February 22, 2012
You'll Lust After One or the Other
Coffee & The Newspaper is a menswear tumblr with no product links, no best of lists and no reports from fashion week - just post after post pairing a picture of menswear with a picture of food. Without the Pepsi Blue, it's a fascinating study of color, texture and structure in clothes.
Swindler
Swindler! A new game by nitrome! You play as a booger theif, not a thief who steals boogers but a booger who is a thief. Also by nitrome: Rainbogeddon, a crazy take on Pacman.
Dermot O'Connor's "There's No Tomorrow"
"There's No Tomorrow" is a half-hour animated documentary that deals with resource depletion, energy, and growth. [more inside]
State favorability poll
Americans love Hawaii and hate California. A new PPP poll asks respondents which states they like and dislike, resulting in favorability ratings for all 50 states. Full results, including crosstabs, here. (.pdf) Sorry, Illinois! Nice work, Colorado!
Pew Pew Pew!
In Bolivia's jungles and steep cliffs the Yungas people do not walk. They fly. On ropes. Like birds. Faster than astronauts.
It's All Done With Mirrors
"Off the Wall"* is an electro-pop ditty by French artiste Yuksek** with a video that uses a mirror effect*** for maximum delightfulness. Bonus fun: a 'Making Of' video that just replays the whole thing without the mirror.**** [more inside]
Qu’ils mangent du chocolat
Le Club des Croquers du Chocolat (The Chocolate Cruncher's Club) is an exclusive private association of 150 connoisseurs who gather four times a year to sample and judge the best in French chocolate. Clotilde Dusoilier, the blogger behind the well-known Paris-based food blog Chocolate and Zucchini, gives her readers a peek inside its workings. [more inside]
Make It Stop!
Shit Cancer Patients Say is a video filmed by five-time cancer survivor Woody Roseland at Presbyterian St Luke's Hospital.
Saving Zelda
Tevis Thompson writes about Nintendo's video game series The Legend of Zelda. Specifically about how it's gone downhill since Ocarina of Time. (via Kotaku) [more inside]
A Stereoscopic Music Video
18th Century Pharmacopeia
A Cephalic Infusion
Take dry Peacocks dung (the white part) 4 ounces; Millepedes alive bruised 1 ounce; black Cherry water, white Wine, each 1 pint and half; let them stand cold 24 hours, then having clarify'd it, by often passing it through a Flannel bag; add Langius's Antepileptic water 3 ounces; Spirit of Lavender compound 1 dram and half; Oil of Nutmeg 3 drops; Syrup of Piony compound 6 ounces, mix.800 medicines from Thomas Fuller's Pharmacopeia Extemporanea, 168 from William Buchan's Domestic Medicine and 11 from The Reverend Twigge's Notebook - indexed and fully searchable.
It cleanses out the Meatus of the Brain, when choak'd up and grown unpassable, by reason of muddy Feculencies, roborates its Tone when flaccid and suck, and defecates the Animal Spirits, when clog'd and incens'd with an heterogeneous Copula, refreshes and invigorates them when feeble and fainting; discusses the Mists and Clouds of the Head, and procures Serenity and Sun shine. Therefore we employ it with happy Success in an Idiopathic Head-ach, Vertigo, Scotomy, &c. giving a quarter of a pint Nights and Mornings.
Scott Ritter's Fall.
Scott Ritter's Other War SL NYTMagazine
“Brutality in playing a game should awaken the heartiest and most plainly shown contempt for the player guilty of it.”
"No take-backs."
Are you bothered by the LDS practice of "baptism for the dead"? Well, take heart, because now, All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay.
If you have nothing to hide, why do you have curtains on your windows?
How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect on 1 March If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.
Dementia be Damned
Dementia be Damned [via mefi projects] With dementia and brain related links, personal stories about good and trying times, and information about the latest research, it's a fascinating read about a woman with lots of personality and her amazing Mom. [more inside]
Neutrinos: Still not quite superluminal
Did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in? Last year's faster-than-light neutrino observation may be explained by a loose connection between a GPS unit and a computer. [more inside]
Exclamation marks up the minister's arse.
Cassetteboy vs The News [SLYT, maybe NSFW]. A seamless mashup of fifteen BBC News episodes.
Pushing Mushrooms
"We want to eat, not be eaten by our food, right?"[TED]. Artist/MIT graduate Jae Rhim Lee's current project explores the possibility of, and interest in ecologically responsible interment. She is currently cultivating personalized Infinity Mushrooms, which in combination with the Mushroom Death Suit will promote postmortem mycological growth, and more importantly intimacy with and acceptance of the physical realities of decomposition as vehicles toward death acceptance. [more inside]
Dory Previn, 1925 - 2012
"Whether writing as herself, or through one of the many voices she heard in her head, Previn's sinister riverboat chansons revealed the pain, games, lies and loneliness behind the L.A. free love myth. 1971's Mythical Kings And Iguanas was, perhaps, the peak point of Previn's eerily confessional style containing the searingly honest Lemon Haired Ladies and The Lady With The Braid, both of which recount encounters between young men and single older women in chilling detail. Her third album, Reflections In A Mud Puddle was a concept album based upon her life with her father, and contained the astonishing Doppelganger, a Weillian Sympathy For The Devil in which the world's evils are found to lurk in all of us. " Singer-Songwriter Dory Previn has died. (previously on Metafilter).
The Great American Novel -- will there ever be another?
The Great American Novel -- will there ever be another? ...even if a new Melville or Twain, Faulkner or Fitzgerald were to appear in our midst, his work would fail to achieve the critical traction and existential weight of those earlier masters. We lack the requisite community of readers, and the ambient shared cultural assumptions...The diffusion or dispersion of culture brings with it a diffusion of manners and erosion of shared moral assumptions. Whatever we think of that process—love it as a sign of social liberation or loathe it as a token of cultural breakdown—it has robbed the novel, and the novel’s audience, of a primary resource: an authoritative tradition to react against.
Latest and Greatest.
STUFF I WISH I’D NEVER BOUGHT. 'When I wrote about stuff I would buy with my own money it got me thinking about all of the buyer’s remorse I’ve had over the years, both with personal gear I’ve bought, and with things I’ve bought for Lensrentals. I’m a gearhead, so this isn’t about “things that weren’t profitable”.' [more inside]
My best known work is in game theory
"A double crested winky. This will be a real prize for the collection."
Dr Grordbort Presents: The Deadliest Game, which follows a Victorian big game hunter on a distant planet. [more inside]
Concrete expressionism
The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.
Marie Colvin, an American journalist working for The Sunday Times of London, and French photographer, Rémi Ochlik were killed this morning in the city of Homs, Syria. The two Western journalists were among 20 people killed in a makeshift media center, raising suspicions that Syrian security forces targeted their location by tracing satellite signals. Their deaths follow 19 days of shelling that activists say killed hundreds of trapped civilians in one of the deadliest campaigns in nearly a year of violent repression by the government of President Bashar al-Assad. [more inside]
The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing
Barney Rosset, former owner of the influential Grove Press and Evergreen Review, boundary-shattering publisher of Tropic of Cancer, Waiting for Godot, and Naked Lunch, and U.S. distributor of I Am Curious (Yellow), died yesterday at the age of 90.
"Ugh. We can't with this show anymore."
Tom & Lorenzo: "A show in 2012 with a large teen audience and a proportionately large gay audience will find itself dealing with the issue of gay teenagers generally and anti-gay bullying specifically at some point. We would have expected no less from Glee and we support the show’s efforts to consider the lives of young gays and help educate other people as to what those lives are really like. But... there comes a point when the urge to educate and be respectful of a group of disenfranchised people tips over into inadvertently redefining them in a new way: victim." (warning: spoilers for last night's episode of Glee)
a 300 million year old fossilized forest discovered
Photographs of an almost perfectly preserved 298 million year-old fossilized forest discovered under a coal mine in China [pdf] (In Wuda, Inner Mongolia). [more inside]
Rihanna's 'Birthday Cake': Reasons to listen
Rihanna's 'Birthday Cake': Reasons to listen (Ann Powers, NPR) "I'm choosing to do something else, though — to wrestle with the material at hand. As a music critic and, on a personal level, as someone who's long considered pop to be a crucial avenue for understanding the intricacies of the human heart and soul, I'm committed to engaging with the music that makes us sit up and take notice. I'm willing to try, even if those songs expose or even encourage aspects of behaviors that aren't so savory. I don't think "Turn Up the Music" tells us much; "Birthday Cake" is a different matter. So I'll continue trying to grasp what's happening in a song that makes many — but not all — of us want to turn away."
(Potentially triggering all round.) [more inside]
An Non-Manipulated Photograph of a Keel Walk Stunt
"This amazing photograph of sailor Alex Thomson walking on the keel of an 8-ton yacht was created with courage rather than Photoshop. It was an ad for fashion house HUGO BOSS, which has sponsored Alex Thomson Racing since 2003. The conditions for the shot had to be just right, and the skipper had to carefully keep the yacht at a 45-degree angle for up to a minute to avoid crushing Thomson and the jet ski driver. Here’s a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the image was made."
The Tesla Brickster
$40,000 is what you'll pay to have the battery replaced if you leave your Tesla Roadster, a $100K electric car, unplugged long enough that the battery discharges completely. Reportedly, the problem will also plague the upcoming Model S coupe, a $50K downmarket model. Owners cannot insure against this loss, it is not covered by warranty, and the car cannot be driven, recharged, or easily towed if so "bricked".
PIPE!
This debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile, and mouth with myriad subtleties.
We study techniques for identifying an anonymous author via linguistic stylometry, i.e., comparing the writing style against a corpus of texts of known authorship. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques with as many as 100,000 candidate authors. [...] In over 20% of cases, our classifiers can correctly identify an anonymous author given a corpus of texts from 100,000 authors; in about 35% of cases the correct author is one of the top 20 guesses.On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identification[pdf] is a draft of a paper for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. [more inside]
It's like the love child of Ace Frehley and Rondo Hatton!
What Would Babbage Do?
Nadia Boulanger
"Nadia Boulanger was a French composer, conductor and teacher who taught many composers and performers of the 20th century." She is particularly well-known for her American composition students, including Aaron Copland (you remember this, don't you?), Elliott Carter, and David Conte (who has uploaded to YouTube an excerpt of a lecture he gave reflecting on what he learned from Nadia).
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