overstated

Tell me it isn’t true: The New York City Anti-Hipster Forum!

I had always wished there was someone out there capturing the absurdity and triviality of hipster kids. This is great! But what if the hipsters read these words and use them to breed a more powerful and offensive mutant hipster species that is unstoppable? Oh god!

One of the most difficult search procedures, and one where most people rely on social networks is the dark and mysterious world of car repair. It’s relatively common to get ripped off, shoddy repair, or the worst, slimy and inexperienced repair people. The mechanic everyone wants to find is a friendly guy who always undercuts the competition because he cares about your business.

Car repair, like western medicine, deals with the problematic scenario. Beyond the regular service (oil, tune-ups), we only deal with mechanics when symptoms appear: the squeaky brake, clunking noise, or click when we turn the key. Unfortunately, mechanics, unlike doctors, do not come with affiliations or a strong community of mechanic friends. If you’re moving to a new city, or don’t trust your friends’ advice, how do you find a trustworthy and skilled auto shop?

I would expect the Internet to provide a bridge between people with good mechanics and those looking for one, but my searches came up empty. Local information providers (CitySearch, Yahoo Classifieds) give the facility to rate or comment on businesses, but lack any actual personal testimonials. Consumer advocate sites (ripoffs.org, The Squeaky Wheel) don’t have a local focus. And to the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any “auto repair testimonial” sites in existence.

My best effort came through the community associated with my car, Volvo owners in America. I found two sites (swedishengieering.com, brickboard.com) that list affordable, experienced Volvo repair shops in the Boston area. It’s a place to start, but definitely not the most efficient search technique possible.

Looking for a new way to enhance your sex life? Tired of using the same old vision technology? Try hooking 144 electrodes up to your tongue. Paul Bach-y-Rita is developing a high-resolution interface to one of the most dense areas of nervous endings, which also comes with great conductance thanks to saliva.

The wired article that led me to this also says that Bach-y-Rita is hoping to have a wireless retainer-like interface that could be used for a number of purposes. The holy grail of course, “a sensor-filled condom that, in theory, could channel sexula stimulation to the tongue.”

U of Wisc: Tongue seen as portal to the brain

When did man become best pals with the dog? Recent genetic research suggests that dogs may have evolved as recently as 40,000 years ago in East Asia, assumedly through human domestication of wolves.

So how has this tightly coupled evolution affected our relationship with the little woofer? Cognitive research shows that dogs respond to human social cues better than any other animal, including our assumed ancestor, the chimpanzee and their closest extant relative, the wolf. So when you look into your dogs eyes, and you think there is something more there than a blank stare, there probably is.

NSU: Stone Age man kept a dog

Science: Domestication gave canines innate insight

The most surprising nugget in this Brown University newspaper interview with stoner hero Ellen Feiss (like my computer totally crashed and it went bleep bloop bloop bleep so i switched to apple) is the director of the series: Errol Morris. I had no idea that this docugenius was behind the clever character presentation in the ads. From Dr. Death to Happy Apple in one step.

Brown Daily HeraldL Ellen Feiss Interview

Errol Morris: filmography and more

A debate has ensued between myself and a friend, and I’m calling on the weblog community to help us solve it. So here it is:

Which is more probable: a meteor hitting a commercial airliner, or a meteor hitting a person?

There are quite a few variables in this debate, which I will list along with my approximation, usually pulled from thin air:

Number of people on planet earth: 6 billion

Average percentage of people standing outdoors at a given point in time: 0.1%

Surface area of an average person (from the top): 1 sq. foot

Surface area of “in risk” population: 6 million sq. feet

Average number of airliners in the air at any given point in time: 10,000?

Average surface area of a commercial airliner: 2500 sq. feet?

Surface area of “in risk” airplanes: 25 million sq. feet?

My money was on the demons in the sky, which is why my statistics probably favor that solution. If anyone has a better estimate on these numbers, or can find some motherf%@$ing google query that turns up good statistics, please lend a hand. The fate of a job-seeking consultant may be in your hands.

Nothing is better than when a good friend documents your life for three years and then edits it down into a three minute movie. Aisling has been around me continuously during my time here in dorkland, constantly taking pictures and video of the experience. Sit back and enjoy her (and my) life at one of the weirdest places on earth

audiovisceral: Life at MIT

I can’t really tell what kind of animals these singing Swedish pets are, but they’re damn cute with their hip hairstyles and endearing facial expressions.

While search engine companies struggle to provide effective geographical search methods, the BBC news service points to a simple and effective trick for identifying sites around you: search for your postal code.

In America, the results tend to be less significant. Using only the 5 digit zip code, there tends to be a lot of noise from the fact that many other things tend to share the first 100,000 integers on the web. Extending the zip code to include the 4 digit extension specifies the search enough, but given that the extension is optional, misses lots of results.

Since the extra 4 is geographically based, I subtracted and added within a range of 20 for my home address and received quite a few results, but since Google and other search engines do not support regular expressions or partial search queries, this is a painstaking process.

BBC: Web reveals hidden lives

Google: Sites around the Media Lab