May 20, 2010
awwwwwww
Crater face: "Astronaut risks life and limb to bring two moon pimples together for love."
Free Willy
You've stepped out of a time machine, it's 1894 and you're standing in front of a young Adolf Hitler, with instructions to assassinate the child. What you do next may depend a lot on your belief and definition of free will (never mind the unintended consequences) [more inside]
Dear Dad
Letters to an Absent Father is a wonderful and touching comic strip that "takes place from the perspective of Ash Ketchum as he writes a letter to the father that he never met". [more inside]
Fly Away
Cain and Abel?
Families, everyone's got to have one (or two, or three) Christopher and Peter Hitchens. Brothers.
I Am The Draw!
Script to Page - Guy Davis(automusic) comic panels alongside a Rob Williams script of a story of the eponymous law man from the Judge Dredd Megazine, a spin off magazine from the venerable comic 2000AD. The original comic has been around since 1977 and the Megazine itself is now approaching it's 20th year. [more inside]
Don't look don't look the shadows breathe
Haven't had your fill of creepy machinery? Watch John Nolan Films' 2010 animatronics showreel video (quicktime version). [more inside]
Socrates Keeping It Real
Socrates and Glaucon on the Home Shopping Network.
You [insert popular culture reference here] fanboys keep drinking the Kool-Aid
I've considered myself a fanboy on occasion in the past, but it never occurred to me to investigate the history of the term. Technologizer's Harry McCracken (god I love that name) has a *far* more detailed and interesting look into the history of the term than I would ever have considered undertaking. [more inside]
What's Sacred?
"To ignore this trespass is to agree that NOTHING any musician has attempted to do with their life in music has any intrinsic value - and I refuse to do that." Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, whose new album Orchestrion came out in January (see him discuss it here), ranted about smooth jazz legend Kenny G, claiming that his overdubbed performance of What A Wonderful World defiled the memory of Louis Armstrong. (Via Aaron Cohen at Kottke.org)
Cousin! Let's Go Bowling!
We could adopt a bunch of alien kids!
The Man From Galilee
What Did Jesus Do? - Adam Gopnik takes a look at the man, and the myth that was Jesus Christ. A Q&A follows.
Venter creates spiraling coils of self-replicating DNA.
"The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet." - Freeman Dyson, on the J.C. Venter Institute's creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome. We are now in the business of engineering life.
'Spoiler police, up yours.'
Death to the spoiler police! Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams takes a stand against people who insist on spoiler alerts: "[O]nce a work enters the pop culture vernacular, it is not society's responsibility to provide you with earmuffs until you finally get around to experiencing it. ... But for the love of God, if you really don't want to know about a book/movie/television show, do the rest of the world a favor and stop hanging out in the online discussion groups about it." Via Roger Ebert.
"Google for Usenet" Shut Down
Regrettably the Newzbin website has to close as a result of the legal action against us. Once the premier Usenet indexing site and the inventor of the NZB file format, Newzbin has officially closed its doors after losing a court battle against several Hollywood studios. Gossip suggests that Newzbin is in dire financial straights. [more inside]
"Signs of Every Description"
Up There is a twelve minute documentary about the nearly-lost art of hand-painted wall advertisements, the kind that eventually become ghost signs. The signs in this film were painted by Colossal Media/Sky High Murals and by Bob Middleton, himself the scion of a New York sign-painting family. [more inside]
It is not a Sunday host's job to make sure his guests aren't lying any more than it's a party host's job to make sure the food isn't poisoned.
Jay Rosen thinks that "Sunday morning talk shows are broken. As works of journalism they don't work." In December, he had a suggestion for the producers of "Meet the Press": "Fact check what your guests say on Sunday and run it online Wednesday." When asked about the proposal, David Gregory responded, "People can fact-check 'Meet the Press' every week on their own terms." Two college students took Gregory up on this and created Meet the Facts. On the other hand, it looks like Jake Tapper of ABC's "This Week" thought it was a pretty good idea. [more inside]
Trying to find out what human nature is all about.
The Saint Louis Bread Company Cares Cafe opened Sunday, as an experiment by Ron Shaich, former CEO of Panera Bread. Customers are asked to pay what they can afford. [more inside]
mit blinkenlights - PLC installations across Europe
Achtung!
Alles Turisten, Teknischen Und Nonteknischen Lookenpeepers!
Relaxen Und Watschen Der Blinkenlichten!
Projekt PIWO (Poland): video Mikontalo Lights (Finland): video Schönherz Matrix (Hungary)
Project Blinkenlights (Germany, France, Canada...) (previously)
Floyd Landis admits to using performance enhancing drugs
Floyd Landis admits to using performance enhancing drugs. He's also dropping the dime on Armstrong, Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer and his friend, David Zabriskie. So much for Omerta.
Unctuous Gunk in the Bayous
Oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill hits the Louisiana wetlands. More photos here. Meanwhile, the state department confirms US officials have begun talks with Cuba about how to help the small island nation deal with the environmental impacts of the disaster. And as McClatchy and other news agencies are now reporting, the latest independent scientific estimates appear to confirm a rate of flow much higher than BP has previously been willing to acknowledge, in the likely range of 95,000 barrels a day, amounting to roughly an Exxon Valdez size spill every three days. Meanwhile, ProPublica reports that the industry seems intent on keeping the lid on just how bad things really are in the Gulf, and quotes company spokesmen as saying that the actual rate and amount of flow is “not relevant to the response effort.”
To say Twitter is colloquial is putting it lightly.
Lexicalist attempts to be 'a demographic dictionary of modern American English.' Here's how it works. Lexicalist's developer David Bamman goes into greater detail at Language Log. [more inside]
Don't mug someone in front of ninja school.
The worst place to mug someone? Probably right in front of the ninja school.
Swinging away
Swinging Away: How Cricket and Baseball Connect Five minute slideshow with audio from the BBC of historical images to coincide with an exhibition at Lords on the linked histories of the two bat and ball sports.
Early films from the Library of Congress
America at Work, America at Leisure - "Work, school, and leisure activities in the United States from 1894 to 1915 are featured in this presentation of 150 motion pictures." [Library of Congress Youtube playlist]
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