The Baby Name Wizard is a very cool website. I saw this earlier this year, but when I tried to find it again. Jason Kottke has posted his favorite links of 2005 and I found it there.

According to The Independent:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

This is a terrible idea. When I saw the headline, I hoped they would be using tracking for a legitimate purpose–congession pricing for roads. With a tracking system people could be charged for when they drove and how much they drove. It would be more costly to drive on congested streets at rush hour and then they could do away with all gas taxes. I didn’t imagine that the only reason Britian is doing this is because they want to track their citizens. This is truly scary.

Check out these pictures from Southeast Asia.

These pictures of the VW Phaeton assembly line are nothing short of amazing.

SNL might be worth watching again.

At least this study says that Media Bias is real. I don’t know what I think of their methodology, but it is interesting nevertheless:

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”

“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker’s support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where “100″ is the most liberal and “0″ is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‑population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants

This guy has way, way, WAY too much time on his hands.

If only George Lucas had cared as much about the story as some fans did about how the bad guys dressed the last three movies might have been okay.

Rotten Tomatoes has just release its list of the worst-rated movies on 2005. One film on the list, Stealth, makes we wonder how anyone could have thought that making that picture would be a good idea. Here’s the plot from IMDB.com, “Deeply ensconced in a top-secret military program, three pilots struggle to bring an artificial intelligence program under control … before it initiates the next world war.” What was insanely lame is that the AI went nuts from a lightening strike–yes, that’s right–a lightening strike. Could it have been more stupid. I could understand if there were an evil programming genius that hacked his way into the computer and directed it to do things, instead, an errant lightning strike scrambled the plane’s AI. After seeing that preview it makes me wonder how I could get a job greenlighting pictures in Hollywood. Whomever greenlighted this one is dumber than a bag of hammers.

In 1984 I saw the short educational film the “Power of Ten” for the first time at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. I thought it was great then. It’s still good today.

I saw King Kong today. It was great! It’s a Peter Jackson movie, so it’s a bit long (3+ hours), but the story is engaging and and the special effects are the best special effects I’ve ever seen.

My only complain is that the movie deserves its PG-13 rating–people get killed and the people on Skull Island are pretty freaky. But don’t let that deter you. It’s a truly awesome movie.