April 15, 2012
100 years of ocean travel 1750 to 1850
For centuries, ships navigated by the stars. Thousands of ships' logs representing hundreds of thousands of position readings were diligently recorded by sailors for a future use they never could have imagined: 100 years of ocean travel 1750 to 1850.
Jazz on Bones
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. While the authorities of the Soviet Union decided they didn't want the people to hear Rock 'n' Roll, the people had other plans.
X-Ray Plans.
Human chess
Every other year since 1923, the town of Marostica in Italy has staged a recreation of a human chess game played in 1454 between two noblemen for the hand of the castle lord's daughter. [more inside]
A whole new meaning for the term "play money"
Just Keep Dancing!
PRACTICE YOUR LIGHTING SKILLS ON A PALE, FLESHY, HAIRLESS MAN
Virtual Lighting Studio. Works best in Chrome.
Ice
Car poolers - Alejandro Cartagena
Siri, how do you hide a body?
"Nostalgia is a seductive liar" ... Old Hollywood
I should like to help everyone, if possible.
The climactic speech from Charlie Chaplin's first talking motion picture, The Great Dictator, re-enacted by Team Fortress 2's own Herr Doktor
Photographic experiment shooting clouds everyday
Clouds 365 Project. The goal? To shoot an image or video of clouds every day. Sorted by month or time of day, or personal favorites of the photographer, Kelly DeLay.
How Abortion Used To Be
Honor your enemy
Who was the greatest foe the British Empire ever faced? George Washington, according to the UK's National Army Museum.
Ray Bradbury and Disneyland
Alien Maker
Film maker Dennis Lowe has worked in special effects on a number of films including Alien. His website features several documentaries of his interviewing the makers and fans of the film. [more inside]
Tiny Food
Following up after Pina
Wim Wenders at the Film Society Lincoln Center introducing Pina, and post-film talk and Q&A session [50m] during which he describes much about the groundwork for the film, how it was made, and the challenges of filming a 3D dance documentary. [more inside]
Needs more cowbell...for the world record (and charity).
Led by Phish drummer Jon Fishman, approximately 1,600 participants took part in the World’s Largest Cowbell Ensemble on Saturday on Church Street in Burlington, VT, beating the previous record of 640, set in Switzerland in 2009. Song used to set the new record: The Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today."
Loving You, as the Mouse Loves the Rice
Mouse Loves Rice isn't really a well-known song in the English-speaking west, but it's been huge throughout east Asia since it first hit the net in 2004. The music video (here in English) covers all the big timeless truths about life: beauty, the nature of love, sacrifice, and human-mouse transformation. [more inside]
Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance
Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance.
"A particularly important nucleus of the [Harvard] Photograph Archive's collection consists of a group of images of Renaissance Italian paintings that Berenson famously classified as “homeless,” that is, works that were documented by a photograph but whose current location was unknown to him....Berenson published some of his photographs of artworks “without homes” with the express invitation and hope that their owners, public or private, might come forward and claim them as their own...It is in this spirit.. that we have developed the project to catalog, digitize and make available online the Photograph Archive’s images of "homeless" paintings by Italian artists between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. By the project’s end--scheduled for the summer/fall of 2012--we will have published on the Internet records and images, often rare or unique, of around thirteen thousand pictures."
"A particularly important nucleus of the [Harvard] Photograph Archive's collection consists of a group of images of Renaissance Italian paintings that Berenson famously classified as “homeless,” that is, works that were documented by a photograph but whose current location was unknown to him....Berenson published some of his photographs of artworks “without homes” with the express invitation and hope that their owners, public or private, might come forward and claim them as their own...It is in this spirit.. that we have developed the project to catalog, digitize and make available online the Photograph Archive’s images of "homeless" paintings by Italian artists between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. By the project’s end--scheduled for the summer/fall of 2012--we will have published on the Internet records and images, often rare or unique, of around thirteen thousand pictures."
Stacks and stacks of wax
MeFi's own waxpancake celebrates the 10th anniversary of his blog Waxy.org with a retrospective of some of his favorite posts. [more inside]
Horses: Why We'll Always Love Them A Creepy Amount
Science + Cooking
Harvard's Science & Cooking class - a collaboration between eminent Harvard researchers and world-class chefs - featured a series of public lectures from scientifically-minded A-list chefs, including Ferran Adrià (of elBulli), Wylie Dufresne (from wd~50), Grant Achatz (of Alinea), White House Executive Pastry Chef Bill Yosses, and Nathan Myhrvold .
Youths big plans and vague longings, the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks
Joseph O'Neill on the Dutch literary hero Nescio No one has written more feelingly and more beautifully than Nescio about the madness and sadness, courage and vulnerability of youth: its big plans and vague longings, not to mention the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks. No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity about the radiating canals of Amsterdam and the cloud-swept landscape of the Netherlands. [more inside]
I like the one on velvet.
Let's add some monsters to thrift store paintings! Artists Chris McMahon and Thryza Segal decided to inject a little fun into these discarded works and give them a second life by adding monsters to the scenic landscapes.
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