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Science, says Clive Thompson, is about “the quest for facts — the scientific method, the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance. It’s dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive, filled with flashes of crazy excitement and hours of drudgework, and driven by ego: our desire to be the one who figures it out…” While kids may get bored by science lessons, they do have a knack for scientific method: a recent study shows how teenagers use systems-based reasoning to play (and win) complex games.

You’ve seen the Get A Mac TV ads with the Apple Guy and the PC Guy. The PC Guy, John Hodgman, has a life outside the commercials. This BoingBoingTV interview may provide more information than you require.

As a freight-train geek, I’m delighted by the idea behind Following The Box, a BBC News project that is tracking the progress of a shipping container over 12 months. The Beeb will use the box to explore themes and stories relating to globalisation and international trade. In his 2006 book The Box economist Marc Levinson describes the disruptive effects of introducing standard-sized shipping containers in the 1950s. An April 2006 article in The Economist[**] likened the modern global freight network to another disruptive technology — the Internet — with containers acting as data packets.

[**] I’d provide a link, but the article is only available to subscribers. Bleh.

Showgirl, spy, courtesan, adopter of orphans from many backgrounds, and friend of Princess Grace: the NGV’s Art Deco exhibition includes images of Josephine Baker, after whom one of my cats is named.

Girly bits, circa 1946, brought to you by Disney and Kotex — the story of menstruation:

Judging by her rather snooty attitude to fan fiction, expressed in a recent radio program, I’m sure Ramona Koval will be gobsmacked to learn that the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention, Aussiecon 4, will bring A$18 million to the Victorian economy, according to our State Minister for Major Projects, Theo Theophanous. That’s about $6000 per attendee (which sounds a tad high to me). And, ahem, Major Projects??

CS Lewis confessed that “my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books.” (thanks to Will Type For Food for posting the quote)

Need more cowbell in your life? Upload an MP3 and add that special Christopher Walken touch!

Just as one can never have enough cowbell, there’s always room for another duck in a great work of art.

When worlds collide: Jack Benny interviews (a shirtless!) Isaac Hayes. *sigh* I’m far too young to see this video.

The BBC’s overseas journalists routinely prepare stories for radio, TV and the web, funded by a combination of public and private-sector sources. Earlier this year, the Beeb started broadcasting in Arabic and Farsi. “If we think the BBC should be one of the world’s leading news providers, and that it is one of the UK’s best opportunities to have a global brand… [we've] got to go down the commercial route,” says global news director Richard Sambrook. “…we’re in danger of falling behind because we’re unable to keep up with what is going on out there. We’ve got to move as fast as we can.”

A witty anniversary article from Esquire magazine: 10 years of corrections and apologies.

“The happy effect that Babar has on us, and our imaginations, comes from this knowledge — from the child’s strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park.”

The National Library of Australia is digitising newspapers dating from 1803 to the mid-1950s, for free online access.

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• Torchwood radio show for LHC (2)
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Beware the lettuce demon, especially if you’re a hungry nun.

US film critic Roger Ebert describes how to read a film. It’s a reflective practice technique that works equally well for teaching a class and for developing your own expertise in visual language, symbolism and storytelling.

The joy of Ernie Hudson:

“Sometimes when I’m walking down the street, anywhere in the world, I see somebody on the other side of the street, and you can just tell his life sucks by the way he’s walking… They look up and see me… and the cloud kind of disappears. They say, ‘Wow, man, we’re really happy to meet you.’ After that little exchange they walk away, but it’s a different walk. That doesn’t cost any money. And I think it’s pretty cool.”

In a painfully detailed example of creme de la phlegm, Matt Taibbi describes the prose style of Thomas Friedman: “He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.” The central premise of Friedman’s new book, says Taibbi, is “the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing ‘launch’ instead of ‘lunch’ in a space capsule.”

A couple of must-see movies… First, a heart-warming romantic comedy, the story of a writer, a single mom and a little boy in search of happiness.

Second, a film for grown-ups. Dark, cold and deeply disturbing.

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Avast, me hearties, today be International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Let’s hear ye rrrrrroll those aaarrrrs and blast those lubbers for the lowdown scum that they arrrrrre.

(All right, if you’re feeling a bit internal today, perhaps you could Knit Like A Pirate instead.)

BBC Labs staffer Tristan Ferne describes the process of analysing the content and meta-content of The Archers, a long-running radio serial. How might the basic elements of plot, character, sound, text, time and location be recombined and re-used in innovative ways?

Established by Harper Collins, the Authonomy web site solicits new writing by… well, anyone. Essentially, it’s a public version of the publisher’s slush pile, the unsolicited manuscripts that arrive daily in any commercial publisher’s in-tray. Authors are invited to publish their work at Authonomy, and Harper Collins hopes that readers will review, comment and (via the ‘wisdom of crowds’ theory) identify writers that could be offered publishing contracts. In the site’s FAQ Harper Collins makes all the right philosophical noises:

“HarperCollins, like all publishers, is inundated with new manuscripts, and cannot hope to consider them all fairly. We don’t feel that our current, closed ‘slush pile’ system is fair to authors themselves – nor do we believe it is giving us the best chance of finding the brightest new talent. authonomy is a genuine attempt to find a better way to determine the books on our shelves – and it hands selective power to the readers who will ultimately be buying them.”

Writing in The Guardian, Aida Edemariam recalls her days as a slush-pile reader.

Things Magazine offers a short history of urban portals — a link-filled sampling of intriguing doorways, facades and imaginary places in cities. Great for the armchair explorer :-)

If you must have a fence, at least make it interesting: have you considered pencils, bras, shoes or a string of perfectly matched padlocks? (found via BoingBoing)

Health warning: the video below may cause incessant whistling for the rest of the day.

For more cake-related goodness, try the Cake Wrecks blog.

Clive James says a “poem without form has nothing else to grab your attention either: no little low heavens, no gauze babushkas, nothing to see or even hear. Today’s deliberately empty poetry can get a reputation for a time: there will always be a residency” for poems that lack either metaphorical lightning or solid craftsmanship. Great poetry needs both.

Gregory Mcdonald died last week. His “Fletch” books are enduring favorites of mine, and Chevy Chase’s delivery of the line, “I’m a shepherd” never fails to make me laugh aloud.

Being commissioned to write the sixth Hitch Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy novel was “like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice,” says Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer.

Here’s a video of great classics, translated: Wuthering Heights, Julius Caesar, Gunfight at the OK Corral and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

The next video is art in motion: what can you do with a few thousand sticky notes? (found via swissmiss)

Credit: EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

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