IHateYoungPeople.com hosts a surprisingly addictive set of videos of old people on the street ranting about the young people and vice versa.

Here’s one of my favorites, “Who complains more?”:

Lego Stephen Hawking

(via kottke)

Looking for something to do? Wikipedia has lists of unsolved problems. Get to work!

Google launched an Elections Video Search Gadget. Basically, it lets you search through what Obama and McCain have said in their speeches and shows the results in videos. It uses speech recognition, not written remarks.. give it a try!

As this brilliant video montage explains, reality show participants are “not here to make friends”:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w536Alnon24)
“I’m not here for the girls, I’m here for Flav”

Via Andrew Sullivan…
Fatness by state:

I’m surprised California isn’t leaner, but I guess my sample is skewed. It’d be more interesting to see these numbers by county, or correlate them with other data (e.g. college education, income, etc.).

Andrew Sullivan also pointed to some text illustrating the ridiculous nature of drug policy in the US:

“The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids — strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin — caused 2,328. Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths.

Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 — fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).”
–NYTimes

I can’t think of any rational argument as to why marijuana should be illegal while alcohol and tobacco are legal.

Finally, from BoingBoing a while back, the Craftsman “everything” kit:

I wouldn’t know what to do with half of that, but it looks awesome. ($8600, by the way)

Also from the archives, BoingBoing points out the hidden bear in the tolblerone logo:

Sneaky! Reminds me of the arrow in the Fedex logo.

I still have over 500 starred items on reader, so there will probably be several more of these MEGA POSTS.

This guy’s a parody of himself:

(via Abe)

This wordpress theme doesn’t seem to list the tags for a given post anywhere. I guess I’ll need to dig into the theme source to change that, since I’ve just started tagging my posts. Maybe I’ll look into some other theme changes while I’m in there. There are a couple of broken navigation links in the theme. Any other suggestions?

For a while, I’d been having a problem where firefox would beach ball (aka hang) a lot on my mac. It wouldn’t be hitting the CPU, which seemed quite confusing. This behavior was much more pronounced when I was on a high-latency connection, like the ones on the shuttles to/from work. Sometimes, the problem wouldn’t happen at all.

Last night I finally decided to look into this, and found this bug: if you’re using a proxy configuration from a PAC URL, the browser hangs when it resolves DNS queries (it’s the result of some apple weirdness). So, my workaround is to not use the PAC file whenever possible (I only need it a few times a day). I guess this is only a workaround in a certain sense, but whatever. Since I made the change, I haven’t had any beach balls.

I’ve installed the switchproxy extension to make switching the proxy on and off really easy.

This morning’s song is All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem from their 2007 album “Sound of Silver”. I’ve been listening to it a lot in the last week for some reason. It’s really good music for walking or jogging because of the steady repetition. It’s one of my favorite songs of last year.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDRLW748j68)

There’s a music video for this on youtube, but that’s a shorter version and the video is not enjoyable anyway.

There’s a cover by Franz Ferdinand that I didn’t like quite as much:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tagO7EL6siQ)