May 15, 2014
Who Gets to Graduate?
Who Gets to Graduate? "If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores."
The First Ad On The Moon
Japanese Pocari Sweat sports drink is striving to go where no ad has gone before: the moon. Lunar Dream is their campaign to get kids to submit their dreams to include in a "dream capsule," on SpaceX's Falcon 9, as part of the company's first moon landing in October 2015. [more inside]
May 16 is National Bike To Work Day
Strava, the bike and run tracking system, is using their database to create Strava Metro, to sell to urban planners for commute data. But unless you're the Oregon DoT, London, or Alpine Shire, you might find the Strava bike and run heatmaps more useful. [more inside]
The largest elections in Human history
An election spread over 42 days with 550 Mn people (66% of eligible voters), 930,000 polling booths, more than a 1000 parties, 545 seats and approximately $6 Bn spent. These elections come at time when India is going through huge changes. The economy has slowed down from its heady days of 9% growth to around 5% growth. The current coalition government headed by congress was mired in scandals and policy paralysis. The demographic dividend has resulted in a large number of youth participating in elections. [more inside]
Dota goes big in 2014
Valve's annual Dota 2 championship was record breaking last year. It took 3 months to raise the prize pool by a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding from 1.6 million USD to 2.8 million USD.
This year it took a little more than 1 week to raise the prize pool from the same 1.6 million USD to 5 million USD. And the tournament will only start in mid July. At this rate, even if the winners had never won cash before (and assuming they will the take half of the total money), they will become the highest earner in esports of all time.
(previously)
(previously)
Smell Those Douglas Firs, Diane....
Finally, after 25 years, the conclusion to one TV's enduring mysteries is finally at hand... Finally, after 25 years, the conclusion to one TV's enduring mysteries is finally at hand with the Announcement of Twin Peaks - The Complete Mystery.
[more inside]
Emily Dickinson's handwritten manuscripts
The Emily Dickinson Archive is a collection of high resolution digital images of Emily Dickinson's handwritten manuscripts. Here are, for instance, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Tell the Truth but Tell It Slant, I Dwell in Possibility, They Shut Me Up in Prose and I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died. The whole collection is fully searchable and the images include the text of the poems as they were written down by Dickinson. The archive is a project of Harvard's Houghton Library but many other institutions provided manuscripts. Perhaps the best place to start is to simply browse the poems by title.
Thriller wasn't lying...
Two recent studies support Beringian origins for first Americans
"Because of differences in craniofacial morphology and dentition between the earliest American skeletons and modern Native Americans, separate origins have been postulated for them, despite genetic evidence to the contrary." The 12,000-year-old skeleton of a girl with these features, however, confirmed a Beringian origin. "Thus, the differences between Paleoamericans and Native Americans probably resulted from in situ evolution rather than separate ancestry." [more inside]
Way too close for comfort
Two Weeks Ago, I Almost Died in the Deadliest Plane Crash Ever How two jetliners nearly collided over the Pacific, why no one knows about it, and what it means for safety oversight aboard airplanes
Burger perverts welcome
Gawk at the unholy burger combinations of PornBurger. (disclaimer: not at all porn, but NSIH --Not Safe If Hungry)
Notes From the New Wave Queer Underground
Southern Belles, Latchkey Kids, and Thrift-Store Crossdressers. Worth a click if only for the photos of a teenage RuPaul. [more inside]
ISS Eviction notice
Russia wants to nix plans to use the ISS after 2020, prohibit the United States from visiting the space station after that date along with preventing the US from using Russia made rocket engines for military launches. NASA says it hasn't received any official word, as US Congress critters begin asking questions
Robbing the Banksy
Was the pilfered painting worth it? Detroit's 555 Gallery saved a stencil from scrappers, but now wants to sell it.
(Walt) said we should have gone ahead and made it anyway
In the mid-1940s, surrealist artist Salvador Dali began collaborating with Walt Disney on a short film. The idea was fully storyboarded and an 18 second test animation was completed by Disney animator John Hench. Soon after, the idea was shelved due to a changing of focus with Disney Feature Animation.
Almost 60 years later, Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney (with consultation from the now 95-year old Hench) spearheaded an effort to finish the film. In 2003, the finished product, "Destino", premiered. [more inside]
Better World Cup slogans?
FIFA: "The votes have been counted and the winners declared! Congratulations to our 32 winners... The winning slogans will be placed on the respective teams' buses at the 2014 FIFA World Cup! Scroll down to read all the winning entries." - CNN: FIFA's bus slogans cause misery and mirth on social media - and
The Guardian asks: "Can you think of better World Cup slogans for the 32 teams?
"The England team are not 'the heartbeat of millions', real men do not 'wear orange' and since when did 'heroes play like Greeks'? The World Cup slogans need a rewrite. Can your wit help?"
"But circumstances are different in Manning's case."
In a story first broken by the AP (heads up: link does not conform to guidelines about how to refer to trans people), Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has given approval for the Army to transfer Pvt. Chelsea Manning to a federal prison in order to allow her to access treatment for her gender dysphoria. [more inside]
“Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock n' roll.”
A Short History of Game Panics: [Boing Boing] "Do you know where you child is? Watch out: they might be in an arcade! Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine on video gaming's juciest moral panics." [Previously] [Previously] [Previously]
Baby Mentalist
Discovering Literature through the collections of the British Library
The British Library today unveiled a major addition to its website: Discovering Literature, a portal to digitized collections and supporting material. The first installment, Romantics and Victorians, includes work from Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, and Blake, and forthcoming modules will expand coverage of the site to encompass everything from Beowulf to the present day.
A Diet Coke and a George Saunders, please
Cultivating Thought: Cups and bags at Chipotle (previously) will now feature stories and essays by famous authors, including Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Steven Pinker, Sarah Silverman, and Jonathan Safran Foer, who came up with the idea for the series and will be curating it as well.
Ginger Baker is quite the interviewee
Q&A: Ginger Baker on Why 'the Rolling Stones Are Not Good Musicians'
“an issue with management in the newsroom"
Yesterday, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson - the first woman to hold that position for the paper - was unexpectedly fired, reportedly because she attempted to bring on a new co-managing editor without consulting the managing editor already at the paper or the publisher, though there is also a persistent rumor that it was because she addressed a pay gap between herself and her predecessor. Today, the first woman managing editor for French paper Le Monde resigned, claiming that she was being undermined, drawing more attention to journalism and media's woman problem. [more inside]
Within Sight And Gunshot
The Last Shot, 20 Years On
Amos Barshad of Grantland talks to
Darcy Frey and the basketball players featured in the classic book The Last Shot 20 years after the book's release.
SIGGRAPH 2014
A preview of computer graphics technology innovations to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2014. (Previously)
A keen noise for ambience
myNoise.net uses audio synthesis cleverness and the HTML 5
Web Audio API to give you a
vast array of ambient soundscapes and background noises right in your (recent) browser. Each generator is highly customisable and users can share customisations with each other.
And the Waltz Goes On
50 years ago Anthony Hopkins wrote a piece of music titled 'And the waltz goes on'. Watch him hear it played for the first time. [SLYT].
GI Tufte
Military infographics are completely insane -- An analysis of some of the baffling infographics that the US military have made public on the web for some reason.
iMessage Purgatory
"That font just makes me so happy."
"Most people don’t fit common gender definitions"
and, with a quaint device, the feast vanishes.
“Putting magic at the center of a play about a magician doesn’t seem like that radical a choice,” explained Teller’s co-director and co-adapter Aaron Posner. "But in the history, at least the modern history of producing 'The Tempest', it is a radical choice."
« Previous day | Next day »