January 8, 2014
Daft Punk is virtually playing at my house.
BE-AT.TV features live DJ performances from around the planet. It also has a huge archive of shows. It's currently featuring live performances from the BPM festival in Mexico.
Last Words
"This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk."
In 2000, Improbable Research sent a variety of regulation-violating items through the mail to see what would make it.
CSI: The MOOC
Welcome to Introduction to Forensic Science, the murder mystery that doubles as a university course. Enrol here.
With the usual amount of salt
"We're here tonight to honor Tom Hanks..."
The Somalis have cheekily declared themselves African champions for 2013
Bandy is a game similar to ice hockey, but played with a ball instead of a puck. Somalia is set to enter its first ever team into the World Bandy Championships, comprised entirely of Somali refugees living in Borlaenge, Sweden where almost 10% of the population hails from war-torn Somalia. [more inside]
Your favorite blue web site may be harming your health!
Blue light may be bad for your health, especially at night.
You may want to click over to the grey or the green before you go to sleep, or, god forbid, turn off the technology!
"I imagine I'll probably have my vote stripped."
Dan LeBatard of ESPN gave away his baseball Hall of Fame vote to Deadspin, and talking heads had a lot to say about it.
Brooklyn was hip before it was hip
In January 1978, a then unknown, and still very much undiscovered photographer by the name of Dinanda H. Nooney began documenting Brooklynites in their homes. She gained access to the private lives of hundreds of perfect strangers, who showed her around, introduced her to their families and became part of a collection of over 500 largely unseen gelatin silver prints, known as The Nooney Brooklyn Photographs.
post-industrial education for post-industrial organizations
Sudbury Valley School - "It upends your views about what school is for, why it has to cost as much as it does, and whether our current model makes any sense at all. But what's most amazing about the school, a claim the founders make which was backed up by my brief observations, my conversations with students, and the written recollections of alumni, is that the school has taken the angst out of education. Students like going there, and they like their teachers. Because they are never made to take a class they don't like, they don't rue learning. They don't hate homework because they don't have homework. School causes no fights with their parents." (previously-er) [more inside]
Have you ever wanted to do some yoga?
DoYogaWithMe.com is a free, constantly expanding resource of online yoga videos created by a passionate group of experienced instructors. Our yoga videos include classes, poses, breathing techniques and anatomy videos. Search their entire collection by difficulty, length, style, and teacher or start in the Beginner's Studio. Yoga has a unique way of strengthening and toning your body, improving flexibility and enhancing your sense of well being.
Clear some of your floor, put on some comfy clothes, turn off your other electronics and turn on a video. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of that great journey for you!
M-m-m-mad Movies
Mad Movies originally aired on television between 1985-1986, and in reruns on Nick at Nite from 1987-1989. Every episode is a spoof of a classic movie where the video is the original (although edited to fit the show’s half-hour format) but all the dialogue is overdubbed with humorous dialogue. [more inside]
Clark Nova & pinkphone not included in starter kit
Take a stroll through French artist Vincent Fournier‘s [previously] gallery of animal photographs, and you’re likely to come across some creatures you’ve never seen before. Like, for instance, a jellyfish that is capable of electronically transmitting data across the Abyssal depths of the ocean. Or, perhaps, a scorpion that can perform semi-automated surgery on humans.
“These creatures come from the future—an imagined future, based loosely on current research on synthetic biology and genetic engineering,” says Fournier, of his project Post-Natural History, a series of digitally-altered photos of animals that do not yet exist. “The idea is that these are living species, reprogrammed by mankind to better fit our environment as well as to adapt to new human desires.”
"Just trying to make all these things work, okay?"
Here is a baby polar bear trying to take its first steps and not quite succeeding.
By the minute
London's first pay-per-minute café, Ziferblat (photos) costs 3 pence (5 cents) per minute to be there. Part of a chain from Russia. A Moscow cafe for example.
Yank of the Yalu
The First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) was notable for having the first confrontation between ironclad ships with modern weaponry, at the Battle of the Yalu River. And the presence of foreign advisors among the Chinese fleet, like German Captain von Hannecken and American Captain Philo Norton McGiffin [same text with some embellishment, Google Books links to Collier's article and Real Soldiers of Fortune], who later wrote The Battle of the Yalu for Century Magazine. [more inside]
Ike's Secret Santa - To All Mankind
Everyone knows the birth of the Space Race: Sputnik and Vostok gave the Soviets a huge start while the US floundered about with the odd tiny satellite making it through a cavalcade of explosive fiasco. Most would say that the first voice from space was that of Yuri Gagarin in 1961. They'd be wrong. [more inside]
Apparantly I'm now a world champion
"That is not to say that Oglaf depicts a perfect world. There is a dark side to its humor and it can depict humiliations and sex coerced through magic and subterfuge and through dominance. When a king wants his court wizard to transform him to look like the duke so he can sleep with the duke’s wife (a variation on a scene from Excalibur), he realizes it is easier to order the court wizard to transform himself into the duke’s wife and the king fucks him instead." -- Osvaldo Oyola explains the timeless appeal of Oglaf. Not remotely safe for work.
"Nineteen months later, I feel safe answering"
"Why biotech whiz kid Jack Andraka is not on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list." Forbes science and medicine reporter Matthew Herper sends out Andraka's draft paper on his cancer diagnostic test to scientific experts, who find the results do not match the breathless excitement attracted by initial coverage, seen previously on MetaFilter and elsewhere. [more inside]
Butts pumped up like a pair of Reeboks
Buttloads of Pain - Illegal Ass Enhancements May Be America’s Next Health Epidemic (NSFW) Because of its clandestine nature, it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many people in the US are illegally getting their butts pumped up like a pair of Reeboks.
Headlines Against Humanity
Which is the real link-baity headline? (real being a relative term these days...)
"Time For Some Traffic Problems In Fort Lee"
Email Links Top Christie Aide to GW Bridge Scandal.
The week of September 9, 2013, traffic was bad on the approach to the George Washington Bridge -- the busiest bridge in the world. Cars were backed up into the streets of Fort Lee, NJ, gridlocking the entire city on the first week of school.
The reason? Two tollboths leading to the GWB were closed by the Port Authority of NY and NY. The PA claimed it was for a traffic study, except that the head of the Port Authority, Pat Foye, appointed by New York Governor Cuomo, was not told about the closure, and neither was anyone else. [more inside]
Monitoring the raindrops that keep falling on your head from space
The successor to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the NASA/JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) spacecraft is preparing for launch at the Japanese Tanegashima Space Center. GPM will be the newest international Precipitation Measurement Mission and will be the core observatory of the GPM Constellation.
The two sensors on-board GPM are the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) and the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR). The GPM/DPR team has produced a fantastic anime about the DPR instrument. [more inside]
I've got a bad feeling about this
Freiheit the first, student, film of one George Lucas (staring Randal Kleiser, who later went on to direct Grease) (slyt)
... he was utterly appalled by "the real thing."
"In 1945, Hitchcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen." A truncated version of Alfred Hitchcock's Holocaust documentary was aired on Frontline in 1985 under the name "Memory of the Camps" (YouTube mirror), but now the restoration work on the film is nearly complete and set to be released later this year. The film is "much more candid" than other documentaries, and Hitchcock himself was reported to have been so disturbed during production that he stayed away from his studio for a week. (Given the subject matter, disturbing content throughout.) [more inside]
Pointless Diagrams
A new pointless diagram drawn daily...
Shut up and listen
"Barely a week goes by without some old white man castigating the yoof of today on the shallowness/stupidity/etc. of their taste in music, art and culture in general. It’s a narrative as old as culture itself — adults throwing up their hands in despair because Kids These Days just don’t get it." But, contrarily, "there’s a subset of music criticism these days that seems to view the taste and aesthetic of teens (and teenage girls, in particular) as weirdly sacred. It’s a sort of creepy offshoot of poptimism, one that starts from an unrealistically monolithic view of teen culture — not all teens like Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus, after all — and is, in its own way, as deeply patronizing as claiming from on high that teens have no taste." -- Flavorwire's Tom Hawking on Critical Assumptions about Teen Culture.
Turn that parenting grind into pure grindcore
Has creating life sucked the life out of you? Sounds like you need ... DAD METAL!
You'll probably want your winter wetsuit
Icy weather getting you down? How about a nice relaxing beach holiday? The same weather pattern bringing Antarctic temperatures to America is pushing Himalayan surf towards Europe. With storm swell battering coastlines from Portugal to Cornwall, big-wave specialists from around the world are flocking to the unlikely surf mecca of Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo, Ireland. Apparently it's been pretty intense... "Down there was living repeatedly rabbit punched while diving in the deep!" [more inside]
"Good luck, Jim. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds."
Snapchat represents the greatest existential threat yet to the Facebook juggernaut. Today’s teens have finally learned the lesson their older siblings failed to grasp: What you post on social media–the good, the bad, the inappropriate–stays there forever. And so they’ve been signing up for Snapchat, with its Mission: Impossible style detonation technology, in droves. [more inside]
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