November 25, 2013
An Illusionist in Skyrim
This is the diary of me attempting to play Skyrim using only Illusion magic: I'm not allowed any weapons, armour, or magical items, and I can't attack anyone directly.The first entry is here, or you can see all entries to date here.
What is Cicada 3301?
On January 5th 2012, an image was uploaded to various image boards. It contained two messages. One was obvious & easy to read. In white letters on a black background it said:
Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301As promised there was another message hidden inside the image. It was the start of a bizarre, as yet unexplained chain of complex hidden messages leading those who could solve them on a journey across the Internet and around the world towards a destination none of them could predict with certainty. Is it a highly evolved ARG? Is it a recruitment campaign for the NSA? Welcome to the mystery of Cicada 3301.
Cheap Bourbons, Ranked
"The sale totaled $691.5 million"
NYTimes: At $142.4 Million, Triptych Is the Most Expensive Artwork Ever Sold at an Auction
It took seven superrich bidders to propel a 1969 Francis Bacon triptych to $142.4 million at Christie’s on Tuesday night, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. William Acquavella, the New York dealer, is thought to have bought the painting on behalf of an unidentified client, from one of Christie’s skyboxes overlooking the auction.[more inside]
Exiting the Vampire Castle
‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.In Exiting the Vampire Castle, Mark Fisher finds two recurrent bad dynamics in online left-politics debate: identity-essentialist witch-hunting and neo-anarchist fatalism. Jodi Dean agrees with the diagnosis: [more inside]
I started competition at age 11, and left at 16
Framed as a letter in words and pictures to Magnus Carlsen, the new World Chess Champion, French comic artist Fanou recalls her experiences as a girl with an interest in chess and all the reasons why she still holds that world at a distance.
An army of hipster-friendly bacon ninjas
Why Did 9,000 Porny Spambots Descend on This San Diego High Schooler? A voyage into the strange underworld of spambots, shady marketing, and non-human intelligence.
Beyond Tarot Drome
UK-based performance artist Marissa Carnesky previously created Carnesky's Ghost Train, a dark ride with a theme of the experience of women immigrants, which after touring is now permanently located in Blackpool, England. More recently she produced Carnesky's Tarot Drome, an interactive extravaganza with roller-skating and wrestling versions of the major arcana.
For a Follow Up, a Pirate Plays Daft Punk on 8 Rubber Chickens
The Monkey Island Theme, as performed by eight 3 1/2 inch floppy drives.
Know Thyself - Or Not
FDA orders personal genetics company 23andMe to stop selling tests. 'Last Friday, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to the most popular personal genomics service, 23andMe, ordering the company to stop selling its genetic testing kits. According to the FDA's letter, the company has been advertising that its tests offer diagnostic information for a variety of human conditions, placing them in the category of a "medical device" and thus within the agency's jurisdiction. Accordingly, the FDA has been working with the company since 2009 to get 23andMe's testing approved. Now, the FDA has apparently run out of patience.' [more inside]
Dogfood
You might now be running in your head to a well worn path of justified resistance, phoning up the ol’ gang, circling the hippocampian wagons of amygdalian resistance. Hold on a sec, pilgrim. Yahoo urges its employees to switch from using outlook to Yahoo Mail in a bizare internal email. Meanwhile, as Microsoft abandons the hated practice of stack ranking Yahoo adopts it as its own. But hey, they have Katie Couric now!
Your desert island reading list. Now with affiliate links!
A motherfucking website.
This is a motherfucking website. And it's fucking perfect. Seriously, what the fuck else do you want?
Surely "Fascinating" by Leonard Nimoy is just around the corner.
"Actor and Internet Personality" George Takei has a new fragrance out for the holidays. Yes, it's called exactly what you expect it will be called.
Mmmmm, Nutella... Ewwww, Cheez Whiz...
Pro-Bono Promo In which artist Dori Pankowska puts product logo/names on walls, using the product itself. It's not graffiti, it's like free advertising with free samples! (Why hasn't anybody thought of this before?)
Scientists join #manicuremonday
Seventeen Magazine encourages its readers to post pictures of their nail polish on twitter every Monday, using the tag #manicuremonday. Starting last week, working scientists and engineers have been contributing their own fingers - often beautifully manicured - doing sciencey stuff. The movement was started by scientist Hope Jahren. [Slate, HuffPo] [more inside]
I know you're tired of loving Kanye, but...
Watch Bound 3 — a shot by shot remake of Kanye West's music video for Bound 2, starring James Franco and a smokin' hot topless Seth Rogan.
Brazil explained in 100 images
What Is Art?
San Diego is buzzing with our recent art celebration of The Complete Frida, the first and only exhibition worldwide where Frida Kahlo’s paintings can be seen in one place. Some paintings, especially from Kahlo’s early years, have never before been seen. Presented by SEE Global Entertainment. Small, trivial caveat, all the paintings are reproductions done by an uncredited group of Chinese artists - a fact the promoters buried until they were recently called on it
That time a beer wasn't just a beer.
65 years ago Vincent Speranza filled his helmet with beer to provide refreshment to some wounded in Belgium in WWII. Visiting in 2009 to commemerate the 65th anniversary of the battle, Vince learned that his act was immortalized on the label of Bastogne’s Airborne beer. The beer is typically served in ceremonial helmets.
STREAMCEPTION
Giant Bomb: Streamception. Next gen is truly here.
Extreme Measures May Mislead
How to think about "Science Studies Prove My Position", for politicians and all non-scientists. Any collation of measures (the effectiveness of a given school, say) will show variability owing to differences in innate ability (teacher competence), plus sampling (children might by chance be an atypical sample with complications), plus bias (the school might be in an area where people are unusually unhealthy), plus measurement error (outcomes might be measured in different ways for different schools). However, the resulting variation is typically interpreted only as differences in innate ability, ignoring the other sources. This becomes problematic with statements describing an extreme outcome ('the pass rate doubled') or comparing the magnitude of the extreme with the mean ('the pass rate in school x is three times the national average') or the range ('there is an x-fold difference between the highest- and lowest-performing schools'). League tables, in particular, are rarely reliable summaries of performance.
An Open Door to Extraordinary Worlds Opens Wider
The 92 Street Y in New York has just launched an amazing online resource, 92Y On Demand, with recordings from their massive catalog of some of the interviews and performances that have occurred there going back to 1949. Some of the many speakers include Kurt Vonnegut, Chinua Achebe, Sherman Alexie and Sapphire, Dylan Thomas, Maria Bamford, Lou Reed, Dan Savage, Junot Díaz and Jamacica Kincaid, Maurice Sendak, Ruth Reichl with Ann Patchett, David Rakoff, and Leonard Lopate, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Bread and Circuses are HOT!
Ill conceived ad campaigns seem to be par for the course these days (I personally threw up my hands twenty years ago when Janis Joplin was first used to sell Mercedes Benz), but you have to marvel at the thinking behind Covergirl's recent marketing tie-in with the film "Catching Fire" that assumes people would enjoy looking like the air-headed, blood-thirsty residents of the Capital. The Guardian weighs in.
The Ninth Wave
The late 19th century Armenian-Russian painter Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky created some truly spectacular paintings of seascapes that capture the beautiful, shimmering essence of the tumultuous waters. The marine artist gained recognition for his impeccable ability to recreate the expressive quality of oceans with over half of his 6,000+ paintings from his lifetime being devoted to the subject.
the aspiration curve from youth to old age
Commenting on work by Hannes Schwandt, Peter Levine writes: "Many young adults feel that they are not yet getting what they want from life but expect to get it in five years. In middle age, people are disappointed not to have seen their expectations met and rate themselves dissatisfied. They also expect life to get worse–it won’t offer important new satisfactions or successes, but their health will decline as their years run out. Instead, life does offer new rewards in the later decades, and so people are pleasantly surprised. Mean self-reported satisfaction is the same at age 70 as it was at age 30 (and much higher than it was at 50). What could we do to avoid the dreaded U-curve of satisfaction?" [more inside]
"Because someone had to fight for photographers"
Haitian photographer Daniel Morel has been awarded $1.22 million on a copyright claim against Agence France-Presse and Getty Images (previously) [more inside]
Walter White outsources production to China
Mike Power's book, Drugs 2.0 was a hugely insightful and interesting overview of the rapidly shifting landscape that is Novel Research Chemicals.
At a recent drugs conference, Power presented an overview of his work
He looks like he's just eaten a ball-boy and is trying not to get caught
"When I showed Mrs. Sits she said "Shouldn't they take their heads off?" But I explained they're not meant to be people so that would just be silly..." -- Football mascots observing the minute's silence on 11/11, courtesy of the When Saturday Comes forums.
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