The Hopp Stop

Hot liniment on Clemens' sack! Yikes! Via RobNeyer.

Overview of the clown show to date.

Very cool, a heated jacket. The North Face had one out a couple years back for about double the money.

A rare bit of environmental good news? Apparently rain forests are quickly reclaiming abandoned land in the tropics.

We'll see how much change actually occurs.

LOL! Butt Hole Road! Wetwang! Etc. Gotta love England.

Article on Microsoft's effort to defeat the Google/Yahoo advertising pact, with help from such friends as AT&T. Sickening to see AT&T trumpet the privacy horn after their role with the NSA wiretapping (which is probably continuing today).

Blog post that says the UAW's work rules are more to blame for its negative effects on Big 3 competitiveness than compensation disparities v. transplants.

An update on Menomena in the comments: they are working on songs. Good stuff!

Good read. Posner points out that because the extra cost of unions for a producer is a competitive disadvantage, unless the union can unionize all producers in an industry, the unionized firms will be steadily driven out of business. That is certainly the path of the U.S. auto industry.

Cool little retrospective.

Excellent article on security theater. The author was on the Colbert Report (or was it the Daily Show) in December talking about the article.

Ray Ratto on Stanford football's impact on the Stanford athletic budget.

Including a question on the Vocoder usage:

"I imagine that you're going to be answering this question an awful lot, but how did you decide to use Auto-tune on "Woods"? Did you have any experience with it before?

I've used it in certain other projects, and I've used it in really folksy, organic sounding songs, as an effect. It's a technique. People are like 'Ooh, Auto-tune is the new thing, people are using it, Kanye's using it, should I be using it?' To me, that's a hilarious argument, because people don't question whether or not you should use reverb. It's a recording technique, and I like using it, and it's really fun, and that's kind of it. Definitely some people have been like 'What's up with that?' and I'm like, uh, I don't know."

Nice, the Monterey Bay Aquarium came out with a free version of their paper guide.

This is something that I've highlighted as a sine qua non for the iPhone to become a legitimate game machine–hard-wired controls. There is a limit to the games that you can play when a touch screen or tilt sensor are the only input methods.

Apparently the blog author is not a gamer, based on this laughable statement at the end of the post:

"Game development for the iPhone generally requires a different way of thinking when it comes to controls. The standard d-pad has been around for a long time, and I'm not sure how I feel about the regression into an old way of thinking."