One Guy and a Dream

Here’s an interesting article about how the TV business model works:

http://abovethecrowd.com/2010/04/28/affiliate-fees-make-the-world-go-round/

(via marginalrevolution)

You may notice that some posts seem to appear in the past. I can edit the post date, so if I miss a day, I may retroactively post items, labeled the day they were found, not necessarily the day they were posted. Just keeping you on your toes.

Now you can play Super Mario Brothers as other classic Nintendo characters:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/534416

My first try was with the Contra guy, which was really interesting and fun.

In addition to being the theme of the 2008 Boston Celtics, Ubuntu is a flavor of linux – an open source, free operating system. They have a 6 month release cycle, so a new version comes out twice per year. A new version was just released today – you can check it out here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

If you want to try it out, you can run it as a live disk, meaning you can run it directly off of a CD or USB stick without affecting your current operating system (though with limited functionality).

Christopher Hitchens has a great analysis of Animal Farm, the mildly controversial (in some parts of the world) Orwell classic. I wish I had read this before reading the book, and may re-read it now with this in mind. Though it is clearly political, I didn’t realize how closely the characters related to real-world figures.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/17/christopher-hitchens-re-reads-animal-farm

(via kottke)

Oyster is a hotel review site. The best part is that they take their own pictures. They have some great comparisons to marketing pictures available through the hotels:

http://www.oyster.com/hotels/photo-fakeouts/

(via kottke)

I’m a few days behind because of a busy weekend, so here are two links from when I was gone.

First, a pretty interesting octopus video.

Here’s the second link:

www.theonion.com/articles/man-at-very-top-of-food-chain-chooses-bugles,17322/

Usually I skip over sites like The Onion that consistently provide great content – otherwise I’d be flooded by links there. I’m making an exception here because this was a particularly great article.

(via kottke)

This is a pretty great compilation of the “problems” people encounter in infomercials.

http://kottke.org/10/04/the-fake-problems-in-infomercials

Interesting thought experiment, although I’m not sure you can take it very far:

http://venomousporridge.com/post/533473203/new-yorker-bubbles

(via kottke)

Interesting link on ultra-endurance athletes who are literally crazy:

?http://kottke.org/10/04/insanely-great-at-ultra-endurance-races