October 22, 2012
A Debilitating Case of Pac-Man Fever
"The original Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was quite the disaster and though it did sell a few million copies many would argue it was the beginning of Atari's end. And rightly so.
Dennis Debro's brand new and properly indie Pac-Man 4k, on the other hand, hopes to make things right by cramming a way more faithful post of the original pill-chomper arcade game to the very same and now very retro machine."
(via IndieGames)
BOYFRIEND REQUIRED
boyfriend_require/README-en.md
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After having spent one too many years not interacting with the opposite sex, I began to feel like I would never find a partner, and so it is with a sense of urgency that I've decided to invite people to contact me here. [more inside]
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After having spent one too many years not interacting with the opposite sex, I began to feel like I would never find a partner, and so it is with a sense of urgency that I've decided to invite people to contact me here. [more inside]
You Should See My Other Hat. Fuck You.
Parrots of the Sea
Researchers think that the late beluga whale named NOC had been trying to speak with a human accent – or at least talk to its keepers. Current Biology has more (PDF link).
Freedom of Information
File FOI requests in different countries Use Alaveteli to create Freedom of Information requests from governments around the world, the full responses will be posted. Read what has been posted US Drones example
UK office, Kosovo office
\mm/
On internet dating
Internet dating destroyed my sense of myself as someone I both know and understand and can also put into words. It had a similarly harmful effect on my sense that other people can accurately know and describe themselves. It left me irritated with the whole field of psychology. I began responding only to people with very short profiles, then began forgoing the profiles altogether...Internet dating alerted me to the fact that our notions of human behaviour and achievement, expressed in the agglomerative text of hundreds of internet dating profiles, are all much the same and therefore boring and not a good way to attract other people. [more inside]
From Joe to Felix
The old and the new videos for Dayvan Cowboy by Boards of Canada. Old (Joe Kittenger's 1960 jump) and new (Felix Baumgartner's 2012 jump). As previously followed on MetaFilter.
You've got an old computer, your're crafty, and you spent way too much time watching "Transformers" as a kid.
Suppose you’ve got an old computer around, just taking up space, and your initial attempts at finding alternate uses for it have not been successful. But you know perfectly well that, according to this super scientific pie graph, there must be better recycling ideas out there on the net. Let’s have a look at some of them, shall we? [more inside]
Heeeeey, green eyed lady!
Lo Pan Style! Yes, it's a Gangnam parody. But how many Gangnam parodies feature a cameo by James Hong?
Bob Schieffer: debate modarator as interviewer and ref
Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer continue their trend of moderating the first and last presidential debates, as they did in 2004 and 2008. Both grew up in Texas, and got their starts in journalism there, too, both covering the JFK assassination in 1963. Following Lehrer's role as moderator in this year's presidential debate, subsequent moderators have been under significant scrutiny before and after their performances, and Schieffer, who has covered all four of the major Washington beats, is ready for his role in the political process, in the middle of partisan divide, which is deeper than any time he can recall from his 43 years in Washington. [more inside]
Online Catalogue of Japanese Prints
Japanese Prints Online - The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts provides an on-line catalogue for its collection of 18th- and 19th-century Japanese prints, which includes over 600 prints made by Japanese artists between the middle of the 18th century and the turn of the 19th century.
Obama and Romney battle it out, rap style
President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney will have the final debate of the US Presidential race tonight. Yawning at the thought of a formulaic back and forth, while secretly hoping for a rap battle? Then look beneath the fold for examples of explicit lyrical parodies. [more inside]
Cat-Bounce.com
Cat-Bounce.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their bouncy cats wedged into our browsers, or why.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
USA? USA? USA?
Mark Rice writes about historical urban and colonial photography; specifically the portrayal of American colonial acquisitions and the imperfect "American Dream" captured by the NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970's. He's also a regular contributor to Forbes magazine, constantly measuring America's policies and self-regard against that of other countries. His blog "Ranking America" portrays many of these measurements using good old-fashioned bar graphs. [more inside]
Six scientists' sentence-shocker.
Six natural disaster experts and one government official were sentenced today to six years in jail for not having warned the populace of the major earthquake that hit L'Aquila, Italy in April of 2009 (previously). [more inside]
"Jack kept climbing beanstalks but none ever got him as high as that first one."
Outlawed by Amazon DRM
Outlawed by Amazon DRM: A couple of days ago, my friend Linn sent me an e-mail, very frustrated: Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation. Leaving her without recourse. [via] [more inside]
Eigenbinder
The hard numbers behind scholarly publishing's gender gap - The Chronicle of Higher Education investigates the nature of gender disparity in science and humanities publishing, with the help of researcher Jennifer Jacquet in collaboration with Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington, whose Eigenfactor tool (previously) is used to map the intersection of gender and authorship in JSTOR articles from 1665 to 2011. [more inside]
Paradise*
The sky is a deep cobalt blue; coconut palms, orange-limbed and yellow-fringed, sway in the steady trade winds. There are still breadfruit trees and pandanus trees and flame trees with brilliant red blossoms. Two hundred yards to the north, a coral reef meets the full, transparent blue violence of the Pacific. There is just one problem, though you could stare at this palm grove for a lifetime and never see it. The soil under our feet, whitish gray in color with flecks of coral, contains a radioactive isotope called cesium 137. In high enough doses, it can burn you and kill you quickly; at lower levels, it just takes longer to do the job, eventually causing cancer.(via)
Abracadabra, No More Banking Crisis
IMF Economists are suggesting that The Chicago Plan, first proposed in 1936 as a way to avoid another Great Depression, is the answer to our current economic woes. [more inside]
Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time"
Simon Critchley on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time: 1 - Why Heidegger Matters. 2 - On "mineness". 3 - Being-in-the-world. 4 - Thrown into this world. 5 - Anxiety. 6 - Death. 7 - Conscience. 8 - Temporality (previously) [more inside]
Still, he DID try to put the ark in a museum
The Sessions
The Sessions, which opens nationally on October 26th, is a film depicting the true story of the therapeutic relationship between the disabled poet Mark O'Brien and the professional sexual surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene, to whom O'Brien lost his virginity at the age of 36. The film, adapted from O'Brien's moving essay "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate," was written and directed by Ben Lewin, who, like O'Brien, contracted polio at the age of six. [more inside]
A chat with Mark Eitzel and Neil Hamburger
Mope-rock titan Mark Eitzel (former frontman of American Music Club) gets some constructive criticism of his excellent new LP Don't Be A Stranger from "America's $1 Funnyman" Neil Hamburger.
This is the sixth video of Eitzel's Life Lessons video series where he solicits career advice. After having a reformed AMC crumble after two great albums last decade, as well as suffering a heart attack in 2011, it's a treat to see Eitzel's fit and working again.
Liberate Little Ears!
On the 40th anniversary of the release of "Free To Be... You and Me," a three-part piece in Slate examines the genesis and impact of this influential album and its accompanying TV special.
Art Book Bonanza
A few days ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art published online 368 full text titles also downloadable as pdfs. They range from major exhibition catalogues such as the 1983 Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library or the 1992 Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, exhaustive lists of holdings (European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volumes I and II), art books like Degas: The Artist's Mind or The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints, facsimile editions such as The Cloisters Apocalypse: An Early Fourteenth-Century Manuscript, social history titles covering subjects such as fashion or dance, technical manuals for those wanting to know how The Care and Handling of Art Objects works and much, much more.
Hugh Tracey's African music recordings
Like folk enthusiasts and field recordists John and Alan Lomax did in the US, Englishman Hugh Tracey documented an astonishing amount of traditional music. Tracey's love was the music of central and southern Africa, and his recording work came at a crucial time in the history of the region, when, due to repression from Christian missionaries as well as great social change and migration, traditional music of various kinds was fast disappearing. The hour-long audio documentary Discover and Record: The Field Recordings of Hugh Tracey is an excellent introduction to the man and his work, and is chock full of some absolutely fantastic music. [more inside]
The players in a mutualistic symbiosis: insects, bacteria, viruses, and virulence genes.
One of the many problems farmers of various kinds of legumes need to deal with is the pea aphid. They reproduce incredibly fast and live by sucking the sap out of the plants, an electron micrograph of one in action. However, while they are terrifying parasites of legumes, they have their own yet more horrific parasites, a parasitoid wasp. Here is a really nice close up picture of one doing its thing, a video of the act, and here is a brain meltingly horrific video of a dissection of the mummified aftermath 8 days later. Essentially, these wasps deposit their eggs in a pea aphid and the growing larva feeds on it, developing there for about a week, and then consuming the host from the inside out like a Xenomorph. When it’s done, the wasp larva dries the aphid’s cuticle into a papery brittle shell and an adult wasp emerges from the aphid mummy. Legume farmers love them, and you can even order their mummies online these days. However, farmers noticed that the wasps didn't work as effectively on all of the aphids, and so researchers went to work figuring out why. It turns out that all aphids have a primary bacterial endosymbiont living inside their cells, in addition to and just like a mitochondria, and that many have some combination of five other secondary endosymbionts. Interestingly, two of those other five, Hamiltonella defensa and Serratia symbiotica have been shown to confer varying levels of resistance to the parasitoid wasp, allowing the aphid to survive infection. However, it turns out that there is yet one more layer to this story, [more inside]
Where The Wild Things Really Are
Maurice Sendak's (probable) inspiration. Campbell's blog is the antidote for anyone bored with religion: Barbarella and Xenu, evolution from the simple to... the simple, how God evolved (possibly backwards), and more. [more inside]
Recession? What Recession?
UK dividends hit new record in Q3 2012: "Dividend payments in the UK hit highest quarterly total of £23.2bn, up 10.4 per cent in the third quarter compared with last year, according to Capita Registrars." [more inside]
"one can quickly find themselves on the wrong side of an argument at a materials handling convention"
no stairway?
Q: How many miles is it to the crab nebula? How does one even figure this out?
A: The cosmic distance ladder! Here's a talk by Fields medalist Terrence Tao on methods for indirect calculation of distances to astronomical objects. Here's Tao's blog post on the subject, including the slides for the talk. And here's a Wikipedia page. [more inside]
Bipedal robot walks a tightrope
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