April 2016 Archives
April 30
Radzyn Stories
"The inside of her head felt slow with panic"
"The Choking Victim" by MeFi's own Alexandra Kleeman is a short story that portrays one new mother's anxiety. The dream-like fiction linked at the author's web site offers a wider perspective on her work. [more inside]
Shades of Purple
Prince's passing has inspired countless musical tributes, usually involving the title track of his magnum opus. Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and New Edition did distinct versions. So did Garth and Trisha Yearwood, Corey Taylor, the cast of The Color Purple and crowds in the streets in New Orleans. The Harlem Gospel Choir and 1,000 high school choir students made the most of the soaring chorus, and Prince protégé and backup singer Elisa Fiorillo gave an understandably emotional performance.
Of course, no one can ever do it like the man himself.
Sir, Name? Sir! Name!
This website gives the meaning and distribution of millions of surnames all over the world. Plus, it suggests some interesting history about surnames.
how it's made in japan
Ever wondered what a possible Japanese equivalent for How It's Made could be like? The jstsciencechannel has one!
There are from 2 to 150, and 151 to 309 videos to choose from. Sadly, they lack English subtitles, however there are a handful of videos that do have them.
Starting with mayonnaise, the series takes you through the making of steel balls (available in English), the construction and testing of sewing machines, how rice crackers are made, a thermos factory, the recycling of PET bottles, a matcha tea factory and the creation of bamboo whisks, and plenty more.
People watching people watching cats
Most of you will have heard of Nyan Cat before. A similar number will know that there is a ten-hour version on YouTube. What you probably didn't know is that there is a ten-hour video of someone watching that ten-hour version. What you almost definitely didn't know is that there's a ten-hour video of someone watching someone else watch ten hours of Nyan Cat.
Which is bigger: >---<
Optical illusions are not universal, and the differences in how we perceive them can help us to understand cognition. The famous Müller-Lyer illusion is not universal, but differs by culture, with some African tribes unable to see the illusion at all - possibly because of differences in environment. Individuals with autism seem less sensitive to the Sheppard's table illusion, which might help improve an understanding of the condition. Differences in responses are possible because different illusions trick your brain in different ways. BBC has a great history of the evolution of optical illusions, and, finally, here are some auto-kinectic illusions, because they are awesome.
Neurodiversity on display
With his project Special Books by Special Kids, special education teacher Christopher Ulmer interviews neurodiverse people about their lives and interests. [more inside]
When Windows Update attacks
You're my special friend
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares
Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ - teacher, poet, and Jesuit priest; lionhearted activist for peace and FBI Ten Most Wanted alum; who set Vietnam War draft files on fire with homemade napalm, co-founded the Plowshares Movement to end nuclear war and weaponry, ministered to men and women with AIDS at St. Vincent's starting in 1984, and Occupied Wall Street in his late 80s - has died at age 94, on the 41st anniversary of the Vietnam War's end. He loved a good arrest photo.
Boom.
Harry and Liz are flicking through some pictures from the Invictus Games when Harry gets a call from Michelle. You'll never guess what happens next... [In tweet]
"There's no point in writing it all down if nobody ever reads it."
One breezy afternoon in 2001, two friends of mine, Richard and Dido, were mooching around a building site in Cambridge when they came across a battered yellow skip. Inside were 148 handwritten notebooks. Some were crammed into an old bottle box that had jaunty green print on the side: "Ribena! 5d!" Most were scattered across the bricks exultantly. A few had royal emblems from George VI's time. Others were bright, bubblegum colours, tangerine and mushy-pea green. A chalky jotter that Dido picked up broke like chocolate. Inside, the rotted pages were filled with urgent handwriting. Running up one of the margins were the words, "Hope my diaries aren't blown up before people can read them – they have immortal value." There was no name or return address on the books. The diarist was simply "I" who had lived, and then died, and been pitched in a skip.– Diary of a somebody: could I solve the mystery of 148 lost notebooks? is an essay by Alexander Masters about the writing of his new book, A Life Discarded.
Radiohead's Corporate Empire
It seems Radiohead are not so much a band as a conglomerate, having the sort of financial structure you would expect to be more associated with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than bands from Oxfordshire. They have been directors of some 20 companies since they formed, according to Companies House. This is not just interesting for gossip. Radiohead’s financial structure shines a light on one of the lesser discussed facts of the music industry: if you want to be a great band, it can help if you are as good at finance as you are at music, or at least have a team supporting you who are. [SLGrauniad]
Or, disdyakis triacontahedron
I hereby claim credit for this when it shows up on various CSIs
Fingerprints! Everybody's got 'em...except for folks with adermatoglyphia, aka "immigration delay disease", a rare, benign genetic mutation that disrupts the formation of fingerprint ridges by disrupting RNA transcription tied to the SMARCAD1 gene.
The Suicide Note as Literary Genre
I Want Your Email Address
I Want Your Email Address. Don’t think about it. Just enter your email address into any of the places I’ve provided for you. Then, you can be on your way.
I made it extremely easy for you to join my mailing list, and yet you think this is a game. This is not a game. I want your email address! And I want it NOW!
Dog is my Copilot
Mister Bentley the Dog and his human, Bradley Friesen, document their rotor-borne adventures up and down the pacific coast of Canada in a Robinson light helicopter. (Don't worry, Mister Bentley always straps in and wears his ear-pro). [via]
"I stop talking, realizing that everyone at the table is looking at me"
Patrick Blanchfield writes for The Revealer: God And Guns
Setting aside both its lyrical merits and ideological upshot, of all responses to Obama’s remarks, Skynyrd’s song had the distinction of being perhaps the most honest – and, as a matter of simple description, the most analytically accurate. For the bare fact of the matter is that whatever you may think of God, or of guns, American history would be unrecognizable without the influence of both. God and machine, ever-in-tandem, producing a nation “strong” not just in the narrow sense of being powerful, but also in the etymological sense of resolute violence, of an abiding legacy of wreckage unparalleled by any other nation on Earth.[more inside]
BUT SHE WAS A BUNKO SCREAM JAR
The Register reports on an audio track a company devised to transfer unwanted sales callers to, which they call "Extension 666," made of detuned singing, distorted hold notices and bursts of garbled static. They posted the track on SoundCloud. Notes: don't have the volume up very high for the sake of your speakers, and it loops after about two-and-a-half minutes.
"I'm having an amazing life, and it isn't over yet."
Born April 30, 1926, Cloris Leachman has appeared in a multitude of roles on stage, film, and especially television. In addition to an Oscar for her role in The Last Picture Show, she holds the record for most acting Emmys, at eight. This fall she will star with George Takei on a Lifetime original sitcom, Friends with Government Benefits, and just last week it was announced that she will play Zorya Vechernyaya in the Starz television adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods. [more inside]
The Bank of England is moving to polymer banknotes
The next Bank of England £5, £10 and £20 banknotes will be printed on polymer. "The new fiver will be issued in September 2016. On 2 June, the full details of the design and security features will be revealed and a range of training materials for retailers and businesses will be released. The £10 note will be issued in 2017 and the £20 note by 2020.
Polymer banknotes are cleaner, more secure, and more durable than paper banknotes. They will provide enhanced counterfeit resilience, and increase the quality of banknotes in circulation."
Man of two voices.
Reel Wild Cinema
Hosted by Sandra Bernhard, clips from Something Weird Video’s (previously) catalogue and a heavily edited main attraction that cut down some feature length z-movie to a presentable bite-sized clips made up 1996's Something Weird Video. SWV has put up the entire run on their Youtube channel, so if you’re looking for some trashy fun, check it out. It’s not safe for work, but Puritans will be happy to know everyone’s best bits get covered in episodes like the “Nudist Camp Night.” Ta-tas get covered with happy faces and front bottoms with Stop signs! (via the twice Hugo nominated Black Gate).
April 29
What gravity?
Tareq Alsaadi performs gravity-defying aerobatics with the SAB Goblin Nitro radio-controlled helicopter — in one case, with some interesting LED patterns on the blades
A recipe for fried mayonnaise.
A Ghost in the Machine
Someone turned a YouTube comment into something good. Prepare to shed a tear or two. (SLV)
Bike Batman
This Just In
One man's trash is another man's treasure
In 2014, Provo, Utah-based rock band Neon Trees' lead singer Tyler Glenn's came out as gay and Mormon. At the time, he seemed optimistic in his ability to navigate both identities, reporting that he received positive messages from Mormon church leaders shortly after coming out. In 2015, he commented that the LDS church seemed to be changing for the better. But with the release of the single "Trash" from Tyler's new solo endeavor and Rolling Stone's related article, it appears that all has not been well in Zion. [more inside]
The third year, we built a ship in the desert
Wasteland Weekend is a Mad Max-inspired festival in California City, California. (SLVimeo)
All Prior Art
All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero – which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art. [more inside]
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
Elisabeth Moss will star in a 10-episode Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood is a consulting producer; The 100's Bruce Miller wrote the script and is an executive producer along with Daniel Wilson (The Handmaid's Tale feature film), Fran Sears (The Sophisticated Gents) and Warren Littlefield (Fargo). [more inside]
Holes, as adapted by Richard Kelly
You want to adapt a lighthearted whimsical YA novel for the big screen; who do you hire for the screenplay? The original author? Nah. Just get the guy who wrote Donnie Darko.
Holes, by Richard Kelly [pdf]. Featuring nuclear holocaust, prostitutes, and mercy killings. [more inside]
Physicists and their love-hate relationship with animals
On the one hand, physicists sure do love cute baby animals and clever puns.
On the other hand, animals can really mess things up sometimes.
Moving On: the story of a life passing, told in yellow yarn
The stop-motion animation video for James' "Moving On" is the story of a life passing, told in yellow yarn. BAFTA award winning Scottish animator Ainslie Henderson explains what inspired him: It’s 2014, and I’m on the phone to Tim [Booth, lead singer of James]. He is describing how the band came to write MOVING ON, and what the words mean to him. The story he tells me is deeply moving; one thing that stayed with me is his describing death as a birth. Days later this conversation echoes around my mind while I’m listening to the song as I walk past a typical Scottish woollen knitwear shop. My eyes flit over a ball of wool in the window while the word “unwinding” is sung....
Manly Health
The most famous trade for a backup catcher in baseball history
What do you do when your team is aiming for the World Series, but nobody on your team can catch your knuckleballer? It's a tale of panic, mistaken identity, emergency flights over cleared airspace, and missing jock cups... It's an oral history of the Doug Mirabelli trade. (SLSports)
I, personally, do not care for apples. But I like you just fine.
It's cold, eh
Atlantic Canada is still getting some winter this "spring". Here's what a guy from Saskatchewan thinks about winter, just in general; some Manitobans' responses, previously.
How Sweden's Roads Became the Safest in the World
When Vision Zero first launched, Sweden recorded seven traffic fatalities per 100,000 people; today, despite a significant increase in traffic volume, that number is fewer than three. "The largest resistance we got to the idea about Vision Zero was from those political economists that have built their whole career on cost-benefit analysis. ... although they might not say it explicitly, the idea is that there is an optimum number of fatalities." [more inside]
You Ask Me for A Hamburger.
What is Cuil Theory? One Cuil ( ‽ ) is one level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation. A pictorial guide. [more inside]
Is This A Bubble?
i am making this post so someone can explain it to me
Menace 2 is an artificial intelligence which learns how to beat a human player at Tic-Tac-Toe and also it is made entirely of wooden drawers and colored beads
"Dad, I'm almost there..."
Hau`oli la Hanau, Aloha!
In the spring of 2015, a billboard for the film Aloha was erected overlooking Logan Square in Chicago. It's still there today. While its fate and that of two others (mercifully blank) is fought over in court, fans of the billboard are planning a tiki party in honor of its first birthday.
Even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again
We all "enjoyed" watching Winter Dragon, a pilot for a TV adaptation of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. Our suffering appears to have been worthwhile however, as Robert Jordan's widow, Harriet McDougal, has announced that the legal issues have been resolved and a new series is on the way. [more inside]
Can't we all just get along?
No Labels is an American political organization based in the United States, composed of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, whose mission is to "usher in a new era of focused problem solving in American politics." As the election draws nearer they have begun promoting their National Strategic Agenda; based on a nationwide survey conducted in the fall of 2013, it's billed as "A Policy Playbook For America's Next President."
(Wikipedia)
My son is also named Borte
Wait for it.
Riding in Cars with Beers
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Inspired by a column in Nature by Melanie Stefan, Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer keeps a CV of failures (PDF); he was interviewed by NPR about it this morning. Other examples of the form include: Bradley Voytek (PDF, skip to the end), Sam Lord (PDF), Alexandra Roshchina, and Sara Rywe (PDF). For non-academic examples, look at Srinivas Rao and Monica Byrne. Ironically, Melanie Stefan's CV page does not list failures.
To hijab or not to hijab
What it means to be a ‘free hair’ in a predominantly Muslim society This is an edited version of a conference and seminar paper presented at the National University of Singapore in March 2016 and Australian National University in April 2016
Ken does it again
Ken Livingstone suspended (again) by the British Labour Party Never a stranger to controversy, Ken Livingstone - former scourge of Margaret Thatcher, erstwhile London Mayor and close friend of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn - was yesterday suspended by the Party. In a continuation of an ongoing issue over alleged Anti-Semitism in the Party (and the British Left in general) he defended MP Naz Shah for remarks she had made (on Facebook in 2014) suggesting: 'Relocate Israel into United States'. [more inside]
April 28
The Jewish Community of Antioquia
The Faithful. "René and Juan Carlos set out to convert their Colombian megachurch to Orthodox Judaism. This is what happened."
... tastes like sad Christmas
New York Sommeliers Try Malört: "On the palate ... a mix of corked Bordeaux, Saler's apéritif on crack, dead dog, and the Gowanus canal during summer."
Best Eaten Alone with No Pants
Do you like Spam and Kimchi? So does J. Kenji López-Alt. Anthony Bourdain and Anderson Cooper like it too.
I'm bringing home a baby peregrine
Watch live: falcon eggs about to hatch in downtown NYC! "Adele and Frank, two Peregrine falcons that call 55 Water Street their home, are expecting five baby falcons. Falcons have been nesting at the building on and off since the 1990s."
Slovenia's Astonishing Baby Dragons
Man Up
On the eve of the 2016 NFL Draft, as one of its most talked-about players faces domestic assault charges, Detroit Lions linebacker DeAndre Levy pens a heartfelt essay on masculinity, power, and sexual violence:
"It’s important for men, especially in a hyper-masculine culture that breeds so many assholes, to stand up and challenge the values that have been passed down to us. This is not just a woman’s problem."
"when I was 16, no one talked like me"
Monica, Marcia, Tonya and Anita - the ‘scandalous’ women of the '90s
The media frenzies that once surrounded Marcia Clark, Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding and Anita Hill all have a pleasant sheen of ‘90s nostalgia about them. Yet their most meaningful lessons remain timeless, as do their most enduring questions—chief among them the mystery of why we are so able, so often, not just to happily watch the story of an abused and marginalized woman unfold in real time, but to see her powerlessness as wicked, shameless strength.
The four women whose stories we are reconsidering now—and others still on the horizon—have one thing in common: they indicted America.
Drkatzbot
Reverse OCR is a bot that picks a word and then draws randomly until an OCR library recognizes it
Sometimes I think I grew up in the 50s
Mary J. Breen writes for The Toast. She's a 71 year old Canadian. She wrote an essay about high school dances back when sock hops meant wearing your bobby socks.
And now, fifty-five years later, I do wonder why I kept going to those dances, though of course teenagers do things for tangled, overlapping reasons, reasons both complicated and simple, critical and shallow, and most of all, for reasons deeply unclear to themselves. Back then, wanting to be in a certain place at a certain time with certain people felt like it had life-or-death consequences. So yes, I felt I had to keep going to those dances.
Maggic Bioart?
"Artist-biologist, jungle-dweller, critical-learner, xeno-feminist, optimistic-fatalist, & proud-amateur, wavering between observer and doer, using documentary video to embed myself in the worlds I'm interested in exploring. If you are a biologist, artist, "bio-artist," DIY-biologist, hobbyist, bio-hacker, bio-punk, xeno-punk, and/or citizen scientist, please contact me" [more inside]
“...the public anger about the economy is not without empirical basis.”
President Obama Weighs His Economic Legacy by Andrew Ross Sorkin [The New York Times] Eight years after the financial crisis, unemployment is at 5 percent, deficits are down and G.D.P. is growing. Why do so many voters feel left behind? The president has a theory. [more inside]
The Irony of Being Let Go for Writing a Review of a Review Company
Back in Februrary, Talia Jane went 'viral', thanks to a bit she wrote concerning poor pay at Yelp. She was fired from Yelp that same day (previously). Now, Lauren Smiley at Backchannel.com takes a closer look at Talia Jane.
Additional Love Languages
The Five Love Languages is a bestselling book that discusses the five essential ways that people “speak and understand emotional love.” The primary love languages include Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch, but many readers are unaware of the remaining seventeen categories, which include the following....
Would You Recognize Richard Sherman if He Were Your Lyft Driver?
Ed Balls
Suvlu'taHvIS yapbe' HoS neH
Axanar is a planned feature film set within the Star Trek universe, following on the short film Prelude to Axanar. Paramount and CBS sued the film’s producers, alleging that the fan film infringes on the studios’ copyrights in Star Trek. Yesterday, the Language Creation Society filed an amicus brief (.pdf), written by Mark Randazza, in Paramount v. Axanar, to oppose Paramount’s claim of owning a copyright in the Klingon language.
"We have made a stunning discovery..."
Archaeological evidence has emerged to reveal that the previously-thought home of the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe, in Albemarle County, Virginia, was actually a guest house and that Monroe's Highland was something far more grand. [more inside]
Grant Morrison's Superman
Current Location: Unknown
Misplaced.Design Eleven New York City landmarks have been misplaced, their current location unknown. Photographs of unclear origin appear to show them scattered across the globe – on sand dunes, mud flats, “lunar” plains, and rocky beaches. Nobody knows exactly what happened or why
PLANE SHIFT: ZENDIKAR
"Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering are two different games, but that doesn't mean their Multiverses can't meet." [more inside]
"The rest of this ride is mine to take. By myself..."
As seen on TV
Phillip Kives, the founder of K-Tel International, has passed away at age 87. (previously) [more inside]
Teatox Party
Grateful Dead Home Movies
Grateful Dead home movies filmed by Justin Kreutzmann (son of drummer Bill) on the road late 1987 to Sept 1988.
Farewell to a Congolese music legend
One of Africa's most well known and influential musicians, and an international style icon, Congolese singer Papa Wemba died suddenly during a performance in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on April 24, at age 66. Aside from the video clips contained within this NPR obituary, I'd recommend the entertaining feature film from 1987 starring Papa Wemba, La Vie est Belle.
Red vs Grey
Frampton Comes Alive! (on NPR)
Peter Frampton performs a Tiny Desk Concert on NPR for 17 minute of pure joy.
‘I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself.'
Jenny Diski, author, essayist, diarist, former MeFite, has died. The future flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises. [more inside]
TV & Class
TV's Dwindling Middle Class [SLNYT] Now on TV, no matter your actual job, almost everybody belongs to the same generic, vaguely upper-class class. [more inside]
An endless fount of fanfic
April 27
Chatbots: Next Big Thing or Cash Grab?
At the Facebook F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced that businesses would build chatbots on the Messenger platform, bringing the already strong hype around chatbots to a fever pitch. Chatbots, some argue, are the solution for all our problems. But are chatbots really the solution for everything? Or is it just an attempt to have a "next big thing" in order to generate more cash? [more inside]
This is How an FPP Works
@ThingsWork tweets short GIFs abstracting how things work. Sometimes informative, always hypnotic.
How an octopus cleans itself. How chicken and rice is made in space. How a male seahorse gives birth. How crowd control at a comic book convention in Japan works. How Nintendo’s controllers have evolved How metallic coral is made. How the Genie from Aladdin is drawn. How a ladybug takes flight. How walruses sleep while floating.
How an octopus cleans itself. How chicken and rice is made in space. How a male seahorse gives birth. How crowd control at a comic book convention in Japan works. How Nintendo’s controllers have evolved How metallic coral is made. How the Genie from Aladdin is drawn. How a ladybug takes flight. How walruses sleep while floating.
Art is a conversation between you and someone you’ve probably never met
Years With Yoko. For a long time Ono was basically despised, the inevitable lot of someone married to a person whose fame actually may have eclipsed Christ’s. Fools hate foreigners, and fools hate women, but a lot of people who ought to know better hate the avant-garde, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate the politically engaged, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate polymaths, and Ono is all those things. (SLTheMillions) [more inside]
Program music of Kashiwa Daisuke, telling stories without words
"When it comes to modern day composers, the most prominent ones out there are names like Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Toru Takemitsu, Varèse and a couple more.... But when discussing these modern composers, the name ‘Kashiwa Daisuke’ is unlikely to be mentioned. The guy doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.... But he’s up there along with those ‘big’ names I just mentioned. Program Music I is the very proof of this." Consisting of two long pieces, Stella and Write Once, Run Melos, each evokes the feelings of specific stories, told with modern classical instrumentation, spacious post-rock, jazz piano, and some intentional digital glitches. Almost nine years after that first album, Kashiwa Daisuke has released Program Music II (video for the track "Meteor"), with less glitch and more euphoric elements. [more inside]
Where is my Owooooo?
a room of many doors
Lego and trains. Two great tastes that taste great together
A lego train with a GoPro on it touring 50 meters of track, indoors and outdoors. There were also horrible rail disasters [more inside]
Sweating Blood: The Deaths of Sarah Ottens and Ana Mendieta
The violent sexual assault of Sarah Ottens at the University of Iowa inspired a famous art work by Ana Mendieta. But that wasn't the end of the connection between the women. Mendieta would go on to create more artwork invoking the female body, violence, and disappearance (some images NSFW; many are distressing). Twelve years after Ottens's murder, Mendieta would die in suspicious circumstances in a case that has been called the art world's version of the O.J. Simpson trial. [more inside]
Guess who doesn't care that humans are researching this?
I prefer the term "acticulated figurine" myself...
not really 'wrong,' just suboptimal.
“Rooms full of fifth-graders always want to know if I’m married.”
Why I Came Out As A Gay Children’s Book Author by Alexander London [Buzzfeed] “What happens if I tell the truth about why I’m not married? What happens if I reveal this part of myself? Does my career in children’s books end? Will teachers and parents look at me askance? Ban my books? Run me out of town as some kind of creep trying to “recruit” or pushing a “gay agenda”? Will I never be invited to another school again?”
I Wish Everyone Else Was Dead
Pretty Good, episode 7: 'I Wish Everyone Else Was Dead'. Jon Bois looks at 24.
Scots are mad for citrus!
Scurvy Dogs - A brief overview of the history of the scurvy, brought to you by naval cartoonist Lucy Bellwood
“The idea of murder is represented a lot in the brain"
BioWare Goose Cam
The roof of video game developer BioWare's Edmonton studio has been chosen by a pair of Canada geese as their nesting site for the spring. For the next few weeks, you can watch Ganders (female), Arishonk (male) and hopefully some eventual goslings on the BioWare Goose Cam. [more inside]
Country of the future; always the future
Perry Anderson - Crisis in Brazil
Long read but probably the most comprehensive account I have read about how this enormous country got to the more chaotic state than usual that it is in today.
(Via LRB and previous).
Long read but probably the most comprehensive account I have read about how this enormous country got to the more chaotic state than usual that it is in today.
(Via LRB and previous).
Why Do Taxonomists Write the Meanest Obituaries?
Rafinesque’s “absurd” botanical legacy, Gray wrote, amounted to little more than a “curious mass of nonsense.” Gray’s note wouldn’t be the last unkind obituary in the annals of taxonomy, nor would it be the worst. That’s because the rules dictating how taxonomists name and classify living things bind these scientists in a web of influence stretching far back into the 18th century. When an agent of chaos like Rafinesque enters the scene, that web can get sticky fast. In a field haunted by ghosts, someone has to reckon with the dead.
"I can't sentence you for being a child molester"--judge to Hastert
Former GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert admitted to sexually abusing boys on his wrestling team. He was sentenced today to 15 months in prison for structuring bank withdrawals, after a hearing in which "Individual D" took the stand, identifying himself as 53 year old Scott Cross (brother of a former GOP political ally of Hastert), and described Hastert's abuse.
These are the Chicago Tribune's live tweets from the sentencing hearing. [Trigger Warning]
Diabolical beaver holds Daugavpils in its thrall
A man in Daugavpils, Latvia's second-largest city, was attacked by a beaver in the middle of the night. Pinned to the ground, the man - known only as Sergei - phoned for help but rescue services doubted his tale of rodent assault and thought it was a prank call...
New short story from Paolo Bacigalupi
The shelter that gives wine to alcoholics
the marketing team jokingly referred to as a “lesbian suicide musical.”
Leicester City: Dirty Dozen or Harvard Case Study?
With three matches to go, Leicester stands seven points clear at the top of the Premier League. If I had bet on Leicester, I would need to keep the ticket in a bank vault: it will be worth 100,000 pounds if the team wins just one of its remaining three games (and Leicester may not even need to do that if the second-placed team, Tottenham Hotspur, slips up). Earlier this month, fearful bookmakers started offering Leicester fans the chance to cash in their betting slips early for around 75 percent of their potential value. [more inside]
I fully support whatever this is.
A Fox In Space . A year in the making, episode one of this fully voiced and animated riff on Starfox has landed. And it is fiiiiine.
Your Media Merger Update
Almost exactly a year after rejecting the merger of Time Warner Cable and Comcast, both the FCC and the Justice Department have given their blessing to the marriage of TWC and Charter. As first reported by the New York Times*, the New Charter - or Time Charter or Charter Warner or Charter Time Warner Bright House (because there's a third much smaller partner - it's complicated) will become about as big as Comcast, and be operating under restrictions, like NO data caps, usage-based pricing or peering fees (for seven years).
But The Company Known On 30 Rock As Kabletown hasn't been doing nothing since their mega-cable merger was squashed... [more inside]
But The Company Known On 30 Rock As Kabletown hasn't been doing nothing since their mega-cable merger was squashed... [more inside]
Power to the [snake] people, right on!
A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows. The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it.
April 26
Tweeteorology
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology BirdCast: Bird Migration Forecasts in Real-Time. When, where, and how far will birds migrate? Our migration forecasts will answer these questions for the first time.
More history on the box that changed the world on its 60th birthday
On April 26th 1956, a converted World War II tanker, the Ideal-X left the Port of Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, it arrived in Port Houston, Texas, with 58 35-feet (8 feet wide by 8 feet high) containers, along with a regular load of 15,000 tons of bulk petroleum. Malcom McLean had started something big, changing the long tradition of shipping goods on ships. Before that, cargo handling was almost as labor-intensive after World War II as it had been in the mid-1800s. After McLean's innovation, shipping was transformed by this, one of the most important innovations in the global markets of production and trade (Google books preview), though that's not without its complications. [more inside]
The man in the steel cylinder
Fast forward to July 1945. In the interval the cylinder became a minor part of the neighborhood. It was sometimes used by the locals as an impromptu bench and children climbed over it and rolled it around for a playground amusement. One end of the tube was closed and one had been crimped off by the bulldozer that uncovered it, and that end had re-opened enough for a boy to discover something in it: a skeletal foot.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife ... nor his ox. (Exodus 20:17)
Cattle rustling in Texas has risen five-fold in the past decade. Driving it? Drought and desperation: "Cattle rustling has returned, but it has also changed; if the essential act has not, its context has. Today’s rustler has no hope of parlaying a few stolen cattle into a business. Rustling is no longer an aspirational crime, but a stopgap, a stay against desperation. A single head of cattle is not the seed of an empire; it’s a payday loan, a child support payment, or cash for pills. Rustling is not, in this sense, an archaic crime at all, but a crime very much of its time and place, adapted to today’s America, in which social classes are established and the frontier, whatever it was once, has collapsed." [more inside]
The myth of the "Irish slave"
Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend
Hobbes and Me: an obviously unauthorized, yet surprisingly true-to-the-original, live-action Calvin and Hobbes by Rafael Casal and featuring Daveed Diggs.
Sin Empezar: Daymé Arocena
"Meet Daymé Arocena, the Afro-Latina singer taking cues from Selena and jazz greats alike" -- "Sin Empezar" ... "Madres" ... "Don't Unplug My Body". [more inside]
I have to read all of them, right?
Sarah Spain is just a scrub muffin. Watch men sit down with ESPN anchor Sarah Spain and Chicago sports radio host Julie DiCaro and read off harrasing twitter comments about journalists to their face. As part of a campaign #MoreThanMean, to learn more about the project check out the discussion on how the video came about on More Than Sports podcast.
Puppies All the Way Down
The 2016 Hugo Award finalists have been announced. As is probably to be expected given the problems of the last two years slates have yet again had an outsized influence on the nominations. Though various fixes have been proposed the future of the award may be in doubt.
The bear doesn't panic or climb a tree to flee. It stands its ground.
What does a bear in yellowstone do all day? For the first time, trek into the wild backcountry of America's first national park and see what it looks like from a bear's point of view.
Special cameras were attached to the tracking collars of two grizzlies and two black bears in Yellowstone...Tag along as National Geographic gives you an unprecedented window into some of the most fearsome predators on Earth. Watch as these bears act as tour guides through their secret world, with little human intervention.
"A cautionary tale of mangled crisis management on an epic scale."
"Most of them hit ninth grade thinking, 'It's not for me.'"
"Students who are new to America or lack college-educated parents often don't know how important college is. They don't know their options. They don't know that the sticker price isn't necessarily their price. They don't know how to choose schools and apply for college and financial aid. They also lack the support structure that can keep them on track." Guiding a First Generation to College [NYT] [more inside]
PSA: Dogs Hate Hugs
Dogs are technically cursorial animals, which is a term that indicates that they are designed for swift running. That implies that in times of stress or threat the first line of defense that a dog uses is not his teeth, but rather his ability to run away. Behaviorists believe that depriving a dog of that course of action by immobilizing him with a hug can increase his stress level and, if the dog's anxiety becomes significantly intense, he may bite.
Encasement was certainly not something we were expecting
Reddit user _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 is leaving long comments on various seemingly unrelated threads that link together into a very horrifying secret history of LSD, WWII, and the end of the world. [more inside]
The Old New World
Meticulously built using 3D camera projections of historical photos, Alexey Zakharov's The Old New World is perhaps the best chance of seeing American cities as they were at the dawn of the 20th century.
The Grouch: Origins
OSCAR is a prototype (the size of a human hand) consisting of clickable organ modules grown from human cells. (skippable auto-playing video warning) [more inside]
“This was the day, of course, when we learned we were wrong.”
30 years ago today, a fire started near Pripyat. "The time was 1:23 a.m. The world had changed. But those sleeping just downwind had no idea."
The Chernobyl disaster began on April 26th, 1986. [more inside]
Crossing the Delaware: five primaries in the US election
With less than 200 days before deciding who will be POTUS #45, five states hold primaries today: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Following the problems with voting in New York, hopefully there won't be so many this week, although location limitations do not bode well. Since the New York primaries, Ted has cut a deal with John but thinks the convention will be contested, people are eyeing Bernie's email address book, Donald buys a ticket to Seattle but gets his historical election facts wrong while encouraging an academic discipline, John corners the astronaut demographic, Hillary rejects a non-endorsement, Joe is focusing on the Senate, and the new first rule of Abe Club is that there is no more Abe Club. [more inside]
Sir David Attenborough
Sir David Attenborough is decidely NOT dead. Yet. But he is turning 90 in a few days, and the BBC is very wisely choosing to celebrate him while he's still around to enjoy it. Their tribute page features quite a lot of material, which isn't all that hard when you consider that he's been on the air for 60 years, but does feature some rare treasures like color footage of his very first Zoo Quest program (sorry, programme), along with color still photos from the same. A BBC archivist stumbled upon a total of six color Zoo Quest episodes, all of which will air in Britain as part of the tribute. [more inside]
Microsculpture
Photographer Levon Biss has perfected an approach to macro photography which involves compositing roughly eight to ten thousand images into a final image of unsurpassed clarity and detail. He has collaborated with an entomologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to photograph unique insect specimens. Prints of his photographs in large format (up to three meters across) will be exhibited at the museum from 27 May through 30 October, but if you can't make it in person you can view the zoomable images on his site or watch a video which explains the history of the project and provides details of his process. (previously)
Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades
In 1989, ninety-six Liverpool fans died as a result of the crush in the Hillsborough Disaster at the 1989 FA Cup Semi-final (previously). Today, after 27 years of campaigns calling for justice, an inquest has finally ruled that their deaths were unlawful. The result of deadly, and tragically avoidable, mistakes and failures by the Police and Ambulance services. [more inside]
Reinvent Yourself
We’re approaching a point where technological progress will become so fast that everyday human intelligence will be unable to follow it. The Playboy Interview with Ray Kurzweil.
Two Good Men
"Where are we going, judge?" Serna asked.
"We're going to turn ourselves in," Olivera said.
"He said he was going to stay with me," Serna said. "I couldn't process a judge being my cellmate.
"They take me to the cell, and I'm sitting on my bunk. And, then, in walks the judge.
Taking a handsoff approach
Giles Coren has decided to stop masturbating forever (NSFW). The jokes write themselves.
John Smith
The great John Smith, filmmaker and artist. The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), one of the finest avant garde films of the 20th century, Om (1986), The Black Tower (1985-87) (discussion)(MLYT/Vimeo) [more inside]
I would say more, but I signed an NDA.
Uncanny Valley. "Morale is down.. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. “Our culture is dying,” we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. “What should we do about the culture?”"
April 25
How to Be an Artist With a Day Job
"More people are incarcerated in America than are making... [an average $30K] ..."living" from art...You don’t have to be cynical and bitter, you can be optimistic and realistic. Yes, realistic optimism is an actual thing that involves recognizing harsh realities while understanding how to make the best of them. This post isn’t about giving up on your dreams, it's about embracing the journey to achieve them. It's also about accepting the reality that you may never be able to work on your number one creative passion full time. Here’s how you can live like that and be happy." (Includes helpful illustrations; note one of the cartoons has a suicide reference.) [more inside]
Meet Neetu
Two Hours of Steven Universe Background Music
"Less is a bore."
Uncube has ended. A Berlin-based digital architecture magazine that began in 2012 has concluded with issue #43, Athens. Known for its unconventional reportage and groundbreaking design, monthly themes ran the gamut from the desert to Iceland to outer space to, well, death. [more inside]
Sorry, you're not sick enough.
The avalanche of direct acting antivirals (DAAs) for hepatitis C has revolutionized therapy. Treatment regimens based on these drugs have resulted in cure rates of 95+% with minimal toxicity, particularly as compared to the interferon-based regimens.
Although varying in mechanism, the drugs all share a common feature - record breaking costs that prevent most patients from being treated. [more inside]
Nom Jabbar
Enter the Tingleverse
#REINFLATEGATE
Tom Brady’s Deflategate Suspension Reinstated [The New York Times] Roger Goodell, the most powerful man in football, appears to have prevailed in a 15-month battle with Tom Brady, one of the game’s most celebrated quarterbacks. In the end, their feud — known as Deflategate, and a subject of intense derision for the league — will likely end with Brady’s serving a four-game suspension. A three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Monday overturned a lower-court ruling, deciding that N.F.L. Commissioner Goodell had broad discretion to suspend players according to the collective-bargaining agreement with the players’ union. The panel’s decision can be appealed to the full Second Circuit, or even the Supreme Court, but a victory for Brady at this point is a long shot, legal experts said.
All work and no play makes Aes a dull Rock
Michael Cera, Trent Reznor, and Jim Belushi walk into the Roadhouse
Showtime's reboot of Twin Peaks (previously, previously, previously) has wrapped principal photography. Showtime has released the cast list of 217 actors and actresses who will appear in the show.
Jack Davis: America's Most Prolific Cartoonist
Jack Davis, born in 1924 and still with us, is the last living artist who contributed to the legendary EC Comics horror titles. [much more inside] [more inside]
Jade and Eggplant
More than just an iconic paper cup design (previously), teal and teal+purple were the defining sports uniform of the 90s. Much of the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the Charlotte Hornets, who kicked of the teal and purple craze in 1988. From there, suddenly teal-clad expansion clubs were popping up everywhere. [more inside]
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
The love you gave me, nothing else can save me
Portishead's first release in eight years is "SOS", an ABBA cover recorded for the film adaptation of J.G. Ballard's High-Rise.
Superman v. Capitalism
The question “why does a superhero exist?” is easy to answer nowadays: to fight super-villains, or more recently, other superheroes in brattish fits of pique. But, as mentioned, “superhero” is derived from “Superman”, ditto “super-villain”; neither concept existed when Superman first appeared. The first enemy Superman would fight with abilities more than those of ordinary men would not appear until Action Comics #13; until then, Superman fought miscreants with no more power than afforded humans in the real world. ... This hardly seems fair given his non-“super” opposition, but Shuster and Siegel provided a perspective that more than made up the difference to themselves and their readers: class & oppression.
The emotional labor of being brown & queer in the U.S. poetry community
Jennifer Tamayo describes the cost of confronting white supremacy in the U.S. poetry communities, pointing to the emotional, economic, and temporal wages it exacts: "The handling of this poison — the labour to spot and deconstruct instances of capitalist white supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchy at work — is particularly venomous because it performs both personally and systemically." [more inside]
HEYA HEYA HEYA HEYA HEYA HEYA HO
"Random" Jon Poole, formerly guitarist for the unsurmountable Cardiacs, is a delightful loud guy with a penchant for killer pop hooks, thundering drums, and saying "GUITAR SOLO, LISTEN" every goddamn time he solos. If you like music that's loud and fast, his project The God Damn Whores condenses "loud and fast" down to a mathematical formula (sample Poolius Caesar and Cynical Haze if you want to know what you're getting into, or Macho Sapiens if you, like me, love the notion of "heavy rock feminism". With Willie Dowling, he becomes The Dowling Poole, whose debut album Bleak Strategies is sunshine with the right amount of psychedelic darkness and political revolution lurking around the edges. (The Dowling Poole's newest album, One Hyde Park, is out this month, and highly recommended if you're into hyperarticulate bubblegum prog-funk.) Good music! Listen!
"We make porn and then we dress people up as giant sponges."
In the latest installment of the AV Club's Expert Witness feature, Wood Rocket co-founder Lee Roy Myers talks about how porn parodies get made. [more inside]
Anticholinergics linked to dementia
Drugs in the class "Anticholinergics", which includes Benadryl, Dramamine, and an ingredient in Tylenol PM, have been associated with increased risk of dementia or other cognitive impairment. [more inside]
I'm confused about the crisps/mug recommended portion
The Headless Women of Hollywood
It's a truly amazing time to be a headless female body part in Hollywood! This Tumblr examines the time-honored tradition of movie posters displaying women’s bodies without their heads or faces. AVClub asks "How can gender equality ever be achieved in movies if women are being chopped up for spare parts in the ads?"
We won't know until we try.
'Paris has changed permanently': a day on duty with mayor Anne Hidalgo
For Hidalgo, it has already been an extraordinary time in office. “After the attacks, there was suddenly a sense of community, of closeness; a need to stand up and be together. I felt that change in people and I can still feel it. It fills me with hope.”[slGuardian]
"After mastering physics, meteorologists must now master psychology."
The Wesley Willis of Video Games
The game developers of Kingdom of Loathing and Frog Fractions, hosts of the Video Games Hot Dog podcast, express their delight in the strange outsider art that is Fruity Pebbles: The Game. [more inside]
Interactive visualisation of world shipping
You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. There is a worthwhile introductory narration, then you can can "pan and zoom in the usual ways, and skip back and forward in time using the timeline at the bottom of the screen. " [more inside]
While the jukebox plays our favorite song...
Jazz and soul singer Billy Paul, best known for the No. 1 hit ballad and Philadelphia Soul classic Me And Mrs. Jones, has died. [more inside]
Living just enough, just enough for the city
1993, Manhattan – someone films test footage for an early HD video format called D-VHS.
SLYT, make sure to switch to 1080p60 for best quality
SLYT, make sure to switch to 1080p60 for best quality
April 24
Transformational leaders can make you sick
A study of 155 postal workers in Denmark has found that, although "transformational leadership has previously been associated with positive employee well-being, better sleep quality, fewer depressive symptoms and reduced general absenteeism in the short term," in the long term
some vulnerable employees in groups with transformational leaders may... have increased sickness absence rates if they ignore their ill-health and frequently show up for work while ill, known as presenteeism.[more inside]
I was served lemons but I made Lemonade.
Beyoncé Knowles Carter treats us to a visual album "bolder and deeper and more uncomfortable than anything [we] could have predicted," blending tracks from her newest record with narration from the poetry of Warsan Shire (more here), and visuals directed by Jonas Akerlund, Kahlil Joseph, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Todd Tourso, and Beyoncé herself. [more inside]
If you wish to make a computer from scratch...
The Megaprocessor is a 16-bit computer made almost entirely from discrete electronic components (individual transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors and LEDs). When finished it will measure 14m wide x 2m tall. [more inside]
Edward Snowden: THE INTERNET IS BROKEN
The activist talks to Popular Science about digital naïveté
Security, surveillance, and privacy are not contrary goals. You don’t give up one and get more of the other. If you lose one, you lose the other. If you are always observed and always monitored, you are more vulnerable to abuse than you were before. [more inside]
Security, surveillance, and privacy are not contrary goals. You don’t give up one and get more of the other. If you lose one, you lose the other. If you are always observed and always monitored, you are more vulnerable to abuse than you were before. [more inside]
“I truly love keeping the wolf from the lambs.”
The retired cops investigating unsolved murders in one of America’s most violent cities. by Christopher Pomorski [The Guardian] A former murder capital of the US, Camden, New Jersey has created its first cold case squad. Can solving old killings help restore an embattled community’s trust in law and order? [more inside]
Ancient Engineering Science So Advanced It Is Like Magic
Scientists have solved an ancient Peruvian mystery from space By using corkscrewing funnels, the Nazca were able to use wind to move underground water supplies without benefit of electricity, thus allowing for “an inexhaustible water supply throughout the year" and "an intensive agriculture of the valleys in one of the most arid places in the world.” [more inside]
Stars reign down - on you
Through Silver In Blood turns 20. Invisible Oranges reflects on the dense, white-hot cornerstone of Neurosis' 30 year career. A marriage of ritualistic drumming, suffocating noise, and crushing distortion, best exemplified in this profound live rendition of Locust Star. [more inside]
ASL at the Supreme Court
This week, 12 members of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Bar Association were sworn in to the Supreme Court bar. After they were presented to the court for admission, Roberts signed in American Sign Language: “Your motion is granted.” [more inside]
The Best Show: Billy Crystal doing his "Jazz Man" character
Tom Scharpling on The Best Show in 2006 listening to Billy Crystal's "Jazz man" impression at the Comic Relief Katrina benefit. Synced to the video from the DVD. (SLYT)
"Piquet," properly pronounced "What the hell is that"
Historic Card Games described by David Parlett. "These pages (Timeless classics and treasures now forgotten) present (a) histories of classic games such as Poker and Euchre and (b) details of historic games, such as Gleek and Quadrille, that are now only museum pieces. This project was started at the suggestion of John McLeod, who tells me that visitors to his award-winning Pagat website for the rules of card games often inquire after the play of some old game that they have come across in period novels or film or readings in cultural history." [more inside]
Everything Happens To Me
In addition to being a talented saxophonist, the late Art Pepper was many things -- among them, a drug addict, a thief, an alcoholic and a writer. This personal film portrait (from 1981) reveals the fascinating life of a remarkable jazz musician in his own words, as he describes his dreams, his criminal past, his upbringing and the meaning of his tattoos. He died the next year. [more inside]
Why are our cars painted such boring colors?
April 23
What would you like your nation to be known for?
In the dubious tradition of "What X Are You?" quizzes, National Geographic asks Which Of These Tiny Countries Fits You Best? (a potentially useful tool if youknowwho wins the election, right?)
Vending Machines: How Do They Work, Anyway?
An animated explanation for how newer vending machine detect fake coins and keep your treat from getting stuck.
We Have Cameras Just No Lenses
Tomorrow - or possibly today - is World Pinhole Photography Day! All around the world, people will be making cameras , which can be simple or complex; you can hack your DSLR or just use an Altoids tin. There are workshops & events happening all over the place, - if your town isn't listed there, Google, because there are a lot of things going on.
Previously on Metafilter with some quite awesome and helpful links!
It's Not The Dark That Kills You
It's Not The Dark That Kills You A very moving and well-written article (with videos) about a terrible problem in isolated Arctic communities. This long article is about Nuuk and Tassilak, on opposite coasts of Greenland, but it could easily have been about Attawapiskat in Canada's North. [more inside]
Final part of McCloskey's trilogy on political economy is here
Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication University of Illinois at Chicago, published The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce in 2007. [more inside]
Charts for Book Nerds
Do not bid me remember mine end
William Shakespeare, playwright and poet, is dead at 52 of causes unknown. Shakespeare often meditated upon death in his works, once stating "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more." In one of his last recorded texts, he urged sympathy for immigrants. [more inside]
Introducing...
Solar Impulse is back in the air
Flying around the world on solar power has proven challenging. 2007: "Meanwhile in Switzerland, development continues on the Solar Impulse, which has a goal of flying around the world, manned(!), by 2010." 2010: "The Solar Impulse took flight today... with the goal of flying around the world in 2012." 2015: "The Solar Impulse... is currently in the midst of the longest leg in its pioneering round-the-world journey — China to Hawaii." Today: Watch a live stream of the Hawaii to California flight. Things are going okay so far.
How it feels to be blind in your mind
Blake Ross: "I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I can’t 'see' my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought 'counting sheep' was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind."
April 22
How thick is a sharpie mark?
I think the best way to describe it is corruscatingly, brutally fast.
Do you like electric cars? Renewable energy? How about a certain Service Mechanoid from Red Dwarf? If so, you should be watching Robert Llewellyn having a tremendous time hosting Fully Charged (YouTube). Whether it's acquiring "roadborne Tourettes" driving the Tesla Model S P85D (and the followup in the Model S P90DL), or the slightly modified 1974 Enfield 8000 ECC, called the Flux Capacitor, he's the very picture of a man having a terrific time. [more inside]
'Heram el-Kaddaab'
Take Your Child to Conference Day
UC Berkeley psychology professor Tania Lombrozo tried an unusual tactic when organizing the Misconceptions of the Mind Conference: invite the babies as well as their parents. She wrote: [more inside]
There are no things, there are only truths.
Something terrible happened to you in outer space. All you can remember are the last few moments, the sun fading to a speck as you and your crew broke free from the solar system, the ship’s systems suddenly shutting down, the panic and blackness inside, shouting and sobbing, outside the phosphorescent fringes of the wormhole as it opened up in front of you—and then you woke up, sweat-slick in your own bed at sunrise, with the birds singing outside, in another universe. You are trapped in the world of the popular TV astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and you know this, because here the sunrise isn’t a sunrise at all.
The Wham of that Memphis Man is Silenced.
Lonnie Mack, one of rock & roll's earliest guitar heroes, role model to Stevie Ray and a fine singer to boot, passed yesterday at 74.
Not 72, not 74.
Vogue Magazine produces a semi-regular video feature called 73 Questions. Name cat breeds with Taylor Swift. Hula Hoop with Lupita N'Yongo. Play ping pong with Daniel Radcliffe. Trampoline with Reese Witherspoon. Stretch with Amy Adams.
A riot unfolding
An extraordinary piece (MarylandMorning) on the detailed unfolding of the Baltimore riots from one year ago, with police radio interspersed with interviews of students.
Charges Levied in Flint Water Crisis
The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is proceeding past the finger-pointing phase into the actual-criminal-charges phase, as a city employee and two state Department of Environmental Quality employees have been charged with various crimes related to misconduct in office and tampering with evidence. [more inside]
Doris Roberts RIP
Doris Roberts, an ubiquitous stage and screen actor from the United States, passed away April 17th at the age of 90. [more inside]
One in five African Americans in Virginia is disenfranchised
...until now? "Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia used his executive power on Friday to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 convicted felons, circumventing his Republican-run Legislature. The action overturns a Civil War-era provision in the state’s Constitution aimed, he said, at disenfranchising African-Americans." SLNYT: Virginia Governor Restores Voting Rights to Felons
Next year in JeRUsalem
“...spark some reactions from an otherwise staid subway ridership.”
Subway Reading: Taking Fake Book Covers on the Subway [YouTube] [Video] How would you react if you saw someone reading 'Getting Away With Murder for Dummies on public transport?' Comic Scott Rogowsky (@ScottRogowsky) took some pretend, provocative book covers on an underground operation. [via: The Guardian]
Chag Sameach!
I want no part of such elec-trickery.
How could kids today rebel? Stephen Fry suggests going off the grid.
U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High
"Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s." (slNYT) [more inside]
The State of New York City Rent Affordability in 2016
"Using the median rent-to-income ratio, which measures the share of income spent on rent, the typical household in New York City is expected to spend 65.2 percent of its total income on market-rate rent in 2016."
Les bruits de Paris au XVIIIème
Musicologist Mylène Pardoen has researched and recreated the ambient 18th-century sounds of Le Grand Châtelet quarter in Paris. Historians used artwork, surviving machinery and tools to record and bring together 70 different soundscapes, including a recreation of the Notre Dame water pump using an 18th-century water mill whose sound was adapted for the size of the Notre Dame pump. The pump in question brought up water from the Seine for Parisian consumption. [more inside]
Counter-Strike Casino
Datasets over algorithms
"Perhaps the most important news of our day is that datasets — not algorithms — might be the key limiting factor to development of human-level artificial intelligence". Alexander Wissner-Gross responding to Edge. Found here, with some links and a table.
Everybody dies
Pieter Hintjens is an author and programmer best known as the founder of the ZeroMQ project. He was recently diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. A Protocol for Dying is his latest and final blog post in which he reflects on how to interact with the terminally ill.
April 21
It's Raining Humvees
Stripes: Humvees plummet to ground in Hohenfels parachute drop fiasco.
Popular Science (with GIFs): Parachuting Humvees Crashed in Germany.
I felt many of the murals with children came across as creepy
For years, foreign visitors to North Korea were only able to see two stops on the Pyongyang metro. Until now: for the first time ever, photos from all across Pyongyang's subway.
Out of the goodness of our mammaries
On inequity in job applications
"Our hiring practices are inequitable and need to change", says Vu Le from Nonprofits with Balls, who then lays out a comprehensive list of factors that companies should change in their hiring processes.
The Secret History of Tiger Woods
ESPN's noted longform writer Wright Thompson charts the decline and fall of Tiger Woods in the years after his father's death.
"The death of his father set a battle raging inside the world's greatest golfer. How he waged that war - through an obsession with the Navy SEALs - is the tale of how Tiger lost his way."
"The death of his father set a battle raging inside the world's greatest golfer. How he waged that war - through an obsession with the Navy SEALs - is the tale of how Tiger lost his way."
We offer every customer the same price. It doesn’t matter where you live
Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It? - Bloomberg This is a logical approach from a cost and efficiency perspective: Give areas with the most existing paying members priority access to a new product. Yet in cities where most of those paying members are concentrated in predominantly white parts of town, a solely data-driven calculation that looks at numbers instead of people can reinforce long-entrenched inequality in access to retail services. For people who live in black neighborhoods not served by Amazon, the fact that it’s not deliberate doesn’t make much practical difference.
This is one Big Dance they're all winning
How's your Running Man these days? Some members of the Maryland Terrapins basketball team challenged people to a dance off. Several other teams responded with enthusiasm. The #runningmanchallenge was ON.
It is my one recreation and I think it should be done well
Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson when he wasn't teaching at Oxford or writing fiction under the name Lewis Carroll was an avid photographer. Over 200 of his images originally contained in five of his personal albums are collected at the UofT Harry Ransom Center whom have posted 47 of them online in the Lewis Carroll Photography Collection .
When Dungeons & Dragons Set Off a ‘Moral Panic’
"It was just a bunch of s***."
"They called me once and said, 'We found a torture chamber!' I go over there and it was a fuse box." An oral history of that two-hour live television special in which Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault. [more inside]
Cancer is Stupid
Richard Lyons, Negativland Founder, Dead at 57 A founding member of audio collage band Negativland, passed away from nodular melanoma today, on his 57th birthday. According to the band's Facebook posting, he died "peacefully and pain free." [more inside]
It's a blog that mashes up Rushmore and Sonic the Hedgehog
The Ninth Wonder of the World falls - Chyna, 1969-2016
Pro wrestler Joanie "Chyna" Laurer has died. Known as the Ninth Wonder of the World (André the Giant had long been billed as the Eighth) for her physique and dominance in the ring, Laurer was 46. [more inside]
Nothing Compares
His full name was Prince Rogers Nelson. He was 57 years old when he passed away today at his home, Paisley Park, outside of Minneapolis MN [more inside]
Bittersweet
Water will flow once more in Maui streams long diverted to feed the island's thirsty sugar cane industry. The water will now be available for the cultivation of kalo, or taro, a plant with historic and cultural significance whose cultivation has had a complicated history. This marks a win for local taro farmers, who had been fighting for some time for the return of water. The water returns as the sugar industry departs the island for good, taking a number of jobs with it. [more inside]
The smug style in American liberalism
Vox: The smug style in American liberalism: "There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really —but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them."
A Ghost in the Freezer
A moving little essay about the power of food, family, and memory.
Liscarians
"That term—library anxiety—is hardly a household name among students, but say it to a college librarian, and he or she will know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s the feeling that one’s research skills are inadequate and that those shortcomings should be hidden. In some students it’s manifested as an outright fear of libraries and the librarians who work there. To many librarians it’s a phenomenon as real as it is perplexing.
"'Why would anyone think we are intimidating?' writes Michel C. Atlas. 'What is intimidating about a master’s-prepared professional earning $35,000 a year?'”
"'Why would anyone think we are intimidating?' writes Michel C. Atlas. 'What is intimidating about a master’s-prepared professional earning $35,000 a year?'”
The Killer Hiding in the CDC Map
What caused Haiti’s cholera epidemic? The CDC museum knows but won’t say. The U.N. soldiers at that base had just arrived from their home country, Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway. Thanks to negligent sanitation practices, such as the open dump pits above, there was a multiplicity of ways that their choleraic feces could have gotten from the base into the river, including latrine pipes leaking over a drainage canal that emptied into the river.
Nut Job
A $10 million nut heist is a window into the shady, lucrative world of large-scale food theft. Food and beverages have replaced electronics as the most-stolen good in the US. Criminals are concentrating their efforts on fewer heists of larger value, and as stolen goods go, nuts have a lot of appeal. They’re expensive. They have a long shelf life. They have no serial numbers and can’t be electronically tagged or traced.
“There was big hype over the video, the stream had a good 2.8K views,”
When Rape Is Broadcast Live On The Internet by Rossalyn Warren [Buzzfeed News] Sexual assault, domestic abuse, and attempted murder are among the crimes recently captured on live video services. BuzzFeed News uncovered one apparent incident of a rape aired in real time and asked what it means for the companies that host this content. [more inside]
Gunnerkrigg Court - "Traveller" "(Viaxeiro)"
Gunnerkrigg Court, Tom Siddell's webcomic about a mysterious school (apparently) for children with unusual abilities, has progressed and expanded considerably since we first saw it here nearly nine years ago - both in-universe and out. It's now up to fifty-seven chapters and counting, and the many new and different characters and plotlines can make it a bit daunting to jump into cold. Fortunately, Siddell has also published collected books of the series as well as two stand-alone side comics. The second of these, "Traveller", was just put up on the website last week. It's a quick read at 40 black and white pages, and about the only thing you need to know going in is that the girl can communicate with animals.
Behold the Kickmen
Dan Marshall (@danthat) knows nothing about football. Is that going to stop him from making a football game? It is not! [more inside]
It's Confederate Heritage Month!
Back in February, Mississippi (Goddam) Governor Phil Bryant declared April Confederate Heritage Month, joining other southern states in in the practice. Orcinus blogger and SPLC contributor David Neiwert thought it would be appropriate to devote his blog this month to exploring the history of the Confederacy, although perhaps not in the way Bryant intended. [more inside]
Even though ye are naughty, I still luv ye... aye!
Who is this naughty raven? It's Izzie of the Knaresborough Castle Ravens. Read about the adventures of Izzie and her fellow ravens on their website: "One Saturday I was busy chatting to a local resident when Izzie decided to get up to mischief, she spotted a potential victim and like a spider drawing a fly into its web, Izzie did like wise with this poor unsuspecting visitor..." [more inside]
AAAAAALLLLLVIAAAALVIIIINNNAAALVIIIINNNNII
The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive
The EmDrive (previously 1, 2) is still getting attention from the scientific community. MIT Technology Review sums it up: The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster
If cities are sexed, then Cork is a male place.
Low-sized, disputatious, stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type. He has a haughty demeanour that’s perhaps not entirely earned but he can also, in a kinder light, seem princely. He is certainly melancholic. He is given to surreal flights and to an antic humour and he is blessed with pleasingly musical speech patterns. He is usually quite relaxed, and head over heels in love with himself”
Algorithmic sampling
Music Mappr will take any uploaded mp3 or soundcloud link, chop the linked piece of music into short fragments, reorder the fragments based on sonic similarity and let you play back clusters of these fragments independently.
April 20
treated static
Ideas in motion... crash to a halt
DC comics has announced a "restructuring" of their Vertigo imprint and has eliminated Shelly Bond's role as Vertigo Vice President & Executive Editor. Bond was also involved in setting up Wild Animals, Gerald Way's DC imprint which uses many early Vertigo characters. Meanwhile previous Vertigo head Karen Berger has returned to comics editing a book for Image.
Millennial Reality
Psychiatric lockout: making the toughest love choice
A growing number of parents in Illinois who are unable to access necessary mental health treatment through Medicaid are voluntarily abandoning custody to the state so their children can get the care they need for severe mental illness. [more inside]
Is a little bit of ionizing radiation good for you?
Paracelsus, the father of modern toxicology, held that "The dose makes the poison.” Substances considered toxic are harmless in small doses, and conversely an ordinarily harmless substance can be deadly if over-consumed.
Going a step beyond Paracelsus, hormesis is the idea that small doses of ordinarily harmful stressors actually improve a variety of outcomes by stimulating defense or repair mechanisms. Below a certain dose the stressor acts beneficially, there is a threshhold dose where the stressor has no net effect, and past that point the net effect is deleterious. [more inside]
Phoenix puts the "graphic" in graphic novels about bike safety
Arizona Central reports that the Phoenix Department of Streets has been distributing to kids bicycle safety comics that use very explicit visuals of injuries from bicycle accidents. Warning: I'm not kidding when I say they are explicit.
Professor Sun Ra Has Got Something To Say To You
It's Spring of 1971 and you're a student at UC Berkeley, where artist-in-residence Sun Ra is offering a lecture series entitled "The Black Man In The Cosmos." The Weather Underground is blowing up bathrooms. The Ed Sullivan Show is grinding to a halt. As the weeks roll on, Charles Manson will get the death sentence (later reduced to life in prison) and the Rolling Stones will drop Sticky Fingers. But you? You're in the pocket of something Next Level and way above all that noise. Sometimes Ra hauls in his keyboard and treats the class to extended solos. Mostly he delivers his own signature blend of arcane afrofuturistic dharma:
Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four. [more inside]
The Great Green North
At this week's UN General Assembly Special Session on drug policy - scheduled after lobbying by Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, whose leaders are calling for a more “humane solution” to the drugs problem that goes beyond a focus on enforcement and criminalization - Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott announced that Canada will begin the process of legalizing and regulating marijuana in spring 2017.
Acting is not my favourite thing
Victoria Wood - comedian, actress, singer and songwriter, screenwriter and director - has passed away at 62 on 20 April 2016, after a short battle with cancer. [more inside]
Snake, the MMO game
age quod agis
One Part Science, One Part Human Interest
Message in a bottle, promising finder a shilling, bobs up after 108 years “We found an old shilling, I think we got it on eBay. We sent it to her with a letter saying thank you.” [more inside]
Calais and the shantytown on its doorstep
Steven Universe’s frustrating schedule is crucial to its success
Steven Universe is a pretty popular Cartoon Network show with pretty odd scheduling -- its second season mostly aired in week-long "StevenBombs", with one new episode airing each weeknight, with sometimes months between Bomb weeks. This isn't because the animators are backlogged or the censors are combing through it for naughty bits. Instead, it's a conscious strategy of combining binge-watching and appointment-television scheduling to maximize fan reaction. And it seems to be working.
how to negotiate a raise (if you're a woman)
Is this hydrogen car the future—or just a gimmick?
Living is complicated
Last Men Standing. The stories of eight men who aren't supposed to be here. Diagnosed with HIV in the 1980's, when that was a death sentence, they are now living lives they never expected to have. [more inside]
SOURCE
From psych-pop band Fever the Ghost and Tasmanian animator Felix Colgrave (previously), a new and fantastic voyage: SOURCE. [more inside]
Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20
Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew announced that Harriet Tubman, a black woman who helped to free slaves via the Underground Railroad, will replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the US $20 bill. This is a change from earlier plans to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 with a woman. The new bill designs “should be ready by 2020.”
Access Together
Access Together crowdsources accessibility information about businesses and other venues. The site is relatively new, and coverage outside of NYC is sparse, but contributing is easy.
"I DIDN'T LIVE AS A HUMAN"
AP: South Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants'. [no graphic pictures but deeply unpleasant]
Choi was one of thousands — the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled — rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. ... The owner of Brothers, Park, received two state medals for social welfare achievements and sat on a government advisory panel. His version of his story even inspired a 1985 television drama about a man's heroic devotion to caring for what were called "bottom-life people."
Don't tell me I'm getting served anything other than Tit Window Pie
Earlier this month, the Disney cable network Freeform (formerly ABC Family) announced they had greenlit an upcoming live-action series about the Marvel teenage superheroes Cloak and Dagger. In response, comic artist Kate Beaton has used Twitter and her comic “Hark A Vagrant” to draw attention to the impracticality of Dagger’s costume, notably the Tit Window.
(See also The Hawkeye Initiative, discussed previously.)
Who's the hero of the story?
Looking forward to the ironic pileons
"When we punish others, we're advertising our own moral character" is one of the assertions made in this piece on Vox that offers a number of explanations for the question of "why it's so easy to get sucked into fights on the internet."
Even Hillary Clinton has dabbed.
Interactive timeline of history
Chronas is a history project linking Wikipedia and Wikidata that lets you use a time slider at the bottom to see how the world looked any given date during the past 2000 years, watching realms grow and disappear. Video describing how it works. If you click on the countries/regions/empires shown, then it will show you the appropriate Wikipedia entry. [more inside]
The Great Firewall of China has blocked The Economist
After leading with a cover story criticizing Xi Jinping (otoh) The Economist has been censored in China; Time too and now Medium. [more inside]
April 19
The first time my ass touched porcelain I was already a married man.
It's a veritable Earthbound cabaret!
The man who composed the soundtracks to cult video games Mother and Earthbound, Keiichi Suzuki, has a crazy-ass pop duo. It's more wonderful than you would ever expect. [more inside]
Going viral on Pakistani social media
Waiting for the build (oil on canvas)
I want to fly like an eagle
JUST GET AN APARTMENT
Anti-Bullying Activist Goes Gamergate
The Strange Tale of Social Autopsy, the Anti-Harassment Start-up That Descended Into Gamergate Trutherism [more inside]
“crisis” refers a moment when the body identifies intense danger
“To Become Louder, Even Still”: Responses to Sexual Violence in Literary Spaces Apogee Journal has collected fourteen responses from writers to sexual violence perpetrated in the literary community. [more inside]
School is in attendance on Wednesday April 20th
The Vancouver School Board would like to remind students that 4/20 is a regular school day, and absences will be marked. "While not officially confirmed," the information sheet from the VSB helpfully adds, "it appears that the 2016 Vancouver event will be held at Sunset Beach." [more inside]
The not so lonesome prairie
Rex Sorgatz grew up in Napoleon, ND - population about 750, and a hundred miles from nowhere. So what's it like growing up there today, with the world at your fingertips?
'Hope everyone pukes on your artisanal treats': fighting gentrification
A Guardian article on the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights details the efforts of "an eclectic coalition of residents, business owners, feminists, Maoists and other activists" to fight against gentrification -- and against capitalism itself: [more inside]
Someone Knows Something
Someone Knows Something is a CBC podcast that attempts to uncover the mystery behind the disappearance of Adrien McNaughton. In 1972, 5 year-old Adrien was fishing at Holmes lake in Eastern Ontario with siblings, his father, and a family friend. After getting his line stuck on a tree in the lake, he gave his pole to his father, then walked to the edge of the woods near the lake, where he sat down and watched the others fish. That was the last anybody saw of him. The podcast is led and hosted by CBC producer David Ridgen, who grew up in the same area as Adrien's family. Ridgen has a history of tackling and solving cold cases.
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans
Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them. An essay on "Financial impotence" from Neal Gabler in The Atlantic, part of a longer project on "Financial shame": True Money Stories
The alt-right explained
Doppelgänger thy name is Legion
The rise and fall of Rafael Palmeiro
the most important and costly conversation America is not having
"In celebration of National Health Care Decisions Day, Death Over Dinner and The Conversation Project are teaming up once again to challenge Americans to fill their table with comfort food, family, and friends — to break bread and taboos by taking part in a nationwide dinner party... Send an invite to loved ones, and then set the table to start talking about end-of-life care and how we want to live the final days of our lives." [more inside]
This Doodle Is Mystifying The Internet - Can You Tell What It Shows?
This drawing is stirring all kinds of confusion on the Internet. It seems that many people can pick up what’s in the drawing within a few seconds. Others, however, seem to see nothing but a black blob or find all kinds of things that aren’t there, like a kind of Rorschach test.
social media as your guide
Twirling towards freedom: the US election - New York primaries
In the endurance test that is the 2016 US presidential election, we finally come to New York State where all of the polling stations are now open. The state consists of not only the city famed for fine dining but also the mainly rural upstate region. There's a lot of delegates here; Ballotpedia has information about the Democratic and Republican allocations.
Since last time, Paul said "Nope", GOP leaders said "Meh" followed by "Rules?", Washington Democrats had their own local endurance test, Virgin Islands Republicans had an unpleasant meeting, Bernie visited the Vatican, Hillary visited Staten Island (as did Donald), the Democratic candidates debated, Donald is figuring out West Virginia, Ted appears very conservative, and a grumpy John is aiming for second. [more inside]
How Were They Gonna Say No to This?
Hamilton is awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making it the ninth musical to receive this award. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama is given "For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life." [more inside]
"Severity always, justice when possible"
The Lure of Everest
With their empire in tatters, postwar Britons were desperate for a source of renewal to pierce their collective mourning; they needed grand projects to restore national pride. They looked eastward, and up. Starting in 1920 the lexicon and tactics of war were applied to the attempts to scout and conquer Everest. Vast expeditions — the first in 1903-4 had taken a load so hefty that 88 porters died of exhaustion — made their way across the Tibetan plateau.- writes Holly Morris in the NYT review of Into The Silence, a book by Wade Davis of the National Geographic Society covering the British Everest expeditions of 1921, '22, and '24. [more inside]
“I do not have the answer to that one.”
Helena’s mission is to “create positive impact across the globe,” is funded by “significant personal capital” from 20-year-old Henry Elkus, and “thus far, we’ve been awed by the bonds of friendship and collaboration Helena Members have begun to make in advance of their first meeting.I Have No Idea What This Startup Does and Nobody Will Tell Me
Destined to make a difference
Maryland has the highest rate of deaths attributable to emissions--113 per 100,000 annually--of any area in the United States. The Curtis Bay area of Baltimore is the epicenter for this pollution, ranking "first in the entire country for quantity of toxic air pollutants." In 2012, when high school student Destiny Watford read online about a plan to build a so-called "clean energy" trash-burning incinerator power plant less than a mile from her neighborhood, Destiny organized students and residents to fight back. Her efforts yielded two unlikely results: successfully blocking construction on the plant, and being honored with a 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, an international prize awarded annually to 6 grassroots activists each year from each of the world's 6 geographic regions. [more inside]
Deep Alice
Recently there was a post about using deep learning techniques to apply artistic styles from one image to another. Here is a similar technique applied to moving video from Disney's Alice in Wonderland, using a number of well-known paintings to modify the source. [more inside]
Bendito Machine V
"Motor Doping"
Tiny Motor Powers a New Threat to Cycling Races (NYTimes) "A grueling cycling race is somewhat less grueling if your bike is a motorcycle."
This Business Insider article has videos and demonstrations of the motors. It also includes a sentence that puts doping into some context: "Greg LeMond, the only American to win the Tour de France, showing how one version of a bike motor works." (Previously)
This Business Insider article has videos and demonstrations of the motors. It also includes a sentence that puts doping into some context: "Greg LeMond, the only American to win the Tour de France, showing how one version of a bike motor works." (Previously)
Six bulldozers enter....
A legitimate royal rumble between heavy machinery: construction workers were from two competing companies allegedly get mad... and get even.
In A Perpetual Present
"Teen girl" chatbot Tay lit up the internet with her rapid "learning".
What happens when creating a new AI chatbot is as easy as installing a new app? Hugh Hancock writing on Charles Stross's blog explores the future implications of swarms of artificially intelligent chatbots. [more inside]
Czech Yeah!
Since the break-up of Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic has been one of the few nations with "Republic" in its name without a shorter alternate version... until now: Welcome to Czechia. (most likely pronounced "Check-ya" because there are concerns it'll be confused with Chechnya, aka the Chechan Republic) (via Brand New which proposes a logo) [more inside]
Ideal to acquire instant credibility
Public discussion about offshore tends to focus on the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands or Panama: sunny places for shady people; remote countries full of dodgy money. But if 29 Harley Street tells us anything, it is that offshore isn’t a place, it’s an idea. Formations House is about as offshore as a place can be, and our government appears powerless to bring it back onshore again.Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Bullough looks into Formations House and its premises at 29 Harley Street, which house 2,159 companies. "Why," Bullough asks, "has this prestigious address been used so many times as a centre for elaborate international fraud?"
April 18
Games over
Big Play Films, the YouTube channel of PBF’s Nicholas Gurewitch (pre vi ous ly) has released a new video, “Mushroom Kingdom of Heaven.” [more inside]
How to Blow $9 Billion in 6 Months
In 2003, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University and formed Theranos (Wikipedia), a biomedical startup with the goal of transforming the blood testing industry. By mid-2014, the startup had raised over $400 million in venture funding and was partnering with Walgreens, making its young CEO a billionaire. And now, federal regulators have proposed revoking the federal license for Theranos' California laboratory and banning the firm's top two executives from the blood-testing business for at least two years (WSJ [paywalled], LA Times). [more inside]
Hacking the Hacking Team
Phineas Fisher Hacks Back! Last year, an Italian company best known for selling surveillance software to governments was hacked. Phineas Fisher gives an overview of how he gained access to the Hacking Team's network.
Money for Nothing
A Charity's Radical Experiment --Communities and governments have experimented with universal basic income in the past. GiveDirectly has demonstrated the benefit of placing money directly into the hands of those who need it. Now the charity is taking the idea to a whole new level. [more inside]
Ruggedness and lack of concern
Nectar of the Gods
The Story of Mead A long, long time ago, before the invention of writing and polyester, a lucky human stumbled upon the contents of a beehive. The beehive had been left out in the rain, and the honey inside had fermented. Behold; MEAD! [more inside]
"The problem with ENS is probably not that it does not exist."
Is Empty Nose Syndrome Real? And if Not, Why are People Killing Themselves Over it?
This medical mystery — a byproduct of common nasal surgery — has stumped many doctors and scientists, some of whom suspect the suffocating condition may just be imaginary. But that isn’t making the people who feel suicidal over its horrific symptoms feel any better.
This medical mystery — a byproduct of common nasal surgery — has stumped many doctors and scientists, some of whom suspect the suffocating condition may just be imaginary. But that isn’t making the people who feel suicidal over its horrific symptoms feel any better.
"If you are protected from dark things..."
Despite the title, this is a list of books for people of any age, rather than just children. And the subject is personal loss rather than specifically the death of a loved one. Consolation for Life’s Darkest Hours: 7 Unusual and Wonderful Books that Help Children Grieve and Make Sense of Death. [more inside]
questioning the 'illustrated tour of madness'
"During Wain's life, though, his fortunes reversed several times. Believed to be suffering from schizophrenia, Wain lived his final years in institutions. Eight of his cat drawings—which range from cuddly to psychedelic—came to be known as the 'Famous Series' and for years would be offered up as a the stages of a deteriorating mind, illustrated. But the truth is a bit more complicated." (Previously)
How to mindfully eat popcorn
Supper Mario Broth
Supper Mario Broth is a wonderfully obsessive blog devoted to all sorts of Super Mario Brothers minutia. Really, you are not prepared for this. Things like.... [more inside]
Australians are both warm and erect
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard have recorded what some describe as a "bizarre" and "awkward" apology for unlawfully bringing dogs into Australia. The Guardian's film critic is not impressed.
Original story with dramatised video re-enactment. [more inside]
Original story with dramatised video re-enactment. [more inside]
Did the Pentagon mislead Congress about sexual assault?
Protect Our Defenders, a victim advocacy group, uses FOIA to fact check military claims on sexual assault. [more inside]
Technically 101, but let's not quibble.
100 Years/100 Shots - Starting with Birth of a Nation in 1915 and ending with Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, a series of iconic shots in film with one shot per year.
Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food
The shrewd peasant organizer had a mean, even “spiteful” streak. “For example, for a long time I could not accustom myself to the strongly spiced food, such as hot fried peppers, which is traditional to southern China, especially in Hunan, Mao’s birthplace.” The Soviet agent’s tender taste buds invited Mao’s mockery. “The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper,” declared Mao. “And he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight.’ ” How the chili pepper got to China by Andrew Leonard
“But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!”
On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, writers and artists reflect on her greatest creation. [The Guardian] [more inside]
The shame sticks to you like tar
Jon Ronson, writing for The Guardian's Web We Want series (previously) profiles Monica Lewinsky.
“She said to me, ‘Whenever power is involved, there always has to be a competing narrative. And you have no narrative.’ It was true. I had mistakenly thought that if I retreated from public life the narrative would dissipate. But instead it ran away from me even more.”
Empathy Through Agency
Bioshock creative director Ken Levine is teaming up with Interlude, creators of the Bob Dylan "Like A Rolling Stone" interactive video, to make a Twilight Zone interactive movie.
"...a third party in our relationship"
Thoughts on open marriage and illness. Poet and essayist Melissa Broder, formerly anonymous creator of the Twitter account so sad today, writes about her relationship with her husband, their other partners, and his progressive chronic illness. This essay is excerpted from a larger collection, recently published.
Meet Haben Girma
"Disability is not something one overcomes. Stories that claim successful people with disabilities overcame their disabilities mislead the public. The barriers exist not in the person, but in the physical, social, and digital environment. People with disabilities and their communities succeed when the community decides to dismantle digital, attitudinal, and physical barriers. My success at school, in the office, and even on the dance floor were facilitated by communities that chose to practice inclusion." [more inside]
"this maelstrom of entitlement and self-absorption"
There's a name for the kind of mindset that mistakes depression for profundity, that associates an inability to feel or express joy, or sadness, or any emotion other than anger, with heroism and manliness. In 2015, it informed the shape of most of our blockbuster movie villains, from Immortan Joe to Kylo Ren. In 2016, it seems, it also afflicts our heroes. The actual villain that both Batman and Superman need to fight in this movie isn't Lex Luthor, or Doomsday. It's toxic masculinity. -- Abigail Nussbaum dissects Batman v Superman.
Indian Geek Jams ahoy
Tushar Lall arranges Indian classical music versions of well-known pop culture soundtracks. The latest release is Star Wars; there's also Harry Potter, Interstellar, Game of Thrones, Pirates of the Caribbean and BBC Sherlock.
The fight for the future of NPR
What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
"More than a dozen universities — including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia — have publicly recognized their ties to slavery and the slave trade. But the 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say." (slnyt)
A graphical programming toy for Monday
BOX-256 BOX-256 is a 8-bit fantasy computer, with 256 bytes of memory, 16 color 16x16 display. It is also a programming game, where the player tries to pass the graphics tests and optimize the code to perfection. The ultimate goal is to use as little CPU cycles as possible, by employing multithreading and other optimization tricks.
A manual is available.
A Journey to the Medical Netherworld
Having a sick child is never easy. But if your child has to be sick, hope for something mechanical: a broken bone, a gash that needs stitches—something that can be physically mended. Failing that, wish for something commonplace. Chickenpox, a bladder infection, bronchitis. Doctors can manage these things with their eyes closed. If pushed, consider the merits of illnesses that are at least well understood—illnesses that can be definitively diagnosed and have generally agreed-upon courses of treatment. What you least want is something obscure, something not yet well characterized—and least of all, something both obscure and pertaining to the mind.
It's not secular stagnation; it's financialization.
Elizabeth Warren has a great idea for making Tax Day less painful - "She's taking on TurboTax and other predatory companies." [more inside]
April 17
The New Astrology
Surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences’. What is the basis of this collective faith, shared by universities, presidents and billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and powerful people be the first to spot the exaggerated worth of a discipline, and the least likely to pay for it? In the hypothetical worlds of rational markets, where much of economic theory is set, perhaps. But real-world history tells a different story, of mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy.
It's hard to imagine not making robots all the time...
The hats of your mortal enemies, turned inside-out and used as flowerpots
Hiring women works.
How Lifetime Became One Of The Best Places In Hollywood For Women. Since Lifetime’s acquisition by A&E Networks in 2009, the channel has mounted a successful effort to legitimize itself — 12 Emmy nominations in 2013, and 17 in 2014. This new legitimacy has hinged on two strategies: Lifetime’s prioritizing the hiring of women to write and direct their stories, and its witty, postmodern self-awareness of its own tropes. [more inside]
Why is this matzo different from all other matzos?
“What was remarkable to me is that being constrained by the rules of the rabbi, it forced us to figure out how to better preserve the quality of the grain,” Klaas said. (NYTimes)
Iceberg, right ahead!
Show Me The Money
Why Diversity And Inclusion Will Be A Top Priority For 2016 Research shows that gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform their peers and ethnically-diverse companies are 35% more likely to do the same.
Fallout: New Vegas - Choose Your Own Apocalypse
Fallout: New Vegas - Choose Your Own Apocalypse [slyt, but not really...] is an interactive novel, played entirely within YouTube. Make your choices, pick your allies, select the best approach, and maybe you'll make it all the way to New Vegas...
"disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words"
Encrypted is an essay by New Yorker critic Alex Ross about French 19th Century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and the difficulties he poses for translators and scholars. Notoriously the most bourgeois of avant-garde poets, his life has proved difficult to write about. So perhaps it's best to just go straight for the poetry. The Electronic Poetry Center has a nice page on his late masterpiece, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard, with the original and several translations.
Bake. The. Cake.
Sorrowful Songs
Colin Stetson has released "Sorrow - a reimagining of Górecki's 3rd Symphony". Pitchfork writes that the avant-garde saxophonist's reimagining of the famous symphony by the Polish composer comes close to something by Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Stetson himself is hoping that "the sound world and the genre implications are really irrelevant, that they’re second to the musical content and to the overall theme and feeling of the piece." You can listen and decide for yourself here (YT).
AC/DC officially name...
Axl Rose as new lead vocalist. "We are dedicated to fulfilling the remainder of our touring commitments to everyone that has supported us over the years, and are fortunate that Axl Rose has kindly offered his support to help us fulfill this commitment," band says in statement
G -n- R with Agnus Young and Axl Rose Whole Lotta Rosie live at Coachella 2016
..and
Riff Raff
at the same venue. [more inside]
..and
Riff Raff
at the same venue. [more inside]
The Mentorship - on guiding youth and Obama's Connect Four victory dance
An older man (Barack Obama, POTUS) provides a promising younger man (NBA MVP Steph Curry) some life lessons (YouTube). President Obama launched the My Brother’s Keeper initiative to address persistent opportunity gaps faced by boys and young men of color and ensure that all young people can reach their full potential. This lighthearted promotion encourages participation in the program. Perhaps Obama's influence will persuade Steph to set aside distractions and complete his college degree.
Playing with Blocks
In the late ’70s and ’80s, the arrival of personal computers like the Commodore 64 gave rise to the first generation of kids fluent in computation. They learned to program in Basic, to write software that they swapped excitedly with their peers. It was a playful renaissance that eerily parallels the embrace of Minecraft by today’s youth - Inside the Minecraft Generation.
First Step
Seattle School's Segregation
How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated. Seattle reluctantly bused students to integrate schools in the 1970's. They bus no longer—unfortunately, as integration benefited the students who did it.
A history of one-man bands, from fife and drum to wireless midi
The term "one-man band" generally brings to mind someone surrounded by instruments, like this Croatian street performer, but the earliest examples are a simple combination of pipe and tambor, which traces back to the 1300s. There were records of some creative, enterprising individuals in the centuries since, with more in the early to mid 20th century, including seated set-ups by Fate Norris, Jesse Fuller, and Joe Barrick, with Vic Ellis representing the traveling one-man band. Add in a MIDI controller, and you can expand your sound with less gear. The footprint can shrink more with the new ACPAD, with demos focusing on bringing electronic sounds to an acoustic guitar. [more inside]
It's Almost A Complete Load Of Pants
BBC: "Ever since the Victoria and Albert Museum opened , textiles and how they're used has been a primary focus. But it's taken until now to organise a whole exhibition about underwear. The curator says more than any other clothing, underwear is a mix of the alluring and the utterly practical." [V&A]
'Talking makes you weak, and weakness makes you vulnerable.'
Why do some progressives of older generations react with such violence and horror to the new way of doing politics, online and in the streets, to the radical sharing, the intensity of emotion, the insistence that trauma and hurt are political? Why does this matter so very, very much to them? Laurie Penny writes about what she realised in the aftermath of Stephen Fry's remarks about trigger warnings. [more inside]
On making stuff, by someone who knows his stuff
April 16
Can you earthquake proof a city?
Four experts talked to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme, which was published on March 24th, about how to make earthquake-prone cities safer. More people may be asking that question in the wake of the major earthquake that struck earlier today, April 16, in Ecuador and the twin earthquakes that hit Japan on April 15 and April 16. US residents have reason to worry as well. [more inside]
לעולם לא לשכוח
What did Americans know as the Holocaust unfolded? How did they respond? A new initiative of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, "History Unfolded" is using crowdsourcing to scour newspapers across the country for articles that ran between 1933 and 1945 on the plight of Europe’s Jews. The project focuses on 20 historical events from the time period. [more inside]
Eats Like a Duck
The Work That Keeps This World
"The most unappreciated and undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist, that were ‘innovated’ long ago....We can think of labour that goes into maintenance and repair as the work of the maintainers, those individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things." Innovation is overrated: "Hail the Maintainers," an essay by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell.
Why Does Hollywood Keep Disrespecting Melissa McCarthy?
This is not just a remarkable run; it is literally a singular one. No other woman or man unaided by a franchise in the last five years has emerged from nowhere to become such a completely dependable movie star, appearing in one successful film after another and regularly creating product that turns a profit, while maintaining a successful foothold in TV as well.
Left Handed Kisses
Left Handed Kisses a duet between Andrew Bird and Fiona Apple, also a live version on the Ellen show. [more inside]
“Gimme an RC Cola and a Moon Pie...”
"you can't help but want to live in a world like that" - Matthew Kielty
The Raycat Solution is a 15 minute documentary by Benjamin Huguet about an idea proposed in 1981 by philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri that by genetically engineering cats to be living Geiger counters, we could create a warning system for radioactive waste that would last at least ten thousand years. The idea languished for decades until Matthew Kielty did a feature on it for the 99% Invisible Podcast in 2014 [previously on MeFi]. Now biologist Kevin Chen is trying to bring the Ray Cat Solution to life.
Gerald Caye
Gerard Caye is a YouTube calligrapher. Working with a quill, he does alphabets and more complicated work. [more inside]
Oh my God, shoes.
Shoes - ten years ago Liam Kyle Sullivan created "Shoes", one of the first viral hits of the YouTube era featuring his Midwestern teen girl character Kelly. Now he sits down with Vice to talk about YouTube fame, touring, how it came about, and what came after.
A New Map for America
Is Staying In The New Going Out?
These days, we respond to the question [how was your weekend] with a look of puzzled amnesia. Did we do anything? “Not really,” we say. “It was pretty uneventful.” We furrow our brows trying to remember key events, but nothing comes to mind. It’s as though the last two days have elapsed in a narcotized, undifferentiated blur. A leisure-time blackout. We still have fun — probably? — we just have no clue how it happened. [slnyt]
Meet Nora, the polar bear from Ohio
Meet Nora! The Columbus Zoo's newest baby polar bear received her name in February. She's grown up a bit, and now ready for her public debut at about five months. See Nora frolicking in the yard. previously
Britain might leave the EU. Here's why Americans should care.
With all the focus today on the problems in the Middle East, it's easy to forget that for most of the 20th century, Europe was the central US foreign policy problem and the source of massive wars that cost millions of lives. The solution to this problem was European integration — a heavily American project, in large part because it served US interests so well.
Old photographs
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
Hundreds of documents uncovered by the Center for International Environmental Law have push back the record of oil industry knowledge on climate change by decades, and have now been published on the Internet: Smoke and Fumes. [more inside]
April 15
Instant Rogue's Gallery, Just Add Beats
In Mystery Skulls Animated: Ghost, we met some van-driving interfering youths with more backstory than a certain 1960's TV show ever had (Mystery Inc. notwithstanding). Now it's time reacquaint and just plain acquaint outselves with foes old and new older in Mystery Skulls Animated: Freaking Out. [more inside]
Four hands, two hearts
Márta and György Kurtág play Bach-transcriptions by Kurtág - The two play transcriptions made by the composer of Bach's choral prelude Das alte Jahr vergangen ist BWV 614, his Duet BWV 804 and a (devastating) movement from the Baroque composer's cantata Actus tragicus. [more inside]
Ten pounds of what?
Starlog presents CineMagic: The Guide to Fantastic Filmmaking
If you made (or dreamed about making) super-8mm movies in the late 1970's to early 1980's, and loved visual effects, you read CINEMAGIC magazine. You can download scans of issues here and here (the second link contains a bit more background).
riverrun... from swerve of shore to bend of bay
Rivers through time, as seen in Landsat images. "Thanks to the Landsat program and Google Earth Engine, it is possible now to explore how the surface of the Earth has been changing through the last thirty years or so. Besides the obvious issues of interest, like changes in vegetation, the spread of cities, and the melting of glaciers, it is also possible to look at how rivers change their courses through time."
FROG IS A CLASS 1 LASER DEVICE. DO NOT STARE DIRECTLY INTO FROG'S EYES.
"Why"
"I met Steve while volunteering at a Challenged Athletes Clinic in Boston back in September of 2013. But Steve didn’t seem to want to be there. Everything about his body language said, “Don’t talk to me.” His beard needed trimming, his arms were crossed, and he stood as far from the center of activity as possible. And who could blame him? How would you feel if you lost your leg 5 months earlier as a spectator at the finish line of the Boston Marathon?" [more inside]
Swimming in socks
modern send-ups of blues tunes transformed into dancing ditties
Black Trauma Remixed For Your Clicks
In viral videos, the real-life pain of black people is repurposed into fun, catchy songs for popular consumption. But at what cost?
In viral videos, the real-life pain of black people is repurposed into fun, catchy songs for popular consumption. But at what cost?
Step 1) Find your dirtiest friend
"This is a very light overview of some information you may want to know for your first mushroom trip." Comedian Ari Shaffir may not resemble Bill Hicks (more) in nearly any other way but he has become this comedy generation's mushroom advocate despite having had some questionable trips. Shroomfest is a thing that happens once a year in Telluride, Colorado.
No pokey
A short history of the thimbles one might find in the English countryside. Also crotal bells and Gunter's chain markings. [more inside]
Insert Ham Joke Here
Need a little something to enliven up your seder? There's a great Black Lives Matter Supplement from JFREJ. A Refugee Supplement from HIAS. Or any number of social justice supplements. But my favorite might be A Hamilton Haggadah, written by a couple of rabbinical students at RRC.
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
Robert H. Frank, professor of economics at Cornell University, for The Atlantic: Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think. "...the luckiest among us appear especially unlikely to appreciate our good fortune. According to the Pew Research Center, people in higher income brackets are much more likely than those with lower incomes to say that individuals get rich primarily because they work hard. Other surveys bear this out: Wealthy people overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time." [more inside]
“No humbug is great without truth at bottom.”
The Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune. A former 1960s bondage-film actress is waging legal combat with a toy
company for ownership of her husband’s mail-order aquatic-pet empire.
"Hey! It's time to cause some mischief!"
The scientific way to train white people to stop being racist
No one wants to be called fragile. And if you’re white, what you feel reading the title of this article may be indicative of the term. “White fragility” refers to white people’s low emotional tolerance for discussing topics of race and racism. What makes race so hard for white people to talk about? And more importantly, what can they do about it? [more inside]
What is the process for getting a security clearance?
People in the United States who hold security clearances should be those: “...whose personal and professional history affirmatively indicates loyalty to the United States, strength of character, trustworthiness, honesty, reliability, discretion, and sound judgment, as well as freedom from conflicting allegiances and potential for coercion, and willingness and ability to abide by regulations governing the use, handling, and protection of classified information.” Executive Order #12968 [more inside]
Every Disney song, from worst to best
The good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the unforgettable, the forgettable, the racist, the sexist, the silly, the enthralling — it's all here, in this list of every Disney song, ranked from worst to best. (Click here to start the list; here's the top 10; and here's the whole thing on one page.) [more inside]
водка яд!
We are all neoliberals now.
Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
People Who Write Theatre Reviews Are Very Easily Provoked
A Question of Privilege
Writer Marti Leimbach explores how her personal circumstances make it difficult for her to define privilege. [more inside]
Order! Ordaaaar!
The northern UK Member of Parliament, Dennis Skinner, attacked David Cameron in Prime Minister's Questions this week, and was thrown out of the chamber for refusing to take back the blistering epithet - Dodgy Dave. [more inside]
Are you not entertained?
100 Greatest One-Liners: After The Kill - the obvious and inevitable follow-up to this. (slv) (also NSFW)
The Man Who Sold the Ocean
The story of Irv Teibel, the man behind Syntonic Research and the Environments record series. [Environments previously on MetaFilter] [more inside]
Will it get the job done, on time, and even if lots of things go wrong?
Gagarin was an incredibly lucky man to have come out of this unhurt and alive. In rushing to accomplish a human spaceflight in the race with the US, Soviet engineers pushed the boundary of acceptable risk to its limits. Fortunately for Soviet planners everything went well.Yuri Gagarin's flight as the first human in space fiftyfive years ago may have been slightly more dangerous than previously thought.
Why critics need to stop getting personal in their essays
"Contemporary criticism is positively crowded with first-person pronouns, micro-doses of memoir, brief hits of biography. Critics don’t simply wrestle with their assigned cultural object; they wrestle with themselves, as well. Recent examples suggest a spectrum, from reviews that harmlessly kick off with a personal anecdote, to hybrid pieces that blend literary criticism and longform memoir." [more inside]
April 14
Fight Like Hell.
DOOM [Campaign Trailer] As the iconic DOOM Marine, you wake to learn that the Union Aerospace Corporation’s facility on Mars has been decimated and overrun by hordes of demons. Humanity’s survival rests in your hands – and your hands alone. [more inside]
Roll the Old Chariot Around
Roll the Old Chariot - David Coffey leads an entire festival's worth of sea-shanty enthusiasts into far more than the sum of their whole.
Doctors Strange
Just in time for it's series finale on Friday, Wired presents an oral history of Childrens Hospital.
Cars' tailpipes are nearly as deadly to cyclists as their fenders
Work by University of Toronto researcher Marianne Hatzopoulou "shows cyclists are particularly vulnerable to the risks posed by air pollution — higher levels of breast and prostate cancer being among them. Cyclists, she said, 'tend to have higher breathing rates than other pedestrians, so whatever they’re inhaling is going deeper into their lungs.'" And some of the most popular routes she studied were also the most polluted. [more inside]
Provably 4.416 times more complete than your favorite musician
Sean Archibald makes electronic music using microtonal scales, rather than the typical 12-tone temperament, as both Sevish and himself . Droplet is a neat starting point. If you're a sucker for strange harmonics, also check out his blog, in which he gets geeky about xenharmonic music and his favorite microtonal bands. Happy listening.
"I had to tell the truth"
Twenty-five years ago, Anita Hill stood before 20 million people and testified that then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while she’d worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. [more inside]
Johnson & Johnson Has a Baby Powder Problem
More than 1,000 women and their families are suing J&J and Imerys, claiming the companies have known of the association with ovarian cancer for years and failed to warn them. The next trial is scheduled to begin on April 11 in a St. Louis circuit court. “Whether or not the science indicates that Baby Powder is a cause of ovarian cancer, Johnson & Johnson has a very significant breach of trust,” says Julie Hennessy, a marketing professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “In trying to protect this one business, they’ve put the whole J&J brand at risk.”
I can do something that no one else on a planet of 7 billion people can.
Inside the studio of the “micro-engraver” who works between heartbeats to keep his hand steady. Graham Short carves using “a needle pushed into a wooden engravers’ handle,” along with a microscope to see his work and a strap to keep his arm steady. His portrait of Queen Elizabeth II “is carved onto a speck of gold stuffed into the eye of a needle.”
Our long matza nightmare is over
Are you a Conservative Ashkenazi Jew dreading Passover next week, not because you miss bread but because you miss legumes and rice? Good news! Kitniyot are now kosher for Passover. [more inside]
50 shades of pray
Perhaps the only kink you might not find in San Francisco, Christian Domestic Discipline is a community of women looking for a theological reading of sex and submission. [more inside]
Center for Corporate Studies
Welcome to the future you.
The Center for Corporate Studies is a best-of-breed, high-level institute with a core competency in leveraging the power of language to develop personal, synergistic paradigm shifts within each of our students. You’ll learn how to champion mission-critical learnings across all verticals resulting in high-yield growth, for both your organization and your personal brand.
Join us. And in just eight weeks, you too will be able to write barely decipherable paragraphs that put your career in the fast lane. [via]
Les Américains souhaitent se faire plaisir et ne pas se limiter
Do You Speak Touriste? [PDF, 3 MB, in French] and the accompanying website is the Parisian tourism board's guide for workers in the Parisian tourism sector on traveler preferences from 17 different countries on subjects such as their habits, preferences for transportation, views on quality and price, dining times and specific cultural tics -- for instance, the fact that Americans "are hoping to have fun and not limit themselves"* or that the Japanese "won't complain about anything immediately, at least until they return home."** [more inside]
scanlime: hacking hardware and software for art and human connections
Micah Elizabeth Scott, or scanlime, is an artist and engineer who focuses on "the boundaries between technology, society, and creative expression". Recently, she has taken from writing cool software like Zen Photon (previously) and constructing open source hardware to creating videos documenting some of her work. These videos offer insight not only into the "what'" and "how" of some of her projects, but also her thought process and dead ends, as well as guest appearances by her lovely cat. For example: coastermelt part 1 and part 2. Additionally, you can check out her art or read her technical blog. [more inside]
Former Day Saints
Students at Brigham Young University, the private Provo-based university owned by the LDS church, have alleged that the school’s Honor Code Office investigates and sometimes penalizes victims who report sexual crimes. Honor Code investigations were launched even when the accused assailants were not BYU students, and when the attacks occurred off campus and away from campus housing. Ostensibly this is to punish violations of the school's honor code that may have given rise to the situation where the assault occurred. [more inside]
Obscura Day 2016
This Saturday (April 16) is Obscura Day 2016. Billed as a day to "celebrate the world's most obscure and awe inspiring places," there will be events taking place all around the world (although, mostly in the US, with some in Europe). [more inside]
Always ahead of the curve
What is it to know your time is up when nothing in your body has betrayed you? "Wasn't Born Hustlers: The Aging of Jay-Z", by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib for MTV. [more inside]
This massive bookcase is hinged and hides a secret closet...
Joe Patten was born in 1927, and he lived until his death last week inside Atlanta's Fox Theatre, which opened in 1929. Over 35 years ago Joe, who was instrumental in saving the theater in 1974, was granted rent-free, lifetime occupancy of a deluxe Moorish-style apartment in a space that used to belong to the Shriners. This is that apartment. [via]
Do the Kenyan hustle and the Nigerian hip twirl
“Many of the Africans entrepreneurs I encounter represent the elite of their society,” Burfield told me. “They have received world-class educations, but aren’t interested in following in the family business. When combined with members of the African diaspora starting to return home, and ex-pats looking for the big new problems to tackle, most people would be amazed by how many entrepreneurs I encounter in Africa did their undergrad in great institutions around the world, or are self-taught from online courses and hackathons here. These are world-class entrepreneurs.”
That is a big stone sphere!
Dr Osmanagic, known as "the Bosnian Indiana Jones," has made interesting claims in the past...he has now found and enormous stone sphere buried in the earth...(YT) [more inside]
You can’t know you’re missing something if you can’t see it.
Not For Publication (2016) – 210x291mm, Mixed Materials on Card
A few weeks ago, Popbitch published a guide to spotting clues to celebrity superinjunctions. Unfortunately, a law firm, believing that this guide affected the superinjunction case currently in the media, decided to send them a stern legal letter - which they have reproduced on their site in line with current copyright restrictions. [more inside]
"Clark's Place"
Ninjas Mapping the Rabbit Hole
THE SECRET RULES OF THE INTERNET: The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech [Potentially NSFW - language & content]
Substitute "baseball" with any sport, really
When the sport you love doesn't love you back.
If Gibbons’ “dresses” comment was just one isolated incident, it wouldn’t deserve a second thought, but that’s not the situation we face. We are not talking about one off-color remark or even a handful of off-color remarks. We are talking about a sport-wide culture which permits casual sexism and reinforces over and over and over again to its female fans that their involvement in the sport is not as valid as that of their male counterparts.
Scrape it off, I scrape it off...
Take a large wheel of cheese. Cut it. Melt an edge of it under a grill. Scrape, scrape, scrape and pour over potatoes. Enjoy. [more inside]
How the UK's Boots went rogue
Britain’s biggest pharmacy used to be a family business, dedicated to serving society. Now, many of the company’s own staff believe that its relentless drive for profit is putting the public at risk.
Gareth Thomas (1945-2016)
Welsh actor Gareth Thomas, best known for starring as Roj Blake in the BBC's 1970s science fiction drama Blake's Seven, has died aged 71. [more inside]
The Raw Appeal Of Game Of Thrones
April 13
"... I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc."
Julie Beck: How you arrange the plot points of your life into a narrative can shape who you are—and is a fundamental part of being human. [more inside]
The Djinn of Aiman
The Djinn of Aiman "IT WAS A DIM JANUARY AFTERNOON IN LAHORE, there was a power outage on Zahoor Elahi Road, and Farida Khanum had finally woken up. We were sitting among shadows on the floor of her living room: I on the carpet and she on a cushion that was at once a mark of her prestige (she is “The Queen of Ghazal,” the last of her generation’s iconic classically trained singers) and advanced age (she can no longer sit as she used to, like a mermaid, with her legs folded beguilingly beneath her). I had come to prepare Khanum for a concert she was to give in a week’s time in Calcutta, and was trying to engage her, in this fragile early phase of her day, with innocuous-sounding questions: which ghazals was she planning on singing there, and in what order?
Now that applications for Teach for America are down....
TFA chief executive is taking a fresh look at how to turn things around. Applications are down 35% over 3 years. The executive team is taking a "fresh look" at how to make things work, with the goal of doing things differently. [more inside]
It's the tops
They're all still falling down
Aaron's Inc has set a new Guinness World Record for most humans & mattresses successfully toppled in dominoes style, at 1200 people/mattresses, knocking out the previous record of 1150 set by German company Höffner Möbelgesellschaft GmbH & Co. KG back in 2012. (previously) [more inside]
...fucking hell, what have we been doing for half a century?
Brian Eno's favorite records in a longish interview with William Doyle of the Quietus.
At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction
Farm to Fable Part 1: The restaurant's chalkboard makes claims as you enter from the valet parking lot. At the hostess stand, a cheery board reads, “Welcome to local, farm-fresh Boca.” Brown butcher paper tops tables and lettuces grow along a wooden wall. In a small market case, I see canned goods from here and produce from somewhere. Check the small print: blackberries from Mexico and blueberries from California. With the tagline “Local, simple and honest,” Boca Kitchen Bar Market was among the first wave of farm-to-table restaurants in Tampa Bay to make the assertion “we use local products whenever possible.” I’ve reviewed the food. My own words are right there on their website: “local, thoughtful and, most importantly, delicious.” But I’ve been had, from the snapper down to the beef. [more inside]
Climate Deniers Versus The Volcano
Anyone reading pundits and politicians pontificating profusely about climate or environmental science will, at some point, have come across the “volcano gambit”. During the discussion they will make a claim that volcanoes (or even a single volcano) produce many times more pollutant emissions than human activities. Often the factor is extremely precise to help give an illusion of science-iness and, remarkably, almost any pollutant can be referenced. This “volcano gambit” is an infallible sign that indicates the author is clueless about climate science.
He also heard the Hum
From Zug Island to Bristol to British Columbia, interest in a mysterious humming sound continues. Colin Dickey investigates The World Hum Map and Database Project, its creator, and some recent experiments, including the first Deming box. Stops along the way include TACAMO, tin foil hats, school shootings, Jesse Ventura's tv show, and noise-abatement laws. [more inside]
Dear Booger-Wiper,
If you care, here’s how it all went down.
Music journalist Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stones member) on Liz Phair, Steve Albini & Me: The True Story of 1993, the Greatest Goddamn Year in Chicago Rock History.
Dedicated to the appreciation of the mundane in everyday life
The Umbrella Cover Museum is about finding wonder and beauty in the simplest of things, and about knowing that there is always a story behind the cover. [via]
A Surfeit of Sandboxes
You may be familiar with JSFiddle and CodePen, but there are similar tools for a variety of languages, some more practical than others. [more inside]
a moment-by-moment decision not to escalate
Women do what they need to do to survive. "Emergencies so often don't look like emergencies as we're taught to understand them when we are children. Monsters don't look like the monsters we've been taught to avoid." [cw: rape] [more inside]
Octopuses are famous escape artists.
Duluth!!!
Duluth: Who Loves Ya, Baby? (SLYTellySavalas)
That's a beauty.
"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."
Reader on Revolutionary Feminism "The Revolutionary Feminism reader includes a century of debates between communist, anarchism and radical feminists, extending from 1890 to 1983. Groups in 21 cities and four countries did study groups on the Revolutionary Feminism reader in the fall and winter of 2015. This collection is beautifully laid out, easy to share, and includes a lot of great material on lost traditions of queer and women's liberation movements." From Mefi's own alexkollontai, via MetaFilter Projects. [more inside]
Why Do Cats Love Bookstores?
Curbing toxic game culture
League of Legends has 67 million players and grossed an estimated US$1.25 billion in revenue last year. But it also has a reputation for toxic in-game behaviour, which its parent company, Riot Games in Los Angeles, California, sees as an obstacle to attracting and retaining players. So the company has hired a team of researchers to study the social — and antisocial — interactions between its users.
Gone in Six Characters
Gone in Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services [abstract] [pdf] [more inside]
I looked up and there you were
Here Are Your Eyes
How to Read a Neighborhood
Dating Historic Images A key to using clues in photos to narrow down the date of construction for historic vernacular architecture, from University of Vermont's Landscape Change digital image project. [more inside]
Not ALL Devo, Just Part of It
Gerald Casale, one of the original members of DEVO (and reported originator of the “Theory of Devolution”) was tired of waiting for another band reunion, so he wrote and recorded a new song with Italy's Phunk Investigation to be released physically and digitally on Saturday. But the video is available now, designed by collage artist Max Papeschi, with a visual mix of Energy Domes, Donuts, Drones, Dentures, Dinosaurs, Dropped Pants, Drumpf, Disney, Dildos, Dynamite and lots of other things that don't start with D, plus a new version of Devo mascot Booji Boy...
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for "Devo's Gerald Casale" with "IT'S ALL DEVO".
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for "Devo's Gerald Casale" with "IT'S ALL DEVO".
April 12
Enter the Sorcerer Supreme
that bad that hard that street
When The Corporations Exploiting 3rd World People Are Also 3rd World
The face of corporate exploitation in the third world is increasingly local, and thus even more invisible than usual. Most land in Africa is technically owned by "local chiefs," and bribery and collusion between chiefs, state and corporations are dispossessing huge numbers of rural families of their land, health and livelihoods.
Dreaming of Mars, again
Ginger Baker had one.
Inside Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force
Jeremy Scahill continues keeping tabs on MrBlackwater; Xe; Reflex Responses Erik Prince now Chairman of the Chinese Fsgroup set to loot Africa.
(Previous)
Jeremy Scahill continues keeping tabs on Mr
(Previous)
Digital Neurons in your Browser
Browser-based Neural Network Demo
What is a Neural Network?
It’s a technique for building a computer program that learns from data. It is based very loosely on how we think the human brain works. First, a collection of software “neurons” are created and connected together, allowing them to send messages to each other. Next, the network is asked to solve a problem, which it attempts to do over and over, each time strengthening the connections that lead to success and diminishing those that lead to failure. [more inside]
What is a Neural Network?
It’s a technique for building a computer program that learns from data. It is based very loosely on how we think the human brain works. First, a collection of software “neurons” are created and connected together, allowing them to send messages to each other. Next, the network is asked to solve a problem, which it attempts to do over and over, each time strengthening the connections that lead to success and diminishing those that lead to failure. [more inside]
This is what it feels like to be hunted by U.S. drones
"I am on the US kill list. I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again."
Little Pink Houses
Did This New Nonprofit Crack The Code For Building Developing World Housing? "We ask families for their input about the location, the style of home, broader community needs, etc. In Haiti, we built our community about 10 minutes away from the tent slum so that home recipients still had access to their jobs and support networks."
Shocking News: Rage Yoga Invented by Canadian
Istace is now holding Rage Yoga classes in the dimly lit basement of Dickens, a bar in Calgary, Canada. “You should expect there to be foul language, laughter, and shenanigans. If these offend you, Rage Yoga is not for you.” Istace promises that her special brand of yoga will leave you “zen as fuck.” By the way, when you sign up, you get tickets for two draft pints at the discounted price of $4.00 each. Classes have been held on Monday and Wednesday nights since January.
A Thing So Rucked in the Vernacular ... Such an Epic Quality
The wayward greatness of the towers — resolutely local and eccentrically universal — and the scale of Rodia’s achievement were attested to by admirers such as Buckminster Fuller and Jacob Bronowski. Whether or not Rodia created a work of art is another question. Or at least the question “Is it a work of art?” brings with it another: what kind of work of art might it be? Geoff Dyer visits the Watts Towers for Harper's [more inside]
It’s amazing when you have professional people design a front end!
"I’m glad people have stopped asking whether the schools are better"
“Thou shalt not...”
The Bible makes most challenged books list in US for first time. [The Guardian] Americans have objected to titles as diverse as the Bible and Fifty Shades of Grey over the last year, according to a list of the most challenged books which has just been released by the American Library Association. [more inside]
1870s Olmstedian vision of the pastoral context alive and well in 2016
Take a peek inside the development of Apple's new spaceship headquarters, designed by Norman Foster, in this video from 2013. Here's a fly-by of the development from November 2015, and an update from early April 2016. That's nice, but why are America's most innovative companies still stuck designing workplaces set in 1950s suburbia? The ghost of Olmsted reaches beyond urban parks.
You know what they say the best thing about prison is: ladies drink free
Terriers’ perfect one-season run defied description, marketability “Five years later, I still have not been able to think of a title that works,” Terriers creator Ted Griffin told TV critic Alan Sepinwall in a 2015 interview. “Beach Noir? Dolworth & Pollack, P.I.? Our Brand Is Competence?” [more inside]
The worst-reviewed actors and actresses in Hollywood
Vox attempts to take a scientific look at the actors and actresses who most consistently appear in terrible movies. [more inside]
I didn't understand rape culture until I was attacked
Spaceward ho!
Great Blacks In Wax
“African American history’s been smoothed out. You lose focus of how it was, how cruel. But this is the most impacting museum I’ve ever been to. It’s amazing, it’s face-to-face, like reading Nat Turner’s Rebellion—though that was written by a white man.”
How a museum in Baltimore shapes African American history—in wax.
individualistic and subjective, tailored to insecurity and desire
"The mix of things presumed to transmit and increase female power is without limit yet still depressingly limiting."
How 'Empowerment' Became Something for Women to Buy, by Jia Tolentino for NYT Magazine [more inside]
How 'Empowerment' Became Something for Women to Buy, by Jia Tolentino for NYT Magazine [more inside]
"I've gone through my whole life trying to avoid this moment"
Lesbians Touch Penis For The First Time! By the women who brought you Gay Men Touch Vagina for the First time (featuring Stevie), Straight Women Touch Another Vagina For The First Time and Straight Men Touch Another Penis For The First Time
Bringing Gender Equality to the Apocalypse
Rust, a popular multiplayer survival video game, has just added female character models to their game. In an interesting twist, rather than being able to choose your gender, one is randomly assigned to your Steam account, permanently, when you first join. They did something similar previously with skin colour and body shape. Some players are not happy. (NSFW warning: screenshots contain pixelated CGI nudity, since players are dropped into the game naked and must, among their first objectives, find clothing) [more inside]
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TO ABANDON CAPSLOCK
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICES HAS ANNOUNCED THAT STARTING May 11, 2016, their announcements will no longer be all upper case. [Via Slate] [more inside]
Don't Read the Comments?
The Guardian Investigates What Goes On "Below the Line" Comments allow readers to respond to an article instantly, asking questions, pointing out errors, giving new leads. At their best, comment threads are thoughtful, enlightening, funny: online communities where readers interact with journalists and others in ways that enrich the Guardian’s journalism.
But at their worst, they are something else entirely. [more inside]
The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life
Considering the constant fatalities, rampant pollution, and exorbitant costs of ownership, there is no better word to characterize the car’s dominance than insane. "The car is the star. That’s been true for well over a century—unrivaled staying power for an industrial-age, pistons-and-brute-force machine in an era so dominated by silicon and software. Cars conquered the daily culture of American life back when top hats and child labor were in vogue, and well ahead of such other innovations as radio, plastic, refrigerators, the electrical grid, and women’s suffrage.
A big part of why they’ve stuck around is that they are the epitome of convenience." [more inside]
50 Cent Is Really Big In Europe
This is our Really Big Coin. It is big because it makes other things look small when photographed next to it. [more inside]
I of course had to adopt the dog bc i'm not a monster
Turns out adopting a dog in Skyrim is the hardest quest in the game... [via Alas! A blog] [more inside]
This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.
The profound impact of LSD on the brain has been laid bare by the first modern scans of people high on the drug. The images, taken from volunteers who agreed to take a trip in the name of science, have given researchers an unprecedented insight into the neural basis for effects produced by one of the most powerful drugs ever created. [Guardian link] [more inside]
Baltimore and Baltimore-A Tale of Two Cities
“That’s the thing, though,” he continues. “All that is surrounded by vacant lots, boarded-up homes, and that junkyard—the scrap metal and salvage place where there’s always a line of people hauling stuff in. Down the street from Jubilee Arts, where those little girls do ballet in their pink leotards, I saw a metal coffin once being scrapped for cash.”
Nell pauses.
“But that’s the way Baltimore has always been",he says. “It’s what a good friend of mine who is no longer around used to say: ‘In Baltimore, beauty and chaos live side by side.’”
Blood, sweat, tears and cobblestones
Last Sunday was the day of Paris-Roubaix, one of the most important races of the year in cycling. Today, the team of surprise winner and ultimate underdog Mathew Hayman posted the latest episode in their ongoing series Orica Greenedge backstage pass.
Enjoy! [more inside]
People always call me an asshole - that’s because I don’t stop.
Skaters call it “the bible,” but we’re prone to hyperbole. Maybe it’s Vogue, but for degenerates, and Phelps is skateboarding’s Anna Wintour.A profile of skateboarder & Thrasher editor Jake Phelps, by Willy Staley.
Go Puff Yourself
If it's not enough to have made personal avatars based on characters from Peanuts, The Simpsons, South Park and MeFi Favorite Cartoonist Boulet (previously; BTW Our Boulet has just won this year's Cartoonist Studio Prize, but I digress), Cartoon Network is celebrating/promoting the revival of its classic toon The Powerpuff Girls (but without the original creator or the original voices of the girls, I digress again) with a webapp you can use to make yourself into a Powerpuff Girl... or Powerpuff Boy.
April 11
Buried Ideas
‘For over two millennia,’ Ian Johnson writes, ‘all our knowledge of China’s great philosophical schools was limited to texts revised after the Qin unification.’ Now a trove of recently discovered ancient documents, written on strips of bamboo, ‘is helping to reshape our understanding of China’s contentious past.’ [more inside]
"To be honest I'm not sure who won."
"the appropriation of his aesthetic by others for commercial means."
Imma Boss Ass (Animated) Bitch
clowns were the creepiest of all
The fourth prediction was that things that make a person unpredictable also predict creepiness. One item among the ratings of creepy individuals (“I am uncomfortable because I cannot predict how he or she will behave”) and one item among the items assessing beliefs about creepy people (“Even though someone may seem creepy, I usually think that I understand his or her intentions”) allowed a direct test of this prediction.— McAndrew, F. T., & Koehnke, S. S. (2016). On the nature of creepiness. New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 10–15
The Wonderful World of Livermush
What is Livermush? Similar to scrapple, Spam, and definitely not the same as liver pudding, liver mush is a common meat in the western parts of North Carolina. So slap some deep fried livermush on a biscuit with some mayo and save the date for the annual Mush, Music & Mutts livermush festival in Shelby, North Carolina!
It's still only April: the US election drags ever onwards
As we enter the last 30 weeks of the election campaign, delegate talk becomes more prevalent. On the Republican side, current Donald (future Donald) did not have a good Saturday in Colorado and South Carolina, with Cruz picking up delegates, and Kasich seeing a path despite lacking delegates. On the Democratic side, Bernie's recent good run has added to his count, although he remains behind Hillary. Voter suppression continues to be a strong issue, while Wikipedia has some interesting data on historical voter turnout. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan may or may not be running, while Kevin Spacey, who plays Frank Underwood in House of Cards series, says some real-life presidential candidates ‘appear to be fictional’. [more inside]
A Target Rich Environment
"A beautiful speech! But of course it has to be demolished."
The Drinking Party (1965): a modern dress re-enactment of Plato's Symposium, written and directed by Jonathan Miller. Leo McKern stars as a rather donnish Socrates. [more inside]
If the AKC had a competition for throwing shade...
😬 or 😀?
Take a look at: 😁. On many browsers, and on Android phones, this looks like a grinning face with smiling eyes (the official label), while on an iOS device, this looks like a painful grimace. A study shows that these differences can lead to difficulties interpreting emotions across platforms (and even within platforms there is a lot of variation)! With linguists arguing over whether emoji can evolve into a language, and with their own distinct grammar, these differences in interpretation can matter. Either way, the real-time tracker lets you see what emoji are being tweeted [prev], and fivethirtyeight sums up the 100 most popular.
Rusting Rainbow
The soothing educational tones of Reading Rainbow combined with the exciting technical explanations of Geordi La Forge: Levar Burton explains how to Combat the Pervasive Menace of Corrosion. In this series of DoD-sponsored educational videos, Levar Burton and various luminaries in the field explain how corrosion works and how to fight it. [more inside]
MFA novels prefer names like Ruth, Pete, Bobby, Charlotte, and Pearl
How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel? We wrote a program to analyze hundreds of works by authors with and without creative-writing degrees. The results were disappointing. [more inside]
Therapy and defiance of planting: make gardens and forests, not war
Back in 2011, Ron Finley took up gardening, planting tomatoes, peppers, chard, melons, squash, pumpkins, onions, broccoli, eggplant, celery, kale and herbs in front of his house in Los Angeles. He reclaimed a strip of useless, scrubby grass between the curb and the sidewalk along his property, except it wasn't permitted at that time, because local ordinances prohibited "overgrown vegetation" in such "parkways." But that didn't stop Ron, the guerilla gardener in South Central LA (YT/TED), who is still spreading his gospel of urban gardens. If you want practice some guerrilla gardening of your own, you can make and hurl seed bombs into vacant lots, which can be scaled up if you happen to have some aircraft and a lot more seed or even sapling bombs, you can really scale up your reforestation efforts. [more inside]
How Natural Language Tech, Holograms Are Preserving Holocaust Testimony
Eva Kor was six when she and her twin sister Miriam were sent to the Șimleu Silvaniei ghetto. Four years later they were taken to Auschwitz where they were selected for human experiments by Josef Mengele. Now she is recording her story for the USC Shoah Foundation's New Dimensions in Testimony project, which will create 3D interactive holograms of Holocaust survivors for museums. [more inside]
I've won the game of not taking myself too seriously.
No more Mr. Nice guy - From Kenfig schoolboy to international drug importer via an Oxford education.
By the mid-1980s Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines and 25 companies operating throughout the world. Wiki is informative
As he said of himself I've won the game of not taking myself too seriously.
A Rhondda man recalls as does another welshman. [more inside]
By the mid-1980s Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines and 25 companies operating throughout the world. Wiki is informative
As he said of himself I've won the game of not taking myself too seriously.
A Rhondda man recalls as does another welshman. [more inside]
Don't you feel eyes moving over your body?
“The concept of male entitlement is represented by male arms and hands performing a variety of actions that are overwhelming intrusive on her body and her life. In each situation she maintains a blank expression, a visual choice that demonstrates how conditioned we as women have become to accept this atmosphere as excusable and even normal.” -- Boundaries, from photographer Allaire Bartel.
No one liked that son of a bitch
Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, argues that, contrary to the popular perception, maybe Ty Cobb wasn't a complete asshole.
Cobb was, like the rest of us, a highly imperfect human being. He was too quick to take offense and too intolerant of those who didn’t strive for excellence with the over-the-top zeal that he did. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he thought too many others fools. He was the first baseball celebrity, and he did not always handle well the responsibilities that came with that.
"We don't know why it came to this."
Yanis Varoufakis: Why We Must Save the EU
"Our European Union is disintegrating. Should we accelerate the disintegration of a failed confederacy? If one insists that even small countries can retain their sovereignty, as I have done, does this mean Brexit is the obvious course? My answer is an emphatic 'No!'" [more inside]
It's the floofy clouds that get me
Fallout (disambiguation)
"I asked Ralph Eldridge if he would share some of the migrating-songbird photos he has taken as a lighthouse keeper. [We] were slack-jaw amazed by the sight of so many types of songbirds together. The birds were exhausted and in desperate need of rest after flying for untold hours and miles on their journey from wintering grounds as far south as the Caribbean and South America."
NHL Playoffs, Round 1!
It's playoff time in the NHL, and for the first time since 1970, no Canadian teams will be represented. In the Eastern Conference, the wild card Philadelphia Flyers take on the President's Trophy-winning Washington Capitals. The Flyers just lost team founder, owner, and chairman Ed Snider to cancer and the team has dedicated their postseason to him. The Detroit Red Wings just barely squeaked in, extending their playoff streak to 25 years. In the Western Conference, the Minnesota Wild are matched up with the team that used to be the Minnesota North Stars before relocating to Dallas in 1993, while the Battle of California rages on with a San Jose Shark-LA Kings series.
How does Elisheba become Babette?
Maybe in high school you had to translate your given name into a foreign language for foreign language class. If you were an Elizabeth, you may have become an Elisabet or a Liesel or a Jelica. If you were a Steve, maybe you became an Esteban or a Szczepan or a Tapani. Or perhaps you've just always wondered why supporters of King James were called Jacobites, or you'd like to find some feminine forms of Michael for your new baby girl. Whatever it is, Behind the Name's Family Trees will take you all over the world with your name and its variants and diminutives. [more inside]
Canada's Greatest Living Orator
Over the weekend, the federal NDP voted to oust leader Tom Mulcair. But this dramatic turn of events was nearly overshadowed by another event at the NDP convention: The delivery of one of the most powerful political speeches in recent Canadian memory by former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis. CBC's Neil MacDonald calls Lewis "probably Canada's greatest living orator."
Thanks, Obama
Pijul
Pijul is distributed version control system that combines the patch theory based approach of Darcs with the snapshot-based approach of git, mercurial, etc. (NH) [more inside]
“We need help in Attawapiskat,”
Attawapiskat Declares State of Emergency Over Spate of Suicide Attempts [CBC.ca] The chief and council for the Attawapiskat First Nation on remote James Bay have declared a state of emergency, saying they're overwhelmed by the number of attempted suicides in the community. On Saturday night alone, 11 people attempted to take their own lives, Chief Bruce Shisheesh said. Including Saturday's spate of suicide attempts, a total of 101 people of all ages have tried to kill themselves since September, Shisheesh said, with one person dying. The youngest was 11, the oldest 71. The Cree community — home to about 2,000 residents — saw 28 attempts in March alone. Last September, a group of five girls overdosed and had to be medevaced out of the community, Shisheesh said. [more inside]
Losing Motivation
"You know that feeling that you got in school when you had to do some homework?"
Youtuber @mpjme of FunFunFunction talks about how external motivation can mess up your inner motivation. [more inside]
D'oh!
The Dodo is extinct. But apparently not for the reasons we long believed. And those pictures of the bird we're used to seeing? Not so accurate. It's a tale of a tradition of Bad Science and the struggle to fix mistakes made long ago.
April 10
You know it's--it's great for, uh, women's equality.
The Road Home
“Treated right, poems don't just ‘work’ on radio, they can rock your world.” The Road Home, Bob Chelmick’s weekly broadcast of poetry and music, is perfect for winding down on Sunday night (and do male voices get more relaxing?). Each month the Road Home website cycles through 27 hours of past shows (playlist). Or listen to the live program on Sundays at 8-10 pm MST via the CKUA website. About Bob Chelmick.
Most (and least) meaningful jobs
Payscale asked a couple of million workers whether their jobs made the world a better place, and presented the results by job category. 24/7 Wall St. provided the specific job titles for the 20 most meaningful and 16 least meaningful jobs from the same data. Payscale provided the list of job titles whose workers are most likely to think that they're actively making the world worse.
Growing up with Star Wars
I Grew Up Star Wars had been collecting and posting photos of people growing up with Star Wars for almost a decade now. It is chock full of photos of kids with amazing retro toy collections, fake looking Darth Vaders signing autographs and a ton of Christmas and birthday photos. While it is fun just to look at the old photos, the site also demonstrates the influence this franchise has had on people over the years. [more inside]
Meet Newt Scamander
Flickr Photobomber Tagged Image Game
Solve simple puzzles using tagged images from Flickr. That's it.
"How to Become Famous on the Internet"
The memorable URL damn.dog hides a game where you try to guess the titles of WikiHow articles by one of their illustrations.
A tangled web of rock and roll survivors
The most dangerous band in the world is back (almost). What could possibly go wrong? But there's a twist. And another. [more inside]
Conan O'Brien and Steven Yeun K-pop Style
Conan O'Brien and Steven Yeun go to Korea and end up in J.Y. Park's "Fire" music video along with the Wonder Girls and Twice. [more inside]
We're Gonna Need A Bigger Remote
Some say that we are currently in a new Golden Age of TV, where quality and popularity of shows are at an all time high. Some would also say that we're in an age of Peak TV, popularized by John Landgraf (FX Networks CEO) in 2015. It refers to the amount of quality television programming, which gives even TV critics pause.
Backing this up, FX Networks researched and released list of all 1400 plus primetime shows in 2015, including all 409 original scripted series that aired in 2015 between 8 PM to 11 PM Eastern (direct download).
38.0000,-97.0000
How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell: For the last decade, [Joyce] Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat. All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why.
Dave Spector, Gaijin Tarento: Big in Japan, unknown in the US
Tarento, a Japanese rendering (gairaigo) of the English word "talent," or actors, though often is used to refer to actors who take part in more comedic panel shows. Gaijin tarento are "foreign talent," non-Japanese actors who speak Japanese and often represent a stereotyped view of their given nationalities. One of the best-known and longest operating gaijin tarento is David Spector, a relative unknown in his native Chicago, but a household name in Japan (NYT, 2014). The strange cult of the Gaijin Tarento (YT, 5:41) [more inside]
History Lesson - Part II
On the 15th anniversary of its publication, The A.V. Club interviews author Michael Azerrad and others on the creation and impact of Our Band Could Be Your Life. [more inside]
“Dancing saved my life.”
Sal “Doc Lock” Barcena is a member of the GroovMekanex, a Bay Area group dedicated to preserving popular local dance styles from the 70’s, like Strutting and Locking which he does with fellow dancer “O.G.” Mike Predovic, a member of the Boogaloo Conservatory. Sal started dancing as a 16 year old in 1978. [more inside]
Still Making Weight
A year ago, Des Moines Register columnist Daniel Finney was about to turn 40 and weighed 563 pounds. After he was offered a wheelchair when he became short of breath on a routine reporting assignment, he made up his mind to try to lose weight. When the column he wrote about his decision went viral, he decided to chronicle his efforts in a blog called Making Weight. A year later, 95 pounds lighter, and significantly fitter and healthier, he looks back on the effort in today's paper. Previously [more inside]
Imagining 'The Life of Pablo'
Pigeons and Planes: With both Spotify and Tidal yet to launch in the East Asian market, a lot of listeners have been left in the dark when it comes to Kanye West’s latest album, 'The Life of Pablo', which remained exclusive to Tidal from February 14 until April 1. Kyoto-based producer TOYOMU (Bandcamp, Soundcloud) has been creating his own lo-fi music for some time now, and as a fan of Kanye he was upset when he learned he could not listen to the album without illegally downloading it. So he decided to make the whole album himself without listening to it, using sample credits he found on WhoSampled and lyrics he grabbed from Genius. You can listen to TOYOMU's Imagining 'The Life of Pablo' on Bandcamp.
So, *that's* why we have 4-H.
Fetishizing Family Farms Broken families, underground vice, and sexual variance - not stability - characterized the American family farm for most of its history, argues historian Gabriel Rosenberg. [more inside]
There is no ending to that thought.
"But theirs is a loss that never can be recovered." John DeShazier on the death of former New Orleans Saints Defensive End Will Smith. Smith was 34.
Sunday Morning Woodworking
Butterfly room divider A video showing the making of a butterfly room divider. More videos inside... [more inside]
The Flying Forest
"While crows and ravens get most of the attention, smaller members of the corvid family like jays and nutcrackers are out in the world busily building and rebuilding forests. Not on purpose, of course, but through a behavior charmingly called “scatter hoarding,” which basically involves stashing seeds around in various places for later devourment." And this allows the trees - oaks, chestnuts, beeches, hickories - to "borrow the wings of birds." [more inside]
Dragon Panda King's Golden Garden Asian Wok Buffet House and Kitchen
Wonkblog analyzed the names of almost every Chinese restaurant in America. As expected, certain words were very commonly used. [more inside]
April 9
The Museum of Jurassic Technology
[PREVIOUSLY ON METAFILTER]
The Museum of Jurassic Technology contains strange exhibits that test one's sense of authenticity. It has been the subject of a radio documentary and a book.
“The worse things that happen, the more people come.”
My hovercraft is full of eels
A very useful phrase translated into every language you've ever heard of.
“...the urgent need to intervene well before violence happens,”
A Familiar Pattern in a Spouse’s Final Act by Benjamin Mueller, Ashley Southall and Al Baker [The New York Times] After years of violence, Nadia Saavedra finally told her husband to leave their
Bronx home. Soon after, the police say, he returned to kill her and then himself. [WARNING: Article contains descriptions of physical violence, domestic abuse, assault, homicide.]
Yes, zombies can swim.
Corpseburg lays a zombie survival skin over Google Maps. Punch in an address to create a map. Scavenge local schools, businesses and hospitals for food, weapons, meds and barricade materials.
Used.
Mother Jones profiles subprime lending in the used car industry:
Credit Acceptance makes its loans knowing that a large portion of its customers won't have the happy endings advertised in the promotional materials. The company operates on the assumption that it will collect only about 70 percent of the money it lends out—which means it will end up repossessing an awful lot of cars and suing those customers for the balance. As Wall Street banks clamored for more securities built on subprime auto debt, Credit Acceptance pumped out ever more paper, boosting loan volume by 23 percent in 2010 and 30 percent in 2011. (Growth has been slower in subsequent years due to increased competition, notes the company's 2014 annual report.) In the meantime, subprime lenders have boosted their average interest rate on used cars from 16 percent to nearly 20 percent annually, guaranteeing that more customers will default and end up with punitive court judgments and garnished wages.[more inside]
3 Glasses Later
“The first glass of wine is all about the food, the second glass is about love and the third glass is about mayhem.” Brazilian photographer Marcos Alberti on his project 3 Taças Depois
On poverty, surviving, taxes and economic justice in America
Velocipedia by Gianluca Gimini
I decided my job was going to be presenting the potential and the beauty inside these sketches. I selected those that I found most interesting and genuine and diverse, then rendered them as if they were real. I became the executor of these two minute projects by people who were mainly non-designers and confirmed my suspicion: everyone, regardless his age and job, can come up with extraordinary, wild, new and at times brilliant inventions.Gianluca Gimini asked strangers to draw pictures of bicycles from memory, then proceeded to render them in 3d
Tony Conrad, 1940-2016-[infinite]
Rest in peace Tony Conrad, who passed early this morning at the age of 76 due to prostate cancer. He was a pioneering avant-garde musician, particularly known for his massive, minimalist drones. He collaborated with the likes of La Monte Young and Faust, and was a major inspiration for the Velvet Underground (he was briefly in a pre-VU band called the Primitives with John Cale and Lou Reed.) He was also an innovative video artist. More links within. [more inside]
"It kind of works"
Following in the footsteps of a long line of Swedish inventors, Simone Giertz designs and builds helpful tools for our modern society, addressing issues like dental hygiene, preparing and serving breakfast, and looking your best in real life as well as in Internet discussions.
She recently teamed up with (Mefi's Own™) Adam Savage to optimize your movie experience, with a popcorn machine.
You probably can't force someone to take this test without causing drama
The joys and solitude of Alaska
While he may "struggle at poetry" Alaska trial lawyer Phillip Weidner has built an epically poetic 185 foot log cabin tower in Talkeetna Alaska. Called the Dr. Seuss House, its actual name is the Goose Creek Tower. Previously only visible by air it's now documented by Great Big Story with the short-but-lovely video We're Not In Whoville Anymore. [via]
Inside America’s Auschwitz
Smithsonian Magazine looks at the Whitney Plantation, the first slave museum in the United States.
“Often, plantation exhibits were established for those who lived through the Civil Rights era and yearned for a less complicated time,” says Ashley Rogers, director of museum operations. “And that’s an easy thing to accomplish when you have a ‘chandelier’ tour. Where the previous focus at plantations has been on the house and the culture of Southern gentility, things are changing.”
Slopaire! Que-est-ce que c'est que ca?
Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century. As a groundbreaking female cartoonist depicting a long-overlooked urban, often working-class milieu, the wide range and quantity of her work has been forgotten. A new website showcases her work for the comic magazine Judy, including her most famous creation, the working-class anti-hero Ally Sloper, 'the first comics superstar'. [more inside]
Oh, So Now I’m Bangladeshi?
Unconscious people don't want tea. Trust me on this.
It's Art, But Is It Funny?
New trend: adding funny captions to classic (or at least OLD) works of art. Steve Melcher's "That Is Priceless" has found slightly-off-center pieces of classical painting and given them more contemporary (and very logical) contexts since 2009. Now, "Popquotery" matches Old Art (some familiar, some not) to Less-Old Movie Quotes (mostly familiar). And "Classic Programmer Paintings" re-contextualizes art in terms Software Engineers can understand. Fine Art is for everybody, right?
April 8
If America Wants to Kill Science, It’s on Its Way
Science is desperate. It needs to believe itself honorable. It's threatened by the fact that it's not safe for so many of us. Period. It's just not safe.- A. Hope Jahren, in an interview about women in science and advancement in plant biology.
Film Dialogue from 2,000 Films
The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
The mysterious and useful Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: a plant whose ripe seed-pods yield tiny live lambs. Or was it a plant growing in the shape of a full-size lamb, but with an umbilical tether to the ground? (Oh, and do you know about the barnacle goose?) A tale from the medieval science grapevine. [more inside]
Tech and Privacy Experts Erupt Over Leaked Encryption Bill
A draft of a highly anticipated Senate encryption bill was leaked to The Hill late on Thursday night, sparking a swift backlash from technology and privacy groups even before the legislation has been introduced. [more inside]
The ... white baseball player has always been a study in negative space
He does not flip his bat after home runs. He does not insult the hard-working fans with talk about politics. He never takes more than one day at a time. As a result, he cannot exist without a foil to embody all those “flashy” or “hotheaded” or “provocative” things he is not. The foils, of course, have generally been black. But as the demographics of the sport have changed, so, too, has this dynamic.- Jay Caspian Kang on The Unbearable Whiteness of Baseball , and the decline of the sport's cultural relevance
First Listen: Santana IV
Carlos Santana and his band Santana release their 24th album Santana IV next week. NPR offers up a first listen. It reunites most of the Woodstock-era band for the first time in 45 years.
"Cheesecake, Chalkpit, Nutter, Butter, Crumple, Rumple..." (all rescues)
"Your by no means displeasing letter has arrived."
In Erasmus' De Copia, "students learned how to vary a given idea in manifold ways by putting it into different forms and figures (developing copia, or abundance, of words and expressions). [...] Erasmus provided extended examples of copia in his text, the most famous of which includes several hundred variations upon the same, initially insipid sentence, 'Your letter pleased me greatly.'" [more inside]
A new role for an old protein
A newly discovered way for cells to die "Everything about this death process is different from apoptosis," he says. "It looks different under the microscope, it requires different genes, and it has different kinetics."
The Dragon has landed
Space X has successfully returned the first stage from their Dragon rocket! This is link to the video clip of the landing, here's a link to the launch. [more inside]
the far away shore
Changing minds on minority rights with a single conversation, revisited
Previously on MeFi, a pair of then-graduate students, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, uncovered that some highly-publicized research, claiming to show that brief conversations with gay canvassers could cause lasting changes in people's opinions on gay rights, was in fact fraudulent, and was based on fabricated data. However, whether or not there was in fact any grain of truth to that paper's claims remained to be seen. Recently, the same team that uncovered the fraud has published their own study, showing that canvassing can really be effective at durably increasing support for transgender rights. [more inside]
Feel The Payne
The (Mostly) Tragic History Of Video Game Adaptations. He watches them so we don't have to: Sep Gohardani looks back over the ignominious history of the video game adaptation. [more inside]
Satire: verboten.
You may know him for his racy "V for Varoufakis" (previously). Or else, more recently, for his anti-counter-jingoistic "Be Deutsch!", or just as the laid-back "Laugengebäck" guy.
But Jan Böhmermann's new brand of TV-satire is about to shake more than just Germany's belly. [more inside]
There Are Not Enough Women in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Courtney E. Smith writes on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's woman problem: out of 312 inductees, only 37 are women (or bands with women). No one inducted as an executive, manager, or producer is a woman. [more inside]
Sicnarf is Francis backwards
Aesthetically amusing alliterations, creative alternative spellings, commonplace words artfully arranged, and other names that are just plain fun to say. Presenting the top 100 Minor League player names of 2016.
"Watch our favorite pop star ascend to the Swiftian heights"
"I had an open-door policy on dumb ideas."
An brief oral history of the time the New Jersey Nets almost changed their name to the New Jersey Swamp Dragons
I, Robot... Soccer
RoboCup is a robotics competition featuring autonomous humanoid soccer-playing robots. The action may be a bit clunky at times, but there are some surprising moments. The project's goal is ambitious and maybe a bit threatening for fleshy carbon-based soccer players:
By the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.
Where have all the gentlemen gone...
on Grindr? [NSFW kinda]
Look for Periwinkle Patches.
The Burial Database of Enslaved African Americans is a project of the Periwinkle Initiative to identify and document often-unmarked cemeteries where the remains of enslaved people are interred. Now "in its infancy," it will aggregate submissions nationwide. People who know of a site can submit it online - an important task given that many are threatened by development and identified by local lore and memory alone.
Physics, math and science toys
Physics Fun is an Instagram account with short videos of physics, math and science 'toys.' An accompanying blog looks at some in more detail.
In the greatest city in the world....
"The statistics tell us that changing the way we think of race and ethnicity in the theater will not be easy. Of Equity’s 50,823 active members, 68% identify themselves as Caucasian." -- Actors' Equity President Kate Shindle, on the Hamilton casting debacle, and the real problem of diversity in theatre. [more inside]
Pope Releases Apostolic Exhortation on the Church and Modern Family Life
With the release of “Amoris Laetitia,” (.pdf) or “Joy of Love,” Pope Francis has called for the Catholic Church, as the Guardian puts it, to "revamp its response to modern family life." As the New York Times notes, the document "calls for priests to welcome single parents, gay people and unmarried straight couples who are living together....But Francis once again closed the door on same-sex marriage, saying it cannot be seen as the equivalent of heterosexual unions." [more inside]
You're in charge, pal. Just look at the size of your commemorative knife
Commemorative championship bullshit is a cottage industry that's latched onto sports both professional and amateur, not unlike a remora on the bottom of a shark. Only this remora wants to sell you a team-branded divot tool and adjustable baseball cap made of Chinese newspaper shreds: Which Alabama Commemorative Championship Knife Are You?
Cheating at Triathlon
Run. Bike. Cheat? (NYT) A story about Julie Miller, an age-group winner at 2015 Ironman Canada, who appears to have cheated her way to "victory." Here is the related thread at the Slowtwitch forums.
The seventh book of "hows" : or how to knit
The Knitting Reference Library, approximately 300 knitting books, ranging from the 1800s to the 1970s.
There’s no such thing as free information
Content providers are in a double bind: readers don’t want to pay to read, but they also resist and resent the use of advertising and tracking software to generate income. While the introduction of subscription-only models has had mixed success, the UK newspaper The Independent recently shut down its print run, while the Guardian is cutting 250 jobs. Who'll pay to publish if we won't pay to read? [more inside]
April 7
sock it to me
EU referendum: PM 'makes no apology' for £9m EU leaflets
BBC: "David Cameron has defended a government pro-EU membership campaign, amid criticism that £9m of public money is being spent on "one-sided propaganda".
The PM said the government was "not neutral" in the referendum and the cost was "money well spent".
The 16-page leaflets will be sent to 27 million UK homes from next week." [more inside]
"My mother raised me to believe that mayonnaise was for idiots."
Ottessa Moshfegh writes about mayonnaise, and her mother, in an essay for Lucky Peach. [more inside]
The sugar conspiracy
In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar—and not fat—was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?
2016's best video (foreign language, with monkey)
Turn off the "Upload videos" link, Google, because the best video of the year has already been uploaded! Its summary reads like a penmanship exercise: Russian farmer monkey in a snowsuit & mittens visits his pet goats and hens. [SLYT] [more inside]
If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower [SLVimeo]
"Wrapped" is a graduation short film from Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, created at the Institute of Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Postproduction. After running at over 100 festivals world wide and winning numerous awards the film is finally online.
"This is for Allah. And it's goin' way out there, sucka."
The Good News: While slight in stature and short on talent, Tanner Boyle brings a feistiness that any championship club requires. Anyone who picks a fight with the entire seventh grade won’t back down come crunch time in the playoffs ... Underpinning all his actions is a pure love of the game. When asked if he wanted to quit, Boyle replied: “Crud no, I want to play ball.” He can also use the word “crud” as a noun, adjective, or verb, which, while irrelevant to baseball, is linguistically impressive.
The Bad News: The pint-size shortstop doesn’t get along with Jews, Hispanics, blacks, gays, or women (for starters) — attitudes complicated by the fact that he plays for the only team in the North Valley League that boasts any real diversity on its roster ... It’d also be safer to pass John Rocker a microphone than to let Boyle tackle any post-game press conferences.
The Bad News Bears Turns 40: A Complete Player Scouting Report
The Bad News: The pint-size shortstop doesn’t get along with Jews, Hispanics, blacks, gays, or women (for starters) — attitudes complicated by the fact that he plays for the only team in the North Valley League that boasts any real diversity on its roster ... It’d also be safer to pass John Rocker a microphone than to let Boyle tackle any post-game press conferences.
The Bad News Bears Turns 40: A Complete Player Scouting Report
Wakaliwood!
the DIY action film studio from the slums of Uganda that took over the Internet and made it plausible for anyone in the world to become an East African kung fu movie commando. [more inside]
A Century of Beverly Cleary
“I owe my literacy learning and appreciation to a mother who loved reading, read aloud, and believed in the use of the public library, and to my teachers who were strict in teaching the tools of writing.”
Beverly Cleary celebrates her hundredth birthday next week. She recently spoke to the Oregonian about her long career. [more inside]
Recycle Nixon. Stop Kissing Pig Ass.
The University of British Columbia hosts an online collection of 250 anti-war and other posters from the Berkeley student movement, dating between 1968 and 1970. [more inside]
"...evil is very often inextricably tied up with misogyny."
The Surprising, Subtle Feminism of the Spider-Man Trilogy - Sarah Barrett, The Mary Sue
Creators for Creators
The 2016 Image Expo, a satellite event to this years Emerald City Comiccon, brought a wealth of announcements and new comics. It also saw the unveiling of the Creators for Creators grant: The goal of the Creators for Creators grant is to help pave the way for the next generation of comics creators by supporting their work financially and through mentorship, as well as providing opportunities for their creations to reach a wide audience. We plan to give $30,000 to a single cartoonist or writer/artist duo in order to support the creation of a new and original work of a length between sixty-four and one hundred pages over the course of a single year.
Founders of the grant include a rnage of Image creators as well as Spike Trotman of Iron Circus Comics, and they will be providing support and advice to go alongside the money.
Founders of the grant include a rnage of Image creators as well as Spike Trotman of Iron Circus Comics, and they will be providing support and advice to go alongside the money.
{dials} "Bork, bork, bork, bork!"{click}
Are you lonely? But your relatives just want to talk about that election, and your friends about their problems, and your work colleagues about your boss? Then dial The Swedish Number, get connected to a random Swede and talk about anything! (Call charges apply. A service provided by the Swedish Tourist Association.)
It's north of where I live, obviously
Where The Hell is Upstate New York? With the $15/hour minimum wage set to take effect across New York State in a complex fashion (geographically and otherwise), and the arrival of primary candidates in New York State, Gothamist explore the time-old question of where exactly upstate New York is and interviews scholars and historians whose opinions (surprise!) differ.
We just did it and then we did another and then we did another.
Patricia Moodian: Really it was easy to find the women to participate. There were talented and able women everywhere, chafing at the bit to get a chance to show they could do such amazing work. I did make the calls, have the meetings at my humble abode, and dealt with Turner. The brilliant and legendary Trina Robbins had already published the first all-women comic, and I was very motivated by all that she taught me.An oral history of Wimmen's Comix. Part Two.
No One Man Should Have All That Power
Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze is brilliant, political, and human
Ultimately, Stelfreeze and Coates have woven a story that Black Panther deserves, and one that pushes his and Wakanda's preestablished narrative into brave new territory. This is a story about a man of his people, and unlike many Black Panther stories of the past, it does justice to and makes us care about those he's pledged to serve and protect. It's a brilliant start to one of Marvel's most promising new series, and like the hero whose story it tells, it's poised to defy its already grand expectations. [more inside]
Ultimately, Stelfreeze and Coates have woven a story that Black Panther deserves, and one that pushes his and Wakanda's preestablished narrative into brave new territory. This is a story about a man of his people, and unlike many Black Panther stories of the past, it does justice to and makes us care about those he's pledged to serve and protect. It's a brilliant start to one of Marvel's most promising new series, and like the hero whose story it tells, it's poised to defy its already grand expectations. [more inside]
Tsk tsk
The fall: how diving became football’s worst crime
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Rule 34 May Be Moribund. The Washington Post investigates the origins, history, and doubtful future of Rule 34.
The geographies of loneliness (The Guardian - Cities)
"What's the world's loneliest city?" "Urban life is more stressful than rural life, but whether it’s lonelier is a point of debate among social scientists. A 2016 report by Age UK noted there are higher incidences of loneliness in cities, but precisely what brings it on is surprising. The same report found that gender and education are largely irrelevant – except for those with the highest level of education, who are often lonelier – and that household income and caring for a pet also have little effect."
Stephen Sondheim in Conversation
Stephen Sondheim talks to Rufus Norris about his career, and his views on current musical theatre trends. (SLYT, 42 minutes)
"What will you become?"
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story The first trailer for the next Star Wars universe story is online.
95, Alive, and Folding Regularly
Cartoonist Al Jaffee recently celebrated his 95th birthday at a party thrown by his friends and collaborators at MAD Magazine, where he was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for the "Longest career as a comics artist": 73 years 3 months... and counting. A contributor to MAD for 60 of those years, since 1964 he has done the "MAD Fold-In", almost 450 consecutive issues - with one interruption. And he's working on one for the next issue. (previously) [more inside]
April 6
"Then I fell face-first on the ground."
25 Innocent Coloring Book Pictures Made Instantly NSFW
Exactly what it says in the title. [SL-CollegeHumour]
An API of Ice And Fire
According to Joakim Smoog, its developer, “[This] is the world's greatest source for quantified and structured data from the universe of Ice and Fire (and the HBO series Game of Thrones).” (Documentation) via
It’s hard for me to consider a penis in my mouth as “impersonal.”
It’s a “blow job” because it’s work: How guys push women to make oral sex as common as shaking hands
How oral sex became a teen's workaround, a path to popularity -- but rarely the road to reciprocated pleasure
How oral sex became a teen's workaround, a path to popularity -- but rarely the road to reciprocated pleasure
Unfriending the University of Northern New Jersey
The US Department of Homeland Security created a fake for-profit institution, the University of Northern New Jersey (UNNJ), as part of a sting operation targeting student-visa fraud. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the demise of UNNJ's Facebook page, which featured photos of a mysterious cup of coffee and condolences for the fictional death of the fictional president's mother.
Ain't Misbehavin' - Louis Armstrong transfer from a master disc
Listen to this 1929 Louis Armstrong recording cleaner than you have ever heard, thanks to Nick Dellow's audio transfer from a mother record shipped by Okeh to Germany for their Odeon pressings. (slyt)
Whatsapp enables end to end encryption for a billion people
Whatsapp is now the mostly widely used end to end crypto tool on the planet. Working with Moxie Marlinspike of Open Whisper Systems the Facebook owned messaging system is now using the Signal protocol for encryption. [more inside]
Four Years a Student-Athlete
On the racial injustice of big-time college sports: "Amateurism rules restrain campus athletes—and only campus athletes, not campus musicians or campus writers—from earning a free-market income, accepting whatever money, goods, or services someone else wants to give them. And guess what? In the revenue sports of Division I football and men's basketball, where most of the fan interest and television dollars are, the athletes are disproportionately black."
Merle Haggard 1937-2016
The Global Makeup Gorillas
How to Write a History of Video Game Warfare
How to Write a History of Video Game Warfare - A look at journalist Andrew Groen's new book, Empires of Eve, a detailed history of The Great War in Eve Online, a MMORPG of spaceships, star systems, intrigue, betrayal, and diplomacy.
And for a more academic look at the game, Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business, also recently published. (Link for those with university Shibboleth access)
And for a more academic look at the game, Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business, also recently published. (Link for those with university Shibboleth access)
“Whoops, I lost me muff!”
Arno the socialite stayed at the Ritz-Carlton until dawn, keeping Frazier company, and was captured in photos holding her hand while the 17-year-old looks utterly exhausted by the event. (She was.) Five nights earlier, Arno the satirist and his friends—publisher Condé Nast and George Balanchine among them—held a well-publicized debut at the nightclub Chez Firehouse for Miss Wilma Baard. A fashion model, Baard had spent much of her childhood on a Hoboken tugboat captained by her father, so reporters at the event dubbed it the debut of “Tugboat Minnie.” “I think most debutantes are dopes,” she told reporters. While Arno and his friends worked the receiving line in shifts, she stood there for hours, saying only of society that it made “my feet hurt.” - The Double Life of Peter Arno, The New Yorker's Most Influental Cartoonist by Ben Schwartz (NSFW warning: butts)
UConn Basketball Completes Four-Year Sweep
The University of Connecticut Huskies have won their fourth straight NCAA Division I women's basketball championship, dominating Syracuse in the championship game 82-51. Power forward/center Breanna Stewart won the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four for an unprecedented fourth time (she was also the first freshman to win it, and the first player to win it three times). Stewart had promised two years ago that she would bring four titles home to Storrs, and she delivered. [more inside]
Eight years of AGILE experience. Also, I'm a dog.
Deconstructed anything, food on boards, ironic seating among other sins.
So Much Is Said By Saying Nothing
“Déjeuner du Matin” (YouTube), a short film adaptation of Jacques Prévert's poem about the last moments of a relationship. [more inside]
Mapping lead exposure risk by census tract
Vox, with the help of the Washington State Department of Health, has used "housing and poverty data in our calculations to [map] areas of risk" for lead poisoning. [more inside]
Trevor Noah didn't fall from the sky.
The Funny Thing About Race in South Africa
It's 1948 and it's the first day of apartheid in South Africa. A jazzy tune is playing, the sun is shining and some white people are lying on blankets on a grassy embankment. A familiar sign pops up: "Whites Only." The camera pans onto a young black man who is taking his place on the lawn as a security officer approaches. "Apartheid? Ahhh, it's today?" he says, as he's being led off the screen. "Man, I thought it was next week."
I Can't Give Everything Away
The Immortal David Bowie continues to make his presence felt with the release of the animated video for the closing track from ★, I Can't Give Everything Away. The video was created by Jonathan Barnbrook, who has done art direction for Bowie albums since 2002, and created the packaging for ★.
Interactive Fiction has a convention of rating how cruel a game is
Is this Cruel, y/n? In my hunt for the most interesting and bewildering wikis, I discovered the IF wiki, and it yielded a cruelty system that isn't only explained in the permanence of actions - but also described in save file usage. [more inside]
The Scars Project
Australian artist Whitney Develle has started a project to offer free tattoos to survivors of self harm.
"The way the tattoo made her feel, it was like she was wearing armour on top of her scars."
"They can receive some closure and find confidence again."
New York Times has a Conversation on Race
A Conversation on Race. With Asians. With Latinos. With Black Women. With Police. With White People.
The Show About The Show
This self-referential scripted series by Brooklyn filmmaker Caveh Zahedi is about him trying to make a TV show. Co-starring Alex Karpovsky, Eleonore Hendricks, Dustin Defa, as well as his wife and children, the intensity of the series rapidly increases as his brutal honesty about the production causes tension with his staff and family, but the honesty continues.
Here is a trailer which sums up the show, and this is the first episode.
On another note, here is Will Oldham starring in Tripping With Caveh.
Here is a trailer which sums up the show, and this is the first episode.
On another note, here is Will Oldham starring in Tripping With Caveh.
BABYMETAL Makes Their U.S. Television Debut
Babymetal (previously) have released their second album (Metal Resistance) on april first (dubbed Fox Day). To promote the release they appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert yesterday. [more inside]
No Spingus Pelb Only Final Destination
On April Seriousness Day, Vinny from Vinesauce streamed himself playing and watching four instalments of an obscure but beloved video game franchise. What, you've never heard of Scrimmy Bingus "and the" Crungy Spingus? [more inside]
San Francisco Rock: A Night At the Family Dog
Santana, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were filmed on February 4, 1970 by WNET. Each band had two songs on TV, and then they all jammed together. Not a single word: just music. Article about the show. The set list for the show with a video of each song is inside. [more inside]
April 5
Djrum: aiming for the dancefloor, but ending up with more ambient tunes
Felix Manuel, better known as Djrum (pronounced as "drum," evolved from his initial DJ Rum handle) blends hip hop, house, jungle and bass seamlessly in his mixes, plus splices the DNA of techno, dubstep, garage and grime in an attempt to make them, in his words, “live inside each other” in his own productions. This blending is not frenetic, but slow and methodical, often including extended clips from movies, such as heard in The Miracle. With a relatively scant 9 EPs and singles, including two splits, and one album to his name, you can get hear more of the scope of Felix Manuel's musical tastes from his mixes... [more inside]
Welcome to the most eye-popping development in the history of vision!
Squant: the fourth primary color
Squant Story, by Crosley Bendix, Director Of Stylistic Premonitions, U.M.N.
Squant Photography, by Rolin Wandbagon. [Note: Since these pictures include the color squant, you'll need a special SquantView™ plug-in to see them properly. Plug-ins are available for both Mac and Win versions 3.1 through NT. Click here for troubleshooting.]
Squant Story, by Crosley Bendix, Director Of Stylistic Premonitions, U.M.N.
Squant Photography, by Rolin Wandbagon. [Note: Since these pictures include the color squant, you'll need a special SquantView™ plug-in to see them properly. Plug-ins are available for both Mac and Win versions 3.1 through NT. Click here for troubleshooting.]
Rule 34 - If something exists, there is porn of it.
After 100 years, the verdict is in
“Slavery has always been a legal institution. And it never ended.”
“prisoners are the slaves of today, and that slavery affects our society economically, morally and politically.” (pdf)
Swiss in CSS
Classic Swiss design rendered as animated CSS. That is all.
What is an "average" Rembrandt?
The Next Rembrandt Can you create a "new" Rembrandt "painting" via data analysis? This project gives it a try.
ID that landform you see from your window seat
". . .the airplane seat is sort of a planetarium for the Earth,” she says. “It’s a great way to inspire people to learn about the sciences.”Flyover Country is a free app that correlates geo/paleo databases, maps, and other data sources with your phone's GPS to provide information and identification about the landscape below as you fly over it - no wi-fi necessary. [more inside]
Nine-year-old Reporter Breaks Story, Takes Names, Kicks Ass
Hilde Kate Lysiak has journalism in her blood. Her father was a reporter for the New York Daily News before the family moved to Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Hilde realized that her new town had no newspaper, so like any enterprising 7-year-old, she founded the Orange Street News (her first story was about the birth of her baby sister Juliet). She covers all the bases, with all-caps headlines about the Selinsgrove vandal striking again, a possibly rabid skunk, and an advice column by her older sister Isabel. Then Hilde broke a story about a murder on Ninth Street (beating the local area paper's story by several hours), and the big papers came calling. [more inside]
I hope this works
The Future is Now
Virtual Reality, a tech geek dream for decades, was long hobbled by high latency, clunky hardware, and perennially absurd reports on network news.
That all changed in 2011, when Palmer Luckey, then 18, built the first Oculus Rift prototype in his parents' garage with iPhone repair money.
Awed by its powerful sense of presence, developer John Carmack became a fan and demoed it at E3. The ensuing Kickstarter campaign shattered all fundraising goals, and Facebook controversially bought the rights for a whopping $2 billion -- alienating erstwhile partner Valve Software, the iconic creators of Half-Life/Portal/Steam.
A Cambrian explosion of headsets followed: Morpheus, HoloLens, Google Cardboard, Gear VR.
But perhaps most interesting is Valve's own counter-project: a breathtaking "room scale" VR set-up with Tron-like "Chaperone" and tracked motion controls called the HTC Vive.
With this week's commercial launch of Rift and Vive bringing us to the threshold of a new interactive medium, look inside for guides, notes, and killer apps for this, the stunning arrival of consumer VR. [more inside]
"What do you plan to do with the wings?"
Rex Ridenoure's sister, LouAnn, a Southwest flight attendant, was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. "As he waited to board a Southwest flight to see her, partially fearing he wouldn't make it in time to say goodbye, Ridenoure decided he would somehow turn his cross-country journey into the proper farewell celebration she deserved."
"Is this nonfiction? Is this just fantasy?"
Librarian Rhapsody: A parody of Bohemian Rhapsody, created by the Shoalhaven Library Staff to celebrate the end of the the school year. (Lyrics)
The Voyeur's Motel
Techies
"Techies is a portrait project focused on sharing stories of tech employees in Silicon Valley. We cover subjects who tend to be underrepresented in the greater tech narrative. This includes (but is not limited to) women, people of color, folks over 50, LGBT, working parents, disabled, etc." [more inside]
Crowd Source: Inside the company that fakes it all... for a price
April 4
flushable computing
In electrical engineering class, I was told to think of electric circuits with a kind of hydraulic analogy. But could you extend this to entire computers? The Rube Goldberg Machine That Mastered Keynesian Economics, built by John Horton Conway[PDF] from a urinal flush mechanism. [more inside]
Power poses: stand like a boss (and catch more eyes on dating sites)
Forcing a smile genuinely decreases stress, so what if you were to stand with pride even when you feel less than super? You don't have to pretend to fly like Superman (previously), but it does help to stand like Wonder Woman. Your body language shapes who you are. TLDW: Business Insider's summary with screencaps, or read the slightly more lengthy summary of the study at Harvard Business School by Amy Cuddy and coauthors Dana R. Carney and Andy J. Yap of Columbia University. Such power poses can also better your chances on quick-reaction dating apps.
It's a... well, you know.
2016 is turning out to be a tragic year for the voices of iconic Star Wars characters. Only three months after Jason Wingreen (who voiced Boba Fett) passed away, we now have the passing of radio dramatist Erik Bauersfeld, who once upon a time stepped into a recording booth and spent an hour or so voicing Admiral Ackbar and Bib Fortuna.
“Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: Robin isn’t gay.”
Glen Weldon, writing in Slate: A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. [more inside]
[James Brown] had all the pageantry of the Catholic Church.
$5, same as in town
"Swipe Buster, he said, was an attempt, albeit perhaps a prurient and sordid one, to use a popular company (Tinder) and a juicy lure (cheating) in order to educate people about how much of their personal data is out there and how easily people can get access to it without hacking or breaking rules. (Swipe Buster was originally called Tinder Buster. It changed its name and URL on Sunday evening.)" — Here’s How You Can Check if Your Partner Is Cheating on Tinder by Emily Jane Fox for Vanity Fair. Previously: Tinder Confidential, and relatedly: Ashley Madison has been hacked. [more inside]
Kitty Genovese's killer dies
"Winston Moseley, who stalked, raped and killed Kitty Genovese in a prolonged knife attack in New York in 1964 while neighbors failed to act on her desperate cries for help — a nightmarish tableau that came to symbolize urban apathy in America — died on March 28, in prison." (NYT link) [more inside]
“As a practical matter, the ruling mostly helped Democrats.”
Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to ‘One Person One Vote’ by Adam Liptak [The New York Times] The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that states may count all residents, whether or not they are eligible to vote, in drawing election districts. The decision was a major statement on the meaning of a fundamental principle of the American political system, that of “one person one vote.” Until this decision, the court had never resolved whether voting districts should contain the same number of people, or the same number of eligible voters. Counting all people amplifies the voting power of places that have large numbers of residents who cannot vote legally — including immigrants who are here legally but are not citizens, illegal immigrants, children and prisoners. Those places tend to be urban and to vote Democratic. [more inside]
"I took my love for my own children and I put it on these girls"
The Cost of Caring: After Emma realized that her white-collar job in the Philippines would never pay her enough to send her children to college, she came to New York and became a nanny. She hasn't seen her kids in 16 years.
shame, anger, alienation, and other hallmarks of the masculine psyche
Teaching Men to Be Emotionally Honest [NYT]: "By the time many young men do reach college, a deep-seeded* gender stereotype has taken root that feeds into the stories they have heard about themselves as learners. Better to earn your Man Card than to succeed like a girl, all in the name of constantly having to prove an identity to yourself and others." [more inside]
Your attention: please?
Blaming technology for the rise in inattention is misplaced. History shows that the disquiet is fuelled not by the next new thing but by the threat this thing – whatever it might be – poses to the moral authority of the day--Frank Furedi, The Ages of Distraction [more inside]
Thought You Owned That Device You Paid For?
Guess again. In a move that is sure to provoke a little discussion about licensing/ownership, privacy, and Internet of Things, Nest plans to brick customers' older devices on May 15.
(via the always entertaining Pinboard twitter feed.)
Two very enthusiastic thumbs up
"We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls." Three years ago today, Roger Ebert passed away. [more inside]
Jailhouse Stories
In Texas county jails, thousands of people wait for justice. Many have not been convicted but are held in dangerous and inhumane conditions while their cases are decided. Read their stories at JailhouseStories.org. (Warning - there's some tough reading in here, including abuse of the mentally ill and of pregnant women.) [more inside]
Kill the tyrant Kal-El before his rise to power
Everything you never suspected about the perils of raising a young Clark Kent. [SLTumblrFanfiction]
Jonathan Katz, Larry David, and Joel Hodgson walk into a room...
Comedy Central turned 25 years old on April 1st. The AV Club commemorates the anniversary with an oral history of the network that brought us South Park, Jon Stewart as a serious pundit, and an ongoing revolution for women in comedy.
This can't be happening at Macdonald Hall!
If you experienced children’s pop culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the nostalgia cycle has caught up with you, and the entertainment industry has accelerated the process of harvesting even your faintest memories. The sheer volume of revivals means that at some point a story small and forgotten enough to feel like a personal memory will be unearthed and dragged into the sunlight. The sudden reappearance of a once-loved TV show/book/slice of intellectual property forces you, the viewer, into an existential anxiety. To merely be the target of this deluge of content is a weird sensation. To be one of the creators—dusting off past work, bringing old versions of yourself into a new world and hoping to find the public’s affection—must be infinitely more bewildering.
Lego Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus
A Texan sheriff stumbles upon a vast secret civilization. A loophole enables the resurrection of one of history's greatest monsters. And it's all in Lego. Harry Potter Comics (page one), currently over seven hundred pages (three 'books' going on four) long. (Warning: spoilers for the official books; current character page spoils comic but there's different versions for each 'book').
April 3
The last Plains War Chief has passed at the age of 102.
"Warfare was our highest art, but Plains Indian warfare was not about killing. It was about intelligence, leadership, and honor." - Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow (October 27, 1913 – April 3, 2016). Historian, Anthropologist, Author, Lecturer, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Tribal Leader, Veteran, Elder, War Chief. [more inside]
An Open (and Open Source) Campaign Takes on Facebook
Man builds 'Scarlett Johansson' robot
Ricky Ma has built the girl of his dreams: Scarlett Johannson, using parts mostly created using a 3D printer, and as a result has landed right square in the middle of the uncanny valley.
"Find another hobby or you're going to die."
Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem (TW: nasty stuff)
Buckle up Bonehead. 'Cause you're goin' for a ride!
Hong Kong is dense: three takes
Andy Yeung’s drone photos of Hong Kong.
Michael Wolf’s many photos of Hong Kong (and other megacities).
Peter Stewart’s photo art of Hong Kong. (Before and after)
Michael Wolf’s many photos of Hong Kong (and other megacities).
Peter Stewart’s photo art of Hong Kong. (Before and after)
After this it's the midterms: April's US election primaries
And then there were five. On the Democratic party side, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders remain. On the Republican party side, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Donald Trump remain. But there's also the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and lots of other parties. The dates for candidate debates are fluid; for example there may be a Democratic debate on April 14th. In other election news, the New York Times thinks that Candidate Trump would be "Wildly unpopular", while the Washington Post thinks that Republicans are gaming the voting system in their favor. Cruz and Sanders lead in Wisconsin polls, Kasich enjoys a beer, and the BBC describes five ways the Republican bloodbath could end. [more inside]
Haters gonna hate, baby.
"A hater can be anyone. A family member, a friend, a colleague, a teacher, a boss, or some random person you meet on the street or the Internet. People who were friends forever can suddenly be haters. You HAVE to have the tools to deal with it." The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Dealing With Haters.
And the shit just hit the fan.
The Panama Papers - Overview The largest leak journalists have ever had to deal with.
Panama company Mossack Fonseca has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax. The documents show links to 72 current or former heads of state in the data, including dictators accused of looting their own countries. They were obtained by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). BBC Panorama and The Guardian are among 107 media organisations in 78 countries that have been analysing the documents.
Panama company Mossack Fonseca has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax. The documents show links to 72 current or former heads of state in the data, including dictators accused of looting their own countries. They were obtained by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). BBC Panorama and The Guardian are among 107 media organisations in 78 countries that have been analysing the documents.
"Spurned Elle Writer Goes On Truly Bananas Rant"
Last week, freelance reporter Jacques Hyzagi wrote a scathing account of the ethics, talent, and working practices of various media figures in what became a viral post for the New York Observer. Responding to the intrigue, The Guardian interviewed Hyzagi to "learn just who is he and why is his background a mystery?". [more inside]
With self-discipline, all things are possible.
Autumn Ray is running a marathon in every one of America's 59 National Parks. Photographer Jonathan Irish is seeing them all in one year. [more inside]
April 2
unicorn tears
"The Raindrop Cake is inspired by traditional Mizu Shingen Mochi from Japan," and it's coming to New York. [more inside]
West of House
A Brief Bibliography about IF History is a review and overview of the sometimes-mainstream, sometimes-forgotten genre of Interactive Fiction, and chock full of good links besides. By Emily Short, from her blog.
Life doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints
I work with a group of men who aren’t used to seeing themselves in the narrative, unless it’s as the villain, maybe not in your history book, but in a few newspaper articles a few years back and in the hearts of their victim’s families. These men understand that much of America thinks they are monsters, they deserve to be locked in cages. They are the bastard, orphan sons of … every kind of women you can imagine; they are also beloved sons and husbands in close families who come to see them in the visiting room at the prison every week. Maybe they’ve been “livin’ without a family since I was a child. My father left, my mother died, I grew up buckwild.” Many of them know all about impoverished, in squalor, and fathers who split.Kate Powers, on watching (parts of) Hamilton with prisoners and the power of theatre.
I got a little stoned, smoked some weed, put on the Superman costume.
Think Defence Blog's Top 25 British War Films
British defence blog Think Defence presents an idiosyncratic list of the Top 25 British War Films. [more inside]
Internet -> internet
The Internet (old/current format) is blowing up at the Associated Press Stylebook announcement that as of June 1st it'll be the internet. Furthermore, Web will begin with a lower case w in all instances from the same date. One author made the case for this (Facebook picture) in 2009. However, others are disagreeing, while others are finding more to disagree on. This, of course, is all good publicity for the forthcoming product.
“Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.”
Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet for Ever. by Robert Macfarlane [The Guardian] We are living in the Anthropocene age, in which human influence on the planet is so profound – and terrifying – it will leave its legacy for millennia. Politicians and scientists have had their say, but how are writers and artists responding to this crisis?
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy"
The latest episode of Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs. Women has dropped, this time focusing on Laura Mulvey's [pdf] concept of the 'male gaze' in video games. [more inside]
Rhonda-Marie
Rhonda-Marie Avery is one of the 35 runners who started the Barkley 100 this morning, a 100 mile trail race (previously) that boasts a total climb to 62,680 ft., with no aid except for water at two points. Rhonda-Marie is also legally blind. [more inside]
Practical Magic
Edward Lovett was a bank employee and amateur folklorist fascinated with charms and amulets and the superstitions they represented. He rambled early 20th century London collecting charms from soldiers, sailors, street vendors and others. Today the charms are preserved in the Wellcome Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, and Horniman Museum. [more inside]
Is that a gun in your spacesuit?
The centre at the edge
Is There Value in Training Scientific Generalists For Positions at the Edge of Academia? Gopal Sarma says Yes
Hit the Road Jack and Jill.
How To Start Running. (SLNYT). A comprehensive guide that covers the walk-run method, running form, training plans, also the skinny on weight-loss, stretching, hydration, running gear, and lots more. As part of NYT's Well section, it's backed by the latest scientific findings, most of which (surprise!) default to common sense. Trying to find the perfect shoe? Pick a pair that's comfortable. How much to hydrate? Drink when thirsty... [more inside]
Why not love Queen by playing its hits on trombone?
A trombone player loves - LOVES - Queen, and does the band proud by playing it all. It makes sense to do this, once you've heard it.
Saturday Morning Acid Flashback
“In December of 2015, a group of sleep-deprived Boston-based animators, artists and musicians met at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design to collaborate on an animated film. With the intention of re-imagining an episode of the classic cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, they assembled the project in four days. This was the result.” SCROOBJAM is the third and most elaborate in a series of "Golem Jams" organized (if that's the correct word) by John F. Quirk. (via Cartoon Brew which lists the credits here)
And they would have gotten away with it, too...
And they would have gotten away with it, too...
Ostagram
Ostagram (github), uses neural networks to combine two images, styling the first (may be NSFW) as the second, with awesome and terrifying results.
April 1
The language of flowers, spoken in forms around the world
In the Victorian Era, "the language of flowers" (floriography) was all the rage. According to The Smithsonian Gardens History in Bloom summary (and activities sheets) for The Language of Flowers (PDF), "Nearly all Victorian homes would own at least one of the guide books dedicated to the ‘language of flowers.’ The authors of these guidebooks used visual and verbal analogies, religious and literary sources, folkloric connections, and botanical attributes to derive the various associations for the
flowers." But where did it come from? (Google books preview) Istanbul in the Tulip Age (PDF, first chapter of Crime and Punishment in Istanbul: 1700-1800), and Turkish love-letters and harems ... somewhat. [more inside]
Let's Fhqwhgads Again! Let's Fhqwhgads Again!
The Comeback Kid, also known as Homestar Runner, has a new update for the 3rd April Fool's Day in a row!
cook in a pan or bake in an oven
The Warrant Canary in the Content Mines
Reddit has removed its warrant canary. One might take that to mean they've been subpoenaed. [more inside]
Delmer Berg, Last U.S. Survivor of the Spanish Civil War, Dead at 100
The Death of the Last Veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. "Delmer Berg, 100, was one of the Americans who volunteered to fight Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and he never stopped fighting for leftist causes." Berg died on February 28, 2016. The war ended 77 years ago today. [more inside]
TribbleCam
The Smithsonian National Air and Space museum has set up a live camera monitoring a box of tribbles as they reproduce.
Look it's been a long week
It's Friday and you need something nice and good, go on listen, this will give you that smile NSFW
Enraptured contemplation of a pure assthetic ideal
Baby goat headbutts puppies
Pipsqueak headbutts puppies (SLYT)
This record in no way endorses a belief in the occult
Spirit Phone is the latest album by Lemon Demon, aka Niel Cicierega (previously on Metafilter). [more inside]
QUEEN.
"[I]f I’m stranded on a desert island, and have ten records to take, I know [Aretha Franklin is] in the collection. For she’ll remind me of my humanity. What’s essential in all of us. And she just sounds so damn good," writes President Obama. "Here’s a tip: when you’re deejaying a party, open with ‘Rock Steady.’ " David Remnick profiles Aretha Franklin for The New Yorker: "Soul Survivor." [more inside]
Maybe... I am the fool
Did a few of your usual webcomics seem to be ripping off each other today? Indeed, 'tis Fools of April day, and it was planned.
An imgur gallery of many involved in the plot.
Goofus and Muad'Dib
Goofus and Muad'Dib [via mefi projects]
Goofus and Gallant illustration mashup with Frank Herbert's Dune quotations.
Happy April 1
April Is The Cruelest Month / At The Oooold Baaaall Gaaaaaame!
Poems to Celebrate the National Pastime. Opening Day for Major League Baseball's 2016 season is just around the corner, and today begins National Poetry Month. Celebrate both with a selection of fine baseball verse from the Editors at poetry.org. [more inside]
The Redemption of Pingu the Noscoper
From the Camp Santo Quarterly comes this lovely little story: As a kid, did you know someone who claimed their uncle worked at Nintendo?
With Firewatch, the uncle was real.
With Firewatch, the uncle was real.
film criticism 101
Police Body Cameras: What Do You See? An interactive simulated piece about the usefulness of bodycams in discerning the facts of a given situation. (SLNYT)
“VR has the potential to induce severe pain or suffering...”
You gonna rock down to Electric Avenue?
Tesla Model 3 announced . 215 mile range, $35K for base model, available in "late 2017". Tesla took over 125,000 pre-orders in under 24 hours before the car was even unveiled. If you want an EV now, the Nissan Leaf is cheaper than the Model 3, but only has a 107 mile range. The Chevy Bolt will be out later this year with a range similar to Tesla's car.
In other EV news, 30% of vehicles sold in Norway last year were plugin electric, while China is working on a home grown solution. But with gas prices still at near historic lows, will the EV revolution come fast enough to impact climate change?
The fate of Willkommenskultur
Looking back, the events of September 2015 seem strangely unreal. Hundreds of Germans gathered at Munich’s central station to applaud incoming refugees. A smiling Merkel posed for selfies with Syrians at asylum-seeker homes, and ordinary Germans opened their doors for “welcome dinners”. I remember feeling both excited and a little nervous. Something extraordinary was happening and we were there to witness it first-hand ... Germany is [now] bitterly divided on the refugee question. Neighbours and families are divided. The poisonous atmosphere has been fuelled by rightwing hatemongers. But the adherents of the Willkommenskultur, in my view, are also to blame. Where did it all go wrong?Konstantin Richter writes in the Guardian on the fate of Germany's Willkommenskultur towards Syrian refugees. [more inside]
Being An Ambassador To An Anti-Gay Country When You’re A Lesbian
drop it like it's hot
If you're just waking up, you might not have noticed that Gmail rolled out Google Mic Drop overnight. This service adds a button to Gmail which allows you to "mic drop" out of a thread, complete with an appropriate Minion gif.
Unfortunately it looks like Google didn't exactly think this through and may have lost some people their jobs. Google have since apologised and pulled the joke, a few hours after going live.
Documentary: PSB on BBC
BBC Radio 2 presents a 4-hour, 4-part career retrospective of Pet Shop Boys. The first two hours, Chart (Part 1, Part 2) cover their 11 main studio albums released during their 28-year relationship with the Parlophone music label. Hour three, Collaborate, covers their forays outside of pop music into musical theater, silent film scoring, ballet, and even a BBC Proms classical music piece. The final hour, The Pop Kids [which deviates from PSB naming conventions in ways that annoy me deeply -ed] looks at their most recent recordings, both done for their own label, X2. [more inside]