January 26, 2013
Baseball Card Vandals
Baseball Card Vandals Baseball cards, vandalized. Slightly NSFW.
Adaptive Systems
"Who is Adaptive Systems and where did he come from? How did he have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from molecular biology to European intellectual history? Is it possible he was a famous author or an artificial intelligence? What is he doing now? Is he writing a book?
[more inside]
I heard it through the
Vinepeek shows you a continuously updating stream of uploads to vine, a recently launched video clip sharing startup that Twitter acquired last October. Fascinating, mesmerizing 6-second clips of life from all around the world. (via)
Positive energy YES!
Brody Stevens: Enjoy It! (2, 3, 4, 5, 6) is the story of cult comedian Brody Stevens—his friendship with Zach Galafianakis, his falling out with Chelsea Lately, his infamous "Twitter meltdown" and, of course, his credits.
I ♥ DULUTH, The Story of the Maria Bamford Show
About a year after her participation in the groundbreaking Comedy Central documentary series the Comedians of Comedy, Maria Bamford was on stage at the Friars Club in LA when a heckler began shouting at her. What happened after that isn’t entirely clear, other than Bamford had a breakdown, walked off stage, and disappeared. She was found three months later selling clock radios on the sidewalks of Detroit. A fellow homeless person, who was also a Comedy Central fan, recognized Bamford and eventually her parents were contacted. They brought her back home to Deluth, Minnesota and began to get her help. Maria decided to document her recovery in a series of short videos called The Maria Bamford Show, which were first posted to the TBS networks' now abandoned Super Deluxe Web site. [more inside]
A bit of nostalgia for canucks who were kids in the 1970s (youtube vid)
I'd been searching for this for some time and recently discovered that someone had unearthed it. [more inside]
Another Hard Day of Trying to Stay Alive
Almost as soon as we got back to Dash-e Towp, I overheard some U.S. officers loudly complaining about the inability of Afghan soldiers to make appointments on time. Afghan soldiers do have difficulty making appointments on time, it’s true. They also don’t like to stand in straight lines or dress according to regulation or march in step or do so many of the things intrinsic to a Western notion of professional soldiering. When a lieutenant calls a formation of Afghan privates to attention, they will inevitably resemble, as my drill sergeant used to say, “a soup sandwich.” But they will also accept a much higher level of risk than any coalition force ever has. Their ranks are filled with tough and brave men who run toward the fight without body armor or helmets or armored vehicles and sleep on the frozen ground without sleeping bags and dig up I.E.D.’s with a pickax and often go hungry and seldom complain. - A week in the life of an Afghan National Army battalion, on its own in the wilderness. (NYTimes)
Carrie and the final frontier...
Trek and the City "Needless to say, the Prime Directive wasn't the only thing Samantha violated that night." (Single Link Twitter Feed)
55m Down Somewhere Off Maui
Whales off Maui Divers encounter a group of humpback whales (slyt).
Data Storage in DNA Becomes a Reality
"The researchers began with the computer files from some notable cultural highlights: an audio recording of MLK Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and, appropriately, a copy of Watson and Crick’s original research paper describing DNA’s double helix structure. On a hard drive, these files are stored as a series of zeros and ones. The researchers worked out a system to translate the binary code into one with four characters instead: A, C, G and T. They used this genetic code to synthesize actual strands of DNA with the content embedded in its very structure.
The ouput was actually pretty unimpressive: just a smidgeon of stuff barely visible at the bottom of a test tube. The wow factor arose when they reversed the process. The researchers sequenced the genome of the data-laden DNA and translated it back into zeros and ones. The result was a re-creation of the original content without a single error, according to the results published in Nature on Wednesday."
Albert Dubout
Albert Dubout (1905-1976) was a highly popular and prolific French cartoonist and illustrator, whose works were ubiquitous in France from the 1930s to the 1970s: Dubout illustrated books, film posters (notably those of Marcel Pagnol), magazines, advertisements, postcards and some of his cartoons were eventually adapted as a movie. Today, Dubout is best known as the creator of the Dubout couple (movie version; figurine version), consisting of a very large, full-bosomed, dominating, angry-looking wife with a diminutive, hapless and mustachioed husband in tow. Dubout's work is often highly detailed, and images larger than the tiny ones available on the official website are shown under the fold. [more inside]
The Hunter
Is Legendary Comic-Book Vigilante “Judge Dredd” Light In The Gavel?
Since first appearing on the scene in 1977, Judge Dredd has been the comic-book world’s answer to Dirty Harry, serving as judge, jury and executioner in a dystopian future.
Now, in the latest issue of 2000AD, titled “Closet,” it appears as if the legendary lawman is coming out of the closet.
On the first page of the comic, Dredd is shown sharing a passionate kiss with another man, with a caption reading: “I guess, somehow, I’d always known I was gay. I was just too scared to admit it.”
Note: these links contain SPOILERS. [more inside]
Good morning
Deep Space Nine. Deep Space Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine (Not Deep Space 8).
"You know, before Star Trek Enterprise, none of the Star Trek shows had theme songs with words. Until now. And so, I present to you, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the theme song, with words." [MMLYT] [more inside]
micro cars are the best cars
The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum, located near Atlanta, will close forever today. The collection will be auctioned off in February. Only the virtual tour will remain as a way to see all of these cars together, but now is your chance to collect any one of these unique pieces of automotive history. Who among us hasn't desired a car you could drive into your office? [more inside]
A Great Package Deal
The US Postal Service is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Parcel Post by renaming it "Standard Post". [more inside]
Light Travelling Faster Than Sound
"Most films of nuclear explosions are dubbed. If they do contain an actual recording of the test blast itself.........it's almost always shifted in time so that the explosion and the sound of the blast wave are simultaneous. This is, of course, quite false: the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound....." Unearthed recently from some Russian archive, this document of a nuclear detonation is one of the few films of its kind that includes a recording of the audio. The sound is not what you might expect.
This music station is fully operational
A Trip to the Moon, a triumph of science and scenic art
In 1889, the Urania Astronomical Society of Berlin put together an illusion of a trip to the moon and a solar eclipse, created with painted scenery, transparent screens, and a variety models, created live before an audience. Three years later, the same show was presented at Andrew Carnegie's Music Hall, as covered in Scientific American, a decade before Le Voyage dans la Lune, the film by Georges Méliès (previously). The stage show was documented in 1897, in Magic; stage illusions and scientific diversions, including trick photography (Archive.org, direct link to Trip to the Moon; also available on Google Books). [via io9, who have a summary of the special effects]
Potential employers might not love your Beer Pong trophy
Facewash is the newest app to help people make themselves more attractive in the job search. [more inside]
Nikolai Tesla's Planetarium Collection
Owen Phairis, aka “Nikolai Tesla, Man of Lightning”, has a planetarium projector museum near Bear Lake, CA. Cool Hunting takes a tour.
Radially symmetric self-organizing behavior in juvenile canids
Puppy pinwheel [SLYT]
Slow Motion Sneezing
Sneezing in Slow Motion; somehow simultaneously more fascinating, terrifying, and disgusting than you'd imagine it'd be. [more inside]
World's Largest Snowball Fight
While, ostensibly a promotion for a camera company, the world's record for the largest snowball fight was staged earlier this year by Snow Day and benefited the Boys and Girls Clubs of King County. It also looks like it was a lot of fun to participate in.
Bizarro
Weird Vintage - a tumblr of weird ads, illustrations, and photographs of a vintage or antiquated nature
Bring me more genomes
"If the history of public health has until now been embodied by the map—as in British physician John Snow’s famous map, which allowed him to curb the London cholera outbreak of 1854 and to found, in doing so, the modern field of epidemiology—Snitkin was embarking on a new kind of epidemiology: one founded on the phylogenetic tree." Writing for Wired, Carl Zimmer describes how Evan Snitkin and Julie Segre used genome sequencing to halt a bacterial outbreak at the National Institute of Health's Clinical Center. (via The Feature)
A gentleman from sole to crown
Aleksey Vayner, Whose Tale the Internet Mocked, Has Died at 29. A strangely poignant article on his death, from a reporter who had interviewed him in 2010.
Previously -- his viral fame, in 2006.
Previously -- his viral fame, in 2006.
"But what is the sane response to an insane situation?"
Punk Voyager was built by punks.
They made it from beer cans, razors, safety pins, and did I do this part already? Whatever. They loaded it with the most precious artifacts of human culture they could find in Mexican Johnny D-bag’s van. “You gotta make it faster than regular Voyager,” said Red. “So our culture gets to the aliens before the CIA’s fascist pseudo-culture.”
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