October 27, 2013
How to get out of an Egyptian jail
Free, Tarek and John:
Longread by Justin Podur about the campaign to free Canadian filmmaker John Grayson (among his films is the South Africa-based Proteus) and doctor Tarek Loubani, who were on their way to Gaza via Egypt in August 2013 when they were detained. Insight into what went on behind the scenes and what political and strategic calculations were made.
The longform.com guide to standup
The longform.com guide to standup. Not a ranking, but rather a collection of links to long form articles about some legendary stand-up comedians. [more inside]
Welcome to Offal Pudding Lane
Take a fly-through tour of 17th century London! Six students from De Montfort University have created a 3D representation of London before the Great of Fire of 1666. The digital model is based on the area surrounding Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire began. The project is the winning entry in the Off The Map competition, in which students were invited to build 3D models based on maps at the British Library.
The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think
Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.
“Western culture is Islamically forbidden”
When the car exploded, the same two words occurred to him, and to the ticket taker, and to every other person who saw or heard the blast, which could be heard on the other side of Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city: Boko Haram. That neither they, nor practically anyone else in Nigeria, knew what Boko Haram was exactly or why it would want to bomb a bus station was beside the point. Officially, according to the Nigerian government, Boko Haram is a terrorist group. It began life as a separatist movement led by a northern Nigerian Muslim preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, who decried the country’s misrule. “Boko Haram” is a combination of the Hausa language and Arabic, understood to mean that Western, or un-Islamic, learning is forbidden. In 2009, after Yusuf was killed [BBC, The Guardian]—executed, it’s all but certain, by Nigerian police—his followers vowed revenge.[more inside]
Free art books online from the Metropolitan and Guggenheim Museums
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim offer 474 free art books online. 99 art catalogs from the Guggenheim. 375 MetPublications. An example: Masterpieces of Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art [more inside]
An animator explains why she studies physics
Lions Tigers & Bats!
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog
The Cost of Living
The Rising Cost of Cancer Drugs: "New drugs could extend cancer patients’ lives—by days. At a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars. Prompting some doctors to refuse to use them."
Polyamory: "When Three Isn't A Crowd"
This latest article focuses on a triad raising a child in Atlanta. CNN.com has spent more than a little time on polyamory throughout the years (unusual for a 'mainstream' publication. As usual, there's the 'poly could end up hurting the children' counter-arguments, but this is certainly a more even-handed portrayal than in a lot of other arenas, and is not particularly preachy in either direction.
Lou Reed (1942 - 2013)
On Amazon and world retail domination.
Ex-Amazon employee Eugene Wei on Amazon's "profitless business model" fallacy, and why the claims that Amazon is not profitable are fundamentally wrong. "If Amazon has so many businesses that do make a profit, then why is it still showing quarterly losses, and why has even free cash flow decreased in recent years? Because Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail. This is one area where the press and pundits accept Amazon's statements at face value. Given that giant mission, Amazon has decided to continue to invest to arm itself for a much larger scale of business. If it were purely a software business, its fixed cost investments for this journey would be lower, but the amount of capital required to grow a business that has to ship millions of packages to customers all over the world quickly is something only a handful of companies in the world could even afford." Wei also previously touched on this in Amazon, Apple, and the beauty of low margins.
Wes Anderson's The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders
Wes Anderson's The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders Last night Ed Norton hosted Saturday Night Live, and this short film trailer parody was the standout. [more inside]
Anytime I hear the wind blow, it will whisper the name "Edna"
Marcia Wallace, the Emmy-winning voice of Edna Krabappel on “The Simpsons” and earlier Carol Kester, the receptionist on the 1970s sitcom “The Bob Newhart Show,” has died at 70
NYT
LAT [more inside]
Stock up on the handyman's secret weapon
From 1991 to 2006, there was one show that stood ready to help Canadian men with much needed advice on D.I.Y., hunting, fishing and other wildlife pursuits, not to mention married life and other challenges of modern life. Now the entire archives of the Red Green show are available on youtube.
Two Thumbs Up
Statistics Done Wrong: a free guide for scientists
Statistics Done Wrong is a guide to the most popular statistical errors and slip-ups committed by scientists every day, in the lab and in peer-reviewed journals. Statistics Done Wrong assumes no prior knowledge of statistics, so you can read it before your first statistics course or after thirty years of scientific practice.
"It's a cake with two tiny dolls that look like us. EAT A SLICE."
Thru Tokyo
« Previous day | Next day »