I came across this Superman parody which I think you will enjoy. It’s called “How Superman Should Have Ended” and I couldn’t agree more.
Sopranos Series Finale
After six very spread out seasons, The Sopranos series comes to a close tonight. Here’s a sheet and some suggested rules to set up a household pool about who’s going to die, how, and other predictions.
Personally, I think Tony’s going to get whacked.
Fermat’s Last Theorem
As a follow-up to the recent Malcolm Gladwell speech at the New Yorker 2012 conference, here is a documentary all about Fermat’s Last Theorem (wikipedia) and its proof by Andrew Wiles in 1994.
BBC Horizon – Fermat's Last Theorem from mmenchu on Vimeo.
Even if math isn’t your thing, there is something intriguing about following Wiles’ seven year struggle to solve the mystery. In general I get a bit of a rush out of the beauty of mathematics but watching Wiles create a proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem was just magical.
Typographics
Ryan Uhrich, an artist living in Edmonton, AB has created a wonderful motion graphics piece called Typographics (19mb Quicktime).
I love watching this kind of thing and wish I was more experienced with compositing.
Desktop Tower Defense Interview
Paul Preece, creator of Desktop Tower Defense, shares some inside info about his tremendously popular game in a recent interview. He claims to be making nearly $100,000 a year in ad revenue.
Amazing Papercraft
Check out this interesting collection of do-it-yourself papercraft. My favorite is the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.
Here is the AT-AT papercraft.pdf (234KB)
(Via BoingBoing)
Auction Ads
Last week I received an email touting the great benefits of a new kind of web advertising for eBay auctions, called “Auction Ads”. The email stated that just for signing up I’d get a bonus of $5 put into my account within two business days. Well four days passed with nothing, so I emailed them. They responded by saying it takes a week for the money to show up on my account. It has now been about a week and two days. I’ve given them over 24,000 ad views and they’ve given me nothing.
My advice: don’t waste your time with auction ads.
After the Warming
“After the Warming”, stars James Burke, whom you may remember from the days when TLC actually showed educational television and not just a bunch of reality-tv remixes in various flavors of “how to buy a house”, “how to fix up a house”, “how to flip a house”, or “how to be an cretin while making motorcycles”.
“After the Warming” is like a special edition of Connections (wikipedia) in which we learn how changes in civilization, the weather, and industrialization brought on the current climate crisis we now face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc
[“After the Warming” is] an early documentary about global warming. It theorizes and tells facts about the effects global weather has had on our history. It then theorizes a lot more about its effects on our future and especially the way in which we will overcome it’s bad effects. If you don’t mind some, not proofed, theorizing from a reasonably intelligent guy, and are interested in our climate, this is probably a must see.
I found the news clip style predictions of an increase in hurricanes, rising oceans levels, and the devastation of New Orleans particularly chilling. Some of the prediction dates were a bit off, but interesting to think about anyway.
(via)
The Top Ten best 8-bit Games
Check out the top ten best 8-bit games as rated by the Game Trailer Countdown. A couple of my favorite 8-bit games, Tetris and Excitebike, didn’t make the cut, but the GT list does have some classics.
Genius: 2012
Cultural phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell gave a talk at the New Yorker Conference 2012: Stories From the Near Future. His talk Genius: 2012 illustrates the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving.