September 16, 2013
A world of equal districts
La Cosa Patento
Kevin O'Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick and current CEO of FindTheBest files a RICO lawsuit against Lumen View for trying to extort, via patent claims, money from FindTheBest, not to mention claiming that calling someone a "patent troll" is a "hate crime".
Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt was diagnosed 9 months ago with Parkinson's and, according to Linda, she "can't sing a note". Linda sang her last concert in 2009, her voice reflecting the impact of the disease.
It's hard to pick out a favorite, there are just so many fantastic hits, especially considering that Linda suffered from stage fright, but...I'll leave you with this simple tune, Someone to Watch Over Me.
Previously on Metafilter.
HEAPS OF BURGERS HEEEEAPS OF BURGERS AND THEN THE MONKEYS AND BANANAS
All Your ***** Belong To Us
Google knows almost every wi-fi password. Of course this means that the NSA also has access to them. Apple might not be much better.
It's been a year, and I still get questions about this daily
In 2012, 32 year old Jeremiah McDonald uploaded to YouTube 'A Conversation with my 12 Year Old Self'. Before long, the quirky and somewhat heartwarming video had been viewed over 10 million times. MetaFilter discussed it here. Here's a follow-up video, in which McDonald discusses the genesis and evolution of the idea: "Making Of" A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self: Needlessly Self-Indulgent Edition
10. Do not enter the Dog Park.
Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York (ca. 1975).
From Mars
Fusion in four years? Hey that's less than 20
"I didn't love my wife before we got married."
And even worse, it seemed that the harder I tried to be sentimental and lovey-dovey, the less it was reciprocated. "But eventually it became clear. Through giving, through doing things for my wife, the emotion that I had been so desperately seeking naturally came about. It wasn't something I could force, just something that would come about as a result of my giving." (SLHuffPo)
Over the Abyss in Rye
If you truly would like to hear this story, first of all you will probably want to find out where I was born, how I spent my stupid childhood, what my parents did before my birth—in a word, all that David Copperfield rot. But truthfully speaking, I don’t have any urge to delve into that. "If Holden Caulfield Spoke Russian" (SLNYer)
Sci-Fi Radio and Beyond 2000/2000x, hours of storytelling from NPR
National Public Radio produced at least two short runs of sci-fi radio dramas in the relatively recent past. The first of these two was Sci-Fi Radio, which was was produced out of Commerce, Texas, and broadcast on NPR in 1989-90. The producers drew their inspiration from some of the best stories from some of the best science fiction authors of the 20th century, including Ray Bradbury, Roger Zelazny, Henry Kuttner, and Poul Anderson. You can read more here on the Old Time Radio Plot Spot, or listen to the series on the Times Past Old Time Radio blog (also on Archive.org). A decade later, NPR revisited the format with 2000X: Tales of the Next Millennia, for which they won a a 2001 Bradbury Award. The official site is no longer online, but Archive.org captured Yuri Rasovsky's site for the series. Rasovsky shared two of those broadcasts and talked about his work in radio with Radio Drama Revival, and you can listen to the rest, as recorded from radio and grouped in an unsorted jumble (with duplicates), thanks to the very generous OTR Sounds.
all the financial advice you’ll ever need
Blogging through Hypercard
"Today I would probably describe Archipelago as a group blog. It was a computer-based system that allowed about a dozen members to regularly post short essays and whimsical observations. Each member had his or her own icon which appeared next to timestamped postings which contained pictures, sounds, and hyperlinks. All pretty standard except for one thing: the year was 1988." The archives of Archipelago show a glimmer of what the social web was to become over the next two decades. [more inside]
Where's lunch?
It's like Shark Week, but for goats
It is Goat Week over at Modern Farmer! Come for the live GoatCam, stay for the goat taxonomy, rules for raising a goat in the city, and a story about the effort to make goats that produced spider silk (previously).
Possibly the end of The Big Bang Theory? (Not the TV show)
Nature covers a brane based theory of cosmological creation... Is the universe a 3D brane created from a 4D star collapsing into a black hole? [more inside]
It's not too often that we come across photos that look like paintings.
Gentlemen, let's talk turkey.
Deals on Wheels
The first online shopping transaction took place from a Gateshead living-room in 1984, sixteen years before Tesco fully launched the web version of their stores. It didn't take place on a BBC Micro or an Acorn, but through Videotex, a service better known by the Francophone world as Minitel (previously).
Active shooter at Navy Yard in SE DC
Streaming video of local DC news as an active shooter situation is ongoing. There are 10 victims mentioned so far at least two police officers are involved. DCist broke the story before any local news stations did. [more inside]
Turning Weapons Into Instruments
Mexican artist Pedro Reyes newest project "Disarm" consists of robotic musical instruments made out of dismantled firearms which were confiscated by the authorities. It is a follow-up to his previous piece "Imagine". [via]
It would have been cheaper to lower the Mediterranean
The cruise liner Costa Concordia is finally being raised (live footage) at a cost of more than $500m, in a delicate refloating procedure. Grounded since the 13th January 2012, when it ran aground at the Island of Giglio at the cost of 32 lives, the Costa Concordia will take 10-12 hours to be refloated, several more months to be prepared for towing and then taken off for scrap. [more inside]
But it can be
Shell help
Explain Shell is a nifty little website created by Idan Kamara that takes the often horrid Linux command line man pages and makes them that much easier to understand, by breaking down a command like ssh(1) -i keyfile -f -N -L 1234:www.google.com:80 host into its component steps.
Croak and Dagger
Taxonomy: The spy who loved frogs. "To track the fate of threatened species, a young scientist must follow the jungle path of a herpetologist who led a secret double life." [Via]
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