You've probably already seen this, but in case you haven't: It's a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande investigating the reasons behind medical costs that vary from town to town.

It's the article that Obama made required reading for his aides. And it's pretty good too.

A blog about deconstructing fast food meals into their constituent ingredients and remaking them into fancy looking (but still unhealthy) dishes.

It hasn't actually been collected, but it looks like the conditions for the Netflix prize have finally been met.

Update to this post, itself an update to this post.

John Hodgman from the Daily Show (though perhaps better known as the "PC guy" from the Apple commercials) giving a speech at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner in front of President Obama.

I laughed my ass off.

Beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota, a 4,850 foot deep lab is being built to help scientists look for dark matter.

This guy has done some wild things with dollar bills.

NAWLZ is a webcomic done in Flash that integrates sound, animation, and some interactivity. The art is very urban graffiti, and the plot has some definite cyberpunk elements with a surrealist bent.

Too much static clinging to my earlobes. GEEZUS!!!!!!

A set of photos by Serbian photographer Vlado Marinkovic of buildings reflected in puddles. A really cool and surreal effect.

A cool improvement on the already pigged flicker site that allows you to view peoples pictures from around the world. This is basically the same thing, except its linked with Google Earth which allows you to click on any country and see random flicker pics from that country only. North Korea is conspicuously missing.

Youtube video of a truly bizarre optical illusion.

Even knowing what's really going on it takes continual effort to see what's actually there.

Over the last decade the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has spent two and a half billion dollars researching alternative medicine, and really hasn't turned up anything interesting.

See extended for my comments.

The world's most famous graffiti artist has a new exhibition at the city museum in his hometown of Bristol.

Banksy said: "This is the first show I've ever done where taxpayers' money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off."

A music video by the CunninLynguists.

I smoke trees'ins through all four seasons
But I’m like gas prices, high for no reason

If I could sell MysterPig, I could buy this sweet "lazy boy-esque" recliner chair and still have enough left over for lunch!

mysterypig.com Estimated Worth $211.7 USD!!

OK it's not actually transparent, but it does transmit light from one side to the other without severely compromising structural integrity.

It's called Litracon, and it works through the magic of scads of tiny optical fibers running from one side to the other.

A video reinterpretation of the classic fable in the style of industrial design. By Tomas Nilsson.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081205095956.htm

"...the findings may be related to the team's earlier findings, that is, that microwave radiation from cell phones can affect the so-called blood-brain barrier... The research team also found certain nerve damage in the form of damaged nerve cells in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus."

firefox doesn't think hippocampus is a word?
well, i guess it doesn't think "firefox" is a word either.

Interesting blog about hackers (mostly just DIY stuff, not like Conficker) linking together and maintaining shared common areas. Kind of a cool concept, like a permanent LAN party. Anyone interested?

Their main site is down so I couldn't look to see if there were any in SD but sounds like it would be fun.

I'm back on MysteryPig and I'm going to be posting a lot more. To celebrate, click to the extended for the Dragon Boy Suede video "Quit Playing Videogames and Get Laid"

MTV classic sketch show "The State" is finally being released on DVD.

I hope it's still as awesome as it was when I was 12!

Interesting graphical comparison between the images used in ads and what you actually get in reality, done for a number of fast food items (Big Mac, Whopper, Nachos Bell Grande, etc.). Some of these actually look somewhat similar in real life but others are way off. Kinda makes you want to claim false advertising.

Apple was just sued by the parent of a kid who said his iPod Touch was off in his pocked during school when it 'popped' and caught fire. It was supposedly hot enough to burn his pants, melt his underwear, and send him to the hospital for 2nd degree burns.

Who knows whether this has merits or not, but they stupidly included 10 people from the Mac retail store that sold the product to the mom. I don't know if the had to include them for legal reasons (to complete the liability chain possibly?) but it sounds like kind of a stretch to me. Do people who sell something really have a responsibility to test and ensure that the product is not defective?

The actual allocution of Madoff detailing how he conducted the world's largest Ponzi scheme for almost 20 years (since the early 90's). He could be sentenced for up to 150 years in prison for various charges including multiple counts of fraud (securities, mail, wire), money laundering, and perjury.

With yet another parallel to the New Deal, a new 'American Recovery and Reinvestment Act' logo has been unveiled and will start being pasted everywhere. Nothing like more propaganda to soak into everyone's brains.

Derren Brown is a magician who, in this special, uses classic stage techniques ("suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship") to examine various US belief structures and the naivete they run on. He's an outspoken atheist who has worked with Richard Dawkins and has a huge list of other TV specials, all of which sound just as clever as this one. Link is to first part of video (embedding is, sadly, disabled).