Balancing the bad news

There has been a deluge of bad news lately (for example, how those poor penguins from that terribly depressing movie can't get a break).

Honestly, I can't stand the news. I see very little purpose in it. The news paints the world as a scary, dangerous, heartless place. Sometimes it is, but when I start paying too much attention to the media's view, I become terrified and introverted. What does one gain by reading headlines, finding out what terrible things have happened in the world? It's all bad, in my mind.

And that's why I'm grateful for the internet. The best stuff out there is completely unrelated to the news.

Do you love Popcorn? Here's a link to 79 versions of it, all mixed together in a single 12-minute-long masterpiece.

This blog, Music Machinery, is a new discovery, and I'm enjoying it. He's got some great graphs and visualizations. My personal favorite is this one, which shows loudness as a function of time (to track the crescendo) for Muse's song 'Take a Bow':

I love good data visualizations. Which is why I can't stand this one (not created by the same person):

I can't even figure this out. At first I thought it was graphing music playlist classifications across Europe, but evidently the cloud isn't supposed to evoke a geographical image at all. It's just a...cloud.