• A demo video of next-generation game character movement. The balancing effect is way cool.
• The Amarna Letters are an archive of diplomatic correspondences between Egypt and its neighbors written on hundreds of clay tablets. They record trade deals and other nations begging for military assistance. Strangely they are written in cuneiform.
• Styrofoam cups seem like an odd canvas, but Boy Obsolete draws on them and takes pictures.

As you probably heard, this past weekend was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. There has been some great coverage of it, and a couple things caught my eye.

First, a bio piece on Neil Armstrong from BBC News. Armstrong has always been the most reticent of the astronauts to give interviews, leaving many people wondering about the man with the most notable role in space history. He was the only Apollo 11 astronaut who did not participate in the recent (and great) documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.

Second, recognizing that the moon missions were an incredible risk, NASA and Richard Nixon had a speech prepared in the event of a disaster. It starts, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace…” The full speech and its context are in the article at space.com.

Last, Google has let you explore the landing sites through their Google Maps interface for a while; now you can see the whole Moon in Google Earth. It’s big! You can see some screenshots here or update Google Earth to try it out. Find a lunar rover path and check out the panoramas they took.

I saw a commercial for the upcoming Fame remake, and, at the end of the commercial, the website address that flashed on the screen was facebook.com/fame.

It was the first time that I’d seen a major campaign like a movie release direct people to a facebook landing page rather than an independent website (generationfame.com, in this case.)

Starting a page or a group is nothing new, but getting a url like that means partnering with facebook. And it makes a lot of sense: Fame is on a network where almost everyone in their audience already has a profile, and “becoming a fan” is a single click away.

Users will “fan” a page when they wouldn’t sign-up for an email list or sms service on an independent domain. And rather than gathering solitary users who saw the commercial, others can get on board from watching their friends’ newsfeeds.

At the same time, it frees the official site to be the flash monstrosity that it always wanted to be. I expect to see a lot more facebook callouts as their partnerships continue to mature.

Starts adorable, gets awesome. This is apparently the work of Pascal Bideau, who can be found on myspace.

This car has been parked outside my building recently. Ashland has some rough patches, but this is ridiculous.

• Happy belated Independence Day. NYT illustrator Maira Kalman recently took a trip to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, in Virginia and documents it her way.
• The Lori Drew/Megan Meier case is upsetting, but I’m happy about the acquittal. Finding her guilty on the Terms of Service charge would have given all TOSs on the web too much power.
• I’ve been looking at another good animation blog, this one called Ape on the Moon.
• Electronic drone and noise musician Birchville Cat Motel (Matt Silcock) talks about his process in this 2000 interview.

A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev Volcano (Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, and it is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island.