November 8, 2015

"We were to become paymasters for the CIA around the world."

The mysterious collapse of Australia's Nugan Hand bank (SLYT) has long been a favorite subject of the espionage mythos, with its chairman's suicide, the disappearance of its former CIA co-founder Michael Hand, the bank's ties to the CIA, apparent drug money laundering... basically, talk of ties to every CIA conspiracy theory of the last 30 years... the stuff of legends. Except, of course, that Michael Hand has been found by Australia's 60 Minutes, living in Idaho Falls, where he runs a business manufacturing combat knives for the special OPs crowd. Here is the full 60 Minutes report.
posted by markkraft at 10:35 PM PST - 22 comments

Boolosian logic

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever goes like this:
Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for “yes” and “no” are “da” and “ja,” in some order. You do not know which word means which.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:53 PM PST - 60 comments

"with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids’’

Sex, Death and Mushrooms
posted by telstar at 9:26 PM PST - 24 comments

“the few comprehend a principle, the many require an illustration.”

Frederick Douglass's Faith in Photography by Matthew Pratt Guterl [The New Republic] How the former slave and abolitionist became the most photographed man in America.
He wrote essays on the photograph and its majesty, posed for hundreds of different portraits, many of them endlessly copied and distributed around the United States. He was a theorist of the technology and a student of its social impact, one of the first to consider the fixed image as a public relations instrument. Indeed, the determined abolitionist believed fervently that he could represent the dignity of his race, inspiring others, and expanding the visual vocabulary of mass culture.
[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:56 PM PST - 4 comments

The Conversation We Want

Writing for Agence France-Presse, Rob Lever details the struggles of major news organizations and online content aggregators to keep comment sections from devolving into ‘pie fights’ at best to hateful and abusive at worst. Some sites have simply eliminated comments rather than deal with the negativity. In 2014, The New York Times and The Washington Post announced that they would form a partnership, the Coral Project, aimed at creating a commenting system that, “might diminish the ‘incentive to be the loudest voice’ and would foster communities of commenters[.]” [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 7:41 PM PST - 46 comments

Later That Same Life

56-year-old (Peter) Stoney Emshwiller is interviewed by his own 18-year-old self from the year 1977. In the late 70s teenaged Stoney Emshwiller filmed several hours of himself pretending to interview his future self. Emshwiller went on to be an actor, novelist, editor, filmmaker and artist. Recently he released a sizzle reel - still on its way to being a longer film - of his older self answering some of those questions. Poignant and funny, this concept reminds us that the closest any of us can get to time traveling is still through the magic of recorded media.
posted by NorthernLite at 5:45 PM PST - 16 comments

The Notorious RBG

'Marty Was Always My Best Friend': Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Love Story, an excerpt in Jezebel from the new book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. [Don't read this unless you're ready to sob like a baby.]
posted by Ragini at 2:57 PM PST - 16 comments

Tweet it like it is

Abortion in Ireland is illegal with the sole exception of when the mother’s life is in immediate danger. Comedian Gráinne Maguire is using Twitter to focus more attention to the issue by live-tweeting the details of her period to Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny. [more inside]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 2:32 PM PST - 22 comments

Broken

"San Bernardino is the poorest city of its size in California, mired in its fourth year of bankruptcy. Industries left, the middle class shrank, the working poor struggle to rise and the destitute fall. Yet there are people in San Bernardino who work tirelessly to resurrect the city for the next generations. Although their paths are different, their trajectories meet at the same question — can San Bernardino be saved?"
A slow, powerful documentary by photojournalist Liz O. Baylen about a sad, desperate city not far from here.
posted by growabrain at 1:34 PM PST - 20 comments

Tribal sovereignty and Native American weed.

About a year ago, the U.S. Justice department issued a memorandum allowing tribal nations to grow and sell marijuana. In June of this year, The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, located in South Dakota, announced plans to open a marijuana resort (See also). The tribe signed a contract with Colorado-based Monarch America to help them with the venture. A member of the tribe is creating a documentary of the process. The resort was slated to open on December 31, 2015. An extensive grow operation was underway to provide more than thirty strains of marijuana in a tightly-controlled environment. As of yesterday, all growth operations have ceased, the plants may have been destroyed, and the future of the Tribe's plans is uncertain.
posted by yesster at 1:27 PM PST - 22 comments

Just in time for Thanksgiving

Dakotaraptor ruled Hell Creek Formation as lethal predator The bumps serve as reinforcement points for long wing feathers, marking the first concrete evidence that large raptors had wings. "It really would have made this like a turkey from hell," he said.
posted by Michele in California at 1:16 PM PST - 15 comments

MARPUSS

It’s a Thursday morning, and you’re sitting around with nothing to do. You had a job, but it exploded, so now you’re stuck here in your boring house. Suddenly, your phone rings. Murder, Cheat, and Fuck Your Way Through Boston
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:32 AM PST - 46 comments

One of the stranger events in aviation history

What do you do when the Japanese bomb your airfield and smash the right wing of your only airplane? The strange tale of the DC-2 ½
posted by pjern at 10:11 AM PST - 19 comments

My family's always been in meat.

RIP Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface in the classic horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:23 AM PST - 29 comments

Translating gender: Ancillary Justice in Five Languages

In Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice (Orbit Books: 2013), the imperial Radch rules over much of human-inhabited space. Its culture – and its language – does not identify people on the basis of their gender: it is irrelevant to them. In the novel, written in English, Leckie represents this linguistic reality by using the female pronoun ‘she’ throughout, regardless of any information supplied about a Radchaai (and, often, a non-Radchaai) person’s perceived gender. This pronoun choice has two effects. Firstly, it successfully erases grammatical difference in the novel and makes moot the question of the characters’ genders. But secondly, it exists in a context of continuing discussions around the gendering of science fiction, the place of men and women and people of other genders within the genre, as characters in fiction and as professional/fans, and beyond the pages of the book it is profoundly political. It is a female pronoun. When translating Ancillary Justice into other languages, the relationship between those two effects is vital to the work.
posted by sciatrix at 7:09 AM PST - 98 comments

Slowest Rube Goldberg Machine

The world's slowest Rube Goldberg machine. [SLYT]
posted by spitefulcrow at 7:02 AM PST - 25 comments

Who do you mean by we?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari - "The book delivers on its madly ambitious subtitle by in fact managing to cover key moments in the developmental history of humankind from the emergence of Homo Sapiens to today's developments in genetic engineering." Also btw, check out Harari on the myths we need to survive, re: fact/value distinctions and their interrelationships.
posted by kliuless at 6:55 AM PST - 7 comments

Music....OLD music.

"The UCSB Library, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Grammy Foundation, and donors, has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free." You can browse the collection here. More information about the collection can be found on their "about" page. (It's been nearly 10 years since this was posted previously, they've nearly doubled the size of the collection since then, I felt it was worth mentioning one more time. The collection, along with other resources was also mentioned in an FPP in 2006.)
posted by HuronBob at 5:35 AM PST - 16 comments

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