science

Monday various

Thursday various

Tuesday various

  • Will singing “My Way” in the Philippines get you killed?

    Still, the odds of getting killed during karaoke may be higher in the Philippines, if only because of the ubiquity of the pastime. Social get-togethers invariably involve karaoke. Stand-alone karaoke machines can be found in the unlikeliest settings, including outdoors in rural areas where men can sometimes be seen singing early in the morning. And Filipinos, who pride themselves on their singing, may have a lower tolerance for bad singers. [via]

  • Salon.com on Kevin Smith: The face of flying while fat:

    And then I read Southwest’s apology to Smith, which includes such gems as “If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.” And I think, first, “If we allowed a cramped, restricted seating arrangement? Because ‘The Greyhound of the Skies’ is positively roomy when there are no fat people on board?” And second, I think, “Translation: Fat paying customers’ fully expected discomfort only becomes a problem for us if it also makes the paying customers we care about uncomfortable.” [via]

  • Speaking of apologies, does Tiger Woods owe you one? Probably not. [via]
  • A neat, albeit a little disturbing, H.R. Giger cake [via]
  • And finally, the truth behind elephant brain power:

    “We are a bit limited by how little we know about elephants, but the odd glimmers we get seem to be rather remarkable.”

    Incidentally, today is your last day to listen to Inside the Elephant Mind on the BBC player. [via]

Monday various

  • Play any website as music using CodeOrgan. For what it’s worth, here’s what this site supposedly sounds like. [via]

  • “Sealed with a righteous kiss and something something death.” Very funny subtitles from Cambodian Twilight and Avatar DVDs. [via]

  • Meanwhile, here’s a neat infographic outlining just what you get as a DVD pirate versus as a paying customer. Of course, it seems to be missing one of those full-length anti-piracy ads — also often unskippable — that play at the start of many DVDs.

  • Here’s a horrific and “little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.”

    Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. [via]

  • And finally, on a slightly happier note: the headline reads: Rapper says politician used Vulcan grip on him in airplane fight.

Tuesday various

  • The headline reads, Vegetative state patients can respond to questions. This seems significantly more scientific than some other recent stories in this area. [via]
  • All I can really say to this argument — and to James Cameron’s own insistence that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations — is that hey, if you want sci-fi films to be nominated more often, make better sci-fi films. Avatar an important movie (and so are Up and District 9 to some extent), but Avatar is not a particularly good movie. That’s just my opinion, but I think it’s a defensible opinion and one easily shared by members of the Academy. Maybe these movies aren’t being snubbed out of some lingering genre bias; maybe they’re just genuinely not as good.

    There’s maybe some bias against computer-assisted performances like you’ll find in Avatar, but as Mark Evanier writes:

    There may be a solid argument that in Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is “acting” her role just as certainly as she acts any roles she plays. But you can’t argue that when we see her performance, we’re only looking at the work of Ms. Weaver with the guidance of Mr. Cameron. There are a lot of other people making that character like that…enough to make it feel inappropriate for an award that honors individual achievement. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. But I think that’s how it is.

  • Word to the wise: don’t look at porn while at work. And definitely don’t look at porn while your office computer is on live television. [via]
  • I have to say, I really loved this Previously On Lost 2: Lost In Five Minutes video. Huge props for actually covering all the big moments of the past five years — though also huge spoilers if you’ve never seen the show. [via]
  • And finally, speaking of Lost, Todd VanDerWerff (who might just be my favorite television critic at the moment) explains why, while it’s okay for a show to have a plan, it’s usually better for them to work around it:

    Could you plan out a TV show to the extent that some Lost fans seem to want the series to be planned out? As a matter of fact, you could, but it almost always ends up being a lesser series. Look, for example, at ABC’s big Lost replacement hopeful FlashForward, now off the air until March in hopes that absence will make viewers’ hearts grow fonder. The series’ creators—David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga—entered the series with a hard and fast plan for where all of the plot points would lead and for where all of the characters would go. This was one of the things that made the show so attractive to networks, who’d been burned by serials that often seemed to have no idea where they were going before. In practice, though, it’s been woefully terrible. The plot, confined by the fact that it knows exactly where it’s going and what all of the characters are going to do, can’t make any of the organic evolutions that any TV series needs to make to be successful. Everyone’s trapped and hemmed in by a plan that has no wiggle room. (A similar thing happened to the vaunted ’90s sci-fi series Babylon 5, though unplanned and uncontrollable events there forced enough of a sense of organic evolution onto that series that it had a little breathing room.)