October 17, 2011
Occupy Wall Street, how it started
Occupy Wall Street started informally through social media. But who and how? Gilad Lotan has reconstructed the origin of #OccupyWallStreet for Reuters.
Six Characters in Search of an Author
The Strange World of Gurney Slade was a "sitcom" starring Anthony Newley (previously). Airing on British television in late 1960, the show's self-reflexivity, bizarreness, and deep experimentation was truly ahead of its time for television. All six episodes are available on YouTube. [more inside]
Surely this..
A new BBC Documentary titled This World: Spain's Stolen Babies alleges that up to three hundred thousand Spanish infants were stolen from their mothers at birth over a fifty year period, and then sold by the Catholic Church through illicit adoption services.
Everything's out of whack again.
Playboy and Hunter S. Thompson
The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright
The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright: Why the Current Crop of Twentysomethings Are Going to Be Okay
One-stop publishing.
Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers. “Everyone’s afraid of Amazon. ... If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out."
(Some adventures in self-publishing.) [more inside]
My Kid Was An Honor Student At The Punk Rock Academy
The Other F Word (trailer) is a new documentary about punk rock fatherhood. Blog Musical Urbanism argues that it mostly focuses on the materialistic Southern California punk rock scene.
Many Lives, Furnished in Middle-Period Moorcock
Intrigued by the trolley problem? Here is a link to the full text of Michael Moorcock's 1971 SF novel Breakfast in the Ruins. Moral conundrums at the end of every chapter for you. [more inside]
World Radio Network
Welcome to the World Radio Network, a 24-hour stream tailored for various global regions (in a variety of languages) featuring news and social programming from all around the world. There are a variety of ways to listen, from the internet to AM radio. [more inside]
New York Subway, 1980s
It's as if chocolate was a ninja turtle and peanut butter was your nose
Paris, 17 October 1961
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Paris massacre of 17 October 1961, when the city's police under Maurice Papon murdered dozens if not hundreds of Algerians who were demonstrating peacefully against the curfew they were living under. A number of commemorations were held in the city. For French speakers, an hour-long 1991 documentary on the massacre, Le silence du fleuve, can be viewed in its entirety on Médiapart. (The title means 'the silence of the river': many of the dead drowned after being thrown in the Seine.)
Clichés Never Get Old(er)
The Hippocratic Oath of a Photographer circa 1937. Still relevant today. HEY YOU WITH THE CAMERA! STEP AWAY FROM THE EGG!
1 button or 2? Answer: No buttons
"What kind of a**hole enters his game in the IGF before it’s done and then decides to delay release for 2 years?" The creator of Monaco discusses the philosophy of one or two buttons in gaming. His answer: None.
(NSF People who don't like Penny Arcade.)
Quantum Levitation
Sapphire + Superconductor + Gold + Saran Wrap + Liquid Nitrogen + Magnets = Quantum Levitation. [more inside]
Help Wanted: Busybodies With Cameras
People in Korea now have a new vocation available to them: snitching on other civilians for cash payouts from the government.
Flask Awards +10 CHA
Why it's MC Frontalot (Previously, Interviewed by Metafilter) has a new music video, "Critical Hit" which imagines the future of his career as a D&D game.
The Mysterious Stones of Bologna
In 1602, a cobbler strolling outside of Bologna discovered a colorless stone with the curious ability to "accumulate light when exposed to the sun and to emit it in the darkness." His lapis solaris was to be the chemical sensation of the century. [more inside]
Pons-Brooks
A reanalysis of historical astronomical observations suggests that Earth
narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago in 1883. [more inside]
Temporal Anomaly of The Week
The Cynic's Corner, abandoned in 2003, features a handful of reviews for various Star Trek TV franchises, as well as Andromeda (ostensibly a Roddenberry project) and Babylon 5. Each review covers a variety of topics, including the Temporal Anomaly Of The Week, Spatial Anomaly Of The Week, Unexplained Mystery Of The Week, and the War Crime Of The Week. An entertaining read, and serious time sink, for anyone currently skipping past Lwaxana Troi episodes on Netflix Instant.
Bicycling the Globe at a Bargain
35 days, 2822 miles through 9 states at a cost of $252.51 ($7.21 per day). George 'the Cyclist' Christensen spends a good part of each year bicycling through a different country and wild camping in places like Iceland, Turkey, China, the foot of Mt Fuji and around Lake Victoria; And writing about his travels on his blog from libraries and internet cafés. For the past eight years, too, he has also followed the Tour de France after first watching upwards of 70 films [in 12 days] at the Cannes Film Festival.
Pay to play, pay to win
"The days when you could buy a videogame one day and get an expansion a year later are, sadly, lost in time. Instead, it seems there's a constant bombardment of DLC and microtransaction items all vying for our credit card numbers. They're in everything, from MMORPGs through to singleplayer shooters, and it's only getting worse as time goes on." - An investigation into microtransactions and gaming.
"Re-organizing" a Canadian institution.
The government of Canada has decided to end the Canadian Wheat Board's single desk system for the sale and export of wheat and barley. This has been on the Conservative agenda for some time now, despite some claims that farmers support the Wheat Board. Many are suggesting that the repercussions could stretch beyond wheat farmers; including concern for the town of Churchill, known mostly for the local bear population, which does 95% of their port business through the Wheat Board.
A history and primer of the Wheat Board.
Previously
It's co-op week on metafiler?
A history and primer of the Wheat Board.
Previously
It's co-op week on metafiler?
Cold Night In The Potteries
There is one argument that has taken the soccer world by storm: Can Barcelona win on a cold, windy, night at The Britannia Stadium, home of Stoke City?
Conceived by Andy Gray (talked about on the Blue before) when he said: “I don’t know if Barcelona have ever gone to a place like the Britannia Stadium and suffered the kind of onslaught from Tony Pulis’ team of long throws and free-kicks or been up to a place like Blackburn and been beaten up by their long ball into the box.”
There has certainly been analysis of this thorny question.
Of course, Stoke is in the Europa league this year. If they were to win the competition and advance to a Champions league spot, we might actually see this fixture.
Reel History of Britain
The Reel History of Britain, a BFI/BBC co-production, brings archive film into the nation’s living rooms. The footage shown in the series has been selected from the hundreds of thousands of films and programmes preserved in Britain’s film and television archives. We are complementing the series by making many of the films featured in The Reel History of Britain available online in their entirety, alongside expert commentary from the nation’s archive curators.
Centenarian completes full marathon
Feeling tired today? Back a little sore from that yard work? Morning run left your knees aching? Maybe you just had a lazy weekend. Well, in case you aren't frustrated enough with yourself for what you're (not) accomplishing, enjoy the story of Fauja Singh. Yesterday, the 100 year old became the oldest person ever to complete a full marathon, finishing the 42 km Toronto Waterfront Marathon in under 9 hours (beating his personal target). [more inside]
Big Food Makes Big Finance Look Like Amateurs
"Agribusiness is concentrated to a point that would make a Wall Street master of the universe blush. Vast globe-spanning corporations, many of them US-based, dominate the industry."
Tom Philpott, writing in Mother Jones, says Big Food makes Big Finance look like amateurs
women's self defence
Judo Jymnastics SLYT
Occupy George
Occupy George is an attempt to convey the current wealth distribution of the United States by using dollar bills as a medium. But is it legal?
Hate mail from in front of the iron curtain
During the cold war Wartburg and Skoda exported cars from the Eastern Bloc to the United States. An action that was . . . controversial. One dealership received both love and hate mail.
The Co-op Wars
"Think of 'co-ops' and you might conjure up images of bulk food stores and tie-dye wearing hippies. But in the 1970s, co-op wars raged in the Twin Cities, dividing communities and fracturing the young movement. In this documentary, producer Maria Almli interviews those who were there. Learn how the co-op wars began--when a secretive group in support of Marxist principles began retooling operations for the newly emerging hippie grocery stores--and how members found themselves in the midst of a car bombing and violent takeovers."
A look at the heated, sometimes violent conflict over the direction of the co-op foods movement from Minneapolis/St. Paul's KFAI Radio. [more inside]
Three Minute Thesis
The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition challenges higher degree students (PhD and MPhil) from Australia and New Zealand to communicate their research in three minutes to a non-specialist audience. Contestants are judged according to communication style, comprehension and engagement criteria. Here's the 2011 Winner, Matthew Thompson (University of Queensland): Suspects, science and CSI. [more inside]
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