April 3, 2013
The Story of the Turban
The Story of the Turban (slyt) is a 38 minute documentary on the history of the Sikh community in 20th century Britain as embodied by the struggle to be allowed to wear the turban in all walks of life.
"Onze helden zijn terug!"
On April 13, the Rijksmuseum will reopen to the public after a renovation and makeover that took five years longer than expected and went tens of millions of dollars over budget. The museum's most famous painting was also one of the last to be restored to its original location: Rembrandt's "The Night Watch". Sponsor ING Bank celebrated with a unique and special flashmob. [more inside]
MOOCs of Hazard
Will online education dampen the college experience? Yes. Will it be worth it? Well... [more inside]
Fooood In Spaaaaaace
NASA's Space Food Hall of Fame
Today's space food has come a long way since the Mercury Program of the early 1960s. When John Glenn first tried apple sauce from a squeeze tube onboard his Friendship 7 spacecraft in 1962, who could have dreamed that later astronauts would be able to choose from such a wide variety of foods?See also: Food in Space: Great Photos of Astronaut Meals, from the Early Space Voyages to Today, on io9. [more inside]
Take a Left off WebKit onto Blink
Google is forking WebKit. WebKit was a fork of KHTML and now Google is creating a new fork called Blink. Opera will contribute to it and use it too. Vendor specific prefixes will no longer be supported.
Antimatter. It's out there.
A number of headlines have proclaimed the detection of "dark matter" today, but Science News has a more measured take.
What we do know is that the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer riding aboard the ISS has detected positrons at high energy. Some theorists suggests that dark matter collisions would generate these positrons, but dark matter annihilation should also produce antiprotons, gamma rays and radio waves, which have not yet been observed. Since dark matter is suspected to account for far more of the universe than ordinary matter, the AMS data is a tantalizing hint of what we might learn.
Jim Morrison, fat activist
"It’s terrible to be thin and wispy, because, you know, because you could get knocked over by a strong wind or something, man." Via Dangerous Minds. [more inside]
It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.
Starlog Magazine
"Thank you for being the best readers any film critic could ask for."
Roger Ebert has announced that he has had a recurrence of cancer and will be taking a partial hiatus from reviewing while he undergoes treatment. Ebert, who lost the ability to speak and eat to cancer in 2006, filed a career-record 306 reviews in 2012. The news comes as Ebert plans to revamp his website and is considering a Kickstarter campaign to bring back his iconic show At the Movies. A documentary about Ebert directed by Steve James and executive produced by Martin Scorsese is currently in production.
Welcome to Night Vale: Vigilant Citizen article coming soon?
Ever watch one of those shows set in a town with odd happenings (ie, Gravity Falls, Eureka, Twin Peaks), and wish you could listen to their community AM radio station?
Welcome to Nightvale [Podcast] has you covered. [more inside]
Dunkirk in Manhattan: the 9/11 boat evacuations
The 12-minute 2011 documentary "Boat Lift: An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience", vividly depicts one of the lesser-known aspects of September 11th: the evacuation by water of over 500,000 people, and the largest evacuation by water in history.
Abort Guidance System? There's a manual for that!
How to set a bar on fire.
Caldera
Caldera. "Through the eyes of a young girl suffering from mental illness, CALDERA glimpses into a world of psychosis and explores a world of ambiguous reality and the nature of life and death." [Via]
"This is me flirting. I know I'm doomed."
Viking Knitting: It's not just for Vikings anymore!
The Vikings, pillagers and plunderers that they were, were the possessors of quite a bit of metal that needed to be used in some way. So they made jewelry. By the 8th century they had created a technique that is called trichinopoly or more commonly "Viking knitting", although it is really a type of weaving. If the Viking style of adornment appeals to you, you can learn this technique and make your own Viking-style jewelry. It's less complicated than it looks, and you don't even have to know how to knit in order to learn. You can learn to make a necklace or bracelet like this with this tutorial, or by watching a YouTube video. Once you master the basic technique, you'll be able to start improvising by adding beads and findings and semi-precious stones. It's possible that such jewelry was used as currency on those occasions when the Vikings actually paid for their acquisitions, like some sort of wearable bank account. Ostentatious types, those Vikings, but I suppose when you're known for your ferocity and lawlessness, you don't have to fear being mugged or looking nouveau riche.
LucasArts RIP
Game Informer has learned that Disney is closing its LucasArts game publishing subsidiary. [more inside]
Join the merchant navy and transport people for a living
A ro-ro ferry briefly "docks" at the island of Kimolos. Video. Everyone, and everything gets soaked.
The Glorious Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is dead. RIP
RT @bijli Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born screenwriter and novelist who, as the writing member of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team, won two Academy Awards for adaptations of genteel, class-conscious E. M. Forster novels, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85. Her 1975 novel, “Heat and Dust,” about an Englishwoman exploring a family scandal in India, received the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor. She wrote the screenplay for the Merchant Ivory version in 1983 as well. New York Times obit
"Where is the moon?" "Right straight ahead of you, John."
Distractions in Space: Because astronauts also have problems with directions, coworkers, and poop.
To Boldly Design....
Artist/designer Shepard Fairey was commissioned the Center For The Advancement Of Science In Space to design a brand new patch for the International Space Station's ARK 1 (Advancing Researching Knowledge) mission. CASIS's Pat O'Neill unveiling the patch and the ARK 1 proposal.
Metropolitan-Statistical Madness
Which of these two cities is bigger? The Census bureau has a quiz to see how well you know the relative sizes of the 64 largest metropolitan areas in the US, March Madness style. [more inside]
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Rutgers Fires Basketball Coach After Video Goes Public: [New York Times] Rutgers fired Mike Rice, the coach of its men’s basketball team, on Wednesday, a day after a video [ESPN] surfaced showing him berating his players during practices, throwing balls at them, kicking them and taunting them with slurs.
45 years ago, the future visited us...
The stewardess who retrieved a sleeping passenger's floating pen. The man in the ape suit who howled at the monolith. Arthur C. Clarke, recalling how he thought Stanley Kubrick was wrong, back in the day, about HAL being able to read lips, but later, aware that computers were developing such ability, admitting that he had been wrong. This and much more in The Making of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Meanwhile, from Douglas Trumbull, here's Creating Special Effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey. And here, full to bursting with interesting info, is the IMDb trivia page for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Why all this? Well, it's in honor of the 45th anniversary of the film's world premiere. Thank you for the masterpiece, Mr. Kubrick.
Buttoning Up Up and Away!
Fully Dressed Redesigns of Superheroines. Artist Mike Lunsford redesigns several prominent superheroines' costumes to show a lot less skin while retaining the feel of their original outfits.
A German Shephard, a suit, a jar of peanut butter, a spoon, and laughter
Galaxies are quite big.
Boom!
PANDA TACKLE!! [slyt]
Writers, rebels and diarists, remember rule #1: buy low, sell high.
The Italian producer of the restarted Moleskine notebooks has taken the company public. The IPO is being managed by Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, and UBS.
He is interested in confusion
‘I am a phantasmagoric maximalist. I like things to be overwhelmingly strange and capacitous. I want what I write to live; it isn’t about something, it is something’— Michael Cisco. [more inside]
"Usually we don't hit anybody"
"Chinese citizens can file petitions about their grievance with so-called letters and visits offices of various levels of government organs and courts, a mechanism set up in the 1950s. Under the current system, the number of petitions filed during an official's tenure is used as a yardstick for performance evaluation, prompting local governments to use every means possible to stop petitioners and shuffle them home. It has become an open secret that local governments hire "black guards" in the capital to stop petitioners from filing a grievance, thus reducing the number of petitions that are recorded." -- A day in the life of a Beijing "black guard".
Turn the wheel and look to windward
Two of our finest authors, humanist and government critic, Iain [M] Banks is dying of cancer. His next novel will be his last. His books are a source of inspiration and joy for me and many other mefites.
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