December 23, 2013
Look at all these people, liking a thing!
A Better Cardboard Box
Woodsongs + Amy Grant = <3
Grammy-award-winner, multi-platinum artist Amy Grant does a mostly-acoustic, lengthy, combination interview and performance set for Woodsongs [1h20m, direct mp4 video link], partially to promote her new-ish album How Mercy Looks From Here, and mostly because she is totally awesome. [more inside]
One does not simply walk into Fairmount Park
PsychoQuiz!
How Much of a Psychopath Are You? Take the quiz, compare yourself with your friends (or with some historical figures), and see what pets, musical styles and news media are more popular with the more psychopathic.
from Great Britain's Channel 4, which won't tell you how Nigella Lawson scored.
from Great Britain's Channel 4, which won't tell you how Nigella Lawson scored.
RIP Yusef Lateef
Today was marked by the passing of the venerable Yusef Lateef. Perhaps best known for his Eastern Sounds, he notably played with the Cannonball Adderly sextet. A largish (89 song) youtube playlist.
The Transcendental Transatlantic Sessions
The other day, I woke up humming Guy Clark's "Dublin Blues." That terrific performance is from Transatlantic Sessions, a long-running project uniting musicians from different countries and varying musical backgrounds. "For almost two decades, the sessions have been inviting American musicians – from Rufus Wainwright to Emmylou Harris to James Taylor – to the UK to collaborate with British musicians steeped in the folk tradition, and filming the results. Imagine Later with Jools Holland, if all the acts played on each other's songs. And with more accordion." Drawing from Wikipedia's list of performances, I offer for your listening pleasure... Transatlantic Sessions. [more inside]
Shenzen spins around me, wowing sporadically.
What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage?
In 25 questions, it will tell you where you are from (in the US), using results from the Harvard Dialect Survey [prev, now closed]. Don't peek, but this is an answer key of sorts, showing the full results of the survey. Come for the highly accurate maps, stay for the interesting variations - apparently, over 6% of people call a sunshower "the devil is beating his wife," and a small group calls it a "fox's wedding." [more inside]
He Tried Therapy, All We Have Left Is DTFMA
In short, I have, since the age of about 2, been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of 10, when I was first taken to a mental hospital for evaluation and then referred to a psychiatrist for treatment, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety. Surviving Anxiety.
#1: 1, #2: 3, #3: 2, #4: 4, #5: 5
Die Hard is objectively the best Christmas movie ever made. Related: What makes a good Die Hard movie (and its not necessarily Bruce Willis).
60 Minutes and out of time.
When ‘60 Minutes’ Checks Its Journalistic Skepticism at the Door. ''“60 Minutes” is a calling, not an assignment, and the program should not be the kind of outfit that leaves its skepticism at the door to get inside.' '"In the last few months, there have been significant lapses into credulousness, when reporters have been more 'gee whiz' than 'what gives?'"'
'The sad decline and fall of 60 Minutes has been a long time coming, but now it is nearly complete. Just in recent months: the horrid hit on Americans with disabilities, the Lara Logan affair, and now tonight’s whitewash of NSA (and bonus slam vs. Edward Snowden), hosted by longtime FBI/police/NSA propagandist John Miller. Good night and good luck!' [more inside]
You have to turn around sometime...
T Rex is just waiting for the perfect time to pounce. (SLYT)
Turing pardoned
Alan Turing, the cryptographer and mathematician whose work was credited with shortening the Second World War, has been pardoned.
Turing, a gay man, was convicted of gross indecency following consensual sex with a man in 1952. Ordinarily, a pardon will only be granted if the person is believed to have been innocent of the offence and the request is made by a family member. Turing met neither criteria, but his application was supported by a petition of over 37,000 people.
Of course, this comes far too late for Turing, who poisoned himself over 60 years ago at the age of 41. (previously)
Chief O'Brien at Work
"If you've ever felt lost and worthless, step aside, because someone else feels even more so, and his name is Chief O'Brien of the Starship Enterprise. Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, crappy jobs, and ennui will enjoy our short-lived Chief O'Brien at Work comics." From cartoonist Jon Adams.
Web Domain White Elephant Gift Exchange
"This should be a web domain that you currently own, but do not want. At the end of the exchange, you will need to transfer this domain to someone else. In return you will receive a domain from someone." [more inside]
Complex Things Explained
This Video Will Hurt
A detailed explanation of a fascinating field of science and medicine by the always interesting C.G.P. Grey.[more inside]
Tis The Season To Secure Contain Protect
The collaborative wiki-as-fiction site, Secure Contain Protect (previously), held a contest to determine which entry will get the coveted SCP - 2000 spot. The theme? Science Fiction. Read the winning entry here, and the rest of the alien-spaceship-crashing-memetic-virus-watching-living-TV-show-spreading contestants here.
Canada's Siberian Expedition to Counter Bolshevism, 1919
On a wooded hillside outside Vladivostok, Russia, fourteen Canadians found their final resting place in 1919. Five others died at sea. They were ordinary folk who had enlisted in the closing days of the Great War for service in an unlikely theatre — Siberia. Consisting of 4,209 men and one woman, Canada's Siberian Expedition mobilized alongside a dozen Allied armies in a bid to defeat Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The mission failed — in the face of a robust partisan insurgency, divided Allied strategies, and heated domestic opposition.This is their story, including over 2,000 photographs and images. Also available in French and Russian.
Shall these bones live? shall these Bones live?
Settling in for a long winter's nap? In need of a memento mori to guard against the unbridled jollity of the season? Just want to explore the wonderful world of 3D scans, osteology, and bioarchaeology on the internet a little further? Sad that Santa probably isn't bringing you a T-Rex for Christmas? Well, just peak inside... [more inside]
Who wouldn't go?
"Mirror twins are the ultimate twins. Fuck all you other twins."
Meet the ATL Twins: two men who "share the same bed, wear matching outfits, only fuck the same girls, were both engaged to the same Penthouse Pet, and are both looking forward to marrying the same woman and fathering the same child." After Vice interviewed them in 2011 — "[T]hey literally finished each other’s sentences. Every sentence." — the twins achieved a certain notoriety, which led to Harmony Korine casting them in his 2013 film Spring Breakers. Last July they gave an interview with GQ, and Vice filmed a mini-documentary about their life [part 2; part 3] earlier this year. [ALL LINKS STRONGLY NSFW]
The past guides us; the future needs us.
Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future. The most magnificent person I met in 2013 quoted a line from Michel Foucault to me: "People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does." Someone saves a life or educates a person or tells her a story that upends everything she assumed. The transformation may be subtle or crucial or world changing, next year or in 100 years, or maybe in a millennium. You can’t always trace it but everything, everyone has a genealogy. Rebecca Solnit in TomDispatch: The Arc of Justice and the Long Run: Hope, History, and Unpredictability [more inside]
Get into my truck, girl
Why Country Music Was Awful in 2013. Grady Smith reviewed the 10 ten country albums in 2013. This was his response to the comments. [more inside]
"I invented it for the protection of the Motherland."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, has died after a lengthy illness. He was 94 years old.
Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States
"Untold History of the United States challenges the basic narrative of the U.S. history that most Americans have been taught.... [Such history] is consoling; it is comforting. But it only tells a small part of the story." Instead of clips of modern people pondering the past, Oliver Stone's ten-part series relies heavily on archival footage and clips from old Hollywood films, with narration by Stone. Towards the end, he gets into the assassination of JFK, "but that should not detract from a series that sets out to be a counterweight to the patriotic cheerleading and myth-making." [more inside]
the olfactory arts
Is perfume art? Could it be? Or is it something else: a craft, a commercial product, an ornament, a luxury, a prosthetic, an aphrodisiac, a love letter, a prayer, a con? Why does it matter?[more inside]
New Frontiers In Science
Can plants think? Michael Pollan asks the question. (SLNewYorker)
Archaeology vs. Physics
Conflicting roles for old lead
The use of old lead for shielding increases the sensitivity of our most delicate experiments by orders of magnitude, an increase that is crucial when looking for a reaction that sheds light on new physics. Lead recovered from roofs, old plumbing, and even stained glass windows has been used, but Roman lead from a shipwreck is the best you can find.
That is not dead which can eternal lie
Something unknown, engineers say — and all the more intriguing to many residents for being unknown — has blocked the progress of the biggest-diameter tunnel-boring machine in use on the planet, a high-tech, largely automated wonder called Bertha. At five stories high with a crew of 20, the cigar-shaped behemoth was grinding away underground on a two-mile-long, $3.1 billion highway tunnel under the city’s waterfront on Dec. 6 when it encountered something in its path that managers still simply refer to as “the object.”
TOTALLY UNAUTHORIZED
Strategy guides, then. Some were official. Some were... less official. Unauthorized, even, free to explore a game's mysteries without the nagging presence of the developers hanging over them. Of course, being unofficial meant these guides couldn't use official artwork for their covers. They had to produce their own alternate, non-copyright-infringing cover art. Can you see where I'm going with this? That's right, here are some unofficial strategy guide covers and boy howdy are they a mess.
Pandamonium!
A scientist radio-tracking pandas in the Chinese wilderness frolics with an inquisitive cub who was left in his care by its mother: Dajun and the wild baby panda. [more inside]
The Politics Of The Next Dimension: Do Ghosts Have Civil Rights?
The Awl presents the article that would've accompanied that Atlantic Monthly cover from Ghostbusters.
More now die by suicide than car wreck
The American suicide rate has spiked upwards, according to the CDC. That increase is especially noticeable among baby boomers. Is the reason the availability of prescription drugs, or challenging family circumstances? The article's comments generally cite the economy.
(SLNYT)
What do you get when you mix red and blue paint?
David Briggs' The Dimensions of Colour, a comprehensive online explanation of traditional (what you've probably been taught) and modern colour theory, and its applications to visual art. Invaluable for artists and non-artists alike. (The answer: probably some kind of brown. Yes, your kindergarten teachers fed you lies.)
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