September 24, 2013
Earthquake in Balochistan
An earthquake in Balochistan (also spelled Baluchistan), a mountainous province of Pakistan, has killed many people and reportedly flattened many houses in Awaran, the worst-affected district. The force of the earthquake raised the sea bed near the port of Gwadar, creating a new island. Early estimates of casualties are notoriously inaccurate, but a preliminary report by Max Wyss of WAPMERR suggests there will be several thousand deaths.
Reactance
Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom an autonomy. It is experienced whenever a free behavior is restricted. [more inside]
NY77:
Variations on the Goldberg Variations
Why I Hate the Goldberg Variations, by Jeremy Denk, whose new (lovely) recording of the Goldberg Variations is now streaming on NPR. Also by Denk: Hannibal Lecter's Guide to the Goldberg Variations, which explores the famous cannibal killer through the lens of Bach. This is Your Brain on the Goldberg Variations, which gets in-depth on just how the Variations vary.
X is the Y of Z
metropho.rs (You can zoom in)
Sex Lexis: Dictionary of Sexual Terms and Expressions
If you are searching for the definition to a sexual term and find Urban Dictionary a bit to cluttered with (non-sexual) entries of questionable validity or juvenile jokes among friends and people you don't know, yet the sex dictionary doesn't have enough entries, you may find sex-lexis enlightening, from a bit ginger to zucchini (NSFW, natch).
Mars is a world of wonders!
Educators, prepping for World Space Week, Oct 4-10? Be sure to include the very excellent space documentary The Mars Underground in your plans. It's free! [more inside]
Why do people want to eat babies? The Christian Science Monitor explains
UPDATE: The headline, subhead, and lead to this story are not meant be taken seriously. Together they are, in the parlance of journalism, "the thing that gets people to read the article." The Christian Science Monitor website published a brief article summarizing a study that examined the effects of newborn baby smell on women's brains. Its lead sentence: "If you're like most normal people, you've briefly considered eating a baby or two."
Via Romenesko
A man before his time: FM-2030
Notable transhumanist and futurist FM-2030 (née Fereidoun M. Esfandiary) was really, really into the future.
Move over, Reince Preibus
The Strangest Names in American Political History is a compendium of ludicrous nomenclature among America's political figures, from Arphaxed Loomis to Zerubbabel Snow (with stops for Outerbridge Horsey, Supply Belcher, and Odolphus Ham Waddle).
Also Johnny Castle. And Those Pants
Dirty Dancing is A SUBVERSIVE MASTERPIECE and here are four reasons why. "While I loved it as a mushy romance starring a relatable heroine and a dreamy guy, a huge portion of the plot flew right over my tiny unworldly preteen head. But it was only as an adult that I realized how RADICALLY subversive and politically bananas this movie really is." [more inside]
Instrument Lights Made the Beads of Sweat Twinkle on His Dark Skin
In 1956 EC Comics attempted to re-publish the pre-Code comic Judgement Day, originally published in 1953 in Weird Fantasy #18, prior to the founding of the Comics Code Authority. The CCA "objected to" the story because of "the central character being black.".
"Would you want to be in a group with Criss and Frehley?"
Nathan Rabin reviews the Kiss autobiographies for the A.V. Club. The memoir of Kiss drummer Peter Criss is endearingly needy and sleazy: "Makeup To Breakup positively vibrates with rage toward Criss' former bandmates, Kiss' management, and everything Kiss represents." Gene Simmons' Kiss And Make-Up lets The Demon speak for himself: "To critics who ask how he could have treated core members of his group so coldly, he responds, "Would you want to be in a group with Criss and Frehley?"" Spaceman Ace Frehley offers his bland version of Kiss’ story in No Regrets: "For better or worse, No Regrets, Frehley's curiously underwhelming 2011 memoir, is the product of an author who can also now assure himself that no matter how debauched or crazy he might get, at least he isn't Ace Frehley-in-the-'70s-level debauched or crazy."
My name is Atrus. I fear you've met my sons Sirrus and Achenar.
Fans and critics alike held their breath in anticipation of the tidal wave of exploratory, open-ended gaming that was supposed to follow, waiting to be drowned in a sea of new worlds.
And then, nothing. The legacy of Myst, 20 years later
[more inside]
Suddenly, every Japanese child wanted their own pet raccoon
How a Kids’ Cartoon Created an Real-Life Invasive Army. At the peak of their popularity following the animated series Araiguma Rasukaru, Japan imported more than 1,500 North American raccoons annually... Raccoons compete both for food and for territory with the native raccoon dog (tanuki) and the red fox, and push native owls out of nesting spots in hollow trees. Ever since raccoons attacked a reproductive colony of grey herons in Nopporo Forest Park in 1997, the grand birds have not returned to their historic breeding grounds. [more inside]
Is college worth it?
From a purely economic perspective: Is college worth it?
Mystery Solved: Golden Eagle Kills Deer
"A camera trap intended for Siberian tiger research in southeastern Russia instead captured a golden eagle swooping on a yearling sika deer on December 1, 2011." ... "There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died," Kerley said in the statement. She and her colleagues pieced together the attack from these three images, culled from more than 7,000 collected by the camera trap over five months." Pictures.
The X-Shaped Scar
On April 11, 1994, a red-headed wandering swordsman appeared on the pages of the Weekly Shōnen Jump. It was ten years after the end of the Boshin War, and Himura Kenshin no longer answered to the assassin's name Hitokiri Battosai. At his side, he wielded a sakabato, a katana with the cutting edge along the inside of the blade, in his heart an oath to never kill again, and on his cheek, two intersecting scars that formed an "X." In the the years that followed, Nobuhiro Watsuki's creation, Rurouni Kenshin, jumped from the pages of the weekly magazine onto television screens and finally into theater screens as a live action movie. [more inside]
404 No More
A new study from Harvard Law School (get the full paper here) reports that nearly half of the links cited in Supreme Court opinions are rotten (sometimes cleverly so).
A new web-service built through collaboration by many of the largest libraries in the world, Perma, currently in Beta, will enable users to create citation links that will never break.
Popular Science, not Populist Science
Why Popular Science is shutting off comments.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
Proud Hipster
They’d look at me like I’m saying "I’d like to give babies more cancer."
Joss Whedon: The definitive EW interview. "We use stories to connect, to care about people, to care about a situation. To turn the mundane heroic, to make people really think about who they are... We create to fill a gap—not just to avoid the idea of dying, it’s to fill some particular gap in ourselves."
Singularity flip side
47% of US jobs under threat from computerization according to Oxford study. The study reveals a trend of computers taking over many cognitive tasks thanks to the availability of big data. [more inside]
Baa baa black sheep / have you any wool / yes sir yes sir / kill all men
Pharma and the Damage Done
Guest Assistance
Following a media report (and subsequent investigation) last May that wealthy guests of Disneyland and the Walt Disney World resort were abusing the Guest Assistance Card system, Disney announced this week that it will replace the card with a new Disability Access Service Card, beginning October 9th. [more inside]
Projection mapping, robotics and theatre
Box. A choreographed performance incorporating a live human, two industrial robots, and projection mapping onto moving surfaces. You've seen projection mapping onto static surfaces, typically buildings. This takes it several steps beyond… and the result is stunning and beautiful.
Orange is the New Black is the new Alabama?
The Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, CT (famous for once housing Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black) is converting from a women’s prison to a men’s prison. Where will the inmates go? Aliceville, AL; a location more than 1,000 miles away, nowhere near a major airport, and 45 miles away from a train station.
Eleven United States senators sent an open letter to the director of the Bureau of Prisons last month, and the transition remains in a state of delay. Piper Kerman wrote a NYT op-ed with her perspective.
Visualizing Minority Representation
these are hard times for everybody...
4... 3... 2... 1...
"[Full Turn] works with the rotation of two screens placed back to back, creating a three-dimensional animated sequence that can be seen at 360 degrees. Due to the persistence of vision, the shapes that appear on the screen turn into kinetic light sculptures."
From the Journal of Modern Illogical Studies
The new Sokal: Serbian academics hoax a scholarly journal into accepting their gag paper.
(Scribd copy of paper)
What, Exactly, Constitutes a Constitution?
Constitute offers the constitutions of the world's nations for comparison. Search for constitutions by country or by topic, then pin or download results using a clean, easy-to-use interface. Brought to you by The Comparative Constitutions Project.
Britain Built By Billions of Blocks
The Ordnance Survey (the national mapping authority for Great Britain) has a large amount of its mapping data available online for free use. Over the past few weeks, one of its summer interns has been using a few of its datasets to recreate the whole of mainland GB at 50:1 scale in Minecraft.
0. Don't have children. Or pets.
"12. Get a large, 56-quart storage bin to designate as your “items to donate” box. It’ll be too big to fit in your car, so keep a box of trash bags next to it for easy bagging when you’re ready to make a Goodwill run. (Yes, the bags have to be next to it — if you leave the room to get them, you’ll be watching Youtube videos of funny kittens in two minutes. I don’t know how this happens. It just does.)" -- Twentyfive tips on how to organise your life if you're a lazy slob like me, courtesy of Jennifer Fulwiler.
Trader Lost Millions Betting on Romney
A new academic paper digging into presidential betting in the final weeks of the 2012 election finds that a single trader lost between $4 million and $7 million placing a flurry of Intrade bets on Mitt Romney—perhaps to make the Republican nominee’s chance of victory appear brighter.[more inside]
things that seemed like universal laws to people at the time
The Slow Winter [PDF]. A slightly true story about CPU design.
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