April 3, 2012
Amazon from A to Z
The Seattle Times has just published a largely unfavorable four-part series about Seattle-based Amazon.com. In Part 1, the newspaper questions how much Amazon is doing for the local community. Part 2 suggests that Amazon is damaging the publishing industry. Part 3 asks if Amazon's tax-free status gives it an unfair advantage. And Part 4 wonders whether Amazon is bad for its own workers.
Where cabs and omnibuses are ruthlessly driven against them
In the frantic pace of modern life, it is often easy to forget what life was once like for those who built the world we now live in.
More from Bishopsgate library here and the Institute itself is worth a poke around
Call Me Ehsaan
He has it memorized???!?!?!?
Rob Paulsen, voice actor extraordinaire, performs Yakko's World... live... from memory. [more inside]
full of ★☆★☆★
OMG SPACE aims to illustrate the scale and the grandeur of our solar system, as well as illustrate through the use of infographics our work in the exploration of our solar system with various spacecraft. [more inside]
Occupy May Day: Not Your Usual General Strike
The U.S. Occupy movement has called for a general strike - or something like it – on May 1. May Day.
Most Occupy May Day advocates understand that a conventional general strike is not in the cards. What they are advocating instead is a day in which members of the “99%” take whatever actions they can to withdraw from participation in the normal workings of the economic system -- by not working if that is an option, but also by not shopping, not banking, and not engaging in other “normal” everyday activities, and by joining demonstrations, marches, disruptions, occupations, and other mass actions.[more inside]
National Magazine Awards 2012
Stay away from my afterlife
Pikachunes.
Out-of-context-filter: the sometimes dorky, sometimes sweet (and sometimes quite competent) music and videos of New Zealand's Pikachunes. [more inside]
Wirele$$tap
These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps. After a flurry of public records requests to over 200 police departments, the ACLU has obtained a trove of documents detailing police tracking of cell phone location, call logs and more, including a price list for subscriber information from every major US carrier. [more inside]
Sounds familiar
There was more to the L.A. hit music sound than the Wrecking Crew (previously). The Ron Hicklin Singers (Facebook page) lent their distinctive sound to movie and TV theme songs, and as you'll hear in this demo, were the secret sound behind certain prefab bands.
Pot police target political dissidents
"Dozens of federal agents on Monday raided the Oakland businesses and apartment of Richard Lee, the state's most prominent advocate for the legalization and regulation of marijuana, carting away loads of pot and belongings but not revealing the purpose of their investigation." ... Today, "[f]our of the six medical marijuana providers who are suing the U.S. government over last year's raids of pot businesses across Montana have been arrested on federal drug charges."
National Poetry Month. Yay!
April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, the Academy of American Poets is having 30 different poets each curate their Tumblr blog for 24 hours, posting whatever they please. [more inside]
Austin Beer Fail
Over the weekend, Austin had a beer festival. It was a disaster. An apology was offered on facebook. But it looks like this wasn't the first time the organizers tried this game.
I am zucchini - and I am in space.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (SLYT)
This film Was nominated (and won) the Oscar for best animated short feature. If you love books and words then this silent 15 minute piece is worth your time. Here is the backstory.
To-Go-Bots
MIT is leading an NSF-funded project with researchers from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard that aims to enable anyone to "design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours." Constructed from "cyber-physical primitives," the robots (some early examples here) would be able to be made in bulk on demand and could help change the entire workflow of device and robot creation, from engineering to warehousing to assembly.
Honey Hunters of Nepal
High in the Himalayan foothills, fearless Gurung men risk their lives to harvest the massive nests of the world's largest honeybee. [more inside]
2012 NBA Playoff bandwagon rankings
2, 12, 1, 9, 4: Big Money. No Whammies.
On May 19, 1984, an unemployed ice cream truck driver named Michael Larson went on Press Your Luck and over the course of two episodes, took home more money than had ever been won in the history of television: $110,237 -- to the shock of the show’s producers and host, the late Peter Tomarken. How did he do it? The show’s game board had only 5 patterns of 18 squares, and Mr. Larson had memorized them all. After the show, CBS tried to disqualify him but couldn’t, because Larson hadn’t done anything illegal. But they did refuse to allow those episodes to be aired in syndication. So, they didn’t re-air until 2003, when the Game Show Network produced a Tomarken-hosted documentary about Mr. Larson’s incredible win: Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal. [more inside]
Time To Corner The Market On Passenger Jet Wing Assemblies!
Economies of Scale is a free, web-based multiplayer business/commerce simulation game under development by Scott Rubyton (aka Ratan Joyce). Players use starting capital to build production/wholesale/retail businesses from the ground up in a basic economic model, competing for market share while collaborating through business-to-business trading of goods and materials. It's more fun than getting an MBA! Also much less expensive. [more inside]
Sacred text
Meg Hitchcock creates intricate collages out of individual letters from spiritual and philosophical texts (via).
Where are you on the global pay scale?
Where are you on the global pay scale? A nice calculator that shows how your monthly salary compares to the average for your country and for the world. But before drawing too many sweeping conclusions, check out the notes that explain how the numbers are calculated, and the difficulties with trying to calculate any such thing. [more inside]
'I'm not in favour of potchkying with it, but if something's bothering you...'
Is a ’director’s cut’ ever a good idea? The director's cut has been a feature of the home video landscape for years, getting a significant boost from multi-disk DVD and now Blu-Ray sets. There are some pretty bad ones around, but which are the best? Movie sites like Shortlist, IGN Movies, MoviesOnline.ca, FilmWad and Empire have all given us lists of the best (and worst), and online discussions have suggested others (Blade Runner tops most lists, but beyond that they diverge significantly). Where do you start when that two-hour epic isn't epic enough?
“If you can't find the creature, be the creature”
How Video Game Sounds Are Made: a brief but fascinating look inside the world of video game sound production.
How to be a fan of problematic things.
Rock 'n' Roll as the crystallized, mythologized Wild West
Closed Frontier: Is rock over? "Rock ’n’ roll is to 21st-century America what the Wild West was to 20th-century America: a closed frontier, ripe for mass mythology....Exciting new music still thrives in the subgenres, but modern musicians draw increasing amounts of inspiration from tradition, not originality. The sexagenarian Rolling Stones do serial victory laps around the world, just as an aging Buffalo Bill toured America and Europe in the 1880s and 90s, performing rope and horse tricks alongside Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull."
Timeless Message
The story behind the iconic poster Keep Calm and Carry On rediscovered in 1991 at Barter Books, has been covered here before, but not in this lovely short video. And not with the new iPhone app.
Finally, a flying car!
Video: the Terrafugia Transition flying car goes for a drive and a flight. Press release. Previously. This is the first demonstrated flight of the vehicle at significant altitude (above ground effect).
How Much BPA Exposure Is Dangerous?
US Feds Reject Petition To Ban BPA In Food -- "...recent studies done by government researchers at the request of regulatory agencies suggest it's very unlikely that BPA poses a health risk to people." (NPR Audio) [more inside]
Psychotropic medication efficacy and publication bias
Antipsychotics: "The magnitude of publication bias found for antipsychotics was less than that found previously for antidepressants, possibly because antipsychotics demonstrate superiority to placebo more consistently."
Antidepressants: "We found a bias toward the publication of positive results. Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome. [...] Using both approaches, we found that the efficacy of this drug class is less than would be gleaned from an examination of the published literature alone. According to the published literature, the results of nearly all of the trials of antidepressants were positive. In contrast, FDA analysis of the trial data showed that roughly half of the trials had positive results." Previously [more inside]
Antidepressants: "We found a bias toward the publication of positive results. Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome. [...] Using both approaches, we found that the efficacy of this drug class is less than would be gleaned from an examination of the published literature alone. According to the published literature, the results of nearly all of the trials of antidepressants were positive. In contrast, FDA analysis of the trial data showed that roughly half of the trials had positive results." Previously [more inside]
April Fools for Physicists
Some physicists celebrate April Fools Day by posting spurious papers to the arXiv preprint server.
Non-detection of the Tooth Fairy at Optical Wavelengths
Non-detection of the Tooth Fairy at Optical Wavelengths
We report a non-detection, to a limiting magnitude of V = 18.4, of the elusive entity commonly described as the Tooth Fairy. We review various physical models and conclude that follow-up observations must precede an interpretation of our result.[more inside]
“probably the best possible edit of the Star Wars prequels given the footage released and available”
Topher Grace Edited The ‘Star Wars’ Prequels Into One 85-Minute Movie and We Saw It Grace’s Star Wars III.5: The Editor Strikes Back still manages to tell a complete, surprisingly moving story of Anakin Skywalker’s rise and fall even while making some severe cuts [more inside]
Executive Compensation
The Incentive Bubble (ungated pdf) - "The fraying of the compact of American capitalism by rising income inequality and repeated governance crises is disturbing. But misallocations of financial, real, and human capital arising from the financial-incentive bubble are much more worrisome to those concerned with the competitiveness of the American economy." [more inside]
The Broderick-Terry Duel
On September 13, 1859, a former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court shot and killed a U.S. Senator in what has been called the last notable duel in American history. The duel itself can be interpreted as a sort of proxy battle between pro- and anti-slavery groups of the time, and a harbinger of the American Civil War (which would begin a year and half later).
"At least it's an ethos."
What do American "values voters" actually value? The American Values Project gathers answers.
When Corporations abandoned the 99%
In 2010, the top 500 U.S. corporations - the Fortune 500 – generated $10.7 trillion in sales, reaped a whopping $702 billion in profits, and employed 24.9 million people around the globe. Historically, when these corporations have invested in the productive capabilities of their American employees, we’ve had lots of well-paid and stable jobs.
That was the case a half century ago.
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