Web Monitor
15:50 UK time, Tuesday, 19 May 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor selflessly clicks through the web to find the most interesting bits on the internet to document it here. Make sure you share your best links with us by either sending us a comment via the box to the right of this page or recommending them to us on where we're called "bbcwebmonitor".
• his new song Arab Money was not meant to cause offence:
"I was really trying to point out that Arabs have one of the richest cultures in the world, not just from a monetary standpoint but also a spiritual standpoint. In the United States and North America, we're not really identified with a particular faith. We don't really have a culture that anyone can identify with because America is a mixture taken from everyone else's [roots]. My thinking is that if we're going to take from a culture, let's take from a culture that has exemplified success for thousands of years."
• In the film Angels and Demons, part of the plot involves making a gram of anti-matter. , a CERN scientist who worked closely with the director Ron Howard to find out how realistic this is:
"In the movie, we switch on the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] and it produces a gram of antimatter in a few minutes. ... it would take about a billion years to produce a gram. We can make about a billionth of a gram in a year."Landua also added that he didn't use the Hadron Collider to make anti-matter. Dan Brown could have done with this .
• In the is open about considering plastic surgery:
"I think I'm at the point where I can see the way things are heading as far as aging goes. I'm trying to figure it out just so that I'm happy. You need to be content with how you are and how you look. And a very good surgeon helps...I think I'm lucky in lots of ways. Some days I even like what I look like in the mirror!"
• Are your secret security questions too easily answered? You know the ones - your first school, the street where you were born, your pet's name. The shows these questions are simple to work out and found a great example:
"Brian Green's experience with not-so-secret questions began when he logged on to his World of Warcraft account in March of this year and found all of his characters in their underwear. Someone had stolen the account and sold off all of his virtual equipment."
• The actor against President Obama's decision to withhold torture pictures:
"It seems most people are quite clear -- the law says if someone should be held underwater repeatedly on no sleep until he thinks he's drowning, or tortured in other ways, the people who ordered it or did it should be be arrested, charged, tried, and sent to jail. And even if, say, 40% of the country wants to advocate breaking the law -- they should still be resigned to see those who did it pay the price for it. How that is a left /right debate is beyond me. How that is even debatable is also beyond me."
• If life is a cabaret, then maybe the news should be an R'n'B Song. That's the thinking behind Michael Gregory's Autotune the News, whose third installment is now spreading around the blogosphere. Using tuning software, Gregory has autotuned US TV news about , and now to make catchy songs.
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