October 6, 2011
Happy Ada Day!
Ada Day appreciates and commemorates women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics with events all over the globe. A few links to start the celebration: Ada Lovelace, The Origin. Women@NASA (previously). Ladies Learning Code. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper explaining nanoseconds to David Letterman. AstronomyCast with Dr. Pamela Gay. Hedy Lamarr and other female inventors.
Falcon Punch!
Super Smash Land is a free PC demake of Nintendo's popular Super Smash Brothers crossover fighter. It imagines the game as a cart for the original monochrome Game Boy. More of a PC fan? The latest version of Team Fortress 2 demake Gang Garrison was released a few months ago. If you prefer just to look, there are some gorgeous demake mock-ups made by Junkboy. Previouisly.
Museum of Mathematics, NYC
R.I.P. Professor Derrick Bell
Derrick Bell, Law Professor and Civil Rights Advocate, dies at 80. Bell was a pioneer of critical race theory and the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School. Bell was also a lover of gospel music, and hosted an annual gospel choir concert.
How things work, Big Ben department
As part of a comprehensive site on the workings of the UK Parliament, you can explore in detail the mysteries of Big Ben. Don't miss: [more inside]
Photo of the day
This is a collection of obsessive photo projects conducted over years or decades.
Charles Napier, 1936-2011
unfortunately, i don't know what else to do with my life
Incredibly smooth-voiced singer/songwriter Jay Brannan covers Adele's Someone Like You on acoustic guitar. (The post title is from his website.)
It's for you!
It's a ring-tone! It's place-based community art! Well, you don't have to choose any more. In Locally Toned, artist T. Foley sources sound in the wild to create hundreds of unique ringtones.
Sundrome No More
Known as The Sundrome , I.M. Pei's Terminal 6 at JFK Airport (b. 1970) has been slated for demolition.
A Clumsy Martian, Indeed
Margaret Atwood defines science fiction "Is [the term science fiction] a corral with real fences that separate what is clearly 'science fiction' from what is not, or is it merely a shelving aid, there to help workers in bookstores place the book in a semi-accurate or at least lucrative way? If you put skin-tight black or silver clothing on a book cover along with some jetlike flames and/or colourful planets, does that make the work 'science fiction'? What about dragons and manticores, or backgrounds that contain volcanoes or atomic clouds, or plants with tentacles, or landscapes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch? Does there have to be any actual science in such a book, or is the skin-tight clothing enough? These seemed to me to be open questions."
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
Now That You're Big - a guide for the pubescent, in the style of Dr. Seuss (slightly NSFW)
Aberrican Me - Ross Capicchioni
It's called Jurassic Park, eventhoughmostofthedinosaursinitareactuallyfromtheCretaceousPeriod
The Baron does these things
In Issue 391 of the Batman magazine published by Editorial Novaro there is a Flash adventure titled "The Flash Stakes His Life On You." This comic is the most important literary argument of recent months. The Flash vs. Gurdjieff by Alejandro Jodorowsky. bonus craziness: The comics journal talks to Alejandro Jodorowsky (Sample answer: "This question is too long and annoying for me. I stop to fart.")
The last of the famous international playboys
"The Beatles and the Rolling Stones rule pop music, Carnaby Street ruled the fashion world...and me and my brother ruled London." Reginald "Reggie" Kray and his twin brother Ronald "Ronnie" Kray were the foremost perpetrators of organized crime in London's East End during the 1950s and 1960s. [more inside]
The Walk Again Project
Body suit may soon enable the paralyzed to walk. "In a busy lab at Duke University, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is merging brain science with engineering in a bid to create something fantastical: a full-body prosthetic device that would allow those immobilized by injury to walk again. On Wednesday, Nicolelis and an international group of collaborators declared that they had cleared a key hurdle on the path toward that goal, demonstrating they could bypass the body's complex network of nerve endings and supply the sensation of touch directly to the brains of monkeys."
Better Dead than Red
A glimpse inside the Republican Party's little known Red Map Project: "Last fall, we worked together and achieved unprecedented success with the RedMap Project—an effort to capture legislative majorities across the country in preparation for the decennial redistricting process that will redraw districts for 2012 and beyond. The result was the pick up of an unprecedented 20 legislative chambers and over 700 seats." [more inside]
O poeta é um fingidor
13+ ways of looking at Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography".
The Cruiskeen Lawn, Daily
Give us this day our daily Myles. Sir Myles na gCopaleen's daily column, the Cruiskeen Lawn, ran for 26 years in the Irish Times. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Brian O'Nolan, the man behind na gCopaleen (and whose novels in English - At Swim Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and The Dalkey Archive, were published under the name Flann O'Brien) the Irish Times is republishing a column a day for the month of October. [more inside]
AHH NOT FLICKR, ANYTHING BUT THAT
Going through the Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls will cause you to face your greatest fear - getting caught screaming your face off.
Don't get me wrong, yeah I think you're alright; But that won't keep me warm in the middle of the night
Deja Vu
EVERYTHING IS A REMIX tackles the truly numerous amount of references, call-backs, remixes, quotations, scene mimics, and inspiration parallels found in The Matrix (via) [more inside]
Warning, may contain nuts
The contestants on the grand final of the BBC's The Great British Bake Off were upstaged by the brief 'explicit' appearance of a squirrel. This has apparently shocked a nation. (possibly NSFW unless you work in a zoo/farm/park/pet shop etc)
War Photos Tumblr
Once Upon a Time in War is a photographic retrospect of the Great War, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam and the War on Terror.
"Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas"
In 1971, Hunter Thompson first published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in Rolling Stone. Forty years later, The Daily’s Zach Baron revisits the piece and the town in which it was born, chasing Thompson's ghost through crazy desert car races, a dying local economy and a massive and menacing hacker convention known as DEFCON. (previously)
"Even if you ignore the embarrassing ceremony and clichéd platitudes, few of these awards actually reflected genuine quality or what is happening in mainstream genre publishing today."
British Fantasy Award winner returns prize; Sam Stone hands back award after criticism of judging process. [The Guardian] "Controversy has riven the 40-year-old British Fantasy Awards, with the winner of the best novel prize handing her award back just three days after it was bestowed.
But the organisation and presentation of the awards has been drawing criticism since then, culminating in Sam Stone, the winner of the best novel award – named after American writer and editor August Derleth – announcing yesterday that she is giving it back.
The biggest attack on the awards was delivered by editor and anthologist Stephen Jones, who on Tuesday posted a lengthy blog decrying the organisation of the BFAs and making several allegations against awards co-ordinator and British Fantasy Society chairman David Howe."
"Once there was a shock that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail."
Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. His poetry has been translated into more than five dozen languages and is the living poet who has been translated most into English. He received the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007, and the award page is a pretty extensive source of information. Below the cut I'll include a few of his poems that I've found online, but the best place to start is the poetry section of his website, where you'll also find an interview, video, audio and a list of English translations. Tom Slegh wrote an appreciation of Tranströmer and Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss him briefly on Poetry Fix, and read two of his poems. [more inside]
Survivial of the fittest school of economics?
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