June 3, 2010
Who's next?
A Burmese general has defected from the country to tell the world about the military junta's top secret nuclear weapons program. Sai Thein Win reveals that Singapore and Germany have been selling SLORC technology used to convert uranium into weapons-grade fuel. The end goal of the program is not to defend Burma from other countries but to protect the military elite from the underground democratic opposition. In response, US Senator Jim Webb cancels his trip to Burma. A full report will air on Al Jazeera starting at 6AM GMT.
4chan's domination of the educational system continues apace.
/mu/, 4chan's music board, has started a university and listed its proposed faculty list. /tv/, 4chan's film and television board, is working on a comparable program of higher education.
How To Destroy Angels
How To Destroy Angels, the latest band/project by Trent Reznor has a DMR-free EP available for free download (email address required). You can ask HTDA a question. [more inside]
Lap Stop
Ridiculous product for sale. Ridiculed on Amazon, in comments and in pictures. It causes a stir at NPR. Borked by Jalopnik.
Saturday night!
Ann-Margret joins the Bay City Rollers to entertain possibly one of the greatest audiences in the history of show business. (SLYahooV)
Are you forgetting that you came to me for a job?
Lovely Hawaii and its volcanoes
Oh cool, a thermal video of a Hawaiian volcano. More cool, but non thermal, video of another volcano in Hawaii. Another awesome geographical happening in you know where. Wow, the place is a hotspot for shield volcanoes, even has its own observatory.
On the Fly
"Of the four strokes swum in competition, butterfly is almost universally regarded as more exhausting than freestyle, breaststroke or backstroke. And therein lies its allure.
In an age of ultramarathons, Ironman triathlons and crowds chugging up Mount Everest, long-distance butterfly swimming is becoming a new and less-crowded frontier for fitness fanatics." [more inside]
Life begets life
A functional self-replicator has been designed for Conway's game of life. The deceptively simple automata 'Conway's game of life' is a model system that illustrates how simple 'physics' can give rise to incredibly complex phenomena. Although a menagerie of existing patterns have been discovered/engineered that display a variety of interesting behavior (eg here), there are also many unanswered questions about what is possible within the simulation. Recently, life-enthusiast mscibing succeeded in designing a universal constructor pattern that is capable of building a functional copy of itself. Its execution can be viewed directly (though it takes a while!) using Golly, a sweet, open-source app for viewing life simulations, as well as other cellular automata.
Tripmaster Monkey
Advanced Robotic Arm Controlled by Monkey's Thoughts From PhysOrg: Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a monkey controlling an advanced robotic arm by using its thoughts ... (Direct links to the embedded video here and here).
Drumming with the subtlety of a golden blazer.
Mayfly frenzy
The life of an adult mayfly may be short, but it starts with a bang: a recent mayfly hatching in Wisconsin showed up on doppler radar. [more inside]
For while my daily rage maybe diminished, I assure you we are still not finished.
Not until everyone in the Bronx has asthma are we going to stop building stadiums.
Stadium Status by the Internets Celebrities (previously 1, 2) is a (short) documentary which examines the rush of new sports stadiums in NYC as the latest example of an obscene national trend. New stadiums are built every year and the private businesses that own them benefit from huge sums of public money for their creation. Are we getting our money's worth?
I'm not holding my breath on this one.
The pipe spewing oil into the gulf has been cut as part of the next plan to cap the leak. BP had planned to use a diamond edged saw, but it got stuck while cutting through the pipe, and they had to use shears instead. However, the shears "resulted in a jagged cut, meaning that the containment cap will fit less snugly." [more inside]
How Our Laws are made.
Carl Th. Dreyer
Carl Th. Dreyer: The Man and His Work is a website created by the Danish Film Institute dedicated to all things Carl Dreyer. The website includes reviews, film stills and clips, film programs, essays on themes, camera space, as well as access to an archive of the Carl Theodor Dreyer Collection, which contains screenplays, working papers, book collections, and over 4000 letters. via
Designer/Artist Tobias Wong Dead at 35
Canadian designer and artist Tobias (Tobi) Wong died May 30th at the age of 35 of suicide. His personal site, though not updated for several years, details some of his work. The press release, posted on a design blog, notes his exhibitions and work on 100% Design Shanghai. This blog post also compiles many works, including his business card. One of his works was also discussed on the blue previously.
It Could Only Happen in Detroit
Dog and Orangutan, BFFs for evah
Suryia the Orangutan has a human-like relationship with Roscoe, a hound dog. (site takes about 30 seconds to load) This is the most beautiful and sweet thing I have ever seen in my cynical life. (SLNATGEOTVL?) via [more inside]
Tiery-Eyed
AT&T Just Killed Unlimited Wireless Data (and Screwed Everybody in the Process) AT&T is likely just the first, since carriers rarely do anything alone (like when everybody launched unlimited voice calling in lockstep), and Verizon's CTO has rumbled that plans with "as much data as you can consume is the big issue that has to change." And so it is.
Thank You for (Also) Being A Friend.
Rue McClanahan has died of a stroke at age 76. She was known and loved as Blanche Deveraux on the Golden Girls. She has joined costars Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty in the great beyond, where presumably, they serve cheesecake.
Sexy Sadie/Ticket to Ride
Mercedes Stafford is the former president of the Cincinnati Roller Girls. She skated under the name 'Sadistic Sadie,' and won the 2009 Most Valuable Skater award. She was the Women's Flat Track Derby Association's Featured Skater in May 2010. On June 1, she pleaded guilty to airline-ticket wire fraud. Between 2007 and 2009, while she worked for United Airlines, she stole $400,000 worth of airline tickets, then sold them to her friends and family, a group that included some roller-derby folks, and pocketed around $50,000. After her plea, the WFTDA removed her Featured Skater page from their site.
Employment Rights for Domestic Workers In New York State
New York State is now poised to pass the nation's first laws mandating that domestic workers receive overtime pay, vacation and sick days and the right to a weekly day of rest. The legislation signed by the state Senate yesterday is based in part on the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which was conceived and lobbied for by Domestic Workers United, who estimate there are over 200,000 nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers in the New York Metropolitan area. Domestic Workers are currently exempt from most US employment laws and as a result remain unprotected by basic workplace guarantees that are given to most employees. [more inside]
Sueing 14,000+ P2P users to SAVE CINEMA
Ars Technica reports on the US Copyright Group (website: SAVECINEMA.ORG), an entity that has sent out over 14,000 subpoenas in the past 5 months to P2P users who have downloaded smaller independent movies such as Uwe Boll's Far Cry and best picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker. To put that in perspective, the RIAA sued 18,000 P2P users during their multi-year anti-file sharing campaign. The law firm takes the moviemakers cases on for free, splitting with them the money the defendants pay to settle the case ($1,500 to $2,500 per subpoena) on a site that will conveniently take your credit card. The law firm and the filmmakers could end up splitting $19.7 million, and it's likely that this kind of approach will be tried with more movies. As you might expect, some targeted individuals have been wrongly accused.
Early 1900s in COLOUR
Early 1900s in COLOUR (a sampling). "In the early part of the 20th century French-Jewish capitalist Albert Kahn set about to collect a photographic record of the world, the images were held in an 'Archive of the Planet'. Before the 1929 stock market crash he was able to amass a collection of 180,000 metres of b/w film and more than 72,000 autochrome plates, the first industrial process for true colour photography." The whole enchilada.
Those ink blobs just rebuilt themselves.
Among 3quarksdaily's 80 nominees for the second annual 3QD prize in science is an excellent entry on the science of viscous laminar flows with a hard-to-swallow video: Why does the blob rewind? (Last year's science prize post.)
Fuckin' ukuleles, how do they work?
The rise and rise of the f*** yeah tumblrs
The rise of the f*** yeah tumblrs has been noted on MeFi, but with the appearance of Is it a F*** Yeah!?, it's easier to find curious FYTs. So in addition to the obvious cats, sharks and what have you, one might happen upon modernism, Hamlet, e.e cummings, chinchillas, archeology, Romania, The Kinks, weather, and ballet.
"When Kabul had rock and roll, not rockets."
Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan. "It is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan's youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived."
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