The Flash cartoon menace!

The author of "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter" fulminates about violent Flash cartoons warping her children's fragile little minds. She was all liberal and everything until this happened but now, NOW society has gone too far.

I can sympathize with parents' worry about their kids encountering stuff they don't want them to on the Internet. I'm going to have to deal with something like this someday, I'm sure, and it's never easy.

What mostly takes me aback about these little moral panics is how surprised the parents always are. Who could ever be so sick as to think of cartoon characters decapitating each other? How dare they use Flash to subvert my Net Nanny filter? I thought it was safe!!

Many-fingered time

The Khronos Projector lets you time-shift parts of a video image by poking it.

I like the very carefully worded statements on the site about relativity, which make me think that these people also know their physics. The ArsTechnica post that pointed me to it suggested that it "shows space-time as deformable", but what it actually engages more directly is the notion of the arbitrariness of embedding of "equal-time" surfaces in space-time, a constant stumbling block in talking about black holes and cosmology. Messing with this thing might be useful as an intuition-builder in that regard.