The junk that talented developers are doing with jQuery is starting to blow my fraking mind. Ref: Parallax, a plugin that turns a set of container elements into a parallax-ed viewport. But wait – this brilliant chunk of code was created by whom now? Stephband, if you're listening, I hope you'll make yourself known! (#)

I can't imagine how cool it'd be to work on a project like Google Chrome, so amid all the ho-hum acquisition gobbledygook, this is still a fascinating read. The article includes nice, brief bios on the members of the Google Chrome team whose names have been released so far. (Via Simon Willison.) (#)

I worked in DC at a Political Action Committee for three years, so aside from my personal interest in politics, I've heard my fair share of infuriating, obtuse, speeches filled with falsities and half-truths. But I have never been as infuriated by any political event as I have been by this year's Republican National Convention. Luckily, the AP did me a great favor by fact checking some of the worst lies to come out of this hellish suckfest. (Via dooce.) (#)

In the way-back-when, I spent way, way too much time on the dpreview.com forums. Some helpful folks, yes. But also some of the saddest schmucks you'll find, on the internet or elsewheres. Now, Dean Allen has brilliantly, in one semi-brief blog post, summed up the whole history of discussion on those forums. "What must the flash be? Diffuse." (#)

A comic book drawn by Scott McCloud probably isn't the best way to stealth-announce a software project. So I'm taking that to mean Google gets how much of a ripple their new web browser might cause. It's named Chrome, it's built on Apple's open source Webkit engine, and it boasts some truly groundbreaking features. For all the interesting goodies presented here, the feature most discussed among the geeks will likely to be its memory management. In brief, each tab/web app will have its own discreet set of processes, (hopefully) making massive memory leaks a thing of the past. We'll see if Google can deliver, but color me excited. (Via ReadWriteWeb.) (#)

I think I need to make a trip to Brazil. They're just putting out the best work right now. Case in point: Mopa. I've spent the last 30 minutes burrowing through their site, and there's not a weak piece in the collection. Vibrant, glowing colors, wonderfully varied textures and lines, beautiful, beautiful. (Via Kitsune Noir.) (#)

For your film critic friends. Classic metal band identities used to promote (?) broccoli cinema auteurs. I've got one friend in particular who's gonna love these. Ingmar Bergman's is so funny it hurts. (Via Darren.) (#)

I'm starting to think that The Mozilla Foundation might be the best place for tech-savvy folks to spend their philanthropic dollars. They're kicking that much ass right now. Consider Ubiquity, a platform for facilitating interaction between you and the data you view in your browser. I'm more excited by this than I was by the Aurora browser concept, if only because this one's available for download right now. (Via Darren.) (#)

Oh, heavens. This is fantastic. Wallace and Gromit are, finally, gettin' real paid. British store Harvey Nichols commissioned Nick Park and Co. to dress the duo up in their wares. What with my sparse disposable income, I'm likely not the target market for this campaign. But the Nicks sure snagged my attention. (#)

This topic's been on my mind since a local criminal case got national attention. The network covering the story quoted some truly asinine comments from a local rag that made my hometown look like a backwater hicksville. Just pathetic. It's a terrific list, but the one about linking comments to stories really stands out. The way most media outlets ghettoize their community sections exposes a real ignorance of how social media works. (#)

Most of my friends aren't on twitter, or use it only very occasionally. This article will probably only confound them more. If they, by some strange happenstance (man, I wish they would), decide to join, this is a good, quick primer on some dos and don'ts for being a good twitter citizen. (#)

This is the last novelty blog I'll link for awhile. Promise. It's just that these things are like crack to me. Simple, no nonsense giggles. The concept on this one's a bit narrower than most: show us your worst professionally-made cake disasters. For best results, check out the Beyond Bizarre category first. (Via Guardedly Optimistic.) (#)

My love for Wikipedia knows no bounds. Thank you, contributor(s)-in-the-clouds, for putting together this utterly useless list of every friggin' challenge MacGyver ever confronted. Seriously. It's pages like this that make me proud to work on the Internet. (Via core77.) (#)

If you can't laugh at this, you either a) have no hipster friends or b) are too close to your scene to see it. The great thing about Your Scene Sucks is that they skewer sub-scenes that I didn't even know had names. I love this one. (Via Darren.) (#)

When independent cartoonists are crafting shorts that make Disney and Pixar look like artless amateurs, you know the future is at hand. The Blender Foundation, creators of the popular Blender 3D modeling software, apparently created this film to showcase what kind of work one can produce with their tools. Stunning stuff. (Via Drawn!) (#)

Have you been watching the Olympic swimming? God knows I have. I'd been hoping someone would publish the official finish photos from Michael Phelps' unbelievable win over Milorad Cavic. I saw it on TV, but seeing these pictures, I'm even more amazed. Kid was a good two feet behind Cavic in the last few meters. That was some seriously lucky timing. (#)

If there was a tagging system here, this would most certainly get marked "good for nothing." But because TNF is a taste-agnostic zone, it's jammed right up against "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" with no differentiation given between the two. A simple premise: find photos of two "celebrities" that look alike, post them, comment. Some are brilliant. (Via yewknee.) (#)

I'll admit that I lose Rob Bryanton's "plain english" explanation of the 10 or 11 dimensions suggested in String Theory somewhere around dimension five, but I'm still intrigued. And he does a great job with the whole Möbius strip analogy. If you've done a lot of acid in your day, I'm betting this video will be especially enlightening. (Via Bobby.) (#)

I just did this last weekend. There are some pointers here I wish I'd had when I started, but I'm only linking it to it here because I'm flabbergasted that Sonos is trying to sell a device bundle that does just about the exact same thing for a cool grand. WTF, guys? One caveat: volume control sure would be nice. (#)

If you design on the web, there are a limited number of job titles you can whip out when asked what you "do." Cameron Adams has come up with a terrific little flow chart that pretty handily sums up how the conversation's gonna go. (#)