January 22, 2008
The last Eyak speaker passes
Chief Marie Smith Jones, 1919-2008. "Eyak language dies with its last speaker." Or download the story directly as an .mp3 from Alaska Public Radio Network
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Detroit Public Schools Book Depository
"This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste...All that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential." (Via Making Light.)
bits are fun
The Way We Gawk
People Are Curious. A 3-foot-1-inch tall man with no legs propelling himself along by his hands on a skateboard tends to warrant a fair share of attention. Kevin Michael Connolly, who was born with no legs, used his X Games winnings (he won the 2007 Silver Medal in Skiing) to travel the world and photograph people's reactions to him.
Hold Please
Joel Johnson of Boing Boing shows up to The Hugh Thompson Show to discuss gadgets but chooses a different topic
Yesterday, I was invited to talk about gadgets onThe Hugh Thompson Show, a television-style talk show sponsored exclusively by AT&T for distribution on the online AT&T Tech Channel. I eventually did talk about gadgets, but in light of AT&T's shocking and baffling announcement of their plans to filter the internet, I thought that a much more interesting and important topic.
The Nutcracker Suite
Strange reunion
Otters in Lithuania
The best/worst in Lithuanian music: the catchy Otter in Love, DJ Dago's rave music, Suopis ir Rambynas' folk music and Mr Valdas Karklelis and his creepy and [NSFW] pervy writhing . [more inside]
Heath Ledger dies
You peed on my car but I still love you. WHY???
Got an embarrassing love letter or humiliating photo from your angsty teenage years you’d like plastered all over the web, perhaps recited aloud and featured in live performances? Thought so
Now if they'd just move back to Boston
Atlantic Magazine opens its archives. Atlantic Magazine announced today that they will drop subscriber-only access to the site, giving full access to every issue of the last 12 years.
Where to start? Well, I particularly recommend David Foster Wallace's fascinating examination of right-wing talk radio (DFW trademark footnotes intact),
Hitler's Forgotten Library, and Eric Schlosser's The Prison-Industrial Complex. (via)
I'm Going To Disney World
Can't afford to get to Disney this year? Worry not: ride the rides on YouTube. There's The Haunted Mansion, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Splash Mountain, The Tower of Terror, Peter Pan and plenty more. The best, though, are the ride-throughs for rides that are no longer there: EPCOT's Horizons, World of Motion and original Imagination are ones I remember vividly from my childhood. Maybe you will too.
...I DRINK IT UP!!
I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! In light of this morning's Oscar noms, here's a site where there will be discussion about There Will Be Blood. Via Projects.
Dispossess the swain
Wharram Percy [1996 vintage Web] was a Yorkshire Wolds village that survived for more than a millennium before being suddenly depopulated. Was it plague, Viking raids or William the Conqueror's Harrying of the North that drove the people from the land? No, it seems it was the sheep.
The main link provides an overview of some of the findings about the village and medieval English peasant life [BBC radio programme] emerging from the decades of archaeological research into Wharram Percy.
The Origin of Emotions
The Origin of Emotions by Mark Devon “I began thinking about emotions while studying evolutionary theory at Harvard University. Learning that adaptations do not evolve unless they help survival, I reasoned that each emotion must have a purpose that helped survival. If I could identify an emotion’s trigger, I could also identify its purpose." [more inside]
Ramak Fazel: 49 State Capitols
Odyssey of State Capitols and State Suspicion. "The story behind an exhibition: postcards, designs, photography, travels, history, stamps and law enforcement." [Via BB.]
Shake, mate.
Bulgarian chess grandmaster Ivan Cheparinov twice refuses to shake hands with English grandmaster Nigel Short before a match. This is forbidden under tournament rules, so Short protests, and here's how it plays out.
The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia
Six new cities are planed in The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia. "The vision is to turn the kingdom into a major industrial power by 2020. Drawings of these new towns depict a cross of the futuristic “Blade Runner” and traditional Arabic design." The cities will focus on petrochemicals, aluminum, steel and fertilizers, and will together have four times the geographical area of Hong Kong, three times the population of Dubai, and an economic output equal to Singapore’s. [more inside]
Harpooned: Japanese Cetacean Research Simulator
Look out below...!
While the US equities markets were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, stock markets around the world took a nosedive, losing billions in equity; the markets in Australia, South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Germany, France, the UK, and more countries have dropped at least 5% each (Canada only fell 4.75%), even though most of those markets had already been seriously down for several days prior. India has been hit particularly hard, at one point down a whopping 11%, tripping their markets' automatic "circuit breakers" for a mandatory time-out period, before scraping back up to close at 8% down. US futures markets are currently predicting a 650+ point drop just at the open Tuesday morning, before even a single trade goes through. [more inside]
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