Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

• Acceptosaurus -- this, and the comments underneath, are very funny whether or not you're involved in submitting papers, evolutionary biology, etc.
• Lady GaGa is an Illuminati puppet -- does this surprise anyone at all? And the Bad Romance song and video are all about Baphomet, as they would be.
• George Monbiot slams the feed-in tariff -- my own feeling is that micro does have some place, eg. solar hot water. But he does a good job here of exposing the skewed financing behind the current plans. I'd be interested to hear your critiques, if you disagree.
• Flip Flop Fly -- an excellent collection of sport-related infographics. Mostly to do with baseball, but toward teh foot of the page there are a load to do with other sports. Not all of the data is especially interesting, but it's a great showcase of different diagramming / design techniques.
  

• Body Ritual among the Nacirema -- famous and influential anthropological article by Horace Miner. A bit dated now (hog hairs?) but it still works pretty well as satire, both of the society and of anthropogical perceptions.
• Are you being ripped of by motor insurers? -- specifically, have they tried to write off your car for a nugatory value when you could get it repaired and roadworthy? THis article shows how to get your own way.
• Natural Science Museum of Barcelona visual database -- clever and fun piece of Flash to explore the animal kingdom. Includes links to Flickr images! This could eat a lot of your time.
• Wikileaks needs money -- a very worthwhile cause, I think.
• The Four Big Myths of Profile Pictures -- not a very serious subject, but neatly and entertainingly explored by the OkCupid people.
• Dewey Organizes Internet Archive Music -- there is loads of great (legal) free music at the Internet Archive, but it's hell browsing it. This new interface seems to do a good and useful job.
• Spotiseek -- uses Last.fm technology to generate Spotify playlists according to your requested likes. This seems to really work well. You can just drag the playlist into your Spotify window.
• My Consulate in Samoa, by William B Churchwood -- a fascinating historical document, very readable and entertaining. Includes an account of the strange Samoan version of cricket.

"Okay, this is quite a big decision, but I've taken it. Six Momus albums -- the ones I recorded for Alan McGee's Creation label between 1987 and 1993 -- are out of print. Creation doesn't exist any more, and in theory Sony owns the rights to these albums, but isn't doing anything with them and probably never will. In the meantime, only Russian pirates are profiting, charging punters for illegal downloads."

When I asked Sandra Löv to make the video, she was like:
- Oh, we need to make a dance video.
And I was like:
- On this theme? And also, as you may or may not know, I’m no dancer.
And she was like:
- And we also need to involve my four friends as your background dancers. Pretty much all of them work with computers.
And I was like:
- You’re a fucking genius, I’ll always let you do anything you want.
After watching the video once, you’ll want to dance along. After watching it about three or four times, I think you’ll understand what it’s really about.

• Went the other night to see Burn after Reading, the new Coen brothers film. We thought it was pretty good fun: just a fairly shallow piece of fluff really, but there's nothing wrong with that. The galaxy of stars (Malkovich, Swinton, McDormand, Pitt, Clooney) all put in entertaining turns. It kind of cops out and runs out of steam at the end, but it wold be harsh to resent it for that.
• The Plantbot moves autonomically around in search of light for its precious cargo. Excellent idea! I think ideally you'd want it to also rotate so the heaviest part of the plant was facing away form the light, so it grows evenly, but maybe its drunkard's walk will achieve evenness anyway. (Via curiosity_ips.)
• Last night we were at a get-together of children's book illustrators organized as part of the National Year of Reading, with which T's involved. Michael Foreman, Anthony Browne and Nick Butterworth were the headline names, but plenty of lesser luminaries too, plus some publishers, writers, etc. They mostly talked about the industry, which was interesting for me but may have been deathly for the kids who were present. Also, a bit strange that the three main speakers were all middle-aged blokes, when there are plenty of young people and women in the field. They were all engaging enough guys, but there was definitely a tone of "these young art-school types today, never been taught to draw properly, we had to come up the hard way" etc.
  It was in Suffolk's Council Chamber, which is pretty new and had a rather snazzy mike system, like a sort of automated "speaking object" for those of you who were ever at OUSFG discussions or similar. If you want to speak, you press the button on your mike, but that doesn't interrupt the current speaker until they press their own button to signal they've finished: so only one mike is live at any given time. The good bit though is that there are three big projection screens on the walls of the room, fed by a handful of ceiling of cameras that are slaved to the mikes -- so as the "live mike" changes, the live camera switches to the one with the best view of that mike, which pans and zooms as required, and the projections all automatically go with that so as to display the current speaker most effectively. Maybe this arrangement is commonplace these days, but I hadn't seen it before and thought it was pretty neat.
• I expect everyone's seen this reinterpretation of A-Ha's Take on Me video by now, but just in case you haven't -- you should, it's very very funny.
  

• PMOG, The Passively Multiplayer Online Game -- mentioned by killalla, basically a way of making ar$ing around on the Web more fun. Needs Firefox. See also pmog.
  
• What does atheism mean to you? Interesting finding from the Pew Foundation that an impressive 15% of US atheists are either absolutely or fairly certain that there is a God. (As are a mighty 40% of agnostics.)
• Nice little film of a mechanical escalator device. I just think this is a really ingenious design.
• Labrador have released their free 2008 Summer Sampler, to which I can't find a link on their site, but here's a direct link to the zip itself. "A summerish mix of recent favourites from The Sound of Arrows, The Radio Dept. and Club 8, lost classics from Acid House Kings, Caroline Soul and Chasing Dorotea and sun packed songs by [ingenting] and lots more." Many of the 30 songs will already be familiar if you know Labrador stuff, but if not then you really should.
• Typetester is a neat little online utility that allows you easily to compare your chosen sample text in a variety of fonts, spacings, colours, weights etc. I anticipate using this a lot.
• Relatedly, see your chosen text as smoke, droplets, lovehearts, fireworks etc, here. Pretty!
  
• This looks like a good recipe for elderflower cordial, which now is the time to make. Anyone tried doing so?
• Does reading Stephen R Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books make you feel as gelidly preterite as a carious scoria? It does me, but this useful page helps make sense of it all.
• Conservapedia has posted this email exchange with evolutionary microbiologist Professor Robert Lenski (longish, but worth reading). Good example of how a scientist can comprehensively demolish an idiotic opponent. I can only guess that one of the other Conservapedia editors hates Schlafly.