I recently noticed that Casio's F91W, the de rigueur chronograph of terrorists, is now officially available in colors other than "Anarchist Night". Having ordered one myself to make sure they weren't the usual terrible knockoffs, I found it to be Casio-made and just as good as the original.

The F91W is offered in magenta, birch, ginger spice, butterscotch tempest, and, of course, cornflower blue. Personally, however, I opted for chartreuse. [Amazon]

List of Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of possessing Casio watches [Wikipedia]

The Chow Video folks make a VERY good case for spiral-cutting one's wieners.

Why You Should Spiral-Cut Your Wiener - CHOW Tip (via Reddit)

"Ringbow" is a recent, half-funded Kickstarter project from a team that includes Andrew Hartman, design director of Philips Electronics. It's a Bluetooth game-controller that you wear on your finger, serving as "a mouse, keyboard and joystick simultaneously." A $35 pledge gets you one when they ship.

Since touch screens are controlled with fingers, a finger-worn tool, specifically a ring, is the natural choice for complementing them. Operating Ringbow with your thumb, in conjunction with using a touch device, enables countless new features and a much more efficient user experience. Ringbow multiplies the functionality of your finger together with allowing amazing simultaneous actions providing powerful capabilities and layers of functionality that are simply not available in today’s technologies.

Operating the ring with your thumb while using your finger to touch a device provides powerful capabilities and layers of functionality that are simply not available in today’s technologies. Ringbow multiplies the functionality of your finger together with allowing amazing simultaneous actions.

Ringbow - Next Generation Gaming Accessory (via Red Ferret)

Today, many friends and loved ones of Erik "Possum Man" Stewart gathered at Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery to remember him and his life. I gave a eulogy. Many of Possum's friends asked me for the text of it, and I promised them that I'd post it here. He was remarkable, and the event was bittersweet, full of beloved old friends and sad contemplation.

---

Erik "Possum Man" Stewart was one of my oldest friends. His death was a freak occurrence, one of those awful outflows of the statistics of small probabilities and large numbers. Take any infinitesimal outcome, multiply it by a large enough population and it becomes a near certainty.

It was the sort of statistical oddity that Possum loved to chew over. Though he was technically a vegan or a vegetarian through all the years we knew each other -- we met when I was 16 -- what Possum mostly liked to chew on was oddities.

Read the rest

In 2010, DeviantArt's Zedew produced "My Little Death Dealer," which posits Frank Frazetta as a secret bronie.

My Little Death Dealer (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Amy Crehore painted “Blue Mirror” for the Kingdom Animalia show opening June 29 in Anahiem. All proceeds from the show will be donated to Big Life Foundation in Africa. See all the artwork that will be in the show.

O'Reilly Media has just released what must be counted as one of the most important books of the decade: Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress may be the most complex video game ever made, but all that detail makes for fascinating game play, as various elements collide in interesting and challenging ways. The trick is getting started. In this guide, Fortress geek Peter Tyson takes you through the basics of this menacing realm, and helps you overcome the formidable learning curve.

The book’s focus is the game’s simulation mode, in which you’re tasked with building a dwarf city. Once you learn how to establish and maintain your very first fortress, you can consult the more advanced chapters on resource management and training a dwarf military. You’ll soon have stories to share from your interactions with the Dwarf Fortress universe.

• Create your own world, then locate a site for an underground fortress

• Equip your party of dwarves and have them build workshops and rooms

• Produce a healthy food supply so your dwarves won’t starve (or go insane)

• Retain control over a fortress and dozens of dwarves, their children, and their pets

• Expand your fortress with fortifications, stairs, bridges, and subterranean halls

• Construct fantastic traps, machines, and weapons of mass destruction

Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress

Read the rest

[Video Link]SoundWorks profiled Brave director Mark Andrews, re-recording mixer and sound designer Gary Rydstrom, supervising sound Editor Gwen Yates Whittle, and sound designer E.J. Holowicki about their work on the movie.

SoundWorks Collection: Brave

[Video Link] I'm happy to learn that Jake Shimabukuro has a new oo-koo-lay-lay album coming out this fall.

An editorial in the 200th anniversary issue of the New England Journal of Medicine looks at mortality and health through the centuries, and includes this chart of causes of death from the turn of the last century, which makes for quite a comparison. We're doing great on kidneys, but hearts not so much.

During the 20th century, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic conditions assumed more dominant roles (see bar graphTop 10 Causes of Death: 1900 vs. 2010.), although outbreaks of infectious disease — from eastern equine encephalitis (1938) and kuru (1957) to legionnaires' disease (1977), AIDS (1981), and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (1993) — necessitated ongoing vigilance against microbes. New concerns also came to medical attention, from the terrifying consequences of thermonuclear war (1962) to the indolent but devastating effects of environmental pollution (1966) and climate change (1989). Optimism about prospects for the health of future populations persisted but remained tempered by concern about the pathologies of civilization. An obesity epidemic, feared in 1912, has come to pass. Our previously steady increase in life expectancy has stalled and may even be reversed (2005).

The Burden of Disease and the Changing Task of Medicine (via Beth Pratt)

I had no idea that the great Gilbert Hernandez released a new comic book mini-series today. It's available on iTunes and Android, and at your local comic book shop.

Comics luminary Gilbert Hernandez envisions his strangest, most thrilling future yet! A drug called "spin" offers the wildest trip imaginable, followed by its users' inevitable, rapid deterioration into undead flesh eaters. Despite the side effect, the drug is so popular that the human population is dying out! With no cure to be found, the beautiful, lovesick Fatima may be the only thing standing between the survivors and the apocalypse. Get ready for four issues of zombies, drug lords, and gorgeous women!

Nirvan Mullick, the filmmaker who made the sensational short movie about the boy named Caine in East Los Angeles who built an amusement arcade out of cardboard, says:

Caine and I just got back from France, where Caine was the youngest speaker at Cannes Lions. Caine had never been on such a big airplane before, and he really loved the safety announcements and the Emergency Exits. The day after we got back, he built this new game, Ticket Grab, which includes said Emergency Exit. He also wrote 5 lessons that he has learned so far on the back of an Air France barf bag:

5 Lessons for Entrepreneurs Caine has Learned:

1. Be nice to customers.

2. Do a business that is fun.

3. Do not give up.

4. Start with what you have.

5. Use recycled stuff.

The above reminds me of P.T. Barnum's advice for entrepreneurs that Cory posted about earlier this morning!

Learn more about Caine's Arcade as well as Caine's Arcade Imagination Foundation

Tony from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, "This week on StarShipSofa we play the short story Malak, by science fiction writer Peter Watts. Malak was originally published in the anthology Engineering Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan and views the world of a semi-autonomous combat drone called Azrael and throws in some very powerful ethical questions. A brilliant story from a brilliant writer."

StarShipSofa No 244 Peter Watts/MP3 (Thanks, Tony!)

I'm a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac's California cocaine trilogy of Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, and Tusk. It's amazing that this year Rumours turns 35. Ken Caillat, who co-produced and engineered the record, has just written a new book that I'm really looking forward to reading titled "Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album." From a CNN interview with Caillat:

At the time they were recording the album, all five band mates were going through painful breakups: (John and Chrstine McVie) were divorcing, (Lindsey) Buckingham and (Stevie) Nicks' long-term relationship was coming to a bitter end and Fleetwood's wife was about to leave him for his best friend. It's all personal drama that Caillat chronicles in his book.

"In retrospect, it's a miracle that we were able to finish 'Rumours,' " he said. "But later, I came to understand that 'Rumours' probably succeeded because it was brilliant group therapy.

"Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album" (Amazon)

"Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours' at 35: Still the 'perfect album'" (CNN)