Been busy and the bookmarks have been piling up so this is a somewhat larger collection and all over the place at that.

First, Space & Science stuff:
• June 30 to be 1 second longer
• Mars Reality Show Could Fund Manned Colony by 2023
• How Humans Could Get to Mars in Weeks, Rather than Months
• BBC’s Space Travel Guide
• Researchers Test Infinite-Capacity Wireless Connection

Internet/Computers stuff:
• Pre-computer chess algorithm by Alan Turing goes up against Grandmaster Kasparov
• We know what your doing: a social networking privacy experiment
• Because of Google Ads, TV Tropes Deletes Every Rape Trope
• List of Worthwhile DOS Games

Sports!
• London’s wildly over-budget Olympics (101% over and counting)
• The US Olympic running team’s upcoming coin toss decision its 387-word procedure

And other things of very different tones (sorry)
• More than 200 church leaders across the US now say they no longer believe in God
• Conservative Rabbis Approve Gay Marriage
• Girl Found Alive In Dead Mom’s Arms After Tornado Throws Them From Home
• Journalist Natasha Smith’s account of being sexually attacked in Cairo
• Fan gets kicked out of Kenny Chesney concert for looking too much like Kenny Chesney
• Skater Punk Gets Stuck in Soda Machine, Needs Jaws of Life Rescue
• Swedish police appeal for help to find girl’s missing teddy
• Warren Ellis on the fiction of money
• Video: Nick Offerman Read Tweets from Young Female Celebrities
• Videos: 10 Essential Dirty Phrases in Sign Language
• Announced! The Big Lebowski 2: The Dude Goes To Washington
• Letters of Note: Helen Keller’s letter to Mark Twain in lieu of being unable to attend a Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind conference

It’s only taken five years since the release of Team Fortress 2 and the debut of their awesome “Meet the…” promo shorts, but “Meet the Pyro” has finally been released and it is oh so darkly funny.

Photos of The Statue of Liberty’s construction in Paris

• Dumbstrucking on so many levels: Under congressional questioning the DEA’s Administrator doesn’t know if meth and heroin is more harmful than marijuana
• Convict testifies: Solitary confinement ‘is driving men insane’
• Supreme Court awesomely rules: ‘Fuck it, swearing on TV fine by us’ (essentially)
• Game designer Kim Swift on why Portal is a toy and toys are awesome
• Gaming distraction of the day: Gare
• The American Swedish Institute offers it’s Twitter to Stephen Colbert
• Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Numbers: The People at the Center of the Universe
• Scientists Block Excess Aggression in Mice (haven’t they seen Serenity?!)
• How to blow $6 billion on a tech project
• Warsaw museum digitally recreated the destroyed city during WWII
• Photos: Recovering from disaster
• Video: Game of Thrones political attack ads are odd (but funny)

Also, making Easter Island moai heads “walk”.

• Backstage gossip from touring Guns N Roses roadies
• The Necronomicon-Thin Crust pizza (I like to call it a Necronominom)
• How a Boiled squid inseminated a woman’s mouth
• Stoya on the difference between a prostitute and a porn actress
• Yanis Varoufakis on becoming Valve’s economist-in-residence for their virtual economies
• Why smart people can be so dumb
• Is Creativity Sexy? The Evolutionary Advantages of Artistic Thinking
• Singularity University Rule #1: The best way to predict the future is to invent it
• Lifehacker’s guide on how to tie your running shoes
• New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza on reporting and how Twitter has fostered a crisis in political journalism
• These are the books that will make you totally undateable
  

  “Eat Pray Love. Elizabeth Gilbert isn’t a bad person, but if this book is your choice, you are.”

• Interesting discussion on How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
  

  “Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught.”

• A visual summary of Michael Fassbender’s role in Prometheus
• Oh Christ, I thought I could avoid posting a “call me maybe” cover thing, but this MC Chris version with bath salts zombies is catchy.
• Also, Star Wars subtitled with existential philosophy

And for your funny late show segment of the day, here’s 30 Rock’s nice guy Jack McBrayer and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog visiting the Weiner Circle, Chicago’s infamously hostile hot dog stand.

• The only honest revenue based sites out there are porn
• Scientists Closer than Ever to Discovering Higgs Particle
• Is Earth at an Environmental Tipping Point?
• Inside the Troubled ‘World War Z’ Production
• The heartwarming story behind the ugliest man on YouTube
• It’s Gettin’ Hard Out There For A Troll
• “I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for 10 years”
• ‘Game of Thrones’ Director Explains All the Rampant Nudity
• Brain Scans Show Specific Neuronal Response to Junk Food When Sleep-Restricted

Also, Conan teaching the blues to school kids:

Backpedaling slightly after having mostly posted article links during the last week or so. Inversely, its mostly video content at the moment, so here’s three more random lots of them.

First is fake supercut/recut trailer for “Chuck Norris: The Movie”.

Next, a rather smart fellas re-redition of the original Super Mario Bros. game in 3D:

And lastly, I’ve had no idea how to post this, but essentially, it’s like the many, many, many hidden camera gotcha! videos that’s all over youtube at the moment, but the appeal to this humourous video is that it’s really the lovely ‘host/prankster’ who is the most awkward subject as he tries to use Blink-182 lyrics as pick-up lines.

Shit, guess this is what happens when I don’t update regularly; all the left over tabs and bookmarks get to be so numerous, they have to be herded into a single, over-sized aggregated post. My bad. Good stuff to read and check out though. Honest.

• Boston teacher’s incredible speech to graduating class: ‘You are NOT special’ (brilliance)
  

  In a moment of pure untamed brilliance English teacher David McCullough went off on the graduating class of 2012 at Wellesley High, critiquing modern parenting techniques by saying that children are “pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble wrapped… nudged, cajoled, wheedled .. feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie.”
  (transcript here and video here)

• Being the ‘good’ kind of narcissist
• P-p-p pick up a perverted penguin
  

  Newly discovered documents from Captain Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic have revealed their shock at the “astonishing depravity” and sexual habits of the Adelie penguins they encountered around the South Pole.

• Scientists to Use Venus Transit to Hone Alien Planet Search Techniques
  Plus: video observations from the SDO and collected photos on the Big Picture.
• Toward a Dissident Architecture?
  

  The question posed by Wang’s Pritzker selection could be articulated like this: If you provide a particularly humane or humanist built environment within the context of occasionally inhumane political or economic conditions, to what extent are you reinforcing or resisting those conditions? Are you offering a tangible alternative or a mere respite?

• The Pirate Bay evades ISP blockade with IPv6, can do it 18 quintillion more times
• How search engines will develop sentient responses?
• Radiolab: The Art and Science of Digital Shamanism
• Why Great Television Is More Like A Novel Than A Play
  

  Why do still watch plays by Euripides, born some 2,500 years ago, or Shakespeare, who is nearly 450 years old? Writer orthodoxy says it’s because the fundamental rules for drama have never changed, since they are eternal, rooted in human nature.

• Why Americans See Racism Where The French See No Problem
• Wes Anderson: Whimsical Like a Fox
  See also: his collaborator’s radio interview on how he soundtracks his movies.
• Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration

Finally, was pointed to an upcoming Ubisoft game titled “Watch Dogs”. Not much details have been released yet, but based on this E3 trailer, it looks to be one of those rare high concept, modernist thinking games that only get produced once in a blue moon. Plus the trailer itself is a magnificently designed video.

• Game to look forward to: South Park RPG Is Hilariously Inappropriate Fun
• Want to go to place: An abandoned French subway station was turned into the set of Prometheus
• World of Quantum Mechanics May Govern Life
• Ex-Spy Telescope’s New Identity as a Space Investigator
• How the internet killed porn
• Fabulous, Feminist Porn
• The Huffington Post secretly hosts entire vertical dedicated to Sideboob

The Ron Swanson Appreciation Society

Did You Know Gaming

Nicholas Cage Faces Off

Also: As Outras Faces de Nicolas Cage [facebook]

Made me realise I haven’t played an RTS in a long time… might still be a while, but this video sure helps leaving me wanting.