November 1, 2013
Guidebooks for Time Travelers
Numerous "Stranger's Guides" written for 19th Century tourists can be found on the Internet Archive. A sample: New York (1828). Boston (1857). Washington DC (1884). Montreal (1872). London (1828). Paris (1822). United States and Canada (1838).
Swift and Certain
Smart on Crime
I argue that (blue-collar) crime—theft and assault, in all their varieties—is still a real and major problem; that its economic and social costs are vastly under-appreciated; that its primary victims are disadvantaged minorities and poor people; that the current criminal-justice system wrongs them by under-enforcing the law against those who victimize them (who are, of course, mostly people like them in racial and class terms); that better criminal-justice policy could give us less crime and less incarceration; and that better and more equal law enforcement ought therefore to be as central a progressive political goal as better and more equal education or health care.[more inside]
"I don't have a name yet. We're not even on a level."
Reggie Watts on death metal, specifically Exhumed's album Necrocracy
"I talk about death in my comedy because it is something real, but also something that we don't necessarily like to talk about. That's why death metal talks about it too. Death metal is about when death is occurring, or has occurred, and all the mythology that exists beyond that: demons and zombies and hell. And lots of decomposition. And the music is fascinated with that because it's a fascinating topic: we all think about this stuff. Then the sound of the music matches what the content is: It just wouldn't sound right to have that kind of music paired with lyrics about, say, going to your favorite coffee shop and seeing a cute girl. That just wouldn't work. Although, come to think of it, that would be funny to hear." Reggie Watts is an internationally renowned vocalist/ beatboxer/ musician/ comedian, and an aficionado of death metal, as seen in his review of Exhumed's album, Necrocracy (streaming on Bandcamp)
LA to NY in 30 minutes
The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works have finally announced the successor to the famous SR-71 Blackbird. The new spyplane, an unmanned drone called the SR-72, will perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions like its forbearer, but unlike the Blackbird it may also perform a strike role. Using Aerojet Rocketdyne scramjets mated with standard military jet engines, the plane will cruise at hypersonic speeds up to Mach 6, almost doubling the SR-71's top speed of Mach 3.3.
One Strap vs. Two Straps
Broadway Bomb 2013
Chinese students at UW-Madison speak out
Channel C WISC is a YouTube channel where UW-Madison undergrads from China talk about the experience of being Chinese at a big public American university, with the aim of both helping newly arrived international students understand what's going on around them, and helping American students have some sense of what's going on with their Chinese classmates. Videos include "Why Chinese Students Don't Party,", "Chinese Names,", "Pretty Chinese Women", "Who are the Chinese Second Generation Rich?", "Why Chinese Students Don't Speak English," and many more.
Tifo
The Major League Soccer playoffs have begun and the MLS Cup is on the line. After beating Colorado this week, the Seattle Sounders will now face their fiercest rivals, the Portland Timbers, in a two leg Western Conference semi-final Cascadia derby. They'll have to beat both the Timbers and the Timbers Army, who will no doubt produce yet another incredible display of tifo.
A number sentence for 5 cookies and 6 cups of whole milk?
The Washington Post reports on a ridiculous mathematics test for first graders administered under New York's Common Core standards initiative. [Common Core previously.]
The New America
Every frame of "The New America" was laser engraved into a block of maple then photographed.
The Mpemba paradox
Someone appears to have an answer to why warm water appears to freeze more quickly than cool water, a phenomenon known as the Mpemba effect after Erasto Mpemba who noticed the effect in freezing ice cream. The reasons why have eluded scientists and prizes have been offered for a solution. Now a group headed by Prof. Xi Zhang out of Singapore has proposed a promising theory. The answer as they see it lies in energy stored in the covalent bonds within the water molecules which are affected by the temperature of the water. (via the Presurfer)
Stalwart And Steady And True
All I want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague away kit
Football, the beautiful game? Not if you see this parade of horrible, horrible football kits. Yes, including the Dukla Prague away kit.
The Pills of Last Resort
The Frankenstein Notebooks
You can read online original hand-written versions of all of the known manuscripts of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in its various stages of editorial development. "All of these notebooks can now be viewed in high quality, resizable page images accompanied by TEI-conformant transcriptions, which enable several different ways to sequence and view the pages of the notebooks, including according to which parts have been written by Mary or Percy Shelley."
496 years ago, bittersweet day in church history, great for a potluck.
Out of love and concern for the truth, and with the object of eliciting it, the following heads will be the subject of a public discussion at Wittenberg under the presidency of the reverend father, Martin Luther, Augustinian, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and duly appointed Lecturer on these subjects in that place. He requests that whoever cannot be present personally to debate the matter orally will do so in absence in writing.
Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences Commonly Known as The 95 Theses by Dr. Martin Luther on October 31, 1517. or 496 years ago today. [Original Latin][more inside]
Better Homes and Costumes
Was the tooth fairy a stripper?
Women from the DC Youth Poetry Slam Team have a thing or two to say about women's costumes and the choice to be a sexy nurse or a mother-fucking monster. (transcript)
Millions of people follow his biblically inspired advice.
The Prophet: Meet Dave Ramsey, the most important personal finance guru in America. There's probably no better way to learn about the financial lives of individual Americans than to spend a few hours listening to The Dave Ramsey Show, which airs in every major media market in the United States...Listen long enough and you realize you are hearing the raw, unfiltered tragedy of the economic plagues facing 21st-century America. [via]
Should a six-year-old be permitted to read Robert Caro?
The Perils of Precocity by Thomas Beller.
Engineer of the Exploding Whale Dies
The hero responsible for the exploding whale video has died. The video is one of the first links I remember sending to people because of its awesomeness and still makes me laugh. Talk a little walk back through Internet history.
Not Fade Away
But I start to notice, as the interview progresses, that while he is giving me fascinating answers – long, discursive stories about all sorts of things – they’re not quite answers to the questions I actually asked. -- Terry Pratchett in winter
G.I. Jane (Fill Me Up)
An anonymous female protagonist takes on a phallic army in Mrzyk & Moriceau’s erogenous epic [caution: auto-play video, *deeply* NSFW] for Jackson and His Computerband.
Smartphone Wars Go Nuclear
It begins. A consortium of mobile phone makers including Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Ericsson and Sony have launched a barrage of patent suits against Google and major Android handset makers such as Samsung, Huawei and HTC. Unlike previous patent suits from the major shareholders, these suits are on the rocket docket of Eastern Texas.
Henry Rollins gets relationship advice from RuPaul.
Henry Rollins gets relationship advice from RuPaul [SLYT] in which we learn that "making room for other people . . . is as punk rock as hell."
A = Ayn, B = Britain, C = Cameron, D = Doh!
Ayn Rand: More Relevant Now than Ever
The speaker was the CEO of Saxo Bank, Lars Seier Christensen. As the head of an investment bank based in socialist Denmark, Christensen is particularly enraged by high taxation, social welfare and banking regulation. "The world is on the wrong track," he told us. "A malady that has long beset Europe is currently spreading to the US". Apparently we are experiencing a "socialist revival" to which "Ayn Rand is the only answer".
The 25 Twitter people you’ll regret meeting at a tweet-up.
The 25 Twitter people you’ll regret meeting at a tweet-up. "Guy who shouts “GRUMPY CAT! HORSE eBOOKS!” at you, as though memes work as punctuation marks or greetings in real life"
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