October 11, 2012
Bottles Beware!
Bottles Beware! 81 plastic water bottles meet their doom. (SLYT)
Julius is -- different
Does your icon need flogging? (also) Is your writing humdrum? Do your photos just show what you see [previously]? Want to see the world from a new angle, or put a better face on things? Julius can help. [some short videos] [more inside]
Chris Friel Photography
Biden/Ryan faceoff
TakeNote: An Exploration of Notetaking in Harvard University Collections
TakeNote: An Exploration of Notetaking in Harvard University Collections [via mefi projects, nasreddin is Curator and Coordinator] [more inside]
LEGO Batcave
"Try to keep your delusions in check"
Chuunibyou (中二病), or "Middle-school 2nd Year Syndrome", is "a colloquial and rather derisive term in Japan which describes a person at the age of fourteen would either act like a know-it-all adult, or thinks they have special powers no one else has." [more inside]
Wait, why do you have a wine glass full of blood in the first place?
What Snake Venom Does To Blood (SLDubbedYTP)
The fashion canteen
Davé is a restaurant that caters to writers, actors, film directors, and rock stars. The polaroids of Davé Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
The 50 best films of the ’90s
The Onion's A.V Club has posted their list of the fifty best films of the '90s (part 1)(part 2)(part 3). [via]
Mmmm!
"Buffalo mozzarella is the Great White Whale of American cheesemaking: a dream so exotic and powerful that it drives otherwise sensible people into ruinous monomaniacal quests."
Look, I made a Poe!
Footy & the Forty-Fives
45Football is based on a collection of about 1000 vinyl 7" records on football. Listen to classics like "We're Never Going to Stop" (LFC, 1983), and "Undici uomini d'oro" (AC Milan, 1979).
Typical Pentagon boondoggle
The Global Language Online Support System (or GLOSS), produced by the Defense Language Institute in sunny Monterey, CA, offers over six thousand free lessons in 38 languages from Albanian to Uzbek, with particular emphasis on Chinese, Persian, Russian, Korean, and various types of Arabic. The lessons include both reading and listening components and are refreshingly based on real local materials (news articles, radio segments, etc.) rather than generic templates. [more inside]
Pokémon, Paradigmatically
Libraries, Google, and the Transformation of Fair Use
The Hathi Trust, a partnership between 66 universities and 3 higher education consortia, is breathing a little easier now that Judge Harold Baer, Jr. of New York's Southern District has found that the Trust was within its fair use rights to allow Google to scan member library holdings, and then making the resulting files available for the reading impaired, and for use in search indexing and data mining. While this is excellent news for the educational institutions involved, it doesn't completely exonerate Google's role in the scanning project. It's notable that just last week Google abandoned it's own fair use claim in settling a different case involving the same book scanning project. Of the four factors used when considering fair use cases, Judge Baer ruled on the side of the Hathi Trust on all four.
The Railway Man
Eric Lomax, River Kwai prisoner who forgave, dies at 93.
"To most Americans, there is something inexplicably foreign about cricket"
Wickets and Wonders: Cricket’s Rich Literary Vein - a meditation on the literary history of cricket, and a few of the more well-known books surrounding gigaioggie.
Montaigne's Library
On the day he turned thirty-eight, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne retired from public life to the tower of the Château de Montaigne, there to spend the next ten years composing an assay of his life's experience. That his mind might thrive, he turned the tower into a "Solitarium" and its top floor into a sumptuous library, lining its round walls with some 1,500 books. Even the roof beams were made to bear his thoughts: on them he inscribed 46 quotations, here collected and translated.
Push the buttons, Frank.
Don't Look at This! TV's Frank has a YouTube channel! And a hilarious twitter account! (Don't miss his live tweets of the debates.) And a brand new, star-studded, satirical, musical podcast spectacular: The Wonderful Pundits of Oz!
Actually, it's Frank Conniff, mild-mannered stand-up comic and veteran TV writer (MST3K, Invader Zim). And he'd like you to know that Governor Chris Christie is a large man. [more inside]
Actually, it's Frank Conniff, mild-mannered stand-up comic and veteran TV writer (MST3K, Invader Zim). And he'd like you to know that Governor Chris Christie is a large man. [more inside]
How to Manipulate Science Reporting
Back in September a group of French Biologists published a "ground breaking" study on the impacts of GMO Corn. funded by CRIIGEN. [more inside]
"The vaginal corona is a permanent part of a woman's body throughout her life. It doesn't disappear after she first has sexual intercourse, and most women don't bleed the first time."
My Corona: The Anatomy Formerly Known As The Hymen & The Myths That Surround It is Scarleteen's reprint of a booklet (PDF) produced by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (Time for more accurate terminology: Hymen renamed "vaginal corona"). More mythbusting: You can't pop your cherry: Hymen 101 (NSFW-ish video, less than 4 min.); SBTB's Where is the hymen? and Virginity clichés in romance; and 20 Questions About Virginity: Scarleteen interviews Hanne Blank.
Searching for Iran’s lost funk
"...it should be made clear that Tehran in the ’70s was not an equivalent to New Orleans, Chicago or Detroit. There was no funk haven per se, but within the Iranian pop world some tracks did appear, and those records are a rare treasure trove for funk aficionados." — Searching for Iran’s lost funk [more inside]
Why Obama Now
NOT FINAL SOFTWARE
"A historiography of one's present amnesia"
Chris Kraus' new novel, Summer of Hate, is out, published by Semiotext(e). Read the first chapter here. No spoilers inside, but some spoilers in the links. [more inside]
Interrobang!
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Lennon's Poster — A short film follows the recreation of the Pablo Fanque circus poster [previously] that inspired John Lennon to write 'Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite' for the Beatles album 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'. Using the traditional methods of wood engraving and letterpress printing, a team of experts brings Lennon's poster to life.
Ephemeral New York
Ephemeral New York 'chronicles an ever-changing, constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.' [more inside]
The 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature Is Chinese Novelist Mo Yan
Mo Yan has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. A Chinese novelist, born as Guan Moye, his pen name means "don't speak." His most famous novel, Red Sorghum: A Novel of China, was turned into an acclaimed film in 1987. Here are some interviews with Mo Yan: Granta, National Endowment for the Humanities and Paper Republic. Speculation was rife in China before the announcement whether Mo Yan would receive it, and the matter was controversial. For people who haven't read any books by Mo Yan, the Swedish Academy recommends Garlic Ballads [NYT]. For more news over the day, keep an eye on The Literary Saloon and The Guardian's liveblog.
A computer scientist goes all in for poker
Computing Texas Hold'em - Dr. Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins professor, computer security and electronic voting security expert, writes about learning and playing poker. [more inside]
It's a jungle in there
« Previous day | Next day »