February 3, 2010
And she thought it not at all strange...
What Republicans believe
What Republicans believe - a poll of 2000 self-identified republicans by DailyKos/Research2000. With a little elucidation of some of the polling numbers by Nate of FiveThirtyEight. And also picked up by O'Reilly.
"The soil is our bank."
African land reform, plot by plot, may be the foundation for solving so much else – from famine to poverty to genocide.
Yes, Glenn Beck is #1
The Buffalo Beast has finally posted its list of the 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2009. [more inside]
Nuit Blanche
Nuit Blanche. "Nuit Blanche explores a fleeting moment between two strangers, revealing their brief connection in a hyper real fantasy." [Via]
Bringing Perry v. Schwarzenegger to the public in spite of the US Supreme Court
In its January 13, 2010 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the public broadcast of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a U.S. District Court case challenging the constitutional validity of California's Proposition 8, despite the ruling of Judge Vaughn Walker. Working directly from court transcripts and first-hand accounts from bloggers who have been present at the trial, marriagetrial.com is re-enacting the trial, to provide a "non-biased, objective presentation" of the case for public benefit.
This may be the "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" of political ads
Carly Fiorina, perhaps best known as the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, is attempting to become the Republican candidate for Barbara Boxer's long-time Senate seat. But her nomination isn't sewed up yet; her potential GOP challenger is former Congressman and Stanford Law professor Tom Campbell. So earlier today, Fiorina's campaign released this political attack ad against Campbell. It features her newly-minted acronym "FCINO", it's about six times longer than most political ads, it makes copious use of stock photography, and it stars demon sheep with red glowing eyes. Wait, what?
the physics behind aerial skiing
Double Full Full Full, annotated (NYT video, reg REq'd) U.S. Olympic Team aerial skier Ryan St. Onge and a science reporter describe via video the physics going on as he executes a triple backflip with four twists.
Also, the snowboard halfpipe. (Don't ask me why a triple backflip with four twists is called a "double full full full")
Buckle Up
Embrace Life: A lovely road safety PSA from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership. (SLYT) [more inside]
Many eyes make light work
The Victoria and Albert Museum is using crowdsourcing to determine the best images, crops and enlargements of items in its online database. [more inside]
The Virtual Mitchell
Glasgow's Mitchell Library, designed by William B. Whitie, is the largest reference library in Western Europe. Over the past decade, it has been digitising its collection of photographs, which has resulted in the Virtual Mitchell, an unrivalled collection of photographs of Glasgow which covers the last 150-odd years of the city's history.
The photographs can be searched by area, street or subject, all of which provide a fascinating insight into life in Glasgow over the past century and a half.
Some examples: Charing Cross, 1950s; 1975; The Mitchell Library, 1910; Meadowside Shipyard, circa 1930; New Astoria Cinema, Possilpark; Royal Exchange Square, 1868; Alexander "Greek" Thompson's church on Caledonia Road; East End children in class in 1916
Ways of Killing
If you've got a live animal that you want to eat, you will need to kill it. Here's some people sharing ways to get the task done.
Killing and dressing a chicken.
Shooting and butchering a pig.
A goat is slaughtered.
Time.com on killing and roasting a goat.
Internet Depression
"Our research indicates that excessive internet use is associated with depression,but what we don't know is which comes first - are depressed people drawn to the internet or does the internet cause depression?"
Pornography's victim wants viewers to pay
Amy's uncle started abusing her when she was four years old. Depictions of her abuse are "one of the most popular and readily available kiddie porn videos on the Internet." Her lawyer has a novel - and apparently successful - strategy for recovering compensation: use the theory of joint liability to sue everyone with a copy of the video.
It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out.
Vegetated State conversations: To find out whether a simple conversation was possible, the researchers selected one of the four - a 29-year-old man who had been in a car crash. They asked him to imagine playing tennis if he wanted to answer yes to questions such as: Do you have any sisters? Is your father's name Thomas? Is your father's name Alexander? And if the answer to a question was no, he had to imagine moving round his home.
"The coroner’s report from Argentina makes slighting mention of a brain tumor..."
"Back in 1993 I was tutoring my sister in algebra. Her quizzes and tests were always made of word problems with a running storyline involving many recurring places and characters. I tied the fate of the main characters to how well she did on the previous quiz, so a good performance brought them good fortune. Unfortunately, one test she completely bombed, and, well, this is a transcription of the quiz she got next." [more inside]
Hundred-to-won
Last December, the government of North Korea unexpectedly revalued its internal currency, the North Korean won, at a rate of 100-to-1 and capped the amounts that residents could exchange old currency at 300,000 won (approx. $90 U.S. on the black market). This effectively wiped out many peoples' savings and killed the nascent market economy that had begun to emerge after a series of economic reforms starting in July, 2002. Professor Rüdiger Frank of the University of Vienna argues that while it represents a temporary victory for the North Korean government, this move may ultimately lead to the end of North Korean socialism. [Recently here]
Yes, they still make new ones...
If you think I'm sexy, and you want my body...
Need some new moves in your dating arsenal? You could get low and funky, like an ostrich. Or even funkier, like a horned pheasant. [more inside]
Seal is on the menu
As the G7 finance ministers meet in northern Canada this week, a statement will be made about a matter dear to the hearts, and stomachs, of many northerners: seal. The ministers will be served seal meat, while sitting on seal-skin chairs and be given seal-fur gloves and vests as gifts, all to raise awareness of the importance of the seal hunt to the North -- even as Inuit groups in Canada and Greenland are suing in a European court to try to overturn the EU's ban on importing seal products. CBC's FAQ on the Canadian Seal Hunt. [more inside]
Free Paper Airplane Designs
I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name
If you come around here, I make 'em all day
I get one down in a second if you wait [more inside]
If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name
If you come around here, I make 'em all day
I get one down in a second if you wait [more inside]
Unicode utilities
Unicode? There’s an app for that. Need to enter a few characters in a script you only kind of understand? Got a string of characters you can’t figure out? The W3C’s Richard Ishida can help. Ishida’s vast set of browser-based character pickers and troubleshooters let you assemble phonetics, peruse and search Unicode characters, or just paste in a string of characters and get a nice list of every single character in the string. [more inside]
Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition
Last November, Ballardian.com [previously] announced a Microfiction Competition in order to promote a series of interviews concerning Savoy Books. They have now announced the winners.
"Without spoiling too much, this game will show you a bit about yourself and humanity."
Strangers is a very short (~5 minutes to complete) Windows platform game, "which has an interesting twist that you may or may not see coming." Download and forum here, with an admonition to "play this song while playing." [more inside]
Hell & Hate
More Beatles remix/mashup delirium. Hell! (website, zipped download). Hate (website, multiupload link). Mutation (website). The Beastles & Let It Beast (website, multiupload links). The Act You've Known For All These Years (website). And the granddaddy of them all, The Grey Album. (overview, multiupload link) [more inside]
...Electric Boogaloo
“Well, it seems to be happening a lot sooner than I thought. I understand now that this [is] considered a pet project of Dan DiDio, SVP-Executive Editor. That he is determined to impress new bosses by building on DC’s biggest selling comic book of all time with multiple prequel comic miniseries and spinoff ongoing projects.” [more inside]
Abstinence-only education can work?
A new study of middle schoolers found for the first time that abstinence-only education can help to delay [the students'] sexual initiation. While the evaluation adds important new information to the question of “what works” in sex education, the evaluated program was not a rigid "abstinence-only-until-marriage" program of the type that, until this year, received significant federal funding, leaving intact existing evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage programming that met previous federal guidelines is ineffective.
Sounds of the City
The Smalls, a website about short films, has created The Smalls Street Sounds, a site where folks can upload sounds unique to their city and see them mapped (USAcentric). They have set a goal of having 5,000 sounds uploaded by March. via. My favorite.
Spray on Cheese, Spray on Hair; What Will They Think of Next?
Spray-On Glass! Immaculate clothing and easy house-cleaning for all! A German company, Nanopool (may need to run through google translator), has developed some sort of mad science/flying car future-style fluid suspension of SiO2 that can be applied to apparently any surface with startling applications.
I am entertained by the idea that wax fruit may be replaced by glass fruit... as it were.
Additional details, but no real specs here.
Georges Méliès, the Cinemagician
He invented or popularized a startling array of the fundamental elements of film: the dissolve, the fade-in and fade-out, slow motion, fast motion, stop motion, double exposures and multiple exposures, miniatures, the in-camera matte, time-lapse photography, color film (albeit hand-painted), artificial film lighting, production sketches and storyboards, and the whole idea of narrative film.
By 1897, in a studio of his own design and construction – the first complete movie studio – his hand forged virtually everything on his screen. Norman McLaren writes, "He was not only his own producer, ideas man, script writer, but he was his own set-builder, scene painter, choreographer, deviser of mechanical contrivances, special effects man, costume designer, model maker, actor, multiple actor, editor and distributor." Also, his own cinematographer, and the inventor of cameras to suit his special conceptions. Not even auteur directors such as Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Stanley Kubrick would personally author so many aspects of their films."Inside: 57 films by Georges Méliès, the Grandfather of Visual Effects. [more inside]
Industrial Strength Fungus
Industrial Strength Fungus. At an organic farm just outside Monterey, Calif., a super-eco building material is growing in dozens of darkened shipping containers. The farm is named Far West Fungi, and its rusting containers are full of all sorts of mushrooms--shiitake, reishi and pom-pom, to name a few. This new application of mushrooms is sometimes referred to as "mycotecture", but the idea of mycorestoration [TED talk: "6 ways mushrooms can save the world"] is not new. [more inside]
Oh, I thought it was Fox Force Five. Never mind.
The iPad, which you may have heard of, has brought HTML5 into the consciousness of many. Here Gizmodo explains what HTML5 is and why it wont save the internet. Previously.
Underwater
Benjamin Koellmann paid $215,000 for his apartment in Miami Beach in 2006, but now units are selling in foreclosure for $90,000. “There is no financial sense in staying,” he said.
"Mass Affect" - BioWare's Upcoming Hipster RPG
Mass Affect will offer a plethora of engaging side-quests, including bike messenger assignments, competitive coffee-brand disparagement, horrible-dancing competitions, and an interactive café-posturing minigame that involves using motion controls to keep the cover of your barely-skimmed copy of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" within eyeshot of as many cute girls as possible.
Where do my taxes go?
Where does my tax money go? From USA Today, a calculator and graph that lets you enter your salary and shows you how your tax dollars are spent. You can also change the year shown, so that you can compare now and then.
Historical Photographs and Documents
The U.S. National Archives' Flickr Photostream. Includes collections of historical photographs and documents | Civil War photos by Mathew Brady | and the Documerica Project by the EPA in the 1970s. There is also a nice set of Ansel Adams landscape photographs.
Prawns
Neil Blomkamp’s TED Talk starts with the question of does he feel his aliens in his film District 9 are a realistic depiction of what extraterrestrial life might actually be like... (SLYT)
when scientists get angry
"Papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile. At the same time publication of truly original findings may be delayed or rejected."
In an open letter addressed to Senior Editors of peer-review journals, Professor Austin Smith (publications) and another 13 stem cell researchers from around the world have expressed their concerns over the current peer review process employed by the journals publishing in the field of stem cell biology. [more inside]
Ten minutes of innuendo
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