October 26, 2011
a new meaning for the term 'drum head'
Can the human head itself function as a percussion instrument? Why, yes! Yes it can!
"We just wanna see - YOU STUPEFIED!"
You've seen the popular LMFAO's Party Rock, but have you seen Potter Rock? The Christmas light show? How about the Pokemon! or Indian versions? Speaking of Indian parodies, have you seen Thriller recently?
Why do we sleep?
Free as in Free.
"If you buy bus or train tickets for me, do not give my name! Big
Brother has no right to know where I travel, or where you travel, or
where anyone travels. If they arbitrarily demand a name, give a name
that does not belong to any person you know of. If they will check my
ID before I board the bus or train, then let's look for another way
for me to travel." Richard Stallman's rider. Via.
One minute and 18 seconds of pure joy
Assault on the Minibar
In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... It's the big one! Andrew Leman reads The Call of Cthulhu for the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast. Previous readings include The Haunter of the Dark (previously), From Beyond (previously), The Picture In The House, The Cats of Ulthar and Cool Air. But who is behind the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast? g33k of the w33k interviews Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer.
Did McDonalds cause the decline of violence in America?
Arrrrrrrrcheology!
Blackbeard's cannon has been salvaged off the North Carolina coast after 300 years, as part of the Queen Anne's Revenge project. [more inside]
"It gets better" is not enough
He's usually kinda funny. Not this time. Rick Mercer's rants are well known in Canada. They're hilarious, though biting. What set him off? The suicide of Jamie Hubley, a 15 year old kid who liked to cover Lady Gaga, among others. [more inside]
How Leonard Cohen got his song.
Leonard Cohen's speech from his acceptance of the Prince Of Asturias Award for Letters, whereby he details a moving yet previously untold story about where he received his inspiration. [transcript]
Nokia World kicked off in London today
"We comb our hair each morning. We pick you up from school. We would always send you a birthday card. But it’s not enough.” Nokia's President and CEO Stephen Elop opened Nokia World with this frank assessment of his company - although he has been known for franker assessments in the past.
Despite having created the most popular operating systems in the world for dumbphones (S40) and smartphones (S60), the Finnish giant has been a cause for concern in recent years, withdrawing from the lucrative US smartphone market and struggling to profit from sales of inexpensive phones to the developing world, while reviewers lamented the wasted opportunities in the form factor and hardware quality of phones like the Tron-tastic N8. [more inside]
When you ask what Perry's true nature is – the first and principal thing that defines him – there's just one answer: favors.
The Best Little Whore in Texas Matt Taibbi on Rick Perry.
Amazing! Yakity-Yak Talking Teeth
It started because of an odd ad for denture containers, Tooth Garage (for sanitary, safe parking of false teeth), and became one of the gags in Marvin Glass' collection of novelty products (whose gags would include fake vomit [prev], Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, and more [prev] ); usually an inexpensive prank item or toy, but valuable when used as a promotional item for The Rolling Stones: Yakity-yak Talking Teeth, the history.
Biker rescues a calf from a canal.
NYC 1978-1985: A Fantastic Flickr Photo Set
That is all
Orgy of the Dead
Opt-out?
Visa and MasterCard have decided to start selling information about your purchasing history to advertisers. [more inside]
This cake is not a lie
Have you every wanted to try GLaDOS' chocolate cake or S’Jirra’s Famous Potato Bread with a Nirnroot Salad? We've got Starkos straight from the streets of Hillys, and steak skewers prepared in Inaba's finest lunch stops. If you're thirsty we've got some NukaCola Quantum or Lon-Lon Milk, and there's always FK in the coffee. All these recipes and more from your favourite virtual worlds can be found at Gourmet Gaming
Nullius in verba
The Royal Society, publishers of the world's oldest peer-reviewed scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, has made their journal archive free to access. [more inside]
Nailettes
There are around 30 ancient Egyptian obelisks left in the world. A guide to the obelisks still standing (and some Roman copies), including a timeline of their construction.
"“I feel more like myself when I’m out running,” Chase-Brand said. “I’m a good animal.”
"...officials warned that a woman who ran a more ambitious distance might cause her uterus to fall out." [NYTimes] On Thanksgiving Day, Dr. Julia Chase-Brand, 69, plans to run a 4.75-mile race in Manchester, Conn., where the presence of women will be plentiful and unremarkable. Fifty years ago, when she and two other women ran there the first time, it was a widely publicized act of civil disobedience that became a pioneering moment in female distance running in the United States.
My mind disappeared. When it came back, it was not the same…
I am a quirky young woman whose Mind went Pop. I was 26 when a stroke took away my limbs and speech. [more inside]
"The stakes here are huge."
What happens in Pakistan may yet be the most enduring legacy of 9/11 and the hunt for Bin Laden. 'President Obama ordered a review of all intelligence on the region by a veteran CIA officer, Bruce Riedel. "Our own intelligence was unequivocal," says Riedel. "In Afghanistan we saw an insurgency that was not only getting passive support from the Pakistani army and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, but getting active support."' ISI the Pakistani intelligence agency is actively training and transporting suicide bombers into Afghanistan. [more inside]
"I started by failing"
We all get drowned in paperwork from time to time, but imagine your job required you to go through three miles of paper, identifying quasars and interference from radio signals, by hand?
As a 24 year old grad student, Jocelyn Bell did just that. And what she found was called the "greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century." [more inside]
Iconoclast, Fashion Symbol, Bookbinder, Legend
"There has never, ever been a period in the history of mankind where you have as much conformity as you have now, and yet every person is under the delusion that they are an individual. I'm not. I'm trying to fit in. " So says Michael O'Brien, victorian bookbinder, sage of Oamaru, snappy jacobian dresser and all around good guy. Working in the historic district in the pacific's last remaining Victorian harbour he has inspired a whole traditional craft community around him.
NeverSmell.com
NeverSmell.com "A community for people who can't smell and an educational experience for people who can." [more inside]
NOT OKAY
Burton Holmes, Inventor of the Travelogue
The Burton Holmes Archive has information about Burton Holmes, the travel writer who became the first person to make filmic travelogues. More importantly, they also have a lot of film clips by Holmes and his associate, André de la Varre, who was also a great travelogue maker himself. Watching these clips is not quite time travel, but it is as close as we can get. Take a look at Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1926, Lake Michigan in 20s, Cairo in 1932 and the 1955 Rio de Janeiro carnival. The later films have sound and narration, but I prefer the silent ones. [Burton Holmes previously, André de la Varre previously, and the Travel Film Archive, which runs Burton Holmes site, previously]
Police raid and mass arrests at Occupy Oakland
For weeks, Occupy Oakland had been developing into a miniature city in Frank Ogawa Plaza—renamed Oscar Grant (previously) Plaza by the occupiers—in front of City Hall:
Still, seven days into the protest and there is no longer any room for tents on the plaza’s large lawn. Tents are squeezed together so tightly that in many areas there is no room to move in between them, for me in my wheelchair or for someone who walks. There is more access to the community tents. There is a free school, an art station, a Sukkot tent, a medical tent, a children’s area, a people of color tent, and a quite remarkable food station, where huge batches of soups and beans are made, and tea, coffee, and healthy snacks seem to be abundant. The various projects the camp is working on include installing solar panels, and reclaiming parts of the park as a community garden.Early yesterday morning the occupation was forcibly evicted by Oakland police. Last night, occupiers marched to reclaim the plaza and were again attacked by police using tear gas, flash grenades, bean bag rounds, and possibly rubber bullets. [more inside]
—Sunaura Taylor writing in the excellent Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette from n+1 magazine (PDF, quote from page 21)
the bonds (and bounds) of trust
Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies (ted/yt) - "We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust." (previously)
The Singularity and the economy
When the machines take over, how will people make a living? Paul Allen: Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they'll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever. It's heady stuff. [more inside]
Mmmmmmeeeeeeow!
An exceptional talent, no matter how you define it.
So. While hunting for a live performance of a song from the Beatmania IIDX series, a totally sweet primarily-piano piece known for its near-impossibility to play as a video game, much less on real instruments, I stumbled upon this incredible version, performed by the phenomenal TeppeikunViolin and his lovely pianist assistant.
Of course, it turns out that beyond just having RIDICULOUS chops on the violin, he's also a nerd in the best sense. Not only has he done a great violin cover of the internet sensation "Bad Apple!!", he's also done a cover of the music from the original Legend of Zelda that must be seen, a cover of Super Mario Bros. that makes subtle reference in the background, as any good Japanese Nintendo fan should, to "Kintamario," and a little something he calls "Tetris being played on a Game Boy with a dying battery" that absolutely must be seen to be believed.
Growing Old Gothically
An article in the Guardian asks why do so many Goths stick with their subculture through their adult lives, through career, parenthood and well into middle age. [more inside]
Not Getting Any
"Offstage, with his Fleshlight in his hand, 'D-Bone', who will be flown to Austin to compete in the Air Sex finals next month, didn't break character. 'I feel fantastic,' he said. 'It's always a pleasure to be the best air-fucker in the city. I'm going to have tons of chicks over at my place tonight, with lots of cocaine and drugs.'"--L.A. Weekly covers the Air Sex (Regional) World Championships (kinda NSFW)
People Are Awesome
People Are Awesome (2011 Vers. SLYT)
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