February 5, 2014
Watch them all, since you'll never afford the pedals
From the Electro-Harmonix Effectology series, in which the amazingly well crafted pro grade guitar pedals of Electro-Harmonix are used to ends that blur the line between guitar and synthesis. The original 1963 theme for Doctor Who recreated from scratch using only guitar and Electro-Harmonix pedals.
The 2014 Sony World Photography Awards
The Sony World Photography Awards, an annual competition hosted by the World Photography Organisation, has recently announced its shortlist of winners. This year's contest attracted more than 140,000 entries from 166 countries. The organizers have been kind enough to share some of their shortlisted images with In Focus, gathered below. Winners are scheduled to be announced in March and April. All captions below come from the photographers. [33 photos]
"Images of poverty are the Congo’s most lucrative export"
What if poor people capitalized on their own natural resource, poverty? This is the central question of Renzo Martens' 2008 documentary, Episode III - Enjoy Poverty, the second film in a triptych exploring power relations between photographers and their subjects. [more inside]
La-La Land
Vintage Los Angeles is Alison Martino's YouTube channel featuring a look back at Los Angeles during the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. There's an accompanying blog and a facebook page, too.
A One-PDF History of European Socialism and Communism
music as fibre design
Beautiful music makes better materials "It is not the building block itself that is limiting our ability to create better, more durable or stronger materials, but rather our inability to control the way these building blocks are arranged. To overcome this limitation, I am trying to design new materials in a similar way to nature. In my lab we are using the hidden structures of music to create artificial materials such as designer silks and other materials for medical and engineering applications. We want to find out if we can reformulate the design of a material using the concept of tones, melodies and rhythms. Can a composer come up with a radically different approach to design?"
"My life has been reduced to nothing by an intolerable insult."
The Simple Facts About Mass Shootings Aren't Simple At All
The first step in stopping future mass shootings is figuring out what we know and working from there. Unfortunately, the real first step is getting rid of a bunch of stuff we “know” that turns out to be wrong.[more inside]
Carpetbagging in the jet age
Allan Levene really — really — wants to serve in Congress. But he's 64 years old, and says he has no time to build a political resume step by step by getting elected to lesser positions and working his way up. So, he is maximizing the odds by running in four different states simultaneously. He has entered primaries in Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia, which is where he lives. Is this legal? Apparently so, as long as he is a resident, at the time of the November general election, of whichever state he may manage to get elected in. Politifact checked it out with constitutional experts. NPR interview transcript.
The mysteries of the planarian
Animal Loses Head But Remembers Everything: "What we do know is that memory can be stored outside the brain - presumably in other body cells - so that memories can get imprinted onto the new brain as it regenerates."
Con Men! Artistocrats! Nancy Boys! Radiothearpy and More!
A government of the many, not a government of money
The “Government by the People Act”, proposed by N. Pelosi and J. Sarbanes in a WP op-ed, is presented as one of the first concrete steps towards the removal of the influence of quasi-unlimited money in US politics.
The act doesn’t limit the amount of money that corporations, PACs, etc can pay but rather takes the opposite approach, by encouraging and subsidizing citizen participation.
The influence of money on American politics has exploded since the Citizens United ruling… resulting in often disturbing bias. [more inside]
We are not your goddamn beer salesmen.
Budweiser paid for Super Bowl advertising that supposedly was trying to honor the troops. But the troops and veterans themselves have strong and thoughtful opinions about the existence of the ad, their choice of returning soldier, and what it says about companies and organizations who use veterans as props. [more inside]
In this position, it's quite easy for me to dislocate his elbow
Franck Bohbot takes pictures
Franck Bohbot is an up-and-coming photographer, already seen in HuffPo and Vogue, among others. His eye and choice of subjects seem to draw one to infinity. Or to take one to a recent past, seen from younger eyes. And then there's my favorite collection, all about parked cars.
When things get too heavy, just call me helium.
[SLYT] PBS Digital Studios has fancied up Jimi Hendrix's final interview with some whimsical animation.
February Made Me Shiver
Bob Dearborn was a disc jockey at WCFL in Chicago. He had some thoughts about a particular song. [more inside]
Too poor for pop culture
Odd guitars made via 3D printing
This Les Paul inspired guitar body was created via 3d printing.
Here are some more ODD guitars.
ODD was started by Olaf Diegel. His day job is professor of mechatronics at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. [more inside]
Draw a bunch of question marks on the shoes and socks. See what I care.
It's not paranoia if....
“He’s treating them like street punks, and they view themselves as captains of industry.” The most exciting article you will read all year about frog genitals, the FDA, and an eccentric, larger-than-life UC Berkeley scientist navigating class and culture issues while being psychologically profiled and pursued by a pesticide giant he's locked himself into mortal combat with for the last decade.
Previously.
Coin Rules Everything Around Me
In 2014, Bitcoin (BTC) has become established as increasingly "real" money with government regulatory interest, law enforcement, and growing acceptance in commerce, but also as the reserve cryptocurrency for hundreds of "altcoins," making them also convertible to legacy money. Foremost among these is Litecoin (LTC), which introduced the scrypt hashing algorithm to cryptocurrency, democratizing coin mining by being best suited to common GPUs rather than Bitcoin's dedicated mining equipment. Recently donated LTC paid for a forest in Madagascar. Peercoin (PPC), next in prominence, introduces "proof of stake" where less energy is spent mining and existing coins pay interest. Dogecoin (DOGE), a fork of Litecoin (previously covered on Metafilter), continues heading to the moon, with more transactions than all other coins combined, thriving markets in digital goods, tipbots, an upcoming party in NYC's Bitcoin Center on Wall Street, much charity, and the recent announcement that new Dogecoins will be generated indefinitely. A selection of other foremost and interesting cryptocurrencies is within. [more inside]
Undercover - Keep it all out of sight
George Monbiot - "...Before I explain it, here’s a summary of what we know already. Thanks to the remarkable investigations pursued first by the victims of police spies and then by the Guardian journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis (whose book Undercover is as gripping as any thriller), we know that British police have been inserting undercover officers into protest movements since 1968(2). Their purpose was to counter what they called subversion or domestic extremism, which they define as seeking to “prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy … outside the normal democratic process”(3). Which is a good description of how almost all progressive change happens."
American finance has finally caught up with breakdancing
Morrissey, George Michael and radio DJ Tony Blackburn discuss the week's pop culture on a TV panel show from deep, deep, deep in 1984. Michael is unimpressed with a breakdance film. Moz is blasé about Joy Division. Blackburn dismisses vintage Atlantic Records reissues, preferring his current options in soul. Pastel color schemes and harsh opinions aplenty. (SLYT, 27 minutes, via the Guardian Tumblr)
Panti Bliss Abbey Theatre Speech.
Drag Queen Panti Bliss, aka Rory O'Neill, received a standing ovation after speaking at Dublin's Abbey Theatre on homophobia, and oppression. [more inside]
Barrieres incendiée
Images of the French Revolution. 14,000 individual visual items, primarily prints, but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects included as part of the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collaboration between Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. "The use of these contents for non-commercial purposes is free of charge, subject to compliance with applicable French legislation and notably the inclusion of the source’s statement." Post title taken from this print, "Barrieres incendiée"
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