“Animals, all of us: dying, desperate animals, alone in our skulls, in our souls, quietly tortured by our foreknowledge of death, wandering a mindless rock, baying with pain or killing each other. That’s the working week. Come Saturday we crave relief. Slumped defeated in the corner, our flagellated cadavers scarcely held together by the gentle cocooning pressure of our armchairs, wearily we pivot our milky, despairing eyes in the direction of our television sets, seeking consolation or distraction or maybe just a little inconsequential merriment: a dab of balm to spread on these anguished bones, this empty heart.

And this is what you give us, universe?”

A good idea, I thought. Rather expanded on the actual content, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

This great UK label, originally all free music (apparently not a valid business strategy), has relaunched. They’ve put out a new megatrack, a mix of old and new stuff by their artists. I haven’t listened to it, but I guarantee it’s good.

Oh my god, this guy has the exact same gaming affliction I do. Never use the Tanuki or Hammer Bros suit, go through all of Final Fantasy 3 without using an X-Potion or Megalixir, and save all your high-powered weaponry for an encounter that will never come… but the worst by far is my tendency to save bombs in top-down shooters. I’ll die rather than use a bomb, which makes no sense because the bombs are there to prevent you from dying.

Absolutely amazing simulations and presentations of data, both natural and experimental. Beautiful and fascinating videos.

I haven’t trusted Pitchfork as a reliable source of good music judgment in years, though they’re great at getting the newest of the new. Their top tracks from the 2000s appears to be completely arbitrary.

Format stuff is one of my technology hobby-horses, and it looks like it’s one of Soderbergh’s, too. He makes a good argument for directors and producers banding together to demand their work not be cut to pieces in order to fit on a screen.

This is interesting. The international standard for a kilogram (as well as other measurements) is actually based on a single object, defined as being exactly a kilogram, which is kept very safe at a center near Paris. The thing is, since the object is defined as the kilogram, it doesn’t matter what weight it actually is. If it changes weight over time somehow, the actual quantity known as a kilogram changes. This appears to be happening.

Interestingly, if you were to sneeze on the kilogram, or hack a piece of it, by international law you would have just revised the definition of a kilogram. All the weights in the world would have to change in order to reflect your new sneezed-upon weight. Scientists are working to create a constant instead of a weight, but until then the risk remains.

Worried that TPB may disappear overnight? It’s a real risk, so why not help out in the backup effort? A user has collected all the torrents on the site (about 850,000 – another 1.2 million are not hosted on TPB) into a single torrent totaling 21.3GB. It’s still only got one seeder (the guy) but having a few copies of this around will mean that imitation and temporary Pirate Bay-ish sites will have much of the original’s content to start with.

This is great. All those episodes of cartoons where, as an adult, you look back and think, “really?” That was a show for kids?