Lunchtime Links for Thursday, Sept. 06

This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.

Lunchtime Links for Thursday, Sept. 06

Posted by: James Lileks under Outstate, Technology Updated: September 6, 2012 - 12:12 PM

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Busy day; been researching the quality of the Walker Art Center bathroom for a column. Took a stroll through the 1980s exhibit while I was there. Bears no resemblance to the 80s as it actually happened, but I didn’t expect it would. Love the title: “THIS WILL HAVE BEEN.” Portentious and meaningless: just about the perfect name for any modern art retrospective. You can say that about anything. Anyway, here’s the weekly Lance Lawson mystery, with Minneapolis’ most famous snap-judgment crime fighter.

The solution is at the bottom of this post.

INTERNET THING Hey! It’s movie posters for movies that had one letter removed from the title!

More here. Nicely done, but I can't help but think: yeah? So? I mean, "Men Who Stare At Oats"? Okay.

TECH: Oh, don’t you hate when this happens?

“I did a hiking tour in Nepal, and there was no service that allowed people to all put their photos in one place and do something with it,” Kellner told me. “We could have several Flickr accounts and pool it, but that wasn’t feasible because people were so heterogeneous and I didn’t want to force them into something.”

Actually, they have a point. The quote is from a Gigaom puff-piece - er, hard-nosed news story about 7moments.com, a collaborative photo-sharing album. It’s not the only such system; as the article notes: there’s Quilt and Everyme, which let you share pictures with select groups. There’s another app - the name eludes me, but I’m sure it was a noun, whimsically misspelled - that let you combine your cellphone videos with the ones your friends took at the same event.

Thus you can experience from different angles what you didn’t experience the first time, because you were shooting a video of it.

"Everyme" really does sum up the social-network aspect of the internet, doesn't it.

SCIENCE! Human beings may be closer to figuring out a central mystery of the universe.

The Planck satellite, which was launched in 2009, has extremely sensitive instruments that can map microwave radiation in the entire sky with great precision. The latest data from the Planck mission reveals unusual radiation from our own galaxy, which open a new direction in understanding the most fundamental properties of the space, time and matter in the Universe.

Yeah, I know. BOHRING. But this is big stuff. We figure this out, we can figure out whether the universe expands forever or eventually contracts into a hot dense jot of matter, then explodes again. Either the universe is a balloon that leaks everything out or it's an infinite series of chords played on an accordion. Which would make polka the music of the spheres, I guess.

SOLUTION: