December 27, 2010
Live Forever or Die Trying
If you're a man, get married and stay married, because married men outlive bachelors (but only if they talk as much as their wives). If you're a woman, have a baby after 40, but don't put anything on your face that you wouldn't put in your stomach. [more inside]
A Real Science of Mind
A Real Science of Mind Neurobabble piques interest in science, but obscures how science works. Individuals see, know, and want to make love. Brains don’t. Those things are psychological — not, in any evident way, neural.
Video of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and rescue work
Video produced by the California Highway Patrol of the 7.1 1989 San Francisco Bay Area earthquake and the rescue attempts that followed. It focuses on the Bay Bridge and the Cypress collapse. This video has some intense footage, including much that I'd never seen of the rescue efforts. [more inside]
you cut me deep shrek you cut me real deep
From the opening frames of this mesmerizing video: "A crazy idea was born. Early sunday on Swordfish 2010 we got a crazy idea of duck-tape our GoPro Hero camera on the tip of a sword and do some swings to see how it looked. We started slow just to see if the camera was holding together, then stepping it up. All recording are done in real speed." The music really makes the video. (via)
Mama Cass...two generations later
Mama Cass Elliott's granddaughter singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" Sometimes a bit of nostalgia combined with a sweet child is just worth sharing.
Unusual Off-road Locomotion
Unusual Off-road Locomotion documents vehicles that are often "too eccentric, too expensive compared to the improvements or too far ahead of their time."
"the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident"
The Line Between Science and Journalism is Getting Blurry….Again by Bora Zivkovic is an excellent, James Burke-ish, essay on science, journalism, and a hopeful future for science journalism. [more inside]
Los Angeles Times - Sotomayor, Kagan - David G. Savage
Sotomayor, Kagan shift Supreme Court debates to the left. The liberal wing is no longer drowned out by Scalia and his fellow conservatives during oral arguments.
Paul Fierlinger's Still Life with Animated Dogs
Still Life with Animated Dogs is a witty and candid cartoon by Paul Fierlinger, animator of Sesame Street's Teeny Little Super Guy, recounting his life from being a dissident artist in 1960s Czechoslovakia to being a successful animator in the US. He tells his lifestory by talking about the dogs he's owned over the years, Roosevelt, Ike, Johnson and Spinnaker. Warning: Something may get stuck in your eye.
European 14th Century Cookbooks
Take oysters, parboile hem in her owne broth, make a lyour of crustes of brede & drawe it up wiþ the broth and vynegur mynce oynouns & do þerto with erbes. & cast the oysters þerinne. boile it. & do þerto powdour fort & salt. & messe it forth.
Three European 14th Century cookbooks: [more inside]
Three European 14th Century cookbooks: [more inside]
Learn aboot North American English dialects
A quite ugly but intriguing map of English dialects in North America.
A Model for the Rest of Us
Al Jazeera's year in review
Al Jazeera's top 10 stories of 2010.
Including top 10 news, features, and opinion stories by reader hits.
Including top 10 news, features, and opinion stories by reader hits.
India's law to promote access to political information has sad downside.
If the past is a foreign country, this is your passport
Retronaut: someone who makes the conscious effort to experience life outside of time and modernity. Artist David McDermott. Chris Wild, keeper of the How To A Retronaut Site, full of arcane anachronisms: WWII in modern Amsterdam, Map of abandoned London tube stations, 50 years of Japanese concept cars, 1940's London in high resolution color images and much more.
This isn't your grandfather's science fiction
Ted Chiang is perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied.
A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only twelve short stories in the last twenty years, one dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light.
Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio recordings where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his nonfiction essays, and a few other related sites and articles. [more inside]
The Fastest Transcribing by the Greatest Number
“Box 73 and Box 96 contain interesting manuscripts on drunkenness, swearing, adultery and much more...”. The Bentham Transcription Project is using crowdsourcing to transcribe 40,000 unpublished manuscripts of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832 but still sits and watches. (prev) In four months, they've knocked off 435 already. [more inside]
The paper training video is slightly less heartwarming
The weather outside is frightful...
A flock of sheep
The German Model & Works Councils
Wondering at the route US vs. German unemployment has taken, I found some clues here and there, but the overriding factor seems to be the German model[1] and works councils.[2] [more inside]
The Place Where You Live
Your contribution can take the form of a short essay or story of no more than 350 words, up to six photographs, a painting, drawing, or handmade map. Orion magazine reintroduces reader submitted stories about how we connect to where we live.
Brian Butterfield's Christmas.
Holiday season getting you down? Perhaps knowing how Brian Butterfield spent Christmas might cheer you up.
Bonus feature: the full Peter Serafinowicz 2008 Christmas special, part 1, part 2, part 3.
Previously, Brian Butterfield's netsight.
Profoundly not safe for work.
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