May 7, 2010
Walk on water
Liquid Mountaineering is a new sport (or viral hoax) that these guys are purporting will be the next big thing. [more inside]
Pancakes
Jim's Pancakes are elaborate, multi-colored, and structural. Who here likes pancakes? I love pancakes.
Resting transparent in the spirit which gave him rise.
David Milch, creator of Deadwood, John From Cincinnati, and NYPD Blue reads from Luck, his Michael Mann-directed upcoming show for HBO. Following the reading there's a Q&A. (mp3)
Vintage kind of girl, vintage kind of bike
Dead.
The Illusiveness of the Entirely Useless
So, there's a Japanese artistic concept called a Thomasson.
In short, they are "defunct
and useless
objects, attached
to someone's property and aesthetically maintained."
But a more nuanced
explanation involves artist Akasegawa
Genpei, baseball player Gary Thomasson,
and a whole generation of Japanese kids who wandered around Tokyo,
looking for architectural abnormalities.
Now that the book has found its way to English, American readers are submitting some pretty fascinating discoveries of their own . [more inside]
Rosie Hardy: naturally talented photographer, plagiarist, or silly lovestruck teen?
Rosie Hardy is a 19 year-old photographer from Derbyshire, UK. Having first got into photography at age 16, she built a large following on flickr. She detailed her romance and ultimate breakup with another photographer through her photos. As early as 2008 there was suspicion that her romance and photography skills were more than just raw talent, drawing comparisons between Rosie and Lonelygirl15. An MSNBC profile of her relationship raised questions about the veracity of her relationship with then-boyfriend Aaron Nace, who she moved to the US to be with before ultimately returning to England. She was accused of plagiarizing many of the concepts of her photos, for which she apologized. She has regular interactions with her fans and is still featured on photography websites.
Mr. Peacock
Cold Steel FTW
Is your sword having difficulty cutting through boots filled with meat? Then perhaps you need the Cold Steel Two Handed Great Sword. [via] Trouble getting through your opponent's cleverly designed chainmail (and some cardboard boxes)? What you need is the Cold Steel War Hammer. Pesky eggs hanging from strings hanging from a wooden frame got you down? There's a solution: the Cold Steel Indian War Club. More Cold Steel products/videos here. (All meats utilized in these videos carefully preserved and donated to the Ventura County Rescue Mission.)
Dinosaurs in the Deep
In 1916, Bone War veteran (and poet) Charles H. Sternberg loaded 22 crates of fossils from the Alberta Badlands onto the SS Mount Temple, intending to ship them to the British Museum of Natural History. They never made it. [via Dinosaur Tracking]
Do you realize that if I played by the rules, right now I'd be in gym?
Crowdsourcing Crime Prevention!
Want to earn tons of cool badges and prizes while competing with you friends to see who can be the best American? It's up to you to keep America safe! If you see something suspicious, Snap it! If you see someone who doesn't belong, Snap it! Not sure if someone or something is suspicious? Snap it anyway!
Flash Friday Dice Fun
Right Here in Nebraska
We're the makers of Spam. We invented Kool-Aid, and this is where the first Reuben sandwich was made: Right Here in Nebraska. (SLYT) [more inside]
Vancouver's Basquiat?
"if you see ken around the downtown eastside, chinatown, or gastown, buy his art or i'll stab you in the neck!"
Ken Foster wanders the streets of Vancouver, painting the neighborhoods and selling the paintings he's made on found objects.
The quantum mechanics of the waggle dance.
Mathematician Barbara Shipman speculates that a honey bee's sense of the quantum world could be as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound or smell: "the mathematics implies that bees are doing something with quarks."
Happy You-Don't-Have-To-Be-A-Mother's Day
"There's no such thing as the Car or the Shoe or the Laundry Soap. But everyone knows the Pill, whose FDA approval 50 years ago rearranged the furniture of human relations in ways that we've argued about ever since." Time Magazine's cover article this month chronicles fifty years of reliable oral contraceptives. [more inside]
A nick by any other name
The American Academy of Pediatrics is proposing that doctors be authorized to perform a “ritual nick” on the genitals of pre-pubescent girls in order to satisfy cultural requirements and hopefully stave off more invasive forms of Female Genital Cutting (FGC):
Most forms of FGC are decidedly harmful, and pediatricians should decline to perform them, even in the absence of any legal constraints. However, the ritual nick suggested by some pediatricians is not physically harmful and is much less extensive than routine newborn male genital cutting. There is reason to believe that offering such a compromise may build trust between hospitals and immigrant communities, save some girls from undergoing disfiguring and life-threatening procedures in their native countries, and play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC. It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm. (source: PDF; not safe for work, contains line drawings of female genitalia.)
5 Percent Too High
Odds of Cooking the Grandkids: "There is a horrible paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looks at how the limits of human physiology interact with upper-range global warming scenarios. The bottom line conclusion is that there is a small - of order 5% - risk of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction of the planet was uninhabitable (in the sense that if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die)." [more inside]
Spend 600 Nintendo fun points to use a Warp Pipe!
Simon says. Red. Green. Blue. Yellow.
Ralph Baer was just inducted into the United States Patent Office's National Inventors Hall of Fame. His favorite of his own inventions is the microcomputer controlled game Simon - a device almost as ubiquitous as Rubik's Cubes were in the 80's.
In 1966, Baer patented a revolutionary device - first video game system. The system was made commercially available in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey system inlcuded an optical gun for shooting dots on the screen almost twenty years before Nintendo released Duck Hunt... [more inside]
In 1966, Baer patented a revolutionary device - first video game system. The system was made commercially available in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey system inlcuded an optical gun for shooting dots on the screen almost twenty years before Nintendo released Duck Hunt... [more inside]
Art of the Japanese Postcard
View examples of the Art of the Japanese Postcard (1, 2, 3) or browse the Leonard A. Lauder collection of them at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts website.
Meow meow meow meow
Meowmania. Friday flash "fun".
Warning: Contents May Wipe Out Civilization (Again)
For the first time ever, a look inside the most secure room in the world. Not Disney's Club 33. Not the White House Situation Room or the Gold Vault at Fort Knox. Welcome to the OT VIII Course Room aboard the Church of Scientology's flagship MV Freewinds. This room is the only place (on this planet at least) where you can read an authorized copy of Scientology's highest level.
Why Is Coffee Addictive? The coffee bean has a distinctive smell that makes you forget how painful it is to be awake.
Fake Science. answering important questions like Where does Oil come from?, How do 3D glasses work?, and at least a handful more.
Beer Cooler Sous Vide
Beer Cooler Sous-Vide can produce restaurant quality results, without expensive lab equipment. All you need is a beer cooler and an accurate thermometer and you can make perfectly medium rare steak with a great sear, moist and tender chicken breast , and flavorful salmon. [more inside]
Very Mary Kate
Very Mary Kate: The Unofficial Biography of Mary-Kate Olsen. It's better if you start from the beginning.
Chinese Military Shovel WJQ-308
"The multifunction folded shovle (sic) boasting a happy combination of a spade, pickax, trowel, hewing, knife, saw, scissors, hammer, operner (sic), shield, anchor, and oar is perfect design and refined making, making a pioneer in tools family!" I can guarantee you that never before (or, likely, again) will you be so inspired by a multifunction shovel commercial. The music is exhilarating! (PS: This shovel does freaking everything.) (SLYT) [more inside]
Braille is disappearing
Braille is facing extinction, says Canadian newsweekly Maclean's, thanks to strained budgets, audiobooks and text-to-speech. "In the 1950s about half of all blind children learned Braille, says the U.S. National Federation of the Blind. Today, that number has fallen to 10 per cent -- and it's about the same in Canada. For some, like NFB director Mark Riccobono, that means we're letting blind children grow up as illiterate as Braille's 19th-century contemporaries. 'If only 10 per cent of sighted children were being taught [to read],' he told Maclean's, 'that would be considered a crisis.'"
Shiny Happy People
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