November 20, 2012
Into the Future
Hey! The Bad Brains have a new album out! You can give it a spin here at ye olde You Tubes.
Fiona Apple Cancels Tour To Be With Her Dying Dog
It’s 6pm on Friday,and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet.
I am writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.
Here’s the thing.
I have a dog Janet, and she’s been ill for almost two years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now.I got her when she was 4 months old. Fiona Apple postpones her South American tour in order to stay with her companion dog during her final days. [more inside]
Nature's Eternal Flame
Just off the trail in
Chestnut Ridge Park, New York, there is a small waterfall called the
Eternal
Flame
Falls.
Natural gas wells up from the earth and escapes just underneath the waterfall. Once in a while, it goes out and is re-lit by
the next hiker
that comes along.
The Mad Bomber
100 years ago today, on November 20th 1912, a disgruntled rail worker named Carl Warr walked into the Los Angeles county jail carrying an infernal machine loaded with sixty sticks of the highest power dynamite made... Los Angeles Examiner photographer E. J. Spencer risked his life to capture the mad bomber with his plate camera, earning him a rare (for the time) newspaper photography credit, and what is perhaps the most iconic Mad Bomber photo ever.
Put That In Your Scorpion Bowl & Suck On It
I f*ckin love girly drinks! / Don't give a f*ck what what you think! / I f*ckin love girly drinks! / I f*ckin wanted that pink!! / I F*CKIN LOVE GIRLY DRINKS! (Generally NSFW-ish, unless you work in a bar)
I AM A DOG WE DO NOT WEAR SHOES
"HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!"
Dancing the Blanket Hornpipe
17 euphemisms for doing it taken from the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. And previously on the blue.
Last Call: Vertical Integration and England's Drinking Problem
England has a drinking problem. Since 1990, teenage alcohol consumption has doubled. Since World War II, alcohol intake for the population as a whole has doubled, with a third of that increase occurring since just 1995. [...] The United States, although no stranger to alcohol abuse problems, is in comparatively better shape. A third of the country does not drink, and teenage drinking is at a historic low.How a vertically integrated alcohol industry is to blame, and why the US could find itself in the same position soon.
social impact bonds
Are Social Impact Bonds a good way to invest in public services? "Imagine a contract where private investors are paid by the government if there's a decrease in homelessness or convicts re-offending. It's a an idea that's taking shape in the UK and some US states. And now the Canadian government is considering piloting social impact bonds. Critics say it's a way of governments shirking their responsibilities." CBC's "The Current" reports. [more inside]
a distraction that none of us want
Kevin Clash has resigned from Sesame Street as his first accuser retracts his retraction and a second accuser emerges. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon says this can't kill Elmo. Previously, and previously, alas.
Our 4°C future
In a report released [Tuesday], the World Bank analyzed the consequences of allowing temperatures to reach 4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. ... the report's authors admit that predications are a challenge. Still, they do their best to try to paint a picture, and boy, is it grim.
Art for commuters' sake
in 1977 Amsterdam got its first Underground/metro line. The trains that first ran on that line, the "zilvermeeuwen or seagulls" are still in service some thirtyodd years later and have gotten a midlife update a few years ago. Part of that update included a new anti-graffitti skin, but also the transformation of some fortyfour carriages into art shows, featuring artworks and photographs by fortyfour Dutch artists.
Prime Time for Socialism
The US does not have a spending problem, we have a distribution problem "Forty years from now, America will be twice as rich on average as we are today. But most of that wealth will go to the very richest households. We only have a budget crisis if they refuse to pay higher taxes... So the real point isn't that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare. It's that some people don't want to pay the higher taxes necessary to maintain Social Security and Medicare. This is a question of distribution, pure and simple."
RT @CoryBooker: "We have a shared responsibility that kids go to school nutritionally ready 2 learn"
Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, NJ, will spend a week or longer living on food stamps, in response to a Twitter user who told him that, quote, "nutrition is not a responsibility of the government." [more inside]
The Innocent Man
'On April 12, 1987, Michael Morton sat down to write a letter. “Your Honor,” he began, “I’m sure you remember me. I was convicted of murder, in your court, in February of this year.” He wrote each word carefully, sitting cross-legged on the top bunk in his cell at the Wynne prison unit, in Huntsville. “I have been told that you are to decide if I am ever to see my son, Eric, again. I haven’t seen him since the morning that I was convicted. I miss him terribly and I know that he has been asking about me.” Referring to the declarations of innocence he had made during his trial, he continued, “I must reiterate my innocence. I did NOT kill my wife.' [more inside]
Arachnophobia
Markovian Parallax Denigrate
But back in 1996, users of the proto-Web community Usenet got spammed with messages that reached an almost transcendent level of bizarre—a weirdness so precise it implied the influence of a very human intelligence. “Markovian Parallax Denigrate,” read the title of each post, followed by a mountain of seemingly meaningless word spew:Unraveling the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery
Doggerland
Searching for Doggerland. "For decades North Sea boatmen have been dragging up traces of a vanished world in their nets. Now archaeologists are asking a timely question: What happens to people as their homeland disappears beneath a rising tide?"
I was living in 1993 for seventeen years
In 1993, 18-year-old Trevell Coleman shot a man in East Harlem and fled the scene. In the following years, he became part of the New York City rap community and eventually signed with Bad Boy Records, though he never stopped wondering what had happened to the man he'd shot. At the end of 2010, Coleman decided to find out. [more inside]
Oxbridge dominates list of leading UK people
A third of the UK's leading people went to Oxford or Cambridge universities and four out of every 10 of them attended private schools, a report suggests. [BBC] [more inside]
Math Publishing for Dummies!
Mathgen is a program to randomly generate professional-looking mathematics papers, including theorems, proofs, equations, discussion, and references. Try Mathgen for yourself! (PDF example) It’s a fork of SCIgen, a program which generates random papers in computer science. Surprisingly, Mathgen has already had it's first randomly-generated paper accepted by a "journal".
Skill-Luck Continuum
"We have little trouble recognizing that a chess grandmaster’s victory over a novice is skill, as well as assuming that Paul the octopus’s ability to predict World Cup games is due to chance. But what about everything else?" [Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success]
If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear.
Facewatch is the National low level crime reporting and image sharing system for businesses. (Vimeo)
One UK-based firm has combined facial recognition and CCTV technology to give businesses the ability to identify and track "repeat offenders" on-site. With endorsements from Philadelphia's police commissioner, the Chief Crown Prosecutor of London and Crimestoppers among others, the technology gotten its fair share of press. (And yes, there's an app for that.)
One UK-based firm has combined facial recognition and CCTV technology to give businesses the ability to identify and track "repeat offenders" on-site. With endorsements from Philadelphia's police commissioner, the Chief Crown Prosecutor of London and Crimestoppers among others, the technology gotten its fair share of press. (And yes, there's an app for that.)
I kind of think it feels very narcissistic, to tweet.
I will tell you it cost $42 million just to print Newsweek. Before you’ve even engaged one writer, or one copy editor, or one picture editor. Forty-two million dollars.
Long, wide-ranging interview of Tina Brown by Michael Kinsley.
Long, wide-ranging interview of Tina Brown by Michael Kinsley.
How happy are we?
The UK Office of National Statistics is measuring and reporting on more than just money as a measure of national success The ONS has started a process of measuring and reporting on national wellbeing. They've also made some very pretty animations with the information
"With each detonation, [it] loses just one or two legs."
A simple, beautiful solution to clearing landmines in Afghanistan. From the public filmmaker competition section of Focus Forward, a series of documentaries about people who are changing the world.
It's a floor polisher. It's a dessert eater.
Baby Mop is one of the strangest products I've ever seen. I have no idea how parents got their infants wedged into cleaning supplies, or why.
The Carp and the Seagull
The Carp and the Seagull is an interactive short film by Evan Boehm and Nexus Interactive Arts featuring original score and sound design by Plaid.
Uses WebGL and apparently optimized for Chrome so not sure if it works in anything else.
The Carp and the Seagull on The Creators Project and via an article on creativeapplications.net
Uses WebGL and apparently optimized for Chrome so not sure if it works in anything else.
The Carp and the Seagull on The Creators Project and via an article on creativeapplications.net
"That's a catchy diagnosis, you could dance to that."
The Typewriter at the Gates of Dawn
The BBC reports that the last typewriter to be built in the UK (according to its manufacturers) has been donated to London's Science Museum. "Brother said it had stopped making typewriters because demand had fallen to 30 a day, with most of those being sold in the US." [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »