March 2012 Archives
March 31
Where does it hurt?
Deep vein thrombosis is generally a topic that comes up with regards to airline seating and other periods of prolonged immobility (previously). Anna Brown was a homeless woman and constantly on the move, so doctors in the emergency room thought that her complaints of leg pain were just drug-seeking behavior. Unfortunately, drug seeking is a major problem in ERs in the United States. [more inside]
Anatomy of a Massacre
On March 11 United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales allegedly murdered 17 Afghan civilians. A reporter from Australia's SBS is the first journalist to interview survivors of the deadly Kandahar massacre.(via)
Ultrarunner Micah True Disappears
Micah True, an ultrarunner profied in Christopher McDougall's book, Born to Run, has gone missing in New Mexico, after heading out for a 12 mile run on Tuesday. Known as Caballo Blanco in McDougall's book, he helped launch the recent barefoot running craze.
Guardian feature on the future of computing education in UK
The Guardian has a feature today on computer science education in the UK It includes short interviews with teenagers who use coding (for fun or work), an article on encouraging girls to get involved in computer science, an editorial encouraging an overhaul of the UK's system of teaching computing, and some discussion of Young Rewired State, a group that offers "festivals of code" to help kids learn to "program the world around them", and also encouraging use of open data.
Response Records: Answers to Hit Songs
Before hip-hop beefs, there were response records, also known as answer songs, usually replies to well-known songs. There are a few key eras: blues and R&B recorded music in the 1930s through 1950s, including a number of responses to "Work With Me, Annie" (1954), recorded by Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, with answers including "Annie had a Baby," and "The Wallflower" by Etta James; and Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" (1953), with a quick response by Louis Innis and Charlie Gore, made a mere week after the original was released, and Rufus Thomas' "Bear Cat" (1953), Sun Records' first hit. Country, rock & roll, doo-wop and pop music picked up where the blues left off, with most activity in the 1950s to 60s. Two examples from this era are "Are You Lonesome To-night" and "Who Put The Bomp," and responses to both. The most well known from the next decade was Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" (1974), a response to Neil Young's "Southern Man" (1970) and "Alabama" (1972). Until the 2000s, no answer songs had charted as high as the original hits. That changed with Frankee's "F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)" (2004), a response to Eamon's "Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)" (2003), which was the first answer song to reach number 1 in the UK. Six years later and across the pond, Katy Perry's "California Gurls" was a response to "Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z. It was the first answer song to reach No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100. More Responses inside. [more inside]
No Chevy, Just Chase.
“What a privilege it is to experience the ‘charmed’ life of another and as a result to appreciate what is valuable in our own.”
After 61 years of marriage, Charles D. Snelling killed his Alzheimer's-stricken wife before turning a gun on himself. Months before, in response to a David Brooks column, he submitted a 5,000-word personal essay where he reminisced on his life, his marriage, his wife's disease and his role as a caretaker.
A Game of Lessons
With Season 2 of Game of Thrones to begin on Sunday, it's important to review the various life and parenting lessons we've learned from the show.
The Baseball Methuselah
At the age of 49 years and 4 months, Jamie Moyer of the Colorado Rockies is the oldest baseball player to ever earn a regular roster spot on a Major League Baseball team (Satchel Paige pitched 3 innings in a 1965 game at age 59 as a publicity stunt). There are many current players, including some of the game's best, who weren't even born when Moyer made his MLB debut, making Moyer's feat all the more impressive.
Just a click away
Voting via clicker with real time data visualization is happening in schools, churches, and loads of other organizations throughout the world. This NY Times piece examines how clicker voting is shaking things up.
Bike Parkour
Urban Trials Riding in Melbourne looks a lot like bike parkour; amazing and more than a bit insane.
New Google Maps
Facebook and socially agressive narcissim
Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a "socially disruptive" narcissist.... [more inside]
"And with millions of chicks checking in daily, there's never been a better time to be on the hunt...."
A column by John Brownlee over at Cult of Mac yesterday highlighted his privacy concerns about the app Girls Around Me -- which used a mashup of FourSquare check-ins, Google Maps and Facebook public profile information to show the user women who were nearby. In response to the story, Foursquare cut off the app's API access to their data, effectively knocking it out of commission. CNET: How to prevent friends checking you into locations at Facebook Places. [more inside]
"If the end is right it justifies the beans."
The Online Musical started as a 2010 University of Virginia student project to create an interactive online musical based on audience feeback , called Musical: The Online Musical. It continued after that project finished, moving on to mini musicals (Thomas Jefferson: The Musical, Pokemon: The Musical, Where's Waldo?: The Musical), and other musical works (a dub step treatment of Les Miserables). Their most recent project is less musical, more dystopian: The Beanie Baby Hunger Games. [more inside]
"This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me." ~ John Steinbeck
Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America: The inspiration for this exhibition was the Library of Congress's collection of literary maps--maps that acknowledge the contributions of authors to a specific state or region as well as those that depict the geographical locations in works of fiction or fantasy. Throughout the exhibition, these colorful and varied maps reflect the contributions of authors to specific states or regions and locate their imagined people and places. Through these maps, authors' words, images, and characters, Language of the Land presents a tapestry of the impressions that endure in our collective imagination of the American land and its culture. [more inside]
March 30
No One Can Hear You Scream.
The Quietest Place on Planet Earth Measured at -9.4dB, this is the quietest place on earth. There is a standing bet that anyone lasting 45 minutes in the chamber, in the dark, earns a case of beer of their choice. No one has lasted more than a half hour.
Down To Fax
Down To Fax: We're Chatroulette for fax machines.
"America wants its respect."
A warthog can be happy.
Paper Ligers
Back to square one.
Bombshell investigation reveals vast majority of landmark cancer studies cannot be replicated. In a shocking discovery, C. Glenn Begley, former researcher at Amgen Inc, and a team working with him, has found that 47 out of 53 so called "landmark" basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- cannot be replicated, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future. These were papers in top journals, from reputable labs, which achieved landmark status with frequent citations. The consequences for cancer research are far-reaching. [more inside]
[LOUD MALE SCREAMING]
@Sheboyganscan attempts to transcribe everything that comes over the Sheboygan, Wisconsin police scanner. The fine folks at Something Awful have cherry picked a few gems.
Rest in Peace
Alexis Rivera, Transgender Rights Advocate, Dies In California Masen Davis, Executive Director of Transgender Law Center, in a statement: "She understood that we are stronger together, and she kept organizing until the very end. Alexis' death is a reminder that the fight for equality -- and against AIDS -- is far from over."
I Can't Go For That
Hundreds of musicians criss-cross the country daily on their way to the next gig. How do they deal with the boredom? This way
Push Back Protesting
Back in September of 2011, a group of protesters from Defend Life, held a demonstration in front of Robert Frost Middle School in Rockville, MD. The daughter of Todd Stave, the landlord for Reproductive Health Services in Germantown, attends this school. Todd Stave, no stranger to having protests targeted at him, decided to fight back. He founded the group Voice of Choice, to calmy call the people who call the homes of abortion providers and those with other connections to clinics. Their stated goal is to "[use] peaceful methods to neutralize those who use bullying tactics."
Are Birth Control Pills Changing the Mating Game?
Two researchers have reviewed the body of research on the effects of birth control pills on both women and men’s perceptions of attractiveness, and have come to some provocative conclusions. “If you don’t take into account society maybe we’re all animals, but in social situations I don’t think there are many women who change who they would mate with at different times of the month. It might change desires or perceptions but, gee whiz, that’s a long stretch to changing who you would date, or even who you would go to dinner with”
Mean streets
Will Self: Walking is political A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities. Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate control
Sounds from a Room
Sounds from a Room is a series of live music performances streamed once a month from A Room for London, a boat installed on a London rooftop. [more inside]
The MAVS are coming(not the NBA team)
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less known is the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.(via) [more inside]
Voice in the Fog
“It is startlingly loud,” he warns, “and it's loud enough that you can actually feel the sound wave going through your torso.” On East Brother Island in California, lightstation keeper Peter Berkhout is caretaker to one of the last working vintage foghorns in the United States.
Paintballing with Hezbollah.
"We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this 'friendly' paintball match." Paintballing With Hezbollah.
a due Colori
"That roars so loud and thunders in the index."
Birth of a Book [Vimeo] A short vignette of a book being created using traditional printing methods. For the Daily Telegraph. Shot at Smith-Settle Printers, Leeds, England. The book being printed is Suzanne St Albans’ 'Mango and Mimosa' published as part of the Slightly Foxed series. Shot, Directed & Edited by @Glen Milner
Brine, Baby, Brine!
Food Network Magazine's 100 Greatest Cooking Tips (of All Time) goes beyond the basic "taste-as-you-go" kind of advice (though it's in there). [more inside]
The problem with slippery slope arguments is that once you start using them you quickly move on to other fallacies
An illustrated guide to common logical fallacies as well as well as a very nice worked example of the fallacies involved in Cardinal Keith O'Brien's recent(ish) article against gay marriage.
Autism Prevalence on the Rise
Since 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has based its estimates of how many children in the United States have autism on surveillance reports from its Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. Every two years, researchers count how many 8-year-olds have an autism spectrum disorder in about a dozen communities across the nation. According to a new report released by the CDC yesterday, (pdf), the latest data estimate that 1 in 88 American children has some form of autism spectrum disorder. (1 in 54 boys and 1 in 252 girls.) That's a 78% increase compared to a decade ago. The report, which analyzed data from 2008, indicates a 23 percent rise in diagnoses of ASDs over a two-year period. (Last link has autoplaying video)
Slap Shot turns 35
John Lanchester on Marx
March 29
Literature
The top 25 American writers, as determined by the amount of scholarship on them. Literary flowchart by Jimmy Chen.
Manuscript Found On The Coast Of Yucatan
What a beautiful mind you have.
something about bells, balls and bulls
“Vermin!” “Abortion!” “Sewer-rat!” “Crritic!”
A Large & Startling Figure
"How do you like your blue eyed boy, Mr. Death?" Harry Crews has died at the age of 76. He was an author, a teacher, a boxer, a raconteur. But mostly, he was a writer.
The Miracle of Facial Transplant Surgery
Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez is one of the world's foremost facial transplant surgeons. He and his team performed a 36 hour facial transplant surgery, the most extensive one to date, on a man who lost his face in a gun accident 15 years ago. The transplant included a donor tongue and set of teeth.
In honor of the advancements modern medicine has made in facial transplant surgery, CBS News recently ran a gallery of facial transplant recipients. (Warning: disturbing, yet hopeful, images inside.)
Flying Low
Josef Hoflehner took a series of black & white wide-angle shots of planes that appear to be flying very close to the beach. [Previously]
Moan about the present, venerate the past.
Amazing Paper Sculptures. Brooklyn based artist Lauren Clay "creates these three-dimensional sculptures out of papier-mâché and painted cut paper (among many other things) that go far beyond the limits of paper’s two-dimensionality."
'On contaminated dives, they get an extra $10 per day'
Swimming on the Hot Side: An elite team of nuclear divers are risking their lives to help save a troubled industry.
The Life of a Nuclear Diver
Pour one out for the penny
5 years after a think tank study (PDF) recommended its retirement, Canada says goodbye to the penny.
Previous penny pinching 1 2
A Woman's Story
To the ocean, Alice!
"NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore." An undersea expendition funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has discovered the spent rocket engines used to power Apollo 11.
Good thing he didn't hack that box open with a carpet knife!
In 2007, a 15th-century illuminated manuscript returned to the George Peabody Library in Baltimore after going missing over 40 years ago. [more inside]
Physical violence is the least of my priorities.
Ritualized vomiting was simply part of brotherly life.
I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks... among other abuses.A sobering look into the world of Dartmouth College's fraternities. Single page view.
It's the Pleats.
Ron Burgundy will return to the big screen. During Conan O'Brien's show on Wednesday night, Will Ferrell announced in character that a sequel to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is happening. [more inside]
No man is an island
Eke out a peaceful life in the wilderness in Make No Wonder, a new HTML5 game by MeFi's own Matthew Hollett.
[via mefi projects]
Pretty Pony DEATH BLASTER
The Enduring Consequences of Unemployment
The Enduring Consequences of Unemployment. It is perhaps no surprise that "....workers who lost jobs during the recession of the early 1980s were making 20 percent less than their peers two decades later." Or that unemployment is also bad for your health.... "lA worker laid off at age 40 could expect to die at least a year sooner than his peers." What frames the issue starkly though is that unemployed people gradually lost the ability to read. [more inside]
The next night we ate whale
Go to bed, Tao Lin. Cole Styker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan's Army Conquered the Web interviews and considers Tao Lin and 'trollgaze'. [more inside]
Thomas Zwijsen performs Nylon Maiden
“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive has gone live. The archive organizes Mandela’s papers chronologically and thematically. You can jump into sections covering his Early Life, Prison Years, and Presidential Years, or explore his extensive book collections and work with youngsters or see his first recorded interview from 1961. (via)
This isn't Amelia Earhart or the Bermuda Triangle we're talking about here...
And yet, we don't know exactly when the game came out. In fact, talk to enough people and you'll come to find out that we can't even agree on the year...Sad But True: We Can't Prove When Super Mario Bros. Came Out
Everything Must Go!
I get up in the morning and ask: What if?
"I get up every morning at 5, go for a half-hour walk in the desert, come home and have a cup of coffee, sit down at the desk and ask myself what I would say if I were him, and what I would do if I were her. I think curiosity is actually a moral virtue. I think a person who is curious is slightly more moral than one who is not curious, because sometimes he enters into the skin of another. I think a curious person is even a better lover than one who is not curious. Even my political approach to the Palestinian question, for example, sprang from curiosity. I am not a Middle East expert or a historian or a strategist. I simply asked myself, at a very young age, what it would be like if I were one of them. So, that’s what I do − get up in the morning and ask myself: What if?" - Israeli writer Amos Oz reflects on his life, on Israel, on writing, and discusses his newest work [more inside]
Power to the Peeple
The results of the 2012 Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest are in. The winner: Occupeep DC. Runners up: Peepius Maximus, What People Think Peeps Are (based on the popular meme), The Black Peep (based off of DC's Black Cat music venue), and Just Peeped (based off of the 2011 British Royal Wedding). In addition to the finalists, check out Peeps in Washington, Political Peeps, the full gallery of submissions that the Post received this year, and the winners from 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007. (Peepiously, peepiouslier, peepiousliest)
Astronaut with a camera - an amazing combination
Dutch astronaut and physician André Kuipers brought his camera aboard the International Space Station and took some photos in his spare time, the results are breathtaking. [more inside]
The worst linux PC ever
The worst linux PC ever. Running on an 8-bit microcontroller.
…it takes two hours to boot up to a bash prompt, and four more to load up Ubuntu and login.
Certainly not Hugh Hefner
Who Was Casanova? "Today, Casanova is so surrounded by myth that many people almost believe he was a fictional character. (Perhaps it’s hard to take seriously a man who has been portrayed by Tony Curtis, Donald Sutherland, Heath Ledger and even Vincent Price, in a Bob Hope comedy, Casanova’s Big Night [and many more].)" [more inside]
Downton Arby's
Downton Arby's. (SLYahooVideo)
WrestleMania III
25 years ago today, the professional wrestling boom sparked by the Captain Lou Albano/Cyndi Lauper "Rock 'n' Wrestling Connection" reached its zenith with WrestleMania III - whose attendance record of 93,173 for a live indoor "sporting" event in North America stood until 2010. The match between "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat is prized by aficionados as one of the greatest in wrestling history. Look into the videoscope! [more inside]
Taste the Rainbow
Hull 0, Scunthorpe 3
How can one describe it? For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’. Christopher Priest on the 2012 Clarke Award shortlist, the self-described "most prestigious award for science fiction in Britain".
TETSUUUOOOO!!!....'s creator returns
In 1982 the manga, Akira (previously) , began its run. It would ultimately spawn a film that would lead the way for the growth of the anime medium outside of Japan. An attempted Americanized remake (previouslyer) was in production before being ultimately canceled.
The manga’s creator, Katsuhiro Otomo, in the meantime, had taken a 20 year break from long-form manga. It was recently announced that this break was coming to an end and that Otomo would be working on a new long-form shonen series.
March 28
Rabble-rousing
More like "Equal XXXchange"
But shouldn't consumers have some context to evaluate what they are viewing? Shampoo bottles and Tuna cans assure us that animals were unharmed. Shouldn't we know if porn actors are subject to out-of-control STD rates, or are forced to do things against their will? At a minimum, a Porn housekeeping seal of approval would tell us by, and for whom, the porn was made. It might make you think twice before downloading that random YouPorn video or chatting with a "horny Russian slut" at LiveJasmin.
Erika Christakis proposes a Fair Trade label for pornography.
Erika Christakis proposes a Fair Trade label for pornography.
Here Come the Brides and Brides and Grooms and Grooms
On Wednesday 29 March 2012, the first mass same-sex TV wedding in Australia was broadcast. [more inside]
Things that seem normal when you live alone.
Since apparently it is Map Day.
Who Will Sing for Me? Earl Scruggs
Earlier this year, Steve Martin penned a loving tribute to Earl Scruggs, published in New Yorker. "Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried." A few minutes ago, Steve Martin offered a rare somber tweet: "Earl Scruggs, the most important banjo player who ever lived, has passed on." One could do worse than spend some time watching and listening to Earl Scruggs perform.
[Enter totally relevant Simpsons quotation here]
Catch up on The Simpsons. Quickly [slyt]
Gas Leak at North Sea Platform
A potentially dangerous situation is developing off the coast of Scotland. An off-shore drilling platform is leaking substantial quantities of gas contaminated with hydrogen sulphide. Much as here, the comments thread is as interesting as the post at The Oil Drum itself.
My immediate thought: Messy.
The West Virginia Surf Report is picking up where they left off [McDonald's McSkillet burrito] (previously), Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality has recently been updated with picture comparison and comedic review of:
Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco Supreme [more inside]
A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them
Poet Adrienne Rich, celebrated over her 60-plus-year career with the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and many other awards, and known for both her vivid and original poetry and her advocacy of feminist and civil rights causes, has died at the age of 82. Read, watch, listen.
The answer, my friend
KUOW, KCMU and KEXP: a brief history of college(type) radio from University of Washington
KEXP 90.3 FM is a Seattle, WA-based radio station, officially "a service of University of Washington," but it's more complex than that. The first University of Washington radio station started broadcasting in 1952. Five decades, a few station organizational shifts, plus three call letter and frequency changes later, KEXP was (re)born in 2001. Along the way, the station spread the sound of 1990s Seattle indie rock, started streaming "CD quality" MP3 audio of their broadcast in 2000, and they have an ever-growing collection of recordings of live in-station performances, including over 2,000 videos on YouTube. [more inside]
Open Source Tricorder
3DEverywhere
WebGL, the 3D technology that's associated with HTML5, continues to make giant strides in diverse areas:
Exploration of human anatomy: Zygote Body, released yesterday, and BioDigital Human, the successors to Google Body (previously)
World Visualisation: WebGL Earth, Nokia's 3D Map of the entire earth (previously). WorldWeather and The WebGL Globe, a Google project that displays all kinds of data. Also: Where Does My Tweet Go?
Games: browser ports of Team Fortess 2, Quake 3 and Rage (a developer’s diary). SkidRacer, an entire game in WebGL. Mini Mass Effect (not yet playable, sadly).
Musicals: Lights.
Tools: 3Notes.js, a visual scene editor. Developer documentation. More resources.
[more inside]
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Debunk-tainment
The Lomax Collection -- a 'renewal of the forgotten springs of human creativity.'
NPR: "Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world." Now, nearly ten years after his death, thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. "It's part of what Lomax envisioned for [his] collection — long before the age of the Internet." (Mr. Lomax, Previously on MeFi) [more inside]
Pop! ... Pop!
Boston Dynamics is getting close to mastering quadrupedal motion with Big Dog and Cheetah (previously). And are working on bipedal motion with Petman (previously), but how about a robot that is able to leap (up to the top of) tall buildings in a single bound? Sand Flea! [more inside]
Batman Drives a Lamborghini?
You may have seen the news footage about a guy in a Batman suit being pulled over in suburban DC. It turns out that there is a lot more to the story.
Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly / Good Golly Miss Molly and boats / Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet / Jump back in the alley, and nanny goats.
Born in 1942, Colin Fulcher was better known – though not by much – as Barney Bubbles, who worked prolifically from the 1960s until his suicide in 1983. A graphic artist, designer, art and video director who preferred to remain behind the scenes (he only rarely signed his work, and when he did, often used obscure pseudonyms), Bubbles' revolutionary and innovative practice encompassed record sleeves, band posters and videos for Hawkwind (and their friend/collaborator Michael Moorcock), Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and the Blockheads (including their iconic logo), Billy Bragg, The Specials and Depeche Mode. A retrosective of his work, Reasons To Be Cheerful, and its associated blog has a comprehensive overview of Bubbles' diverse body of work. Designer and artist John Coulthart offers up his perspective; Creative Review get behind his creative processes; a new Radio 4 documentary, In Search of Barney Bubbles , covers his work and often troubled life.
Guy comes out of closet on Facebook to friends who are entirely too geeky to care.
A cure for special snowflake syndrome.
The Who's 5:15 gets an official video
They write the songs.
Sodajerker is a songwriting team from Liverpool. But Simon Barber and Brian O'Connor are also the co-hosts of the iTunes podcast Sodajerker on Songwriting, a programme featuring hour-long interviews with some of the world’s most successful songwriters including Jimmy Webb, Andy Partridge, Todd Rundgren and many others. [more inside]
We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.
HEAD MAN
No line of unlicensed Star Wars figures is as sought after as the Turkish line known as Uzay. STARS WAR UZAY set includes: Stormtroper, Imperial Stormtoper, Head Man, Chewbacca (Monkey Man), Artoo-Detoo, Imperial T E Fighter Pilot and See-Threep.
The News Corporation scandals
Murdoch's Scandal - Lowell Bergman (the journalist portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider) has investigated News Corporation for PBS Frontline [transcript]. He depicts Rupert Murdoch's British operation as a criminal enterprise, routinely hacking the voicemail and computers of innocent people, and using bribery and coercion to infiltrate police and government over decades. Enemies are ruthlessly "monstered" by the tabloids. Bergman also spoke to NPR's Fresh Air [transcript].
But the hits keep coming: in recent days News Corp has been accused of hacking rival pay TV services and promoting pirated receiver cards in both the UK and Australia. With the looming possibility of prosecution under America's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, how long will shareholders consider Rupert Murdoch irreplaceable? [Previous 1 2 3 4]
"The stories of these cases are very painful."
This is an animated documentary about Mohammad Mostafaei who is an Iranian lawyer in exile in Norway. Mostafaei specialized in advocating for defendants who faced the death penalty and the animation focuses on one of these cases, that of Behnoud Shojaee. The animation features Paul Bettany reading Mostafaei's words, is a part of Amnesty International's campaign against the death penalty.
Rumble in the Toy Chest
The Duel - An amazing-stop motion Lego skirmish relying almost exclusively on practical effects.
If you like the way your bike rides, it’s an awesome bike.
Got questions about your bike or bicycling in general? Surly bikes' Skip Bernet has answers to just about any bike forum post ever written.
Pasty Gate
Following an amendment in the recent Conservative Party budget, VAT on 'Baked Goods' will be re-instated. In response, the question of whether or not David Cameron once ate a Greggs pasty infects the British press. The Telegraph have a live blog covering what has been termed by some Pasty Gate
Noisy Jelly
It's like a synthesizer control interface made out of molded jello. "Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly."
Phablet Blue
An elephant uses a Galaxy Note, proving that not everybody looks ridiculous while using a phablet.
Getting wood
Romeyn Hough's American Woods is one of the most astonishing books of the late 19th century, a 14-volume set containing a thorough survey of the trees of the U.S., complete with thinly sliced samples of the wood of each tree. Complete sets of this mammoth undertaking are today rare and highly prized.
Well, I never hated you.
Jake Cole of the film blog Not Just Movies discusses the semi-legendary hour-long debate about Monty Python's Life of Brian on the BBC Four program Friday Night, Saturday Morning. The debate features Pythons John Cleese and Michael Palin on one side and opposite them broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark.
“What you see is what we sim”
Twenty-four years after the original, Maxis (sans Wil Wright) is rebooting SimCity. RPS' preview states that, thanks to the bottom-up approach of the Glassbox engine, each entity "...will be its own discrete software agent, running its own little simulation of its own little life." In their own preview, IGN state that having animations reflect behind-the-scenes processes will "[give] the players tangible signals that they need to step in..." However, is there trouble in (simulated) paradise already?
Poo-Powered Rickshaw Unveiled At The Denver Zoo
Poo-Powered Rickshaw Unveiled At The Denver Zoo Poop. Is there anything it can't do? On Wednesday, The Denver Zoo introduced what is believed to be the world's first poo-powered motorized tuk tuk showcasing The Denver Zoo's very own patent-pending gasification technology.
The Treniers
Do you know The Treniers? Back in the 40s and 50s, they straddled the lines between jump blues, swing, early rock'n'roll, jazz dance, hep jive and comedy. They were a whole hella fun, and they happened to be the backing band for what must be the best dance performance Jerry Lewis ever gave the world. That particular clip, BTW, from a Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis "Colgate Comedy Hour" in 1954, is purported to be the first rock'n'roll performance on national television, and it may well have been.
Boing Booiinng Boooiiinnng Booooiiiinnnng
Snowflake Cultivation
Linden Gledhill is trying to grow snowflakes in his garage by passing 2000 volts through a cold moist chamber, as previously achieved by a team at Caltech [more inside]
ScHmITt hits the fan
An expert committee has found that the President of Hungary, Dr. Pál Schmitt, is not guilty of plagiarism, despite extensive parts of his doctoral thesis being copied from multiple sources. The fault, the committee claims, was not his, but that of his supervisors. The Contrarian Hungarian and The Hungarian Spectrum have detailed analysis of the allegations and the committee’s report, while the Urban Dictionary has coined a new term in honor of the scandal.
Other European politicians have faced with similar claims recently with differing results.
March 27
R.I.P. Christine Brooke-Rose
Experimental novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose has died. The Guardian has an obituary and an appreciation. [more inside]
What a brilliant man!
"Hilton Kramer, whose clear, incisive style and combative temperament made him one of the most influential critics of his era, both at The New York Times, where he was the chief art critic for almost a decade, and at The New Criterion, which he edited from its founding in 1982, died early Tuesday in Harpswell, Me. He was 84." [more inside]
On November 1, 2005, nine men ceased shaving
The Winter Of The Beard [1h47m] is a documentary which chronicles the lives of nine men across six months. Each was provided a video camera and weekly interview questions to document his own experience. The resulting 600 hours of intimate footage revealed a group of men traversing the same rite of passage from disparate vantage points. Throughout the process, the men told stories from their pasts, shared likes and dislikes, and confessed personal fears and aspirations. They laughed and cried, hid and came alive behind their beards. The tireless taping captured bad days and good ones, and it is in this framework that the individual stories stand out and the beards fade into the background. From a son dealing with his father's descent into Alzheimer's, to financial and marital struggles, to the birth of a child, THE WINTER OF THE BEARD [trailer, 2m58s] reveals the trials and tribulations of what it means to drastically alter one's appearance and otherwise go on living life. [more inside]
Top Hat Good
Guide to buying a top hat - Charles Henry Wolfenbloode gives advice on buying a topper.
Two bits of wood bolted together
Fender Factory Tour 1959 - Leo Fender in the second shot. Freddie Tavares at 7:26. A day when "everything was done by hand... It is amazing to realize that every guitar made that year is now worth a small fortune." The 1959-63 era Stratocaster is called one of the 50 guitars to play before you die. (via the q-ster)
The Only Winning Move is to Watch This
Most of us reading on the blue lived through at least a portion of it. Forty-plus years of tension between the world's two superpowers and their allies. That's right: The Cold War.
Then, they made a documentary. Aired on CNN in 1998, and never released on DVD,
the 24 episode, 20 hour series features tons of archival footage, along with many interviews with individuals directly involved at some of the highest levels.
You might not be able to see it on DVD, but you can watch the full series on Youtube, starting with Part 1: Comrades (1917-1945).
A Database of Metaphor
The Mind is a Metaphor. A database of thousands of metaphors organized by category, like 18th century, Liquid, or Jacobite. It's maintained by University of Virginia English Professor Brad Pasanek.
New image formats for artistic purpose.
I am sure more than a few of you are involved in gli.tc/h, and thus prepared to discuss extrafile, brainchild of one Kim Asendorf (previously), in greater detail. New image formats for artistic purpose, anyone?
It's a weird, sad way for an adult to behave.
So Tara Tiger Brown of Forbes.com wrote an article begging fake geek girls to go away. Leigh Alexander of Sexy Videogameland responds with "This is the worst kind of thing to me, because not only is it sad for her, but it sucks for all of us. Women in our space, having once been something of a scarcity, face particular challenges. We lack for companions and mentors. " Followed by The Mary Sue's Susana Polo "So yes, I understand the desire to weed the “posers” out of your personal life and interactions. But I have never, actually, in the flesh, met a “fake” geek girl. Or guy. "
juiced goose
How is democracy doing?
Bulletproofing Your House
"Not only did the .30-30 go through, but this is you."
Ballistics expert Paul Harrell demonstrates the stopping power of various objects. [more inside]
The Song Machine
"At Roc the Mic, Stargate carries on a glorious and disappearing New York tradition that stretches back to the Brill Building days of the late fifties and early sixties, when songwriting teams such as Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry cranked out hits for the top pop acts of the day; and further back still, to the nineteen-tens and twenties, when the Broadway-to-Sixth Avenue reach of West Twenty-eighth Street, known as Tin Pan Alley, for the sound of pianos coming from the upper floors, was the center of the music-publishing industry. With their managers, Blacksmith and Danny D., orchestrating demand, Stargate has become one of the very few writer-producers whom labels approach when they absolutely must have a hit single, or a “bullet,” as Hermansen calls it, to market an album with." The New Yorker - The hitmakers behind Rihanna
United States v. Health Care Reform
This morning marked day two of marathon proceedings in what's likely the most momentous and politically-charged Supreme Court case since Bush v. Gore: the effort to strike down President Obama's landmark health care reform law. While yesterday was a sleepy affair of obscure technical debate, today's hearings targeted the heart of the law -- the individual mandate that requires most Americans to purchase insurance by 2014. With lower courts delivering a split decision before today, administration lawyers held some hope that at least one conservative justice could be persuaded to uphold the provision, which amortizes the risk that makes universal coverage possible. But after a day of deeply skeptical questioning by swing justice Anthony Kennedy and his fellow conservatives [transcript - audio], the mandate looks to be in grave trouble, with CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin going as far as calling the day "a train wreck" for the administration. But it's far from a done deal, with a third day of hearings tomorrow and a final decision not expected until June.
“I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it”
The Media Map: Who's Reading What And Where: [Forbes] We worked with Bitly and its data on millions of Web clicks to find the most influential media outlets in the country. This map shows which news sources are read and shared at above-average levels by state. Roll over and click on the media outlets below to see where they influence readers and which stories were big hits. Updated monthly to reflect the latest trends. More about the map.
Mark Kirk & the Candy Desk
What do John McCain, Rick Santorum, and George Voinovich have in common? They have all been seated at the Senate's candy desk throughout their careers. [more inside]
As seen on podcast #69.
I Don't Know
So You Think You Can't Do That On Television? Interview with Geoffrey Darby, inventor of green slime and co-creator of a show that many 80's kids will remember.
The making of Bad Girls.
NOM Strategy Documents Publicly Released
Docket Item 132-2 a.k.a NOM Desposition Exhibit 12 a.k.a "National Strategy for Winning the Marriage Battle" was unsealed yesterday along with many others and the Human Rights Campaign have been busy scouring the documents. [more inside]
Slow-Motion Dance
Ballet dancers of the Staatsballett Berlin at 1000 FPS, to the sound of Radiohead. Also: TimeTwist [more inside]
Stag Party
The GOP’s woman problem is that it has a serious problem with women. Frank Rich on George Stephanopoulos's unanswered question, how the Republicans have shifted to being the party of misogyny since the 70s, and why Mitt Romney would be just as bad as Rick Santorum.
Just because.
A Shory Biography of Emmy Noether
Complaints Department, medieval monk style
Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Illuminated Manuscripts. [more inside]
The man with the golden flute
Bonus level unlocked: A deathmatch game of Goldeneye being played inside of the map for Kakariko village from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. [more inside]
The Ethnic Aisle
The Ethnic Aisle discusses race and multiculturalism in Toronto. Their current "issue" is about Hair. [more inside]
Color est e pluribus unus
RGB is an exhibition by artist Carnovsky which layers primary colored images on top on one another with unexpected, disorienting, and often fascinating results. [more inside]
Notes from dreamworlds
Microworlds is the blog of biology student Daniel Stoupin, and he also has a photography website as well. His chosen subject is microphotography, especially of living things. Perhaps the best place to start is his latest post, where he uses fluorescent dyes to take pictures of a rotting flea embryo. Other favorites are shells of microscopic crustaceans, colorful plant seed fluorescence and mosquito larva in polarized light. He has also made a video, and explains the process here.
"Before we let you take over our city we will burn it down first,"
Emotions ran high (video) as city and state leaders met to work out a deal to address Detroit's looming budget crisis. The threat of state imposition of an emergency financial manager has some residents
fearful of the ulterior motives of state officials: [more inside]
Brothels Gonna Work It Out
March 26
Wikipaintings
Wikipaintings is a fantastic resource, a well curated database of the world's great paintings that will blow your mind. Click the logo in the top left corner for a collection of a random artist's work in chronological order. Their popular artists and popular artworks. [more inside]
The Conservative Teen
Presenting for your perusal: "The Conservative Teen", a new magazine designed to instill the right values in today's youth.
Louise Fitzhugh's "Harriet the Spy"
In December 1974, there was a memorial service at St. James Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue for Louise Fitzhugh, author and illustrator of Harriet the Spy, the groundbreaking children's novel that has sold 2.5 million copies since its publication in 1964. [more inside]
Pope Hats
Pope Benedict XVI has revived many dormant style traditions and introduced a few fashion innovations of his own. Also, he often wears fanciful hats. Examples: A Sombrero, A camauro (camel skin hat of red wool or velvet with white ermine), a free baseball cap, a wide brim red cappello romano, (I.E. saturno), a Yarmulke (a little zucchetto), Mitra Pretiosa, Papal Tiara (there are many in existence) and so many more. A Time Magazine gallery.
Also: Papal shoes & slippers. [more inside]
The Newspaper That Rules Britain.
MAIL SUPREMACY - How the Daily Mail Conquered England. 'In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail is the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain. A middle-market tabloid, with a daily readership of four and a half million, it reaches four times as many people as the Guardian, while being taken more seriously than the one paper that outsells it, the Sun. The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News.' [more inside]
The average [professor] owes over one hundred thousand dollars in [grad] school loans, and makes about as much as a waiter.
New York Dick
In the name of Defense.
In December 1974, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh's front-page account (paywall) of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program documented their illegal domestic intelligence operations against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States. The article eventually prompted investigations by the Rockefeller Commission and the Church and Pike committees. "There have been other reports on the CIA's doping of civilians, but they have mostly dished about activities in New York City. Accounts of what actually occurred in San Francisco have been sparse and sporadic. But newly declassified CIA records, recent interviews, and a personal diary of [George H. White,] an operative at Stanford Special Collections shed more light on the breadth of the San Francisco operation." SF Weekly: "Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA doped San Francisco citizens with LSD." MK-ULTRA: Previously on Metafilter. (Via)
"Sound matters more than smell in terms of politeness"
"Stick to the book, dude"
In the book version of The Hunger Games, the tributes Rue and Thresh from District 11 are described as having "dark brown skin." In the film version of The Hunger Games, Rue and Thresh are played by Amandla Stenberg and Dayo Okeniyi, who are both black. However, a surprising number of fans (presumably the same ones who complained when Idris Elba played Heimdall in Thor - previously) are upset that black people were cast in these roles rather than the white people they imagined. Hunger Games Tweets provides continuing coverage of whatever the hell these people were thinking.
Coming Up Like A Flower
" Thus in today’s China one confronts the paradox of a communist regime that is at ideological loggerheads with left-leaning intellectuals, but which finds pro-Western, liberal intellectuals on the whole quite congenial." Richard Wolin is Dreaming In Chinese...
Remember, relax your eyes
“We don’t want everything for free. We just want everything.”
Animator & copyleft activist Nina Paley sat down with a group of teenagers and asked them how they would prefer to support the artists they liked.
Corridor running
Exploring Cardiff's Roath Lock studios, home of Doctor Who, Casualty, Upstairs Downstairs and the Welsh language Pobol y Cwm. Oh yeah, and there's a trailer for Doctor Who series 7, in which Farscape fans will catch a glimpse of Ben Browder.
Why Won't They Listen?
Why Won't They Listen? Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”
First it was a Goldfish. Now it's a Rabbit!
"Herman Cain's latest crazy ad has launched (so to speak), and features a bunny rabbit which represents 'small business' that is hurled into the air with a catapult and then blown to bits with a rifle.
It's a follow-up to his goldfish snuff film."*
See the hands of my offspring making windmills
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of They Might Be Giants' album Apollo 18, a group of designers have made a collection of interactive fiction games based on each track of the album.
Dawn of an Old Age
Mad Men is back. And so is Vulture with another of their always-enjoyable recaps.
An industry running out of luck?
After three horses used in the production of Luck had to be euthanized due to injury, HBO decided to pull the plug on the horse racing drama. Perhaps for the first time since Eight Belles broke down following the running of the Kentucky Derby in 2008, the deaths and subsequent decision to cancel the show have again cast a national spotlight on the darker side of the US horse racing industry, a business “still mired in a culture of drugs and lax regulation and a fatal breakdown rate that remains far worse than in most of the world.”
The end of the Chongqing Model? Bo Xilai’s rapid fall from office examined.
Bo Xilai, former Party Secretary of Chongqing and current Politburo member, was recently sacked by Chinese leadership. He is well known for his economic success at growing Chongqing, and his flamboyant leadership style which included the revival of “Red Culture”[previously]. [more inside]
Kief
What is keif? More importantly, is it easier to produce it using techno, folksy guitar pop, violin rap, or with a chatty Canadian gabbing away?
Built to Last!
Kefirpedia
Kefirpedia aims to be the authority of all things kefir-related on the Internet, using evidence-based research (not just hype!) and community collaboration for know-how and recipes.
“You have to stand in the pocket and throw the football at some point.”
The New York Times isn't known for trenchant sports analysis, but in this article, Mike Tanier throws down stats to back up the problem behind the Jet's Tebow acquisition: Tim Tebow, though a "gifted athlete," lacks passing mechanics.
A patent on speech
Dana Nieder explains how an ACC patent fight may substantially delay her daughter learning to speak. [more inside]
Ike Harder!
Shoutmennonitenames.com generates Mennonite names (shouting not included, except for an exclamation mark). Does what it says on the well-worn tin passed down through the generations. [more inside]
March 25
The Titanoboa returns
The Titanoboa commutes (more). The Titanoboa disco (more). The Titanoboa vs. T-Rex. Titanoboa: Monster Snake. previously.
LOVE ME
Artist Bas Van Oerle presents a series of propaganda posters for the 2012 Republican presidential contenders. Ron Paul For The Youth Vote.
Fields of Santorum.
Love Me Romney.
Join The Cosmonewts.
Creating alliances based on shared animosities!
In an act of social media blasphemy, Texas researcher Dean Terry has added an "Enemy" feature to Facebook.
"To commemorate National Hairball Awareness Day, the museum featured a display of 10 of these hairballs"
Yoga Breakdancing
Living in a Washing Machine.
The Nakagin Capsule Tower (slyt) is a prime example of the uniquely Japanese architecture known as "Metabolism", as well as the main inspiration for Tokyo's famous Capsule Hotels. The most unique feature of this building style is the interchangeability of the individual units, supposedly to allow it to adapt to changes in density and lifestyle (although that plan hasn't exactly panned out). Local residents are calling for the tower to be demolished, although a group of architects are trying to preserve it as an architectural landmark [more inside]
Is DriveABLE reasonABLE?
DriveABLE, is a driver testing program, primarily for seniors, implemented across Canada and in the United States and Australia. Questions have been raised about the lack of consistency and accuracy in the testing. With only a 15% pass rate, drivers are complaining about the unfamiliar technology (youtube - DriveABLE computer use demo) and the lack of services in rural areas, where a senior may have to drive several hundred kilometres, to complete the mandatory computer test. [more inside]
Rare and Unusual Images
recto|verso is a place where the staff of F.A. Bernett Books showcase some of the more spectacular, interesting, unusual and puzzling items they have come across. Discoveries of note include: Both Sides of Broadway, Then and Now, a building-by-building sequential photographic survey of the most famous street in America. The most influential graphic arts publication of late-1920s Tokyo, Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu Zenshu. Felix Vallotton’s Reinvention of the Woodcut, credited by many art historians of his time (and ours) as having modernized and revitalized the form in Western art. [more inside]
OH GOD GRASS YES
A New Piece From Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is well-known for having been a child prodigy. A previously unknown composition of his, dated c. 1767, when he would have been 11 years old, (PDF of score) had it's premiere earlier this week. [more inside]
DeepSeaChallenge
Director James Cameron is currently 32,160 feet underwater and descending further, solo, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. [more inside]
A Day In The Life
24 hours with designer Karl Lagerfeld "I don't like hot drinks, very strange. I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed. I can even drink it in the middle of the night, and I can sleep." [more inside]
"The Hunger Games" costume design
You may have heard that they made a movie of the The Hunger Games. While others discuss its dystopian vision of a barbaric future America, we will concern ourselves with something more important: the clothes. [more inside]
Less Wrong: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. How inefficient! [...] What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful.Less Wrong, a community dedicated to rationality, is compiling a list of The Best Textbooks on Every Subject.
Trouble in Ponydise
The internet phenomena of My Little Pony:Friendship is Magic [pre-vi-ous-ly] has been through a bit of a stir last month. Beloved fan character Derpy Hooves has become canon. And then her entrance was edited, much to the chagrin of fans. [more inside]
“I wanted him to die.”
HBO Documentary: Child of Rage: (1989) "Story of Beth, a six-year-old child who had faced the loss of a mother, physical abuse, and sexual abuse all before the age of 19 months. Both Beth and her younger brother Jonathan were put up for adoption. They were adopted by a minister and his wife. This unsuspecting couple quickly learned that something was extremely wrong with Beth.
This terrifying and disturbing documentary traces Beth as she goes through therapy in Colorado. The video explains that Beth suffers from Reactive Attachment Disorder. [Via]."
Jailhouse Rock
Two year old William Stokkebroe clears the dance floor and impresses everyone with his jive.
È morto a Lisbona Antonio Tabucchi
Dreaming in French
He turns off the television and takes off his shoes and socks.
"Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?" [Vimeo] During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders set up a static camera in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez and provided selected film directors (inc. Spielberg, Godard, Fassbinder & Herzog) a list of questions to answer concerning the future of cinema. Each director was given one 16 mm reel (approximately 11 minutes) to answer.
you are invisible
Movies as Code
The Naked Rambler now in prison for 6 years for nudity
The Naked Rambler now in prison for 6 years for nudity Six years ago, Naked Rambler Stephen Gough's hike from Land's End to John O'Groats brought him media fame – and a prison sentence. Then another, and another, and… why has he been locked up ever since?
Triste
I kept going out with the rescue workers and one day we came upon this scene that was so sad that the rescue workers gave me a vest to cross the police line. I shot the scene a bunch of different ways, but the way that worked best was just showing it from the front. These people were killed by one single bullet. The woman is far into her pregnancy. The hit man came in from the left-hand side of the car and fired a bullet into the man’s head when they were embracing and killed both of them.
The violence is really hard to show in a way that is humane. It is almost impossible to give any kind of dignity to the people that have died, because of how horribly they have been maimed. Taking pictures of those things, you feel like you are supporting what the narcos are doing because you are spreading out their message of horror. So I really became obsessed with making a picture that was intimate – while still showing violence – and encompassed humanity and dignity. I wanted to give these people a story.
The violence is really hard to show in a way that is humane. It is almost impossible to give any kind of dignity to the people that have died, because of how horribly they have been maimed. Taking pictures of those things, you feel like you are supporting what the narcos are doing because you are spreading out their message of horror. So I really became obsessed with making a picture that was intimate – while still showing violence – and encompassed humanity and dignity. I wanted to give these people a story.
Perpetual ocean
Leaving St Kilda
The last man to remember St Kilda. Norman John Gillies was five years old when he, and all the other residents, left the remote Scottish island of St Kilda in 1930. Fortunately, we still have photos and films of island life, including 1928's 'St Kilda, Britain's Loneliest Island' (part 1, part 2).
(St Kilda on MeFi, previously and previouslier.)
WINGS AND TEETH. You turn tail, I turn heads.
Doomtree is a hip-hop collective from Minneapolis featuring Dessa, P.O.S., Sims, Cecil Otter and Mike Mictlan with producers Paper Tiger and Lazerbeak. [more inside]
March 24
SAT anyone?
Graphs of Stock Market Historical Ratios
Market Capitalization-to-GDP is an indicator described by Warren Buffet as "probably the best single measure of where [stock market] valuations stand at any given moment." Here is a historical graph of this indicator along with twenty other historical indicator charts covering the US S&P, Japanese Tokyo Stock Exchange and Indian Sensex indices. The indicators include P/E ratios and dividend yields. Also of note: which currencies are under or overvalued according to purchasing power parity.. [more inside]
"I think I just really wanted that last hold really bad"
Bouldering is a climbing sport that requires no rope, only grip strength, chalk, a crash mat, and nerve. [more inside]
For once, clouds are a good thing
One of the neater aspects of astronomy is that amateurs often make significant contributions to the field. A few nights ago Wayne Jaeschke found a strange cloud feature in his Mars images. He posted his findings to the site Cloudy Nights. It created a bit of a buzz there, as well as the wider media, (even MSNBC!). It has also piqued the interest of the pros. Researchers working with the Mars Thermal Emission Imaging System onboard the Mars Odyssey spacecraft and the Mars Color Imager onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Observer are looking over their data to try to figure out exactly what it is they're seeing.
Traffic jams without bottlenecks—experimental evidence for the physical mechanism of the formation of a jam
The mathematical theory behind shockwave traffic jams was developed more than 20 years ago using models that show jams appearing from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic - typically triggered by a single driver slowing down. After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, traveling backwards through the traffic. The theory has frequently been modeled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but had never been recreated experimentally until recently (PDF of SCIENCE). The authors also released video of their experiments which has since been posted to YouTube. [more inside]
Aisle seat, please.
Tsunami Debris Field
Just a little over a year ago 20 million tons of debris were generated by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, much of that is now drifting eastward. [more inside]
A Burger, an Order of Fries, and Your Credit Card Number
"Why are small businesses such frequent targets? Because they offer hackers the easiest path to your financial information. In fact, security consultants say, there’s an entire underground industry built around extracting customers’ credit card numbers from retailers’ point-of-sale systems." Slate: Why it’s so easy for hackers to steal financial information from restaurants
Okay, I have dropbox too...
Deadmau5 makes a new artists's career on his live stream: starring deadmau5 and some dude called Chris. (SLYT; NSFW profanity)
Your patient needs you as much as the new heart.
Legend of Korra
The Legend of Korra - the sequel series to Avatar: the Last Airbender - is set to premiere on April 14. This weekend you can watch the first two episodes at Korra Nation.
Singularity, I don’t know
The American Repertory Theater presents a musical by The Lisps about the Civil War, Ada Lovelace, and the Singularity, including such songs as Singularity, which is breathtakingly terrible but ever so catchy. [more inside]
Future Noir
Richard Strauss' "Four Last Songs" sung by Jessye Norman
In the sixty-odd years since their composition, the Four Last Songs have acquired in many people’s minds an unassailable status as simply the most beautiful music known to them, to be listened to in a dimly lit room and a state of rapt meditation, surrendering to the extraordinary spell of profound, other-worldly calm that they cast. This is not surprising. They were, indeed, the last things of any significance that Strauss wrote, between May and September 1948, at the age of eighty-four. (previously) [more inside]
"Liven up your results by reporting them in furlongs, chaldrons, and fluid scruples."
A Teacher's Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students
That German that sent Americans to the Moon
Picturing our scientific grandmothers
In honor of International Women's Day and Women's History Month, the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) is pleased to present a sampling of images documenting women scientists and engineers from around the world, most of whom were pioneers in their respective fields, or were the first women to receive advanced graduate degrees in their discipline (via). [more inside]
To PBS With (Tough) Love
But this season, PBS chose to move Independent Lens and P.O.V. to a new time slot -- 10 pm, ET, on Thursday nights. This may not seem like such a big deal at first, until you know that on Thursday nights stations can broadcast any program they like in prime time, whether it's part of the PBS schedule or not. Many take the opportunity to offers viewers locally produced programs, British sitcoms or reruns of Antiques Roadshow. As a result, episodes of the independent documentary series can now be run anywhere local stations choose to fit them in (here in New York, WNET airs the films at 11 p.m. on Sundays) or maybe not at all.Bill Moyers writes an open letter to PBS about scheduling changes which have ruined PBS as Tuesday night destination for documentary television.
“The Fastest Way to Tomorrow is by Giving Up On Today!”
Aim like a drunkard... jump like an idiot...
Choices?
The GOP has released their sunnily-named Path to Prosperity Budget (PDF), offering it as a stark choice in the upcoming 2012 elections. Paul Ryan makes their case in their new video "The Path to Prosperity Budget: Your Country. Your Future. Your Choice." Conservatives argue for it. Liberals argue this is the death-knell for the middle class. Has the end-game arrived?
Don't get lapped.
The Red Hook Criterium is "an unsanctioned race held at night featuring a fixed gear criterium and a 5km running race held over multiple laps of a short technical circuit. The field consists of elite athletes, track stars, amateur runners, professional cyclists, bike messengers, and urban cyclists."
First held in 2008, the Crit has steadily gained momentum, recognition and exposure. In recent years it has spread to Milan (highlights, footage).
The 5th running of the Red Hook Crit is being held tonight. Red Hook Crit website and promotional design by MeFi's own fidgets.
Lesson #1: The United States lost.
Nobody's Home(page)
The Gallery of Default Anonymity What being nobody looks like all over the web.
Stranded dolphins saved by beachgoers
What will be the next possible trend in Dystopian Literature? Robotics? Climate change? Insect overlords?
I'm sorry!
VGJUNK looks at "Gonbee no I'm Sorry", a strange Japanese arcade maze game released in 1985 by Banpresto and Sega that mocked notoriously corrupt former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei "Shogun of Darkness" Tanaka, who was convicted in 1983 of taking 1.8 million dollars from Lockheed Martin in exchange for letting them sell planes to the national airline.
March 23
"There are times you realize how small the place you're from really is."
The voice of reason... in Washington, DC?!
Organized irreligion! This weekend , Washington, D.C. will be invaded by the voice of reason. A free rally featuring Tim Minchin, Paul Provenza, Richard Dawkins, Eddie Izzard, Adam Savage, James Randi, Bad Religion, and many others, in what is anticipated to be the largest gathering of non-believers in America.
"If we don't organize, we will be the only ones not organized. Religion will be organized. We won't be organized. That means we lose... and they win."
"If we don't organize, we will be the only ones not organized. Religion will be organized. We won't be organized. That means we lose... and they win."
I've got your "Physician outrage" right here!
Where is the physician outrage? Metafilter's own jscalzi played host to an anonymous post by an outraged physician who put forth a five point plan for civil disobedience in the face of legislators demanding that physicians prescribe transvaginal ultrasounds to women who may choose to abort.
The Iced Coffee Economy
Found in the Hy-Lo in 1970
The Internet never lies!
Maria Dmitrienko, a member of the Kazakh national shooting team, won a competition in Kuwait. At the medal ceremony, the organizers played the fake Kazakh national anthem from the movie "Borat", which praises Kazakhstan for its potassium exports and claims that it has the cleanest prostitutes in the region. [more inside]
The happiness in my heart was as deep as the sea.
The true story of a lost child who never forgot his home, a mother who never gave up hope, and google earth.
http://yungja.ke/e.m-bed.de/d/ (live experience screen video)
Yung Jake, who also has a great song about datamoshing, drops a new track on internet fame as a means to acquiring internet fame. It appears to be accompanied by some sort of internetface http://e.m-bed.de/d that isn't loading. Maybe if you stopped clicking on the link it would work...
Dandelions and bellwomen and eyehands, oh my
Opeth's 'I Feel the Dark' juxtaposed with Dali/Disney's 'Destino', pairing a sound lush enough to match the visuals. [more inside]
Machines vast and sinister
We've discussed subblue/Tom Beddard and Mandlebulbs before, but two months ago L'Eclaireur Sévigné asked him to create a few animations for their 147-screen exhibition. And here are the hypnotic, terrifying results.
Pungle up, unless your pockets are full of flug.
In the late fall of 1965, lexicographer Frederic Gomes Cassidy dispatched a fleet of Word Wagons from a Madison, Wisconsin parking lot. His team of graduate students and volunteers, armed with Cassidy's 1,847-item questionnaire were attempting to compile and decipher all regional dialects and idioms found in America. Cassidy passed away in 2000, but colleagues continued on, and the fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) has been completed. [more inside]
Fact and a Photo
From Dan Lewis, the same guy who writes Now I Know, the daily e-newsletter of interesting stories ("Every morning, I share something interesting I’ve learned over the last few weeks. It began in June of 2010. As of January 1, 2012, 35,000 people are subscribed." Previously. Archives.), comes the nascent Fact and a Photo tumblr. Already, there's a picture of a swimming pig.
Michael Mann's "Thief"
Michael Mann's "Thief" is a film of style, substance, and violently felt emotion, all wrapped up in one of the most intelligent thrillers I've seen. - Roger Ebert [more inside]
Dissecting OV's 103, 104 and 105.
Orbiter Autopsies "What NASA will learn from dissecting Space Shuttles Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour" before they transition into retirement. (From the May 2012 issue of Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine.)
"I heard human blood boils in space..."
Humanity’s long war with the nefarious space-cat Kilrathi has been revived in the fan made Wing Commander Saga : The Darkest Dawn! [more inside]
Roads & Kingdoms
The newly launched Roads & Kingdoms describes itself as an online journal of food, politics, music and travel [more inside]
The Big Split: Why the hedge fund world loved Obama in 2008—and viscerally despises him today.
If you’re elected president,” asked one guest at a 2007 hedge fund managers event for Obama, “what will you do to the taxes on the people in this room?” “I’ll raise them,” Obama fired back. The managers, who share social circles and an educational background with Obama, approved of his style. These days, however, the bloom is off the rose. In The Big Split, Alec MacGillis investigates the souring of a 20 year relationship between Democrats and high finance, and surmises that it's the administration's rhetoric more than its policy that has upset the masters of the financial universe.
O'Keefe's accomplice defects after harassment
Nadia Naffe describes herself as a former accomplice to James O'Keefe (oh so Previously) but last year filed a harassment claim against him, which was dismissed in December. Now she is telling all on her blog: [more inside]
The return of Whit Stillman
“A trio of girls set out to change the male-dominated environment of the Seven Oaks college campus, and to rescue their fellow students from depression, grunge and low standards of every kind.” After a 14-year absence, director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco) returns with Damsels in Distress (trailer on site), opening April 6 in New York and Los Angeles. The New York Times Magazine did a story on Stillman’s return on March 16. (Previously)
(◡ ‿ ◡ ✿)
The Fungarium & The Millenium Seed Bank Partnership:A Pair of 5-minute Documentaries on the Research Institutions at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. (Previously 1 , Previously 2)
Do you miss Four Loko the same way I do?
Instruments from the Inside
Näher an der Klassik (Closer to the Classical) is an advertising campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic which features macro photographs that turn the inner spaces of musical instruments into lovely, cathedral-like spaces.
Dartmouth Idol
With algorithms subtle and discrete / I seek iambic writings to retweet.
Not satisfied with his previous attempt at generating sonnets randomly, mefi's own moonmilk has created a twitter bot that searches for lines of iambic pentameter, and a site where the results are assembled into sonnet form. [more inside]
"Rule 100: Cleanse not your teeth with the tablecloth."
The Mouse's New Clothes, er, Groove
The Sweatbox "the documentary Disney doesn't want you to see" (95-minute SLYT), was made when Sting wrote songs for "Kingdom of the Sun" and his filmmaker wife Trudie Styler got insider access to the production. What? You say there was no Disney movie "Kingdom of the Sun"? I meant "The Emperor's New Groove". Rarely has the decline of an Institution been better documented.
This may or may not be Disney property and may or may not be taken down any minute, but it has survived on YouTube for over 48 hours after getting blogged-about a dozen times.
This may or may not be Disney property and may or may not be taken down any minute, but it has survived on YouTube for over 48 hours after getting blogged-about a dozen times.
Doug Aitkin's Song 1 at the Hirshhorn
Artist Doug Aiken's projection installation, Song 1 on the façade of the donut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum in DC opened last night.
The work is a looped video installation of many people singing "I Only Have Eyes for You." It's very atmospheric and finally brings some art that enlivens the somewhat strange shape of the museum's exterior.
I heard him speak and then got to see the installation. It's beautiful. If you're in DC definitely come down to the National Mall after dusk (projection runs nightly until midnight).
It's the freakin' weekend, baby, I'm about to have me some fun
Young the Giant's excellent cover of R. Kelly's Ignition (Remix) kicks off this season of A. V. Club's Undercover series in some style. The song has been covered extensively since it came out, in styles ranging from bedroom ukulele to ivy a capella to basement indie. It was also covered by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and inspired Dave Chapelle's pisstake. John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats has been a long-time fan, usually adding a minute of the song as a coda to his cover of The Boys Are Back in Town. Darnielle, and some friends, gave us 100 Reasons Why "Ignition - Remix" Is So Damned Great.
We Love You - Iran & Israel
To the Iranian people.
To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters.
For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate.
I'm not afraid of you, I don't hate you.
I don t even know you. No Iranian ever did me no harm. I never even met an Iranian...Just one in Paris in a museum. Nice dude. [more inside]
I'd Like Some More Mondelez with Cheese, Please!
Large Heavy Vegetables and Rap Music
In September 2011, Welshman Ian Neale, claimed to have grown the world's heaviest swede. This bold claim caught the eye of Snoop Dogg who invited him via youtube to attend his gig in Cardiff so they could chat about horticultural matters. [more inside]
"Bad books" and how to spot them.
"The world is full of 'bad books'; not just uninteresting, or ill-informed, or morally repugnant books, but books that set out to present or defend positions that are insupportable in logic….Often these bad books become quite popular, and frequently gain a wider audience than good books on the same subjects. In discouraging my students from relying on such bad books, I began to wonder why they are popular." [more inside]
Frustro: The Impossible Typeface
Hungarian designer Martzi Hegedűs has created a single typeface, titled Frustro, on the sole premise of making it impossible.
Go face to face with your ancestors.
The Turkana Basin Institute and the Kenya National Museums are digitizing their fossil collections. Look around their virtual laboratory and collections and get up close and personal with some of paleoanthropology's most important fossils.
There are over 20,000 specimens that are housed in the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi as well as in the laboratories of the Turkana Basin Institute to the east and west of Lake Turkana. These range in age from 28 million years to several thousand years in age and have been recovered over the past six decades of exploration of the fossil rich deposits around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.
But did it keep Mathematica quiet while it looked?
Superman the Asshole
The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis
Bill Moyers' scathing 1987 special report on our secret government.(SLYT)(via)(trigger warning: pictures and video of dead bodies) It includes an in-depth look at the Iran-Contra Affair and much, much more. Note: sound cuts out for a couple of minutes during the intro because of copyrighted song. Sound returns around 3:20.
Security theatre theatre.
In the latest (ongoing) Economist debate (run Oxford-style), security expert Bruce Schneier and architect of the TSA Kip Hawley are facing off to respectively defend and attack the motion "This house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good." Overview. Opening statements. Rebuttals. (Surprisingly cogent) comments from the floor.
Jeunesse
March 22
Robot Animals of the United States Government
First there was the doomed cyborg Acoustic Kitty. Then the vaguely ominous man-outrunning robot cheetah. Now we have super stealth Robojelly, a robotic jellyfish.
Jardin la francaise
The Château de Marqueyssac is a 17th century chateau and gardens located at Vézac, in France. The chateau was built at the end of the 17th century on cliffs overlooking the Dordogne Valley. The original garden à la française featured terraces, alleys, and a kitchen garden surrounding the chateau.
In the 1860s, the new owner, began to plant thousands of boxwood trees - today there are over 150,000 - and had them carved in fantastic shapes, many in groups of rounded shapes like flocks of sheep. [more inside]
Geeklist, Sexism, Redemption-- Oh My
Last night, the founders of Geeklist and a female product manager got into a twitter fight about a video featuring their logo. A reporter for the Guardian Storified the whole fight and titled it "OH HAI SEXISM". Then, the entire internet got mad. The founders of geek list issued a "non-apology" apology. The founders Christian Sanz and Reuben Katz are now looking for redemption. [more inside]
Frank Bruni Has The Gout
Frank Bruni (previously) announced in his blog column today that he has recently been diagnosed with gout. The New York Times' restaurant critic for years, he links his condition to a predisposition combined with his personal habits and his professional experiences with alcohol and fatty meats. He chronicled his food writing in his memoir Born Round.
The American College of Rheumatology, PubMed, and The Mayo Clinic all provide factsheets on gout. Bruni wonders, "Why must it take something like [gout] for so many of us to pivot in a healthier direction?"
The cutting and stitching edge.
Push Stitchery Some stiched images are Not Safe For Work (but none the worse for all that) [more inside]
Somebody make a foul, you whistle.
The World's Best Referee: Rob Smyth tells the story of referee Abraham Klein.
It takes 2 minutes to start the movie with the original disc. It takes less than 5 seconds with an MKV.
Cinavia DRM: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Blu-ray’s Self-Destruction The latest Blu-Ray anti piracy technology uses audio watermarking to shut down unauthorised uses. Anandtech's Ganesh T S argues that it is a harbinger of doom. [more inside]
Kid Zoom: Home
'HOME' an exhibition by Ian 'Kid Zoom' Strange In October 2011, after three years living in New York, artist Ian Strange [Kid Zoom] returned to Australia to create a major new installation work housed in Cockatoo Island's prestigious Turbine Hall. The exhibition featured a full-scale reproduction of his childhood home and a film documenting the violent destruction of three Holden commodores. This video documents what resulted.
I see you!
Colors
What's it like to play Bach with synaesthesia?
Zone of Thought
Kyoto tofu
Fresh tofu in Japan is far better than it is anywhere else, and the tofu in Kyoto is generally held to be the best in the country. This is generally attributed to the skill, refined court and/or temple-influenced culture and the quality of the local water. ... During my week in Kyoto, I was able to pursue one family business’s vision of what tofu should be from beginning to end. [more inside]
In a sympathetic biochemical photo-reactive process, the Biosphere has altered the litho-sphere into the pedosphere, the cryo-sphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere*
The Loess Plateau in China’s Northwest is home to more than 50 million people. Centuries of overuse led to one of the highest erosion rates in the world and widespread poverty. Two projects (results) set out to restore the Loess Plateau. [more inside]
Because Kristen Bell's tears are delicious regardless of sloth content
It's damned if you don't and it's damned if you do
Aack!
Cathy's Requiem for a Dream - the novel, illustrated with panels from the Cathy comic strip. [more inside]
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
/dev/sigh, Where Developers Sigh
/dev/sigh :: user-contributed scenes from the sometimes frustrating world of software and web development.
World War I poetry
A great deal of poetry was written about the Great War, much of it by soldiers in the trenches. Two period books of World War I poetry and poets are The Muse in Arms and For remembrance, available in a variety of formats at archive.org. There is also The First World War Digital Poetry Archive which mostly has things from the most well-known authors, but many of these are available as scans of the original documents. (The interface is a little iffy on the DPA; click on a person, then use the search for "any poem" to get a full listing of what's available)
talking for the sake of talking.
"The result feels like musicians threatening to become content-producers, churning out a steady stream of conversation topics and half-formed ideas without quality control."
The Tumblr trap: Is Internet culture turning musicians into content-producers?
The Tumblr trap: Is Internet culture turning musicians into content-producers?
Things are not as they seemed in EE101
A series circuit of 1 battery, 1 resistor, 3 switches, and 3 LEDs. What happens when you turn on each switch? [more inside]
Nodding Disease
Since 2010, over 3,000 children throughout northern Uganda have come down with nodding disease, a degenerative neurological condition, reports CNN. [more inside]
Solve for Professor X
Pop Culture Math: Artist Matt Cowan breaks down pop-culture icons into basic formulas. [more inside]
Fabrice Muamba and the Doctors
Last Saturday 23-year old professional soccer player Fabrice Muamba suffered cardiac arrest while playing in front of a packed stadium. The medical staff rushed to his aid, as did a cardiologist who happened to be in the crowd. Muamba's heart was stopped for 78 minutes, but he survived and seems to be making good progress. Here, the doctors involved tell their remarkable stories of the incident.
The Dinner Party
Feminist banquet or confrontational gynocentrism? You decide. From 1974 to 1979 Judy Chicago orchestrated the creation of The Dinner Party, a collaboration with hundreds of artists, craftspeople and volunteers. Now permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum, this project has sparked controversy, analysis and discussion, and was considered quite shocking when initially unveiled. [more inside]
Evil men with evil schemes, They can't destroy all our dreams!
Imagine one person in America directed Star Wars, the original Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes, Alien and Blade Runner -- basically, all the big sci-fi hits except Star Trek. In Japan, that man existed, and his name was Noburo Ishiguro. He directed Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which became the first part of Robotech), Space Battleship Yamato (called Star Blazers in the U.S.), the classics Super Dimension Century Orguss and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and more. Basically, he had his hand in almost all the major sci-fi anime of the '70s and early '80s except Gundam...
While many of his works were subjected to questionable translation practices (such as changing any mention of sake to "with water from a favourite spring on Earth" in Yamato) when they were adapted for Western audiences in the 1980s, the popularity of his works helped lay the foundation for anime fandom as we know it today.
On Wednesday, Studio Nue co-founder Haruka Takachiho reported that Noboru Ishiguro passed away at age 73.
(Via Topless Robot & Anime News Network)
While many of his works were subjected to questionable translation practices (such as changing any mention of sake to "with water from a favourite spring on Earth" in Yamato) when they were adapted for Western audiences in the 1980s, the popularity of his works helped lay the foundation for anime fandom as we know it today.
On Wednesday, Studio Nue co-founder Haruka Takachiho reported that Noboru Ishiguro passed away at age 73.
(Via Topless Robot & Anime News Network)
"One small fling for a bird, one quantum leap for birdkind."
"A space station is a serious place. We're doing serious research." Rovio and NASA further explore the classic avain-porcine rivalry (and microgravity) through a Space Act Agreement. Angry Birds: Space is launching today.
Mastodon - Leviathan (Piano)
John Abbott plays metal covers on the piano. On the 20th March, he uploaded a 39 minute video of himself playing Mastodon's 2004 concept album, Leviathan, in its entirety. [more inside]
A Corgi goes for a hike
Our project has been 90% complete for a year now...
Why are software development estimates regularly off by a factor of 2-3? Scroll down a page to learn why writing software is like a horror hike from San Francisco to Newport Beach.
Randall Munroe's Holistic Browsing Website
The XKCD Holistic Browser allows you to type in a web address and get sent to one typed by someone else. (NB: Results may be NSFW or even outright harmful. Take suitable precautions.)
Let's Pretend We're Marionettes
When artist Troy Gua wanted a new project to cheer himself up with, he hit on the idea of making a tribute to his favorite musician. Le Petit Prince, a 1/6 scale doll of The Purple One, was born.
The sport of pizza throwing
At the 2012 International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, several freestyle pizza dough throwers competed in the World Pizza Games including Japanese Kazuya Akaogi who took home the Gold Medal in Freestyle Acrobatics.
You are on your own for moose
Has your garden been ravaged by the marauding squirrel hordes? Has your bird feeder been pillaged? Tired of shaking your fist at the neighbor children? Learn how to use Python to tap into computer vision libraries and build an automated sentry water cannon capable of soaking intruders.
That's how a turkey created TV
The IMDB says of the Canadian-produced, early 90s Nickelodeon show Turkey Television: A series comprised entirely of short (several per episode) comedy sketches. Unfortunately practically nothing of the show survives on the internet today, other than two clips: the theme songs from the two formats of the show and a commercial showing off some archive clips. Page on the Classic Nick Wiki - Everything2 node [more inside]
Fugitive Malcolm Naden Captured
The fugitive Malcolm Naden has been captured by police after a long drawn manhunt in the north of New South Wales. [more inside]
Still plenty of room for improvement
"He is the kind of boy who is bound to be rather a problem in any school or community, being in some respects definitely anti-social." Alan Turing's school reports.
Jake Kelly. Cleveland Rock Illustrator
Jake Kelly is a Cleveland, OH, based comic and concert artist. One of many rock artists in the area, he is prominently known for his really great concert fliers, promoting upcoming shows at venues around town. Last year, he completed a collaborative project titled 10 Imaginary Movies, where he created fake movie posters with local artist John G. He has also created murals for a number of area locations including The Grog Shop, Melt Bar and Grilled, and the Arts Collinwood Community Center. [more inside]
Nipples
Nipples at the Met: "A database of all the nipples on view in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Updated regularly
March 21
When safe words are ignored
Women in the bondage and kink scene are speaking out about sexual assaults in the community, and calling for change. Kitty Stryker, KinkyLittleGirl, Perverted Negress, and Maggie Mayhem share their experiences
A Field Guide to Creepy Dom (All links as likely as not to be NSFW)
watch those hems, boys!
Moments before the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade in the small town of Padua, Minnesota was about to begin, a truck fire broke out at the end of the block. Fortunately, the all-volunteer firefighting crew from nearby Sedan, Minnesota was on hand to celebrate their 125th anniversary, and to raise money to pay for their new fire hall and truck. One of their members was set to drive the new fire truck in the parade, and the others were on a float, dressed in drag to entertain the crowd. Firemen in Drag Put Out Truck Fire.
Job Dog may exist only in the dream of a small child living on the New England coast.
Bonne Fête Job Dog is a comic about a dog with a job.
"My mom was a little mad, but my dad is OK with it."
So you're a senior and prom is approaching. The last big event of your high school career, and you don't have a date. What to do? Maybe use your Twitter account to ask Internet porn stars to go with you. Alas, it turns out your school district is the enemy of fun.
Trail View
Nature Valley Trail View is sort of a "street view" for 300 miles of hiking trails in Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Great Smokies National Parks.
Right to Effective Counsel
Supreme Court Expands Right to Counsel in Plea Bargains. In a legal landscape that has enforced a right to counsel for criminal defendants, but not, practically speaking, a right to effective counsel except in extreme circumstances (ie: when you can prove that but for the gross incompetence of your counsel, the outcome of the case would have been different) and where the vast majority of criminal cases are resolved through plea bargaining, these two cases may be hugely influential in increasing the rights of the accused.
No, not the warehouse in Seattle, but the real one.
Boeing's 737 -- Prone To Problems?
Goal, Squid Attack for USA.
White Out + Pen + Newspaper Photos and Captions = White-Out News.
"And believe me, I want to say that I suffered right with you."
60 years ago, two moments in musical history took place in Cleveland, Ohio: The first, being the original Moondog Coronation Ball, hosted by disc jockey Alan "Moondog" Freed; the event was hailed as the first ever rock concert, and continues in spirit with a commemorative anniversary performance featuring Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, Sam Moore, and Creedence Clearwater Revisited.
The second event was the subsequent riot which broke loose that evening, when a printing error on the venue's tickets caused twice the audience's standing capacity to be sold. Frustrated and impatient concertgoers surged into the building, which led to cancellation, a formal apology from Freed, and the cementing of the 50's music scene as dangerous and unruly.
Whenever Roger claimed to have the superior intellect, Gene would say, “Aren’t you the guy who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls?”
Enemies, A Love Story, an oral history of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert that first appeared in the premiere issue of The Chicagoan, has been published today as an eBook single by Now and Then Reader. Slate has a lengthy free excerpt, which includes an amusing anecdotal report that the two men began every taping with a game of patty cake. Writer Josh Schollmeyer, executive editor of Playboy, based the 25,000-word article on interviews with 36 participants and observers of the two men who "essentially invented televised film criticism." (Via)
(but I still feel the faded scars of claws digging at me from below)
The AV Club's Todd Van der Werf enters the Dungeon "I’ve been at this for three days straight, and I need to start getting back to my everyday life, to start settling back into my real role as a TV critic with -3 dexterity. I go through the motions of playing the good guy, of standing in front of doors as we open them, in case they’re booby-trapped. This, of course, is how I end up getting splashed with copious amounts of acid, which begins to eat away at my health. (“It’s not a second-edition game unless there’s a room full of acid,” Brett says, and everyone agrees.)
Instantly, I’m into it."
Read so hard
Bitches in Bookshops SLYT NSFW
"The marathon can humble you." ~ Bill Rodgers
Could you run a marathon without training? [bbc.co.uk] "London Marathon entrants have a month of training left for what’s seen as one of the greatest feats of human endurance. Yet Irish twins Jedward claim they completed the Los Angeles marathon without any training. So is it possible to run one on a whim?"
Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics
Despised by the rock establishment which they assaulted with every turn, Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were so far ahead of their time in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin. They synthesized punk and metal before it was cool to do so, used chain saws and other noise put through amplifiers, and their stage shows were second to none. (previously) [more inside]
Space is Key
Space is Key: An evil little flash game. Press space to jump. That's it.
Even dykes say "Yay!"
Chick-Fil-A is known as much for supporting anti-gay organizations as it is for its tasty chicken. Nevertheless, drag queen divas assure you it's okay to Chow Down (at Chick-Fil-A).
All of these things are quite like the others
Otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch. Koalas who look like David Mitchell. Hedgehogs who look like Martin Freeman. Celebrities who look like mattresses abandoned on the streets of London E17.
(Previously.)
(Previously.)
2012 just got R.Kelly-fied
32 all new episodes of: Trapped. In. The. Closet.
(The Alien is back and It has brought friends along.)
"As you can probably imagine, this took some effort to make."
"The calculator itself is just over 250x200x100 blocks. It contains 2 6-digit BCD number selectors, 2 BCD-to-binary decoders, 3 binary-to-BCD decoders, 6 BCD adders and subtractors, a 20 bit (output) multiplier, 10 bit divider, a memory bank and additional circuitry for the graphing function." Yes, someone built a working scientific calculator, in Minecraft.
The Violin Maker
The Not-So-Easy Guide to Becoming a Screenwriter
How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big Budget Flick: "Now, in response to The_Quiet_Earth’s question about time-traveling marines, Erwin started typing. He posted his answer in a series of comments in the thread. Within an hour, he was an online celebrity. Within three hours, a film producer had reached out to him. Within two weeks, he was offered a deal to write a movie based on his Reddit comments. Within two months, he had taken a leave from his job to become a full-time Hollywood screenwriter." [more inside]
Resistants de la dernière heure
Too Smart to Fail : "A résumé filled with grievous errors in the period 1996–2006 is not only a non-problem for further advances in the world of consensus; it is something of a prerequisite. Our intellectual powers that be not only forgive the mistakes; they require them. You must have been wrong back then in order to have a chance to be taken seriously today; only by having gotten things wrong can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy, a member of the team. (Those who got things right all along, on the other hand, might be dubbed “premature market skeptics”—people who doubted the consensus before the consensus acknowledged it was all right to doubt.)" —Thomas Frank, The Baffler
Darth Vader Tai Chi
Darth Vader Tai Chi (SLYT)
Giant Fighty Robots, take two!
Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack is the 10th anniversary revision of Mechaton, a fast-paced table-top game of giant robot combat. Giant robots made of LEGO! [more inside]
Ordinary Batman Adventures
What do you get when you cross mundane daily life with Batman? Ordinary Batman Adventures (contains animated GIFs).
The White Savior Industrial Complex
"From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex." (Teju Cole, The Atlantic)
...and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Arrested for speaking out! When does an "open-palm pat on the shoulder" become assault? When it's the Vice President's shoulder, that's when.
The Supreme Court of the United States (previously) will today hear arguments in the matter of Reichle v. Howards. [more inside]
End Game
British high-street games retailer Game - who also own their once-rival chain, Gamestation - files for administration. After a tense few months involving supply chain issues and cutting prices to stay afloat, the options for purchasing physical games are dwindling, leaving the also-beleagured HMV, the music chain hoping to stay afloat by concentrating on gaming, and the all-powerful supermarkets.
March 20
Mother Whale Introduces Her Baby
Cranky
"Fahkin' hate green screen. Pay significant amounts of money never to do it again. You cannot fake adrenaline." - The man, the legend, Jason Statham.
Happy Birthday, Coathanger. You haven't aged a bit.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge - the widest, although not the longest, long-span bridge in the world - has turned 80. [more inside]
Pop! Goes the Law School Bubble
With the number of LSAT test takers in sharp decline, has the law school tuition bubble finally burst?
If you collect model buses you may want to avert your eyes as I decapitate the bus
Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL. Transport for London has a wonderful service called Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page showing live buses passing No. 10 Downing St. Underlying this is a simple JSON API that, while not public, seems to be usable by the average programmer. So with its details deciphered (hardly hard since the web site uses the API) John Graham-Cumming set about building an ambient bus monitor into a model London bus. The idea is to glance at the model bus and see the times of the next two real buses you're likely to want to catch, and know when to leave the house.
... because reality won’t cut it, isn’t outrageous enough, we must sex up the story for it to get any traction, and it must get traction, it MUST.
TIGsource forum imagery
TIGsource is a blog about indie video games that also has a very active forum community of both amateur and professional indie game designers/programmers/artists. About two months ago one of the forum members (Daid) whipped up a tool to display the art images of a particular thread so he could find something, and it turns out it's a pretty great thing just to browse for its own sake, which you can do here. Updated once a day and, obviously, image intensive. [previous tigsource mentions]
Einstein Archives Online
Hebrew University in conjunction with the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University Press are in the process of digitizing and releasing on the Internet Albert Einstein's personal letters, academic correspondence, love letters, and scientific manuscripts.
If you want to be a bird
Is there nothing a Wii controller can't do? YouTube tutorial in 14 parts DIY human bird-wings . [more inside]
A Month of Kraftwerk from DJ Food, and more from other sources
You're bummed that you're one of many who couldn't get tickets to the eight concerts of eight full albums in eight days at the Museum of Modern Art. Let DJ Food console you with a month of posts dedicated to Kraftwerk, including old and rare pictures and graphics, and six hours of songs that cover, sample, or are inspired by Kraftwerk, and even how to play Kraftwerk songs on your Casio pocket calculator. If you just want to hear Kraftwerk do their thing, here are three (incl. tracklist) live sets (partial tracklist) from recent years (tracklist). [more inside]
A Map of Io
The United Stated Geological Survey has finished a six-year effort to map the surface of Jupiter's moon Io. [more inside]
Ephemera related to The Shining
The Overlook Hotel: "Ephemera related to Stanley Kubrick's Masterpiece of Modern Horror, The Shining."
Unpacking the "Boo"
(Monsters) do so best when they believe in themselves. Author and academic China Miéville discusses prose style, weird fiction and the pratfalls of imbuing monsters with "meaning." [more inside]
The Art of Video Games
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has just opened a new exhibition The Art of Video Games. If you're in DC, it's up until the end of September and then will be traveling to other museums.
"My Japanese is getting better. We started speaking English."
Iron Lady lost in Russian translation. [Guardian.co.uk] Speaking to a crowd of supporters, Margaret Thatcher, as played by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, explains what she would do as prime minister: "Crush the working class, crush the scum, the yobs."
Fotos de Frida
Frida Kahlo produced art that was self-reflecting — 55 of her 143 known paintings were self-portraits. A cache of her 6,500 personal photographs was unsealed in 2007, and a small selection of those -- 259 total images -- are now on display in an exhibition entitled "Frida Kahlo: Her Photos," at the Artisphere in Arlington, VA until March 25th. Images: Washington Post, WJLA and NPR. PBS: Interview with exhibit curator Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. [more inside]
Dangerously Delicious, DRM Free
In the wake of Louis C.K.'s tremendously successful experiment (previously 1, 2), Aziz Ansari of Parks and Recreation fame has released his own self-produced comedy special, "Dangerously Delicious," straight to fans and DRM free.
What's up, Doc?
Chuck Jones draws and discusses Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote and Pepe le Pew and Warner Bros. and the producer Eddie Selzer (MLYT) [more inside]
The dog is on the roof
Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? (SLYT, but incredible)
Jiro Ono, sushi master
Like a cuckoo clock, but with Twitter... so not really like a cuckoo clock at all, actually.
"Nearly every second, a user on Twitter tweets about what time it is." Chirpclock makes use of this as an interesting way of keeping track of the time.
The Realm of Blade
The Realm of Blade: Why Nintendo Will Always Rule.
"Where's Adolf?"
Floral X-rays
Brendan Fitzpatrick took x-ray photographs of flowers that can be magnified by clicking on them.
Sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchal dividend. It's SO over.
Shit Men Say to Men Who Say Shit to Women on the Street, a project by Stop Street Harassment and Meet Us On the Street for International Anti-Street Harassment Week (which runs through the 24th). [more inside]
Andrea Yates, 10 years later
"Andrea Yates' story tracks so many of the themes we talk about all the time today. The role of religion in family life. The cognitive dissonance of so many marriages. Lingering stigmas about mental illness, especially as they relate to postpartum depression. The Yates trial was a big deal 10 years ago — even though it was overshadowed by the fallout from 9/11." The Atlantic looks back at the Andrea Yates case and how she's doing now.
supercilious daiquiri
Who wants to be in a spelling bee? Tricky and difficult are neither, but fiendish is a way to spend too much time. It does have quite a few words adopted into English, but everyone should know how to spell burrito.
A psychopathology of unconscious gesture in search of a purpose
"The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary's obsession with the image of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come." [more inside]
Trayvon Martin, shot by George Zimmerman
"This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about," Zimmerman told dispatchers. The dispatcher, hearing heavy breathing on the phone, asked Zimmerman: "Are you following him?" "Yeah," Zimmerman said. "Okay, we don’t need you to do that," the dispatcher responded.
On February 26, 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a 28 year-old man named George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Police did not arrest Zimmerman; under Florida's Stand Your Ground law Zimmerman was, according to the local police, acting in self-defense as Martin attacked him in his role as neighborhood watch captain. However, this is not the story that emerges from newly released 911 tapes - rather, the picture that emerges is of Zimmerman as aggressor and Martin as a scared kid, trying to run away. Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing about the case, and now the FBI and Department of Justice are now investigating. Previously.
On February 26, 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a 28 year-old man named George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Police did not arrest Zimmerman; under Florida's Stand Your Ground law Zimmerman was, according to the local police, acting in self-defense as Martin attacked him in his role as neighborhood watch captain. However, this is not the story that emerges from newly released 911 tapes - rather, the picture that emerges is of Zimmerman as aggressor and Martin as a scared kid, trying to run away. Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing about the case, and now the FBI and Department of Justice are now investigating. Previously.
Lego Marge's hair looks easy to replicate
Lego print ads with minimalist characters. Galleries of previous ads (there's some overlap in these older galleries).
March 19
V: Very Amber
"I just love Old Milwaukee. That’s my official answer." Over the past few months, Will Ferrell has been creating local-market commercials for Old Milwaukee beer. [more inside]
"What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920" -William Burroughs
Classic seafood and fish recipes, from a time when it was cheap and plentiful, and often cured in salt.
Moving pictures
Stereographic drawings from Dain Fagerholm.
I don't even...
OneTinyHand.com - Not safe for sanity.
No Mortgage, Underwater Anyway
Live in America? Find out if your house will be underwater in 2100 and plan your sandbag purchasing well in advance.
The Strange Art of Picking a TV Title
How David beats Goliath
Substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life: Malcolm Gladwell on how unconventional strategies and effort can beat the odds.
Video of aurora from orbit
Auroras Underfoot is a short documentary about auroras by NASA, which uses high-definition images taken by International Space Station science officer Don Pettit of aurora from orbit. Pettit writes about the difficulties of taking photographs from orbit and other subjects on his blog.
"Streets ahead" is a goddamn phrase already, Dan Harmon
Why don't you like Community? "Community isn’t a hit under the usual means, but it’s a big fish in a new TV comedy ecosystem, one where the way you make money isn’t by attracting the largest audience, but the most passionate one. " A point-counterpoint from the Onion AV Club.
Oregon Trail meets Fallout meets Nethack
NEO Scavenger is a hex-based, turn-based scavenging/survival/mystery RPG. Dig through abandoned buildings! Punch a looter to death! Get eaten by a Dogman! Contract cholera! Die of cholera! Flash-based browser game, under active development; the current demo lets you explore the landscape and play with the game's mechanics at length. [more inside]
Murphy Ranch: the faded dreams of a Nazi Shangri La, just outside of Hollywood
About 2 miles into the park... things start to get strange. A forbidding padlocked wrought-iron gate, surrounded by a low lying stone wall sits nestled on the edge of the trail.... Strange rusted debris starts to appear on the side of the paths. What looks like an old water filtration system, broken pieces of farm equipment, half buried sinks, strange concrete slabs with graffiti . A lovely little steam appears and makes delightful background noises, lizards and birds scatter about your feet. And then you see it. A burned-out overgrown concrete building completely covered with graffiti. Cartoon of Hitler? Check. Declaration of undying teenage love? Check.... The bunker of the building is exposed and filled with trash; a metal cage sits menacingly in the corner, and outside a series of stone steps wind up to what seems to have once been a sustenance garden. The steps then continue all the way to the top of the canyon (3,000 steps in all) and ghosts of America Nazis patrolling the wilds fill your head. Baby, we aren't at the Grove anymore... We are at the Los Angeles Nazi Compound! Well, it's actually the ruins of a small community built by Nazi sympathizers, in the hills outside of greater Los Angeles. [more inside]
Got The Space Station Blues, with apologies to musicians everywhere
Learning his return to Earth from the International Space Station might be delayed for possibly up to two months, NASA astronaut Ron Garan sings the blues from the Soyuz spacecraft that will take him home. Eventually. [more inside]
Oops, I may have added a few zeroes
“I bought into this idea for a long time that it was superior labor productivity that caused most manufacturing job losses,” said Rob Atkinson, of Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. “Then I began to dig into the numbers.”
An upcoming report argues that the price savings that U.S. factories have realized from outsourcing have incorrectly shown up as gains in U.S. output and productivity. This bias may have accounted for as much as half of the growth of U.S. manufacturing output from 1997 to 2007. (sl Wash. Post link to print version so everyone can read it.)
I'm going to have to disagree
A beautiful proposal from one hockey fan to another. Unfortunately, the first commentator felt the need to rain on their parade... (SLJezebel) [more inside]
the self care of insects (grooming, mlyt)
Listen to the Bug Bytes episode Scrub a Dub Bug, then head on over to youtube where you can see various insects cleaning themselves:
Lacewing, bumblebee, probably a bee,
praying mantis,
parasitic wasp
"We wanted a word that was short, memorable and impossible to mispronounce."
Alphabet Soup: Restaurant names are becoming more complicated and enigmatic. Christopher Hirst asks the experts what’s going on.
A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.
The pleasure of the gods
French hospitals have rooms where medical students (internes) can rest, lunch and vent off steam between calls, but these salles de garde are not your usual staff room. They are brightly decorated with lively mural paintings showing the current internes, the doctors and other hospital staff engaging in very (very) explicit sex acts. The frescos are done by the students themselves or commissioned from local artists, and are replaced on a regular basis. Here are some choice examples (sorted by hospital):
Ambroise Paré, Cochin, Widal, Louis Mourier, Saint-Louis, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Institut Gustave Roussy (ibid) (ibid), Lariboisière, Robert Debré, Saint-Cloud, Tenon.
Many other images can be seen on the website of an association of former internes. [Totally NSFW unless you're a medical student training in France] [more inside]
Imagine a dinosaur in sneakers stomping on Whoopi Goldberg's career... forever.
"A futuristic buddy cop movie costarring Whoopi Goldberg and a dinosaur? How could that possibly go wrong?" Theodore Rex: The Best of the Worst. [more inside]
Oi! What you looking at, you little rich boy?
Some have said the protest song is dead. However UK rapper Plan B looks set to change that by releasing 'ill Manors' raging against the demonisation of the young urban poor. Ill Manors is also the name of a film Plan B had directed under the name of Ben Drew. [more inside]
Stars, Galaxies and Lasers
Astronomer’s Paradise - A beautiful time-lapse video of Paranal Observatory in action.
States of American Corruption
Slavery's Last Stronghold
Although officially abolished in 1981, slavery still exists in Mauritania. CNN Special Report includes a twenty-two minute video and offers a look inside a country where an estimated 10 - 20% are still enslaved.
The Iron Man
UK Prime Minister David Cameron unveils plan to lease motorways in England. David Cameron will clear the way for a multibillion-pound semi-privatisation of trunk roads and motorways as he announces plans to allow sovereign wealth funds from countries such as China to lease roads in England.
Guardian liveblog.
M.A.R. Barker 1929-2012
Role Playing Game pioneer Mohammed Al Rahman Barker died last week (PDF). Inspired through playing dungeons and Dragons, M. A. R. Barker created what is possibly the world's second RPG, Empire of the Petal Throne, set in the world of Tekumel, a world he would continue to keep building for the rest of his life. [more inside]
Having Twins With a Surrogate — in India
Eurovision
Rambo Amadeus - Euro Neuro , Montenegros rapping donkey-riding entry to the 2012 Eurovision Contest. "Euro skeptik, analfabetik, try not to be hermetic. Euro Neuro don’t be skeptik, hermetic, pathetic, analfabetic forget old cosmetic you need new poetic, estetic eclectic, dialectic."
Attacking the DC Internet Voting System
Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System (PDF). "When we inspected the terminal server’s logs, we noticed that several other attackers [from Iran, New Jersey, India, and China] were attempting to guess the SSH login passwords." J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, describes how thoroughly he and his team were able to penetrate a pilot Internet voting system run by the District of Columbia, as part of an open public test in 2010. An earlier report on the attack. Via comp.risks. [more inside]
March 18
miraculous and dream-worthy and mysterious
Neil Gaiman writes a poem about nudity (in collaboration with Olivia De Berandinis). Katie West responds. Neil approves. [consider the entire post NSFW] [more inside]
LEDs and a low-powered microscope
Most epic troll ever.
Turkish football fans have probably kept many flare companies in business over the years, but when the Turkish FA banned flares from stadiums, their brand of pyromaniac fun seemed to be over. The fans of Super Lig club Eskisehirspor had other ideas, though. [more inside]
More fallout from the War On Drugs, in Mexico.
In Mexico, extortion is a booming offshoot of drug war. 'From mom-and-pop businesses to mid-size construction projects to some of Mexico's wealthiest citizens, almost every segment of the economy and society has been subjected to extortion schemes, authorities and records indicate. Even priests aren't safe. Extortionists have shut entire school systems, crippled real estate developments, driven legions of entrepreneurs into hiding or out of the country.' [more inside]
It's getting hot in herre...
Another Titan Arum Bloom
'These plants, native only to Sumatra, bloom very infrequently (only 140 times in cultivation since 1889) and then only for one or two nights before collapsing. Until it opens, there’s no noticeable odor. After that there’s little doubt where the name “Corpse Flower” comes from.'
Tonight, Cornell University's Titan Arum is expected to bloom. Live feed here.
(previous blooms on the blue)
Tonight, Cornell University's Titan Arum is expected to bloom. Live feed here.
(previous blooms on the blue)
Gideon's Trumpet
On June 3, 1961, a poor drifter named Clarence Gideon was seen getting into a cab with a bottle of wine, some smokes, and some cash in his pockets as he left the Bay Harbor Pool Room. Police had been called to investigate a broken cigarette machine and promptly found and arrested Gideon. Unable to afford an attorney and forced by the trial judge to represent himself, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. After having his petition for a writ of Habeus Corpus denied by the Florida Supreme Court, he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. 49 years ago today, the court ruled unanimously in his favor, setting a lasting, fundamental precedent. His case was sent back down to Florida, and with proper representation, he was acquitted.
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride is a 75 minute film documenting Hunter S. Thompson's life and death, focussing mainly on his relationships with Hollywood celebrities and other public figures. In 8 parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
3 little bears
Blogger-writer Andrew Sullivan proudly attended Obama's latest state dinner for Cameron with his husband, in an open display of growing acceptance of same-sex marriage possibly by the powers-to-be. Michael Shaw's always-insightful BagNews (but not MS himself in this post) notes that there were 3 bearded men in the photograph.
Proof that libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries
Build Your Own Little Free Library. Check out some others. These too. The scoop and the FAQ. "Question #1: Won't People steal the books? No. You can't steal a free book. And if you have a good steward and lots of active users, eventually someone who tries to "steal" books will realize that it's not a good thing to do."
Caution: Ants at Work
Amazing macro photos of ants "at work" and "at play." There are many, many more photos here. My favorite is the weightlifting ant. Ants are incredibly strong for their size, as this amazing picture of an ant holding a snail shows.
Web site to catalog record shops world-wide
Record Shops is a new web site that's attempting to list all record shops world wide. Allows you to rate/review shops you're familiar with and scope out the scene in places you're travelling to.
W C Fields in The Mormon's Prayers
W. C. Fields appeared in the Earl Carroll Vanities in 1928. George Mann, part of the dance team of Barto & Mann, was on the same bill, and captured Fields in The Mormon's Prayers.
Beautiful surfing at Byron Bay
Surfing at Byron Bay: Jorgelina "Lina" Reyero shows off the beauty of Wategos Beach at Byron Bay, Australia with a camera mounted to her surfboard.
"Try as I could, I couldn't get past the first sentence."
In June 1979, I left Paris, returning home to San Francisco without saying farewell to Barthes. Why advertise my failure? I left Paris without fulfilling my reason for coming. His letter arrived in October. Barthes explained that he was retiring from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes at the end of the year. If I wished to complete my thesis under his direction, then I would have to have it written and in his hands by the 15th of December. No extension was possible. The date was a deadline. "A vous de jouer," he wrote. "Your move."- Deadline [pdf] by Stewart Lindh, Roland Barthes' last doctoral student, is an account of how he wrote his Ph.D. thesis.
ms12-020 mistery: the packet stored in the "chinese" rdpclient.exe PoC is the EXACT ONE I gave to ZDI!!! @thezdi? @microsoft? who leaked?
Included in this month's Patch Tuesday was MS12-020, which is a remote exploit in Microsoft's widely deployed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Microsoft projected an exploit would be out 'within a month', but a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) appeared on a Chinese website within a few days. Professionals are concerned. The discoverer of the vulnerability noted that the PoC included the exact packet he had crafted to help Microsoft understand he issue; this points to a leak in the MAPP early vulnerability sharing program. A full remote exploit isn't out yet, but is expected soon.
(Cutting the) Bee's Knees (out from under them)
Honeybees are responsible for pollinating 1/3 of all our food crops, and represent 80% of all insect pollination. But honeybees have been dying off in huge numbers in the last few years. We've discussed Colony Collapse Disorder here before, but now scientists may have found the cause.
No fear! No indecision! Rage against the system of the oppressors!
Punks Not Dead.... but it can get you killed. Punk rock in oppresive regimes.
Life on the Breadline
Welcome to the world of Britain's working poor. The Rowleys belong to a section of society not much mentioned in ministerial and media dispatches. They are neither the very wealthy affected by the 50p tax nor the "squeezed middle" expressing anxiety about child benefit and this week's budget; nor are the Rowleys representative of the long-term unemployed or one of the 120,000 "troubled families" in which the government is investing £448m over the next three years. [more inside]
Rock and roll is here to stay
Alex Chilton (of the band Big Star) died two years ago today. Here's a choir singing Big Star's song "Thirteen."
March 17
And now he's dead.
John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant to the United States and later accused and convicted of serving in the Nazi SS as a concentration camp guard, has died.
That's no Lunar Transporter!
Spaceships that became other spaceships: The Millennium Falcon, The Colonial Viper, The Eagle Transporter - from the blog of Gavin Rothery, visual effects designer on Moon. Previously.
YOU DON'T KNOW ME!!!
Space is where the screaming starts.
Hot, hot, hot new PROMETHEUS trailer! It looks to me that Ridley Scott has returned Paul W.S. Anderson's favors and gotten Event Horizon right, this time.
Enjoy!
Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy
Mass Effect 3, a blockbuster video game (previously: 1, 2), and no stranger to controversy, is encountering controversy of a different sort over the series ending. Some fans feel it is incomplete and lacks closure, over 90% by some polls. It opens up interesting questions, such as: how are video games different than other media? Do consumers of video games have a reasonable right to ask for another ending, or is it akin to asking for modifications to the Mona Lisa? Many spoilers inside. [more inside]
St Paddy's Day 2012 remembers 1916 and 1917
O'Brien is tryin' to learn to talk Hawai'ian / To his Honolulu Lou / He's sighin' and cryin' / And all the time he's tryin' / Just to say "I love you true" / He's sighin' and lyin' in Irish and Hawai'ian / To his wife and Lulu, too . . Meanwhile, another gent from the Emerald Isle was indulging in blissful fantasy: Sure the shamrocks were growing on Broadway / Every girl was an Irish colleen / And the town of New York was the county of Cork / All the buildings were painted green / 'twas only an Irishman's dream. Happy St. Patrick's Day! [more inside]
anti-gravity loopkicks by LiL B
Lil B Loopkicks Camp 2011 Sampler | Brandon "Lil B" McCuien (born April 4, 1990) is a Street Tumbler from Little Rock, Arkansas. He started cheering when he was 7 and is now currently a cheerleader in Garland, Texas. In July 2010, he showed that he had taken an interest to freerunning by releasing an outdoor freerunning sampler. | Team Loopkicks is a martial arts demonstration team that promote the art of sport karate and tricking which is a combination of kicks, flips, and twists
San Patricios: the Irish Mexican connection
Hailed as heroes in Mexico for fighting with and defending the country against American invasion and reviled as traitors in the US for desertion, about 50 Irish immigrants were hung en masse after defeat in the Mexican-American War. A musical collaboration by The Chieftains, Ry Cooder and Latino musicians tell the history of the 'San Patricios'. (Related NPR story) For more background on the San Patricios, the fascinating documentary Saol John Riley, part 1 and part 2 follows Kerry singer songwriter Charlie O'Brien as he revisits sites associated with Patricio leader John Riley to discover the revolutionary hero's fate. [more inside]
Diminutive Hippopotamus Amphibius
What is wrong with you? Does god hate you or something? Has he not taught you how to love?
"It was hot as blazes as we tore through the south side, pulling up at lights all the people laughing at the white kids doing their little dance in the car." John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats performs 'The Sign,' by Ace of Base, interspersed with a story about the song and hand-signal dancing.
Pie In the Sky
Tom Monaghan had a dream: To create a law school and surrounding community that would adhere strictly to Catholic values. Things have not gone according to plan. [more inside]
Brooke Shaden's Surreal Photography
Brooke Shaden is an LA-based fine-art photographer. (Note: none of the directly linked images are NSFW but there is some fine-art nudity in the photostream.) [more inside]
Get a load of these cuties
Design Decoded, a new blog on Smithsonian.com, kicks off with a seven part series on the century-long process behind creating and marketing the perfect citrus. [more inside]
When you’re lost, ask someone who knows the way.
Parahawking in Nepal: beautiful footage of paragliders working with raptors to find thermals. [more inside]
Dark Slender Boy, performed by Liam O'Flynn on the Uileann Pipes
Frozen Planet
Fans of BBC series Planet Earth will once again be thrilled by the power of nature in HD as Discovery Channel airs the new series Frozen Planet, made by the BBC Natural History Unit, which created the original series. Entertainment Weekly has a lengthy interview with the series producer and director about Frozen Planet and the making of the series. The series premieres on Discovery Channel on March 18 at 8pm.
Hey, what are all these kids doing in here?
So that's why they call 'em fractals!
You got a lot of money but you can't afford the freeway.
"The Detroit metropolitan area is covered with freeways. Ever freeway you could possible imagine has been built. And they have solved the problem that they identified, which was congestion. The city of Detroit doesn’t really have a problem with congestion anymore. That’s the least of their problems". How demolishing freeways is reviving American cities. [via][bonus]
His first memory is an execution.
Extracts from Escape From Camp 14 - How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp. There was torture, starvation, betrayals and executions, but to Shin In Geun, Camp 14 – a prison for the political enemies of North Korea – was home. Then one day came the chance to flee…
Of course devil horns had to be involved
Earth From Above / Pale Blue Dot
Earth in perspective:
- Stratocam takes the most beautiful landscape satellite photographs from Google Maps, as voted on by visitors, and switches them every few seconds, with a fullscreen mode.
- ChronoZoom is an interactive, zoomable HTML5 timeline of the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to Homo Sapiens, with embedded video and lectures.
A story about the art of aging.
The Chase Another day out on the town for the girls (Animated Short)
March 16
speaking, without
In Way, two strangers learn to speak. A game (download/installation required) in which you are one of those strangers.
You know what every kitchen needs? A Bloonderbooss or a Boomashootn, and Swedish Chef shows us why.
The Swedish Chef (Muppet Wiki) is the incomprehensible preparer of foodstuffs for The Muppet Show. A rather literal variation of the Live-Hand Muppet concept, the Swedish Chef is a humanoid character, with human hands rather than gloves. An annotated list of every televised appearance of the Swedish Chef is after the fold... Børk! Børk! Børk! [Click here to view the thread translated fully into Mock Swedish] [more inside]
Back to the Present
"I am Darth Vader, an Extraterrestrial from the Planet Vulcan!" - The 80's attack in an amazingly detailed and frenetic video for The Death Set's "They Come to Get Us." [SLYT]
Here. I. Go.
After much stalling, he sent the writer a link to the Wikipedia page for “chicken.”
I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter [SLNYT]
It Was Unthinkable
The attack of the dot-clones
How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web
"Launched out of a loft in New York City’s Garment District last June, Fab had sales of $20 million in its first six months and is on track to earn $100 million in 2012....Six months after Fab launched, it was knocked off. An e-commerce design site called Bamarang opened for business in Germany, the U.K., France, Australia, and Brazil...
Bamarang is the creation of Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer, a trio of German brothers who have a wildly successful business model: Find a promising Internet business, in the U.S., and clone it internationally. Since starting their first dot-clone in 1999, a German version of EBay, they’ve duplicated Airbnb, eHarmony, Pinterest, and other high-profile businesses. In total, they’ve launched more than 100 companies." [SLYBloombergBusinessweek]
"Launched out of a loft in New York City’s Garment District last June, Fab had sales of $20 million in its first six months and is on track to earn $100 million in 2012....Six months after Fab launched, it was knocked off. An e-commerce design site called Bamarang opened for business in Germany, the U.K., France, Australia, and Brazil...
Bamarang is the creation of Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer, a trio of German brothers who have a wildly successful business model: Find a promising Internet business, in the U.S., and clone it internationally. Since starting their first dot-clone in 1999, a German version of EBay, they’ve duplicated Airbnb, eHarmony, Pinterest, and other high-profile businesses. In total, they’ve launched more than 100 companies." [SLYBloombergBusinessweek]
"Vulnerability is not weakness.... Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.”
Brené Brown: Listening to shame. Filmed this month at TED in Long Beach, CA. (YouTube) Also see: The Power of Vulnerability (yt, previously on MeFi), and The Price of Invulnerability. [more inside]
The wizard under the hill
Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen trilogy is to be concluded with Boneland, over 50 years after it started.
Tall Tale Images from the Golden Age of Postcards
Several factors came together to bring about a Golden Age of postcards (Google books), including the introduction of inexpensive cameras and film development from Eastman Kodak. From around 1906 to 1915, the publishing of printed postcards doubled every six months. Along with pictures of real people and places, tall tale postcards were also made in increasing quantities. William H. "Dad" Martin was the first to make and sell outlandish postcards (previously), making collages of real images and photographing the result, dodging and burning the new image to make the composite images blend into something vaguely believable. Alfred Stanley Johnson, Jr. followed Martin's success, but they weren't the only ones to make tall tale postcards.
RUIN
Dharun Ravi Found Guilty
A jury found a former Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi guilty of 15 charges of invasion of privacy and bias intimidation (under a relatively new New Jersey hate-crime statute) for secretly recording his roommate Tyler Clementi, who later committed suicide.
Inside the Matrix
In
Inside The MatrixJames Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace and The Shadow Factory, reports about the NSA's new US$ 2 billion data center being built in a remote corner of Utah. A follow up of sorts to last year's
Post-9/11, NSA 'Enemies' Include Us,
Inside the Matrixmarks the first time a former NSA official has gone on the record to reveal details of the scope and scale of the NSA's domestic intercept program, codenamed Stellar Wind.
Ring Ring
The story of the ABBA sound. 8 minute Swedish documentary. Click the "CC" button for subtitles.
Introducing Dotsies: The Space-Saving Font
A treasure trove of Disney animation artifacts.
A treasure trove of Disney animation artifacts. Things like Scar Pencil Tests, a Bambi wire model, and character doodles from the Aristocats.
"I have difficult news."
Ira Glass retracts the This American Life episode "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory".
Mike Daisey responds. [more inside]
Daily Life in the Holy Land
Gil Cohen-Magen takes pictures of daily life among Hassidic and Holy Land communities.
and that's how science gets done
Today the Icarus Experiment released their measurement on the speed of neutrinos from CERN. Within small errors, they find them to be traveling at the speed of light, in accordance with the theory of relativity. [more inside]
From the Abyssal zone to the Wizard Of...
Science. Fun. Community.
An Oral History of The Sopranos
The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos
[single-page print version]
[single-page print version]
EDIE FALCO (Carmela Soprano): After we shot the pilot, David said, “Well, that was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, no one will ever watch this show, but you guys have been great.” And that was the end. Or so we thought.
Fashion for Friday
Remarked by her contemporary Coco Chanel as "That Italian artist who makes clothes"
Elsa Schiaparelli (New Yorker - Janet Flanner) bought Surrealism to fashion. She was one of the most influential creators of Parisian haute couture in the era between the two World Wars. [more inside]
Good for one fare
"How important can this speech be if we're giving it at noon?"
"Oooh, you son of a bitch."
Classic Hollywood Guide on how to react when you screw up a scene. Movie bloopers with Bogie, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Kay Francis, Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, George Brent, Merle Oberon, Patricia Neal, Mickey Rooney and more.
March 15
Manga is not a crime
About two years ago, Ryan Matheson visited Canada. Canadian customs checked out his notebook computer and found a Japanese manga on it which the customs official decided was out of line. Matheson was charged with possession of, and importation of, child porn. After two years of legal maneuvering, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund just announced that Matheson "has agreed to plead to a non-criminal code regulatory offense under the Customs Act of Canada. As a result of the agreement, Matheson will not stand trial." He also won't be listed as a sex offender, in Canada or anywhere else, and he won't have a criminal record.
Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed
Touted as the cure for what ails public education, charter schools have historical roots that are rarely discussed. [more inside]
The Ultimate March Pop Culture, Food and Sports Madness Bracket...Bracket
"If it were just the NCAA tournament bracket, March Madness would be far less mad than it is. Something about the reminder of how much joy we get in filling out a bracket has led writers and talkers deep into the great time-wasting ether, creating brackets on everything you could possible dream of bracketing."One writer thought about this, took a step back, and created a bracket tournament to discuss the best possible subjects/entries for a pop-culture, food, and sports bracket tournament. [more inside]
The Sun's Angry Red Spot
The Sun has been in a bit of a mood lately, spitting out some pretty big flares (including the second largest one of the current magnetic cycle)
Be sure to scroll down for the photo of the entire Sun, it will change the way you think about it.
Remix my music, please.
Sarah Fimm wants to inspire people to use their creative talents to promote human rights. To that end, she's encouraging people to take portions of her and fellow artists' works Everything Becomes Whole" - music, lyrics, images and music video - to create new presentations focusing attention on ending slavery. [more inside]
♫ I'd like to help you son, but you're too young to vote ♫
It being bracket season, The Weather Channel has devised an epic Weather Song tournament for those not interested in college athletics. It consists of four weather-related phenomena, with underdogs and favorites abounding. "Have you Ever Seen the Rain" trounced "the crowd-favorite Weather Girls' It's Raining Men" in the first round of the Rain Region. Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" upset Bananarama's summer-related hit in the Seasons Region. Voting is still open until tomorrow for round two of the Sun and Elements regions.
TurIndiMexiBrazIa for short.
What? And leave the comfort of the basement?
This is the Occupy movement we should really be worried about. The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees.
Skywalker Sound
Beautiful HD video, with enhanced sound, of STS-117 and STS-127 booster rockets launching and returning to Earth . Previously.
"But, since you asked, buckle up."
Big Brother at the Petrol Station
We've all heard about the proliferation of CCTV in the UK. Now, accounting firm Ernst & Young has a new scheme for the Brits: Uninsured drivers won't be able to fill up. [more inside]
"Why is this book, 50 Shades of Grey, so popular?"
E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Master of the Universe, an adults-only Twilight fanfiction posted under the pseudonym Snowqueens Icedragon. The erotica re-imagining of Bella Swan as a 21-year-old college student and Edward Cullen as a 27-year-old billionaire -- with BDSM tastes -- was published by Australia's Writer's Coffee Shop Publishing in May 2011; names and details linking it to Stephenie Meyer's bestselling trilogy were changed (...for the most part). In recent months, the book has gone viral, selling more than 250,000 copies (over 90% in ebook format) and landing the #1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Last week, E.L. James sold republishing rights for the Fifty Shades trilogy to Vintage Books in a seven-figure deal. [more inside]
Long live the New Flesh!
Disney Parks, Past and Present
Plenty of people collect Disneyana, the toys, books, animation cels, and theme-park souvenirs. Then there are those fans who collect information and details on the Disney parks themselves, collecting official park maps or drawing up their own ride blueprints, assembling the design history behind the attractions, and even collecting vintage tickets and ticket books. Yesterland (previously: 1, 2, 3) is an ever-growing collection of Disneyland history, and has an updated collection of links to similar fan sites and Imagineering blogs, which is a whole collection of rabbit holes of nostalgia and behind-the-scense information. So grab a riding crop and pretend like it's the 60s all over again!
Keith Haring's Journals
The Keith Haring Foundation is posting Haring's journals to Tumblr for the duration of the exhibition Keith Haring: 1978–1982, opening tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum.
NEYKHUD
The greatest hits from Arnold Schwarzenegger commentary track for 'Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines'. SLYT, Possibly NSFW, previous
The Hacker Shelf
The Hacker Shelf is nice crowd-sourced guide to (legally) free books on various computational and mathematical subjects. The topics page gives you an idea of the breadth of material available.
Still a Fast Food Nation
Counting Down HK's Top Flicks
Time Out HK counts down the 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films (along with a mind map of the perfect HK film), while lovehkfilm.com begins its series on the Top 100 Hong Kong Films of the Eighties.
Every new teaser poster shows a worse example
"So far, 2012 is shaping up to be a great year for archery, what with The Hunger Games coming in March, then Brave, followed by Hawkeye in The Avengers." An archery coach analyzes the technique in three upcoming movies.
Do or !do. There is no _why.
"Vitamin R goes straight to the head. Ruby will teach you to express your ideas through a computer. You will be writing stories for a machine. The language will become a tool for you to better connect your mind to the world." Slate compiles the mystery of _why. (Previously).
The Extractive Institutions in US
Why Nations Fail - In a nutshell: "Proximately, prosperity is generated by investment and innovation, but these are acts of faith: investors and innovators must have credible reasons to think that, if successful, they will not be plundered by the powerful. For the polity to provide such reassurance, two conditions have to hold: power has to be centralised and the institutions of power have to be inclusive." [more inside]
Dysfunctional and Co-Dependent
Going face to face with a lioness
National Geographic photographer Mattias Klum talks about having a face to face run in with an endangered Asiatic lioness while shooting in the wild. [more inside]
Strange Knobs
Another day, another story of a Goldman Sachs employee quitting. This one, though, isn't filing any op-eds - rather, he's starting up his own custom condom business, TheyFit, which offers 95 different sizes. Warning: puns ahead.
RL in '78, TJ in '83
Oh yeah. There he is, Mr. RL Burnside, in the year of nineteen and seventy eight, Independence, Mississippi, porch fulla kids, singin' about when his first wife left him, million-dollar smile on his face. And there he is again, with his guitar and amp, out by the barb wire fence, a poor boy a long way from home. These two little gems just added to the Alan Lomax Archive YouTube channel, where you'll also find some wonderful newly-uploaded clips (filmed in 1983) from fretless banjo plucker Tommy Jarrell, the toast of Toast, North Carolina.
March 14
CGI becomes reality
Pipe Dream [2001, CGI (previously)]
Pipe Dream [2011, physical (another video) (yet another)] [MLYT]
Pipe Dream [2011, physical (another video) (yet another)] [MLYT]
The Forrest Gump of Opera
Whilst searching for more images of La Milo (mentioned in this post), I stumbled across the David Elliot theatrical postcard collection. In it were some pictures of Blanche Arral. [more inside]
Lucky Act 13
Pennsylvania has adopted what may be the most anti-democratic, anti-environmental law in the country, giving gas companies the right to drill anywhere, overturn local zoning laws, seize private property and muzzle physicians from disclosing specific health impacts from drilling fluids on patients. This American Life on fracking in Pennsylvania. Fracking: Anatomy of a Free Market Failure. Previously in Pennsylvania. [more inside]
The House Doesn't Always Win, I Guess
The Man Who Broke Atlantic City Don Johnson (no, not that one) won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.
Your wife's pregnant!
Official Spoiler Etiquette. The stars of your favorite TV shows (assuming your favorite TV shows include The Wire, Heroes, Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, or True Blood) teach you how not to ruin them for your friends.
Hunker down
The current generation has gone through the fads of planking (previously 1 and 2), cone-ing (previously), owling, leisure diving (both previously), and even Tebowing (previously). Posing-for-pictures fads are not a new thing, though. In 1959, near the end of the relatively well-known phone booth stuffing craze, there was hunkering.
Snake Whacking Days.
Last weekend, the annual Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup took place in Sweetwater Texas, as it has since 1958. Previously 1, Previously 2, plus on the Simpsons. Sponsored by the Jaycess, it attracts a huge crowd and lots of press, but when Danny Mendez, a zoologist and host of Urban Jungles Radio showed up to see for himself what it was like, he was refused entry and given a citation for Criminal Trespassing. What sort of issues would a zoologist be concerned about and why the Sweetwater Jaycees not want Danny (as well as Sky Stevens, a Texas biology student, Wildlife enthusiast and contributor to the show) not to even enter to see a beauty pageant? [more inside]
The magic wand of French health care
An intrepid American reporter tests out perineal re-education , a state-sponsored wonder of the French health care system. She plays a game she nicknames Pole Position (and a friend gets to play Cooter Pac-Man). Bonus: many gentle euphemisms for vagina (Earlier test here from the NYT).
The Dictator's Secret Emails
The British newspaper The Guardian has obtained a cache of 3,000 emails purported to have been exchanged between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, his wife, and a close circle of advisers and friends. The personal emails allegedly show Assad dismissing his government's proposed reforms, mocking the efforts of Arab League monitors to spot military tanks besieging cities, as well as Assad's wife placing extravagant shopping orders, sometimes through intermediaries. [more inside]
You Betcha!
A comparison of Sarah Palin's media appearances versus Julianne Moore's reenactment of them in the movie Game Change.
DUELING BANJOS. TESLA COILS. OH MY GOD.
This is the coolest thing in the world. For reals. It's "Dueling Banjos"... played on two giant Tesla Coils. That's... pretty dang amazing. As if that's not enough, perhaps you'll like the Nyan Cat theme? Or perhaps Sweet Home Alabama, for jonmc? Or In The Hall of the Mountain King, for the most awesome remake of M ever? [more inside]
hundreds upon hundreds of tales to tell, all on a 40 × 24 character grid.
Entries for the International Teletext Art Festival are currently being broadcast on teletext pages 525-545 of Finnish broadcaster YLE. [more inside]
The Black Vernacular
"Much of the history of Black people, particularly our intimate history, is still unseen and unexplored." Beautifully understated, The Black Vernacular is a communal memorial to this history. [more inside]
The Greatest Character on "The Wire"
Grantland held a March Madness-type bracket this past week to determine the greatest character from HBO's 2002-2008 series "The Wire". The idea came from a conversation between Grantland's Editor-in-Chief, Bill Simmons, and President Obama. Voting took place via Grantland's Facebook page. Spoilers from the results and TV show are within. [more inside]
The Anatomy of an Annoying Song
The most remarkable play staged on Planet Earth
Blocked on Weibo: Censored Searches of China's Largest Microblogging Service
The fact that Chinese internet access is censored and monitored is not new, but Sina Weibo (新浪微博, literally "Sina Microblog,"), handles the task differently. Commonly referred to by the generic name Weibo, the social service that is likened to Twitter and Facebook is more open in what you can post, but searches for certain words are blocked. Without context, a list of blocked searches is fairly abstract. Blocked on Weibo adds translations and context to the blocked words. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
Ghost town of Bald Mountain
Doodletown, NY, from the Dutch "dood dal" meaning "dead valley" a ghost town since the 1960s, lies just an hour north of New York City in Bear Mountain State Park [more inside]
Tomorrowland
Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, is brash and grandiose—and wildly attractive to young strivers seeking success. [more inside]
Who wants a pet beetle?
Apparently big in Japan but gaining interest in other countries, raising and keeping giant beetles is a lucrative pet industry. If keeping the strongest creature on Earth for its size isn't your cup of tea, you could instead keep a tank of predatory diving beetles. Just make sure there aren't any escape routes.
What Am I Fighting For???
Do you enjoy the work of independent musicians? Do you like Capcom's Mega Man X series of video games? Then you'll love OverClocked Remix's latest album, Maverick Rising. The free five-disc album features 62 tracks by 49 artists in a collection totaling over 4 1/2 hours of Mega Man X music remixes spanning 8 of the primary games in the series and a few extra goodies.
Stop being meta!!
As fans of Community get ready for the show's return from hiatus tomorrow night, AV Club writer Todd VanDerWerff, who writes the weekly episode reviews of the show, drew attention to something odd that happened while the show was off the air. The discussion in his review of the last episode before the break Regional Holiday Music, didn't die down after people had put in their two cents about the episode and his review. People kept talking, and not just about the show. The show's fans developed their own self-contained piece of the web. Last week, the post passed 30,000 comments (now at 35,000): [more inside]
Focus on the potential.
Lytro, the 6-year-old[1] consumer plenoptic camera start-up started shipping their first light field camera to end users last week. Reviews have been mostly positive with regards to the technology and industrial design, but also warn users of specialized hardware and software that is difficult to use, the "poor quality"[2] display, and low resulting image quality. However everyone seems to agree that light field technology is the way of the future and is here to stay. Previously. [more inside]
Guessing the health effects of Obamacare
A new working paper by economists Charles Courtemanche (University of Louisville) and Daniela Zapata (UNC-Greensboro) shows that Massachusetts 2006 uniform healthcare coverage caused improvements for numerous health outcomes. To the degree that the Massachusetts experiment is a guide for the federal Affordable Care Act, this study provides some guidance for guessing which individuals and approximately how much the benefits of the program will be. [more inside]
Spring Awakening
Mother Jones: The 10 'Occupy' candidates vying for seats in the US House Of Representatives and Senate and their prospects.
No checkmate for you!
Only two buttons from the top: The European Women's Championship in Gaziantep, Turkey is the first where the brand new European Chess Union Dress Code regulations [pdf] apply. The men’s championship, which will take place this month in Plovdiv, Bulgaria will follow. ECU General Secretary Sava Stoisavljevic answers some questions. Players respond. [more inside]
Pin-Ups of the Past
In our continuing series on pin-up girls of the past (previously and previously previously), this lady's costume was a source of some puzzlement. Welcome to the wonderful world of Poses Plastiques. [more inside]
"His work," writes Gallagher, measuredly, "is characterised by its directness as well as its ambition; it is both deadpan and affecting, and it provokes awe and outrage in equal measure."
Damien Hirst: 'I still believe art is more powerful than money' Damien Hirst has gone from mouthy YBA to global brand over the past 25 years – and become the world's richest living artist on the way. Here he talks about money, mortality and his first retrospective in Britain [more inside]
One down, many to go.
History is made: the ICC has made their first ruling; Lubanga is guilty, and the use of child soldiers is now clearly against international law. [NYT] [BBC] [Guardian] [actual judgement] [judgement summary] [more inside]
You Complete Me
What is the minimal number of clues necessary to create a uniquely solvable Sudoku puzzle? It turns out to be 17, though it took fancy symmetry arguments and nearly a year of computer time to prove it. But no need to read the paper when you can watch the video.
If only it were this quick.
A short and sweet pregnancy [slyt] The impending arrival of a baby inspired this happy couple to track their pregnancy in a short time-lapse video.
Finally! A fast and inexpensive way to remove a cork from a wine bottle!
Wine De-Corking Machine: designed by mechanical sculptor Rob Higgs, this amazingly elaborate Rube Goldberg styled device weighs over 770 pounds and took about three years to build. [more inside]
"Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?" ~Flann O'Brien
'Bike Thief' [NYTimes] The filmmaker Casey Neistat conducts an experiment in New York City, where he locks up his own bike and brazenly tries to steal it, to determine whether onlookers or the police would intervene. [More]
Tighten your seat belts, it´s likely to be a rough ride.
A Tough Oil World Why High Gas Prices Are Here to Stay by Michael Klare (via)
It was the easy oil—that’s what fueled our prosperity. Back in the fall The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health highlighted The five key areas that illustrate the potential health fallout of petroleum scarcity.
It was the easy oil—that’s what fueled our prosperity. Back in the fall The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health highlighted The five key areas that illustrate the potential health fallout of petroleum scarcity.
I shall take my fun and my pleasure however it comes.
Transcript of a recent 90-minute interview with Alan Moore:
page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5, page 6, page 7
A Vampire Squid with Muppets
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs. New York Time Op-Ed. March 14th 2012:
TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.[more inside]
"When a man is tired of Liberty City he is tired of life."
Cities in dissolution. "It’s a game for anyone who has ever wondered what happens in the grandest house in town once the lights go out at night. It’s for anyone who has ever seen two men slumped at a hotel bar and wondered what other secrets are contained in such temporary lives. Thief is a game for anyone who has ever walked through a city at night and thought, which parts are still breathing and what does each seclusion contain."
Rockpapershotgun's Adam Smith thinks about cities.
Dad and Windows 8
March 13
Stop-Motion Dance
Wrecking Crew Orchestra (original Japanese site) are a young dance crew from Japan. Last week, they put on a light-synchronized performance in electroluminescent suits that has to be seen to be believed.
20% meant half-assed
"Why I left Google": James Whittaker joined Google from Microsoft in 2009. Now he want back to MS, and explained why he left Google
Rule, Britannica
How Yahoo Weaponized My Work
On the Aftermath of Sexual Misconduct
Having heard way to many similar stories, Dr. Kate Clancy, author of the popular Scientific American blog Context and Variation, has recently run two accounts written by graduate students about their experiences with sexual harassment in the hopes that they will spark a wider discussion. The comments in the second article are uncharacteristically amazing and include several more women sharing their experiences. [more inside]
It's a Dirty Job
The nation is awash with a new black market commodity... Across the country, retailers are finding massive amounts of this product missing. In West St. Paul, Minnesota, one enterprising individual has taken $25,000 dollars of this chemical that some Police Departments are calling liquid gold: Tide Detergent
When there's no more room in Hell, the consoles will walk the Earth.
The Sugar Daddy Recession
RIP, Lanier Philips
Civil rights activist, (and adopted Newfie) dies at 88 As reported previously, Philips was the sole black survivor in a shipwreck of US navy vessels of the coast of Newfoundland. The kindness shown to him by those who nursed him in the tiny town, where no one had seen a black man before, inspired Phillips' life of activism for civil rights.
A good reminder of the power of small kindnesses ...
What, no Pepsi Blue?
JetBlue names all of its jets with a variant of "blue" in the title. Blue Suede Shoes. Bright Lights, Blue City. The Name is Blue. JetBlue. If You Can Read This, You're Too Blue Close.
Your window to weight gain/nasal health.
According to a procedure done at the Detroit Medical Center, and published in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork is effective against a rare platelet disorder.
The Devil's Auction
Why this lady is wearing a horse costume. previously.
"For the drama and the way it may happen to be played, and the plot or moral or meaning of it, nobody seems particularly to care. The point of interest is, first, the dancing; next, the dancers, and last, the scenery."[more inside]
"On Behalf Of Governor Rick Perry, May I Welome You To Your Compulsory Transvaginal Exam..."
“For some reason, the GOP has chosen 2012 to relitigate reproductive freedom, an issue that was resolved decades ago. Why [Rick] Santorum, [Rush] Limbaugh et al. thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate, I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice.” -- Gary Trudeau"Only once in the long history of "Doonesbury" has Garry Trudeau’s syndicate ever intensely objected to one of his story arcs. It was 1985, a documentary purporting to show the reactions of a fetus had been released, and Trudeau satirized the film "The Silent Scream" with his own “prequel" strips featuring “little Timmy,” a 12-minute-old embryo. Those strips never saw wide release in newspapers. Now, Trudeau has decided to take on the abortion wars head-on for the first time in "Doonesbury’s" four decades in a series of strips depicting mandatory vaginal ultrasounds as rape." [more inside]
McDonalds: home of the McHotdog Mega Breakfast Sausage
Just the First Frame
Just the First Frame - Just the first frame of the best comics on the web. You decide if you want to read the rest.
In which Richard Rodgers and John Steinbeck have a falling-out over a whorehouse
"It's either a whore house, or it isn't. Suzy either took a job there, or she didn't.
The play doesn't give satisfaction here and it leaves an audience wondering. My position is that she took the job all right but she wasn't any good at it. In the book, Fauna explains that Suzy's no good as a hustler because she's got a streak of lady in her. I wish we could keep this thought because it explains a lot in a short time."Pipe Dream, a little-known and rarely performed Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on John Steinbeck's novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, will be revived this month in a concert production at New York City Center [SLYT] for the first time in decades. The musical had not been available for performance for years due to rights issues. [more inside]
Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard
Exquisite Beast: illustrating evolution
Exquisite Beast is a tag-team tumblr, featuring an illustrated evolution that started with this little beastie, drawn by Evan Dahm (Rice Boy comics | Making Places worldbuilding blog). The next evolution was by Yuko Ota (Johnny Wander comic | forthcoming Lucky Penny comic), the other half of this illustrious duo. But their creature does not have a simple linear evolution chart, as seen in this cladogram showing the various fan-made offshoots. Some are linked from the Exquisite Beast posts, but you can find more from the Exquisite Beast tumblr tag.
More like Mighty Sciuridae Am I Right?
A squirrel enjoys playing with a ball, to the tune of "The Mighty Mouse Theme". Strangely satisfying.
The Santorum Strategy
The Santorum Strategy Linguist George Lakoff explains how Santorum is helping reinforce right wing beliefs.
Spring Has Sprung
In 2003 a building housing the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) was slated for demolition to make way for updated facilities. Artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to memorialize its rich history. Schuleit: The concept for Bloom came to me as a site-specific installation to mark the transition of the life and history of the institution toward its closure, from its physical state to the remembered with 28,000 potted flowering plants. More images available here.
The return of iamamiwhoami
Remember iamamiwhoami? Jonna Lee's previously mysterious little music project complete with codes and secrets, has begun releasing new song-length videos every couple of weeks. On Valentines Day, Sever, then Drops. Today, Good Worker. The videos are just as odd as when the project first started.
Run, baby, run!
Sometime tonight the winner of the 2012 running of The Last Great Race will cross the finish line. [more inside]
And now the music is stuck in your head
After I hung up the phone, I went to the bedroom and woke my wife, Lori. "Honey," I said. "You're not going to believe this, but I just got off the phone with a guy who's in charge of video game world records, and he said the world record for Game Boy Tetris is 327 lines, and he wants us to go to New Hampshire this spring so you can try to break the world record live in front of the judges at the world's largest classic video game tournament. [more inside]
Erin Go Barf
Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.
"Homicide Watch is a community-driven reporting project covering every murder in the District of Columbia. Using original reporting, court documents, social media, and the help of victims’ and suspects’ friends, family, neighbors and others, we cover every homicide from crime to conviction." [more inside]
Oh, just some kids trying to play Dueling Banjos
Susan Cain: The power of introverts.
Susan Cain prefers listening to talking, reading to socializing... but she's a good speaker with an interesting message. (SLYT)
Pavlov’s tweet
Nat Morris built a machine that gives his dog a treat and takes photos when people tweet to @FeedToby. [more inside]
Law Deans in Jail
In a new working paper provocatively entitled Law Deans in Jail, Emory law professors Morgan Cloud and George Shepherd
examine the widespread reports of lying by law schools and their administrators, and the publication of these fabrications by U.S. News, and explain how the reported conduct could constitute federal crimes, [specifically] mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering.Advisory: 77-page PDF; click on the link on the top-left to download the full paper. [Abstract]. Previously. Previouslier. [Via the always trenchant Margaret Soltan].
Where we're going we don't need roads...
Quadrotors? Check. Flying Delorean? Check. Roads? No need. While a full-size model may still be a few years away, this crafty Russian tinkerer has constructed his very own hover-conversion model Delorean, and the results are pretty darn cool. (SLYT)
Hiding under your toilet.
Here are two stories about men hiding themselves under toilets for strange/unknown/sexual reasons. [1] [2a] [2b]. NSFW, NSF people who don't want to read about men hiding under toilets.
March 12
Get Ready to Play Tag
Tag Challenge! "The infamous Panther Five has pulled an audacious new heist: they’ve stolen the world’s 3rd most expensive jewel, the Adly Diamond, from the Overholt Showroom in Washington, DC. Now they’ve split up and fled—dispersed to five different cities. We’re offering a reward to help find them. We’ll release their mugshots here on game day: March 31, 2012."
If you can get a team together that can cover these 5 cities, then you've got a shot at $5000 (USD).
Washington, DC | New York City | London | Stockholm | Bratislava [more inside]
If you can get a team together that can cover these 5 cities, then you've got a shot at $5000 (USD).
Washington, DC | New York City | London | Stockholm | Bratislava [more inside]
Thriller Bees
Bees have different “personalities”, with some showing a stronger willingness or desire to seek adventure than others, according to a study by entomologists at the University of Illinois.
Exotic dancers 1890s
Deeper into the Twungle
"Would you let a skull pick you up at a bus stop? Definitely not. But on Twitter you find yourself doing all sorts of things you wouldn't otherwise do. And once you've entered the Enchanted E-Forest, lured in there by cute bunnies and playful kittens, you can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time. You might even find yourself climbing the odd tree—the very odd tree—or taking refuge in the odd hollow log—the very odd hollow log—because cute bunnies and playful kittens are not the only things alive in the mirkwoods of the Web. Or the webs of the mirkwoods. Paths can get tangled there. Plots can get thickened. Games are afoot."
Weak Interactions
Weak Interactions is a blog that looks at the science in Breaking Bad and the non-science in Fringe.
Homeless people used as mobile 4G hotspots at SXSW
Homeless people are being used as mobile hotspots at SXSW, as part of a project called Homeless Hotspots. According to the official website, "Homeless Hotspots is a charitable innovation initiative by BBH New York. It attempts to modernize the Street Newspaper model employed to support homeless populations." Reactions online have been mixed. Some commentators are outraged, while others wonder whether the project is helpful or exploitative.
"Bet he forgets the aluminum. Guarantee. Guarantee he forgets."
"If you strung all of the opening scenes from the various seasons [of Breaking Bad] together in chronological order, would the show's basic narrative make sense?" [more inside]
Micro machines
The 3D printer uses a liquid resin, which is hardened at precisely the correct spots by a focused laser beam. The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a hardened line of solid polymer, just a few hundred nanometers wide. This fine resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand. "Until now, this technique used to be quite slow", says Professor Jürgen Stampfl from the Institute of Materials Science and Technology at the TU Vienna. "The printing speed used to be measured in millimeters per second – our device can do five meters in one second." In two-photon lithography, this is a world record. Article and video.
A letter from Harold Camping admitting wrongdoing to his disgruntled flock
After numerous failed doomsday predictions, Family Radio founder Harold Camping announced this month that he has no plans to predict ever again the day of God's Judgment. He also issued an apology to listeners, admitting that he was wrong. [more inside]
Teach to the test, or not
Vox populi
Simon Cowell (aka 'Karaoke Sauron') has for some time dominated Saturday nights on UK TV, but he now faces a challenge... [more inside]
Our readers respond below...
BUCK
It is not very often that we have the opportunity to create a graphic equivalent of a drug fueled rant bringing all of our collective skills to bear. And it is almost unfathomable that we could actually do something like this and benefit a good cause. The Buck team dug deep, channeling our inner gonzo, to direct and produce this homage promoting Good Books, the online bookseller that passes all its profits through to Oxfam.
Amazing animation from the production/design company Buck.
Amazing animation from the production/design company Buck.
T-shirt singularity
Today expensively educated graphic artists sit at expensive designer tables in expensive offices, solely in order to put "Ithaca is gorges", rainbows, and band names on t-shirts all day … but even this quasi-preindustrial situation has now come to an end. Riesenmaschine's collaborators have succeeded in automating the production of modern t-shirt designs. The chance shirt machine mechanically produces, from a chance combination of a chance picture and chance text, in a chance font and chance colors, a chance design existing only once.
South London Gay Community Centre
The Brixton Fairies and the South London Gay Community Centre, Brixton 1974-6 "This fascinating story about Brixton’s legendary gay community of the 1970s was posted up on the urban75 bulletin boards, and thanks to the author Ian Townson, I’m now able to repost an illustrated version, giving a wonderful insight into a long lost part of Brixton life."
Jewish-Freemasonic Yowl
"But maybe the single most remarkable example of 20th-century totalitarian invective against jazz that Skvorecky ever relayed was here in the intro to The Bass Saxophone, where he recalls -- faithfully, he assures us ("they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind") -- a set of regulations, issued by a Gauleiter -- a regional official for the Reich -- as binding on all local dance orchestras during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia." (via)
Clouds as temporary sculptures
Berndnaut is fascinated by anything in between. Corridors and clouds, not yet there and not yet solid. What if a sculpture were to be nothing but thin air, smoke or scent?
The goldfish is fine! In fact he is tweeting!
Though no longer a Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain has resumed publicizing his bold, marginally practical flat-tax plan (previously). Cain Connections has released several new videos including: "9-9-9 The Movie: Slaying the Tax Monster," [YT] a 5-minute animation, and "This is the Economy on Stimulus," a bleak, child-narrated criticism of the stimulus. [more inside]
Conformal Models of Hyperbolic Geometry
You got your hat tip in my reblog
Introducing The Curator’s Code - a standardized system for honoring discovery and intellectual labor, using two unicode characters. But is it dead in the water already? [via] ↬
Siamese Cat vs The World
When you need to get past that cat bully in the alley, you must be willing to have a Cat Fight!
Etta Baker, American musician
Guitarist Etta Baker worked in a textile mill, raised nine children, and didn’t take her music to the stage until she was 60 years old. Fortunately for all of us, she continued to play and record right up until her death in 2006 at the age of 93.
March 11
President Obama signs H.R. 347, "Anti-Trespass" bill
Thursday, President Barack Obama signed the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. [more inside]
The Death of Poor Joe (1901) - earliest Dickens film, 1-min long
The earliest surviving Charles Dickens film, thought lost since 1954, has been re-found in the British Film Institute's archive. The Death of Poor Joe (YouTube HD, IMDB, Wikipedia), a one minute-long silent film based on an episode in Dickens' novel Bleak House, was filmed in 1901.
"I still have Buffy taste in my mouth."
On the 15th anniversary of the TV debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an interview with James Marsters, reflecting on his time on the show, and his relationship to it.
Rashomon in the hallway
In 1996, Yale psychologist John Bargh published a much cited paper (pdf) demonstrating the "priming effect" --- in a nutshell, subjects who had to unscramble sentences mentioning the elderly walked slower when leaving the examination room than control subjects. This year, Stéphane Doyen and his co-authors attempted to replicate Bargh's experiment, but were unable to reproduce the priming effect --- instead assembling evidence that it was the experimenter's knowledge of the study topic which created the apparent "priming". Is Bargh's famous experiment flawed? Or is Doyen's paper a pile of horseshit published in a two-bit for-profit online journal, as Bargh's strident critique suggests? Or is Bargh full of it himself? And who gets to decide what counts as good science these days anyway?
“Y’know Moeson, you really can’t do that kind of shit anymore.”
Yes, but do they have a secret plan to fight inflation?
"It’s been nearly 6 years since the series finale of The West Wing, and more than 12 since the one-hour drama, which [Aaron] Sorkin created and largely wrote, first walked and talked its way through NBC’s Wednesday-night lineup; and yet you might think the series never ended, given the currency it still seems to enjoy in Washington, the frequency with which it comes up in D.C. conversations and is quoted or referenced on political blogs. In part this is because the smart, nerdy—they might prefer “precocious”—kids who grew up in the early part of the last decade worshipping the cool, technocratic charm of Sorkin’s characters have today matured into the young policy prodigies and press operatives who advise, brief, and excuse the behavior of the most powerful people in the country."
Few Examples of Lisp Code Typography
You make my heart go to 12,000 RPM
"Nature is not always the best designer, at least when it comes to things that humans must build and maintain. So the newest artificial heart doesn’t imitate the cardiac muscle at all. Instead, it whirs like a little propeller, pushing blood through the body at a steady rate. After 500 million years of evolution accustoming the human body to blood moving through us in spurts, a pulse may not be necessary. That, in any case, is the point of view of the 50-odd calves, and no fewer than three human beings, who have gotten along just fine with their blood coursing through them as evenly as Freon through an air conditioner."
"Two years before Hannah Arendt declared evil banal, Vonnegut was staking it out for stand-up treatment."
In the spring of 1945, three weeks after VE Day, Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut, Jr wrote a letter home to inform his family that he was alive. His infantry unit had been smashed by Panzer divisions in the Ardennes; his unmarked POW train attacked by the RAF; miraculously, he and a handful of fellow prisoners escaped incineration by American and British bombers. "Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden – possibly the world’s most beautiful city", Vonnegut wrote. "But not me."- Survivor: How Kurt Vonnegut created a novel, a cult following and one of the most loyal readerships in American Fiction by Thomas Meaney in The Times Literary Supplement.
One Year Later
On the one year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, the Economist magazine now considers Nuclear energy to be "the dream that failed", in an issue with articles covering the history, safety issues, handling of nuclear waste, and costs (with emphasis on China) of nuclear power. [more inside]
Cliched Dialogue is My Middle Name
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Don’t even go there! You know as well as I do, I’ve literally been there, done that, bought the t-shirt and to be honest with you at the end of the day when push comes to shove and it all boils down to it if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Know what I mean? Basically, what I’m trying to say is with all due respect between you and me screenwriting is not rocket science, it’s about breaking the mold, thinking outside the box, giving it 110% 24/7. And I think we can all agree clichés suck but, hey, it’s a job. You gotta do what you gotta do. Just remember you’re writing for an audience and there’s no “I” in . . . you get the picture.—
Definitive List of Cliched Dialogue, Go Into The Story
Nothing gonna stop me now
"The sorrow of loss, the pain of being unable to regain those lost cherished moments, but the wherewithal to keep on." Vermont musician Anais Mitchell asked director Jay Sansone to make a video for her song "Coming Down". Jay turned to neglected cans of film in his grandparents' abandoned house. The result is a beautifully emotional combination of sound and vision.
Studio Legend: Alan Parsons on "Dark Side of the Moon"
Studio Legend: Alan Parsons on "Dark Side of the Moon"
Critical thinking for kids
A series of short animations explaining critical thinking. Created for children and pretty good for adults too.
365 Art project
The Great Tohoku Earworm of 2011
Following the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, commercials largely disappeared from television. To fill space between the news reports and lists of missing people, the Ad Council of Japan put together a number of PSAs. Since there were only five or ten of them, the PSAs played thousands of times over the course of a few months, searing themselves into the memory of the Japanese public. Most were typical messages about common courtesy, perseverance, listening to your kids, conservation, and international support. But one PSA in particular quickly took on a life of its own, instantly being mashed up with a classic Japanese TV trope: Robot Transformation Sequences! [more inside]
How Corporations Corrupt Science at the Public's Expense
How Corporations Corrupt Science at the Public's Expense: Report looks at methods of corporate abuse, suggests steps toward reform [Full Report (PDF)] [Executive Summary (PDF)] [more inside]
Tiffany sold me the car....y'know, I scared her on the test drive
This is Chris Barnes performing Hammer Smashed Face in Moscow.
This is Chris Barnes shilling for his local auto mall in Tampa. [more inside]
Let's Get Lost - Chet Baker documentary
Let's Get Lost - Chet Baker documentary by Bruce Weber 120 min
There will never be another you A remembrance of Chet Baker by Bruce Weber
See also chetbakertribute.com [more inside]
There will never be another you A remembrance of Chet Baker by Bruce Weber
See also chetbakertribute.com [more inside]
“It's a war created by illusions,”
Crash the Justice System
Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System. Michelle Alexander argues that ubiquitous plea bargains have allowed America's politicians and judicial system to short-circuit constitutional due process and ignore the mechanics of mass incarceration. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.
Should birth control pills be OTC?
The Drinkers Guide to New York
If you're celebrating St. Patrick's Day or March Madness in New York, the State Liquor Authority can help plan your festivities with this handy guide to every establishment in the state of New York licensed to sell alcohol. [more inside]
"As with other online businesses, the site promised convenience and efficiency."
Need a spouse or uncooperative business associate taken care of? Have no fear! HitmanForHire.net is here.
The Odyssey of Cartier or A Leopard Gets Around
Cartier has decided to celebrate its 165 years in business by taking two years to produce an incredible short film.
On the other hand, we get more daylight
The Monday and Tuesday after moving the clocks ahead one hour in March is associated with a 10 percent increase in the risk of having a heart attack. Heart Attacks Rise Following Daylight Saving Time.
Bug's eye view
Photographer Ondrej Pakan takes macro pictures of insects. Pakan's portfolio on 500px. (completely SFW in spite of the "nudity" warning, unless you work with prudish insects) [more inside]
My girlfriend, after listening: "It was worth meeting you just so I could hear that."
Tally Hall is the best new band I've heard in years, hands-down. They're an American rock band best known for the excellent Good Day video and the cult Albino Blacksheep hit Banana Man. They've released two albums, each masterpieces; the first one is exuberant and youthful and, sometimes, utterly cryptic, while the second is stripped down but astonishingly contemplative and even spiritual, easily one of the best-written pop albums I've ever heard. If you're in the mood for something smart and warm and wonderful, there're... [more inside]
8/31/1972 – ‘Robot due on Sesame Street.’
Jim Henson's Red Book "In June 1965, 28-year-old Jim Henson started a written log of his activities in what became known as “The Red Book.” He noted what had happened up until that point (deemed “Ancient History”) and then recorded anything that he felt was worth recording as single line journal entries until the end of 1988." via retroist.
Mostly Harmless
Heal Thyself!
Athena Wheatley, a webcomic
More diversity in sci-fi webcomix? Yes please: Athena Wheatley, or Warp & Weft features a black female scientist from the 19th century time-travelling to 9283. Fun, and looks good: Moebius meets Futurama meets Adventure Time (and sexy too! occasionaly cartoonishly NSFW)
"If I didn't create art I would go crazy and this is a good enough reason to carry on."
"I draw with a Biro pen, i paint with anything. I often run into the sea." Mark Powell draws old people on old envelopes with a plain old ballpoint pen. [more inside]
'Bodies in the barrels' site is up for sale
An oddly perky video of a real estate agent showing a real estate columnist around an old bank building and semi-attached house for sale (3:51). The building was offered on eBay, had its listing removed, and then reinstated. The reason for the video and the eBay concern? The bank (but not the house) had previously been rented to a group of serial killers. [more inside]
March 10
Old Books
Old Book Illustrations are vintage pictures that were originally wood engravings or woodcuts, etchings or metal engravings. Old Book Art is pictures, drawings, maps and other images from antiquarian, public-domain books and other old documents. [more inside]
Kayfabe Memories
Kayfabe Memories has a small book's worth of material on the history of professional wrestling's regional territories and the grapplers who animated them.
Wait for it... wait for it...
Best. TED Talk. Ever. As the 'spinning beach ball of death' (Apple's Wait Cursor) does much more than slow down a three-minute presentation (SLImprovAnywhere)
Lux Aeterna
Does the success of Trent Reznor, Clint Mansell and others suggest an end to the dominance of the traditional orchestral soundtrack?
There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"It all started with wondering what it was really like to be tapped on the shoulder and told that you are the savior of mankind. Ten years of thinking about that, and I began writing." He was James Oliver Rigney, Jr., a Vietnam vet who went on to get a degree in physics from The Citadel, and was then a nuclear engineer for the US Navy. He put all that behind him and started writing a variety of fantasy novels under various aliases. As Reagan O'Neal, he wrote the Fallon trilogy of historical fantasy in the early 1980s, which he followed up with a quick series of Conan novels as Robert Jordan. Under this pen name, he spent a decade planning and four years writing The Eye of the World, the first book in The Wheel of Time, an epic storyline in a fantasy world. Jordan had planned out the broad story arc from the beginning to the "final scene in the final book," but he died before his epic tale could be completed. A young author, Brandon Sanderson, was chosen by Rigney's wife and editor, Harriet McDougal, to complete the portions of the tale left as a loose collection of notes. One last book became three, and just last month, the release date of the final book was set: January 8, 2013, in the final month of the Year of the Dragon. Now that the end is in sight, you might feel the pull of nostalgia to finish the series, or maybe you're interested to see what all this fuss is about. With around 11,000 pages, 635 chapters, and more than four million words, it's a complex, daunting world to (re)enter. Fear not, the internet is here to help. [more inside]
March Madness Drama Derby
Vulture is running a March Madness Drama Derby to determine the greatest TV Drama of the past 25 years. [more inside]
GPS on an airplane.
The Incident Report. Or, The Time I Broke It
"[It] is the shape, size and color of a baby eggplant.” Jeff Winkler on the time he broke his penis.
Cephalophores, the head-carriers
Walking down Zürich's Lindenhofstrasse, you might stop in surprise by a relief depicting two men and a woman, draped in gauzy robes, each one calmly carrying their own severed head. There is no explanatory sign. Don't worry, though: Felix, Regula and Exuperantius are just the city's cephalophoric patron saints. [more inside]
The Only People For Me Are The Mad Ones
Twinkie Trumpet Gherkin; Captain Winky Shlong
Jon Gomm - Passionflower
Floods, aftershocks, and fallout.
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom. Japan, still feeling the aftershocks of the earthquake, the tsunami, the Fukushima exclusion zone... An opportunity for everyone to reflect on the disaster, share stories, and contemplate the impact of a year ago and what it means today.
How will the world end?
How will the world end? Encased in ice? Crumbling apart due to over mining? Or maybe beset by amphibious monsters and loathsome animals of huge size creeping their way towards us? An article by Herbert C. Fyfe from 1900, illustrated by Warwick Goble. [more inside]
Mischief on three wheels
hey, that's a funny coincidence
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address. [more inside]
Revenge Of The Fan Fic
One of the most popular stories on the Amazon Kindle marketplace is ...Wesley Crusher Slash Fic?. (i09)
Action is his reward
If Batman is a child's fantasy, then Spider-Man is very much rooted in being a teenager. When we're first introduced to Peter Parker in Amazing Fantasy #15, he's an outsider who feels isolated from everyone around him. He's miserable and resentful, but not because of some sort of defining tragedy, but because that's how you feel when you're a teenager. When he gets the one thing he wants -- the power that makes him stronger, faster and more popular than anyone else -- he promptly screws up and loses one of the only people that truly cared about him.
(via Chris Sims @ Comics Alliance)
Moebius est mort
Patrick's obsession: Rihanna...
"Patrick wants to bang all the Kardashian sisters... Page four... And then... wait how does Channing Tatum come into play?" Since 1:00 a.m. last night @BretEastonEllis has been live-tweeting notes on a possible sequel to American Psycho, story of Patrick Bateman —serial killer and Manhattan businessman. "Up to 14 pages of notes..." [more inside]
The Important One Is Mauve
March 9
Pinterest and Feminism
Take Wikipedia: 87% of its contributors are male; a bigger discrepancy than Pinterest by any count. However, when discussing Wikipedia, it certainly is not the norm to go on and on about how male the site is. Instead, it is far more common for the site to be praised for its “neutral point of view.”
Pinterest as a tool for analyzing difference vs. dominance feminism.
Via The Beheld.
Crazy Stupid Politics
Yahoo! Screen launched its live stand-up comedy streaming service on February 23 with Bill Maher's CrazyStupidPolitics. The show is still available to watch (recorded, obviously) via Yahoo!, and also on YouTube. (about 1 hour)
Electoral Datamining
With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all. But it is home to the largely secret engine of President Obama’s re-election campaign, where scores of political strategists, data analysts, corporate marketers and Web producers are sifting through information gleaned from Facebook, voter logs and hundreds of thousands of telephone or in-person conversations to reassemble and re-energize the scattered coalition of supporters who swept Mr. Obama into the White House four years ago.
Dys4ia
Dys4ia is a new Flash game by Anna Anthropy/Auntie Pixelante about her recent experiences as a trans woman. It is brief, touching, high-polish, and low-res. It possibly represents a new form of diaristic game design. (via gamefilter)
The person who did this to you is broken. Not you.
Sierra DeMulder is one of the most accomplished and recognizable young women in the world of slam poetry. The two-time National Poetry Slam champion has spent the past five years energizing audiences at colleges and poetry events across the nation, seamlessly weaving complex issues of identity and gender with the honesty of heartbreak. Her piece 'Paper Dolls', recently shared on Project Unbreakable (previously), is very, very good. TRIGGER WARNING - subject matter pertains to sexual assault.
The mystery of the duqu framework.
The Kaspersky analysts over at Securelist uncovered some interesting things deep in the bowels of the code of a trojan. The hooks of the trojan are written using standard, well known languages and interfaces (C++, DLLs and such), but the payload, upon analysis, seems to be written using some heretofore unknown programming language.
Can you figure out what language the Duqu trojan is written in?
(via Lambda the Ultimate Programming Blog)
Thanks, Housing Collapse!
14 Year Old Buys House in Florida Meet Willow Tufano, age 14: Lady Gaga fan, animal lover, landlord. [more inside]
Wigstock: New York's other Labor Day tradition (while it lasted)
"I know you are out there, just wanting to put your wig on, just like me. And I know you're just waiting to have a good time. Just put a little ball earring on, a little bad sunglasses, and a big, bad wig on, 'cause it's good. It feels good, works, it does." It is, or was, Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival held in NYC, starting in 1985 by "Lady" Bunny and friends. Each year the party grew, moving to Union Square in 1991, then to Christopher Street waterfront in 1994 to deal with the expanding crowd. 2001 was supposed to be the last year, but the party came back in 2003, in conjunction with the annual HOWL festival. That carried the tradition on for another two years, and Wigstock's official website is stuck in 2005, a reminder of the festivities that were. You can reminisce with Gawker, or take a short journey back to 1987 with Wigstock: The Movie (part 1 of 4), not to be confused with the longer film of the same name, capturing Wigstock 1995 (part 1 of 8).
Rachele Gilmore’s 100 MPH Fastball
Andy Ihnatko writes a charmingly enthusiastic post about listening to the same aria, from the same production, sung in two very different ways: by the star, and by the understudy: Rachele Gilmore’s 100 MPH Fastball [more inside]
"Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."
Flannery O'Connor reads A Good Man is Hard to Find aloud at Vanderbilt University in 1959. [more inside]
Everyday I'm riding the Tour de FUCK YOU!
Worlds with a limited palette
When kevin wins, the planet loses! is a tumblr that collects pixel art from a variety of videogames to showcase the beautiful work that lies in the background of the action. [more inside]
Some good iceblink luck
Friday dreams. Simon Raymonde, bassist of Cocteau Twins, writes:
A rare nostalgia moment: i didnt think any footage from the Heaven or Las Vegas tour in 1990 existed and i remember how cool it was being able to have a lighting designer for the first time that tour but have never seen how our stage looked from the audience till tonight so this is a treat to me. The whole concert in on youtube now pretty much. And my god, what a voice Elizabeth had on this tour, absolutely perfect on every song. Some rare good memories. [more inside]
Science isn't about why - it's about why not
No GLaDOS. No Chell. No portals. Set in the 1980s. Competitive multiplayer. Multiple endings. The Portal 2 That Could Have Been.
Dr. Seuss does nudity
The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History's Barest Family is a Dr. Seuss book for adults, which features nude women in every panel.
He had a balcony you could do Shakespeare off of.
Firesign Theater's Peter Bergman Dead at 73 of Complications from Leukemia. Peter Bergman, founding member of The Firesign Theatre has passed on to that great Humbolt County in the sky.
Half platinum, half gold.
Rape Review
Did the Met betray rape victims to avoid bad PR? "Former Metropolitan Police officer -- and Lib Dem mayoral candidate -- Brian Paddick has appeared at the Leveson Inquiry, and his witness statement contains an astonishing allegation against his ex-employers.
In a section about the Metropolitan Police Service's attempt to improve its image in the media, Paddick details the "negative commentary" on Ian Blair after he took over as Met commissioner. "The Met went from being very open to being almost paranoid," he writes.
One of the consequences of this, he adds, was that he was asked to "water-down" a report critical of the Met's handling of rape cases." [more inside]
A Particularly Graphic Graphic Interpretation
James Killian Spratt is a sculptor and Edgar Rice Burroughs fan who, in addition to sculpting pieces for the Barsoomian board game Jetan, has created an illustrated adaptation of the first book in the Barsoom series, A Princess of Mars: "The characters are highly underclad, yet oblivious to it; it's their normal way, and they don't see much naughty or titillating about it. The men are men and the women are women and blood is red and scary. I set out to be honest with the nudity and violence, and the devil take Pollyanna, she needs to grow up anyway." The on-going graphic interpretation, begun in 2000, is presently on chapter 21 of the 28 chapter book. [more inside]
Hood ornaments worth more than most cars..
Part weird bestiary, part alien zodiac, the crystalline characters of René Lalique appear far too ethereal to ride on the noses of mere motorcars. [slideshow] [NYT]. A selection of original Rene Lalique car mascots, hood ornaments and radiator caps will be auctioned this weekend at the Amelia Concours d'Elegance in Florida, but can simply be viewed as photos for those of us on a budget.
Homeless on purpose
Homeless on purpose, how a U1 philosophy student braves the elements, sleeps outside, and keeps an eye on his GPA Shane is a U1 Philosophy student at McGill, and has been homeless since July. He lives on campus, using its facilities like most of us use different rooms in a house. He eats his meals in student lounges and does push-ups in the library. He showers at the gym and stashes extra socks in convenient hiding spots. He won’t say where – he guards his possessions closely.
NYPD Tapes Confirmed
The NYPD Tapes Confirmed The report police hid for nearly two years that corroborates a Voice investigation — and vindicates a whistle-blower the NYPD tried to destroy.
Covered in 2010 by This American Life as Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me? For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do.
Covered in 2010 by This American Life as Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me? For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do.
"Wilderness, to me, is a spiritual necessity."
"My experience reinforced my sense of dedication to use my art form of photography as an inspiration for others to work together to save nature's places of spiritual sanctuary for future generations." Clyde Butcher uses large format cameras to document the beauty of Florida. His work is simply breathtaking. [more inside]
Finding Love Ain't Easy
March 8
The Holga D
The Holga D, a digital camera concept based on the popular Holga medium-format camera. It's a minimalist digital camera that maintains the mystery of film. There's no display, just a little e-ink shot counter on top. The controls are equally spare: shutter speed, ISO, and a completely manual lens. [more inside]
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute
The web site of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has more than 30,000 images searchable by who, what, where, and when.
Friendly neighbors
Looking for life in all the wrong places
Skinhua
FP Passport Blog: In an attempt to highlight the role of women in Beijing's annual National People's Congress, China's party newspaper the People's Daily published "Beautiful female journalists at two sessions," consisting of women asking questions and "beautifying" China's legislative session. It's hard to think of a more awkward way for a media outlet to celebrate International Women's Day, except maybe last year's offering from China's state news wire Xinhua: "Attractive females at NPC, CPCC sessions."
The Thin Wall Challenge
Hi, my name is Ryan, and that sound you're hearing is my neighbors back there doin' it. Welcome to The Thin Wall Challenge. (MLYT) (mildly nsfw)
What Would Jesus Legalize?
Over a year after after decrying mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana possession (Previously on the blue), 700 Club founder and evangelist Pat Robertson has come out in support of outright decriminalization, saying marijuana should be regulated like alcohol.
Lolita cover redesigned
"Any nation, at any time, has the capacity to create a hero."
Neil deGrasse Tyson gives testimony on March 7, 2012 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (Majority member page) (Minority member page) Eight minutes of speech followed by questioning and response. [more inside]
Narendra Modi 2.0
The Emperor Uncrowned: An in-depth look at the controversial man who may be India's next Prime Minister (previously). Also related.
The Mozart of Football
Lionel Messi is the first player to score 5 goals in a Champions League match as Barcelona demolished Bayer Leverkusen 7-1. Comparsions with Mardaonna and Pele abound. Like Mozart, Messi at 5 years [YouTube, Spanish] old was better than most.
PBS Off Book
The first episode of the second season of PBS Arts web-original series Off Book is Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium (mini-documentary, ~7 min). "OFF BOOK explores cutting edge arts and the artists that make it. Breaking the mold of the definition of art, OFF BOOK explores the avant-garde, the experimental and the underground artforms that are supported by online communities." [more inside]
Fight and Flight. And Cars, too.
AIRBOYD.tv has three Youtube channels: The eponymous AIRBOYD features 2000+ videos for "aviation and aerospace enthusiasts. Then there's the Nuclear Vault: Vintage Military, War and News Videos, with 1200+ full-length documentaries, news reels and other assorted footage, including 200 episodes of "The Big Picture (Army Signal Corps)" and a variety of Atomic and Nuclear energy films. Last but not least is US Auto Industry, an archive of over 450 vintage automobile films, including commercials from Buick, Pontiac, Chevy and Ford. [more inside]
Cartoo
Cartoo uses Google Maps to show you how far you could get by car, bike, or foot in a set amount of time.
88 cents for the same job
Just in time for International Womens Day, it's Narrow the Gap, a look at the unbalanced payrolls of American workers based on US Department of Labor statistics from a variety of industries.
Gimme yer lunch photos
American Lunchroom features reader-submitted photos of school lunchroom food from around the nation.
Dancing Frogs Twitch but not Shout
Necromantic frogs twitch to the beat (from Create Digital Motion), the artist Lu Yang has wired up discarded dissected frogs to MIDI and made then "dance" to the beat of a drum machine.
You better run!
SuperMario Balotelli
Is Mario Balotelli the most entertaining footballer of all time?
"Oh Balotelli he's a striker…
He's good at darts/
He's allergic to grass but when he plays/ He's fucking class.
Drives round Moss Side/ with a wallet full of cash/
Can't put on his vest/ But when he does he is the best
Goes into schools / Tells teachers all the rules
Sets fire to his gaff / With rockets from his bath
Doesn't give a fuck/ Cos he did it for a laugh
Runs back to his house / For a suitcase full of cash
Oh Balotelli …"
Not a hoarder
The Personal Analytics of My Life by Stephen Wolfram
Demonicpedia: better know your demons
Demonicpedia exist as a reference and educational resource for demons and demonology. Here you can find references to most demons and information about them as well as topics pertaining to the demonic. Providing more information about demons than those thumbnails from the 1863 edition of the Dictionnaire Infernal that have been bouncing around tumblr recently. See also: DeliriumsRealm's list of demons, American demons, Asian/East demons, European demons, Judeo-Christian demons, and modern magick demons.
Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome
Today in North Dakota news, the Grand Forks Herald reviews the long-awaited Olive Garden "the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks." [more inside]
TOO-GAY DRINKING
A magazine from the 1940s illustrates 'Television Taboos' from the time as salaciously as possible.
An Illustrator of Decadence
Best known for his 1929 illustrations of Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (translated here); Beresford Egan (wiki) also illustrated the dust jacket for Aleister Crowley´s Moonchild.
The year previously he published an illustrated parody on the banning of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.
In 1934 he published But the Sinners Triumph. His first wife was Catherine Bower Alcock aka Brian De Shane.
The year previously he published an illustrated parody on the banning of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.
In 1934 he published But the Sinners Triumph. His first wife was Catherine Bower Alcock aka Brian De Shane.
GrafRank
GrafRank: Global Graffiti Statistics is a new webapp project from Jake Dobkin of Streetsy (previously). With GrafRank, Dobkin codes street art locations from the Streetsy Flickr Pool, tagged by artist, to highlight where notable street artists are working in specific cities, their prolificacy, and the more popular areas in those cities for tagging.
Shave time. Shave Money.
Dollar Shave Club’s launch ad (SLYT).
"In its parody-toned ad, the company CEO takes us on a tour of the Dollar Shave Club warehouse. It turns out the guy in the video really is the founder and CEO of the new start-up, Michael Dubin. What’s more surprising, though, is the fact that he made the ad himself. 'The world is filled with bad commercials and people who are marketing too hard,' Dubin says. 'I think what we wanted to do is not take ourselves too seriously, and deliver an irreverent smart tone.'"
jesus christ all-american hero
And now for a taste of things to come.
Kept Austin Weird
Purim Schpiel 2012!
The Book of Purim (Hasa Diga Eebowai). The students from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Year-in-Israel class 2011-2012 present, "The Book of Purim!" A Purim Parody of "The Book of Mormon" (SLYT, long but worth it.)
Reversal of the Heart
Reversal of the Heart - a 13 minute animated film of the fantasy persusasion, the senior thesis of artist Carolyn Chrisman.
Once extracted, what you do with it is up to you...
"Ever wish you could see the strands of genetic material that make you...you?" NOVA shows you how to extract your DNA with this do-it-yourself tutorial using household items. [via]
Conversion disorder in New York?
What happened to the girls in Le Roy? (NYTimes) 18 girls in Le Roy, New York have been suffering from tics and seizures. Neurologists believe the cause is conversion disorder (AKA hysteria) combined with mass psychogenic illness. Others have suggested environmental causes, or PANDAS. [more inside]
The Runaways & the solo years
The RUNAWAYS!!! - Live in Japan (48:10) 1977 TV special, more Runaways videos, Johnny Guitar (live - audio only, Lita's solo spotlight). After Cherie: School Days, Wasted, Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Saturday Night Special. (previously). Inside - The Solo Years [more inside]
dead shark
March 7
500 new German fairy tales discovered
"The Turnip Princess" is one of 500 German fairy-tales recently unearthed in an archive. They were collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth about 150 years ago, around the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting fairytales. Some are variations of well known stories such as Cinderella, others are completely new like a Turnip Princess, or the story of a maiden who turns herself into a pond to escape a witch, who then attempts to drink the lake. A translator is working on an English edition.
Douglass v. Fairey - Fair use and credit
An interesting tale of fair use and Shepard Fairey. Not the one about the AP Image, this one has to do with a fellow artist. [NSFW: nudity]
Science!
Tetsuo's final scene from Akira + Mardi Gras
Australian government makes datasets publicly available
Data.gov.au is a site giving public access to datasets from the Australian federal, state and territory governments. It was created in response to the Declaration of Open Government, which aims to get more citizen collaboration in policy and service delivery design. People are encouraged to use these datasets to produce apps or conduct research. So far the little-publicised site has resulted in apps such as Dunny Directory, Convict Records of Australia and Transhub, a public transport planner for the nation’s capital. If you’re interested in more online government participation in Australia, Craig Thomler is tracking developments on his eGov AU blog.
More Short Stories
Showtime has produced a second installment of Short Stories, featuring the work of independent animators and filmmakers asked simply to "tell a short story in an innovative way."
*Cyriak Harris - Cobwebs*
*Bill Plympton - Summer Bummer*
*Simon Tofield - Simon's Cat - Lunch Break* [more inside]
Herbert Ross' "Pennies From Heaven"
Pennies from Heaven is the most emotional movie musical I've ever seen. It's a stylized mythology* of the Depression which uses the popular songs of the period as expressions of people's deepest longings - for sex, for romance, for money, for a high good time...there was never a second when I wasn't fascinated* by what was happening on the screen. - Pauline Kael (* SPOILERS)
"My body is not obscene; veiling it is."
[All links NSFW] In solidarity with Egyptian women's rights activist Aliaa Magda Elmahdy (previously), 14 women have posed for the Nude Photo Revolutionary Calendar [pdf] for release on International Women's Day. #NudePhotoRevolutionary
guilt-free time sink
290 cultural Icons in their own words - a nicely curated collection of audio & video clips of great artists, writers & thinkers ... Einstein, Eliot, Beckett, Nabakov, Malcom X, Muddy Waters, Georgia O'Keefe, Zora Neale Hurston & 282 more
Eat the bread everyone. Namaste.
“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.” Poet and Twitter entity Patricia Lockwood talks with HTMLGIANT about Twitter, literature, twitterature, comedy, poetry, sexting, Aaliyah and Olive Garden. Lockwood suggests that there may be something substantial and heretofore unexamined rumbling in the bowels of certain Twitter communities and people (such as @graeyalien and MeFi's own @gregerskine.)
u do have something on ur tie tho :(
"This is a less-than-six-minute video and I had to take five breaks to watch the whole thing because I don’t think I could stand being subjected to this much grace and perfection all in one sitting. It was causing me emotional turmoil." – Adam Lisagor, on a fantastic comedy sketch by Key & Peele. More on their upcoming show.
Your Kinect Is Watching You
The amazing, disturbing things your gaming console can learn about you. Consider the Kinect, the Microsoft console that sold 8 million units in its first 60 days of release. This inexpensive, book-sized panel has the ability to create a realistic, virtual likeness of the player. In doing so, it creates a delightful interface to play games—instead of hitting a button to kick a ball, you kick your foot and the digital character on screen mimics your movements. How does the Kinect produce this dazzling immersive experience? By capturing every move you make.
Irrefutable evidence of crimes against humanity
Britain's Channel 4 has broadcast graphic and disturbing footage apparently showing torture within a Syrian military hospital. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, says that the allegations are "consistent with what my mandate has been receiving over the last several months." [more inside]
Can we go Dad, can we?!
Listening to the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake
What does a magnitude 9.0 earthquake sound like? Researchers sped up low-frequency ground waves recorded during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, bringing them within range of human hearing. Hear the mainshock from just off the coast of Japan. And how it "sounded" in California. [more inside]
Is the dream of home ownership dead?
Despite low mortgage rates (and rising rental demand), home ownership levels among young people remain at their lowest levels in decades--a trend that began even before the housing market crash. Although unemployment and other debts may be precluding many young people from buying a house now, it may also be part of a societal shift where renting is considered just as good as, or superior to, owning. NPR's On Point discussed the question today, as well as linked to NYT and US News stories on the subject. Megan McArdle offers a dissenting view.
How I Helped Destroy Star Wars Galaxies
I remember with crystal clarity when I realized I was making more money from this enterprise than I was at my full-time job. I quickly decided to expand and hired four guys in Singapore to play 24/7. I paid them unreasonably well for the time, almost 3x as much as they would for other re-sellers; this bought me loyalty, and in this enterprise, loyalty is everything."How I Helped Destroy Star Wars Galaxies [more inside]
Excelsior!
There's a new Marvel superhero RPG, but the original Marvel Superheroes from 1984 still has a loyal following. Classic Marvel Forever has everything about the original game; its designer reveals its secret origins. [more inside]
Taller than a HiRISE
"If I had just kept walking...."
The Chicago Reader's current cover story, "The Color of His Skin," (parts 1 and 2,) revisits the murder of a black man on Chicago's South Side in 1970 by a gang of white teens. Last September, a similar article by the same author, "The Price of Intolerance," (parts 1 and 2,) examined an incident from 1971, in which a twelve year old boy and thirteen year old girl were killed.
27. THE WORD IS INUIT AND ALSO THE OKINAWANS LIVE FOREVER.
“You called us, Pu, and we came!”
Last Sunday, Russia's prime minister Vladimir Putin was shown shedding tears on TV as he was elected to be Russia's president for the next six years amidst a wave of protests. Meanwhile, despite a vast network of web cameras installed at polling stations to prevent vote fraud and independent exit polls showing more than 50% support for Putin, his opponents have decried the elections as a sham, as reports of falsifications, ballot stuffing and 'carousel voting' abound. What will his third term be like, though? in Prospect Magazine, Rachel Polonsky takes an in-depth look at the anti-Putin mood in Russian cities and what it means for his system of power. [more inside]
Home on the Range
Los Alamos National Laboratory has posted 10 minutes of newly discovered color home movie footage of the scientists of the Manhattan Project, at work and at play, shot by physicist Hugh Bradner. Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrets Blog notes some highlights and adds context.
"I gotta tell you something — this is a lot better than the movie."
Set phasers for "Wait"
"Redshirting" is the practice of holding eligible children back from kindergarten, with supposed advantages for them academically. Though there are questions as to it's efficacy long term.
#HATE
#JonathanFranzenHates: "Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose… it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters… it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium." [Via: Slate.com] More [Via: The Guardian]
"In conclusion, don't kill yourself, because suicide is super gay."
Park Slope lesbians Ingrid and Desiree are "homophobic, superficial and ultimately, perfect for one another." In this video series the couple considers whether all lesbians can be classified as tops or bottoms, if transmen are hipper than bisexuals, and if the It Gets Better Project sends the wrong message about how to survive high school as a gay teen. [more inside]
Blogger: 1, TSA: -1,000,000,000
Body scanners attacked again as US blogger Jon Corbett who blogs for TSA Out of Our Pants! exposes how to beat the body scanners, carrying a metal box in a secret shirt pocket through security at two airports. [more inside]
Workhouse Fare
"Workfare is the Conservative Government's scheme to get unemployed people into work. Workfare "was first introduced by civil rights leader James Charles Evers in 1968; however, it was popularized by Richard Nixon in a televised speech August 1969." [wikipedia] [more inside]
"His fist will eat your face for lunch."
Prison Dancer is a new 12-episode web musical inspired by the famous dancing prisoner videos of the Philippines.
Perspective Matters
"Magic Angle Sculpture": John V. Muntean creates intricate carvings of wood which, at first glance, can be difficult to discern or understand, but when a light is applied, the shadows they cast create several different images based on their orientation. [more inside]
Avant-garde rooted in nineteenth century aesthethicism
Santiago Caruso is an Illustrator from Buenos Aires who sometimes refers to himself as a graphic journalist. He has illustrated books and both
album and book covers.
He blogs here.
Discovered via The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus Some links NSFW.
Discovered via The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus Some links NSFW.
we don't want your shoes.
Thinking of donating clothes to Africa? Buying shoes so that someone else can have a pair (or just go a day without shoes)? How about buying charity products or visiting impoverished nations to volunteer? Please reconsider. Your good intentions are likely just paving the path to Hell (or economic danger) with Stuff We Don't Want.
Sheldon Moldoff 1920-2012
Sheldon Moldoff, one of the seminal Golden Age comic book artists and the last surviving cartoonist to have had work featured in Action Comics #1, died on February 29 from kidney failure. [more inside]
March 6
Invisible Children
Kony 2012 ... The "Invisible Children" movement, a primarily university student effort in opposition to Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army's kidnapping of children, has produced this video to make 2012 the year that marks the end of his utilization of children to maintain his power. This is a moving 27 minute film.
Welcome to my nightmare / I hope you like it
The YouTube channel of user zjchgf contains many videos of a person wearing eerily realistic human masks. Whether marriage is on your mind, or you'd rather simply have a snack, it is important to know how to make masks that affix to your face.
Bright lights, big galaxy.
Holder Explains Some Of It For You
... it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances. ... “Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” [more inside]
Pay taxes. Kill Nazis. Keep Democracy on the March.
Donald Duck wants you to pay your taxes to fight Nazism, when he's not dreaming he's a Nazi. Of course, Disney didn't need Donald Duck in every propaganda film.
Background Check for the Digital Age
Employers and colleges are now asking applicants for their Facebook logins and passwords in an attempt to get around privacy settings.
Wagga-wagga-wide-web
Help, I've Cut Myself & I Want to Save a Life
What would happen if you significantly dropped barriers to entry for bone marrow registration? Graham Douglas, a copy writer whose twin brother's life was saved by a bone marrow donation, had a brilliant idea that will do just that. [more inside]
San Diego Penguin Cam
Featuring nearly 300 penguins, San Diego's PenguinCam provides hours of entertainment during March and April.
Rub a greased palm along the bottom
For Super Tuesday, sardonic food writer Michael Procopio presents an excellent Rick-Santorum-themed cake recipe. [more inside]
Dogs sing and play piano in a manner somewhat reminiscent of people
Have you melancholia? Watch therefore, as: Dogs sing and play piano in a manner somewhat reminiscent of people
Error -41: sit by a lake
The most immediately apparent characteristic of James Benning’s film is surely its form: thirteen ten-minute static takes, which (save the leader between shots) comprise the entire visual track of the picture. Far from cursory, this detail accounts for the totality of Benning’s æsthetic. Everything that Benning says in 13 Lakes, he says using this formal language – along with a soundtrack recorded on-site, thought not necessarily concurrently with the image. Moreover, Benning, as has been noted, repeats the same basic framing in each of the thirteen segments, presenting the horizon-line in centre of the frame, dividing lake and sky into approximately equivalent fields. James Benning’s Art of Landscape: Ontological, Pedagogical, Sacrilegious, by Michael J. Anderson for Senses of Cinema (via; see also: 13 Lakes Q&A at LA Film Forum) [more inside]
Iron Pyrite Ears
Articles last month revealed that musician Neil Young and Apple's Steve Jobs discussed offering digital music downloads of 'uncompromised studio quality'. Much of the press and user commentary was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of uncompressed 24 bit 192kHz downloads. 24/192 featured prominently in my own conversations with Mr. Young's group several months ago.
Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.
if I can do it, so can you!
When the aliens attacked, the hyphen was the first casualty.
X-Com: UFO Defense, one of the most beloved strategy games of the 90s, was being remade as a first person shooter. That project has been pushed back to 2013. Instead, a 3D turn-based "reimagining" is in the works from Sid Meier's Firaxis Games - XCOM: Enemy Unknown. [more inside]
Did the Little Ice Age start with a big bang?
Did the Little Ice Age start with a big bang? According to the new study, the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures that began after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century was triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism and sustained by a self- perpetuating sea ice-ocean feedback system in the North Atlantic Ocean
Strong Female Characters
‘Tough, Cold, Terse, Taciturn and Prone to Not Saying Goodbye When They Hang Up the Phone’ - Is the fabled "Strong Female Characters" a bad thing? Counterpoints from Mur Lafferty and Charlie Jane Anders. Obligatory Kate Beaton link.
on the flexibility of ideals
In October 2010, William Niskanen, the 78-year-old economist and minority shareholder in the Cato Institute, died. The Koch Brothers, the liberal boogeymen who also finance most of the Cato Institute's operations, are now seeking control over Niskanen's shares and have sued the remaining shareholder and founder of the institute, Ed Crane III, in order to cement their control over the institute's future. [more inside]
Unpublished photos of Johnny Cash
Smoking and Health 1962
Fifty years ago, the Royal College of Physicians released a report titled "Smoking and health (1962)", showing the relation between smoking and lung cancer. In 1962, about 70% of men and 40% of women in the UK smoked, and the BBC spoke to a number of them as seen in this archive footage.
LulzSec
Law enforcement agents on two continents swooped in on top members of the infamous computer hacking group LulzSec early this morning [more inside]
The trouble with value-added-modeling
Value-added model scores for teachers: some disturbing scatterplots. Gary Rubinstein finds a lot of noise and very little signal in the VAM scores of 18,000 New York teachers, recently released by the Bloomberg administration under a Freedom of Information Act Request. (VAM previously on MetaFilter.)
There is just one moon and one golden sun
Robert Sherman passed away yesterday at the age of 86. Robert, along with his brother Richard Sherman, was a Disney legend. Together, they wrote the songs of "Mary Poppins", "The Parent Trap", "Bedknobs and Broomsticks", "The Jungle Book", "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and of cousre, "It's A Small World." [more inside]
The funeral of Hiram Cronk, the last veteran from the war of 1812
Hiram Cronk was born in 1800, at 14 he enlisted to fight the British, and in 1905, he passed away as the last veteran of the war of 1812. This amazing video shows the funeral procession, featuring veterans from the Civil War and the Spanish-American war as they marched through Brooklyn. [more inside]
Personality crisis, you got it while it was hot
Analyzing the Artwork of Thomas Kinkade
Drew Dernavich at The Awl has taken it upon himself to analyze the artwork in the 2012 Thomas Kinkade wall calendar. He has analyzed January, February and March. [more inside]
Dogs (1976)
Dogs (1976) is a film about academics being attacked by a pack of angry dogs. I know you don't have time for the whole film, but could you at least watch the trailer? [more inside]
March 5
We're gonna be like three little Fonzies here.
The Wirbelrohr! (aka, the Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube) You put a stream of air in, you get a hot stream and a cold stream out. Invented in 1930, there are no moving parts and no electricity supplied. [more inside]
This ain't your granny's harmonium
Henry Dagg squeezes out "Over the Rainbow" with the help of a nuisance of toy cats
Your Tax Dollars At Work
Part time virus hunter
It arrived at MIT in the middle of the night... 1988 computer virus - (via Dangerous Minds) [more inside]
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
Mick Jones, co-founder of seminal punk band The Clash, his hair as thin as the crowd, plays a few solo songs at the opening of the Rock and Roll Public Library, a converted office under a motorway in West London, in between swigs of lager. That is all. But what else do you need?
"It even has miniature owls in the Owlery and hinges on the doors."
A 50 foot wide miniature of Hogwarts used in all of the Harry Potter films will be going on display in London this month. The miniature was designed and built by production designer Stuart Craig.
I hope his face hurts too.
Patchwork
Online Modular Synth. Peter van der Noord has used Flash to create an extensive virtual modular synthesizer that runs in a browser.
Dewey Bozella
Dewey Bozella landed a hard right cross on his opponent's jaw at the final bell, and the 52-year-old boxer raised his arms in victory. After 26 years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit, Bozella triumphantly realized a dream deferred in his first and only professional fight. [more inside]
What'll It Take?
Well, it'll probably take 82 fans from 22 countries. Graham Coxon, with the help of director Ninian Doff, brings you a little Monday evening (at least in the US, the rest of you do the calculations as necessary) fun.
No other player has swung at more first pitches on a rainy Tuesday in the past 3.7 years.
This is a clip of Tim Kurkjian, a major league baseball analyst known for his citation of obscure statistics and unorthodox sources. These are clips of baseball players imitating Tim Kurkjian, plus ensuing hilarity. [via]
The Payphone Stadium Project
In 1990, the avenues of information we have today weren't around. So what was a baseball fan who wanted to know the score of a game elsewhere in the country to do? Compile a list of pay phone numbers at stadiums and get the score from passers by who picked up.
Thundercats, Hooo!
A Ph.D. in comic book form.
Nick Sousanis has been approved to write and submit what may be the first ever Ph.D. dissertation in comic book form. See here (PDF) for a taste of the style and content.
"Like Google for old maps"
Recently went live: A central repository of maps held by institutions across the globe. Over 60,000 maps. oldmapsonline.org
NYC High Schoolers Release 10-Point Educational Policy Plan
A group of high school students from The Bronx calling themselves The Resistance have released a 10-point plan to reform NYC public schooling. (via Colorlines) [more inside]
The idea, of course, is to let your attacker have the bag
"A man wearing bowler hat reading a newspaper is seen leaning leisurely against a car. Another person comes from behind and starts hitting the poor man on the head with an iron bar. He does not react at all, still reads his paper. The third man appears looking puzzled. The man takes his hat of and shows it to the other two. They take the hat and examine it." Beat The Bandit, 1961 is a video (01:46) presentation of amazing security/anti-theft inventions that you'll surely feel compelled to buy.
March Madness!
Take a tour of the solar system! Tonight, see the wonders of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn! There's only one catch: You'll need to actually step outside to do it. [more inside]
Leechers gone wild
The set of groups that rip, encode, and disseminate pirated materials on the internet, known as The Scene, recently revised their encoding standards of SD television to switch from the video codec Xvid AVI to x264 MP4. A few recipients of pirated material had a few carefully worded comments about this new decision. Most of the aggression stems from the fact that some consumer DVD players included XviD compatibility and cannot be upgraded to play x264 files.
Spider silk sounds
Spider silk spun into violin strings "Strands of spider silk have been used to make violin strings that have a unique and thrilling sound, thanks perhaps to the way the strands deform when twisted."
1930s-40s in Colour
The Library of Congress has posted a series of colour photos from the 1930s and 1940s online. [more inside]
Well, Who Am Us, Anyway?
How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All. 56m24s of mainlined audio psychedelic comedy from The Firesign Theatre in 1969. In one piece, consisting of Two Sides, including The Further Adventures Of Nick Danger. [more inside]
Open Education Week
March 5-10, 2012 is the first Open Education Week. The effort has been lead by the Creative Commons Education Project and the Open Courseware Consortium. The effort hopes to highlight and promote the use of open educational resources (OER). Events listed here.
NFL Bounties
Joe Posnanski asks why football fans aren't fazed by the news that the New Orleans Saints had a bounty pool to reward players who knocked opponents out of their games.
If pitchers were offered bounties to throw at Albert Pujols' head and knock him out for a series, that would be a scandal beyond anything in memory. If we found out that Dwyane Wade was actually offered extra money to hurt Kobe Bryant in the NBA All-Star Game, he and the people offering the bounty might be suspended for life. Hockey is a violent sport, but if a team of players and coached really had pooled together money to pay anyone who could get Sidney Crosby taken off on a stretcher, wouldn't that be one of the great disgraces in the sport's history? So what does it say about the NFL -- and what does it say about us as football fans -- that this would happen in pro football and there would be a vague, "Eh, everybody does it, everybody's trying to hurt everybody in football anyway" reaction from so many?
If pitchers were offered bounties to throw at Albert Pujols' head and knock him out for a series, that would be a scandal beyond anything in memory. If we found out that Dwyane Wade was actually offered extra money to hurt Kobe Bryant in the NBA All-Star Game, he and the people offering the bounty might be suspended for life. Hockey is a violent sport, but if a team of players and coached really had pooled together money to pay anyone who could get Sidney Crosby taken off on a stretcher, wouldn't that be one of the great disgraces in the sport's history? So what does it say about the NFL -- and what does it say about us as football fans -- that this would happen in pro football and there would be a vague, "Eh, everybody does it, everybody's trying to hurt everybody in football anyway" reaction from so many?
Secret of Dominion
Secret of Dominion, a science fiction adventure in 13 episodes.
Squee!
Top 10 cutest photos of sleeping cats. UK charity Cats Protection has released its top ten pictures of sleeping cats, to coincide with National Sleep Awareness Week. [more inside]
"Rubik's hot dog not hot either."
The mid 1980's marked the zenith of popularity for Erno Rubik's amazing cube (previously on the blue). But how magic was it? To find out, Ruby-Spears Productions gave the toy a face, legs and some clever, albeit grammatically incorrect dialogue, and in 1983 Rubik the Amazing Cube was born! [more inside]
Apple's design philosophy
The idea that the form of a product should correspond to its essence does not simply mean that products should be designed with their intended use in mind. That a knife needs to be sharp so as to cut things is a non-controversial point accepted by most designers. The notion of essence as invoked by Jobs and Ive is more interesting and significant—more intellectually ambitious—because it is linked to the ideal of purity. No matter how trivial the object, there is nothing trivial about the pursuit of perfection. On closer analysis, the testimonies of both Jobs and Ive suggest that they did see essences existing independently of the designer—a position that is hard for a modern secular mind to accept, because it is, if not religious, then, as I say, startlingly Platonic.— Form and Fortune is an essay about Steve Jobs and Apple's design philosophy by Evgeny Morozov.
a radical experiment in empathy
Sam Richards: A Radical Experiment In Empathy (button underneath the video makes "interactive transcript" available, at link) [more inside]
Leopard slug sex is indeed hot
Compared to some species, human sex is boring, as Roxy Drew shows in this comic. NSFW, unless you work with kinky giraffes.
The Magic Dollar Sign
The page for a single tweet is 2.0 MB and 80% javascript. Michal Migurski profiles the sizes and compositions of typical pages from popular web sites, MetaFilter among them.
Sometimes it isn’t about being saved, it’s about finding a friend
Counting Stars is a powerful and touching comic from artist Katie O’Neill, which looks at loneliness, wishes, and what we might really need more than a white knight to come along and rescue us. [more inside]
March 4
Were single mothers better off in the 19th Century?
"As far back as the 1800s, single mothers were receiving benefits. At that time, they would be paid up front and in cash, but were they better off than today?"
[via] [Spoiler Inside] [more inside]
In 129 the Dwarves made war against the Ogre
How to Host a Dungeon is a solitaire pen-and-paper game in which you create an underground complex of rooms, populate them with various fantasy races and monsters, and simulate its history. At almost any time you can stop and have the basis for a D&D campaign. Here's a YouTube playthrough of a game: Part 1 - Part 2 [more inside]
Opportunity cost: The Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan Problem.
Opportunity Cost: The Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan Problem. Think you understand the fundamental economic concept of opportunity cost? Answer this:
"You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan (because he's so cool!). Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton?
A. $0
B. $10
C. $40
D. $50" [more inside]
"The People's Song Book": Union in Song
"The People's Song Book," published in 1948, was intended to be "a folio of freedom folklore, a weapon against war and reaction, and a singing testament to the future," according to its foreword, which was written by Alan Lomax.
"[T]hese songs have been tested in the fire of the people's struggle all around the world. They emerged quietly and anonymously in the vanguard of apparently lost causes, where men of good will have fought to keep this a decent world to live in. ... These folk, heritors of the democratic tradition of folklore, were creating for themselves a folk-culture of high moral and political content." [more inside]
The history of Vox guitar amps
How Dartford Powered the British Beat Boom , a BBC documentary on the history of Vox guitar amps, played by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Shadows and Queen. Part II
Winner: creepiest use of a child in politics.
Republican candidate for the US Senate Barry Hinckley doesn't mind using his cute five year old son on the campaign trail. But things got a little weird when father and son were interviewed on Fox News.
Back again, in 1/128 size.
Four child slaves of mixed-race heritage with pale skin were used in pictures to raise funds
The ‘white’ slave children of New Orleans: Almost immediately after the law came into practice, Northerners and abolitionists set up relief organisations, which battled to establish schools and provide other forms of support – but their resources were limited. They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county.
Do Iran's threats hold currency?
Iran has pledged to open its oil bourse to currencies other than the US dollar as of March 20th, 2012. Previously.
The phrase "nuclear option" gets thrown around in a lot of metaphorical contexts -- perhaps this one would be the most apt. [more inside]
Do I Do Visions?
The SF Jazz Collective just began their month-long Spring 2012 tour. Each year since 2004 the eight musicians have selected a composer to honor — including many of the usual suspects: Coltrane, Hancock, Monk, Shorter, Tyner. (In 2013 it will be Chick Corea) This year, changing things up a bit, they've decided to showcase the music of Stevland Hardaway Morris. [more inside]
Want to bro down and crush code?
"Tech’s latest boom has generated a new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder. Sure, the job still requires enormous brainpower, but today’s engineers are drawn from diverse backgrounds, and many eschew the laboratory intellectualism that prevailed when semiconductors ruled Silicon Valley.... At some startups the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s given rise to a new 'title': brogrammer."
'8,' Dustin Lance Black's Prop. 8 Play
Last night Dustin Lance Black's traveling Prop. 8 play, "8," was performed at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles with a star-studded cast. "Framed around the trial's historic closing arguments in June 2010, '8' provides an intimate look what unfolded when the issue of same-sex marriage was on trial." "Saturday's benefit performance was broadcast live on YouTube, where director Rob Reiner said it drew 200,000 viewers."* You can watch an archive of the performance here [02:01.32]. [more inside]
Janet Napolitano goes Blackalicious on the interwebs
Agriculture avalanche avian bacteria border botnet carbomb China drill drug drug war earthquake execution forest fire gang gas grid hack heroin hostage interstate Islamist Jihad Juarez keylogger kidnap La Familia looting malware marijuana meth lab nationalist nuclear outbreak Pakistan pandemic pipebomb pirates power lines radicals relief resistant Ricin riot San Deigo scammers screening symptoms Tamiflu terror U.S. Consulate violence virus warning weapons grade wildfire, and Yemen. [more inside]
Microsoft Word and writing
Has Microsoft Word affected the way we work? "Consider first the name that the computer industry assigned to it: word processor. The obvious analogy is with the food processor, a motorised culinary device that reduces everything to undifferentiated mush."
Time Has Come Today, Just Not Royalties
The story of Lester Chambers of The Chambers Brothers in one picture. A cautionary tale of working for an RIAA label (and Clive Davis) and what happens when your 'legendary hit' peaks at #11. At least he has a friend in Yoko Ono.
Find One In Every Car, You'll See
Little Tree AirFresheners have been around since 1954. The ubiquitous shapes are in movies, involved in litigation, burn, are art, get you ticketed and may be killing you.
Galanthomania
Snowdrops, or Galanthus, are those little white flowers you often see in the early Spring, sometimes poking up from under the snow. At first glance, they're charming, but not terrifically interesting. Galanthophiles of the world think otherwise. [more inside]
Images from the Envistat satellite.
Scan here for a link to this post!
Global Village People
Is Privacy Dead? A conversation. "For the entirety of human history, we have operated on small scales and in relative anonymity. Our words are heard by the few people close to us and most are quickly forgotten. We walk down the street without passers-by knowing our names or history. The internet has started to change that. Our words and actions can easily be shared with billions of people around the globe and archived indefinitely. The details of our lives can be found simply by typing our name into Google.
We need to understand the risks of this type of technology so that we can fully gain its benefits. We need protections, both technical and legal, so that a small mistake cannot devastate our lives. We also need education to help us function in a world where privacy is no longer the natural state of being."
The Precariat
The 'precariat' "consists of a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as ‘disabled’ and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world". [more inside]
Some are more Equal than others
The best and worst places to be a woman is an Independent on Sunday investigation to mark International Women's Day which unearths some surprising results
Are we EQUALS? Is a series of short films about whether men and women are really equals in 2012.
Are we EQUALS? Is a series of short films about whether men and women are really equals in 2012.
On the Choice of Browser and Numerical Intelligence
We analyzed usage data of the www.calcudoku.org number puzzle website for the years 2010 and 2011, consisting of over 1 million solved puzzles, and attempted to determine the numerical intelligence of users of Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, and Chrome. [[Full 4 page report here, PDF]] [more inside]
Chinese Women's Olympic Weightlifting
It’s a very specialized set of sports that the Chinese focus on but they simply kick absolute ass at them. ... If you look at the 2008 Olympic weightlifting results in Beijing... the women didn’t just squeak by to win a medal; most were simply so far ahead of their competition that it was a joke. In most cases, the Chinese women took their first attempt after everyone else had already finished lifting for the day. And they came out and just dispatched their weights in perfect form, setting new world records and winning medals with abandon. [more inside]
"Seriously..."
"more overt sexuality, more exposed flesh"
American illustrator Coles Phillips became famous in 1908 for his "Fade-Away Girl" magazine covers, which caught the eye and saved money on color printing. He was a leader in creating "more modern, active and athletic images of women" after the prim poise of the Gibson Girl era. His later work became more overtly sexual, making him one of the first artists whose beautifully designed ads were "torn out of magazines and swiped out of store windows to
become pin-ups on college dormitory walls." Some were considered
scandalous. He died in 1927. Two long pages of Coles Phillips images. Six
pages. Bio. Tumblr tag. More ads.
ISAAAAAC? ISAAAAAC!
Harry Redknapp, Rube of the Year
Despite evidence of extensive misconduct, English football coach Harry Redknapp remains beloved in the hearts and minds of football fans.
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
Network Rail virtual archive Original drawings and plans of Britain's railway infrastructure from Network Rail, including the Forth Bridge, Bristol Temple Meads station, the Tay Bridge and lots more.
Never cut your feet again on corals and mussels
The Swiss Protection Sock is a sock as good as a shoe. It's 50% kevlar!
You're not a scientist. You're not a doctor. You're not even a full-time employee! Where did your life go so wrong?
Mari0 is a fan-made mash-up of Nintendo and Valve Software's games, with a 4-player co-op mode and a level editor. And as a nod to Team Fortress, there are hats. Downloadable for PC, OS X and Linux.[via]
RIP Ronnie Montrose
He started out in Sawbuck, played with other bands, including Edgar Winter Group then launched his own band, Montrose. After Montrose, he formed Gamma, and revealed on tour in 2009 that he had successfully beat prostate cancer. Alas, prostate cancer came back with a vengeance and took Ronnie out on March 3rd, 2012. Get on your bad motor scooter and ride, Ronnie.
Just in time for Sunday, Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps
Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is beautiful and strange. The approximately fifty minute piece was written and premiered in a Nazi prison camp, having grown out of the composers friendship with musicians he met while imprisoned. [more inside]
March 3
Ezra Klein on corruption in US politics
Our Corrupt Politics: It’s Not All Money. Ezra Klein on corruption in US politics. The key mistake most people make when they look at Washington—and the key misconception that characters like Abramoff would lead you to—is seeing Washington as a cash economy. It’s a gift economy. That’s why firms divert money into paying lobbyists rather than spending every dollar on campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are part of the cash economy. Lobbyists are hired because they understand how to participate in the gift economy.
"You can do precise statistics about what's in your database, and may be completely wrong about the world."
The Body Counter Meet Patrick Ball, a statistician who's spent his life lifting the fog of war. [more inside]
Dun! Dun!
LSD researcher Gary Fisher passes on.
Gary Fisher, early pioneer of LSD research, passed away today. The news was announced by his friend Lorenzo Hagerty, host of the Psychedelic Salon podcast.
Gerald Bostock must be nearly 50 by now
March 10, 2012 will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick album, their first ever #1 album in the US. (Previously, sadly the "very extensive packaging" newspaper link has rotted, but a replacement has happily been found.) And April 2, 2012 will see the release of Thick As A Brick II. [more inside]
Ralph McQuarrie, 1929–2012
Ralph McQuarrie, legendary concept artist for Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and many other projects, has passed away at the age of 82. Previously, here and here.
The War In Chechnya: Diary of a Killer
They screamed and shouted, begging us not to kill them because they had family and kids back home. So what? As if, by contrast, we’d come from an orphanage into this s***hole. We executed them all. Diary of the war in Chechnya. (via) [more inside]
"What did they talk about all those days?"
"The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia" - When historian Timothy Messer-Kruse attempted to edit the Wikipedia article on the Haymarket Affair he ran up against the project's policies and editors. Besides the coverage by Messer-Kruse about his two years trying to edit the article in The Chronicle, linked above, the story has spilled out into other media outlets. An article in The Atlantic, an NPR segment with Messer-Kruse and Andrew Lih, a Reddit thread, Bigthink, and others have chimed in on the situation. Lengthy discussion, and a "good article reassessment", has resulted on Wikipedia.
Walt Lewin's best lines
MIT's beloved professor Walter Lewin is famous for his engaging video lectures on classical mechanics. Here are some of his best lines.
Posible names: "Junction Box", "Dry Riser Inlet", "Jar'o'Nails"
Claressa Shields - Radio Diary Made of Awesome
Claressa Shields, a 16 year old boxer preparing for the Olympic trials, records a radio diary. It's about 16 minutes long.
Flamingos are a go.
Last October, the newly rebranded Miami Marlins released an artist's rendering of a tacky home run celebration structure that would be built in their new stadium, to widespread derision. With the offseason nearing its end, the structure has moved from concept sketch to reality. Initial reactions note that the structure is mind-bogglingly enormous, and maybe actually kind of awesome. Recently, stadium staff gave the structure a test run.
Buy more oregano
The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi uses a paper bag to illustrate exactly how the sub-prime mortgage scam worked, and how we're still on the hook for the next catastrophe. [more inside]
"when he came along, I just go -- brrrrrr"
Seventy years ago today nine Japanese Zero fighters attacked the North-Australian town of Broome, destroying more than twenty aircraft and killing over eighty people. Only one Zero was lost, shot down from the ground by Dutch flight lieutenant Gus Winckel. [more inside]
The eternal quandary: Eat it or frame it?
Caramel Dragon Lollipop: a street vendor shows off his incredible skill with a ladle by creating an edible work of art.
Scout doesn't move all that much.
Upon a fight in Darien
The Cabbie v. the Morgan Stanley Executive "Those of you who have any degree of contact with the financial blogosphere no doubt caught the news today that one William Bryan Jennings, the co-head of fixed income for the Americas for Morgan Stanley, was arrested and charged with second-degree assault, theft of services and intimidation by bias or bigotry and released on bail of $9,500. He has been put on leave." [Via].
Black Flag
WHAT TIME IS IT?!
Do you like Adventure Time? (previously) Do you like 8-Bit Game intros? Then you'll like the 8-bit Adventure Time Video Game Intro.
The Buzludzha monument
A photographer visited the abandoned Buzludzha monument. The Buzludzha monument is located on top of a mountain in the middle of Bulgaria. It's an impressive example of communist architecture that is mentioned in this previous mefi post.
WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE
Together again at last: "Neil Young" and Bruuuuuuuuce are "Sexy and I Know It".
A controversy in bioethics
When Alberti Giubilini and Francesca Minerva published a provocative paper about the ethics of infanticide in the Journal of Medical Ethics, the hostile response they received included death threats. [more inside]
Omni Consumer Products
Welcome to Omni Consumer Products. "First they came for the NHS and I said nothing because I was not sick. Then they came for the disabled people and those on benefits and I said nothing because I had an income and didn’t care what the ‘scroungers’ said. Then they came for the schools and I said nothing because I had no kids. Then they came for the police force with private/public partnerships and for speaking up, I received a baton to the face. The private guards looked at their targets and smiled: dissent down 35% this month." [more inside]
形左实右、形右实左
A Pictorial Guide to China’s Politics: Left v. Right Translation of a neat infographic that does a fair job of summing up some of the broad differences between the left and right in popular Chinese political discourse.
Saturday Morning Cartoons/Breakfast Danish
The Story of Animation is a tongue-in-cheek educational film about the process of animation, aimed primarily at potential animation clients who are more clueless than most about how these toons get made (and how long it's gonna take and how much it's gonna cost). Made by-and-for graduates of the The Animation Workshop, an animation school in Viborg, Denmark, which has posted A LOT of impressive student works on YouTube... [more inside]
March 2
Seeing in Circles
RUN DMC is Tougher Than Leather
"The script was originally turned down by Spike Lee who went and directed Do the Right Thing instead. Not a good move on your part Spike, not a good move at all."
In the end, Rick Rubin directed the 1988 Run DMC film Tougher than Leather, which has been described as "vile, vicious, despicable, stupid, sexist, racist and horrendously made." [more inside]
X Planes
X Planes, a tumblr. x planes is a tumblr devoted to historical aviation, and with a specific interest in experimental aviation. [more inside]
U2's POP
Fifteen years and three weeks ago, four lads from Dublin wandered into a K-Mart in NYC and attracted a crowd as they played a song they've never played live since. They then took some questions from the audience about their intentions over the next year or so. The proceedings were carried live on music television stations around the world. (Part 1 2 3 4) The day was February 12, 1997; the song was Holy Joe; the men performing were U2. They were announcing the release of their new album, POP, released 15 years ago, on March 3, 1997. Loved by many critics, adored by many fans, met with an indifferent shrug by the general public, and repeatedly scorned by the band themselves, perhaps it's time to look back again at this controversial groundbreaking album and landmark tour. [more inside]
Is there a Joseph Welch moment underway?
Has Rush Limbaugh misjudged how far he can push things? Efforts are underway at Twitter and Reddit to hit Limbaugh where it hurts, with some degree of early success. While the President called Sandra Fluke to express solidarity, GOP front runner Mitt Romney seemed to think the main problem with Limbaugh's attack on Fluke was one of vocabulary, and Rick Santorum fell back on the "he's just an entertainer" defense.
Biggest fish story of the year
The tuna-fisher Trevignon responded to a call for help from the Costa Allegra... if the crew of the Trevignon are like many other sailors I know, I bet they're swilling champagne and living the high life in Mahé.
But the story may be a bit more controversial.
Yoga can lead to sexy-times!
Yoga can improve your sexual experiences... and perhaps lead to sex with your instructor. [more inside]
Give and Take
Given or Taken – an ABC television documentary by the usually excellent 4 Corners looks at a period in the nation’s history when unwed mothers were forced, coerced or tricked into giving up their babies- often without holding or even seeing their newborn.
Writer Kim Berry describes a little of what it was like to be relinquished by her teen mum.
Yo La Tengo Live on WFMU -- 2012 All-Request Marathon TONIGHT
Yo La Tengo are once again playing requests for pledges Yo La Tengo are once again playing requests for pledges, beginning at 9pm US EST TONIGHT on WFMU. Every year, Yo La Tengo perform requests live on-air in exchange for pledges, to help keep freeform noncommercial radio station WFMU (91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ) on the air. This year is no exception. They will begin playing at 9pm US EST tonight, and will be playing listener requests for several more hours.
Master of Good Girl Art and Pop Culture Pioneer
The Passion of Dave Stevens — The work of the late, great Dave Stevens is known to comic book aficionados in the form of his enduring creation, The Rocketeer, and to art collectors and illustration enthusiasts for his reverently retro yet brilliantly modern renditions of vintage pulp characters, science fiction adventurers and iconic superheroes. But as dedicated Stevens fans know, the artist's true passion and inspiration manifests in his seemingly countless and unfailingly exquisite renderings of the female form, most typically in the classic pinup and "good girl art" style at which he became one of the very best. [nsfw comic art]
Rhythm Circles
A fun flash rhythm builder based on Euclidean patterns. For those who enjoyed Circuli (previously) and the Whitney Music Box (also previously), I recommend Wouter Hisschenmoller's rhythm builder, which uses a Euclidean algorithm to create African-like rhythms, which you can layer to create some fun and complex beats.
You can't kill me without becoming like me! I can't kill you without losing the only human being who can keep up with me! Isn't it IRONIC?
Batman should kill the Joker.
No, he shouldn't.
Yes, he should.
No really, he shouldn't.
What would Kant, Mill, Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Rawls think? [more inside]
The Tyrese Sessions
When rapper Tyrese saw the name Amber Rose on a cc'd email, he contacted her asking to collaborate on some tracks. Only problem is it was Amber Tamblyn, and she decided to have some fun with him. (site NSFW, bad language in demos) [more inside]
Lindsey Stirling
Ramen Rater
David Letterman Holding Records
But You're Not Really Here... It's Just The Radio...
Flawed Symmetry of Prediction: time-lapse landscape, astrophotograpy and painting in high definition
Flawed Symmetry of Prediction is a 4 and a half minute long video, compiling time lapse images of abandoned buildings in rural, desert settings, plus strategic lighting and an optical illusion painting or two. See also: On the Inside Looking Out (The Brain of Infinity), another "street art" time-lapse video. If you want to see single images in more detail, photographer/videographyer Jeff Frost has a portfolio site up with some of pictures. [more inside]
Hey Girl, I know you think this meme has jumped the shark, but that won't stop me from loving it
Is Ryan Gosling cuter than a puppy? Well, I don't know, but he sure seems to be good at a lot of things. Programmer Ryan Gosling. Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling. Shakespearean Ryan Gosling. Feminist Ryan Gosling. Typographer Ryan Gosling. Librarian Ryan Gosling. Medieval History Ryan Gosling. Public History Ryan Gosling.
Ex Boyfriend Ryan Gosling. Serial Killer Ryan Gosling? He even follows Toronto Politics! (Previously.)
World of Wood (Wally)
Wally Wood is most acclaimed for his comical comic books, mainly his acclaimed work for Mad back in its original, pre-magazine, 1950s incarnation. But his personal life was a drama verging on tragedy and culminating with his suicide in 1981. Only now, three decades later, is his story heading toward a happy ending, with a burst of renewed interest in his work.
A graphics heavy interview with J. David Spurlock, newly named director of the Wood estate, on the renewed interest in the artist and his work. [via] [more inside]
A graphics heavy interview with J. David Spurlock, newly named director of the Wood estate, on the renewed interest in the artist and his work. [via] [more inside]
Slavoj Žižek on The Wire
The Wire or the clash of civilisations in one country is lecture by philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the television show The Wire.
An impressive work history... for a baby.
French photographer Malo imagines a single baby in a number of different jobs with delightful results. [more inside]
Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear they're right?
Is SEO killing America? Clay Johnson about how media gives us what we want, not what we need, and how it's destroying democracy. If you don't have time or can't watch a 17 minute video, read this article discussing and summarizing the video.
The Whole Wide World
AirPano's speciality is stunning panoramic photographs taken in flight: this plunging interactive piece above Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall, being a wonderful example. Other pieces include the Maldives, the Great Pyramids of Giza, and Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany. A list of all the works in the catalog, and as locations on a world map. All of the linked panoramas require Flash (amd most have music, which can be muted), but the site also supports lower resolution versions for mobile devices. [more inside]
I Think I'm Getting The Black Lung, Pop
Wilt, Wilt the Stilt, the Big Dipper
This much is fact and legend: Fifty years ago today, at the Hershey Arena, Wilt Chamberlain, then 25 and playing for the Philadelphia Warriors, scored an NBA record-100 points in a 169-147 victory against the New York Knicks. A record which remains unbeaten.
An angel gets its wing[tip]s.
Does this mean Canadians get to put Bjork on the hundred dollar bill?
Iceland eyes loonie, Canada ready to talk. Iceland, still reeling from the aftershocks of the devastating collapse of its banks in 2008, is looking longingly to the loonie as the salvation from wild economic gyrations and suffocating capital controls.... The Canadian government says it’s open to discussing the idea. [more inside]
For the person who's got everything
Odyssey Works makes intensive, multi-disciplinary, multi-hour performances. For a lone audience member. And they're currently seeking that audience member. [more inside]
Geologic time sinks - virtual field trips (VFTs)
Understand something of the earth beneath your feet and the landscape in front of you. These sites provide a chance to see geologic sites and also see expert interpretations.
Geology of Southern England's Jurassic Coast - many pages with detailed strata and sometimes questions to challenge yourself (click photos to enlarge), by Ian West of Southampton University. [more inside]
Old Photos of Baltimore
Sippin' History
Quest for the Perfect Bourbon: Voices of Buffalo Trace Distillery is a documentary from the Buffalo Trace Oral History Project, part of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries.
Friday Non-Flash Racing Fun
Trigger Rally is "a fast-paced single-player racing game for Linux" and now, thanks to WebGL, Three.JS, and Jasmine Kent, everyone can play in a browser.
Ex-Senators allege Saudi government role in 9/11
For more than a decade, questions have lingered about the possible role of the Saudi government in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, even as the royal kingdom has made itself a crucial counterterrorism partner in the eyes of American diplomats. Now, in sworn statements that seem likely to reignite the debate, two former senators who were privy to top secret information on the Saudis’ activities say they believe that the Saudi government might have played a direct role in the terrorist attacks.
Call of Apathy: Violent Young Men and Our Place in War
People need to realise that their wars are not fought by the guy on the news that lost a leg and loves his flag — he was the FNG [f--king new guy] that got blown up because he was incompetent, who left the fight before it turned him into one of us. A private military contractor and former infantryman talks about the military PR complex. [more inside]
The more things change...
The Work of Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Poems While You Wait A group of Chicago poets, led by Dave Landsberger and Kathleen Rooney, sets up shop at festivals, markets, libraries—even a planetarium—and writes "artisanal" poems on demand, in front of their customers, with proceeds going to a literary non-profit. And they're not the only ones.
Speech Jamming "Gun"
The gun effectively shuts down the part of your brain responsible for managing speech, and you fall immediately silent. Japanese researchers have created a hand-held gun that can jam the words of speakers who are more than 30 meters (100ft) away.
"...now I am the Jew here, I am the boss."
March 1
It's a gurn-off!
Get ready for ?
We’re on the verge of two world-changing antimatter discoveries
While the Large Hadron Collider is looking for the Higgs boson, we're on the verge of two huge antimatter-related breakthroughs. One could finally solve the universe's oldest mystery, while the other could reveal strange new particles that are perfect for quantum computers.
Android apps can secretly copy photos [SLNYT]
Android apps can secretly copy photos [SLNYT] "Android apps do not need permission to get a user's photos, and as long as an app has the right to go to the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice, according to developers and mobile security experts."
I'm with the teachers!
A British Columbia teacher offers a spirited defence of education and the right for teachers to strike and raise issues of class size and composition in collective bargaining in this blog post. Meanwhile, BC high school students are walking out Friday in support of the teachers and the concerns they raise about BC's public school system. [more inside]
Emotional Elegance in the AAA Space
Mass Effect 3’s gay male love scenes (the game lets the player determine the main character's sexual orientation) have already triggered a battle between YouTubers. (At the time of the main link's posting, it was 1,320 dislikes versus 292 likes. As of now, it's 1,857 dislikes vs. 1,078 likes.) Gamespot hopes that ME3 ushers in a "a more mature form of interactive storytelling."
Hath he the semblance of a harlot?
Texting is the new literature
Anatol Knotek creates hand-drawn word pictures of Bob Dylan and Van Gogh among others. [more inside]
1,000 new worlds
NASA has announced that the latest Kepler data dump contains 1,091 extrasolar planet candidates, with 196 Earth-sized planets among them. The data shows "a clear trend toward smaller planets at longer orbital periods is evident with each new catalog release. This suggests that Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are forthcoming if, indeed, such planets are abundant." Total Kepler candidates as of February 27, 2012: 2,321. [more inside]
World Press Photo Award Winners
Every World Press Photo Award Winner From 1955-2011. Many photos not safe for work and/or not safe for life, due to images of violence.
Hot buttered sloths in pajamas
Why are we still here?
Corrosion of Conformity: An oral history of 30 years of the legendary hardcore/thrash metal/sludge metal outfit from Raleigh, NC. [more inside]
Ntaganda: "We didn't kill you this morning."
The Warlord and the Basketball Star When an athlete-turned-humanitarian and an energy executive tried to buy gold in Kenya, they found themselves mired in Congo's dangerous world of conflict minerals -- and totally outmatched. [more inside]
The 0.01 percent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests in Australia
Writing in The Monthly, Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan makes a cogent case for ongoing economic reform to deliver equity, contrasting Australian with US outcomes, and slamming three modern robber barons, Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart for their increasing political influence.
Major Breakthrough in North Korean-U.S. Diplomacy
In a surprise announcement this week North Korea agreed to halt nuclear weapons tests, enrichment of uranium and long-range-missile launches and allow the return of international inspectors in exchange for a pledge of "no harmful intent" and 240,000 metric tons of food aid from the U.S. The announcement is seen as a major breakthrough by the State Department after years of stalled negotiations and the first major foreign policy action by Kim Jong-un. [more inside]
We are one Maryland, and all of us at the end of the day want the same thing for our children.
don't take it too serious
Mudbone was a reoccurring character of Richard Pryor's.
They say he was performed for the last time for Pryor's legendary "Live on the Sunset Strip" special.
They say he was performed for the last time for Pryor's legendary "Live on the Sunset Strip" special.
Explain This, Clarissa
Who made it, the shark?
FAKE
An investigative "Cold Case Posse" launched six months ago by "America’s toughest sheriff" – Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County – has concluded there is probable cause that the document released by the White House last year as President Obama’s birth certificate is a computer-generated forgery. Livestream here as THE TRUTH is exposed.
"Hey, I'll call you."
Wondering why that special someone you met the other night never got back to you after the first date? Maybe you were a wee bit too forward - or maybe the fifty-odd messages you sent in 24 hours ended up being hilariously, dramatically read on-air by New Zealand's Fletch and Vaughn. (Just maybe a hair NSFW.)
Justin Webb explores the state of the right in the US
The BBC's Justin Webb explores the state of the Republicans and the right-wing in the US. (podcast, transcript)
Super cute super deformed super heros
Ridiculously cute comic book fan art by Turkish artist Riza Turker. If that's too saccharine, browse his comicbook fanart for other looks beyond the cutesy "super deformed" style.
NO ROBOTS
No Robots: An engaging animated short about prejudice in a future in which robots have been banned.
Meowcraft
Minecraft, cats and explosions...what more do you need?
Forget You, You Motherforgetter!
James Inman rants about former city attorney Mark Sidran to Seattle City Council members after getting arrested for saying the "f word". Warning: may be offensive to some, including Swatch watch collectors and John Tesh fans.
So Superman, The Green Lantern, and The Flash are playing with each other in the bedroom...
Sam Daly has an Internet show. Sam Daly's dad is Tim Daly of "Wings" (and some shows about gangsters and doctors). For the last decade, Tim Daly has also been the voice of Superman in the DC Animated Universe started by Batman: The Animated Series (it's
kind
of
popular
here),
including Superman's own show. To prepare for the new animated DVD feature Justice League: Doom, Tim Daly really got himself back into the role. Perhaps a little too much, so Sam has enlisted co-stars Mal Reynolds Nathan Fillion and Lex Luthor Michael Rosenbaum to help out. Everything went better than expected.
Apologies in advance for any work lost due to archive binging or getting lost in TVTropes.
Apologies in advance for any work lost due to archive binging or getting lost in TVTropes.
Recycling Around the World
Some beautiful, some sad, 33 photos of Recycling Around the World.
T. Boone to the Rescue
80. 80. 80. The whole time.
The Masters Of Comic Book Art; or, Seven Cool Poses Which Can Be Struck in a Bright Yellow Jacket
Released in 1987, The Masters of Comic Book Art is a collection of interviews with notable cartoonists on their creations, creativity, and craft, introduced by Harlan Ellison. [more inside]
1984 + Lemmings = Santorum
Rick Santorum released an anti-Romney ad in January that borrows ahem liberally from Apple's famous 1984 ad. Weirdly, it also copies Apple's second Super Bowl advertisement, Lemmings, which was viewed as insulting to its audience and became a legendary failure. (Via Ken Segall, a former creative director at Apple who writes, "Note to Rick: if you’re going to copy Apple’s marketing success, try not to copy its failure as well.")
Gotta see the whole town, From Yonkers on down to the bay, in just one day.
In the spirit of Miami Shark and Sydney Shark comes the latest offering in the series: New York Shark.
Even robots do chores
Andrew Breitbart is dead
La verdad triunfará
In Hiding:The Life of Manuel Cortes the Socialist barber and mayor who hid inside his house for 30 years to escape Francoist retribution was the first publication by the noted oral historian Ronald Fraser who has recently died aged 81.
A gifted and prolific historian of Spain, Fraser helped establish oral history as a discipline in its own right.
His civil war opus Blood of Spain confirmed his scholarship.
He had a long association with the New Left Review which he helped found.
His last publication was Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War.
A gifted and prolific historian of Spain, Fraser helped establish oral history as a discipline in its own right.
His civil war opus Blood of Spain confirmed his scholarship.
He had a long association with the New Left Review which he helped found.
His last publication was Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War.
President Barack Obama on the B.S. Report podcast
London is full of ghosts
"Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so." - China Miéville on Apocalyptic London
Who blames the pigs?
The Guardian reinterprets the Three Little Pigs. An advertisement for the Guardian's "open" approach to journalism. [SLGuardian]
Photographs of antique and vintage clothing from Europe and America
Old Rags is a collection of photographs of beautiful antique, historic and vintage clothing from Europe and North America. A feast of fashion history images from the 17th century to the 1920’s with a brief FAQ page here.