March 12, 2014
In search of Puddles
Let Me Live That Fantasy. "In search of Puddles, the saddest clown of all, whose voice — along with Lorde’s music — made him an Internet star."
Congress examines single-payer healthcare EEK SOCIALISM!!!
Six years ago, PBS's feature documentary program, Frontline, aired Sick Around the World, a documentary examining health care systems around the world -- and specifically how all those featured were generally superior to the American system. (2008 MeFi post)
Today, the American Senate subcommittee on primary health and aging brought the debate over single-payer care to Washington. C-SPAN has a fine video of the hearing, which features seven witness representing health care systems and think tanks from around the US and the world. [more inside]
"If you want to kill someone, do it with a car."
Germaicans
On Aug. 1, 1833 the British outlawed (most) slavery in her colonies. There were, however, still crops that needed tending. Fortunately, Germany had excess people desperate for a better life. Some (as we have seen) of them wound up in Texas.
Some, willing to sign on as indentured servants, wound up in Jamaica.
Seaford Town Jamaica, to be exact. Their descendants can still be found. There is now a documentary on the subject. (Extended trailer can been seen here)
"We had an office full of people sitting with our jaws on the table..."
"I had heard about this film through various channels off and on through the years. It had gotten to the point where it was almost apocryphal in my mind.... Nobody knew where it was, nobody had ever seen it, but I was aware it existed. It was like the holy grail." said Wayne Petersen, director of the Massachusetts Important Bird Areas program for Mass. Audubon on the archival footage of the extinct heath hen discovered, restored and premiering at the Mass Audubon Birders Meeting this month. [more inside]
A New York without people.
A show about Nothing (SLVimeo)
Real live Mario Kart
Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness
"In 1805, a twenty-three year-old Bostonian called Frederic Tudor launched a new industry: the international frozen-water trade. Over the next fifty years, he and the men he worked with developed specialised ice harvesting tools, a global network of thermally engineered ice houses, and a business model that cleverly leveraged ballast-less ships, off-season farmers, and overheated Englishmen abroad. By the turn of the century, the industry employed 90,000 people and was worth $220 million in today’s terms. By 1930, it had disappeared, almost without trace, replaced by an artificial cryosphere of cold storage warehouses and domestic refrigerators." [more inside]
get your sh!t together devs
Bennett Foddy (of QWOP fame) explains why some multiplayer games aren't cut out for online multiplayer.
“as both Pierre Bourdieu and latte orders have taught me…”
As it turned out, when I started working in Brooklyn, the most difficult to serve were the ones who wanted—or expected, really—for you to be cool, or at least receptive to a certain projection of hip-and-coolness. It was nice, at first, to have a job that let me swear and show my tattoos, but the pleasure of that freedom waned somewhat when most of my interactions became about the "fucks" and body modifications. If I had a quarter for every time I showed off my expensive liberal arts degree, holding up my end of a conversation about New York’s small presses or the most recent issue of The New Yorker, my tips certainly would have been better.Molly Osberg: Inside the Barista Class
Chain of Life
Chain of Life is a three part article done by The Star Ledger of New Jersey, following a rare instance where six patients in New Jersey and New York received kidney transplants in March from six living donors, all unrelated and previously unknown to them. Over 36 hours.
"they cry because they are not allowed to be children at all"
"Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent." [more inside]
"Oh, Danny Boy"
With St. Patrick's Day fast approaching, it's a great opportunity to have a look at "Danny Boy". [more inside]
(Another) look at Giovanni Battista Braccelli's Bizzarie di varie figure
Giovanni Battista d'Antonio Braccelli was a Florentine artist (PDF*) who was active from 1616 to 1649, and is little known beyond some highly creative works. Finding details on his life can be more difficult due to multiple forms for his names (Giovanbatista, Bracelli, Braccielli, Brazzè, and the nickname "il Bigio" - the gray one) within his own work and secondary sources, and early writers conflated his biography with that of a Genoese painter of the same name. But if you enjoy surreal illustrations, check out Braccelli's Bizzarie di varie figure (online view from Gallica - Bibliothèque nationale de France; online and PDF in the US Library of Congress collection** from Lessing J. Rosenwald). [more inside]
Uncle Sam was a rolling stone
Let there be Life
How It's Unmade - Oreo Cookies
Codename: TURBINE. Your computer may already be owned.
Top-secret documents reveal that an elite unit at the National Security Agency has developed technology allowing it to automatically install malware on millions of computers worldwide in what it calls 'industrial-scale exploitation'. TURBINE, developed by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit (mentioned previusly here), is a command-and-control suite automating tasks that previously had to be performed manually: Using 'internet chokepoints' and a capability called SECONDDATE, the NSA can perform man-in-the-middle attacks to quietly redirect web browsers to FOXACID malware servers en masse.
Click the banana to return to the top
While CNN is known for its flashy technology displays like holograms of Will.I.Am and its glossy map displays, not everything about the network is so up-to-date: the CNN Interactive: In-Depth Food website appears to have remained unchanged since 2001. via
"the horrible things that come for us when everything goes dark."
Drowning In Light
n 1996, Yale economist William D. Nordhaus calculated that the average citizen of Babylon would have had to work a total of 41 hours to buy enough lamp oil to equal a 75-watt light bulb burning for one hour. At the time of the American Revolution, a colonial would have been able to purchase the same amount of light, in the form of candles, for about five hour’s worth of work. And by 1992, the average American, using compact fluorescents, could earn the same amount of light in less than one second. That sounds like a great deal. Except for one thing: We treat light like a drug whose price is spiraling toward zero.[more inside]
When I have a little money, I buy books
"In 2011, when we blogged about the Shaftesbury Psalter (which may have belonged to Adeliza of Louvain; see below), we wrote that medieval manuscripts which had belonged to women were relatively rare survivals. This still remains true, but as we have reviewed our blog over the past few years, it has become clear that we must emphasize the relative nature of the rarity – we have posted literally dozens of times about manuscripts that were produced for, owned, or created by a number of medieval women." -- For International Womens' Day last week, the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog showcases a selection of manuscripts that belonged to some of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. [more inside]
It's in the water!
What would a great ad for a university of technology be? An ad, that itself, solves a problem through technology This is exactly what the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru and their ad agency Mayo DraftFCB have done - the first billboard in the world to make drinking water out of thin air and alleviate the lives of Peru's people.
"You treat her like a lady. And she'll always bring you home."
Robot Jackalope -- "a blog about design, programming and general geekery" -- tackles The Geometry of Starship Design -- the USS Enterprise
The Egyptian Military's War on Alcohol
The Egyptian Military's War on Alcohol Just before the Ahmed Hamdy tunnel, which links Egypt's main bulk of land to the Sinai Peninsula, there are two consecutive checkpoints. One of them is run by the military, and the other by the Ministry of Interior. This weekend, on a trip to Sinai with a group of friends, we were stopped at the military checkpoint. The conscripts insisted on searching us, and a mere inquiry as to what the purpose of the search was made them adamant on going through every bag.
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