DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Q: How do you make a 42'' television look no bigger than the 20'' television it replaces?
A: Sit twice as far away.

So, we don’t have that huge theater-screen experience we were hoping for, but at least the couch need not sit in the middle of the room like it used to.

The other thing that surprised me about owning a widescreen TV is that some movies are even wider than 16:9. I thought there were only two common aspect ratios for video content — 4:3 (old TVs) and 16:9 (widescreens). 16:9 is roughly 1.77:1… but some movies are shot as wide as 2.35:1. In short, you can buy a widescreen TV, but you can’t fill it.

(Modern televisions have several viewing modes that zoom in on, stretch, and/or squash content to fit the screen. Our plasma even has an innovative mode that only squashes the edges, so that bodies change shape as characters walk offscreen. But I was surprised that a cutting-edge display is essentially already obsolete in this respect.)

Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2003-2004

I could be sensationalist and scream These are the stories your government doesn’t want you to read! But I would never resort to sensationalism, unless, you know, it worked. The American people are far too clever for that.

Censored story #24 is pretty scary:

The Selective Service System, the Bush Administration, and the Pentagon have been quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide in order to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

How many of those soccer moms who are voting for Bush in order to feel safe would still vote that way if they knew that their sons, the ex-soccer players, were due to join 1000+ dead soldiers in Iraq? Here’s a hint: you won’t run out of fingers when you count them.

I’m surprised to see #3, Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists. That’s common knowledge, at least to readers of debris.com. And we already know the Washington Post staff reads debris.com.

These stories could probably really hurt the Bush campaign, if anybody were to actually read them.

Nature magazine:

In the build-up to the US presidential election, science is making a sizeable impact on the political agenda. But what will another four years of George W. Bush mean for science, compared with a term under Democratic challenger John Kerry?

To find out, Nature has asked the two candidates 15 questions about their science policies.

• Introduction and analysis
• The interactive version (in case it doesn’t appear inline at the link above)
• PDF version

How fast can you swim in syrup?

The dangers of playing bass in a drum and bass duo (Toast Machine).

Florida hurricanes are a message from God?

EnviroGlas is a terrazzo flooring made from recycled bottles.

Tool’s Ænima was recorded live, with no clicktrack?!

(Thanks to the usual suspects all the great linkage. You surf the web, finding cool stories, so I can concentrate on my job. Hey, wait a second…!)