the amazing intelligence of crows

I, for one, welcome our new Joshua-Klein-trained underlings.

Lincoln Marathon 2008

One great aspect of downtown apartment living is the extremely low threshold for civic participation. This morning I woke up to people making sounds of encouragement. This is a picture of what I could see from my living room window.

So I took a shower, made myself an iced soy mocha, grabbed my camera, and went down to get a closer view. Does anybody recognize any of the runners? There are one or two people for whom one of these pictures might make a nice keepsake.

Despite a ban on iPods this year, there was a constant stream of people sporting earbuds.    Fortunately,  as the article states, "those who are photographed wearing earbuds won't be disqualified."

I was surprised that a couple of runners (Lana McCracken and Melissa Landis) spotted me on the sidelines and said hi. Unfortunately, neither my camera nor my will to make encouraging noise were at-the-ready. Congratulations, you two, on getting out there and doing it! Did you finish?

desperate housewives: a cognitive heatsink

Sixteen minutes of Clay Shirky on tapping into it.

condo

One of my resolutions for the new year was to sell this huge 'suburban' house and get a smaller place that I can manage. I'm pre-approved to buy a condominium on 10th & O. We should be closing on February 21. I've uploaded some pictures to give an idea of the space and the context. This is not my furniture, of course.

My favorite feature: The Blue Orchid is diagonally across the street. W00t!

duelity

Duelity is a pair of brief movies about the cultural war between the two dominant stories of how things came to be: creationism and big-bang-slash-evolution. There is one movie about each, both the same length. Interestingly, neither movie tells either story in the way preferred by the proponents of each story. Rather, the telling of the scientific story is done in mock-biblical language, and the telling of the creationist story is told in mock-science-speak.

Each film has a narrator (one male, one female) who delivers a sentence and then pauses for the animation to illustrate that part of the story.

The absolute best feature of these films, however, is that they are meant to be played simultaneously, so that neither narrator is speaking over the top of the other. The result is a very impressive work of art.

My flash plugin had some trouble smoothly playing both at the same time, but it was worth it anyway.