Link roundup

1. Darpa held a contest, challenging people to put back together several shredded documents. The winning team took advantage of ink hidden in the paper:

Then he happened on an article about a little-known government project: The U.S. Secret Service has been working with manufacturers of color laser printers to place tiny, imperceptible yellow dots on printed pages so that the government can track the machine that produced them. Good put the puzzle under a blue-light filter and saw the dots. “It was a breakthrough moment,” he says. “The pattern of dots is practically a map for how everything comes together.”

2. If you're looking for some good cheap iPhone games for your kids, I recommend Stunt Bugs and Temple Run (they were free last time I checked and my boys love them both).

3. i09's picks for the best tv moments of 2011.

4. The various writers for Grantland picked their sporting moments of the year. Here's part of Hua Hsu's pick:

We've grown so accustomed to seeing American athletes treated with some measure of deference abroad, particularly in places where the level of play might not be up to the standard of the American ideal. As I watched the brawl, it felt like something was changing: Maybe they no longer aspired to be versions of our stars. It's impossible to disentangle the factors that resulted in the melee, whether it had to do with slack refereeing or China's recent generations of treasured "only children" or maybe the aggressive, chippy play that has, in recent years, become the Chinese style. It's hard to ignore the larger backdrop, this shifting balance of global power, the realities that link the front page to the sports section. We still have the stars, but the money is elsewhere. Geographies are global now. It troubles our stable sense of lineage — the common, generational mythologies and legible, cross-town battle lines, our sense of who seeks approval from whom. Not everyone aspires to Springfield, Canton, or Cooperstown, and maybe a "love of the game" is no longer what unites us. The Brooklyn Nets might be a Russian billionaire's plaything; they might exist, in his mind, only to make him sufficiently famous so that he won't be assassinated. Striker Samuel Eto'o, a champion with both Barcelona and Inter Milan, relocated to Anzhi Makhachkala, in Dagestan, to become one of the best-paid athletes in the world. He flies 1,200 miles to home games. Playing for the Bayi Military Rockets might be the sum of one's dreams.

5. Genuinely funny comic strip/ad by The Oatmeal for Sriracha. Discovered via this giveaway.

6. Don't forget to participate in this month's art contest. Amazon and Threadless credits are up for grabs.

Link roundup

1. Kim Jon-Il's exiled grandson is named Han Sol.

2. Hand signals used by restaurant staff. Via.

3. Mysterious Russian radio tower. Via.

4. The Daily seems to be doing terribly, but it does feature a lot of great articles, such as this one about Zach Baron's misadventures in Las Vegas.

Link roundup

1. This guy boasts that he hacked the communal Starbucks gift card to siphon off money. He's just begging to be hacked, right? Via.



2. Politicians:

The cash-strapped city of Carson has spent $1,200 for new signs so that the names of City Council members could be listed by seniority rather than in alphabetical order, the city confirmed Thursday.



The signs are placed on mostly vacant, city-owned lots.

3. Russian politicians:

Putin 'discovers Greek urns' on scuba dive.

*Buy propaganda posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Great writing about living in China at the time of the Beijing Olympics. Sample paragraph:

Our son had asthma. There was no use pretending it was the squeaky-clean, sensitive, upper-middle-class kind of asthma. He had the asthma that ghetto children come down with, because they live in the dirt. He was wheezing because at last, today, on the morning of the Olympics, the filth of the city where he was born had gotten into his tender lungs. He was sick because we had let him live in Beijing.

2. How to market to old people. For example:

Marketing to the elderly is tricky. The direct approach—say, calling your product “the soap for the over-70s”—does not work. And traditional advertising fails. “You can’t use TV adverts: they forget them,” groans the 30-something executive. “We show it again and again and again—and they still can’t recall it,” he sighs. Word-of-mouth is the only way.

3. "The governor of a prison near Moscow has lost his job after photographs emerged of his inmates holding a toga party complete with caviar and a McDonald's fast food delivery."



*Buy Olympics posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. The start of this article about Chernobyl is so good, I'm not sure I want to read the article and ruin it:

Twenty-five years after the Soviet-era meltdown drove 60,000 people from their homes in the Ukraine, a rebirth is taking place inside the exclusion zone. With Geiger counter in hand, the author explores Europe's strangest wildlife refuge, an enchanted postapocalyptic forest from which entirely new species may soon emerge.

Via.

2. Garfield cake.

3. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw makes a compelling case for a video game that makes you weaker as you progress. Via.

*Buy Garfield Minus Garfield at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. One of Bill Simmons's readers had a great idea - - losing team in the NBA all-star game has to wear short shorts in next year's game.

2. Here's a great explanation for why Mubarak will be very reluctant to give up power - - he fears prosecution:

So, how can Mubarak protect himself if he eventually makes an escape from Cairo? He's taking the usual steps now. Start with his decision to install foreign intelligence chief and CIA confidant Omar Suleiman as vice president and constitutional successor. (Mubarak himself came to the presidency through this route; he had been Anwar Sadat's vice president.) This comes close to matching what in the Russian-speaking world is known as the "Putin option," a reference to the exit strategy adopted by a teetering Boris Yeltsin: Fearing possible retribution from opposition figures, Yeltsin opted to surrender power through a transitional period to a wily senior player in the intelligence community. In exchange, Yeltsin is said to have extracted a firm commitment from Putin that the full machinery of the Russian state would be mustered to protect him. There would be no criminal probes or inquiries, and no cooperation with foreigners who undertook the same. Yeltsin would be free to live his final days shuttling between Moscow and the French Riviera. Putin scrupulously kept his end of the bargain.

Via.

3. Here's Consumer Reports' picks for best frozen pizzas. (Presumably they'll have to reevaluate once the pizza/cookie dough combo is released.)

Link roundup

1. From a review of Brutal Legend:

Like a solitaire or Bejeweled, you have to ask, when you remove even the context of resolution from real life, what is there but burning time. Is there an achievement out there for 1 million games of Bejeweled played? No amount of lines of Tetris fulfill anything. They disappear as soon as they form (Russians have a grim sense of humor–in my private world of crazy, my assumption is that the desire to build something constantly being undermined is some sort of metaphor about a totalitarian state, or maybe anybody with an MBA).

2. Two-headed snowman.

3. Pitchfork's top 100 songs of 2010.

*Buy albums for $5 each at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. From a review of Brutal Legend:

Like a solitaire or Bejeweled, you have to ask, when you remove even the context of resolution from real life, what is there but burning time. Is there an achievement out there for 1 million games of Bejeweled played? No amount of lines of Tetris fulfill anything. They disappear as soon as they form (Russians have a grim sense of humor–in my private world of crazy, my assumption is that the desire to build something constantly being undermined is some sort of metaphor about a totalitarian state, or maybe anybody with an MBA).

2. Two-headed snowman.

3. Pitchfork's top 100 songs of 2010.

*Buy albums for $5 each at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Katy Hargrove's sketchbook is 148 pages for $15.

2. Russia is building floating nuclear power stations to assist in its planned conquest of the Arctic. Via.

3. ESPN blowhard Woody Paige talks about the time he nearly committed suicide.

*Learn how to cope with mental illness with these books at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. "The bizarre, constant audio output of one particular mysterious Russian 'Numbers Station' has changed, for the first time in 20 years."

2. How to make a cardboard mask.

3. "British Spy Stabbed, Murdered, Stuffed in Bag, Left in Bathtub."

*Buy Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Teri Hatcher posted unflattering photos of her wrinkly forehead to prove she hasn't had botox.

2. Paul Robertson posted a bunch of the adorable character designs he created for the Scott Pilgrim game.

3. Fark:

Proving he's the most awesome world leader ever, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin personally pilots a plane that's fighting the fires in Moscow.

4. Slate:

For the disastrous Russian heat wave has exposed a key failing of Russian society: The flow of information has stopped. There is not a single newspaper that even strives to be national in its coverage. The television is not only controlled by the Kremlin; it is made by the Kremlin for the Kremlin, and it is entirely unsuited to gathering or conveying actual information. Even the Russian blogosphere is bizarrely fragmented: Researchers who "mapped" it discovered that, unlike any other blogosphere in the world, it consists of many non-overlapping circles. People in different walks of life, different professions, and different parts of the country simply do not talk to one another. The same is true of political institutions: Since the Russian government effectively abolished representative democracy, canceling direct elections, there is no reason—and no real mechanism—for Moscow politicians to know what is going on in the vast country. Nor do governors need concern themselves with the lives and the disasters in their regions—they, too, are no longer elected but are appointed by the Kremlin.

As a result, no one knows where the fires are burning—unless they are burning right next to you. There is no map that would tell you whether your loved ones are safe or whether there is a fire along your planned travel route. Often, there is also no way to call for help.

*Buy propaganda posters at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Red Dead Redemption pulp cover (featuring Karl Urban). Via.

2. Too good to verify - - photos of an abandoned brain laboratory in Moscow. Via.

3. Lego Neuschwanstein castle. Via.

*Buy Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines at Amazon.

How to get rid of a troublesome statue

Two nights ago, "authorities in Tbilisi, under the cover darkness, decided to remove the giant statue of Josif Djugashvili (a.k.a. Stalin) from downtown Gori, the former Soviet dictator’s hometown." Georgian authorities had long wanted to remove the 48-year-old statue, but feared angering Stalin enthusiasts. In fact, "during the August 2008 war, the Georgian military suggested to their Russian counterparts that, in their shelling of the city, they might train artillery on the Stalin statue." Via these sites.

Soviet Arts Poster (link roundup)

One of several Soviet posters on display in this gallery. The posters are from the book The Soviet Arts Poster: Theatre, Cinema Ballet, Circus: 1917-1987.

And a few more links:

1. Lucy Knisley takes a look at nerd girls.

2. Made to order bobbleheads.

3. Shades of 1984 as schools discourage kids from having a best friend.

*Buy bobbleheads at eBay.

Seize the sun

This would be a good poster for geoengineers plotting to create solar energy - - spotted in this gallery of groovy Russian posters from the 70's.

*Previously: Russian Star Wars posters.

*Buy Russian posters at eBay.

Seize the sun

This would be a good poster for geoengineers plotting to create solar energy - - spotted in this gallery of groovy Russian posters from the 70's.

*Previously: Russian Star Wars posters.

*Buy Russian posters at eBay.

An explanation for that ring over Moscow

William Gibson offered an explanation for that swamp gas/weather anomaly that appeared over Moscow earlier this month:

That ominous ring of cloud over Moscow was God noticing the whale-penis upholstery in those diamond-crusted Russian SUVs.

That line is not an exaggeration mocking the nouveau riche. He was referring to this.

*Previously: Diagram of the delicious parts of the whale, perhaps?

*Buy spaceship posters at eBay.

An explanation for that ring over Moscow

William Gibson offered an explanation for that swamp gas/weather anomaly that appeared over Moscow earlier this month:

That ominous ring of cloud over Moscow was God noticing the whale-penis upholstery in those diamond-crusted Russian SUVs.

That line is not an exaggeration mocking the nouveau riche. He was referring to this.

*Previously: Diagram of the delicious parts of the whale, perhaps?

*Buy spaceship posters at eBay.

V for Vendetta CubeDude by polywen (link roundup)

V for Vendetta Lego CubeDude by polywen.

And a few more links:

1. One response to the claim in SuperFreakonomics that geoengineering is the easiest way to solve global warming, is that if we can't globally agree on cutting emissions, how could we possibly agree on affirmative geoengineering?

2. But that argument begs the question - - if it's so easy, why not just do it without reaching global consensus? Not too farfetched when you hear that the mayor of Moscow "for just a few million dollars" intends to hire jets to spray chemicals on approaching clouds, causing them to dump snow onto suburbs instead of Moscow. Via.

3. CBS News says it has more salacious news (and photos) about Steve MacNair's love life. Via.

*Previously: ESPN spends the day replaying the assertion that McNair was "such a good family man."

*Buy V for Vendetta masks at eBay.

V for Vendetta CubeDude by polywen (link roundup)

V for Vendetta Lego CubeDude by polywen.

And a few more links:

1. One response to the claim in SuperFreakonomics that geoengineering is the easiest way to solve global warming, is that if we can't globally agree on cutting emissions, how could we possibly agree on affirmative geoengineering?

2. But that argument begs the question - - if it's so easy, why not just do it without reaching global consensus? Not too farfetched when you hear that the mayor of Moscow "for just a few million dollars" intends to hire jets to spray chemicals on approaching clouds, causing them to dump snow onto suburbs instead of Moscow. Via.

3. CBS News says it has more salacious news (and photos) about Steve MacNair's love life. Via.

*Previously: ESPN spends the day replaying the assertion that McNair was "such a good family man."

*Buy V for Vendetta masks at eBay.