September 1, 2023
Badgers Badgers Badgers
Badgers, or Badgers Badgers Badgers, or The Badger Song, is 20 years old. Developed by Jonti Picking (Mr Weebl) the animation consists of 12 cartoon badgers doing calisthenics, a mushroom in front of a tree, and a snake in the desert. Related: the sentence "Badger badgers Badger badgers badger badger Badger badgers" is grammatically valid. And as we close in on Christmas...
This Arrowhead Was Made From a Meteorite 3000 Years Ago
This Arrowhead Was Made From a Meteorite 3000 Years Ago. Found in Switzerland, the 1.5-inch-long artifact was fashioned from meteoric iron during the Bronze Age.
A Mystery That Should Not Exist
Sarah Elizabeth, author of the upcoming book The Art of Fantasy, posted in May that she'd been searching for years for the name of the artist who painted the cover for the 1976 Dell Laurel Leaf edition of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Four months of dead ends from various internet sleuths later, the folks at WBUR's Endless Thread podcast have announced the mystery is solved and described how they did it. (Full transcript available at the link.)
A Technology of the Self
A Writing Studies Primer attempts to supplement and enhance the necessarily instrumental nature of a handbook for composition courses by cultivating students’ awareness of writing as a culturally determined act. This is great. But, teeming with factual errors and underpinned by a triumphalist Eurocentrism, it only embraces the surface relativism of liberal values, which ultimately needs history to be quaint so that the surface relativisms of modernity can emerge as modernity’s greatest distinction. from Slanting the History of Handwriting [more inside]
Pizza Styles: Statistics on Every State in the US!
Gift link from today's Washington Post: The most popular pizza style in every state, mapped -- the 'Pineapple Belt' and America's hidden culinary divide. Contrast with The Spruce Eats' Definitive Guide to Pizza Styles in the United States. [more inside]
16 years as a professional maintenance technician
MSIOTHM (Mercury Stardust Is Our Trans Handy Ma'am) on TikTok: Need to find a wall stud? No problem!
Plugged up tub drain? She's here for you. Podcast: Handy Ma'am Hotline. And Instagram.
300 years of formal white supremacy hasn’t served whites well, either
Colin Woodard (previously) and the Nationhood Lab have found that "the most impoverished quartile of U.S. counties in Yankeedom (ones where around 30 to 60 percent of children live in poverty) have a higher life expectancy than the least impoverished quartile of U.S. counties (where child poverty ranges from 3 to 15 percent) in the Deep South." They argue that the difference is not explained by race, income, or population density, but by culture and government.
All across the globe people have looked at the night sky and seen myths
Figures in the Sky by Nadieh Bremer, astronomer and data visualization designer, shows how stars have been grouped into constellations by different “sky cultures”, ranging from the familiar modern ones, to those of the Sardinian, Norse, Hopi, Hawaiian, Chinese, Boorong, Arabic and 20 others. You can read a bit more on Bremer’s page for the project.
Home Taping Is Killing Music
Casseptember! Sixty years of cassette tape culture: BBC Radio 3 "...will feature specially-commissioned works from an array of artists whose work makes use of the particular qualities unique to the cassette tape. And, throughout the month, we’ll also hear from dedicated collectors and artists with a soft spot for the format." [hissssss << tktktkt >> KA-CHUNK]
White, a blank page or canvas, his favorite, so many possibilities
CUNY TV brings us Stephen Sondheim's Legacy, part of their Theater: All the Moving Parts series. It's an hour looking back at Sondheim, with the first half-hour in conversation with three Stephenstans [Sondheimistas?], and the second part with his official biographer and a CUNY music scholar.
Andrew Huberman, Rockstar Neuroscientist
Andrew Huberman is having a bit of a moment. An Associate Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford Medical School, Huberman started posting science education content to his nascent Instagram account in 2019. [more inside]
How Kroger Became the Biggest Sushi Seller in America
Millions of shoppers agree: It’s OK to eat supermarket sushi. At U.S. retailers, sales are up over 70% in the past year. (archive,today link)
Worst First Date
Let's feast! (single link to reddit video post)
Ground control to Major Todd
Starfield | Overwhelming Scope [Game Informer] “Even in the increasingly crowded marketplace of big, expansive games, Starfield stands out. Leveraging the gameplay Bethesda popularized with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, Starfield expands the breadth of exploration to a galaxy of solar systems, planets, and ships. It populates those environments with a rich palette of activities and missions that tap into the outer space fantasy. It’s a staggering span of content to wrap one’s head around. At times, that scope threatens to impair the focus and pacing, and moment-to-moment gameplay is not always a strong suit. But players can expect to uncover hundreds of hours of experimentation in a richly imagined sci-fi playground, and that thrill is worth experiencing.” [more inside]
A B.C. study gives cash to unhoused people, with positive results
"The cash transfer is such a no-brainer. But nobody is willing to try it:" Dr. Jiaying Zhao, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, was part of a team that gave 50 unhoused people in Vancouver $7,500 and then followed them for a year.
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