September 18, 2013
Wired food science
Eater.com breaks down Wired's new food issue, which includes David Chang's essay called "The Joy of Cooking With Science"; Alton Brown on the science behind real-tasting fake chicken, and a piece on umami (recently on AskMeFi).
R/C Carrier Launches R/C Plane
Funny vs LOL subgraph
The definitive difference between Funny and LOL [Warning: dataviz]
The Lockheed-Martin F-35 JSF
Will it fly? The Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons system ever developed. It is plagued by design flaws and cost overruns. It flies only in good weather. The computers that run it lack the software they need for combat. No one can say for certain when the plane will work as advertised. This Vanity Fair article investigates.
Alien Nation
Australia in 2013. We have forgotten our origins and our good fortune, we are blind to our own selfishness. In place of memory we cling to a national myth of a generous, welcoming country, a land of new arrivals where everyone gets a fair go; a myth in which vanity fills the emptiness where the truth was forgotten. -- Julian Burnside writes on refugee policy and alienation in Australia [more inside]
The NSA: We, too, are Americans.
NSA mathematician Roger Barkan's take on NSA survellance of Americans. "As someone deep in the trenches of NSA, where I work on a daily basis with data acquired from these programs, I, too, feel compelled to raise my voice. Do I, as an American, have any concerns about whether the NSA is illegally or surreptitiously targeting or tracking the communications of other Americans? The answer is emphatically, "No."
Chelsea Wolfe, moody drone-folk to gloomy, cinematic post-rock
If you've been tracking gloomy music from witch house sounds to doomy black metal stuff, you might have heard the name Chelsea Wolfe, who contributed to a hazy Halloween-all-year sounding 2-Pac/Notorious B.I.G. mixtape thing and covered Black Spell of Destruction, which was originally by Burzum. There was also her cover of The Modern Age, from the tribute compilation to The Strokes Is This It (prev). Then there are her two past albums: first The Grime And The Glow, which employed lo-fi 8-track tape hiss to add a haunted ambiance, then Apokalypsis, "moody drone-folk" likened to the sounds of PJ Harvey and Scout Niblett. If that catches your interest, great. But may I suggest skip ahead to the current album, Pain is Beauty, "emotionally exhausting in equally mad and enjoyable ways," in which the "permanent Halloween costume" of prior albums is cast aside, and "we get a better sense of her talent and spirit."
"I think the musicality of these poets is often ignored"
The poet Cassandra Gillig mashes up recordings of poets reading their work with the instrumental tracks from contemporary pop songs. She doesn't do this to be "even remotely irreverent," but rather because she believes "pop music has a way of capturing our emotions in their most palatable form & placing pop songs behind poems can guide us incorrectly or correctly but I’m hoping I’m going in a correct direction." Listen: Dylan Thomas with Miley Cyrus, Sylvia Plath with Rihanna and Eminem, Alice Notley with Justin Timberlake, Frank O'Hara with Drake, Hannah Weiner with Beyonce, William Carlos Williams with Wale, Dana Ward with Katy Perry, Dorothea Lasky with Raekwon, Ted Berrigan with Kendrick Lamar, and Richard Brautigan with Mariah Carey.
How To Disappear
"So why might a guy want to go on the lam? [The author of How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found] lists three categories: legal, financial and psychological. He missed one. Scepticism: a cynical itch to find out whether the advice is sound and, if so, whether it's still relevant almost 30 years after it was published. Which is how I came to be...a 'lamster'." [more inside]
Stasi Tech
We've seen the Stasi Fashion, but how about the Stasi camera technology & wireless bugs? High resolution photographs from the Stasi Museum.
WHETHER OR NOT YOU CAN SWIM IN GTA V ... IS VERY IMPORTANT
Cocktail historian is a job? How might I qualify?
Lawyers need bartenders more than bartenders need lawyers. When it comes to cocktails and the names they’re given, a recipe can’t be copyrighted and a name isn’t usually trademarked, and there’s no governing body, no law of the liquor land that stops the duplication of a recipe or a cocktail name. Which makes cocktail naming—shall we call it mixonymics?—special among naming practices in the modern world: It’s the bartender tribe, not the law, that defines prior art."Swizzle Me This," Michael Erard, The Morning News (single link)
Racism, Ridicule, Righteousness and Reactions
"Art was supposed to make you feel things."
Earlier this year, Rainbow Rowell's second novel Eleanor and Park was published to great acclaim. Unfortunately, some parents in the Anoka-Hennepin School District do not share the high opinions of the book. [more inside]
Good Job
In a “third-world” city, a self-styled tour guide might be tipped in return for leading a group of sightseers. In Italy, a Neapolitan street urchin might offer to protect a parked car in return for a gratuity.
In both cases, the inference is clear: if you don’t employ me, I will hurt you. This thinly veiled extortion is the subtext to much tipping: if the propertied individual doesn’t comply with the demands of the semi-employed, something terrible might happen to them or their things. So tipping began essentially as a way to stave off violence by the indigent, forgotten people; it is a social contract adhered to by the privileged class who fear and disdain the less fortunate and are aware of the failure of their own class to create equity.
In both cases, the inference is clear: if you don’t employ me, I will hurt you. This thinly veiled extortion is the subtext to much tipping: if the propertied individual doesn’t comply with the demands of the semi-employed, something terrible might happen to them or their things. So tipping began essentially as a way to stave off violence by the indigent, forgotten people; it is a social contract adhered to by the privileged class who fear and disdain the less fortunate and are aware of the failure of their own class to create equity.
The declassified fashions of East German spies
Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives A collection of images from the book, including more disguises, images of house searches, hand-to-hand combat techniques, hidden cameras, and even fake beards, is available free of charge at Simon Menner’s website. [more inside]
His name is Dr. Chencho Dorji and he is Bhutan’s first psychiatrist
Closure
During the communist coup and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978-1979, thousands of Afghan people disappeared. It was always suspected that most of these people had been murdered, but for many victims this couldn't be proved, which left their family in uncertainty for decades. A war crimes investigation by the International Crimes Unit of the Dutch police however turned up evidence that will end some of this uncertainty. This evidence, in the form of transport orders and death lists for some 5,000 victims has now been put online by the Dutch ministry of justice.
We spent $100 billion and all we got is a space station
As the Cygnus cargo spacecraft makes its initial demostration flight to the International Space Station, the question arises, what is the ISS for?
Death of an adjunct
EagleFilter
Someone strapped a camera to an Eagle. The results are just about as awesome as you'd expect.
We are not here to lead a battle between the sexes
France's upper house of parliament, the Sénat has passed a women's equality bill, which aims to redress some of the persistent inequalities between men and women, in the sphere of pay, jobs and parental leave. [more inside]
How to Write
Writing advice from Oates, Wolfe, Levine, Pynchon, Stein, Welty, DeLillo, Chekhov, Gallant, and Elkin; Baldwin, Miller, Morrison, Vonnegut, Atwood, Nabokov, and Stein again; Maugham, Hughes, Duras, Orwell, Ashbery, Sontag, Creeley, and Steinbeck; O'Connor, Baxter, Didion, Yeats, Hejinian, Cocteau, du Plessix Gray, and Bolaño; Waldrop, Cary, Pessoa, Amis, Carroll, Atwood, and Le Guin; Vinge, Williams, Crane, Creeley once more, Gallant, Vargas Llosa, Mathews, and Wolfe again. [more inside]
Scorpion Dagger
Mostly digital collages made from images found here/there on the internet, a lot taken from northern and early renaissance paintings.
I Want To Be a Rock'n'Roll Star
In 1986, an episode public-access TV show Forestville Rocks began with these words: "Butch Willis has moved into the most selective rock n roll territory, that of the inspirational primitive. Guided by neither the commercial concerns of mainstream pop nor the calculated artsiness of new wave nor the hip rage of punk, Willis stands quite alone; undaunted, he dreams the rock n roll dream..." [more inside]
math into art, hypnotizing and kaledscopic
Doing the wrong things for the right reasons
Introverted teenage girl gets superpowers- it's been done to death, right? Never quite like this. Worm is a web serial updating twice a week since mid-2011 that follows Taylor, a would-be superhero in a crapsack world with the ability to control insects and a truly frightening creativity with that power. Things escalate quickly. Morality is gray. Survival seems increasingly unlikely. [more inside]
The first decade
This is exactly why I often get really good service
A Most Public Humiliation
Boswell's head started to swim. He had been struggling to bowl to left-handers. Suddenly [the batsman] "looked as though he was 50 yards away. He was like a tiny dot. I just couldn't see him. Then I bowled a wide and I heard the noise of the crowd. I bowled a second wide, and the noise got louder and louder and louder." His muscles grew tight. His fingers grew tense. He began to sweat.On the first day of September 2001, promising young fast bowler Scott Boswell came in to bowl for Leicestershire in the final of the C & G one-day cricket tournament against Somerset. A few minutes later, Boswell had given rise to a dark cricketing legend, TV footage that would eventually become one of the most watched cricket clips on Youtube, and his professional career was effectively over. In his first interview since that day, Boswell talks to Andy Bull about what happens after a bowler gets the yips.
"I'll take a Mochachino minus the menacing youth counting ammo..."
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz believes that guns "should not be part of the Starbucks experience." CEO Schultz told CNN that the company is simply making a request "through the lens of civility and respect."
My God, it's full of... everything
Revelations in the field of quantum physics have resulted in the discovery of the Amplituhedron, a jewel-like higher dimensional object whose volume elegantly predicts fundamental physical processes that took the brilliant Dr. Richard Feynman hundreds of pages of abstruse mathematics to describe.
The theoretical manifold not only enables simple pen-and-paper calculation of physics that would normally require supercomputers to work out, but also challenges basic assumptions about the nature of reality -- forgoing the core concepts of locality and unitarity and suggesting that space and time are merely emergent properties of a timeless, infinitely-sided "master amplituhedron," whose geometry represents the sum total of all physical interactions.
More: The 152-page source paper on arXiv [PDF] - Lead author Nima Arkani-Hamed's hour-long lecture at SUSY 2013 - Scans of Arkani-Hamed's handwritten lecture notes - A far more detailed lecture series "Scattering Without Space Time": one, two, three - Arkani-Hamed previously on MeFi - A hot-off-the-presses Wikipedia page (watch this space)
Wladimir Balentien breaks Japan's single-season home run record
Japanese baseball's single-season home run record has been broken. Set by the legendary Sadaharu Oh (still holder of the world career home run record) in 1964, it stood for 49 years. In recent years, several players had come close to breaking it... only to be walked for the rest of the season, by teams managed by Oh himself. The record was broken by Wladimir Balentien, who's from Curaçao -- an island familiar to baseball fans partly for its oddball names which combine Dutch, Papiamentu, and other influences. In affectionate tribute, Notgraphs published this guide to figuring out your Curaçaoan name.
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