November 18, 2018
Jeff Goldblum's jazzy, quirky tribute to a family friend
Jeff Goldblum plays a jazz show almost every week (NPR, 2014). It wasn't until he played piano to back up Gregory Porter on the Graham Norton Show that someone at Decca (The Guardian, May 2018) thought to put Goldblum's jazz to wax (double LP on Amazon). And it's not a solo gig, but rather Jeff Goldblum & The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra (22 minute YT video compilation of snippets from their Oct. 22, 2014 show), named after a family friend from his Pittsburgh childhood (Los Angeles Times article from 2000, in which Mildred Snitzer writes to Las Palmas Restaurant and asks for a cassette of the band who plays under her name -- "I love Dixieland jazz, so I hope that's what I'm doing.") Spoiler -- it's not. [more inside]
Manipulate your children with gifts
The rise of the STEM toy (Forbes, Andrew Raupp) means the profileration of STEM Gift Guides: PBS (Danielle Steinberg), heavy.com, The Spruce (Julie Evans), Tom's Hardware (Avram Piltch), Forbes again (Talia Milgrom-Elcott), and the behemoth, the venerable, the original, and the only one that comes with footnotes to current research: the 2018 Engineering Gift Guide from the INSPIRE Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering at Purdue University.
“The rookies say Metta, all the veterans say Ron. What’s up with that?”
METTA WORLD TEETH
On December 12th, 2011: The NBA player known as Metta World Peace gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times about his recent name change. Metta completely disregarded the reporter’s question and instead decided to talk about his teeth. The following is a dramatic re-imagining of that interview using Metta’s actual audio.
Directed by LAMAR+NIK, starring Matthew Griffin and Michaelene Stephension.
On December 12th, 2011: The NBA player known as Metta World Peace gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times about his recent name change. Metta completely disregarded the reporter’s question and instead decided to talk about his teeth. The following is a dramatic re-imagining of that interview using Metta’s actual audio.
Directed by LAMAR+NIK, starring Matthew Griffin and Michaelene Stephension.
A game that teaches kids 20 years of investing in 20 minutes
A game that teaches kids 20 years of investing in 20 minutes: MeFi's missjenny writes, "High school kids are still learning investing the way I did in the '90s: get a large sum of imaginary money and buy individual stocks for 8-10 weeks. Basically the exact wrong way to learn a lifelong investment strategy," as another source discusses in detail. "We created Stax to take down 'the stock market game.'" [Via mefi projects] [more inside]
I had to regain my self-respect / So I got into camouflage
I love a man in uniform: "Military history buffs come in many flavours – some intrigued by grand strategy, others by the common soldier’s experience. There’s the study of command, technical innovation, weaponry, the nexus between politics and war. But me? I’m more of a Punk Historian, fascinated by military miscellany – the origins of dits, legends, kit and the near-mystical concept of allyness." Dominic Adler, "A Punk History Of Military Cool, or the pursuit of ally – ness." [more inside]
The bone collector
The bone collector: reviving Finland's pagan past. North Karelian artist Sanni-Maaria Puustinen works with the remains of dead animals to create items that honour their lives in ways that predate Lutheranism and Orthodoxy. Puustinen's other artwork.
Such faith much wow
╦ ║ ╝
Why Are Humans Suddenly Getting Better at Tetris? [kottke.org] “As John Green explains in this video, a few people are actually getting much better at the NES version of Tetris than anyone was back in the 90s. One of the reasons for this is that a smaller dedicated group working together can be more effective than a massive group of people working alone on a problem. Today’s top players can not only compare scores (as people did in the pages of Nintendo Power), but they get together for competitions, share techniques, and post videos of their gameplay to Twitch and YouTube for others to mine for tricks. The two approaches boil down to ants solving problems vs. deliberate practice. The hundreds of millions of players were able to map out seemingly all corners of the game, but only up to a point. It took a smaller group engaging in a collective deliberate practice to push beyond the mass effort.” [YouTube] [more inside]
Please excuse the smoke...
Krystalynn Martin is a native of Paradise, California. She wrote this poem about the fire.
The Movement Starts With You
November 19th is World Toilet Day: socialism produces The People's Own Organic Power Project, whereas capitalism sniffs an opportunity to strike gold in all that brown. [more inside]
Marxism, populism, IP & MMT
- Reading _Capital_ - "Prices confront each individual price-taker as objective facts, but --- so goes the Walrasian myth --- they are in fact the outcome of a social process, reflecting at once the possibilities of production, the social facts of initial endowments, and the purely subjective wants of everyone."
- Populism and the New Oligarchy - "Political terms, as Pierre Bourdieu insisted, should be regarded not merely as tools but as stakes in the political struggle."
- The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious - "Property is a legally constructed, historically contingent, social fact."
- Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) Critique - "The state has essentially outsourced money creation in our financial system to private banks."
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