Get Cynical

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a color photographer before his time, who undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II. He was able to capture color by taking three pictures of each scene, each with a different red, green or blue color filter. Walter Frankhauser, a photographer contracted by the Library of Congress, manually registered and cleaned up some 120 of the original high-resolution scans, with breathtakingly beautiful results. The results of his effort can be seen at the online-exhibit The Empire That Was Russia.

Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” is one of my favorite books. It’s a classic cybersleuthing story based on true events that happened to Cliff who was an astronomer turned system admin at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. It starts off with him discovering a 50 cent hiccup in the accounting software that ends up being a hacker involved with the KGB. The entertaining part of the story is how Cliff tracks the hacker through the early days of the internet. Great read. I knew that it was also made into an episode of NOVA but hadn’t ever seen it until now. (Thank you YouTube)

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(via Boing Boing)

Update:

He’s done several other videos using the same two guitars technique.

WOOHOO! Here are a few of my favorites:

Troy McClure: Don’t kid yourself, Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he’d eat you and everyone you care about!

Homer: I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman.

Chief Wiggum: Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city! He is the cancer and I am the…uh…what cures cancer?

Troy McClure: Hi. I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such self-help tapes as “Smoke Yourself Thin” and “Get Some Confidence, Stupid!”

Hmmm. They seemed to have forgotten Kent Brockman’s, “And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.”, which launched a thousand slashdot comments. This list is null and void without that quote.

Max Blumenthal went to the College Republican National Convention (sounds like one hell of a shindig) and brought his camcorder along for the ride. Some of the highlights include:

• Max asking the student war supporters why they don’t enlist.
• Tom Delay claiming if abortion was illegal, we wouldn’t have a problem with immigration. Seriously!
• The “not gay” student claiming that just because he is attracted to the same sex, doesn’t mean he is gay.

(via Evil Bobby)

Waiter Rant takes a question about ordering in a restaurant right before closing and dishes out some good advice.

Wes, coming into a restaurant 30-45 minutes before closing is totally cool. It’s the fifteen minutes to three seconds before closing tables that drive me batshit. Don’t get me wrong, waiters understand that customers often can’t get away from their soul sucking/youth thieving/relationship destroying corporate jobs until late in the evening. We understand that some people can only pencil in quality time with their significant others after eleven o’clock. To make life easier for late night diners I’ve compiled a handy list of do’s and don’ts.

These are almost too amazing to be real.

Each year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture create works of crop art by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety.

(via Bifurcated Rivets)

My favorite on the list is the Peter Principle:

The Peter Principle

One of the most depressing laws in this list, if you happen to have first-hand experience with this via working with incompetent managers.

In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Just read Dilbert (or watch The Office) to get some examples of this in action.

Click here for the other 18.

With little to no medical training.

Wheeler “Johnny” Lipes, had neither the formal training, the equipment, nor the urge to become a surgeon.

But when one of his ship mates came down with acute appendicitis 120-feet below the South China Sea, with enemy warships circling above – he had no choice. He had to do what needed to be done or his shipmate would die.

It was the first major surgery ever preformed aboard a submarine. And it was performed by a man who stepped up to the job.

Four months after the successful surgery, Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller told the story. Below is his article, which won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished reporting in 1942.

(via del.icio.us/wcitymike)