August 29, 2012
China in Revolt?
"Today, the Chinese working class is fighting. More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform, China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest." — Eli Friedman from Jacobin
While almost unknown to Americans, many Europeans have treasured these portraits
Cliff Stoll makes glass Klein bottles. He also sells imported portraits of Gauss.
Dictionaries are mazes
oh my gosh the end of this video :3
So when can we start printing them in newspapers?
This week, tumblr has become the birthplace of a new format of gif that offers a sense of 3-dimensionality. And the gifcrafters have really taken off... (MLTP - multi-link tumblr post) [more inside]
The Detroit Industry Murals
In the early 1930s, William Valentiner thought the Roman Baroque courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Arts needed to be spruced up. With a commission from Edsel Ford, he hired Diego Rivera to paint two large murals of "some motif suggesting the development of industry."
The end result was the Detroit Industry Murals. [more inside]
"Great Shades of Elvis!" - Perry White, Ordained Minister, Church of Elvis
Bionic Eye
I can see the future - with a bionic eye Early days yet but "spots of light" is a great start for somebody that's blind.
Ttio the Boston Terrier loves his ball.
Sound on Sound's "Classic Tracks"
Sound on Sound magazine's "Classic Tracks" series provides technical and personal details behind the recording of, uh, classic tracks. [Not to be confused with Mix magazine's own "Classic Tracks" series, which was featured previously.] [more inside]
(A)pproach, (P)robe, (P)resent, (L)isten, (E)nd
The alternative to admitting that it simply sucks when an Apple TV is bricked or phone shatters, Geniuses are taught to employ the "Three Fs: Feel, Felt, and Found. This works especially well when the customer is mistaken or has bad information…"Apple's secret employee training manual for its "Geniuses" as revealed by Gizmodo.Customer: This Mac is just too expensive. Genius: I can see how you'd feel this way. I felt the price was a little high, but I found it's a real value because of all the built-in software and capabilities…The maneuver is brilliant. The Genius has switched places with the customer. He is she and she is he, and maybe that laptop isn't too expensive after all. He Found it wasn't, at least.
Java 7 Vulnerability
A working, cross-platform Java 7 exploit is now in the wild. It's apparently a pair of bugs, working in tandem; neither, alone, would be enough to escape the Java sandbox, but together, any machine, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux, can be instantly and silently compromised, simply by viewing a malicious web page. Only Java 7 is vulnerable, but because of the way Oracle schedules patches, it may be unfixed until October.
You can test your machine for the flaw; if vulnerable, you'll want to at least disable Java in your Web browser, if not remove it altogether. On Firefox, NoScript will provide a little protection, by not running Java code unless you click it, but the vulnerability remains.
And now for something completely different....
Perez Hamilton reports on American history from the 1400's through the 1700's, in the style of gossip blog Perez Hilton. Contents may be offensive. Archive view.
“Sweater weather. Fall is my favourite. #dlws.”
David Leonard Weather Service: "These real-weather descriptions are, of course, tweets, and part of the David Leonard Weather Service, which its eponymous proprietor explains—and he finds himself explaining often—as “a network of correspondents posting the weather they see right now. Real-time, crowd-sourced [Toronto, Ontario Canada] weather." #DLWS @davidpleonard
Of ants and packets
The Anternet is always up. On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. [more inside]
craigslist casual encounters
"I replied to ads people had posted to the casual encounters section of craigslist. I asked if I could photograph them in visual representations of their ads. Some said yes." [NSFW: naked people.]
A kit for the pen-sucked flap-dragons in your life
Are the verbal pignuts nipping at thine clay-brained heels yet again? Does your dankish, knotty-ated mind quiver at scouring the bard's odiferous works for suitable defense? Then attend thee to the Shakespeare Insult Kit, where all manner of creations await your dullish wit.
The secret allure of the spoiler. Think you don’t want to know the ending? Think again
The secret allure of the spoiler. Think you don’t want to know the ending? Think again "Is there a greater cultural sin than a good story spoiled? The accepted modern posture is that knowing too much beforehand about the plot of a novel, a play, a movie, even a TV series, ruins the magic of experiencing it for the first time — renders it damaged goods, not worth one’s time or money.[..]
It’s a given: Everyone hates spoilers. Except when they don’t. Two researchers in the psychology department of the University of California at San Diego recently decided to test whether we really hate spoilers, or just like to say we do. What they found surprised them: The majority of people apparently like having a story spoiled for them. In fact, we may enjoy spoiled stories even more than the unspoiled versions. Is it true? Do we secretly crave predigested plots the way some foodies sneak Big Macs when no one’s looking?" Pdf link to study. [more inside]
It’s a given: Everyone hates spoilers. Except when they don’t. Two researchers in the psychology department of the University of California at San Diego recently decided to test whether we really hate spoilers, or just like to say we do. What they found surprised them: The majority of people apparently like having a story spoiled for them. In fact, we may enjoy spoiled stories even more than the unspoiled versions. Is it true? Do we secretly crave predigested plots the way some foodies sneak Big Macs when no one’s looking?" Pdf link to study. [more inside]
moof
Working on a shareware game in Hypercard but just can't find the right image for your About box? Give your photographs the System 6 treatment with Gáspár Körtesi's in-browser drag-and-drop dither tool.
The New American Industry
If you haven't heard much about how takeover deals like Dunkin' and KB Toys work, that's because Mitt Romney and his private equity brethren don't want you to. The new owners of American industry are the polar opposites of the Milton Hersheys and Andrew Carnegies who built this country, commercial titans who longed to leave visible legacies of their accomplishments, erecting hospitals and schools and libraries, sometimes leaving behind thriving towns that bore their names. The men of the private equity generation want no such thing.Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
Snappy dressing
Irony? That's like goldy or silvery, right?
Atos Healthcare is a French company that's a contractor to the UK department for Work and Pensions, hired to test disabled benefits claimants on whether they're fit to work. If they are, they'll lose their disability benefits and are back on normal unemployment benefits. It is a controversial company, as its standards for declaring people fit to work are very low, as The Daily Mirror has been showing. By design or through incompetence, quite a few people who are clearly incapable of work are declared fit for work anyway, lose their benefits and some of them even die because of it, either through suicide or through the stress and healthcare problems caused by losing their benefits. (previously.) [more inside]
Pinterested King County
King County Archives, which has a "vast collection" of historic photos from Seattle's home county, has posted more than 100 to Pinterest. Images released thus far include art, historic photos, and maps.
The world is a hologram, Albert.
The mystery that's been set up for us in the first act is collapsing; at this point the movie shifts focus, prefiguring the bifurcated structure of later Lynch films like Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., both neo-noirs that rupture and reconstitute themselves halfway through.Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me [Replete with Twin Peaks/FWWM spoilers and a fake Breaking Bad spoiler.]
Get off your arse!
The Way They Were (SLYT... 1:07:45 'The tape fails there!')... an old Granada / Channel 4 program that was a compilation of Tony Wilson's So It Goes a show that featured performances from some of the best British Punk and New Wave bands of the time.
An Operating System for Songs from God.
The effects of modern mapping
How Google and Apple's digital mapping is mapping us "Digital maps on smartphones are brilliantly useful tools, but what sort of information do they gather about us – and how do they shape the way we look at the world?"
We have to fail – there is no return in time.
Growth is a project in which I reconstructed and re-photographed pictures that my dad took of me and my three little sisters when we were children. I tried to make the new photograph look as similar as possible to the old one: the place and the composition are the same, and so are our positions and facial expressions. - Wilma Hurskainen [more inside]
New Dylan
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