The full version of Pixar’s animated short “Presto” that precedes Wall-E in theaters. Great little short about a rabbit dealing with his pet magician because he’s not being properly fed.

Cats ‘n’ Racks is pretty much heaven, combining the cuteness of cats in sinks with the ample kitten storage of some particularly endowed women.

*swoon*

This isn’t the normal UTI sort of post, in that it doesn’t deal with anything new or science-y or technological-y. But it’s chock-full of YouTube videos!

Feist, Canadian pop singer extraordinaire, is pretty…well…extraordinary. She is cute, writes beautiful songs, and sings with great emotion. The Reminder, her latest album, is pretty fantastic, and the rest of her catalog isn’t too shabby either.

For the past day, I had been trying to remember the song for the music video I had stuck in my head. I could remember all the different parts of the video (the flying toast, floating singer, guitar playing, dancing in the street), but not who the camera was following or what they were playing. Then I started to remember the beginning melody, then some words, and then finally the name of the song: Mushaboom.

And I present it to you now:

It is not often that a video complements the song so well that the two begin to become entwined. The video for “Mushaboom” absolutely accomplishes this. Both the music and the video are lovely on their own, sure, but together they are stunning.

Of course, I could not stop there. YouTube had opened its trench coat and given me a peek inside. Every other Feist music video is, surprisingly, just as great.

1 2 3 4

One Evening

My Moon My Man

One of the Internet’s first uses was as a national connection between labs and universities. The current Internet keeps with this tradition of disseminating scientific information. Also in today’s Undressing the Internet: cute dancing cats and girls getting ripped in half.

On the international front: Straight from Russia come folk redesigns of movie posters. And from the United Kingdom, a small article on everyone’s favorite Japanese author (read: mine), Haruki Murakami.

On the web design front: For anyone out there building a website, a couple new tools have emerged to help out. Most notably, Browsershots.org lets you test your web design in different browsers. For free. No account needed. Also cool, but more informative than helpful, raketforskning.com now has a live Pagerank tool so you can check your site’s Pagerank 1-2-3. And, finally, not a tool, but a whole website full of interesting things to do with CSS: CSS Play, experiments with cascading style sheets.

On the science front: First, a quick jaunt through mathematics. The Mathematical Atlas is pages and pages and pages of introductions to the areas of modern mathematics. Lost before you even begin? Check out the Math Atlas’ tour of the subfields of mathematics for a quick overview. Getting a little more specific, scienceblogs.com has an introduction to information theory. A very good, easy to comprehend read.

As science once again encroaches on the philosophical questions of the humanists, Geoffrey Harpham argues discussion between scientists and humanists could lead to a new golden age of philosophy and science.

Small physics (e.g., particle physics, quantum mechanics, string-theory, etc.) has become increasingly esoteric. Its theories are steeped in math and explaining them in layman’s terms varies from impossible to almost impossible. Thus, it is always commendable when someone comes along with clear explanations and visualizations of a tricky physics matter. To what is all this leading? Imagining the Tenth Dimension, a website for the book of the same name, which seeks to show what the ten dimensions of (one version of) string theory look like.

On the terrible, terrible, embarrassing story front: “I attempted to lose my virginity on craigslist.”

On the OMG IT’S SO CUTE front: Dance you ASCII cat, dance!

On the (finally) random links front: Wikiquote has a collection of last words. A personal favorite: Caligula exclaimed “Vivo” as he was being murdered by his own soldiers. Translation? “I live!”

Think you’re smart? Well, test yourself with the simple intelligence test.

A complete waste of time: A clock with dots for seconds and three centuries worth of days portrayed by dots.

Criss Angel rips a girl in half. That is as self explanatory as you can get.

Have a Windows password that needs cracking? Check out Ophcrack 2, “the faster Windows password cracker.” It’s available as a Live CD, so you can burn the program to a CD, boot from it, and get crackin’. Hurray for free ways to break laws and steal passwords.

I leave you with this: The Royal College of Art Summer Show in London had a submission by Tim Simpson entitled “Natural Deselection”. What’s the idea? “Three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime.”

In today’s UTI: the power of the porn industry is finally acknowledged, the Stencil Revolution is upon us, and NASA creates a beep pop video. And there’s still over half a UTI to go!

UNDRESSING THE INTERNET EXTRAAAAAVAGANZA!

To start, NASA recently put out a movie of the Huygens probe landing on Saturn’s moon Titan. Lots of bells and whistles, literally, and a very interesting movie for those interested. Let me just add on a big GEEK ALERT, just to warn those who might be tricked into thinking it’s a “cool” movie.

And from there we go to the Stencil Revolution. These guys have put up a tutorial on creating stencils in Photoshop. Nothing too exciting, but remember, things are just warming up.

For everyone who was pissed off when the price of stamps was raised a little while ago… well… a recent proposal included another raise of 3 cents (to 42 cents). Also in the proposal? Forever stamps. These stamps would be sold at the same price as first class stamps, and be good forever. Why the government would do this I don’t know, but it sounds good to me.

There are a lot of websites out there that generate things. Webcomics, pictures with captions, pictures with word balloons, names, and so on. Luckily, they have been collected in The Generator Blog. Waste your day away.

And now a sharp turn toward the freakonomics of prostitution. An ABC News article discusses the economics of prostitution. Sexonomics, as they call it.

The sex business is also in the news lately because of the neverending battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The competition between these DVD formats does not seem to be dying soon, but a decider might choose sides before you know it. Who’s that decider? The porn industry.

Let me take some time out of your busy schedule for just a moment and introduce a couple sites for which I will create their own little subsection…

THE CUTE ZONE

Introduced to me by a special lady out there, the San Diego Zoo has a panda cam for their six giant pandas. The feed never stops, and you can even watch past feeds. Cute!

The other cute site of the day? This one shows us a side of our little feline friends: their sink side. Cats in Sinks is exactly what it sounds like. It’s pictures of cats. In sinks. Doubly cute!

And back to the education.

Hang your books in style! Invisibly
Reference and Outline Maps of the United States!
Convert HTML pages to PDF!
Search for lyrics without the crappy popups!
Host and share up to 5GB of files!

Ahem.

Google purchased, as they often do, a software company which made SketchUp, a 3D design program that easily allows you to create conceptual sketches of anything you could imagine. Generally, 3D software is very expensive, but Google has released a personal use version for absolutely free. See, they still have the whole “Don’t be evil” thing under wraps.

2006 SUMMER MOVIEs

The general opinion of movies this summer: Why bother? At least, so says The Onion with it’s 2006 summer movie preview. For all who don’t know, The A.V. Club is (generally) serious, so don’t ignore it just because it’s from The Onion. The New York Times (below) also came out with a summer preview, but the conciseness, humor, and blatant honesty of The Onion makes it a much better read.

Still… Looking for something a bit more high brow? The New York Times has also come out with a preview of this summer’s movies.

This summer might be a terrible one for blockbusters, but doesn’t it always seem that way? Pajiba.com reflects on the ten worst blockbusters of all time. Number 1 goes to Batman & Robin… as it should.

That’s it. I’m done. It’s 2:34 AM and I’m tired. You get one more link, but only because I’m hungry.

The World’s 50 Best restaurants. I wish I was rich.

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