May 10, 2014
Me, The Machine
Me The Machine, from Imogen Heap's forthcoming album Sparks, is the first song written for and performed with the Mi.Mu musical gloves, designed by Heap and a team of programmers, engineers, designers and musicians over the last four years with the aim of making creating and performing digital music "more like the experiences we have with traditional instruments: using the dexterity and mobility of the human body". [more inside]
Is it a dark and stormy night?
How to tell if you're reading a gothic novel, in pictures. A guide to terrible weather, castles, scary eyes, and swooning virgins from The Guardian.
Anonymous artist duo with a penchant for chalk dust
Two seniors at the Columbus College of Art and Design have been sneaking into classrooms one night per week and creating incredible chalkboard art featuring famous quotations. Going by the moniker Dangerdust, they can be found on Twitter, Instagram, tumblr, and behance.
Remarkable!
Surrender to The Void in style!
Welcome to West Roanoke, a tumblr with pictures by Kaleb Horton (whose Twitter is here and whose writing about pop culture is here) and captions by Chris Barrus (whose Twitter as @quartzcity is here and whose blog Quartz City is here). Updates come every Saturday.
Go Rams!
Michael Sam (previously), being the 249th draft pick, becomes a St. Louis Ram and the first openly gay man (and already endorsed) in the NFL.
It's only supposed to be 30% of your income
In Many Cities, Rent Is Rising Out of Reach of Middle Class. Here's What $800 in Rent Gets You in 11 Major Cities [more inside]
The Evolution of London, mapped through its roadways
In seven minutes, you can see the evolution of London, as seen in its road network, from the Roman port city of Londonium through the Anglo-Saxon, Tudor, Stuart, Early Georgian and Late Georgian, Early Victorian and Late Victorian, Early 20th Century and Postwar London, set to the scale of the 600 square miles of modern London, though the original city core is a very dense square mile. [more inside]
Kisima Inŋitchuŋa
Never Alone is an upcoming puzzle adventure game featuring a young Iñupiaq protagonist and her arctic fox companion, whose breathtaking trailer has been causing some buzz. It is the debut production of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council's Upper One Games, the first Native American owned games company. The game draws on Alaskan folklore and was developed in collaboration with elders, storytellers, and E-Line Media, a Seattle-based publisher of educational games.
Why crawl when you can bounce?
Rock bouncers can climb incredibly steep terrain, but on this day, none of the 30 entrants made it to the top (with 20 of them rolling over). Here's a documentary style video showing some runs and interviews at Cable hill.
Minute 319
Last November, after five years of remarkable negotiations that unfolded far from the Delta, representatives from the U.S. and Mexico agreed to a complex, multi-part water deal that will give them desperately needed flexibility for weathering the drought. More surprisingly, the two nations will join the team of environmental organizations to release a flood of more than 105,000 acre-feet of water – 3.8 million big-rig tankers' worth – into the Delta's ancient floodplain, and chase it with a smaller, permanent annual flow to sustain the ecosystem.For High Country News, Matt Jenkins describes the most ambitious water sharing plan ever created between Mexico and the United States (single page print version). For much more about this project and the water issues surrounding it, there's Eli Rabett's roundup of John Fleck's blogposts about this. (Or read the tl;dr version by Alex Harrowell.)
It is the unlikeliest of times to pull off a deal like this. Rather than hoarding all the water for themselves in this drought –– the river supplies some 35 million people –– the West's largest water agencies have pledged to send some all the way to the sea. That move is, to some extent, a long-overdue acknowledgment that the U.S. bears responsibility for the impacts its dams have caused beyond its borders. And after years of fruitless court fights in the U.S. by environmental groups, the Mexican government finally insisted that water for the Delta be a cornerstone of the broader deal.
Reveal Thyself!
In the WSJ today, the authors of Freakanomics have an essay reprinted from their new book, entitled "How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves" which discusses several everyday applications of theory practices including the idea that medieval Trial By Ordeal actually worked (previously), why Nigerian scammers reveal they are from Nigeria, and the policy that Zappos came up with in which they offer a cash reward for new hires to quit working there, which other companies have now picked up as well.
Cultural Dealbreaker
The A.V. Club asks readers What’s your cultural dealbreaker? which they define as "cultural products that someone can profess to enjoy only while losing all of your respect."
You Made Your Big Mistake When I was Cc'd on the Message
Captain Ahab's Motorcycle Club is a project overseen by the perversely multitalented Cory McAbee (previously, previously) It's a band/fan club/film production group, which has been working for the last two years on music written by McAbee and orchestrated/performed by anybody interested in uploading a mix. Its ultimate project will be a feature film chronicling the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln.
Six down, a few more to go...
Arkansas Judge strikes down gay marriage ban. And in a surprising move, didn't put the order on hold so people could appeal. [more inside]
The Internet: The Music Video
So this new music video called 'Tip Tip', by KIDS N CATS, looks like it was shamelessly engineered to go viral on the Internet. I WILL HELP THEM.
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