Gnorb.NET

The Internet has connected mankind in a way never before anticipated. However, in the process many unanswerable questions — some which have lead to qasi-religious warfare — have risen, such as “Who would win in a fight, Superman or Mighty Mouse?”, “Which is better, Vi or Emacs?”, or my personal favorite “In an ultimate showdown of all superheroes ever, who would end up being the winner?” (The answer to this last one was finally revealed in the music video The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.)

Over time, one question, rising above all others, has spawned a rivalry which has been tearing the Internet apart at the seems, a question to which there seems to be no clear answer: Who would win in a fight, Pirates or Ninjas?

With the recent movie theater release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, AskaNinja.com has put out their completely unbiased review of the film. After hearing it presented on NPR (and laughing so hard I could hardly breathe), I decided that this matter is too important (and funny) not to put on Gnorb.NET. So, without further delay, I present you “Ask a Ninja’s Review of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

Frankly, this is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. You can download the review in MOV format by going directly to the source: AskANinja.com.

Best music video ever? Probably not, but some genius (and I do mean genius!) clipped together a bunch of President Bush’s speeches and created his own version of U2’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Hillarious!

(This comes by way of PinkDome.)

For the first time in what seems like forever, this morning I was finally able to go through and read all my RSS feeds. It seems like today was one of those days when weird news just seemed to come out of nowhere, which means it’s time for another episode of Le Linkage! This one I’ll call the “Just Plain Weird” edition because a good number of the articles here are just plain weird. There are some, however, that make for spectacular reading, and one that will make every anime-lover reading this blog wet his/her pants in joy.

ScienceBlog.com — Drunks Don’t See the Monkey: “It’s pretty difficult to overlook the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, or even an average-size person dressed in a gorilla suit. But a new study indicates that people who were given a simple visual task while mildly intoxicated were twice as likely to have missed seeing the person in a gorilla suit than were people who were not under the influence of alcohol.” Lesson: never try to spot a man in a gorilla suit while tipsy. Because if you can’t spot the gorilla, what good are you?

Engadget — Korea to test 1,000 remote-controlled domestic robots: “The Ministry of Information and Communication … will begin placing 1,000 wheeled, cell-phone controlled automatons — dubbed URCs, or ubiquitous robotic companions — into households and kindergartens this fall as a trial run for new robot technologies. The URCs will do the usual handling of domestic tasks as we might expect (and some … like cleaning rooms and reading books to children), as well the usual hanging out, taking care of pets, [and more] … The only thing at all disconcerting about any of this is the fact that unlike normal household droids, these URCs will be operated wirelessly from a central computing center ala I, Robot.” Having just watched that movie agan, the thought of a remote controled robot companion isn’t one I’m at all too comfortable with.

Akihabara News — The Wonderbra powered USB keyboard: Ok, uhm… hmm. How do I… err… geez, oh man… heh… I mean… Hmm. So, like, anyways, I uhmm… hmm… How do I put this? Uhm… What?

USB powered keyboard bra with USB powered camera tail that can be switched out with other USB powered items, such a lights and memory sticks. You have to see this for yourself [Angelkitty.jp]. I guess what I’m wondering is where exactly that thing is supposed to be plugged.

KurzweilAI — Frozen Brains Awaiting Resurrection Day in Storage: (From St. Petersburg, Russia) “Kriorus, the world’s first cryonics company outside the United States, located in Alabushevo village in Russia, has two brains in cryonics storage so far. The price: $9,000.” Just what we need, Russian discount cryonics. “You want better brain? Lie down. We do operation, take out brain now. Give you new brain next week. We freeze brain now so if you want back later, you have. ”

My Heart’s in Accra — Book review: “Globalization and its Enemies”: “This is the basic question development economists try to answer. It’s a question with profound practical implications - if we could suggest strategies that consistently helped nations grow wealth, we could address a huge range of problems in education, public health and state stability. It’s also a question that both development economists and political commentators are surprisingly bad at answering.” A very thorough book review and critique by Ethan Zuckerman. Good reading for anyone involved in economics or business.

The New Yorker — How can someone live with only half a brain?: This week’s New Yorker features a particularly interesting article about the hemispherectomy operation. In this procedure, an entire side of the brain is removed as a treatment because of cancer or chronic seizures. The incredible thing is that if the hemispherectomy is done when a patient is very young, the remaining hemisphere does double duty and the child often develops normally. (This one also came by way of My Heart’s in Accra.)

Index of 1,000 Full Length Anime On YouTube: (via Digg) “There are no ads or garbage clips to weed through, just 1000 anime episodes and movies. This index includes The Animatrix, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Samurai Champloo, Serial Experiments Lain, Ultimate Avengers, and more.” Not weird and not news, but I’ll be damned if I don’t put this link up.

Have you heard? A live action Transformers movie is being made. Yeah, I know — this is the last straw, probably crap, shouldn’t be done, why god why, blah, blah. I totally understand how you feel. I felt the same way! I mean, why mess with a good thing, especially one that doesn’t look anywhere nearly as good now as it did when I was a kid? (Have you seen Thundercats or Silverhawks lately? Geez!)

Anyway, that was until I saw the first trailer, just released today. (If you thought different then you’ve probably never heard of Uwe Boll.) After seeing the trailer, I’ll admit, I got pretty excited about it. Really excited.

07/04/07, baby. 7-4-7.

Newsflash Edit: Looks like the trailer was leaked in YouTube.

(Note: I would still go to the Transformers.com site and see it there. Much better quality. Still, this isn’t bad.)

Newsflash Edit 2: Looks like someone pulled the trailer from YouTube. (Gee, I wonder who.) Anyway, the only place you can see it now is at Transformers.com, which is just fine, unless you use Linux; Flash 8 is requred and Macromedia still hasn’t released it for Linux. Dumbasses.

As a side note, It’s nice to see that all my childhood media heroes are getting resurrected onto the movie screen, most of which are good movies (think Batman Begins and X-Men). This probably means that economically, generation X-ers and Y-ers are finally worthy of attention by industries that have until now been held captive by the economic power of the baby boomers.

Now that we’ve captured the movie market, maybe we can begin influencing auto makers. Why not start asking for our own Transformers? (Hybrid, of course.) Heck, if that’s too hard I’d settle for my own KITT (as in Knight Rider).

The thing is, right now the only “cool” cars are SUVs, Hummers (also known as “monster trucks”), and hybrids, depending heavily on who’s deciding what “cool” is. On the whole, hybrids are generally pretty cool. SUVs and Hummers, however, scream of middle-age soccer mom like a bald man in a convertible Corvette screams of midlife crisis. (Because SUVs and H2s have become the new Minivan. H3s just plain suck.) Maybe auto makers should start updating them to appease the GenX and GenY crowd. After all, if they’re making gas guzlers anyway, if they’re going to force us to drain all of the planet’s resources, why not at least make them appealing to us? (Suck it, Gore!) How to do that, you ask? Easy. Just have the engineers watch at all the 80’s TV shows and get them to start making that stuff. We’ll even let them start with something simple: how about adding a new “Go go Gadgetmobile” feature to the Toyota Sequoia? Call it the Sequoiavalon. Or better yet, since we’re apparently at war, (against… Iraq? Terror? Gangs? Illiteracy? The Poor? Democrats?) how about making super intelligent Hummers that come with mounted weaponry as a standard feature? (Think Airwolf, but on wheels.) Terrorists aside, this would come in handy when riding through insurgent strongholds like Detroit and New Orleans, or when trying to find a parking spot in South Beach on a Saturday night.

After all that is done, maybe we can start with the Transformers. Because, as we all know, what better way is there to fight terrorism, Detroit, New Orleans, or parking problems than with a weapon-loaded Transformer Hummer?

None. Optimus Gasguzler to the rescue, bizatch.

A few months ago, while reading one of my favorite blogs (BenSaunders.com), I saw a couple of posts (post 1, post 2) on something called the “TED” conference. “TED conference?” I thought. “Like the United Airways low-cost air line? You know, I used to work with a guy named Ted…”

No, it wasn’t either of those. In fact, I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Actually, TED — or the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference — is an annual conference which brings together some of the greatest minds on the planet and is set up with the purpose of bringing about ideas to improve the world. Sound ambitious? It is.

From the TED website:

The first TED included the public unveiling of the Macintosh computer an the Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Manderlbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind. Several influential members of the burgeoning digerati community were also there, including Nicholas Negroponte and Stewart Brand.

Now, before you dismiss this a some gathering of computer nerds (”digerati”?) and hippie philosophers sitting around and complaining about capitalist pigs, check this: the recent roster of speakers includes scientists, philosophers, musicians, religious leaders, environmentalists, and many others such as Bill Gates, Frank Gehry, Jane Goodall, Billy Graham, Herbie Hancock, Murray Gell-Mann, Larry Ellison, Li Lu (key organizer of the Tianenmen Square protest), Al Gore, Tony Robins, Sir Ken Robinson, Majora Carter — you get the picture. These are people from all over the spectrum who have done things most people never even let themselves dream of, all of them under one roof. I don’t know about you, but that peaks my curiosity.

Anyway, after reading the post, TED kind of dropped out of sight for me for a while, but I guess my interests keep pointing me in that direction. A few days ago I was reading another of my favorite blogs, Lunch over IP, when — lo and behold — there it was again: TED! This post was about how Tony Robbins gently kicked Al Gore’s butt, and how the TED talks were now being offered as free downloads from the TED Talks website. (They’re available in MP3 audio, MP4 video, and streaming (Google) video.)

From the Lunch over IP article:

At one point during his speech, motivational speaker Tony Robbins asks the audience to raise their hand if they have ever failed to achieve something significant in their lives. All hands go up. So Robbins asks: why did you fail? And starts listing the answers: not enough knowledge; lack of time; not enough money; lack of other resources; wrong boss. “The Supreme Court”, says a voice from front row, and it’s Al Gore’s. The whole room laughs. Robbins too, and walks towards Gore to shake his hand. But then he becomes serious again: “You may not have enough money, you may not have the Supreme Court. But that’s not the defining factor. The defining factor is never resources: it’s resourcefulness … If you have emotion, something that I have experienced very strongly from you the other night [during your first speech] at a level that’s as profound as I ever experienced, and if you had communicated with that emotion, I believe you would have … won!”. Easy to guess what goes to many minds in the audience at that moment: Wow! Has Tony Robbins just flatly told Gore the other inconvenient truth?

I may be a bit biased on this, given my ties to TED, but TEDtalks takes conference podcasting to a whole new level. TED is going out of its way to make it as easy as possible for anyone interested to access the speeches, by making them available in five different formats: Flash (on ted.com), VideoEgg (on the TEDblog), MP3 audio and MP4 video podcasts (from iTunes or directly from the TED site), and on GoogleVideo. Adding to that is an automatic transcript generator called PodZinger that allows for keyword searches: put in “carbon dioxide” and it finds the exact spots in Gore’s talk where it’s referenced - then click and start watching at that point (the search of course only works on the online versions, not on the downloaded files; and while doing a decent job PodZinger, like other automatic speech-to-text software, still has a hard time with some nouns and jargon, so some of the results are only partially helpful. But it’s a step forward in video searchability).

Sure, the Al Gore thing is funny, if not somewhat frighteningly revealing (for all of us), but the best part of all this is the fact that you can listen to the speeches for free. To anyone interested in overcoming mediocrity and personal development, this is a gold mine, especially if you’re not in a position to fork over the $4400 fee for the conference (which includes a subscription to the TED book club (standing order book?), but doesn’t include the air fare to California or hotel room fee).

Anyway, I highly recommend you follow all the links referenced here and save the speeches to your MP3 player or computer for later listening, but even then, I highly recommend going to these sites and checking out what these guys have put up. Seriously good stuff: very positive and guaranteed to kick your butt.

As for me, I think I may just make it a point to attend one of these. 2007? We’ll see about that.