The biggest loser

Stephen Colbert gives us an insightful update on the U.S. Republican primary, showing the two main candidates hard at work trying to demonstrate how they each are the most genuine cretin of them all. It seems the Republicans nowadays are doing their very best to get Barack Obama re-elected. My guess is, they will succeed brilliantly...

Greed is not good

Gordon Gekko now works for the SEC... greed is, like, so 1987.

Procatinator

I hereby totally endorse the fantastically productive website procatinator.com. Genius ideas came to mind as soon as I started watching this...

Håkan Hardenberger plays Haydn

Yehudi Menuhin conducts the Essener Philharmoniker with Håkan Hardenberger playing the solo for Haydn's trumpet concerto in Eb major. Totally awesome!

Blofeld's cat freakout

Never noticed this before. Hilarious.

Suntory time

I was just enjoying a sip of my favorite Japanese Suntory Scotch whisky and I just couldn't resist going to YouTube and watch that old clip from Lost in Translation with Bill Murray shooting an ad for Suntory. It's priceless =)

KAL on the Greek debt deal

Here's my other favorite cartoonist's view on the Greek debt deal: it's all about rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking EU ship. I don't think Europe really is sinking after all-it will be salvaged-but the Greek stowaways are drowning nonetheless...

Admiral General Aladeen releases statement

Admiral General Aladeen rails against the Academy for having banned him from the Oscars ceremony tomorrow!!

Relatively stupid

Almost six months ago the scientific team of the CERN's OPERA experiment announced to the whole world that they had detected some neutrinos traveling from Switzerland to Italy faster than the speed of light. Immediately, theories ranging from the mundane (human error) to the very sophisticated (extra spatial dimensions) were suggested to explain the apparent anomaly. In basic physics, the speed of light is a limit that simply cannot be broken in any way: it is inherent in the mathematical equations that govern the laws of particle physics. So finding neutrinos that could travel faster than light was a real shocker to the physics community.
Whether or not the result might have been revolutionary-I didn't think it was so I didn't bother blogging about it at the time-at least one would have hoped that the explanation should have been interesting. For instance, it could have been an extra relativistic effect having to do with the GPS systems that the physicists had used in their experiment but not fully taken into account. In that case, perhaps something could have been learned that would have led to more accurate GPS receivers for everybody. But no, as New Scientist reports, it turns out the true explanation is really the most boring of all: one fiber-optic cable in the vast experimental apparatus had simply been wired too loosely, leading to a delay in an electric signal coming from a detector. The scientists are now looking stupid all over the web-as fast as light can carry the bad news to the rest of the world.

Nature calls

These zoo lions may be well fed but instinct was strongest...

Cassetteboy vs BBC News

Nicely done, Cassetteboy!!

Royal cleavage

Meanwhile, in Europe... the husband of Finland's (female) president was apparently caught on camera admiring the view on his table neighbor, Denmark's Princess Mary, at a state dinner. I can't blame him, she's a lovely lady. But why the guilty look? perhaps the gentleman may have found the solution to Europe's debt crisis: let's make love, not bankruptcy... full in-depth (pun intended) report in The Telegraph here.

ABC News Nightline visit Foxconn

ABC News' Nightline program have been allowed inside Apple's supplier Foxconn's factory in China. It's not really slavery but definitely not up to the standard you would expect in the United States. How is it moral then to buy an iPad? I am torn. Then again, most of our clothing and many, many other products that we buy on a daily basis are manufactured in third-world countries... it seems our entire living ecosystem has become dependent on cheap labour in faraway places like China.

Steve Bell on Greece

Steve Bell is, as usual, the wittiest cartoonist that I know of. Can't argue with that one, that's for sure... I don't give it a year and a half until the Europeans have to forgive part or all of the money that they've just loaned to the Greeks. Or else the Greeks themselves will choose to default as soon as they've reduced their primary deficit. The bailout deal for Greece that was just passed is really about helping Merkozy getting re-elected (and their Greek colleagues too) and also to help French banks avoid paying out on CDS contracts that they'd sold to the hedge funds. The only people who aren't being helped by this deal are the Greeks...

John Cleese responds to YouTube comments

Leno and Maher discuss Valentine's day

...and the US presidential election. Pretty funny.

The bird was pushed

Mr Brown's take on motivational posters.

North Korean Photoshop tutorial

See more at CollegeHumor

The latest lulz from College Humour. Just barely exaggerated.

Flowing paint

Starry Night (interactive animation) from Petros Vrellis on Vimeo.

Greek engineer and artist Petros Vrellis has released this mesmerizing dynamic animation of Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night canvas. It shows the paint flowing along the brush strokes and it also lets users interact with the flow of the brush strokes. Such a beautiful idea.

OK Go behind the scenes

The OK Go guys have posted this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube, in which they say a bit more on how they've shot their video for Needing/Getting. Their MO essentially consisted in spending two weeks in a warehouse banging on stuff to see how the instruments work. Genius.

Russians breach lake Vostok

A team of Russian scientists have finally breached through more than 3km of Antarctic ice to reach lake Vostok, on February 5th, after 20 years of effort. Lake Vostok itself has been trapped underneath the ice sheet for 14 million years.
Now scientists are hoping to discover new life forms in the prehistoric waters, which have been cut off from the rest of the world for so long that evolution may have produced some surprising new specimens.
However, not everybody is convinced life can exist in the lake, since its extremely high concentration in oxygen would make it very difficult for any living thing to survive in it. But the very lack of existence of life in Vostok would in itself be an important discovery: it would make it far less likely that life might develop on other planets or satellites of the solar system, where conditions would similarly be challenging. Read full feature on Lake Vostok in Wired online here and news release from New Scientist there.

Microsoft to release Windows 8 test on ARM

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft have announced that they will be releasing a public test version of Windows 8 for ARM devices on Feb. 29 at a mobile conference in Barcelona. However, the Windows 8 on ARM software will only be distributed on test machines with an ARM processor, as opposed to being released as stand-alone software.
It looks like Microsoft are now going the way of Apple, by developing their mobile software as a tightly-controlled ecosystem, as opposed to making Windows available to all ARM-based mobile phones. In a way this would make sense, as replicating their model for PC's onto mobile platforms might be both too difficult technically as well as simply too expensive. My take on it: Microsoft are really trying to preempt Mac OS X on ARM.

Pelosi attacks Colbert

U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has apparently turned against her former friend Stephen Colbert in this political attack ad in which she rails against Colbert's super PAC. I agree: Colbert is out of control, somebody stop him!!

Tokyo zoo staff battle paper rhino

This is brilliant: the staff and police at the Tokyo zoo try to contain and capture their escaped paper mache rhino as part of a drill. The vet better not shoot that anesthetic dart into the actor's behind...

North Korean accordionists cover A-Ha

Last December Norwegian artist Morten Traavik visited North Korea looking for artists to feature at an upcoming music festival. When he was introduced to the students at Pyongyang's Kum Song School of Music, Traavik gave them a tape with A-Ha's song "Take on me" on it. A couple of days later the same students came back to him and played the above cover, with gusto. They were so good that Traavik has now invited them to the Barents Festival, where they will be performing at the weekend. And thankfully for us, Traavik had also recorded the performance and posted it on YouTube and it has since gone viral on the internet. Indeed, they do play with a lot of heart.

Hysteric math

Here's Singapore's favorite comedian Mr Brown's take on his home country's third grade math education: hysteric math. I can certainly relate to this. Thank you, Mr Brown.

Psycho Siri

Given how big Apple have become today, I can only guess the future will actually be far scarier than this short film would suggest. Cool to watch nonetheless.

OK Go's Needing/Getting

You really have to admire OK Go's music-making technique. This time they really push the envelope... I really wonder where they got all these piano's and how many times did they have to rehearse this??

Camera with legs

French prankster Rémi Gaillard has made this film where he dresses up as a traffic camera. Can't make this stuff up...

Only in Tokyo

British journalist David Levene visits Tokyo's cat cafe, where punters can rent a cat for the day at the modest rate of 1,000¥ an hour. Meow!

Like, d'oh!

Now that Facebook is finally going public, I'm guessing that this is a good time to recap the social network's main contribution to the world, as best summarized by The Onion. I myself just narrowly escaped terminal brain damage when I finally deleted my FB account. Phew!!

Adding depth to graphene

Ever since graphene was first discovered as a new state of carbon that does not exist in nature, plenty of new applications have been suggested for this new chemical wonder. Among them was the possibility of using a patch of graphene as a nano-scale transistor. Indeed, working graphene transistor prototypes have been demonstrated at labs around the world, including chip giants Intel and IBM.
So far though, all such efforts had proved impractical because the conductivity of graphene was too good as graphene is not in and of itself a semiconductor. The graphene was systematically letting through way too many electrons across the sheet to create an off-state for the transistor that could be reliably distinguished from the on-state.
However, the team of Dr Leonid Ponomarenko at Manchester University in the UK have just published a new study in which they suggest sandwiching an atom-thick layer of molybdenum disulfide between two layers of graphene. In this configuration, the electrons travel through the graphene sheet vertically instead of horizontally and the molybdenum disulfide acts as a dielectric, through which electrons can tunnel. By modulating the electric potential between the two layers of graphene, one can greatly enhance or diminish the probability of tunneling for the electrons, in a non-linear fashion as in tunneling transistors, which leads to two distinct on- and off-states.
As Dr Novoselov explains, "this opens a new dimension in graphene research."

Read news brief in New Scientist here and the reference for the Science paper: DOI: 10.1126/science. 1218461.

Introducing the Apple iNett

Conan weighs in on the problem of suicides among staff at Apple's assembly plant in China... thankfully, the baby lives!