Linkwad.

1. Goddamn. Heartbreaking.
   
2. Tyler Cowen’s best chile relleno in the US is at a Maryland gas station.
3. My college roommate has this exact problem.
4. Bradley Manning’s sadistic punishment is escalated. The Obama Administration’s utter collapse on human rights is awful and terrifying.
5. The Angry Birds story.

Linkwad.

Super Bowl hot wing hangover edition:

1. The best ads of the night were all car commercials.
2. Madden gamers are front-runners and fame whores, like 70% of Cowboys fans. Although Randy Moss was useless on the field, he had a massive impact on his teams’ Madden popularity.
3. AOL’s new new content strategy (as of this week): buy the HuffPo.
4. Smartphone ultrasounds for remote/rural areas.

Linkwad.

1. Via Matt Yglesias, research shows that sitting a lot is bad for you, regardless of whether or not you exercise. Another reason to try a standing desk.
2. The history of the Oregon Trail games.
3. Dave Weigel notes that since Obama’s inauguration, “the percentage of Americans saying blacks have achieved equality has risen from 35 to 42 percent. It has remained static among blacks, and spiked nine points among whites.” Although he says he’s not sure how to interpret it, the answer seems pretty obvious to me: white folks, seeing a black man in the white house, think everything’s hunky-dory, while black people see a 4.9% higher unemployment rate (PDF, page 6), and significantly lower pay (page 39).
4. How social networks decide what information to give to law enforcement.
5. Larry Page will take over as CEO of Google.

Linkwad (updated).

1. Baltimore judge dismisses 75 parking tickets in 13 minutes, including two for my friend Jessica. I’m forced to side with the meter maids–Baltimoreans are idiots who double-park all the time, even when there are open spots twenty feet in front of them. In my ideal situation, double-parking would be legal, but it would also be legal to vandalize any double-parked vehicle without a driver inside.
2. Translate text in pictures. Holy crap, the future is awesome. Less awesome: no Android version. Even-less-awesome update: Steve says it doesn’t work very well on large blocks of text, which makes sense.
3. L.A. Noire, Rockstar’s newest game, looks pretty amazing, and appears to have crossed the uncanny valley. I’m stoked for the game (featuring Ken from Mad Men!), but it also brings George Lucas that much closer to making more terrible, terrible movies.
4. Update: Racing a Honda Fit sounds dumb, but it turns out to be a pretty good idea.

Kinected.

Microsoft’s Kinect is one of the coolest gadgets around. Even though the studio-produced games are sort of uninspiring, hackers have produced some inspiring homebrew:

• Shadow puppets.
  
• A friggin’ theremin!
  
• Live-action Mario.
  
• This isn’t a game, but some MIT smartypants figured out how to get the Kinect to identify individual fingers.
  

Are there others that I missed?