March 1, 2010
Return of the Fungi
Paul Stamets profile in Mother Jones... humans and fungi still have nearly half of their DNA in common and are susceptible to many of the same infections. (Referring to fungi as "our ancestors" is one of the many zingers that Stamets likes to feed audiences.) [more inside]
Art imititates life?
Bringing New Understanding to the Director’s Cut (NYT) Art imitates life? Neuroscientists studying vision have observed a 1/f distribution in the natural scenes we encounter everyday. A new study shows movies have a similar 1/f distribution of scene pacing as natural scenes we encounter in daily life.
Woodworks Library
The Evenfalls Studio - Woodworks Library - a Woodworker's Resource A unique collection of over 175 complete (Public Domain) books on woodworking and related topics of interest to woodworkers.The Library continues to grow, All Free, 24/7
RIP, Robert McCall 1919 - 2010
Once described by author Isaac Asimov as the "nearest thing to an artist in residence from outer space", his artwork has appeared on stamps and mission patches, posters from epic films and even the walls of the Smithsonian Institution. Renowned space artist Robert McCall died on Friday, February 28 2010. He was 90. [more inside]
Ug99
"Indeed, 90 percent of the world’s wheat has little or no protection against the Ug99 race of P. graminis. If nothing is done to slow the pathogen, famines could soon become the norm — from the Red Sea to the Mongolian steppe — as Ug99 annihilates a crop that provides a third of our calories." [more inside]
And I had hyperthreading, which was popular at the time...
Grandpa laces up his skates: How would a single core, 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 670 from 2005 compete against the latest offerings of AMD and Intel? How about a 2007 quad-core, the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad 6600? The Tech Report finds out in a Huge 14-way Roundout, including a price-performance evaluation (2nd perspective). For the release of AMD's new midrange DirectX 11 graphic card, the somewhat disappointing ATI Radeon HD 5830, they've done Something Similar, this time pitting older cards, including a Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX from 2006, against the newcomer and today's top performers. (aggravation warning: hardware review sites love their multi-page layouts)
Your puppy was a rare and delicious breed.
Video games may not have invented the non-linear narrative, but they certainly perfected it. Starfeld is a fine flash game raising the gamut in this area while dealing with morality in deep space. Warning: Mature Dialog. [more inside]
Digital Fiction
Dreaming Methods — Atmospheric digital fiction projects designed to be experienced on a computer with the lights down and your sound turned up. Use the mouse to pan around and interact. [more inside]
Immortal yet still heartbroken...
ImmorTall is a game short glimpse of an alien's life as it is caught in the midst of humanity. It's not really a game that you can win or lose, there are no bosses or leveling up. It's a beautiful but sad look at humanity.
Money in Socialist Economies: The Case of North Korea
A magical card worth thousands until you buy it
Canopy Financial: A classic investor fraud story (civil suit by the SEC) combined with the most modern in misappropriation of health care savings. CFO Jeremy Blackburn, already on the hook for investment fraud, was charged today (*pdf) along with chief tech officer Anthony Banas with misappropriating millions from individual clients health care accounts. On ripoffreport, Vladimir Makarov says he found out about it when his HSA debit card stopped working. [more inside]
Lost in Lost
Never Seen Lost is a blog by 'papa durbin' aka John Durbin, detailing his journey through watching the final season of Lost. The twist: he has never seen any other Lost episodes, and he attempts to understand whatever occurs as best he can. There is, however, some contention about whether the author is truthful about his lack of background in the show.
Hundreds of feet of high-voltage LED rope lights and a translucent nylon outer shell
Tokyo/Glow A time-lapse photographic narration of an illuminated traffic light man who leaves his light and walks around Tokyo. [Direct link to video on YouTube - more info here than on actual site]
EVE for normal people? Kinda.
Jump On Contact is a blog about the mechanics and culture of the crazy unique space MMO EVE Online written for people who are curious about it but don't necessarily play. [more inside]
Marshmallow Test. Again.
Previously on Metafilter, we discussed the Marshmallow Test. But does the study hold up to scrutiny? [more inside]
Irrational Skepticism?
Richard Dawkins has been tweeting on the controversy over the apparent closing down of the RichardDawkins.net Forum. [more inside]
Take you with me, baby, I'll take you to my mamahouse...
A dynamic mix of rock, funk, hip hop and comedy, a cappella sextet Duwende has been winning nearly every award the industry has to offer with original songs that challenge traditional conceptions of what contemporary a cappella music can be. Duwende's latest album, Collective, can be downloaded for free or previewed on YouTube. [more inside]
Whats' the difference between a teacher and a train?
Have you ever spit your gum on the sidewalk. Did you know it's a social problem? New York City is dealing with it. Mexico DF is having a hard time with it. Instead of spitting you can swallow it or make a flower. [more inside]
Presenting Olympic finishing times in auditory format
What do the Olympic finishing times sound like? It's sometimes hard to grasp the significance of the times or how close it was just by the numbers or even the photo finishes. [more inside]
vox pop
Fancy seeing some vocal chords? Put a fiber optic camera up the nose and then down the throat and record a quartet singing in harmony. Hypnotic. (SLYT)
Vogue
Vogue Italia relaunched their website last week (in Italian and English / pictures on the site may be NSFW,) with three new subsites catering to specific fashion industry demographics: Vogue Curvy (focusing on plus-sized models, actresses and celebrities,) Vogue Black (men and women of color,) and Vogue Talents (veteran and up-and-coming designers. "Talents" also encourages hopeful designers to submit their work for review.) "Curvy" and "Black" in particular have received some positive and negative attention and some wonder whether separating those two fashion categories is truly inclusive. Vogue responds.
"just and holy"
The Secret Life of Radovan Karadzic.
A 45 minute documentary made by Rageh Omaar who travels to Serbia and Bosnia to investigate the decade-long period the former president of the Republika Srpska spent in hiding and examines his legacy in present-day Bosnia and beyond. (Warning: graphic and disturbing in parts).
As his trial for Genocide finally commences Karadzic defends his actions as "Just and Holy" ( Meta Related 1; 2; )
A 45 minute documentary made by Rageh Omaar who travels to Serbia and Bosnia to investigate the decade-long period the former president of the Republika Srpska spent in hiding and examines his legacy in present-day Bosnia and beyond. (Warning: graphic and disturbing in parts).
As his trial for Genocide finally commences Karadzic defends his actions as "Just and Holy" ( Meta Related 1; 2; )
I'm no longer feeling lucky
Seeking $335,000 in unpaid advertising bills, Google Inc. filed suit against a small Internet site in Ohio in October. The complaint was so routine it was just two sentences long. Last month, the small Internet site countered with a 24-page antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the search-engine giant of a litany of monopolistic abuses. But what really caught Google’s attention was the Internet site’s legal counsel: It was (Cadwalader’s) Charles “Rick” Rule, long the chief outside counsel on competition issues for Google archrival Microsoft Corp." Google faces further scrutiny in Europe where it leads with near 90% of the search market, "While it has always maintained that advertising prices are set by auction, leaving it without any direct influence over pricing, it has faced complaints from a number of companies over its practice of setting minimum bid levels." [more inside]
The Rockford Files Redux
NBC is rebooting the classic 70's detective show The Rockford Files. The Rockford Files was perhaps the best '70's detective show out there. Jim Rockford, played by James Garner, had more charm than bank balance, and more than often enough his "friends" were less than helpful. But the "closed criminal cases only" P.I. always got through the hour, and somehow looked cool despite being a less than snappy dresser. Perhaps it was the gold Pontiac Firebird Esprit he drove around Southern California. Rockford was able to live on the beach in Malibu, even if it was in a trailer home in the parking lot of a restaurant. [more inside]
Have One On Me
The Guardian on Joanna Newsom's latest album - triple album! - Have One On Me, released last week. But why read the critics when you can listen to the entire 2 hours, 4 minutes and 8 seconds on NPR Music. Previously on Newsom.
Is it 1992 in here?
It's not Friday and it's not Flash. Eric David Ruth makes downloadable PC games which generally ape the style of old-school console games. He's got quite a bit of attention recently for Pixel Force Left 4 Dead, which attempts to recreate Left 4 Dead as it would have been on the NES.
Church, state, basketball and Mennonites
Church, state, basketball and Mennonites. For the first time in 116 years, Goshen College, a small Mennonite school in Indiana, will play an instrumental version of the Star-Spangled Banner before college sporting events. As a college in a "peace church" tradition, this decision has not come without controversy. [more inside]
All That Mighty Heart
To accompany collections of posters and photographs, the London Transport Museum has recently added a number of short films to its website, including All That Mighty Heart (autoplay) showing a day in the life of London's transport in 1962. (previous 1, 2)
Juche, Reconsidered
Happy birthday, Comrade Kim Pepe Escobar's series in the Asia Times (parts 1, 2, 3) reveals how everything we know about North Korea is wrong.
Weaponizing Mozart
Weaponizing Mozart - "How Britain is using classical music as a form of social control".
Sartre in Hollywood
M. Sartre goes to Hollywood. In 1958, John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a biopic of Sigmund Freud. "The Huston-Sartre collaboration fell apart in 1959, when Sartre travelled to Huston's home in Ireland to work on the script. The two didn't work well together. 'There was no such thing as a conversation with him,' Huston later recalled. 'He talked incessantly, and there was no interrupting him. You'd wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn't.' Meanwhile Sartre, in his letters to Simone de Beauvoir, described Huston as 'perfectly vacant, literally incapable of speaking to those whom he has invited.'"
[via Bookslut] [more inside]
Put Your Hands Up 4 Detroit
On February 10, Rick Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archives, screened a collection of footage entitled Lost Landscapes of Detroit at the city's Museum of Contemporary Art. According to Mr. Prelinger, "a standing-room-only and vocal audience of Detroiters" saw the show. The film is now available in the Prelinger section of the Internet Archive.
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