The Stuart Little movies are racist

Stuart Little is a charming book I fondly remember reading as a kid.  About a family where one of their biological kids is a mouse.  (Yes, the mom gave birth to Stuart.)

However, when Hollywood decided to make a movie based on the book, they saw fit to change the color of the mouse.  In the book, he's clearly a brown mouse.

But in the movie they decided to change that to white.

Because Hollywood can only make movies with white heroes.  Even when it's a white mouse.

They also changed him from being a biological child to being adopted, because realism is important with a movie about a talking mouse who wears clothes and has opposable thumbs.

Cookie Monster sings Tom Waits

This is really well edited.

Politics and Embassy closings

To the surprise of no one, President Obama is being criticized for closing embassies under threat.  Because the Republicans in Congress have been yelling at him for almost a year about the attack on the embassy in Libya, and how he didn't do enough to protect that embassy.  Now other people are yelling at him for doing too much to protect the embassies.

There's literally nothing he can do to please some people.  Which is something Lincoln said, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.

Google flip flops on net neutrality

When Google was solely a website with multivaried content, they were clear advocates of net neutrality. Now that they're an ISP, their contract has very restrictive terms that ban you from using your home internet from doing all sorts of things.

We don't know what causes autism, but we know it's not vaccines

Every time I read about another possible cause of autism, I'm fascinated.  Clearly, something in our environment is different, given the surge in cases over the last few years.  There's some increase in diagnosis and awareness, but that's not enough.

And since the alleged ingredient in vaccines has been removed, but autism rates continue to climb, we know that's not the cause.  Plus, the only study to show any relationship between autism and vaccines was faked.  And only included 20 participants.  Whose data was faked.

Anyway, I read an article suggesting the possibility that sonograms cause autism.  I find it a fascinating theory.  I hope we can figure out the cause soon.

Daisy was sung by a computer in 1961

I had no idea that having HAL in 2001 sing Daisy was a reference to an actual computer, programmed to sing the exact same song.  In 1961.

Title of the song

How did I not ever blog this hilarious boy band song? It's meta, it's comedy, it's got everything I like. Title of the Song, by DaVinci's Notebook.
 

Twitter maps

Some pretty awesome maps of twitter usage, including whether people are likely to be tourists or not, which smartphone OS they're using (Blackberry is still popular in Indonesia and Malaysia), and what language. http://www.mapbox.com/blog/visualizing-3-billion-tweets/

Google Glass will lead to terrorists taking command of your starship

I just made this photo. It's commentary, so the images are fair use. Also, it explains to me why I've always felt creeped out by Google Glass. It's because I think people will get addicted to it and then force me to use it. And I don't have a robot friend (or Ashley Judd) to help fight them off.

Linus Pauling FTW

Scientists have just imaged atomic bonds in a molecule as it changed shapes. It's particularly amazing how the shapes from molecular diagrams pretty exactly match the images of the actual molecule.

Atomic animation

IBM made their logo out of atoms when they first invented the scanning probe microscope. Now they've made a movie with atoms as pixels. That's some cool progress.