February 16, 2015
@Pats28Hawks24
The Last Man game is an annual competition to be the last person in the United States to know who won the Super Bowl.
Most of the runners [...] found themselves waking up each day in a cold sweat. “I feel like I’m being sequestered for the stupidest jury trial in modern history,” one competitor said. “It’s gotten to the point where three things may end me: recklessness, homesickness, or sheer boredom.” Several players eventually said that they couldn’t take it anymore and quit. “I’ve spent way more time avoiding the Knowledge than I’ve ever spent thinking on it in the past,” one said, committing seppuku with Twitter as his sword.
I can only hope that they never decide to implement "lolreverts"
Sometimes a one-line text-only description of your git commits just isn't enough. For those types of scenarios there is software called "lolcommits" that is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux that, when enabled, takes a photo with your webcam every time you commit your code via git. Now you can really let your co-workers know how you feel about having to fix their whitespace issues all the time with just a simple facial expression. After the photo is taken, the git message is overlayed on top of the image is a style reminiscent of lolcats. The resulting image files are then stored locally in your home directory. [more inside]
American Tintype
American Tintype - After a personal tragedy, Harry Taylor discovered a passion for the 150-year-old craft of tintype photography.
"I wanted to start with this quote because it just - ugh..."
Rosebud?
Now, I can see wifi signals.
Most of us are surrounded by a myriad of radio signals. Some inspired people have taken the opportunity to enable us to see them. Often seemingly random but with a semblance of pattern, the Rayleigh fading model describes much of what you see. via Hacker News
You can pry my Yorkie out of my cold, dead hands.
The Chocolate Wars... Begun, They Have. The Great Chocolate War began when Hershey sued two food importers, claiming that they infringed on the trademarks that Hershey has had since acquiring Cadbury’s US operations in the 1980s. Hershey said it noticed the British versions were starting to show up on the shelves of bigger US retailers, and not just the specialty shops, as demand for the imported chocolates grew.
Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South
In a three-part series on BBC2 in the UK over February and March, Reginald D. Hunter travels across the (USA) south and explores the music and culture. There is a bunch of intriguing clips in advance. [more inside]
Lesley Gore (1946-2015)
Lesley Gore, who sang "It's My Party" (live performance) and "You Don't Own Me," which Wikipedia calls a "proto-feminist" song (live performance + more), died of lung cancer at age 68 today in New York City. [more inside]
Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire
On the day before Danielle Smalley was to leave for college, she and her friend Jason Stone were hanging out in her family's mobile home. Seventeen years old, with long chestnut hair, Danielle began to feel nauseated. "Dad," she said, "we smell gas." It was 3:45 in the afternoon on August 24th, 1996, near Lively, Texas, some 50 miles southeast of Dallas. The Smalleys were too poor to own a telephone. So the teens jumped into her dad's 1964 Chevy pickup to alert the authorities. As they drove away, the truck stalled where the driveway crossed a dry creek bed. Danielle cranked the ignition, and a fireball engulfed the truck. "You see two children burned to death in front of you – you never forget that," Danielle's father, Danny, would later tell reporters. [more inside]
Science meets professional subjects
Amazon's Mechanical Turk has become an important tool for social science research, but a fascinating piece by PBS Newshour discusses why this might be a problem, with a great profile of professional survey takers, who average hundreds, even thousands of social science surveys each. This is not just idle speculation, recent research [PDF] shows that experienced Turkers no longer have typical "gut reactions" to social experiments, creating a struggle with how to deal with non-naivete [PDF]. Take a look at the questions that professional Tukers are asked the most, and be sure to take the survey in the middle of the first article! [more inside]
Above the Tsunami Inundation line? Check! Volcano hazard? Check!
An interactive map of geologic doom from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. You can model which hazards are most likely to affect your (Oregon) neighborhood, from landslides, tsunamis, and the ever-ominous Cascadian Subduction earthquake.
To be honest, he was going to be hanging out that summer anyway.
If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t believe it all happened in the space of about five weeks in the summer of 1978. But it did happen. In those five weeks, Bill Murray played professional baseball and established himself as a bona fide movie star and the Grays Harbor Loggers – representing the twin cities of Aberdeen and Hoquiam, Washington – posted the best winning percentage in America and won the Harbor’s only professional sports championship in living memory.
Boom Bap
Samplestitch maps hip-hop samples (from J. Dilla, 9th Wonder and Kanye West) to keyboard buttons.
Through a glass, darkly
The Atlantic has published a thoughtful piece on Vladimir Putin co-authored by a Director and a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution. Within they link Putin's Op-Ed in The New York Times from September 11, 2013, perhaps worth rumination now 18 months later.
Huey Lewis Gets His Revenge
Music Workshop - FEZ
Are you interested in making ambient, drifting, densely-layered electronic music? But don't know where to even start? This is the most thoughtful and gentle introduction I'm aware of, from a fine musician. It's a 45-minute video workshop from Rich Vreeland aka Disasterpeace, composer of the gorgeous, acclaimed Fez soundtrack. Rich composes a Fez-like track on the fly, explaining what he's doing in the process. While he uses Logic and the softsynth Massive in this workshop, his general approach and attention to sound design and synthesis will be applicable to whatever software or hardware you choose to use. (Hat tip to sparkletone for the link. Fez previously on Metafilter.)
“I just wanted to be near you”
Sufjan Stevens has released a new track, "No Shade In The Shadow of the Cross", from his forthcoming album Carrie & Lowell. The album is named for Stephens's mother and stepfather, and the musician recently spoke with Ryan Dombal at Pitchfork about his past and the album's origins.
Found Star
But perhaps most intolerable to him was the insistence by the industry itself — "the big businesses that run these corporations and multinationals that own the record companies and all of the conduits through which artists get their music out there" — that he and other artists "whore out" themselves in order to continue to make art. An example? "Things like doing station P.A.s, you know, where you have to go, 'You're hangin' with The Party Pig!' [The Party Pig was the mascot for the LA area's now-defunct KQLZ 100.3 AM.] You know? 'This is Gregg from The New Radicals and you're hangin' with The Party Pig!' [more inside]
They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan
The Philadelphia 76ers are currently the worst team in basketball, but in terms of expected value, they are crushing. [more inside]
Serves you right for charging £4.30 for a cappuccino.
HMS Belfast is a museum ship, originally a Royal Navy light cruiser, permanently moored in London on the River Thames and operated by the Imperial War Museum.
You can take a virtual tour of the ship here.
HMS Belfast served throughout the Second World War and on into Korea, but these days
it's main guns are permanently aimed at Scratchwood Motorway Services
A working 65 is the Holy Grail of the Commodore 8-bit world
The Commodore 65 (aka C64DX or C64DX Development System) was never officially released. Prototypes escaped development hell when Commodore was liquidated in 1994, and 200 have survived to this day. The complete manual can be read here (all 660K of it). One just sold on eBay for €20,500.
Cara Ellison
From Cara Ellison (Embed With, S.EXE), two short pieces: Wordless Reply and Hypercorporeal War Simulator.
Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?
There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview—and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol”
The sun was warm but the wind was chill
Wind chill is vitally important information. Or is it a meaningless number useful only in making weather forecasts more dramatic? [more inside]
What ISIS Really Wants
In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil. Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul.
"I'm not crazy, I just don't give a darn!"
If you are one of those who only remember Daffy Duck as the frustrated fowl who says to Bugs Bunny "You're deth-picable!", then you need to see how he earned the name "Daffy". So YouTuber ibcf has compiled every "Woo Hoo!" the Looney Tune has laughed/yelled, from his first cartoon, 1937's "Porky's Duck Hunt", to a 1998 appearance in a live action sitcom. That's over 13 minutes of "Woo Hoo!" as he bounces off walls, ceilings and the surfaces of bodies of water (nice trick). [more inside]
somewhere between Las Vegas and Pyongyang
"I was attending a funeral about every 12-16 days"
I kept a memory book/photo album of everyone I knew that died of AIDS. It's quite large to say the least. Who were these guys? These were the people I had planned to grow old with. They were the family I had created and wanted to spend the rest of my life with as long as humanly possible but by the time I was in my late 40's, every one of them was gone except for two dear friends of mine.Redditors share memories of having lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the early eighties. [more inside]
The Secret Language of Tennis Champions
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