February 5, 2020
Continental liar from the state of Maine
Crochet away, with Jonah
At 5, Jonah picked up a crochet hook, and with a YouTube tutorial on making a dishcloth (he wanted to make an octopus), he learned to crochet. That was about seven years ago, and you can see how far he's come by looking at his work on his Instagram account, and his tutorials on YouTube. No hooks? No problem! Jonah shows you how to use your fingers to knit a hoodie (full instructions for free from Yarnspirations). "After a very hard, busy, chaotic day in this busy world with school, it's just nice to know that I can come home and crochet in my little corner of the house while sitting by the one I love most: my mom," Jonah told NPR last year. [via Mltshp]
hot singles near me
Video director and conceptual artist ani acopian (Youtube | Instagram) wasn’t having much luck with dating apps so she partnered with Amazon to make a better one.
“Life is like a B-picture script.”
Indomitable Icon of Hollywood's Golden Age Kirk Douglas, an A-Lister if ever there was one, is dead at 103 years old. [more inside]
You see where this is going, right?
"This daily rollout will be an experiment of sorts, a kind of live essay. I honestly don’t know if it will work, or whether it’s wise, or whether I can even pull it off. The essay may shift in the unspooling, and I’m still not sure how some of the later pieces will resolve. But I hope this form speaks to the content I’ve been wrestling with for so long. I hope by the end it makes sense."Tevis Thompson, author of Saving Zelda (previously) and co-creator of the Second Quest graphic novel (previously) is finishing what began as a review of the best games, worst games and critical failures of 2018, a work that has taken a year to finish. [more inside]
Something is happening in Norway
Researchers are no longer in doubt: Global warming has begun to make Norway warmer and wetter. [Visual storyboard showing the impacts of climate change in Norway.]
This unprecedented post is remarkable, novel and really excellent.
Researchers tracked 25 positive terms in clinical-research articles published between 2002 and 2017, and input the authors’ names into the Genderize database...positive words in the title or abstract garnered 9% more citations overall, and 13% more citations in high-impact journals. ...the analysis also found that such self-flattering words were 80% more common in 2017 than in 2002. (paper)
Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint
"Grief is what’s going on inside of us, while mourning is what we do on the outside." David Kessler on the Difference Between Mourning and Grief [more inside]
"There are indications that inhabitants may have departed in a hurry"
"There are indications that inhabitants may have departed in a hurry; doors wide open, personal effects left in a jumble." The ghost village of Al Madam is a place of strange beauty, two rows of homes and a mosque about an hour's drive from Dubai, half buried in shifting sands. Photographers love it, for good reason. If you can't visit it yourself, at least you can take a virtual visit. [more inside]
The Automotive Police State
Legal historian Sarah Seo [twitter] appeared on the podcast The War On Cars to discuss her book Policing The Open Road[HUP], which covers the development of traffic laws and police stopping cars in the United States[New Rambler] and the concurrent increase in police and policing power[Atlantic]: How Cars Transformed Policing, Sarah A. Seo [Boston Review] - "Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything." [more inside]
"..from every shires ende / Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende"
The University of Saskatchewan has released an app (link to web version; iTunes and Google play versions also available) that will read you the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, for those who want to hear how it would have sounded in the 14th century. Plans are afoot for at least two more apps, covering the Miller's Tale and other stories.
This is one of the last academic projects that the late Chaucer scholar and some-time comedian Terry Jones worked on before his death a couple of weeks ago.
Undercover Boss, the most reprehensible propaganda on TV
It’s a shameless endorsement of capitalist inequality that may as well end each episode by reminding everyday Americans that they should shut up and be grateful their lives are controlled by such selfless exemplars of virtue. It’s class warfare in everything but name. [more inside]
AI & Diversity: What Could Go Wrong?
Diverse Editions: Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue has partnered with Penguin Random House to release a new collection of classic novels with "culturally diverse" covers. But as Elizabeth Minkel notes on Twitter, they appear to have chosen the titles by applying machine learning to "scour a corpus of 100+ books to determine whether or not the protagonist was explicitly described as white, and if they weren't, they went to town!" [more inside]
ITS PSYDUCK OR GTFO
Google Opens Votes For Your Pokémon Of The Year, All 890 Included [Nintendo Life] “In the build-up to Pokémon Day, taking place on February 27th, Google has opened a voting system which allows fans to display their love and affection for their favourite Pokémon. You can access the voting form by clicking here (can also search 'Pokémon of the Year' or 'Pokémon' in Google). You can actually vote for one Pokémon per region once per day, with voting closing on 14th February. Google notes that "all forms of each species count as the same Pokémon" and that "your votes will be stored until the vote ends and cannot be deleted".”
In Praise of (the Fashion of) Tintin
Think of Tintin and you’ll most likely picture a round-faced, ginger-haired grass who hails from Belgium, yet has a suspiciously good British accent. And while the aforementioned is mostly certainly, definitely true, what you’re probably missing from your list is: cultured menswear fashionista.
Arrival of a train
L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896). L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (2020). (via)
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