Existentialist Animation

Seen the libertarian candidate who turned himself blue? According to CNN, “Stan Jones,a 63-year-old business consultant and part-time college instructor, said he started taking colloidal silver in 1999 for fear that Y2K disruptions might lead to a shortage of antibiotics.” And that, my friends, is what too much doomsday / conspiracy thinking will get you.

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Scratching my head, I turn to these amazing existentialist animations for solace, and find none. Perhaps answers are buried in this real-time WebCollage.

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It appears the web is becoming more clairvoyant – this site can accurately guess pert near any dictator or sitcom character you can think of by playing 20 questions with you. 10 Qs to guess that I was Maya from Just Shoot Me. Niles Crane from Frasier was much harder – about 25 Qs, with some absurd detours. The power of public/collaborative database building coupled with a slick AI engine — this is how Amazon et al can “recommend 10 other books you might like” and amaze you with how well it “knows” you — same basic principle.

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Think surveillance might be getting a bit out of hand? As Mike says, “I think this is what people mean when they talk about “slippery slopes”:

“There are now video cameras in the remote part of a national forest for the stated purpose of catching people growing marijuana. There are at least 2,397 surveillance cameras on the streets of Manhattan.”

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Sure Microsoft cares about security! They care so much they’re going to start making you pay for it.

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Very cool bookmarklet for web developers – open this as a URL, then drag the bookmark icon to your toolbar. Now you can toggle CSS on/off for any page, any browser:

javascript:i=0;if(document.styleSheets.length>0){cs=!document.styleSheets[0].disabled;for(i=0;i<document.styleSheets.length;i++)document.styleSheets[i].disabled=cs;};void(cs=true);