July 6, 2014
The quick brown fox has a twitter account
PangramTweets automatically finds and retweets tweets which include all of the letters of the alphabet. [more inside]
HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY BIG DOG PEPERONIE!!!!
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop posting to MetaFilter.
The Dissolve's Movie of the Week discussion series (previously 1 2 3 4 ) takes Airplane! for a spin:
The geese are all facing in angles
Pianist Jeremy Denk has been living in a state of emergency. Instead of consulting a professional, I have come up with a three step solution. Recalibrating my life solution. The first step is to ignore all existing emergencies. Now, this—I can already hear you saying it—can’t last, this is not a workable solution. It sounds in fact like the opposite of a solution. Patience! Wait till you hear my next two steps. Step two—the real genius hinge of the whole thing—is then, in the absence of all emergencies, in the vast plain of false calm left after the tyrannical banishment of all the old emergencies, to choose to treat the smallest things as emergencies.
It's a very reasonable way to eat out.
"I enjoy buffets. I wouldn't say love buffets, but it's a very reasonable way to eat out." (SLYT) [more inside]
World of Objects - Found product photography from eBay & Craigslist listings
All the good stuff is in the first 26 pages...
What aren't you reading? By looking at the top 5 most highlighted passages via Kindle in each book, Jordan Ellenberg has figured out which books are most unread: Take the page numbers of a book's five top highlights, average them, and divide by the number of pages in the whole book. He calls the result the Hawking Index, after the much-unread Brief History of Time, though Piketty seems to have knocked Hawking off his throne (all five top highlights come in the first 26 pages, out of 700). Also, everyone finishes The Goldfinch. Previous attempts to figure out what is least finished have been conducted by Goodreads (#1: Catch-22), and by the Guardian in 2007 (which may explain why Vernon God Little is #1), which included helpful summaries. What have you not finished recently?
I'll have s'mores.
The Girl Scouts published the first recipe for Some Mores in 1927, and it just took off. The s'more has become an All-American campfire treat … and the combination of warm gooey marshmallow, melty chocolate, and crisp graham cracker has inspired a bunch of other s'more-inspired recipes. I give you: Triple dipped apples. Pie. Popcorn. Mini donuts. Stuffed cookies. Dip. Ice cream. Chocolatier ice cream. Homemade pop tarts. Macarons. Cups. Fudge. Krispies Bar. Truffles. Cheesecake. Pie pops. Bites. Milkshake. Empanadas. Trifles. Frozen. [more inside]
Woot? Meh.
This Internet Millionaire Has a New Deal For You
So there sat Bezos at the breakfast table, faced with a question for which he was apparently unprepared. Many painful seconds passed without an answer. Rutledge let the pause lengthen as long as he could bear it and was just about to tell his host to forget it, when Bezos finally spoke. He looked down at his plate. Bezos had ordered a dish called Tom’s Big Breakfast, a preparation of Mediterranean octopus that includes potatoes, bacon, green garlic yogurt, and a poached egg. “You’re the octopus that I’m having for breakfast,” Rutledge remembers Bezos saying. “When I look at the menu, you’re the thing I don’t understand, the thing I’ve never had. I must have the breakfast octopus.” Not until Rutledge had returned to Dallas and related the story to his anxious employees—now Amazon’s employees—did he realize just how absurd that explanation sounded. Before it can be eaten, generally, the breakfast octopus must be killed.
Trans Women's Lit
Trans women writers Jeanne Thornton, Imogen Binnie, Red Durkin and Casey Plett read from their recent works for Talks at Google. [more inside]
TRIBBLES ARE A THING
Mark Oshiro starts his biggest project yet: Mark Watches Star Trek. All of it. In airing order. HE IS SO UNPREPARED.
I knew I should watch it and I wanted to watch it, but… good lord, HAVE YOU SEEN HOW MANY EPISODES THERE ARE? So when it was proposed to me years ago that I should journey into the great beyond that is Star Trek’s canon, I knew that this would be the only way I could see all of it – from beginning to end – and to try and appreciate it for what it did and what it is.[more inside]
watching
A story, a force, a tale that means something
The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access digital archive of all-fiction pulp magazines from 1896-1946, such as The Argosy, Amazing Stories, and Weird Tales. In addition to the archive, it features a cover gallery, a collection of articles and contextual material (including "So What is Pulp?", publisher index card files, and an office dummy), and links to dozens of related or similar resources such as the Speculative Fiction Collection at Virginia Tech, the Anarchist Periodicals archive at Pitzer College, and the Digital Dada Library.
10 Words Every Girl Should Learn
10 Words Every Girl Should Learn "Stop interrupting me."
"I just said that."
"No explanation needed." [more inside]
Rolling Coal: Everything Else About It Is Pretty Good
Slate: "Prius Repellent is a perfect introduction to one of the Obama era’s great conservative subcultures: the men and women who “roll coal.” For as little as $500, anyone with a diesel truck and a dream can install a smoke stack and the equipment that lets a driver “trick the engine” into needing more fuel. The result is a burst of black smoke that doubles as a political or cultural statement—a protest against the EPA, a ritual shaming of hybrid “rice burners,” and a stellar source of truck memes." [more inside]
The case for banning fireworks
They're a threat to the environment and dangerous as hell. There's got to be a better way to celebrate.
Look, I’m an environmental reporter, and as such it is practically in my job description to be a killjoy. For this I am sorry. It’s not like I won’t personally be enjoying the fireworks over the East River — which at least can’t get any more polluted than it already is — but I won’t be able to do so without nagging self-admonishments about how fireworks are actually kind of stupid.… Now, as is my professional duty, I pass these nagging thoughts on to you.
Just Leave.
How should you respond when a guns-rights activist carrying a firearm walks into your vicinity? PQED.org suggests a possible response. Meanwhile, Don't Shred on Me held a mocking Open Carry Guitar rally.
Amsterdam Noord is seventh?
The twenty most hipster neigbourhoods in the world or, where to live if you're sick of Williamsburg.
look, Mum - no hands!
"YouTube user Now 夠了沒 has broadcast a genius method of putting on pants.
It is one that forgoes the often irritating and time-consuming use of hands.
No doubt this is why the internet was invented."
(Buzzfeed link - includes animated .gifs & embedded video; soundtrack: "The Final Countdown") [more inside]
Living in a Fool’s Paradise
San Francisco must change. "...the current state of permitting regulations for building and the glacial pace of infrastructure projects in San Francisco benefit very few people and risk turning it into a caricature of its former self for tourists and residents rich enough to live in a fantasy, not a living city. If there was ever a time when San Francisco needed to embrace a dynamic, expansive policy for building housing, offices and transportation, it is now." (Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)
NSA gathers more data from non-targeted people than we thought.
In Snowden’s view, the PRISM and Upstream programs have “crossed the line of proportionality.” [SLWAPO] [more inside]
Think of mistakes as proof that you're trying your hardest.
Forget your magic eight balls, your I-Chings, your tarot cards, and your oblique strategies: Augur is an iPhone app that predicts the future by using the communal (sub? super?)conscious that is Twitter.
[via mefi projects]
musical mathematical journeys
Trio for Three Angles (1968) is one of many beautiful acclaimed visually-oriented short films with music by mathematical filmmakers Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, some animated by hand and some using early digital technology. It inspired three sequels: Similar Triangles (1975), Congruent Triangles (1976), and Journey to the Center of a Triangle (1978) (previously). [more inside]
Offshoring has simply become a reflex
Your good American job has left the building. Your factory is extraordinarily productive. But workers in poorer countries can do your job for less, so you can't compete. Or maybe they can't, because of higher transportation costs and worse infrastructure. It doesn't matter, because offshoring is the thing to do.
Location: Desert; Status: Forgotten
“When international organizations declare a crisis over and refugee camps are closed, what happens to those who remain?” Close to one million people fled Libya as the violent fights of the Arab Spring began and a civil war ensued in 2011. Choucha, a refugee camp close to the Libyan border in Tunisia, housed many of them and was officially closed in June 2013. Roughly 400 refugees still live among the remains of the UN-camp. A short glimpse into their lives. [Vimeo. Partly German, English starts at 1:18] [more inside]
Ey Up Le Tour
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is available to watch for free in its entirety thanks to the Internet Archive. [more inside]
Not as equal as advertised.
Black Women of Brazil
From the ‘mammy’ to the Carnaval ‘mulata’, black women’s representation on Brazil’s airwaves remains very limited.
Although Brazil is a multi ethnic society some have remarked on the whiteness of the teams’ coaching staffs and fans in the stands of the 12 Brazilian stadiums.
Earlier in May there had been a particularily Brazilian protest of “somos todos macacos”
Brazil has a long history of constructing discourses of national unity, while simultaneously pushing their black and indigenous populations to the margins.
From the ‘mammy’ to the Carnaval ‘mulata’, black women’s representation on Brazil’s airwaves remains very limited.
Although Brazil is a multi ethnic society some have remarked on the whiteness of the teams’ coaching staffs and fans in the stands of the 12 Brazilian stadiums.
Earlier in May there had been a particularily Brazilian protest of “somos todos macacos”
Brazil has a long history of constructing discourses of national unity, while simultaneously pushing their black and indigenous populations to the margins.
Justin Bieber: A Case Study in Growing Up Cosseted and Feral
Vulture feature that is weirdly sympathetic to the life of a billionaire popstar. (Bonus: no country for true beliebers, the real estate guide)
29 Celebrity Impressions, 1 Original Song
Rob Cantor (link to Bandcamp page) performs an original song in 29 perfect celebrity impressions... including a dolphin! (SLYT)
Previously: 10 Second Songs
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