October 2, 2015
It was me. I let the dogs out.
This work documents the history and possible origin(s) of a musical hook which consists of the phrase
"Who let the dogs out" in combination with the sound of dogs barking. [more inside]
Painting on Petri dishes
The 2015 finalists for the American Society of Microbiologists'agar art winners have been announced! Agar art, also sometimes called petri dish art or microbial art, is a technique in which colonies of bacteria or fungi are grown on agar plates to produce a pattern. If you want to see more, the Daily Dish posts a new art plate every single day. Previously.
The Apollo Photos
The Project Apollo Archive has uploaded to Flickr all photographs taken by the Apollo missions to the moon (Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17). [more inside]
The Earth-Twin Planet That Nobody Talks About
If we found it orbiting another star, this world would surely be hailed as the most Earthlike exoplanet known: the best place yet to search for alien life. No doubt you sense there is a catch, and indeed there is. It is not orbiting another star; it is the planet closest to home right here in our own solar system. The world I’m talking about is Venus: The Earth-Twin Planet That Nobody Talks About
The race
This week, the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota and a local Black Lives Matters group came to an agreement to prevent the disruption of this Sunday's Twin Cities Marathon. [more inside]
You're saying "Khaleesi" wrong.
The birds that fear death
A study published in the journal Animal Behavior found that crows can recognize their fellow dead crows and learn to avoid the dangerous circumstances associated with death. The BBC described the study, which involved a "masked individual playing bad cop, arriving on the scene holding up a dead crow." [more inside]
Just Say "I Don't" to the 80s
You used to call me on my cell phone ...
First Disclosure & Sam Smith covered Drake's latest hit Hotline Bling. Now we may have the definitive interpretation by Erykah Badu [more inside]
If we do not find new images, we will perish
"The Fall" is a 2006 adventure fantasy film directed by Tarsem Singh. The opening title sequence is the "perfect example of a director’s absolute control over his vision."
Ebert described the movie as "a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself. Tarsem... has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it. " [more inside]
German soldiers who fought in the American Revolution
I've listened to most of the Wartime podcast and enjoy it. But there is one episode that really caught my attention. As a Canadian, I don't know a great deal about the American Revolution and I had no idea that a huge number of Germans fought for the British. This episode gives a fascinating glimpse into who these Germans were. Check it out.
Quantum of Solace
Quantum cryptography could render all our protections worthless soon(ish). But cunning cryptographers have other tricks up their sleeves.
"Barbaric Cultural Practices"
"The Conservative government is not afraid to defend Canadian values." Welcome to the home stretch of the Canadian election! [more inside]
peer-to-peer
"He would never cut off funds to his own f—ing dog!"
The Simpsons co-creator Sam Simon was a philanthropist and animal lover who gave millions and millions of dollars to various organizations, especially after he was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2012. PETA's headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, is named after Simon, as is a 182-foot ship used by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Simon died earlier this year, at which time the Sam Simon Foundation was established by a trust he had set up. The Foundation is now under fire for not continuing to support Simon's pet causes, including the MY Sam Simon and his dog, Columbo, a rescued Cane Corso, "a mastiff breed that some people consider a pit bull on steroids" whose care may cost more than $140,000 a year.
Carlsbad's Frank Kindel: Flying paper boy of the Guadalupes
If you happen to drive along NM-137, a quiet rural road in south-east New Mexico, you'll drive through Queen, a former ghost town that is once again inhabited by the living. Slow down and you'll see a monument to The Flying Paper Boy Of The Guadalupes, Frank Kindel. [more inside]
웃 i am not here and this is not really happening.
After the triumph of OK Computer, Radiohead fell into a creative tailspin -- and frontman Thom Yorke into a nervous breakdown. Exhausted from touring, hounded by press, and jaded by copycats, he escaped into the electronica scene pioneered by Kraftwerk and Warp Records -- fertile ground, the band discovered. Trading spacey rock for apocalyptic brooding, they teased their new sound not with singles or music videos but with innovative web streaming and cryptic, dreamlike "blips" -- winterlands, flocks of cubes, eyeballs, bears. After nearly breaking up over tracklist angst, they cut the kid in half. Thus fifteen years ago today, Kid A and (later) Amnesiac debuted, a confounding mix of electronic fugue, whalesong, pulsing IDM, drunken piano, and epic jazz funeral whose insights into anxiety, political dysfunction, and climate crisis would make it one of the most revered albums of the twenty-first century. See the documentary Reflections on Kid A for interviews and live cuts, or look inside for much more. [more inside]
“I’d rather that everyone… could just stay obscure”
[T]here are immediate practical benefits to trolling. The way we’ve designed the Internet has made the old cliché “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” actually come true. It’s now possible to monetize any kind of attention, good or bad—and if your gift happens to be generating the bad kind of attention, then it’s well within reach to make trolling into a full-time career.
Arthur Chu writes about “The Big Business of Internet Bigotry” for The Daily Beast.
Arthur Chu writes about “The Big Business of Internet Bigotry” for The Daily Beast.
What keeps us apart, what brings us together
Evil! -- one seemed to see it everywhere
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. That is, at least, according to William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella The Doom of the Great City. It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls “the greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed” at what was, for Hay’s first readers, the distant future date of 1942. -- Brett Beasley in the Public Domain review on one of the first modern urban apocalypse stories.
I really did believe we were talking about Edward Scissorhands
Jon Hendren spent an entire segment talking about Edward Scissorhands instead of Edward Snowden. No one noticed.
“I like the half-rhyme. I like 'greatest' & 'played with'. That's good.”
Salman Rushdie Reads Drake Lyrics. [YouTube]
Salman Rushdie's a 68-year-old award-winning novelist but he can also spit bars — Drake's bars. In this clip from Exhibitionists, a new CBC Arts series premiering Sunday, October 4, 2015 at 4:30pm, watch Rushdie read selected lyrics from hip hop icon Drake.
Welcome to 2015, gentlemen. Everyone is on their phone all the time.
After a pair of baseball announcers roasted a group of selfie-taking women, members of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority at Arizona State University, in the stands at an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game, SBNation fires back: Taking photos at sporting events isn't worthy of ridicule. It's simply how fans in the 21st century document moments of their lives.
“Nobody ages like anybody else.”
What old age is really like. Getting beyond "Generic Old Man" and "Eccentric Old Woman" by examining literature by 'natives' of old age.
After my son was born, everyone told me to write it all down.
"I'm trying to think of when my birth story begins, and even though this isn't fair to my son and isn't part of his story, I know it has something to do with when my sadness begins." Part of the Exposing the Silence project.
Attention K-Mart Shoppers
"This is a digitized version of an in-store cassette tape that was played within a Kmart store. See the title of the file for the month and year. I worked at Kmart between 1989 and 1999 and held onto them with the hopes that they would be of use some day. Enjoy!" (via)
EXTREME! Oil Extraction
Project Oil Sands - "In the late 1950s, Dr. Manley Natland, a passionate, lifelong geologist working for the Richfield Oil Corporation, hatched a gonzo idea to harness the power of a nuclear explosion for the benefit of bitumen extraction in Alberta’s oil sands. He proposed a plan to plant an atomic bomb deep below the oil sands, set it off and start pumping the oil freed up by the intense heat of the explosion."
Memories of Future Past
Photographs of crumbling modernist architecture in Paris. This is a sampling of the photography in Laurent Kronental's "Souvenir d'un Futur" exhibit, showing the crumbling majesty of Paris' architectural experiments during a period of great growth.
I know you already had to prove yourself beyond them...
Historical photographs from the Grand Canyon
Here is a big collection of old photos from the Grand Canyon. Among others, there are photos from John Wesley Powell's expeditions down the Colorado river in the 1870's. Pictures of people touring the canyon rim by car in the early 1900's, and ladies going down into the canyon by mule in 1909 wearing very nice hats. There are pictures of Hopi dancers on the rim from the 1940's. And there are pictures of park rangers leading fishing trips down into the canyon in the 1940's, and pictures of the early commercial Colorado River trips in the 1930's through the 1950's.
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