some words to not

laith bahrani's amazing animation music video to radiohead's 'creep' reminds me why i decided to study animation, and how much you can get out of this genre with just one artist and lots of dedication.

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i'm traveling for a while to a place where beer is cheaper than water and another one where the vegetables are really fresh.

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cute video that made me laugh. and remember - you heard it here first.

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there's nothing merchandise-proof in the u.s - not the police, not the subway, certainly not wars. hell not even full-blown national disasters.

but this is even further out there - people are showing their pride in losing the elections. blue state pride merchandising is advertised all over the pinko web.

what's next? 'i got syphilis' baseball caps?

unrelated: a blog entry here is #1 hit for 'MIT geeks'. strange.

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a friend of a friend, yael berda, will be coming to cambridge tonight and i convinced her to give a short talk at m.i.t about political dissent and non-violence.

it's tomorrow at 4:30 in the media lab building (room 235), and i would love to see you there.

she's got quite a track record and you can read all about the details of the talk here.

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added a favicon to my blog. since it's a png file, though, i think it won't work with internet explorer on windows.

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three of the six application updates in today's os x 10.3.7 are improvements to make 'world of warcraft' more playable.

guess it's an important game.

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at first it's embarassing, but once you let your ego drop a little, there's a lot of pride in being that random weird guy that makes people's christmas shopping walk or subway ride a little less ordinary.

read more...

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lovely scans from and witty remarks on this japanese sex instruction book at harmful.org. warning (in case you couldn't guess): not all links from there are work-safe.

it does teach you how to hold hands, though, in multiple styles. and how to please a woman and a man. or, er, rather, a cardboard cutout of a woman and a test-tube. yeah.

via bracha.

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arianna online with a detailed column listing the current state of iraq facts that you want to ignore if you're pro-war.

a good read with many links to lying politicians and homeless veterans.

in all fairness, i should add several notes, though.

• the fact that 20% of injured vets seeking help were diagnosed with a mental disorder seems to say more about the way america (and increasingly the world) views mental health, not with the specific nature of this war.
• it's not clear where the fact that half of the soldiers that died would still be alive if they were properly armed comes from. i mean, yeah, obviously they weren't properly armed while they could have been, but half would still be alive? i doubt it.

whether you think the war in iraq is great or it sucks, one thing is clear. it's not where the u.s thought it would be at this point.

it's also weird to me as an israeli to read about abandoned war-wounded, coming from a country that with all its shortcomings, at least tends to those who got harmed in war.

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for my final project in an industrial design class jeff and i designed and built a low-cost solid state clothesline alarm. the paper should only be taken half-seriously.

you can also check out some pictures of our experiments and assembly.

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i have this east-german nostalgia branded messenger bag. however, most people around here think that it stands for dance dance revolution, and not deutsche demokratische republik.

maybe it's the m.i.t crowd that's biased. but shouldn't the communist logo give it away? that's a far cry from the anime style of that other ddr.

today i found evidence from the internet that my interpretation is the more reasonable one, logo aside.

if you have a short name like me, you can also find out what your name stands for. hopefully something more exciting than "Air Guyane, French Guiana (ICAO code)".

from cambridge, massachusetts, this is w-swn procrastinating while supposedly studying for an exam.

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apparently even some of my more up-to-date friends haven't heard of google suggest, so there. now you know.

remember, you heard it here first.

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looking for a cheap ticket from germany to israel for my winter vacation, i'm also trying german 'billigflug' sites, who cater charter flights to the have-nots.

charter flights, for my american readers, are non-standard flights that are operated especially, but not only, around holiday season by just selling as many tickets as they can, and then - once they sold 300 tickets - using crummy planes and getting people to places without bothing so much about luxuries like drinks, clean seats or functioning toilets on board.

the funny thing, though, is the search forms on these sites.

first of all, they don't seem to really draw distinction between the various countries.

as anyone who has been to varadero or aya napa knows, they're all just 'holiday destinations' not real places. so under 'destination' you can choose between 'any' (i kid you not), 'near', 'midrange', 'far', and then more specifically, 'egypt-israel-u.a.e', 'asia-thailand', (and don't try to be funny about that), 'mediterranean', etc.

or - as my friend yariv noted, they could have just as well said 'places with camels'.

and, on the search results, there's not only the price, but also the forecast water temperature at your destination.

so far, no cheap ticket to cairo-tel aviv-abu dhabi for me yet. but thanks for asking.

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added dogville to the film list

still haven't decided if i hated it or loved it, but since i am pretty sure that i hate most movies, this one gets the benefit of the doubt.

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newfound anti-religion blog, the rude pundit ("proudly lowering the level of political discourse") has catapulted itself to my tiny blogroll, thanks - among others - to quotes like this:

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never got around to praise the amazing talk by negativland member mark holser enough.

this won't change now, and i'll just say that he's a great speaker and performer and you should check him out if he comes to your area.

instead, here's a preview of their new project 'no business'. according to the distinguished mr. holser, 100% stolen material.

and while we're at it, check out the promotional video that made every mistake possible in video editing. i laughed until i cried. via tangerine torpedo.

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walking by the store (if i were an american i would say 'walking by the cvs', but that's a topic for another entry), i really wanted a granola bar, but was late, so i didn't get one.

at the entry to the subway, a friendly dude offered me a free granola bar, which i gladly accepted. with it came a little note:

for my readers who come from countries where churches don't put out ads, this granola bar was an ad for a church.

but to me it was much more. it was a sign from god answering my prayers.

now i just wish that god would find such direct ways of telling me he loves me regarding some other thoughts i had. an ipod comes to mind.

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bought something on amazon from a 3rd party retailer. the next day i got a message that my credit card information was wrong, and the order was canceled. i was already surprised that they didn't just ask me to fix the information, which btw hasn't changed since my last successful amazon orders.

instead they had me re-order the item. but lo and behold, the item is no longer available from the retailer i chose.

is that a new trick amazon employs to get out of being responsible for their site not being up-to-date with out-of-stock items?

i asked them, and will keep you posted.

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a web exclusive: the top 10 emailed stories from cnn.com.

honestly, they really do reveal a sad state of the union in a year that brought us a major overseas war and a presidential election.

and someone is obsessed with dogs.

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just went to froogle and was somewhat disturbed to see a little line on the top of the page saying:

now they can also tell what i'm shopping for? and maybe what kind of emails i write before deciding to shop for an ipod? and maybe, just maybe, target ipod ads to people who write similar emails?

to quote the unbelievably inspiring, entertaining, and intelligent talk by mark holser i attended tonight (and remember: if you were on rcs, you would have known about it, too):

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this morning. -5 degrees centigrade.

happy sankt nikolaus day, everyone. it even snowed today in boston for the occasion.

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is it art or is it crap

via dagg.

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from an inspiring talk by natalie jeremijenko, a look at human/nonhuman interaction, examining relations like zoos, hunting, pets, bestiality etc.

like her talk and most of her projects these slides, too, are superficial and at times gratuitously political, but still thought-provoking.

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if you want to add a little drama to the last 10 seconds, minute, or 90 seconds of something important (like a deadline or the end of a relationship), you should totally use these cool bbc news countdowns.

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i was invited by the commonwealth of massachusetts to perform my duty as an american citizen and serve on a trial jury.

naturally, i'm not allowed to do that, since i'm not actually an american citizen. i just need to fill out the right circle, telling them that i'm not, and send it back.

don't they have a way to tell who's a citizen and who's not other than asking the person? isn't that like an interesting statistic about people that the government would want to save on some computer file?

it seems odd (but not surprising) that the most powerful fingerprinting and photographing superpower doesn't even know which residents are citizens and which aren't.

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in what i think is the most astonishing paper i've read lately, media lab faculty hugh herr writes about a swimming robot actuated by living muscle tissue that he built and tested.

that's right, using actual frog muscle tissue activated by a microcontroller and a battery, swimming in a nutrient solution and driving a little swimming robot. half robot half frog.

it's a good read with few prerequisites.

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blog is the word of the year on m-w.com. it was the most searched for word this year, and since it wasn't even in the dictionary, the word became an lightspeed newcomer addition to the abridged dictionary.

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is this me? or this, where "i" am listed with my piano teacher of 15 years ago?

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last night i was wondering why it's politically correct to write that you're only looking for a jewish mate. is it also ok to write that you're only looking for a non-jewish mate, or would that be considered antisemitic?

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the gap between science and truth is in the footnotes.

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a dear friend forwarded me one of those new age cutesy stories with a moral over email.

i'll spare you the details, most of which you can recover from the following quote

which was then followed by the below signature

lovely.

but seriously, i think that the combination of the two parts of this email draw a surprisingly accurate picture of the state of email communication today.

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