July 28, 2020
6m24s of something walking. A something that changes.
BoingBoing brings us Transfiguration, a walking creature that... changes. Here's the same video broken out into a full window.
I have always been jealous of the eggplant
"The flowers on my eggplants are getting full." Vivien Sansour, founder of The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, ponders the eggplant, the aubergine—bitinjan (باذنجان).
Scientists resurrect ancient life deep beneath the seafloor
Biologists Revive 101.5-Million-Year-Old Microbes - "A team of biologists from Japan and the United States has successfully revived aerobic microbes found in 101.5-million-year-old sediments from the abyssal plain of the South Pacific Gyre." [more inside]
Spongebob Squarepants: Anime-Style
Have you ever dreamed of seeing Spongebob Squarepants re-imagined as a seinen anime? Of course you have. (SLYT) [more inside]
transit chimes by chord interval
Virtual Kidnappings at Scale
Australian authorities are warning that “virtual kidnappings” could be on the rise as anonymous criminals seek to exploit Chinese students in the country and their families back home (NYT). Students are convinced, via robocall, that they must check into a hotel and turn off their phone for their safety. Meanwhile, parents receive a digitally-manipulated ransom video of their child.
1979-1989 Mashed
The Hood Internet has completed their ambitious '79-'89 project, comprising over 550 songs, ~50 from each year of the eighties (1979 is an honorary eighties year for this purpose), mashed up into roughly half an hour of music. [more inside]
An interview with Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg.
"Those laws, artificially restricting what women can do, will not come back. Ever."
Take us back to when you first started, when you wanted to practice as a lawyer but it was difficult for you to do that. In the 1950s, you were attending Harvard Law School. You were one of nine women in a class numbering over 500.
The process of cultural forgetting
How memory starts out as an oral process, and then goes into stable records, and mostly fades. "The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline. The paper argues that people and things that make the rounds at the water cooler have a higher probability of settling into physical records. “Changes in communication technologies, such as the rise of the printing press, radio and television,” it says, affect our degree of attention, and all of our cultural products, from songs to scientific papers, “follow a universal decay function.” [more inside]
The hardest part is still the hard part
“If you’re going to take a moonshot, you may as well do it exactly the way you want to” After Quitting Deadspin in Protest, They’re Starting a New Site (SLNYT)
Orange walls in Copenhagen
An American redditor asks:
What is the story with that funky orange/red that shows up on Copenhagen walls?
Small discussion ensues, and an architecture student posts an explainer video about Paint and Color in Denmark
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