September 30, 2011
head and shoulders, knees and crying
In Canada, "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" is sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down, and is super depressing..
Chen Taijiquan, "Body, As Fist" - A Masterful Martial Art
Taijiquan's (tai chi chuan) roots are in the martial arts There are many pretenders, and few masters. Taijiquan employs a very unique, counter-intuitive style of body movement that delivers great power, at great speed, with great effectiveness, if practiced properly. Everything can be explained via the simple laws of physics, but must be practiced in a way that defies mechanics; there are no "secret" powers, as pretenders would have the naive believe (and pay dearly for). [more inside]
GlassPipes.org
Beauty, Virtue and Vice
Most of the prints in the exhibit "Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Prints" were designed simply to please the eye, but they are also useful to historians who would like to understand how nineteenth-century Americans thought about the world in which they lived. Although prints are often works of imagination (even when they are grounded in fact), they still have much to tell us about the time and place in which they were created. [more inside]
Fake
The Dinner Party Matrix
The Dinner Party Matrix from Mark Bittman. Drinks, appetizers, entrees, and desserts grouped by cuisine and ingredient.
Rescue on the Big Stone
This week, an Austrian climber in Yosemite Valley took a fall on the granite monolith El Capitan. As he fell, his thumb caught in some climbing gear and was severed. Amazingly, the severed digit landed on the ledge beside the injured climber's partner, who retrieved it. Amazing helicopter rescue ensued. [more inside]
Bioshock
Scientist and Science Fiction author Joan Slonczewski, author of A Door Into The Ocean, guest blogs about science fictional and microbiology on Charles Stross's site: Salt Beings, Microbes grow the starship, Synthetic Babies
Temporary Marriage: the next big thing?
Temporary marriage: the next big thing? The divorce rate in Mexico City is huge, with half of marriages ending within two years. Some lawmakers there are introducing a reform to the civil code that would make marriage contracts renewable, with a minimum of two years. [more inside]
The personal website of a retired classics professor
Humanities and the Liberal Arts is the personal website of former Middlebury classics professor William Harris who passed away in 2009. In his retirement he crafted a wonderful site full of essays, music, sculpture, poetry and his thoughts on anything from education to technology. But the heart of the website for me is, unsurprisingly, his essays on ancient Latin and Greek literature some of whom are book-length works. Here are a few examples: Purple color in Homer, complete fragments of Heraclitus, how to read Homer and Vergil, a discussion of a recently unearthed poem by Sappho, Plato and mathematics, Propertius' war poems, and finally, especially close to my heart, his commentaries on the poetry of Catullus, for example on Ipsithilla, Odi et amo, Attis poem as dramatic dance performance and a couple of very dirty poems (even by Catullus' standard). That's just a taste of the riches found on Harris' site, which has been around nearly as long as the world wide web has existed.
I Have Your Infographic Right Here
How far above (or below) the average was the temperature and income in your state for the year you were conceived? A genealogy of US Airlines and a visual history of the TSA. See how the increasing severity and frequency of disasters is starting to strain the resources of FEMA (and where will the next big earthquake strike?). Alcohol vs. Marijuana. Facebook vs. Twitter. International travel and hotel prices for Americans and Canadians. How much does the US subsidize energy? And what would it look like if that energy was renewable? [more inside]
The Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, as illustrated by H. N. Fisk, 1944
The Mississippi River has the third largest drainage basin in the world, exceeded in size only by the watersheds of the Amazon and Congo Rivers. It drains 41 percent of the 48 contiguous states of the United States. The basin covers more than 1,245,000 square miles, includes all or parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces. The US Government has tried to improve navigability of the Mississippi River and its major tributaries for more than a hundred years, focused in part by Mississippi River Commission, created in 1879. The river is ever-changing, and in an attempt to understand their domain, and in 1941, MCR hired Harold Norman Fisk to conduct a geological investigation of the Lower Mississippi Valley. The result was a colorful map that displayed the historical course of the riverway from southern Illinois to southern Louisana. His vivid maps are available online in full, but beware: the files are very large.
We are the 99 percent.
Wide stones cannot be swapped
Hanano Puzzle is a puzzle game about flowers, stones and gravity. Its author announced it recently on the TIGsource forums. Caveat: there is only a Windows version.
Dad, what's an album cover?
“Reddit is uninterested in stopping them, even though it boasts on the corporate blog the good it is doing for the world"
“We’re a free speech site and the cost of that is that there’s stuff that’s offensive on there.” This was the response of Erik Martin aka hueypriest, General Manager of Reddit, to the accusation on last night’s Anderson Cooper 360 that the “jailbait” subreddit is “borderline kiddie porn.” [more inside]
Who’s your daddy?
“Eventually, someone is going to pick up a brick.”
David Simon, creator of The Wire, delivers the 2011 Frank Porter Graham Lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill. [more inside]
SCC OKs Safe Injection Sites
SCC approves safe injection sites. The Supreme Court of Canada today ordered the federal government to stop its efforts to shut down a safe injection clinic in Vancouver, opening the door to more clinics opening across the country. [more inside]
1983 TeV 2011
Wednesday night, my friend Todd showed me the key he had made. On the fob was engraved the following text. "1983 TeV 2011". Today, at 2PM CDT, Helen Edwards, the lead scientist of the machine in 1983, will turn that key, and the Tevatron will shut down forever. [more inside]
Caterwauling
It was really a very small beaver.
When a family of beavers moved in to a creek in the bayside town of Martinez, CA, in 2006, they gained both fans and detractors. Concerned about flood control in the struggling downtown area, the city council formed a Beaver Subcommittee to explore the options, including extermination, relocation, and engineering fixes. [more inside]
Instruments Online
If you want to read about the history, construction, sounds and playing techniques of, say, the tympani, or any other instruments of the classical symphonic orchestra, Vienna Symphonic Library's Instruments Online pages are good reading and a handy resource for orchestrators.
Viva Las Vegas
Grantland's Bill Barnwell is writing an ongoing series demystifying sports gambling for the newcomer. His first two subjects: how to bet the middle and teaser bets.
Battling Boadicea Bashes Latin Louts
Hold Ye Front Page. The History of the World, presented as Front Pages from the often controversial UK tabloid, The Sun [more inside]
♫ For purple mountain majesties / [Several miles] Above the fruited [Chinese] plain! ♫
Tiangong 1, [the] latest demonstration of Beijing's otherworldly ambitions comes in a year when the US has wound down its space shuttle fleet and its partners have said the International Space Station (previously) should be buried at sea in 2020. Perhaps in its honor, [s]trains of the famed American patriotic tune (America the Beautiful) rang out following the launch of the Tiang Gong-1 experimental space station module late Thursday night. [more inside]
The sound you hear in the background is nerdgasm...
I, Frank Fritz, did not fully cogitate...
Mike and Frank reminisce about their first meeting in high school...they were cute l'il pickers back then.
Ig Nobel 2011
R. Crumb's Heroes of the Blues
In the 1980s, R. Crumb produced a set of trading cards called The Heroes of the Blues. [more inside]
The gripping first episode of "Guy on A Buffalo."
"The one he loved the most was beef and blue cheese."
Bear breaks into pizza shop, doesn't leave tip. [video] Lawrance was washing dishes at Fat Tony's Pizza in Whistler, B.C. Monday night when a furry four-legged customer with a big appetite arrived about 7:30 p.m. for some grub. More.
La la la la la, la la la la
What if Smurfs were real? (via.) Be sure to check out Nate Hallinan's portfolio for additional coolness.
The Cruel Mathematics
Tim Rogers has written a long piece about the evils of social gaming and the mechanics of getting players to pay for virtual items. This, in reaction to certain mechanics in the new facebook mega-game, The Sims Social, which Tim has also reviewed, calling it "A Love Letter from a Computer Virus"
Anwar al-Awlaki killed in Yemen
Yemeni and US government sources confirm US-born Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed today al-Awlaki was widely credited with inspiring the shootings at Ft. Hood and the attempted Christmas bombing of an airliner approaching Detroit. [more inside]
Wild West on the internet
Is the internet rewriting history? Teaching the difference between truth and propaganda online via BBC [more inside]
Frankenlouie
Two faced cat is a record breaker. Latest edition of the Guinness Book of World Records to feature Frank and Louie, a 12-year-old cat with two mouths, two noses and three eyes who survived against huge odds. [more inside]
Make Picard human again
« Previous day | Next day »