August 4, 2014
The Streisand effect is alive and well
To date, Mr. Queen is the only artist who has taken this kind of action - other artists and publishers seem to understand Escher Girls & other similar sites are fair use and criticism, and that fan discussion, positive or negative, is important and helpful to their business. (In fact, the creators I’ve interacted with are either fans of EG, or expressed disagreement but know that it’s fan criticism.)Escher Girls is a blog that exists to criticise and point out the more egregious examples of bad anatomy and sexy contortions to be found in American comics. It was subjected to DMCA takedown notices by cartoonist Randy Queen, perhaps best known for nineties Image Comics classic Darkchylde. Once the news spread, he doubled down by threatening legal action for defamation. As an attempt to stifle criticism, it failed miserably.
The study of human thought & behavior without direct contact with either
The British Museum has published on its frequently informative blog a call for citizen archaeologists to help digitize its Bronze Age Index via a crowd-sourcing site called MicroPasts, which uses the open source PyBossa crowd-sourcing framework that also powers Crowdcrafting. The results will eventually be integrated with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (previously), which features a gigantic image database of finds categorized by period (e.g. Bronze Age or Medieval) and object type (e.g. coins or brooches).
Baseball, Football, COBOL
Looking for a great technical skill to develop to make you all the more marketable in today’s increasingly fast-paced industry? Have you considered COBOL?
The cost of journalism
True Plagiarism
How UCLA flooded on a sunny day
Last Tuesday afternoon, a 30-inch water main burst beneath Sunset Boulevard on the northern edge of the UCLA campus, creating a geyser dozens of feet high. It took more than three hours to shut off the flow of water; by then, eight to ten million gallons of water had been released. The water flooded the UCLA campus, damaging the newly renovated Pauley Pavilion and trapping hundreds of cars in underground parking structures. [more inside]
Four weeks later, you move to Florida.
Your wardrobe should always revolve around you, not the latest trend
Dressing your age: 20s, 30s (part 1), 30s (part 2), 40s, 50s, 60-plus. All links men's fashion. [more inside]
"We lost our deposit."
Robot vs. Shark (not a made for SyFy movie)
My hat is beautiful! SPLENDID!
YuMex - Yugoslav Mexico is a 45-minute documentary by Miho Mazzini about Yu-Mex, the genre of music comprising Yugoslav interpretations of Mexican music.
The Rise Of Europe’s Religious Right
“A bomb with a long fuse has been lit,” said Sylvie Guillaume, a French MEP supportive of abortion rights and LGBT rights, who recently stepped down as vice chair of the largest center-left bloc in the European Union’s parliament. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.” [more inside]
Your godmother was Elizabeth Zimmermann?
Channeling Elizabeth: Recreating a Family Heirloom: The sweater was threadbare and holey, but it had clearly been much loved - and, as it turned out, it had been knit by one of the greatest knitters of all time. Elizabeth Zimmermann (1999 NY Times Obituary) popularized knitting in the round, re-introduced the continental method of knitting to the US, and was dedicated to greater clarity in knitting instructions. She also came up with a much-used formula for sizing proportions (EPS), the I-cord, and encouraged knitters to experiment and be creative. [more inside]
"Shh..."
The Year of Outrage
"It is a spellbinding narrative, a multilayered tale of murder, insanity, and mystery replete with shocking twists and turns. It is a startling pastiche of late-nineteenth-century characters, from the most elite figures of Austin society to the poorest African Americans. Yet amazingly, it is almost entirely absent from the annals of history." Before London had its Ripper, before H.H. Holmes had his Murder Castle, Austin, Texas had its very own Servant Girl Annihilator... [more inside]
Just some music for Monday (It's the "this")
[LuckyMe's Claude Speeed] may have labeled this his Summer mix, but it isn’t all sunshine and good times – instead, it’s somewhere between Kanye’s Cruel Summer and Fennesz’s Endless one. 90+ minutes in length, it hypnotizes you with a succession of beatless music by CFCF, Sevendeaths, Richard Skelton Tim Hecker and Speeed himself… then, at the mix’s climax, the world comes crashing in on you.
"Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies”
"When anything had to be changed or repaired, it appeared to pain him physically. For twenty years the bar sagged in the middle like a plough mule’s back. A carpenter warned him repeatedly that it was about to collapse; finally, in 1933, he told the carpenter to go ahead and prop it up. While the work was in progress he sat at a table in the back room with his head in his hands and got so upset he could not eat for several days." A history of McSorley's Old Ale House from the 1940 issue of The New Yorker.
The three Chicken Wars, and their (less than) lasting impacts
In the records of human conflicts, there are at least three Chicken Wars. Two left little mark on the world at large, and the third resulted in some strange work-arounds for heavy tariffs. The first was Wojna kokosza, the Chicken or Hen War of 1537, when an anti-royalist and anti-absolutist rokosz (rebellion) by the Polish nobility resulted in near-extinction of local "kokosz" (an egg laying hen), but little else. The second was an odd spin-off of the more serious War of the Quarduple Alliance that lasted from 1717 to 1720. Though most of the activity happened in Europe, there were some battles in North America. The Texas manifestation was the capture of some chickens by French forces from a Spanish mission, and a costly overreaction by Spanish religious and military men. The third Chicken War was a duel of tariffs during the Cold War, with the only lasting casualty being the availability of foreign-made light trucks in the United States. [more inside]
Charles Darwin's Beagle library
Charles Darwin's Beagle library "As a research vessel HMS Beagle may not have had the internet, but she did have an impressive state-of-the-art library of about 400 volumes. " (via)
In a not-so-quiet corner of Graves County...
Now in its 134th year, the Fancy Farm Picnic is the biggest event in Kentucky's political calendar. Held on the first Saturday of August, the gathering includes bingo, raffles and tons and tons of barbeque. And then, of course, there are the political speeches. This year, Republican incumbent Mitch McConnell squared off against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. PBS has video of the stump speeches and, given that the candidates have yet to agree upon any debate locations or times, this may be their only meeting in a public forum before the November election. The Washington Post provides a explainer of the event.
to end all wars
First world war – a century on, time to hail the peacemakers
"On the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War, we should remember those who tried to stop a catastrophe" [more inside]
Surprise lap dances are not cool.
Stephanie Woodward is a 26 year-old Floridian woman who blogs about dating. Ms Woodward is an attorney who happens to have spina bifida. [more inside]
Sometimes you gotta say...
LA Weekly Film Critic Amy Nicholson offers a contrarian take on Tom
Cruise's famous couch-jumping moment in How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last
Real Movie Star — arguing that the events of 2005
irrevocably changed our relationship with celebrity, and that Cruise's
career as a serious actor was a major casualty. You've seen it, too. You can probably picture it in your head: Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his career.
There's just one catch: It never happened.
"a story about how Steam, Twitter and the App Store came to exist"
Consider the Holy Bible as a product in a marketplace. It has several attractive qualities, foremost among them the tantalizing possibility that it contains the true word of a being who created the universe. But it has several worrisome drawbacks as well. Like most written anthologies it has poor replay value when compared to something like Spelunky; after you read it once you know more or less how it goes. It features a relatively weak Physical Rights Management scheme; for example, you don't need to purchase one for your household if you can simply borrow it from a friend or read it in a local church. Even its branding as a 'perfect document' becomes something of a double-edged sword; the first, purportedly perfect edition might seem very desirable indeed, but who is going to buy Holy Bible: Religious Text Of The Year Edition when the original is supposed to be immaculate? How are you going to make corrections, utilize analytics data or market additional 'content'? Where will your fine sponsors place all their full-page advertisements: After the crucifixion or before?—Form and its Usurpers is a long essay by Brendan Vance [previously] about videogames, Hegel, form, content, what "free" means, how capitalism ruins everything and what to do about it.
Google detects child porn images in user's gmail, leading to arrest
Google's updated Terms of Service state explicitly that the company automatically analyzes all email content to create targeted advertising. This case, in which Google identified child porn images in a user's email message, leading to his arrest, seems to be one of the first known instances of Google monitoring personal gmail accounts for illegal activity. The arrest raises questions over the privacy of personal email and Google's role in policing the web. [more inside]
Crude Translation: "Happy Heartbeat"
Those robotic dancers of J-pop, World Order (previously-ly-ly-ly) have a new short video titled "Jungle Wakudoki" in which they encounter a guy in a gorilla suit (as well as some oddly Caucasian jungle folk). It's part of a promotion for Toyota Asia Pacific which includes a contest to win a trip to Tokyo by uploading a video of you "doing the Wakudoki".
Slug Solos
Riding the rails, safely
Railbikes are pretty self-explanatory. You take a bike, attach an extra wheel sidecar-style, jump on some railroad tracks, and ride. There's no need to steer, so you can look around as you pedal. You stick to abandoned railroad tracks so there's no surprises either. It's not a new idea, dating back well over 100 years to the first bikes, and recently even custom bike builders have devised their own versions. More at Flickr on the railbike tag and in the railbike group. There's even a book about it .
Union Street Guest House woes
A NY hotel fines guests $500 for negative reviews. The press notices. Yelpers take revenge -- a dozen or so reviews this morning have turned into more than 200 at the moment, warning of, among other things, a "MAJOR SPIDER INFESTATION."
Why the Comcast guy is always late
The Verge talks with current and former Comcast employees about life as a Comcast repair/install technician. [more inside]
RIP Jim Frederick
Journalist and author Jim Frederick has passed away in San Francisco. Frederick was the author of Black Hearts, an account of the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings in Iraq by U.S. Army soldiers. He was 42.
The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Microsoft Research, and Adobe Research have presented a technique for reconstructing an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. For example, the method can be used to extract intelligible speech from video of a bag of potato chips filmed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass. [more inside]
terrible consequences . . . the execution of an innocent man
Fresh doubts over Cameron Todd Willingham's execution (Previously)
For more than 20 years, the prosecutor who convicted Cameron Todd Willingham of murdering his three young daughters has insisted that the authorities made no deals to secure the testimony of the jailhouse informer who told jurors that Willingham confessed the crime to him.
Since Willingham was executed in 2004, officials have continued to defend the account of the informer, Johnny E. Webb, even as a series of scientific experts have discredited the forensic evidence that Willingham might have deliberately set the house fire in which his toddlers were killed.
But now new evidence has revived questions about Willingham’s guilt: In taped interviews, Webb, who has previously both recanted and affirmed his testimony, gives his first detailed account of how he lied on the witness stand in return for efforts by the former prosecutor, John H. Jackson, to reduce Webb’s prison sentence for robbery and to arrange thousands of dollars in support from a wealthy Corsicana rancher. Newly uncovered letters and court files show that Jackson worked diligently to intercede for Webb after his testimony and to coordinate with the rancher, Charles S. Pearce Jr., to keep the mercurial informer in line.
Ass and You Shall Receive
Lights Out
« Previous day | Next day »