George W. Bush joke in that somewhere…
3Turns out, that story might not have been true after all.