November 23, 2014
Sunday Reading
On Sundays, The New Inquiry publishes Sunday Reading, a collection of links with minimal context and maximal depth [more inside]
16,000 amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness words
"It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves." After reading Neal Cassady's 16,000 word letter, Jack Kerouac threw out his draft of On the Road and started over, in the style he's now famous for. Ginsberg took the letter and lost it. Kerouac thought it had fallen over the side of a house boat. But now the Joan Anderson letter has been found. [more inside]
Get me off your fucking mailing list
"Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" is an actual science paper accepted by a journal. Original Source.
We're hurting innocent people...but we're helping the economy
Magical Contamination
Seashells? Distant planets? Beautiful mold.
Undelicious Donut Holes
Many people have discussed discussed the Bir Tawil trapezoid before, a piece of land unclaimed by either Sudan and Egypt, because both would rather possess the disputed (and more fertile) Hala'ib triangle. [more inside]
Turkey, Pie, Football, Costumes and Trick-or-Treat! Wait.
Halloween and Thanksgiving are two of the slipperiest holidays in the American tradition. Costumed masquerading and trick-or-treating used to happen on Thanksgiving, while Halloween was mostly devoted to vandalism. As Americans did they best to stamp out the vandalism, they also cleaned up the unruly traditions of Turkey Day, banishing the Thanksgiving Ragamuffins to October. [more inside]
The caudate nucleus
What goes on in the brains of simultaneous interpreters. Miles told me about an agricultural meeting at which delegates discussed frozen bull’s semen; a French interpreter translated this as “matelot congelés”, or ‘deep-frozen sailors’. (via) [more inside]
So many subtle ways to be human, and so many subtle ways to be wrong.
Tor.com presents Max Gladstone's A Kiss With Teeth, in which an ancient evil settles down and tries out middle-class married life.
Shepherded, lovingly but firmly, away from harmful things like airlocks.
Tropical Islands is the mother of all water parks, built inside one of the world's largest buildings, with a separate play area for the kinder while the teens and adults discreetly down their pina coladas or Erdinger weissbiers in the thatch-roofed bars overlooking the beach. It's safe, and clean, and organized and curated and manicured to within an inch of its life. It's got that Malaysian high concept futurist vibe going, combined with German thoroughness and attention to detail, for an experience that's pretty much what you'd expect if Disneyworld opened a park in Singapore, only with fewer dire declarations of death to drug smugglers. It is in short thoroughly enjoyable if you're in Berlin and for some reason decide you want a relaxing tropical beach-side day out in an environment that's barely less artificial than an L5 space colony.
No Cure, No Pay
Marine salvage master Captain Nick Sloane is the man to call when your cruise ship or supertanker founders at sea. "Sloane had a six-man team. They found the Ikan Tanda lying broadside to the weather about two miles offshore. It was rolling heavily and was being swept by seas so large that the entire deck was going under, and waves were bursting over the top of the superstructure. The waves were running 14 seconds apart, an interval just large enough to allow each member of the team, in helmet and life vest, to be winched down onto the deck and take cover. They landed on one of the massive cargo hatches, unhooked from the harness, rolled to the edge, and dropped down to the side deck to crouch behind a coaming—the raised steel perimeter around a cargo hatch—just as the next wave swept across."
They tell us dragons can be beaten: continuing relevance of fairy tales
Neil Gaiman: Why Disney's Sleeping Beauty doesn't work (Gaby Wood for The Guardian):
"I feel like some kind of alchemist," Gaiman suggests. "I have to go to the cupboard and take one ounce of Snow White and two ounces of Sleeping Beauty, and heat the Sleeping Beauty and froth the Snow White and mix them together: it's kind of like fusion cuisine. It tastes like both of them but it's actually a new dish."
Are fairy tales back in fashion? Certainly, the recent success of Disney's films Frozen and Maleficent seems to point to something. But most of the fairy tales we know have come to us via 17th century France or 19th century Germany, and have since been subject to so many retellings and rebellions that trends are difficult to map.
Portraits of love and sex in the 21st century
Everybody Sexts is collection of nude images (re-imagined as illustrations) that people sent via their phone, accompanied by the story and reasons why such explicit photos were sent.
Man in black shirt is playing guitar
Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions.
A model that generates free-form natural language descriptions of image regions.
Holy crap.
A picture is made of a thousand notes
"I have decided you are in a goofy state of mind."
"Martha Gellhorn’s pen pals included Eleanor Roosevelt, Maxwell Perkins, H.G. Wells, her husband (later, ex-) Ernest Hemingway, and Peggy Schutze, my maternal grandmother." Author Amy Shearn shares some of the letters her grandmother received from legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn with the hope that, "if I studied Martha, the writer who wanted to be a mother, and Peggy, the mother who wanted to be a writer, some golden mean would eventually present itself."
Unpublished Coffee Table Books
Over the years I have taken countless photos perhaps under the deluded belief that if I don’t visually document everything then those very things won’t exist because I have a magic camera and enchanted iPhone. Or maybe because I just like to take pictures. Either way, it has resulted in me having an untold number of images that I have time and time again organized into coffee table books that remain unpublished because of The Man (or because my own publisher wishes to remain profitable).[more inside]
Shark Cats, portraits of terror
"It was a normal day when I grabbed my sketchpad and began to doodle. What came out was little scribbles of a horrible little creature: the Shark Cat. The initial design was based on the thresher shark. I found that the short face and extremely large eyes worked well with the cat aesthetic. However, as I kept sketching, I noticed that almost any shark species could be adapted." Shark Cats, portraits of terror, by concept artist/illustrator Brynn Metheney, who has more work on her Instagram account. (Not to be confused with the cat in a shark costume on a Roomba, previously).
Caring for monkeys pays better than caring for children
"Childcare providers’ wage growth was lower than the growth in wages paid to fast food workers. They were consistently in the bottom second or third percentile in salary rankings, sharing that status with parking lot attendants, laundry workers, fast food employees, and bartenders. Perhaps most strikingly, the people who care for our youngest children earn less than those who care for animals in zoos or homes."
Marion Barry, former contentious DC mayor, dies at 78.
Marion Barry, former 4-term mayor of Washington DC, has died at the age of 78.
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations...”
This Kid Just Died [VIDEO]
"Grief porn enters the Facebook era"
"And, like regular pornography, the internet has transformed it. Freed from the already relaxed constraints of tabloid journalism, grief porn is no longer obligated to fake newsworthiness or importance. You don't need to die in a particularly tragic way; your death doesn't need to be the occasion for punishment or law-enactment. You just need to have produced consumable, shareable content before your untimely death. Rather than a news angle allowing a writer to smuggle grief porn into a paper, a grief-porn angle allows a content creator to smuggle a shareable unit onto Facebook."
An interesting essay by Kelly Conaboy, ironically on Gawker.
Dangerous days
Chocolate Smoke Persian Sugartump Supremo Disaronno
Hello. This year's Supreme Cat Show is taking place in Birmingham, England. The one-day show is one of the largest cat fancy competitions in Europe with over one thousand cats being exhibited. Observe Norwegian Forest Cat 'Kattjeules Tinkerbell', while Kirsty, who was at the event showing her Persian cat, said grooming the long-haired cat to get him show-ready was a lot of work and takes 20-30 minutes a day. In 2011 the process paid of for Mrs Murray and her moggie Mr Bojangles (whose show name is “Imperial Grand Premier & Supreme Kitten Isadoryou Mr Bojangles”) won the kitten category.
Tenho que pegá-los todos!
There exists a trilogy of complete Portguese live-action Pokemon fanfilms. That is all. (Subtitles available, and not the automatically generated kind; click the Subtitles/CC button on the video's lower right.) Playlist links: The Mysterious Virus. Destiny of a Hero. The Light of Hope Part 1, Part 2. (MLYT) [more inside]
Migrating cerebral lesions indicate sparganosis
"The patient tested negative for HIV, tuberculosis, lime disease, syphilis, coccidioides, histoplasma and cryptococcus." After four years of MRIs, a person's mysterious headaches, seizures and altered sense of smell and memory are diagnosed as a tapeworm growing throughout his brain.
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