August 25, 2017
Gary are you okay, are you okay Gary?
Is Elon Musk's pet snail okay? Gary is a snail who lives in a pineapple, balanced precariously on a wall overlooking a deep trench. He is trapped there, waiting for the day when he is forced to race against a giant machine.
Why Cops Shoot
Babylonian tablet 3,700 years old, first trigonometry
Babylonian tablet predates the Pythagorean Theorum by a millennium The Plimpton 322 tablet, offers Pythagorean Geometry, and a base sixty trigonometry used for measurement and planning, more concise than what we have been using in modern time. The Guardian covers it nicely. The Atlantic has a different take on it, not so fond of the Astrology they used the Astronomy for, however their Astronomical predictions grew more accurate. [more inside]
I’ve Been Drawing On Beaches Since Childhood, And I Still Do
Dutch artist Tim Hoekstra:
I love the idea of temporary art because all things in life are temporary. I grew up on the beach where I lived during the summer. I have always been drawing on the beach using materials I found there. 6 years ago I started using a rake. This way I could make the drawings much bigger. Because they became so big I wanted to see the result from above. I mounted a GoPro on a kite so I could make pictures. Nowadays I am using a drone. I am inspired by tattoo artists, street art and geometry.(Instagram, Facebook)
“Can Star Citizen be made?”
Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen by Julian Benson [Kotaku] “Star Citizen’s development has been high-profile enough, expensive enough and, yes, troubled enough to spawn a whole ecosystem of theories as to what’s going on at Cloud Imperium Games, from theorising about the project’s technical challenges to wild accusations about what’s happening to the money. Various community scandals have added yet more fuel to the fire, turning Star Citizen into a lightning rod for controversy. The questions I wanted answers to were: what exactly has been happening over the past five six years? What are the reasons behind Star Citizen’s various delays, and what specific development problems has it encountered? Have things been mismanaged? And, as many Star Citizen backers are now beginning to wonder, can it ever actually be finished?” [more inside]
Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta
It was combed by music and woven in mist. neglecta was a cotton cultivar that grew only on a short stretch of the banks of the Meghna river in Dhaka. Local weavers, over millennia, made finer and finer cloth from it, so incomparable that empires east and west traded for it. But the East India Company couldn't profit from it so they destroyed the industry and tried to wipe out the plant. There might be wild specimens left; the cultivation and processing will need to be re-developed; the cultivars can be compared to specimens held at, for instance, Kew Garden. [more inside]
Britain had ‘got a new suit in exchange for an old trouser button’.
A stagnant tide swamps poor boats, but floats the rich ones
Losing Ground: Even as debates over the planned increased to the minimum wage increase in Ontario continue, a new report shows how earnings for poorer families fell between 2000 and 2015, while increasing for the richer 50%. (The first link goes to a webpage, from which the PDF can be downloaded).
No one involved has yet been made a man out of
Hoofed Snarch
New My Little Ponies, designed by neural network - some better than others.
I love my human. I hate humans.
Miriam and I, after the End. (Friday Flash fiction). "It's been over five hundred and seventy years since the war, since the end. I have approximated this by astronomical observations. The second impact event, the one that hit the southern United States, buried us, Miriam and I, in the rubble of our home in Florida. I was unable to move beneath the concrete and debris. I sent an emergency SOS, wideband, all channels, until my batteries were exhausted and I shut down. That took four months and eighteen days. No one came. My internal clock crystal had it's own, smaller battery but that ran out in only a few years. So I can't be more accurate about how long ago the world ended. I suppose it doesn't really matter but I am a precise machine and so precision matters to me." (5 min. read)
Climate Change Changes Bears' Choices; Bears Choose Berries
Every year, William Deacy and Jonathan Armstrong returned to Kodiak Island, Alaska—a place where the world’s biggest grizzly bears gather to gorge themselves. Every year, hordes of sockeye salmon swim up from the ocean and fill the island’s streams in a spawning frenzy. Every year, the bears are waiting for them. But in 2014, the bears were gone. [more inside]
When the boat comes in
I certainly didn’t come out of university and think: "I’m going to work with lobsters." (SL BBC) A short photoseries from the BBC on women working in the male-dominated fishing industries of south-west England. Hope they add more narratives in the future.
Flash Friday?
GDC Vault- Flash Games Postmortem (SLYT) Kongregate's John Cooney summarizes the history of Flash games.
Camp Logan Riot
A historical marker in Texas was vandalized earlier this week, less than 24 hours after a re-dedication ceremony for the newly restored sign in Houston's Memorial Park. The historical marker commemorates Camp Logan, a training camp established in the park in the months after America's entry into WWI. During the summer of 1917, the Third Battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment, an African-American unit in the United States Army, were stationed at the camp. One hundred years ago this week, racial tensions between the African-American doughboys and the white residents and police of the city exploded into the Houston, or Camp Logan, riot of 1917. [more inside]
Truly Up The Junction
Chris Difford of Squeeze talks about going broke and working for Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry. As a chauffeur.
Surely some revelation is at hand
As a child in Iran, Dina Nayeri belonged to a secret Christian church where the Rapture was welcomed as a rescue. Later, as a refugee in the US, she saw how apocalyptic prophecies masked a reactionary nihilism – which is why they are so tempting. From Guardian Long Reads, "Yearning for the End of the World" is current, urgent and surprising. Nayeri explores what she calls 'rapturous thinking' with an insider's perspective, though she is not the sort of insider who's been visible in the discourse so far.
In every heroin victim I still see my brother
From Mike Newall, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who has written extensive coverage (previously) about the response of librarians at the Philadelphia McPherson Square Library to the opioid crisis on their doorstep: I haven’t written about my brother this summer, but he’s there in every line of every column since that first day on the library lawn. I can’t keep writing about this opioid crisis and not tell about him.
Beware of alliterative storms
Hurricane Harvey (WaPo) is approaching the Texas coast as a major hurricane. The Border Patrol has threatened to keep their checkpoints open and lock up fleeing illegal aliens. Always good ongoing discussion at wunderground's Category 6.
Demanding Kinder Classrooms Doesn't Make You a Snowflake
"...there’s no question that many of my students are dealing with much more adversity than I (or their critics) ever experienced, and they largely do so with exceptional resolve. Considering that, what does compassion cost me?" A great response to all the hand-wringing about kids today, by Daniel Heath Justice
A juice company dumped orange peels in a national park.
Twenty years ago two ecologists approached an orange juice company in Costa Rica with a proposition. The company would donate a portion of unspoiled, forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste — a nature preserve in the northwest — and in exchange the park would allow them to dump a year's worth of peel and pulp waste, free of charge, in a heavily grazed, largely deforested area nearby. Here's what it looks like now. (via Upworthy) Spoiler: it looks good.
Every label turned us down. Our booking agent sacked us when he heard it
Everyone thought we were a couple of sad gym queens who’d been put together and got lucky, but we were proper musicians who’d been on the circuit since 1977 under different names.The making of I'm Too Sexy. ObVideo.
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