December 14, 2007
How To Be A Good Host
Bot flies are large, stout bodied, hairy flies that resemble bumblebees. But how they reproduce is what makes them interesting: 1) An egg-laden female botfly captures a night-flying female mosquito and glues her eggs on to it. 2) When the mosquito is released and bites a victim, the host's body heat triggers an egg to hatch. 3) It falls off and burrows in. Even more interesting is that sometimes, this happens on humans! [YouTube/NSFSqueamish] And on humans sometimes, this happens in the most inconvenient [pdf] of places.
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Culture from 1967 to 1979. Douglas is still alive and making posters for the cause, in this case the San Francisco 8, who were arrested earlier this year for the murder of a police officer in 1971 -- despite the fact that evidence was thrown out of federal court in 1976 because "officers stripped the men, blindfolded them, beat them and covered them in blankets soaked in boiling water," and "used electric prods on their genitals." The SF Weekly published a detailed 5-page story about the case in November 2006.
The most banal, grotesque, ironic, twisted, or perverse creations of the capitalist marketplace.
Fuzzy Mail
Fuzzmail records your email as you type it and provides the actual composition for the person, or people on the receiving end. [via]
All fucking Violet!
Kidsploitation Komedy
Camp Liberty: exposing the dire fate of the littlest enemy combatants. Another chilling (albeit fictitious) video from Jon Benjamin. [more inside]
Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology: Implications for Politics and Conflict Resolution in Sri Lanka
David Giral photography
What Happened to My Forty Acres and a Mule, Fool?
40 acres and a mule has been a slogan of African-American economic aspirations ever since the legislation creating the Freedman's Bureau promised ex-slaves parcels not exceeding forty acres each, to the loyal refugees and freedmen. General William Tecumseh Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 decreed that the land on slave plantations be seized and distributed to freed slaves, but Andrew Johnson rescinded the order and vetoed expansion of the Freedman's Bureau. Both Henry Louis Gates and Dalton Conley have associated the failure to grant freed slaves their "40 acres and a mule" with the wealth gap between black and white Americans, but now an economics grad student, Melinda Miller, has brought important quantitative data to the debate in a new research paper. [more inside]
Google's Knol
A star as big as a window.
On December 24th, 1951, NBC aired television's first annual Christmas tradition and the first opera created specifically for TV, Amahl and the Night Visitors, composed by Gian Carlo Menotti (1911 – 2007). Maybe the cast recording, the children's book or one of the hundreds of local performances staged each year have been a staple of one or more of your holiday seasons. If so, you might be pleased to know that a kinescope of the original 1951 broadcast, long assumed lost, has in fact been found, restored, added to the Museum of Television and Radio and (most importantly) put on YouTube. [more inside]
China and India have reported massive finds of frozen methane
China and India have reported massive finds of frozen methane clathrate off their coasts and, along with Japan and other countries, are spending large sums to develop it into a new source of fossil energy. This is important for developing countries as there may be more frozen methane in the world than all the oil, gas and coal combined, and it is available right off their coasts. Some believe it can be extracted in a carbon neutral manner, but methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the scarily named clathrate gun hypothesis provides some fuel for thought about digging this stuff up.
Worst band names of 2007
The Onion AV Club publishes their annual Worst Band Names List. Is your band on there? [more inside]
Travelling by mouseclick
"Happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace." Aristotle
Fonts at the movies
free Yale courses online
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University:Astronomy, English, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies: a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video, syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. [more inside]
BBC launch Flash version of iPlayer
BBC launch Flash version of iPlayer The BBC have developed iPlayer as a vehicle for online distribution of its programs. Originally this involved downloading a stand-alone application for windows users only. This application has had a troubled beta launch and has drawn criticism from Linux and Mac users who were unsupported. The Flash version is an attempt to placate these users (though I believe you have to be in the UK)
Duelity - Creationism/evolution 2.0
Duelity - the beginning in two parts The Vancover Film School does a really cool visual retelling of creation.
The 'biblical' version with a science edge.
The 'evolution' version with a biblical edge.
And you can watch them both at the same time!
Gissa job la? Go on, I can do that. Gissa job?
During the latter half of the twentieth century, Liverpool writers made an enormous contribution to television drama. Writers like Willy Russell and Jimmy McGovern have been hugely influential. But the daddy of them all was unarguably Alan Bleasdale, whose television dramas dominated our screens during the latter half of the 20th century in a manner that was unmatched by anybody besides the late Dennis Potter. [more inside]
Who loves ya, baby?
B s f t e W b + e t o h e = The full picture
Essential Video Resources - primers, guides and links for the video editor and technician [more inside]
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