October 19, 2014
Cubist Reggae
Cubist Reggae. From the mind of Aaron Funk, aka Venetian Snares, comes an EP of sharply angular, yet weirdly chill, grooves, all in a variety of unusual time signatures (7/4, 5/4, 15/8, and 21/16).
The bitterer the betterer.
As a taster, it’s important to know that compared with sour or salty, bitterness is slow to affect our palates. The first two are very simple chemical phenomena and require only the simplest of cellular mechanisms to fire off their signals to the brain. Bitterness, like sweetness and umami, requires an intermediate molecule, something called a G-coupled protein. It takes a little longer to do its thing, and this time dimension of tasting is something that you always need to pay attention to.
An enthusiastic public reading journal.....
Super Intelligent Humans are Coming
The story of the Mamas and the Papas, as "an epic tone-poem"
Mama Cass opened a live performance of Creeque Alley with the following: "Everywhere we go, people ask us how we got together. We got tired of answering that question, because everybody does ask us*.... John has written an epic tone-poem of historical nature describing our very get-together, and so we'd like to sing it for you now. Cue the tape." If it's a bit too fast for you to catch all the references, Creeque Alley (dot com) spells it all out line by line, thanks to "painstaking research, some guesswork and a lot of help from many people," including Richard Campbell and his official Cass Elliot website. [more inside]
And if the guest wants to stay at the house, the house is there…
On 27 June 2014, Puʻu ʻŌʻō Crater of the Kīlauea Volcano in Hawaii started a new lava flow, beheading a previous flow. The flow headed northeast through the Puna district towards Pāhoa, passing right by the Kahoe Homesteads subdivision. At the moment the flow is stalled short of Apa`a Street in Pāhoa, but it could resume and ultimately cut the town in half. What to do? [more inside]
"A master gambler and his high-stakes museum."
Walsh agreed to pay Boltanski for the right to film his studio, outside Paris, twenty-four hours a day, and to transmit the images live to Walsh, in Tasmania. But the payment was turned into a macabre bet: the agreed fee was to be divided by eight years, and Boltanski was to be paid a monthly stipend, calculated as a proportion of that period, until his death. Should Boltanski, who was sixty-five years old, live longer than eight years, Walsh will end up paying more than the work is worth, and will have lost the bet. But if Boltanski dies within eight years the gambler will have purchased the work at less than its agreed-upon value, and won. "He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses. He’s probably right," Boltanski told Agence France-Presse in 2009. "I don’t look after myself very well. But I’m going to try to survive." He added, "Anyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the Devil."—Tasmanian Devil is the story of David Walsh and his Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, as told by recent Man Booker winner Richard Flanagan.
The author admits that he ought to know better
Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock. Hat tip to Kate Beaton's tumblr, where Nonsense Novels is also available as a pdf download from the NYRB, with an introduction by Daniel Handler. [more inside]
"...to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."
carne vera sacra
Family Planning: The short, long and speculative issues
Some interesting recent links on family planning in the short, long and speculative senses.
- Catherine Rampell examines the "information gap" surrounding birth control and family planning amongst young people with lower levels of education.
- Sarah Perry examines the history of fertility transitions over the last 300 years.
- Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom examine the potential effects of human genetic selection in the next 50 years. [more inside]
- Catherine Rampell examines the "information gap" surrounding birth control and family planning amongst young people with lower levels of education.
- Sarah Perry examines the history of fertility transitions over the last 300 years.
- Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom examine the potential effects of human genetic selection in the next 50 years. [more inside]
“Look! Sister Mary Lydia, look. There’s a fireball out there.”
"Only the pen of a Dante could do justice to the sights and sounds that occurred in the St. Clair-Norwood neighborhood that hellish afternoon." Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the East Ohio Gas Explosion, “when fire rained down and streets literally collapsed." Three above ground tanks holding liquified natural gas leaked, caught fire, and exploded, leveling one square mile in Cleveland and killing 130 people. It also served the backdrop to local author Don Robertson's beloved novel The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, which follows the adventures of a nine-year-old boy on that day.
Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We've All Been Waiting For
I am a white, middle class male professor at a big, public university, and every year I get up in front of a hundred and fifty to two hundred undergraduates in a class on the history of race in America and I ask them to shout white racial slurs at me.
The results are usually disappointing. [more inside]
Alzheimers Insiders
How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal.
As Dr. Sid Gilman approached the stage, the hotel ballroom quieted with anticipation. It was July 29, 2008, and a thousand people had gathered in Chicago for the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease. For decades, scientists had tried, and failed, to devise a cure for Alzheimer’s. But in recent years two pharmaceutical companies, Elan and Wyeth, had worked together on an experimental drug called bapineuzumab, which had shown promise in halting the cognitive decay caused by the disease. Tests on mice had proved successful, and in an initial clinical trial a small number of human patients appeared to improve... There would be huge demand for a drug that diminishes the effects of Alzheimer’s. As Elan and Wyeth spent hundreds of millions of dollars concocting and testing bapineuzumab, and issued hints about the possibility of a medical breakthrough, investors wondered whether bapi, as it became known, might be “the next Lipitor.” Several months before the Chicago conference, Barron’s published a cover story speculating that bapi could become “the biggest drug of all time."[more inside]
"Tell me if you hear the fence rattling..."
Life Academy of Health and Bioscience is a small public high school in Oakland, California. In 2011 a small group of student poets evolved, calling themselves "Rapid Fire" .
"At a recent “spoken word” event, senior Monica Mendoza performed her poem "Faggot" . With steady determination backed up by thoughtful research, Mendoza explained why people should never use the word. Her crescendo invoked the names of young gay men who lost their lives because of their sexuality. “Every time you use the word faggot…tell me if you hear Bobby Griffith’s prayers begging for God to forgive him for being gay/ tell me if you heard the truck smash him to death…/ tell me if you hear the fence rattling after Matthew Shepard was tied and tortured."
(The original article in the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Teaching Tolerance" project site)
Nyeah nargh eeah fwa fwa
Cursors
Cursors is a fascinating maze game where you have to cooperate with others with very limited ways of communicating.
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