March 23, 2013
Would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
Maybe hamsters & hippos are better suited for your weight class-- don't worry, Super Duck Punch will allow to test your pugilistic skills against these combinations and more! Watch out for the giraffe-headed Hydra, though. Almost as tough as the Hydra-headed giraffe.
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If Cabbage Patch Kids can be born, they can also die
Dendy Chronicles
After the huge success of the NES, a whole host of bootleg consoles came out around the world. The Dendy console brought a new age of video gaming to the newly born Russian Federation. Kinaman presents a retrospective of the numerous pirate Mario games on the Dendy system in three parts: 1, 2, 3. (Russian with English subtitles)
Not Everything Is Economics, Not Even At The Shareholders' Meeting
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Issues A Smackdown The CEO of the hugely successful, not universally beloved coffee chain gives a brief statement on the intersection, or lack thereof, between economics and respect for diversity.
Watch Me Maybe
Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art were surprised to see Tilda Swinton sleeping in a box today. The Maybe is a collaboration of Swinton and Cornelia Parker originally shown in 1995. Her appearance at MoMa is seven years in the making and will be repeated throughout the year with no announced schedule.
Putting the "I" in IPO
Mike Merrill decided to sell shares in his life. He now has 160 shareholders who can tell him what to do.
Lynneguist's Separated By a Common Language
Wondering about your British colleagues wearing tank tops in chilly weather and complaining about bumf? Trying to figure out what your American colleagues mean by poster child or hump day, or just where exactly kitty-corner is? Lynneguist's Separated By a Common Language will get you sorted. [more inside]
how to smooth a mouse path
Twisted Oak Studios talk about how they smoothed the mouse path for the desktop port of the game Jack Lumber, with code examples.
The dwarves of Auschwitz
Make it so.
Ricky Gervais In His Bath
Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky has been found dead
The Thames is a Filthy Beast
Down to a Sunless Sea - a new short story by Neil Gaiman published by The Guardian as part of their series of Water stories.
20 minutes of hand-drawn and CGI teasers and trailers from Headless Prod
Strange Oaks is the latest teaser trailer from the Barcelona-based Headless Productions (and friends), this time about a retirement community for witches. The Headless Productions Vimeo account has 13 more teasers and trailers, mostly featuring hand-drawn animation, some of which has since made its way into full movies. [more inside]
Mechanical Wankelry
Animated Engines has been mentioned a couple times before, but I wanted to highlight the site entire, along with its sister site, 507 Mechanical Movements. Both sites have animated diagrams of a huge variety of engines and (relatively) simple machines, the latter based on an 1868 book by Henry T. Brown of the same name. While all of the engines are animated, the animated machines start on page 3, and go on from there. And every diagram leads to a page that explains the machine's function — step-by-step in the case of the engines.
Living In Science Fiction: 2013 Edition
Science Fiction Comes Alive as Researchers Grow Organs in Lab
1997 -- Charles Vacanti of University of Massachusetts Medical Center and Robert Langer of Massachusetts Institute of Technology report the growing of a cartilage structure – in the shape of a human ear – on a mouse’s back. 2008 -- Doris Taylor at the University of Minnesota and colleagues grow a beating rat heart in the lab. 2008 --Surgeons in Spain transplant a new windpipe into a patient. The organ is made from a cadaver windpipe stripped of its original cells and reseeded with the patient’s own cells. 2010 -- Researchers at Mass General Hospital grow a rat liver. 2010 -- Yale University scientists grow a functioning rat lung. 2010 -- Alex Seifalian in London transplants a lab-made tear duct into patient 2011 -- Dr. Seifalian makes a windpipe from nanocomposite materials plus a patient’s own stem cells; the new windpipe replaces the patient’s cancerous one, saving his life. In a separate procedure, an artery made at Dr. Seifalian’s lab is transplanted into a patient. 2012 -- Surgeons in Sweden transplant a major blood vessel into a 10-year-old girl. The vein was taken from a dead man, stripped of its tissue, then reseeded with the girl’s own cells. 2013 -- Scientists from Cornell University report the making of a human ear using living cartilage cells.
Life Imitates Rap Perhaps
First they did the crimes. Then they made a rap video of the crime. Then they went down for the crimes with the video used as evidence to convict them. [more inside]
Snow!!!
The United States Men's National Soccer team played a very, very, snowy game last night against Costa Rica.
Costa Rica is not happy.
A live blog of the events.
Mind is moving
Ron Garret, formerly of JPL and Google and "the most referenced computer science researcher in all of NASA", has an interesting take on quantum mechanics he dubs "zero-worlds", which he presents in an hour-long Google Tech Talk (meat starts around 42 minutes) as well as slightly older paper. He also got into a bit of further debate here. [more inside]
"it was even thicker than planned, for a brief exciting interlude"
How Not To Do It: Chromium Trioxide
Back in grad school, I had an undergraduate assistant one summer, a guy who was pretty green. I'll refer to him by an altered form of his nickname, henceforth as Toxic Jim. I shouldn't be too hard on him, I guess: I was a summer undergrad in my time, too, and I wasn't a lot of help to anyone, either. But TJ did manage to furnish me with some of my more vivid lab stories in his brief time in my fume hood. One morning I showed him how to make PCC. That's pyridinium chlorochromate for the non-organic chemists out there, an oxidizing agent that doesn't seem to be used as much as it was 15 or 20 years ago. Even in '85, you could buy it, but the freshly-made stuff was often better. It certainly looked nicer. Like all the Cr(VI) salts, it has a vivid color, in this case a flaming orange. I shouldn't say "flaming;" that's getting ahead of the story. . .
"The Bible says it's gross"
What's in your mouth?
The Sydney Symphony held a contest for its Facebook fans to find the best lyrics for the Carmina Burana. The winner - Ode to Sleep Deprived Parents
“The important thing,” he said, “is moving.”
Becoming the All-Terrain Human: [New York Times]
"Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams."
Feminists aging together.
French Feminist Babayaga Thérèse Clerc, is captured by photographer Elisabeth Schneider in a short French documentary. Thérèse Clerc is the founder of Maison des Femmes de Montreuil, a women-only feminist retirement community, in Paris. [more inside]
Musical Genius and Sex Symbol
Earl Okin performs My Room for an audience of appreciative ladies (SLYT).
Spring Break forever. Spring Break forever. Spring Break forever. Spring
Harmony Korine's new film Spring Breakers [trailer] is "an outrage and an abomination. It’s also some kind of masterpiece." Or maybe it's swill, or just plain old racist. In any event, the movie looks gorgeous, courtesy of cinematographer Benoît Debie, best known for his work on his work on Gaspar Noe's Irreversible and Enter the Void. Actress Ashley Benson thinks the sex scenes were beautiful: "It wasn't raunchy. It was telling a story." Actor Gucci Mane, meanwhile, fell asleep during his sex scene. Korine showed up on Reddit to answer questions, but his responses were somewhat incoherent.
The Apotheosis of the Internet
“I gave all my money to head waiters and tarts”
“The people I burgled got rich by greed and skulduggery. They indulged in the mechanics of ostentation — they deserved me and I deserved them." Peter Scott, known as the "King of the Cat Burglars", has died at the age of 82.
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