Here’s part of an interview I did last week with longtime entrepreneur (and gadfly) Jason Calacanis, live in San Francisco for his “This Week in Startups” online video show. It covered a range of topics, including about my career, the future of journalism and also some choice bits about various Internet companies and their leaders.

I’ve posted the entire hour of interview below, but you might prefer the first clip, in which Calacanis and I talk about a concept I have about CEO “jazz hands,” after he asked me about the performance of Yahoo’s star exec Marissa Mayer.

Enjoy — and remember, keep calm and jazz hands will make it all better:

Enjoy:

Whatever side you come down on after this week of they-are-definitely-watching revelations, this little scientific experiment with table salt and a metal plate is very lovely to watch, and gives you some idea that there is order in the universe of a more magical kind.

Enjoy:

Enjoy:

There have been a ton of videos on the Web spoofing the Masterpiece Theatre hit “Downton Abbey.” But this one from Funny or Die is perhaps one of the funniest — featuring an unlikely new cast member (who is an actual fan of the show).

Enjoy:

It’s impossible to watch this Web-only commercial from Dove, called “Real Beauty Sketches,” and not have a reaction.

The shorter version has already attracted close to 30 million views on YouTube. It’s part of Unilever’s long-running advertising campaign to focus on real-looking women over idealized models for its Dove line of skin-care products. This takes it a step further, with a sketch artist making pencil portraits of various women without seeing them, but listening to them describe what they look like. The artist then made another drawing based on descriptions of people who have just met them.

Guess which one is more attractive? It’s a pretty devastating and very manipulative reveal, with the tagline: “You are more beautiful than you think.”

The campaign has attracted both fans and critics — it sure hits home, whatever side you are on — but you should judge for yourself if it works or not:

You must watch this Funny or Die video of a dramatic reading by “Boardwalk Empire” actor Michael Shannon of the wackadoo email penned by a University of Maryland Delta Gamma sorority girl that went very viral on the Web.

It really has been the crazy gift that keeps on giving.

Enjoy:

It’s from the Anti-Defamation League, and it imagines a world in which some of the most prominent victims of violence had survived instead.

Really worth a watch:

Here’s a brilliant segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live when Harrison Ford, who will be forever known as “Star Wars’” Han Solo, said he did not want to answer questions about the iconic, fan-addled movie.

That did not stop a great set-up with non-“Star Wars” audience questions coming from a man dressed up as Obi-Wan Kenobi, another dude as Princess Leia and yet another in full Wookiee costume as Solo’s sidekick Chewbacca, which did not end so well.

Enjoy:

Delish:

Personally, I would watch her read the phone book.

Enjoy:

Especially, the irritating Google guy:

If you have even a minute of time, please enjoy this fantastic segment from TeamCoco, in which Conan O’Brien does videogame reviews in a way a non-videogame person would.

Enjoy this take on Tomb Raider:

But at a discussion titled “Why We Still Love the Honey Badger,” the industrious little endangered species packed the room and burrowed its way back into the minds of SXSW attendees.

Animal-rights activists can breathe easy, by the way: Unlike Grumpy Cat, the actual Honey Badger wasn’t put on display. “Randall,” whose campily effeminate voice is dubbed over the now-infamous National Geographic footage, showed up instead. He wore dark shades, a plaid jacket and a five-day beard, blending right in with the SXSW crowd (with the exception of that voice).

“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have Honey Badger with me today,” he said. “I got a call asking if I was bringing one. Like, are you [expletive] out of your mind? Like the TSA would let a honey badger through.”

The conversation was pretty loosely focused, spanning topics from the virality of the video to consumers’ video-viewing habits to Randall’s ambitions to narrate more than just animal videos.

Randall, who attended (and later dropped out of) an exotic-animal-management training program, said his original intent with the Honey Badger was both to be funny and bring awareness to the animal.

The first narration, he said, “was dry as toast on a hot summer’s day in Austin. You couldn’t even butter it. I said, I have to do something about this.”

“I actually got scared of the badger while I was doing it,” he continued. “I love animals but, like, nothing can really stop this animal. The fact is, this thing eats a cobra, passes out and then bounces back up. Like they’re flapjacks.”

Despite the meme’s immense popularity, however, Randall never made any money from the YouTube video, he said, due to the fact that Nat Geo owned the rights to the footage. “I care more about working with animals than I do about making nine cents a click,” he said.

Still, for Randall, animal videos on YouTube are where it’s at. “People like animal videos. No one ever says, ‘Have you seen that video of grandma going into the retirement home? She didn’t want to go. It was so funny.’”

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Without giving away the tragic end to the third season finale of popular PBS Masterpiece Classics television series “Downton Abbey,” it might be a good idea to take a big dose of Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess to feel better.

Here’s a compilation of some of her most withering asides from the first season — take 10 and see me in the morning — and also an interview of Smith that aired last night on “60 Minutes”:

Hearst Ventures, the investment arm of media giant Hearst Corporation, said it was making a minority equity investment in Science, the Los Angeles area tech “studio.”

Privately held Hearst is the sole investor in the new funding, although the company declined to reveal financial terms of the investment.

But sources with awareness of the deal said it was close to $30 million for a stake above 20 percent.

Somewhat akin to a startup accelerator, Science is attempting to quickly create and scale a number of promising companies in a variety of areas, and has launched 13 so far.

Among the Santa Monica, Calif., tech studio’s recent efforts: Dollar Shave Club, a subscription-based products company aimed at men; Ellie, which sells high-end activewear for women; and Wittlebee, a clothes club for kids.

Hearst Ventures is operated by Hearst’s Entertainment and Syndication unit, which is run by Scott Sassa and George Kliavkoff. Kliavkoff will join Science’s board of directors.

“It’s clear to us that, while we have these brands that resonate with consumers, we think there are some learnings we can get from these guys that are hard to get in a big company,” said Sassa. “Being able to be nimble with insight and guidance is important for us.”

Kliavkoff also noted that this was a way to get immediate ownership in a range of promising companies. “We are writing one check and will have an immediate stake in more than a dozen great startups,” he said. “[Science] has been very thoughtful in starting companies in smart areas.”

In a statement, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack said: “Hearst is continually looking for smart investments that bring value and intelligence to the company — our investment in Science does both. We’re excited to partner with Science to continue its trajectory of success, gain meaningful industry knowledge and utilize Science’s platforms for current and future Hearst investments.”

Though quieter than most, Hearst Ventures have made many successful investments over 15 years, including in Netscape and Broadcast.com. More recently, it has funded such companies as Brightcove and Pandora, as well as HootSuite and BuzzFeed.

Science was founded in late 2011 — with $10 million funding from big-name investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and White Star Capital. Its CEO is well-regarded entrepreneur Mike Jones, who was most recently CEO of Myspace. Prior to Myspace, he had started and sold Userplane to AOL in 2006. In addition, well-known entrepreneur Peter Pham is chief business officer at Science.

“I am very proud of work that the Science team has accomplished since launching,” said Jones, in a quick interview tonight (short enough so that his wife would not get angry at me for ruining Valentine’s Day). “I am extremely excited about opportunities for Science companies going forward.”

More to come, but here is the very clever viral video that Dollar Shave Club did on its launch:

Here is perhaps one of the most cleverly creepy trailers for a new documentary called “Room 237,” which examines the many intricacies that have sprung up about the horror movie classic, “The Shining.”

At the time it was released in 1980, the film started as more of a box office flop for director Stanley Kubrick. But, since then, it has become a cult phenom, and that is where “Room 237” starts the fun, with all the many theories — mostly of the conspiracy kind — about “The Shining.”

Gory fun, of course.

Enjoy (if you dare):

Thus its March return for a third season on the pay-cable channel is cause for celebration. Then war, of course, followed by much machinating.

Here’s a preview:

And here is a very funny “GoT” pie chart:

But, like I said, spectacular:

Yes, it’s possible to stay on top of the news entirely from within Twitter and Facebook … but it takes work.

Following the right number of people (so as not to get overwhelmed) posting about a broad variety of topics (so as not to leave oneself ignorant) is an inexact and tedious science.

And call me cynical if you must, but I don’t trust my real-life friends to keep me informed, either: Absent the professional news organizations I follow there, my Facebook news feed would be largely pets, music videos and distressed chatter about how winter is, evidently, cold in some places.

All of this is a roundabout way of making the case for NewsWhip, a Dublin-based startup trying to beat Twitter and Facebook at their own social-news capabilities.

NewsWhip claims its site automatically pulls in and ranks the best trending stories of the moment from Twitter and Facebook, based on aggregated and weighted data of what the world is tweeting, sharing, liking and commenting on. The faster a recent story is spreading online, the higher it moves in the rankings.

CEO Paul Quigley said that speed is his “fundamental metric.”

“If a story has 10,000 shares and is 12 hours old, it won’t necessarily be a big deal,” he said. “We only care about how many shares it got in the last one to two hours, or even 30 minutes.”

Users of the free site or mobile app are greeted with a single column of stories from around the Web, which can be filtered by topic or location. A sister site for news professionals, Spike, lets paying subscribers filter even further by time intervals (“published in the last hour,” “published in the last three hours,” and so on).

Quigley’s pitch is that NewsWhip and Spike are better at surfacing trending news topics than Twitter and Facebook because the filter bubbles created by whom we follow “can cause us to become isolated from alternative ideologies to our own.”

But does it work? This isn’t a review, but I will say the algorithm would need some work before I could make NewsWhip my first stop for news. Unsurprisingly, the stories that gain the most speed and, consequently, the most prominent placement on NewsWhip are very “social-friendly.”

So you’ll see a mix of stories that provoke outrage sharing top billing with pop-culture watercooler fodder in the default “Worldwide” section, and not so much “real” worldwide news of the same moment, which usually makes it to the top of that other little aggregator, Google News.

And within certain topics, the absence of human editors is sorely noticed: I came to the technology section yesterday afternoon expecting something similar to the homepage of (human-edited) Techmeme, with stories about Microsoft’s Q2 or the rocky launch of Twitter’s video app, Vine.

No such luck. Instead, one of the top articles in tech was “GRAPHIC: Girl Puts Apparently Bloody Tampon Where It Should Never Go.” Thanks, but no thanks, Huffington Post.

(I’ll leave the inevitable hand-wringing about what the popularity of these articles says about society, or whatever, to the commenters.)

Still, NewsWhip has potential amid a crowded field of curators and aggregators, and even in the short term it could be a decent alternative news source for, as one example, the majority of American adults who have never seen news on Twitter or Facebook. It’s a good surface glance at the zeitgeist, and for some casual newsreaders, that’s enough.

That said, being in your twenties in Brooklyn as a hipster seems even scarier.

So, since Gerber is married to supermodel Cindy Crawford, and Clooney is dating Stacy Keibler, high jinks obviously had to ensue due to the drink.

Enjoy:

Enjoy:

A while back, the incomparable actor Samuel L. Jackson did an epic reading of the book “Go the F**k to Sleep.” Now, the “Django Unchained” movie star is taking on an even bigger task, with a dramatic take on Taylor Swift’s I-lost-another-boyfriend song, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” for a radio show.

Enjoy (it’s really enjoyable):

And what bizarre magic it is: