January 27, 2014

A time to be born and a time to die

Pete Seeger, singer, musician, songwriter, political activist for more than 7 decades died, age 94. As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, If I Had a Hammer, and Turn, Turn, Turn! [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 11:57 PM PST - 315 comments

You can’t see Buzz Lightyear while backpacking

You don’t want your privacy: Disney and the meat space data race
The bands are even uniquely colored and monogrammed with your family members’ names so that they won’t get switched up. Why? Because they don’t want their database to get confused and think that you, a 45-year-old man, rode the teacups instead of your little son Timmy. This is one of the first examples I’ve seen of physical design (e.g., monogramming and coloring) for the sake of digital data purity.
If ever there was a testimony to the importance big data has achieved in business it’s this: We will now shape our physical world to create better streams of digital information.
posted by frimble at 11:28 PM PST - 75 comments

'Her' is the Scariest Movie of 2013

What feels to Theodore like love is in fact work, uncompensated and entirely on Element Software’s terms, and such work is not the stuff of science fiction. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 9:56 PM PST - 58 comments

The Tragedy of the Diluted Commons [SLNYT]

Extra Virgin Suicides is an interactive graphic from the New York Times about the global business of counterfeit olive oil. The NYT graphic is pretty slick, too.
posted by Mad_Carew at 9:23 PM PST - 71 comments

Tiny bubbles

Mefi's Own Rob Cockerham tries...and tries...and tries to make a block of really clear ice.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:28 PM PST - 29 comments

Hank shot first!

A long time ago, on a prairie far, far away... Custom-made Star Wars action figures, re-cast as Wild West heroes and villains.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 8:24 PM PST - 11 comments

Please. These aren't our real enemies.

The real enemies are the homophobic politicians and world leaders committed to outlawing LGBT “propaganda.” There are real, horrifying events happening every single day in the world — and if you truly believe the biggest problem is that a straight white man “using us” for record sales by publicly supporting LGBT equality on a nationally televised awards show in front of a tearstained audience, then you’re not genuinely fighting the same fight. Same Love: On Madonna, The Gay Community And Why That Macklemore Performance Mattered [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:51 PM PST - 101 comments

Choose GIFs

"The .GIFYS are the first ever awards honoring the animated GIF as a medium, social commentary and art form." The finalists were chosen by a panel of alleged GIF experts, with the final vote up to the public... THAT'S YOU. Categories range from Nature & Science to WTF (and of course, Cats). Many of the Usual Suspects are there, including Walter White, Rob Ford, Doge, and Oprah's Bees (a shoo-in for GIF of the Year, get it? shoo-in?)... Come on in and Get Animated. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:22 PM PST - 38 comments

80 Years of The Apollo

What do Bill Bailey, The Supremes, James Brown, Bill Cosby, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Michael Jackson, and Barack Obama have in common? They've all played The Apollo. Flavorwire links 10 classic performances from the Apollo Theatre to celebrate its 80th birthday. Notably absent is the 1983 performance by Shooby Taylor, The Human Horn.
posted by SansPoint at 5:55 PM PST - 5 comments

For 1% of us, apparently cake IS better than sex

Netflix documentary explores asexuality... a topic that baffles even Dan Savage [more inside]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 5:11 PM PST - 143 comments

Looking Deep Inside Nature

X-ray photography of plants and animals by physicist Arie van’t Riet. [via]
posted by brundlefly at 4:33 PM PST - 5 comments

Everybody Talks About The Weather...

From I Fucking Love Science: "In a paper posted online this week Professor Stephen Hawking claimed that black holes do not exist - at least, not as we currently understand them. He claims that the traditional notion of a black hole's "event horizon" from which nothing can escape, even light, is incompatible with quantum physics. If so, physicists will have to redefine black holes entirely." [more inside]
posted by runcibleshaw at 4:12 PM PST - 44 comments

Tarantino's Hateful Eight script leak: Mistrust, coffee, swearing ensue

I gave it to three motherf***ing actors. We met in a place, and I put it in their hands. Reggie Hudlin’s agent never had a copy. It’s got to be either the agents of Dern or Madsen. Please name names.” Quentin Tarantino decided he won't make The Hateful Eight, which was slated to be his next big film. The script is now floating around the 'net, and summaries of the plot abound, telling of an ensemble cast in a very bloody Western centered on bounty hunters. If you don't want to track down the 146 page document, here is a summary of the six "most Tarantino" elements in the film, which was to be shot in 70 mm film, and in CinemaScope to boot. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:33 PM PST - 161 comments

It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.

"Nick Land was a British philosopher but is no longer, though he is not dead. The almost neurotic fervor with which he scratched at the scars of reality has seduced more than a few promising academics onto the path of art that offends in its originality. The texts that he has left behind are reliably revolting and boring, and impel us to castrate their categorization as 'mere' literature." Robin Mackay discusses the past phases of Nick Land, previously of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, now of the neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment (previously). Meanwhile, Mark Fisher, former cohort of Nick Land at Hyperstition, discusses Land in his own way.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:22 PM PST - 37 comments

"Age is a weapon society uses against women."

"On Turning 30" by Molly Crabapple. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 1:12 PM PST - 90 comments

"Senator, if you want your daughter back, we'll need a CAR JUMPER!"

When someone needs to jump from one car to another, there's only one man to call: CAR JUMPER, from the creators of the Channel101 hit soap opera Ikea Heights. You'll thrill to its premiere where CAR JUMPER saves a US Senator's kidnapped daughter! You'll gasp at the technical brilliance of Episode 7 ("Road Warriors")! And you'll swoon at its latest daringly original experiment into branded entertained, generously sponsored by Uber!
posted by adrianhon at 12:56 PM PST - 10 comments

"Nothing. You're screwed."

During their Freedom Hosting investigation and malware attack last year, the FBI unintentionally obtained the entire e-mail database of popular anonymous webmail service Tor Mail. And now, they've used it in an unrelated investigation to bust a Florida man accused of stealing credit card numbers. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:55 AM PST - 39 comments

No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100 per cent Rebel Time Lord.

The BBC releases the first image of the Twelfth Doctor’s costume. Peter Capaldi elaborates on the dark blue Crombie coat and black Dr. Marten ensemble: "He's woven the future from the cloth of the past. Simple, stark, and back to basics." Of course, finding the right look for the iconic character (and fashion icon) has never been easy, as the First Doctor's costume designer, Maureen Heneghan Tripp, describes. Capaldi picked out the character's latest wardrobe with the help of Howard Burden, who joined the programme with Series 7 and gave Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor a new outfit. The question is now, will the fashion police be kinder on this newest one than they were on his predecessor's?
posted by Doktor Zed at 11:38 AM PST - 146 comments

Wow light snow. Such shiny. Much crisp.

Doge Weather
posted by Going To Maine at 10:14 AM PST - 119 comments

Early Indo-European Online

Learn how to read Sanskrit, Hittite, Avestan, Old Persian, Classical Greek, Latin, Koine Greek, Gothic, Classical Armenian, Tocharian, Old Irish, Old English, Old Norse, Old Church Slavonic, Old French, Old Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Albanian in ten lessons apiece.
posted by Iridic at 9:44 AM PST - 28 comments

"irresistible high-low raw material for an online news cycle"

From a small town in Romania, Guccifer skewered and glorified the power elite.
If Snowden perfectly fit the profile of geek crusader, Lehel, a stone-faced, disheveled man in a tight leather jacket, seemed an odd candidate for one of the world’s most notorious hackers. But Guccifer is to hacking what the Beatles are to rock and roll. He had predecessors, 4Chan cowboys like Anonymous and Sabu of LulzSec, but he’s changed the nature of hacking fame. Guccifer rose by exploiting the connections people make online to infiltrate the private lives of some of the most powerful people on Earth. He served up the results to the media, irresistible high-low raw material for an online news cycle driven by leaks and voyeurism and racked by anxiety over privacy.
What Is A Guccifer? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:43 AM PST - 12 comments

Christ, I hate Blackboard

"I will return to all of you then to bear witness, in a rapturous tornado of filth, to my contempt for that unholy system of course mismanagement software." [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:29 AM PST - 83 comments

The New York Filming Locations of The Godfather, Then and Now

Because the film is a period piece, The Godfather actually presents a fascinating record of what 1940s-era New York City locations still existed in the early-1970s. Sadly, many of them are now gone. What still remains? Let’s take a closer look.
posted by timshel at 9:27 AM PST - 27 comments

Ad astra

Golden Age of Insect Aviation: The Great Grasshoppers (SLvimeo)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:00 AM PST - 3 comments

The Secret Histories

"Anthony McIntyre made one thing clear: The project had to remain absolutely secret. If Boston College wanted him to interview former members of the Irish Republican Army, he needed that guarantee.... In those heady, early days, when talk of reconciliation dominated public discussion in Northern Ireland, no one imagined their project would get caught up in an international criminal investigation into a four-decade-old murder. How that happened is a tale of grand ambitions undermined by insular decision-making and careless oversight."
posted by Rangeboy at 8:53 AM PST - 18 comments

not only does art not transcend politics... art is politics

And I met with AZAPO, who had a very frank conversation — I was talking to the translator — about whether they should kill me for even being there. That’s how serious they were about violating the boycott. I eventually talked them out of that and then talked them into maybe going kinda with my thing.
Tthey showed me that they have an assassination list, and Paul Simon was at the top of it. [NOTE: In 1986, Paul Simon recorded tracks for his Graceland album in South Africa, in direct violation of the cultural boycott.] And in spite of my feelings about Paul Simon, who we can talk about in a minute if you want to, I said to them, “Listen, I understand your feelings about this; I might even share them, but...”
-- On the eve of Bruce Springsteen's first ever tour of South Africa, Little Steve van Zandt talks to Dave Marsh about Sun City, the boycott and getting Paul Simon off an AZAPO hit list
posted by MartinWisse at 7:35 AM PST - 35 comments

Peekaboo--I see you!

In an interview with German television station ARD TV, Edward Snowden has alleged that the NSA is actively engaged in industrial espionage on behalf of US economic interests, targeting German engineering firm, Siemens and other international industrial concerns in its data collection activities, with no legitimate intelligence aims in mind. While the international response to the new allegations is still developing, back home in the US, Snowden has already been accused of disloyalty by US officials on both sides of the aisle, and at least one NSA analyst is on record stating he would personally "love to put a bullet in his head." (Previously)
posted by saulgoodman at 7:18 AM PST - 90 comments

I sat out there every day trying to dig out that damn stump

"One night in August 2004, I awoke to a man and a woman in my room whom I had never seen before telling me that they were "escorts" and we were going to a place called "wilderness."...There is a legal process where parents can sign over custody of kids who need residential care, which makes sense, because if a kid has to be housed in a mental health facility, the staff needs to be able to make all of the day-to-day decisions for her care. But that same process works for "unruly" teens like me, which meant the company that ran my camp had total legal control over where I went and what I did." --Cracked.com takes on the Tough Love for Troubled Teen camps that, mostly unregulated, are "treating" more and more children every year. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:54 AM PST - 69 comments

Wayne Gretzky’s head bleeding was the hardest thing to shoot

So Money. An oral history of Swingers.
posted by xowie at 6:39 AM PST - 30 comments

"I love my wife, but oh, you ice."

It only happens once every few years: a brackish river in New Jersey freezes over, and the iceboats come out. It's happening all over the Northeast, where an unusually cold winter is welcomed with delight by aficionados of this sport. Lightly constructed, beautiful, and fast (the record stands at 84 miles an hour propelled by wind alone), iceboats provide a winter thrill ride like none other. Iceboating or ice yachting has thrived in pockets of North America and Europe since the nineteenth century. When conditions are right, see them sailing and racing in Wisconsin, on the Hudson, in Maine, Minnesota, Prince Edward Island. and wherever else "hard-water sailors" congregate.
posted by Miko at 6:18 AM PST - 14 comments

i heard you like plotter videos

Mesmerizing: Aston Martin DB9, Space Shuttle, harmonic, Tutankhamun, locomotive, Marilyn(-esque). Slow: Art Plotter, Teapot, big! burny! mighty! Home-made: Rostock, DVD drive, with lasers!, old scanner, Lego, mug, whiteboard. Art Projects: Hektor, Pedro & Sybil, sand plotter, Paul, XY, PolarGraph.
posted by scruss at 5:40 AM PST - 19 comments

Q: What's more exciting than a runaway boulder? A: 100 runaway boulders.

Three minutes and fifty-six seconds of Buster Keaton running for his life.
From the 1925 film Seven Chances.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:08 AM PST - 53 comments

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