Bing bang bing bong bing!

YouTube - Korki Buchek - Bing Bang Song

This looks WAY more cool than Google Earth.

Combining LandSat 7 imagery with Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Data, World Wind can display a dramatic view of the Earth at eye level. Users will literally be able to fly across the world in any direction.

NASA SVS

Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has produced a set of visually intense animations that demonstrate a variety of subjects such as hurricane dynamics and seasonal changes across the globe.

World Wind can take these animations and play them directly on the world. Anyone can immediately grasp where the event is taking place as World Wind rotates automatically into view.

MODIS

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS produces a set of time relevant data that's updated every day. MODIS catalogs fires, floods, dust, smoke, storms and even volcanic activity.

GLOBE sample - maximum temperature demonstrated GLOBE

World Wind is capable of browsing through and displaying GLOBE data based on any time the user wants. For example, a user can download today's (or any previous day's) temperature across the world.

NASA World Wind

For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies

Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions

Google is unveiling within Google Earth today a new service called Sky that will allow users to view the skies as seen from Earth. Like Google Earth, Sky will let users fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

In Google Earth, a Service for Scanning the Heavens - New York Times

Acidus had a project mentioned offhandedly on the Daily Show a few months ago but Virgil has seriously raised the bar by actually getting his picture on the Colbert report! We now have a new standard for leetness around here. If you haven't been personally denounced by Steven Colbert, you just aren't that important...

WikiScanner on the Colbert Report

Mike the Usurper wrote:
The overall on the surge is exactly what was predicted. Violence is down slightly in the troop concentrated areas, but up in others, in other words, it's a wash. Further, the point of the surge was to buttime for the Iraqis to build a unifying government. That clearly isn't happening.

The point was to reduce violence in the troop concentrated areas. The idea is that if violence is held down in those areas that those areas can develop real economic activity in a secure environment, which hopefully won't deteriorate again when the troops leave. The idea is to provide a window of opportunity for peace to get a foodhold. The impact on the areas where troops aren't concentrated is not relevent to the way this strategy works. It is a neighborhood by neighborhood approach, not a wholistic approach. Having said that, I'd like a source for your statement that the violence level has been "a wash." Its not clear that this is the case. US casualties are down.

This strategy has absolutely nothing at all to do with government negotiations. As a military strategy it is older then the present political context by several years; it predates the 2004 election.
Trying to connect those two things together is a political fantasy.

It's working so we should get out? WTF?

I agree that this doesn't make sense. If this strategy is demonstrated to be effective in actually securing neighborhoods, we need more troops on the ground. The goal here ought to be to solve the problem in Iraq and not to win some domestic political spat. "Get out, right or wrong," is just as stupid as "Stay in, right or wrong."

Hillary is hardly a "base" Democrat if by "base" you mean left. Thats because there really is no left in the United States. The Unites States has a radical right (absolutely no taxes, government by the word of God) and a moderate right (some social programs, more tolerance in morality).

Hillary is what I call a soccer mom authoritarian. She supports more social controls and more economic controls as long as it doesn't significantly impact wall street. So did her husband. Her husband was pro government surveillance. He even ran on the prospect of federally mandated national school uniforms. Their long term vision is Singapore with equal rights for women. Really it is.

The only thing I confidently expect out of Hillary is that her statements running into the election will be extremely savvy and strategic, and will have little bearing on how she governs if elected. There is no telling what she'll actually deliver in office, but it will be driven again more by strategy than ideology. The problem is that the strategic interest in question might not actually be yours.

RE: Clinton, McCain split on Iraq pullout - Yahoo! News

The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed by three sets of parents. Greg Hampel and Ed Swaya of Seattle had feared taking their daughter back to Oklahoma to visit her birth mother. Heather Finstuen and Anne Magro feared that non-biological mom Finstuen couldn't sign medical releases and other forms. Lucy and Jennifer Doel, who live in Oklahoma, had felt the impact of the misguided law: When their little girl had to be rushed to a hospital, the ambulance crew said only "the mother" could go along.

Good. Oklahoma not ok!

AlterNet: Federal Ruling Protects Kids of Gay Parents

...that article tends to belie the underlying nature of a real problem -- the lack of accountability for most of what's written or edited in Wikipedia. The "Corporate Fingerprints" bit is cute -- but what about all of the other fingerprints smeared through virtually every byte of the Wikipedia database?

The single best thing that Wikipedia could do to lend itself genuine credibility would be to require that contributers identify themselves -- by name, not by handles or childish aliases.

Weinstein shoots off an anti-anonymity screed in response to Virgil's tool. I don't find this perspective reasonable, but then Weinstein has set me off in the past with his authoritarian insistence that everyone walk around the Internet with their driver's license taped to their forehead. I think it's notable, however, that Virgil's tool has now spawned a meta-controversy.

Lauren Weinstein's Blog: More Wikipedia

While we're on the subject of video games...

A Japanese arm wrestling game is being withdrawn from arcades across the country after three players broke their arms, company officials said.

"The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it," company spokesman Ayano Sakiyama told AP news agency.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Japan recalls arm wrestling game

VIDEO games are notorious for raising adrenalin levels but now there's one that calms you down.

Julian Spillane of game studio Frozen North Productions in Toronto, Canada, together with a programmer who goes by the name Ne0nRa1n, have created a version of Tetris called BioBlox. Players put one hand on a device that measures their pulse rate. As their pulse rises, so does the speed of the blocks falling from the top of the screen. That makes the game harder, creating an incentive for the player to calm down and so get a higher score. "I'm a big fan of weird input devices," says Spillane.

In 1999, Nintendo released Tetris 64, which also used pulse rate to control the speed of play, but it ran only on Nintendo's console. BioBlox runs on Windows-based PCs and will be available online soon.

This video game won't make you calm. It will just make you really, really frustrated that you can't calm down!

Modified Tetris has calming effect - 19 August 2007 - New Scientist