March 20, 2012
Mother Whale Introduces Her Baby
Cranky
"Fahkin' hate green screen. Pay significant amounts of money never to do it again. You cannot fake adrenaline." - The man, the legend, Jason Statham.
Happy Birthday, Coathanger. You haven't aged a bit.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge - the widest, although not the longest, long-span bridge in the world - has turned 80. [more inside]
Pop! Goes the Law School Bubble
With the number of LSAT test takers in sharp decline, has the law school tuition bubble finally burst?
If you collect model buses you may want to avert your eyes as I decapitate the bus
Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL. Transport for London has a wonderful service called Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page showing live buses passing No. 10 Downing St. Underlying this is a simple JSON API that, while not public, seems to be usable by the average programmer. So with its details deciphered (hardly hard since the web site uses the API) John Graham-Cumming set about building an ambient bus monitor into a model London bus. The idea is to glance at the model bus and see the times of the next two real buses you're likely to want to catch, and know when to leave the house.
... because reality won’t cut it, isn’t outrageous enough, we must sex up the story for it to get any traction, and it must get traction, it MUST.
TIGsource forum imagery
TIGsource is a blog about indie video games that also has a very active forum community of both amateur and professional indie game designers/programmers/artists. About two months ago one of the forum members (Daid) whipped up a tool to display the art images of a particular thread so he could find something, and it turns out it's a pretty great thing just to browse for its own sake, which you can do here. Updated once a day and, obviously, image intensive. [previous tigsource mentions]
Einstein Archives Online
Hebrew University in conjunction with the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University Press are in the process of digitizing and releasing on the Internet Albert Einstein's personal letters, academic correspondence, love letters, and scientific manuscripts.
If you want to be a bird
Is there nothing a Wii controller can't do? YouTube tutorial in 14 parts DIY human bird-wings . [more inside]
A Month of Kraftwerk from DJ Food, and more from other sources
You're bummed that you're one of many who couldn't get tickets to the eight concerts of eight full albums in eight days at the Museum of Modern Art. Let DJ Food console you with a month of posts dedicated to Kraftwerk, including old and rare pictures and graphics, and six hours of songs that cover, sample, or are inspired by Kraftwerk, and even how to play Kraftwerk songs on your Casio pocket calculator. If you just want to hear Kraftwerk do their thing, here are three (incl. tracklist) live sets (partial tracklist) from recent years (tracklist). [more inside]
A Map of Io
The United Stated Geological Survey has finished a six-year effort to map the surface of Jupiter's moon Io. [more inside]
Ephemera related to The Shining
The Overlook Hotel: "Ephemera related to Stanley Kubrick's Masterpiece of Modern Horror, The Shining."
Unpacking the "Boo"
(Monsters) do so best when they believe in themselves. Author and academic China Miéville discusses prose style, weird fiction and the pratfalls of imbuing monsters with "meaning." [more inside]
The Art of Video Games
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has just opened a new exhibition The Art of Video Games. If you're in DC, it's up until the end of September and then will be traveling to other museums.
"My Japanese is getting better. We started speaking English."
Iron Lady lost in Russian translation. [Guardian.co.uk] Speaking to a crowd of supporters, Margaret Thatcher, as played by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, explains what she would do as prime minister: "Crush the working class, crush the scum, the yobs."
Fotos de Frida
Frida Kahlo produced art that was self-reflecting — 55 of her 143 known paintings were self-portraits. A cache of her 6,500 personal photographs was unsealed in 2007, and a small selection of those -- 259 total images -- are now on display in an exhibition entitled "Frida Kahlo: Her Photos," at the Artisphere in Arlington, VA until March 25th. Images: Washington Post, WJLA and NPR. PBS: Interview with exhibit curator Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. [more inside]
Dangerously Delicious, DRM Free
In the wake of Louis C.K.'s tremendously successful experiment (previously 1, 2), Aziz Ansari of Parks and Recreation fame has released his own self-produced comedy special, "Dangerously Delicious," straight to fans and DRM free.
What's up, Doc?
Chuck Jones draws and discusses Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote and Pepe le Pew and Warner Bros. and the producer Eddie Selzer (MLYT) [more inside]
The dog is on the roof
Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? (SLYT, but incredible)
Jiro Ono, sushi master
Like a cuckoo clock, but with Twitter... so not really like a cuckoo clock at all, actually.
"Nearly every second, a user on Twitter tweets about what time it is." Chirpclock makes use of this as an interesting way of keeping track of the time.
The Realm of Blade
The Realm of Blade: Why Nintendo Will Always Rule.
"Where's Adolf?"
Floral X-rays
Brendan Fitzpatrick took x-ray photographs of flowers that can be magnified by clicking on them.
Sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchal dividend. It's SO over.
Shit Men Say to Men Who Say Shit to Women on the Street, a project by Stop Street Harassment and Meet Us On the Street for International Anti-Street Harassment Week (which runs through the 24th). [more inside]
Andrea Yates, 10 years later
"Andrea Yates' story tracks so many of the themes we talk about all the time today. The role of religion in family life. The cognitive dissonance of so many marriages. Lingering stigmas about mental illness, especially as they relate to postpartum depression. The Yates trial was a big deal 10 years ago — even though it was overshadowed by the fallout from 9/11." The Atlantic looks back at the Andrea Yates case and how she's doing now.
supercilious daiquiri
Who wants to be in a spelling bee? Tricky and difficult are neither, but fiendish is a way to spend too much time. It does have quite a few words adopted into English, but everyone should know how to spell burrito.
A psychopathology of unconscious gesture in search of a purpose
"The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary's obsession with the image of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come." [more inside]
Trayvon Martin, shot by George Zimmerman
"This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about," Zimmerman told dispatchers. The dispatcher, hearing heavy breathing on the phone, asked Zimmerman: "Are you following him?" "Yeah," Zimmerman said. "Okay, we don’t need you to do that," the dispatcher responded.
On February 26, 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a 28 year-old man named George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Police did not arrest Zimmerman; under Florida's Stand Your Ground law Zimmerman was, according to the local police, acting in self-defense as Martin attacked him in his role as neighborhood watch captain. However, this is not the story that emerges from newly released 911 tapes - rather, the picture that emerges is of Zimmerman as aggressor and Martin as a scared kid, trying to run away. Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing about the case, and now the FBI and Department of Justice are now investigating. Previously.
On February 26, 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a 28 year-old man named George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Police did not arrest Zimmerman; under Florida's Stand Your Ground law Zimmerman was, according to the local police, acting in self-defense as Martin attacked him in his role as neighborhood watch captain. However, this is not the story that emerges from newly released 911 tapes - rather, the picture that emerges is of Zimmerman as aggressor and Martin as a scared kid, trying to run away. Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing about the case, and now the FBI and Department of Justice are now investigating. Previously.
Lego Marge's hair looks easy to replicate
Lego print ads with minimalist characters. Galleries of previous ads (there's some overlap in these older galleries).
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