This weekend audiences were given a taste of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a Broadway musical that everybody keeps calling the most “daring,” “ambitious,” and “expensive” thing to ever go up on stage. While a small number of theatergoers actually got to watch a preview of the show that was reportedly riddled with wire-work gaffes and production pauses that stretched the show’s length to three hours, everyone else had the opportunity to catch a 60 Minutes segment that detailed the show’s rocky path to even this preliminary opening.

What does the segment make the show look like?

A few days ago, this PSA for seatbelt use was named the YouTube ad of the year, beating the far more talked-about Old Spice Guy ads; understated, yet evocative and effective at conveying its message without going in for shock value, you can see why.

(via The Awesomer | Creators’ page)

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Tom Felton appeared on MTV News for a comedy segment called “American Talk with Josh Horowitz,” where each cast member was given a few “popular” American phrases, such as “Twilight blows,” and are asked to speak said phrases in their best American accents.

An unknown Washington State University student took control of two-dozen in-class projector units this November 5th, causing them to play a pre-recorded spoof of the televised speech given by the protagonist/antagonist/terrorist/anarchist character V of the movie V for Vendetta, exhorting his fellow students to rise up a year hence against a terrible threat encroaching on their school:

Squirrels.

(England, I’d like to apologize on behalf of America for the comical extent to which we have misinterpreted your holiday about anti-Catholicism and the defeat of violent fringe elements.)

Dating back to 1994, GeoCities was free web-hosting service and can easily be considered a big part of the Internet’s history. Yahoo! bought the service only five years after its creation, but then shut it down in 2009.

In an effort to preserve digital history, the Archive Team has compiled and will release a 900 gigabyte torrent of as much of GeoCities as it can.

When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced they’re primarily a streaming company that happens to offer DVD-by-mail, people speculated that the Canadian streaming-only subscription would be available stateside within the next few months. Surprisingly, the streaming option seems to be available today, only a week after Hastings made the illuminating statement.

However, there seem to be inconsistencies regarding the streaming-only option’s availability and pricing. Read on past the jump for the details.

At an event earlier today, Facebook teamed up with Microsoft and announced that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be able to display social search results, which are search results that relate themselves to Facebook user data.

When a user searches with Bing, it will attempt to connect to said user’s Facebook account, gather various bits of data, then attempt to relate the data to the search results via a Facebook module that will travel up and down the search page based on Bing’s ranking algorithms.

About a month ago, Twitter announced they’d be relaunching their site with a new split screen design at an undetermined date in the near future. “The near future” meant today, as the new Twitter is now available to everyone.

Improv Everywhere started out as a prankster group and evolved into a group that likes to create what they call “organized fun.” Their latest “mission” involved over 3,000 participants downloading an MP3, going to a retail store in New York City, pressing play, and following the instructions given in the MP3 file. The above video is the result.

The instructions included slow dancing with a product of the participant’s choice in a retail store, freezing in the middle of the street, high fiving strangers, and having a toilet-paper-wrapped mummy dance party in Bryant Park.

There are seven MP3 Experiments in total, all of which grow in participants from the previous experiment.

(Improv Everywhere via Gizmodo)

This graph is nothing new — it’s been floating around online since it was published as part of a 2006 study which made its way into Science, which concluded that “The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because ofwidespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.” Old though it is, it bears some contemplating.

Iceland, which has the highest belief in evolution of those countries polled, sure is a conundrum: “About 10 percent of Icelanders believe in supernatural beings and another 10 percent deny them, but the remaining 80 percent on this windswept North Atlantic outpost either have no opinion or refuse to rule out their existence, a survey shows.”

(via Reddit | Original journal article from which the graph came)