aphexddb.com

Like a blast of fresh fall air (which still by the way hasn’t happened in St. Louis) this fellow hits what it means to be/live Los Angeles. This is the real deal folks, you should treat every single sentence in his post as gospel because it is. Well done sir! Some choice tidbits:

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you’re fine: that’s just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both.
That’s how we dooz it.

L.A. is the apocalypse: it’s you and a bunch of parking lots. No one’s going to save you; no one’s looking out for you. It’s the only city I know where that’s the explicit premise of living there – that’s the deal you make when you move to L.A.
The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.
It says: no one loves you; you’re the least important person in the room; get over it.
What matters is what you do there.

And the huge irony is that Southern California is where you can actually do what you want to do; you can just relax and be ridiculous. In L.A. you don’t have to be embarrassed by yourself. You’re not driven into a state of endless, vaguely militarized self-justification by your xenophobic neighbors.
You’ve got a surgically pinched, thin Michael Jackson nose? You’ve got a goatee and a trucker hat? You’ve got a million-dollar job and a Bentley? You’ve got to be at work at the local doughnut shop before 6am? Or maybe you’ve got 16 kids and an addiction to Yoo-Hoo – who cares?
It doesn’t matter.

Link

The folks over at autounleashed.com have a super little article on the new Lamborghini concept, the Embolado. The concept was developed by Luca Serafini.

Hot damn, just look at that thing. It’s like a shark meeting a fighter jet.

I don’t know what the deal is with the slew of video posts lately, but they are just oh-so-easy to link. And really cool, like this one. A pinhole camera in an internal combustion engine chamber

News of the Tintin movie sent a torrent of happy boyhood memories through my head. A long spelunking of the internet culminated in a line by line reading of Captain Haddocks’ famous insults. So I finally scratched my WordPress plug-in itch and created the little WordPress 2.3 widget you see on your screen. It displays a random quote by Haddock or any number of characters from the Tintin world.

Download the Tintin-Quotes Widget on the WordPress page! (WordPress 2.3 compatible)

Wow, I can’t believe how bright that explosion is and how far away they must be.

I just finished reading this wonderful article entitled Science and the Islamic World. It examines the once rich Arabic scientific culture (alegrebra, optics, etc.) from antiquity, and how today’s Islamic culture has basically gone backward scientifically.

here are some incredible and very, very sad quotes from the article:

The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC [Organization of the Islamic Conference] countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.

…

Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

…

According to a 2002 United Nations report written by Arab intellectuals and released in Cairo, Egypt, “The entire Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates.” The report adds that in the 1000 years since the reign of the caliph Maa’moun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.

Most everyone has seen Domo-kun on the internets somewhere, but do you know what its all about? He’s the mascot for Japan’s NHK TV station. He pops up on Japanese TV in little stop motion spots. Word.

Man, that show was AWESOME. Thank god my parents let me watch it every single day. Thanks to BoingBoing for the linkage.