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Oh. My. God. This is bad. You HAVE to listen to this (use the player below).

This not a recording of a very bad karaoke singer. No, this is America's Got Talent WINNER Kevin Skinner. I think this is hilarious. Like, this guys seriously not a good singer. I think that literally MOST people are BETTER singers than him. You know how they rank kids' height and weight by percentile? Well, think this guy is probably somewhere in the 40th percentile. Far from the worst, but literally worse than most Americans. Awesome.

A few weeks ago, my neighbors, JT & Pat, and I were sharing a cocktail on the front stoop when we noticed this American Beauty parked out front:

Beautiful. We were even more exited when the owner (with a mysterious Boston accent regardless of the Florida tags) came out to move it. Here are Stephanie and Pat with the owner and his girlfriend:

And I couldn't leave out this one of Pat posing with the car. Lookin good Pat.

Here's the Full gallery. This thing gives customized a new meaning. A lot of TLC. What a beauty. Oh, and note that it has a 'club' on the steering wheel.

Speaking of encryption, I noticed this gem on Golden Tee's website today.

128 BYTES! As I'm sure you all know, one byte is equal to eight bits (they meant to write bit - obviously).

I really don't want to do the math from yesterdays post to figure out how long it would take to crack 128 byte encryption. Suffice it to say that the universe would be a cold dead blob by the time it happened.

I stumbled across a picture of one of those keypads you find on some cars such as Fords and it got me thinking about how easy their code would be to break compared to SSL encryption - and why we don't seem to have a problem with that. You also sometimes see these keypads on the front doors to homes and garage doors.

Typically, these keypads have five buttons labled 1/2 3/4 5/6 7/8 and 9/0. I suppose they're labeled as such to trick us into thinking there are ten possible numbers you could press, thus doubling the possible number of permutations - but obviously this isn't the case.

Given a five digit code, with five possible characters for each digit, we see that there are only 5⁵ or 3,125 possible permutations. In a brute force attack, the expected number of trials before the correct key is found is equal to half the size of the key space - in this case 1,563.

Figuring you can key in about one code a second, it should take you about 20 minutes to break the code using a brute force attack. (and no, most models don't have a timeout - nor do they otherwise penalize incorrect codes)

Compare this to the AES-128 standard we use as a key for credit card transactions on the internet. The key uses 128 on off bits for the key meaning there are 2¹²⁸ or 340 undecillion or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible combinations! Using a brute force attack, one could assume they would break the code in 2¹²⁷ or about 170 undecillion tries.

So why do put so much more effort into securing our online CC transactions than we do our physical belongings? Especially considering that a car or a home is a very likely place to steal physical credit cards! (Which are probably far more valuable to a petty thief - I mean, what would you do if you had just a credit card number and security code? You couldn't have anything you bought shipped to your home)

I suppose one explanation is that once a transmission of an encrypted CC number is intercepted, a hacker could take as much time as he likes cracking it in the comfort of his parents' basement. Even then, with a powerful computer program running 1,000 combinations a second, it would take on average 539,156,392,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to crack the code. Heh.

I think it's more likely that people are just scared of the unknown. A lot of people probably don't have a good understanding of the risk involved. And fear is good business (Credit monitoring companies, Life Lock - I'm looking at you Todd Davis)

Years ago, before google maps, the in thing for cities to do was hire an artist to draw extremely detailed maps of your town. The Library of Congress has a great collection of these from Boston.

In the image above, you can clearly see depictions of buildings that must have once sat on the mysterious foundations I have in my backyard:

The images are absolutely amazing. They're GIGANTIC (this one was over 12,000 pixels wide) and incredibly detailed. I've pointed out some of the highlights in this image:

Here's a view of the same area today:

Below are the scaled full map with the detail highlighted and another view of the highlight (click to enlarge and then click on the expand icon in the lower right for the full effect). Or click here for a very large version (3.5MB).

Update. Even better. You can zoom in and out of the image in all of it's full scale, full resolution awsomeness here:

And here's one from 1905. Just six years later. The changes are so dramatic. Especially downtown.

Brooklyn based graphic designer, Sean Engelhardt came up with this beautiful Tufte-esque, albeit sad display of Mets' injuries this season.

According to his website, he's considering creating the same graphic for other teams. I don't want to look at the Cubs if he does.

Click here for the full effect

Man Bijt Hond (Man Bites Dog) is a daily program aired on Belgian National Television. One of the show's segments is called De Monsters - and it's absolutely hilarious.

It's created by actors eliciting responses from unsuspecting passersby and then digitally replacing the actors with... monsters.

I posted a bunch more after the jump.

I know I have bags under my eyes, but this is ridiculous. WebMD says it's Chalazia or some such nonsense. I just want it to go away.

And that is one lazy dog!

My mom, and her mad typing skillZ should appriciate this:

I've never been more exited in my life. The new GT 2010 preview video has been released. The awesomeness of the hairdos in the video goes without saying. Other less obvious changes to be excited about are:

• Skins play - for four player team play
• Quick Shot Lock - to speed up games with Vinnie
• New Clubs

And, of course, new courses... I'm particularly looking forward to The Great Wall in China, Tahiti Cove, and Bella Toscana.

check out the full press release here