The always fascinating BLDGBLOG has gorgeous pictures and literate speculation on the fantastically baroque architecture of offshore oil drilling platforms.

According to one Professor Todd Kendall there’s a negative correlation between Internet access and rape, and between violent movies and violent crimes: more of the former means less of the latter. Scott Adams runs with the idea in a proposal for the “worst candidate ever.” [mefi]

The province of Alberta in Canada has a problem that we should all have: too much wind power. Technically the problem is not too much wind, but too high a proportion of the province’s power coming from wind. The variability of wind power means that if too high a percentage of an area’s power comes from wind, when the wind stops the lights go out. Seems like a good opportunity to expand solar power. [digg]

I’ve had terrible trouble explaining to people how Creative Commons licences might enable new forms of collaborative art – I just don’t have that sort of imagination. Luckily, other people do have it, as the CC blog reports. So, you get an open-licensed picture from one website, draw or remix a random doodle on another, then combine and mess around with the result on a third site which creates a unique URL at which the final product can be viewed. Print that picture on a T-shirt along with a barcode that can transfer the URL into a suitable mobile device, and all of a sudden there’s something very cool and very weird going on…

I’ve posted a fair few items about Second Life recently, mostly concerning facets of it that intersect closely with meatspace. So to get some balance, I thought I’d share an example of how distant from consensus reality that place can get – ladies and gents, it’s service time at the Church of Elvis! I can’t imagine there’s anywhere quite like that in reality – except perhaps in Vegas.