June 9, 2009
Minecraft
Minecraft is a multiplayer block-based sandbox game. It's built in Java, so no installation is required (except for Java).
Reddit already has their own server; why don't we? [more inside]
India and South Asian resources
Dr. Frances W. Pritchett, Professor of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University, New York, has created a superb online collection of resources, all about India and South Asia, its art, history, literature, architecture and culture. Her Indian Routes section (the Index page) is a particularly rich resource. Her vast, colorful and informative site also has many great images. Check out her "scrapbook pages" on the Princes l the Ghaznavids l British Rule l Women's Spaces l Perspectives on Hinduism. [more inside]
The Rise and Fall of the first dot.com.
An entertaining history of ClariNet, which its founder Brad Templeton describes as the first dot.com. Lots of good reading linked on that first page.
Now if they'll do a map of European football.
There was once a world of living robots.
The Gazprom Song
Gazprom is the greatest corporation in the world/All other companies are run by little girls. This is the most moving corporate anthem I've ever heard (and I include Devo's "Corporate Anthem" in that assessment.)
Crash-for-Clunkers
The US House of Representatives today passed a Cash-for-Clunkers bill, giving people up to $4,500 to trade in their old cars for newer, more efficient cars. Inspired by European and Chinese successes, the bill is naturally not without its detractors.
Inside the White House
Flash Packets
Skin & Bones is a new exhibit about sailor tattoos and their symbolism and history, developed at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. NYTimes story with neat art slideshow.
Good News, Everybody!
Because Brawndo's got electrolytes.
Sports drinks and sodas are adding antioxidant vitamins to transcend their caloric nature and appear "healthy". Antioxidants defend against reactive oxygen species, which are purported to be causative agents in aging and cancer. However, a recent study has shown that supplementation with large amounts of antioxidant vitamins negates many of the beneficial effects of exercise.
The birth of anesthesia
The day pain died. "The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word 'anesthesia' itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever." [Via]
knives in bed, rocks in head
"Bring An End To This False Prophet Obama"
Jon Voight speaks at Annual GOP Fund-Raiser [more inside]
Jon Voight speaks at Annual GOP Fund-Raiser [more inside]
class is in
Reed has cast aside its hopes of soon accepting students based purely on merit, without regard to wealth. "Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the school did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team another task: drop more than 100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute those who could pay full freight."
More Than a Box
Jonathan Ro-Schofield is Jonny Cardboard, an artist and window display designer whose developmental medium is, yes, cardboard. Sure, anyone can fold a box, but can you make incredible sculptures or storefront display-designs and props? Perhaps Jonny Cardboard can cater your wedding cakes. [more inside]
Old Style Jazz
The rise and fall of El Pollo Justiciero!
Another day in a regular city in Argentina, another thief looking to score a car in a city well fed-up with a high crime rate. Or it would have been, except for the enterprising chicken-suit wearing guy that was promoting a nearby shop, who gave pursuit and captured the would-be car thief. [more inside]
Google Translate Toolkit
Google Translate Toolkit is a new webapp from Google to help translate webpages. Video demonstration (1:30s). It has built-in support for Wikipedia and Jay Walsh thinks it "may change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages".1
An Inconvenient Hoof
Opening this Friday in L.A, New York, and San Francisco, Food, Inc. is a documentary about the modern food industry that features Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Joe Salatin of Polyface Farm, and Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Yogurt. Here's the trailer. And here's a New York Times article about the film. [more inside]
Praise be, new jesusPhones!
As expected new iPhones were announced yesterday, taking a bit of wind out of the Palm Pre's excellent sales, pissing off some current iPhone users over upgrade fees, and leaving several gadget makers wondering if they have a future.
Liz Lemon = Kermit the Frog
How are your minds today? Are they good? Not blown, you say? 30 Rock is a ripoff of The Muppet Show.
C. P. Cavafy, demotic poet
The Cavafy Archive has translations of all of C. P. Cavafy's poems (go here for the Greek) except for the 30 unfinished poems, which have just recently been translated into English for the first time by Daniel Mendelsohn. His translations are reviewed in a lengthy essay by Peter Green in the most recent New Republic. Mendelsohn was interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered earlier this week. Late last year Mendelsohn wrote an essay about Cavafy in The New York Review of Books. The Cavafy Archive also has translations of a few prose pieces by Cavafy as well as manuscripts, pictures, translated letters & short texts and a catalog of Cavafy's library.
One of the oldest, rarest, shyest, silliest-looking yet potentially most illuminating mammals on earth.
The long-beaked echidna: plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them. More info, video, and images here and here.
Killing her parents, Erin told Charlie, was their best option.
Let's go in the kitchen and make a game.
Pencil Rebel is a little bitty point-n-click interactive adventure hand-wired with LEDs and simple circuit boards, and made with hand-cut and decorated cardboard, plasticine, string, and other household odd and ends. The artist, Grzegorz Kozakiewicz, has also made a (with spoilers!) video showing his process.
thirtysomething
Winner of an Emmy for best dramatic series in 1988, thirtysomething (ABC, 1987-1991) represented a new kind of hour-long drama, a series which focused on the domestic and professional lives of a group of young urban professionals-- a socio-economic category of increasing interest to the television industry. The series attracted a cult audience of viewers who strongly identified with one or more of its eight central characters, a circle of friends living in Philadelphia. And its stylistic and story-line innovations led critics to respect it for being "as close to the level of an art form as weekly television ever gets," as the New York Times put it. - Museum of Broacast Communications [more inside]
The One O'Clock News from the BBC in 1986
A bad day in the news gallery? Talkback recording of everything going wrong during The One O'Clock News from the BBC in 1986: Part One, Part Two, Part Three. Unless of course, this was a typical day ... "I haven't got any scripts Mike! How am I supposed to run a show?" "Animate quantel or whatever you want to do..." [via]
Digital Superbikes
This week marks the 102nd Isle Of Man Tourist Trophy motorcycle races, run over the 60.7 km Snaefell Mountain Course. The inaugural TT had a fuel consumption component to the rules, which was abandoned for the 1909 event. 100 years on, zero carbon, clean emission comes to motorcyle road racings Mecca in the form of the TTXGP [more inside]
Choire Sicha Reviews The Hangover
"What struck me the most were their clothes. The men, in particular, seemed not even dressed, in their baggy, below-the-knee silvery gym clothing, and synthetic t-shirts and cheap flip-flops from China. These were clothes that were worn without any intention; these were the clothes they wore when they did not have to wear clothes ... it’s not so much that they suffer economically, or suffer intellectually, though these of course can happen, but that they suffer due to lack of 'story,'" Choire Sicha on The Hangover.
"All fur coat and no knickers."
Solving America's hunger crisis is an article by Sacha Abramsky
Feeding America has a Hunger quiz and Hunger 101 - Feed your mind. [more inside]
Feeding America has a Hunger quiz and Hunger 101 - Feed your mind. [more inside]
When Gravity Fails
Editor Marty Halpern looks back at the career of George Alec Effinger (part 1, part 2, part 3), a prolific author best known for his work set in the Budayeen, a walled city in a future Islamic state, teeming with gangsters, hustlers and transsexual prostitutes, many of them habitual users of plug in personality modules. The noirish tone and exotic technology of the Marîd Audran books (When Gravity Fails, A Fire In The Sun, The Exile Kiss) made Effinger one of the leading lights in the cyberpunk movie, and spawned a videogame - a rare attempt at a graphical adventure from Infocom - and an RPG setting. Sadly Effinger faded from prominence after that, and he suffered from a number of health and financial setbacks before passing away in 2002. His work has had somewhat of a resurgence in popularity of late, with the Marîd Audran books coming back into print in 2007, a long with a collection containing The Wolves of Memory, Effinger's personal favourite amongst his novels.
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