August 22, 2012
Brick-and-mortar restaurants vs. food trucks.
There is growing discontent within the food service industry between brick-and-mortar restaurants and mobile food trucks. Many restaurants feel that the food trucks' mobility advantages take away their business and support cities enacting time-and-location restrictions on food trucks in order to "level the playing field." The food trucks argue that these time-and-location restrictions are unfair because they prohibit the food trucks from competing fairly.
In the Boston area, this discontent has been playing out in an ongoing feud between the Phantom Gourmet restaurant-reviewing brothers and the Staff Meal food trucks. [more inside]
In heaven there is no beer, that's why we drink it here
Even in the grips of the Great Recession, one industry's profits are bubbling up, pouring forth, and experiencing growth in market share, dollars spent, and profit: craft beer! [more inside]
Rappin' Ukes
Local businesses repair car following antigay vandalism.
Local businesses repair car following antigay vandalism. Quality Auto Paint and Body in Roanoke decided to help by getting together with several other local businesses and restored the car to better than it was from the start. [more inside]
William Thurston
"The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others." William Thurston, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, has died. He revolutionized topology and geometry, insisting always that geometric intuition and understanding played just as important a role in mathematical discovery as did the austere formalism championed by the school of Grothendieck. Thurston's views on the relation between mathematical understanding and formal proof are summed up in his essay "On Proof and Progress in Mathematics." [more inside]
Bring on the roasted potatoes! Bring on the beaujolais!
The Annotated "Crisis On Infinite Earths"
Crisis on Infinite Earths was a 12-issue comic book maxi-series published in 1985 and 1986 in which DC Comics condensed their multiverse into a single universe, thus "simplifying" and "improving" it. Whether they succeeded in that goal is a good question, and one I shan't address. Crisis is, however, incredibly important to understanding DC continuity, as well as being possibly the most significant crossover series of all time.
"The world turns softly / Not to spill its lakes and rivers. / The water is held in its arms / And the sky is held in the water."
Three Nightsongs is a lovely choral work by Joshua Shank that puts three writings by the child-poet Hilda Conkling to music: Evening, Moon Song, and Water.
The 555 Timer IC
The simple but powerful 555 timer IC can be rigged to produce a timed pulse or a square-waveform oscillation up to 68kHz. It later came in dual-timer (556), quad-timer (558), military-grade (SE555), and low-power (7555) configurations. Although it's largely obsolete in commercial electronics, it became beloved of amateurs wanting an easy and cheap way to make things buzz or blink. In memory of the recent passing of its inventor, Hans Camenzind, Make Magazine offers a retrospective of 555 contest winners. Here's a tutorial on chip function from instructables. How to build a toy piano. The morse code practice circuit. Miniature beeping circuit prank to baffle your friends and co-workers and a screaming altoids tin.
(Previously on metafilter, the 555 footstool.)
The Internet's Gift to Cooking: Recipe Aggregators
Ice Cubes - A Recipe. The comments offer many helpful tips.
The Further Adventures Of Cube-Head
From BLENDO Games: Thirty Flights of Loving, the very strange sequel to the equally strange Gravity Bone. [more inside]
Don't try this at home
Art restoration is probably best left to the professionals, as vividly demonstrated by an elderly Spanish woman's unauthorized attempt to repair a damaged fresco, “Ecce Homo,” by painter Elias Garcia Martinez. The results speak for themselves.
Oliver Sacks on Drugs
Dragons, huh?
From The Nerdist - COPS: Skyrim
You Can NEVER Hold Back Spring
32,000 years ago, a squirrel buried some fruits from a flower related to the narrow-leafed campion in a riverbank in Russia. Either the squirrel forgot, or got eaten itself, and the buried cache of fruits stayed, preserved by the permafrost. This year, Russian scientists discovered the cache, recovered the fruit, and thawed it out to see if they could recover the seeds. Some of the seeds did indeed germinate - and this winter, millennia after first growing on their parent plant, those seeds bloomed.
"I don't know why the BBC won't release this stuff."
Doctor Who Online podcast interviews Ian Levine. In parallel with his career as a DJ and record producer who worked with Bananarama and the Pet Shop Boys, Levine was also a consultant on Doctor Who in the 80s and was instrumental in finding many missing episodes of the series. His latest projects include private reconstructions of unproduced or incomplete stories like Douglas Adams's Shada. The interview is three entertaining, if controversial hours [direct download link to episode one and to episode two].
Does Professor Wankerton have tenure?
Shadow of the Bust
Sony is closing its Liverpool Studio, previously known as Psygnosis, developer of the WipeEout and Lemmings games (DHTML version, previously). The studio created games for 28 years, first gaining attention in the Amiga era for it's high production values and stunning box art (more, more ).
Super VCS Bros.
Over at the AtariAge forums, user Sprybug has been coding an Atari 2600 Super Mario Bros. clone to run on the Harmony Cartridge. Some screenshots. The game running on the cartridge. The game running in an emulator. And some previous discussion on the difficulty of programming for the Atari 2600.
Lunch Box.
LunchBook won the 1st prize in the competition “Expopack” for the design of a paper lunch box for Expo Milan 2015, which is dedicated to food and sustainability. LunchBook is a recipe book made of paper dishes showing recipes from all over the world. The user can taste the food while walking among the Expo 2015 stands. Once a dish gets dirty, he can remove it and use the following dish. (via book patrol) [more inside]
You Always Wanted More Than I Could Give
A tale of science gone mad, global conspiracies, and the dangers of hubris. Drake, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Kanye, Weezy, Birdman, Noah Shebib, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj in: Hottest Chick in the Game, a comic by Sean T. Collins, and Andrew White.
Stockholm Syndrome
Please visit Stockholm. We need more iPads. (SLYTHDTDT*)
*Single Link YouTube "How do they DO that?!" post.
Amazon Election Heat Map 2012
dinner time
maadth-saemie
maadth-saemie reprasentin! In Scandinavia, there's been a recent upswing of Saami culture, from Designers[2] to Art & Musicians. Once upon a time the land of the Saami, Sapmi existed in the north of scandinavia, stretching between Norway, Sweden & Finland, now it's reffered to as the heartland. The new consciousness relating to the Saami struggles[2][3][4] is much Thanks to artists such as Inga Juuso and Sofia Jannok who exist in the greyarea between politics and melody.
The poetry of life in motion
What does the world need? A spider. With claws.
It's a brand new nightmare fuel -- meet Mr. Clawed Cave Spider "When something touches their feet [their claws] may snap shut and seize their prey." Just look at this big guy who would love to drop in your hair as you spelunk in the caves of Southern Oregon! Oh hey those claws are BARBED too. So, totally will get caught in your hair.
Busta Rhymes: the James Brown of hip-hop, there's no use coming on stage after him
Busta Rhymes is back with his 9th studio album, Year of the Dragon. It's free* for a limited time from Google Play, and also available to stream and download from DatPiff**. If that wasn't enough, Google Play put together a 21 minute biographical documentary on Busta Rhymes, with Busta and some close collaborators talking about his last 20 years. [more inside]
a blend of sulfur and marshmallows
Researchers in the Earth Sciences and Art departments at Syracuse University melt basalt and make their own lava flows for science and art! Here's the project's homepage, including videos. via make blog
DON'T PANIC. (AGAIN.)
"America may well be in a fateful decline. But given that the country has survived a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, 9/11, and the quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq, is our current crisis proportionate to the doomsday hysteria—or have we lost perspective?"
Frank Rich, columnist for New York Magazine, explores the recurring phenomenon of declinist panic and our national tendency to burnish the past in "Mayberry R.I.P."
Life on board a British nuclear submarine
"One evening, I wander into the control room at about midnight. The watch officer and sonar operators are discussing an important philosophical question: would it be more painful to be struck by a whole tuna or a tin of tuna? This is never resolved. These epistemological issues can be sustained over weeks."
Guardian journalist Stephen Moss spends a week aboard HMS Triumph, a nuclear-powered Royal Navy fast-attack submarine, and picks up some slang while he's there. Photographer Gary Calton was also there to document life aboard the boat.
"It is a fragile and embarrassing moment before they disappear back into the woods."
Photographer Todd R. Forsgren works with ornithologists to safely capture striking images of birds in nets. [more inside]
Articulate it ain't thusly, Joseph
The Case of the Stolen Blanks — The real story behind the cheating scandal at the National Scrabble Championship.
The main African American character in the novel is referred to as a "beast-man."
It's about a year since the storied Weird Tales magazine (previously) got a new editor and sacked its staff (previously), so WT elected to celebrate that milestone by publishing some text from actress, film director, sometime blogger and new author Victoria Foyt's debut Revealing Eden: Save the Pearls. Some people have a problem with its content and its video. [more inside]
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