November 2, 2008
Roger's little rule book
It is acceptable, but rarely, to join in a general audience uproar, as at the first Cannes press screening of "The Brown Bunny." Even then, no cupping your hand under your armpit and producing fart noises. Roger Ebert's little rule book.
Face Detection detects Faces. Faces are people. People Like You!
PhotoFunia: take a portrait, upload it, and see the magic.
You Betcha
This f*cking election. A babble tower.
Don't get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects
Soon to be a Ron Howard movie (trailer here), portions of the Frost/Nixon interviews can be found online. More Nixon interviews can be found here. [more inside]
Yma Sumac RIP
She was the voice of exotica. Rumored to be a Brooklyn housewife named Amy Camus, she was, in fact, native Peruvian with a voice of three octaves, Yma Sumac's singing graced the exotic easy listening albums of Les Baxter and Billy May. Yma Sumac died today at age 86. (Via) [more inside]
Read this column before you die
Sometimes I just want to buy them for the packaging
Eric Skillman, art director / designer of many of Criterion's DVD packages, has a design process blog. There, he often discusses his work for the company.
Flying Low.
Budget Airlines and sites which book their flights are plentiful. Sterling, Zoom Airways, XL Airlines, Oasis Hong Kong, and a whole slew of others, may have gone down (refunds possible), but there's a new Muslim friendly airline on its way and Ryanair is launching £8 flights to the US. [more inside]
intimidating men of ordinary firmness
A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds. The Democratic candidate for Congress, William Harrison, lost to the American Party’s Henry Winter Davis. Three months later, when the House of Representatives convened hearings into the election, whose result Harrison contested, Davis’s victory was upheld on the ground that any “man of ordinary courage” could have made his way to the polls.
The New Yorker looks at how we used to vote. [more inside]
The Music is the Message
Now we will see what a perfect post looks like. And what it can do.
Fixing the world on $2/day
Amy Smith and MIT's D-lab apply engineering principles to real-world problems that affect the world's poorest residents. She organizes an annual conference. Hear her talk at TED. Previously
AquaJelly & AirJelly
you really should watch this.
Hunting the Hidden Dimension. You may be familiar with fractals, but in this PBS Nova episode, divided online into 5 parts, fractals go beyond the impossible zoom of the Mandelbrot set. Scientists are using fractals to describe complex natural occurrences, like lava, capillaries, and rain forests. In part 5, scientists measure one tree in the rain forests, and the distribution of small and large branches mirror the distribution of small and large trees. Fractals, it seems, are nature.
Plucked Spaghetti
Building a real financial system
The origins of central banking or, perhaps, central planning[1,2] and a defense of fiat currency[3] in the information age. [more inside]
Dock Boggs, 1966
As a young man in the 1920s, Dock Boggs [previously] recorded some songs that were released as 78s, and they are wonderful treasures of southern Americana, but I was always even more fond of his recordings from the 1960s, when, as an old man, he was rediscovered during the folk boom. So I was delighted to find that three of his 60s-period performances have recently shown up on YouTube. Here's Pretty Polly, Country Blues and I Hope I Live, all from 1966. [more inside]
Helter Skelter Vermont Style
Charlotte Dennett who read for the bar in Vermont, is now running for Vermont Attorney General on the Progressive Party ticket. Her platform: Prosecute George Bush for murder. Her choice for chief prosecutor: Vincent Bugliosi. [more inside]
Speculative Poetry
When we think of contemporary poetry, what comes to mind is difficult footnotes, scorching confessions, bardic combat, or maybe a new translation of a classic. Look to the land of children and you spy the sidewalk's end or a pack of Thneeds. Somewhere between the gravid and the childlike is the realm of speculative poetry. [more inside]
Parr: Pies, parties and pink drinks
'From Gateshead pie shops to dog-grooming parlours in Brighton, take a tour of the UK with Magnum photographer Martin Parr' [more inside]
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