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January 18, 2011
"Feathered Hussy Moves in on Pale Male." Famous Central Park raptor
Pale Male has taken a new mate, which most likely means that Lola, his companion of the last eight years, has died. Though some birders
hold out hope for her return,
one expert says, "This is not the season that experienced [female hawks] cavalierly absent themselves from their established territories."
Pale Male is known to have sired at least 26 chicks, and inspired both controversy and counter-protests when fancy Upper East Siders tried to evict his nest from their fancy building. The birds won that conflict. Next argument on tap: what to
name his new mate.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:15 PM PST - 31 comments
What the Heck is Shadow DOM? Browser developers realized that coding the appearance and behavior of HTML elements completely by hand is a) hard and b) silly. So they sort of cheated. They created a boundary between what you, the Web developer can reach and what’s considered implementation details, thus inaccessible to you. The browser however, can traipse across this boundary at will.
posted by netbros at 4:00 PM PST - 38 comments
“You know what Miami gets in their crime show? They get detectives that look like models, and they drive around in sports cars. And you know what New York gets, they get these incredibly tough prosecutors, competent cops that solve the most crazy, complicated cases. —What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it's a city full of hopelessness, despair and dysfunction. There was very little effort—beyond self-serving—to highlight the great and wonderful things happening here, and to indict the whole population, the criminal justice system, the school system.” —
Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, on the effect of
The Wire on Baltimore’s reputation.
[more inside]
posted by kipmanley at 3:14 PM PST - 120 comments
The other places are like kindergartens compared with this. It smells so incredibly evil! I didn't think such a place existed except in my own imagination. It has a ghastly familiarity like a half-remembered dream. *Anything* could happen here... any moment... Pauline Kael called it "hilariously, awesomely terrible". Others consider it "
a forgotten gem of a film that set the gold standard for noir films to come".
It was Josef von Sternberg's last major film -
The Shanghai Gesture (1941).
(parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
posted by Joe Beese at 2:20 PM PST - 7 comments
Know that feeling of disappointment when you realize this is yet another Civil War Re-enactment that's just not down enough?
Good news.
posted by yerfatma at 1:54 PM PST - 30 comments
Kibera is a slum in the southwest of Nairobi, often called the biggest slum in the world; some estimates of the population put it as
high as 1.5m, although the 2009 Kenyan census puts the population at a rather more sober
170k(ish). Now, Kiberans are carrying out two similarly named but unaffiliated projects,
Map Kibera and
Map Kibera Project, to create maps of their home. MKP has a pair of rather slick-looking PDF maps showing the
terrain and
structures in Kibera. MK uses
OpenStreetMap, which means that their cartographers can be rapidly update it to more accurately reflect how quickly things change in Kibera. They also have, inevitably, a
twitter account,
flickr stream and
a blog to keep the world up to date with their work, including their ambition to start mapping another Nairobi slum, Mathare.
Via
the Beeb, which also has a nice wee audio slideshow about MK.
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:46 AM PST - 8 comments
Who, exactly, represents the left extreme in the establishment blogosphere? You'd likely hear names like Jane Hamsher or Glenn Greenwald. But these examples are instructive. Is Hamsher a socialist? A revolutionary anti-capitalist? In any historical or international context-- in the context of a country that once had a robust socialist left, and in a world where there are straightforwardly socialist parties in almost every other democracy-- is Hamsher particularly left-wing? Not at all. It's only because her rhetoric is rather inflamed that she is seen as particularly far to the left.
Freddie De Boer on the
lack of left wing discourse in the blogosphere.
[more inside]
posted by ennui.bz at 8:47 AM PST - 85 comments
In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company received a patent for a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons.
Joule Unlimited, co-founded by
George Church, appears ready to forever alter the way we produce fuel.
[more inside]
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:15 AM PST - 140 comments
In the 1960's, 70's and 80's, urban decay and high crime rates caused retail chain supermarkets to
flee New York City.
(google books link) Korean immigrants filled the gap with corner grocery stores. For nearly two decades they were ubiquitous -- symbols of the group's ongoing quest to achieve the American Dream. But 30 years later,
Where Did The Korean Greengrocers Go? [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:03 AM PST - 19 comments
The Fifth
Solvay Conference, where the leading physicists of the time gathered to discuss quantum theory, produced an
iconic photo of the participants. 17 of the 29 pictured either already were or would be Nobel prize winners, including Marie Curie who was badass enough to have two. But did you know there is
film footage of the conference as well?
[more inside]
posted by kmz at 6:28 AM PST - 8 comments
