October 16, 2015
The Broad Experience
If you spend any amount of time thinking about the business world and how women work within it, you must listen to The Broad Experience podcast. There are currently 70 episodes, hosted by the very smart, inquisitive, and (perhaps most importantly?) British, Ashley Milne-Tyte. I feel like I have never heard these kinds of discussions between women that are as erudite, insightful and pull no punches like these conversations that she is hosting. [more inside]
Hüsker Dü - top-shelf Land Speed Record-era live footage
Hüsker Dü were caught on tape on September 5, 1981 at the 7th St Entry, Minneapolis, MN, blazing through a familiar set they'd recorded weeks earlier for Land Speed Record. Set 1
The real surprise is when they returned to the stage later that night to showcase the slower, more melodic side of the band, complete with four unreleased tracks. Set 2. [more inside]
The real surprise is when they returned to the stage later that night to showcase the slower, more melodic side of the band, complete with four unreleased tracks. Set 2. [more inside]
"he's my zucchini."
"To help shed some more light on this subject matter, here are 12 terms related to sexual and romantic identities that are beginning to receive more attention in the media but that are still regularly absent or erased from conversations currently taking place in popular culture." Noah Michelson sheds light on sexual and romantic identities in a beginner's primer at Huffington Post.
The Middle East Friendship Chart.
Chivalry has fuck all to do with women, and everything to do with horses
"That’s all chivalry is: basic guidelines for how not to be a sack of shit. And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die." Myths Retold (previously) clears up a few errors about chivalry. It's a handy guide to privilege, human decency, history, and Arthurian legend ("It turns out you’re not even allowed to see the grail if you thought about a boob once"). [more inside]
"..the Glaswegian origin story is definitively a crock of shit."
Who Owns Chicken Tikka Masala? Complicating a popular origin story.
Alzheimer's caused by fungi?
"Our findings provide compelling evidence for the existence of fungal infection in the central nervous system from Alzheimer's disease patients, but not in control individuals." Nature magazine just published a study that claims that Alzheimer's disease is caused by fungi. If this is true, this is amazing and incredibly exciting.
(By the way, I've just noticed that our very own cstross was the one who shared it on Twitter.)
There once was a dildo in Nantucket
He's-at-homes The dildos of the wives of the whalers of Nantucket. Except this isn't exactly about that, really, it's about loneliness, fading port towns, myth making and removing women from history.
Aisla Craig, home to curling stones, birds, and a bit more
Not just any rock: curling stones' special granite comes from Scotland
From the study of his run down house, David B. Smith pointed to where the sea crashed against the west coast of Scotland. "Out there," he said, "is Ailsa Craig." Not even a dot on the horizon could be spotted, but the 73-year-old retired judge and curling historian extraordinaire knew the exact location of the island that supplies the granite for the Olympic curling stones.Ailsa Craig is where curling stones are born, but also a protected bird sanctuary, and home to a historic light house and golf course. [more inside]
“THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS, WHICH IS TO SAY, NOTHING MUCH.”
Camus' Web. by Jacob Eugene Horn [McSweeney's Internet Tendency]
Wilbur the pig was unhappy. In the two short months that he had been alive, Wilbur was certain he experienced the peaks and valleys of happiness and despair. When he was but a runt, he was free to prance about, but now that he was under the care of Farmer Zuckerman he was confined to a simple pig pen.
Sequins to outfit The Golden Girls, Designing Women, Dame Edna, and more
Braxae Vintage Co. is an Etsy shop with over 700 vintage beaded and sequined dresses, jackets, tops, and the rare pant suit for sale. You can also browse the hundreds of items the shop has already sold. [more inside]
You've Got Mail
Now you can phone your cat
Worried that FifiCortexieKins has wandered off into the woods mousing and is lost? The cat GPS tracker allows you to monitor the location, and previous ramblings, of your cat. It weighs 25 grams, is claimed to be precise to three metres, contains a sim card, and incorporates a microphone and speaker so you can converse with your cat wherever they are. (Ad contains the French for meow)
Coming out on Facebook
"The future of war belongs to the bots." [and the cyborgs]
Missing hiker Geraldine Largay's remains have been located.
The likelihood that there's interesting or important math is pretty high
Shinichi Mochizuki and the impenetrable proof - "Fesenko has studied Mochizuki's work in detail over the past year, visited him at RIMS again in the autumn of 2014 and says that he has now verified the proof. (The other three mathematicians who say they have corroborated it have also spent considerable time working alongside Mochizuki in Japan.) The overarching theme of inter-universal geometry, as Fesenko describes it, is that one must look at whole numbers in a different light — leaving addition aside and seeing the multiplication structure as something malleable and deformable. Standard multiplication would then be just one particular case of a family of structures, just as a circle is a special case of an ellipse." (previously: 1,2; via) [more inside]
Hunting Witches With Walt Disney
Under the name Attaboy Clarence/The Secret History Of Hollywood, Adam Roche creates very long, very in-depth podcasts about classic Hollywood how it relates to broader sociopolitical trends. Clocking in at 171 minutes, Hunting Witches With Walt Disney goes into the background, motivations, and effects of the Red Scare in Hollywood and the House Of Un-American Activities. The nearly 3 hour long podcast spans a cast of characters including Budd Schulberg, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Dorothy Comingore, Edward Dymytryk, Dalton Trumbo, Walt Disney, Humphrey Bogart, and of course, Howard Hughes
Bathe in Sith Lord Remorse
A 249,999,900% return on your investment in a photo
A $2 photo purchased at a junk store has been verified as only the second known image of Billy the Kid. It may sell for $5 million.
The steam must flow
After a long wait, PC developer/publisher/hivemind Valve have finally begun to roll out their big push for the living room space. [more inside]
The Library of Scott Alexandria
Scott Alexander writes a lot. He's a psychiatrist, but talks about all kinds of stuff (in his about page, he calls out cognitive science, psychology, history, politics, medicine, religion, statistics, transhumanism, corny puns, and applied eschatology). Every time I read something of his, I'm struck by how reasonable he is. Evidently, I'm not alone: his posts each attract hundreds of comments. And he gets linked here a good bit. So a long-time reader of his combed through all his writings of the past decade-or-so and assembled this best-hits list. It's going to take me several happy months to get through it.
Ermahgerd!
Watch the Skies!
Watch the Skies is a megagame which throws hundreds of players into the roles of world governments, corporations, the media, alien races and even the pope (Oh, don't forget the Whales) in a day long game of alien invasion* [more inside]
Now THAT'S a piano.
SLYT, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, 1976. Have fun. It's just a little joyful thing.
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