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HEAVY METAL
The Science of Cast Iron Cooking. The Truth About Cast Iron. How To Season A Cast Iron Skillet:
The skillet you want is at least fifty years old, and right now it is probably sitting on a thrift store shelf or a yard sale table. Your first task is to locate it. Until the 1960s, the final stage in manufacturing cast iron was to machine-polish each pan until the cooking surface was as smooth as glass. New cast iron is sold unpolished, that is, fresh out of the mold, with a texture like pitted Formica. The cast iron companies claim that the new, unpolished skillets are as easy to season and as non-stick as the old, polished ones—but then they would say that. You can polish new cast iron yourself with an orbital sander and some 80 grit, followed by hand sanding with 220 grit wet-dry, then 320, then 400, then 600 for good measure, but let’s face it, you’d rather have those five hours of your life and the ridges on your fingernails intact. The skillet you want is polished already.How To Season A Cast Iron Pan. 5 Myths Of Cast Iron Cookware. [more inside]
A fistful of Rikers.
Star Trek TNG goes horribly wrong in a series of short, surreal and very zen mashups: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
"Distribution is the core of the problem we face."
Trade-offs between inequality, productivity, and employment - "The poor do not employ one another, because the necessities they require are produced and sold so cheaply by the rich. The rich are glad to sell to the poor, as long as the poor can come up with property or debt claims or other forms of insurance to offer as payment..." [more inside]
So, I'm not a racist but...
There's no false valour in Autism
I recently realised that I'm autistic. Here are the resources I found valuable in figuring out what this means. All of these links are about autism in adults, which can be a challenge to find. Where possible I've prioritised resources created by neurodivergent people.
Reasons why autistic people self diagnose
The medical system has long focused on young, white boys — at that, often cisgender, heterosexual, and from families with money — who exhibit very specific autistic traits when it comes to research, diagnosis, and accommodations.
This excludes everyone else, and means the most prevalent information we have only helps part of the community. As a result, the more intersections of oppression an autistic person exists are, the more difficult it can be for them to get a professional diagnosis. [more inside]
Eavesdropping on the Hidden World
In March of 2010, programmer Eric Fry discovered a cheap digital tuner from Realtek could be modified to receive more than mere TV and FM Radio. Much more. [more inside]
Prisencolinensinainciusol - Ol Raight!
Sung in incoherent pseudo-English, Adriano Celentano's Prisencolinensinainciusol (1973) could be thought of as an early example of rap.
The R Project for Statistical Computing
R is quickly becoming the programming language for data analysis and statistics. R (an implementation of S) is free, open-source, and has hundreds of packages available. You can use it on the command-line, through a GUI, or in your favorite text editor. Use it with Python, Perl, or Java. Sweave R code into LaTeX documents for reproducible research. [more inside]
Plane crashes in to the word trade center.
Plane crashes in to the word trade center. Apologies for not linking to anything besides the main CNN page but there are no full stories on this yet. The plane crashed into the building about six minutes ago, from what the TV is saying. We are about sixty blocks north and we can see the smoke over the skyline.
Nick Cave, the Black Crow King, is fifty today
NickCaveFilter: Fifty years ago this very day, Nicholas Edward Cave [previously] crawled from the womb and started to plot. At 16 he formed his first band which evolved quickly into the Boys Next Door [Shivers]. This in turn mutated into the Birthday Party (1980) who terrorised the post-punk soundscape in Australia and the UK [Release the Bats | Nick the Stripper]. The Birthday Party relocated to England and in 1984 the band imploded in an orgy of drugs and booze. Shortly after Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were born [The Ship Song - video & solo live | The Mercy Seat - video & live | Where the Wild Roses Grow], and 23 years and 11 studio albums later (not to mention a best selling book, a great screenplay, some acting and several soundtrack projects) he is still going strong. But, instead of sitting on his musical laurels he decided to get back to basics and, in 2006, grew a huge moustache and formed Grinderman – a four piece with a primeval hybrid Birthday Party/Bad Seeds sound [No Pussy Blues | Honey Bee]. Fellow Mefites, I ask you to raise a glass to Mr. Cave… And, especially if you are not familiar to his work, don’t forget to “look inside” for my primer on the enigma that is Nick Cave, one of the finest song-writers on the face of this miserable planet. [more inside]
Orbital, 23 years after Chime
They were a couple of blokes from a small city in in England who started out messing around with instruments. Paul played the guitar and drums, and Phil the saxophone, but both were interested in electronic music by the likes of Kraftwerk. Phil also liked hip-hop, and Paul got into acid house in the late 1980s. One afternoon, Paul slapped together a happy little song based on a sample from a now-forgotten instrumental cover version of some pop hit, and called the little ditty Chime. Even before it was pressed on vinyl, DJs were asking for it, and Orbital was born. [more inside]
Terror has a new game...
There seems to be a recent golden age of genuinely terrifying indie horror games that experiment with new ways to upset you. Slender [PC/Mac, free], is based on the creepy Slender Man mythos and has been garnering rave reviews and videos of terrified reactions as you try to escape the being that draws ever closer. The 4th Wall [free or $1 on Xbox/PC] is a even more abstract take on existential dread. SCP Containment Breach [PC, free] features the very disturbing Sculpture (even the picture in that link will creep you out) from the SCP series, it follows another SCP game - The Staircase. And there is more - Which [PC, free] has you stumble in the dark; Ib [PC, free] places you in the shoes of a girl in an abandoned art gallery, and Candles [free, Win/Mac] is all about atmospherics. On top of that, there are some cheap independent commercial games that generate great scares, such as Lone Survivor [online demo] and the now-famous Amnesia: The Dark Descent [PC/Mac/Linux, $20], whose upcoming sequel A Machine for Pigs, may have the best title of any game.
Cities and the Soul
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. December 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of Invisible Cities -- the sublime metaphysical travelogue by author-journalist Italo Calvino. In a series of pensive dialogues with jaded emperor Kublai Khan, the explorer Marco Polo describes a meandering litany of visionary and impossible places, dozens of surreal, fantastical cities, each poetically reifying ideas vital to language, philosophy, and the human spirit. This gracefully written love letter to urban life has inspired countless tributes, but it's just the most accessible of Calvino's fascinating literary catalogue. Look inside for a closer look at his most remarkable works, links to English translations of his magical prose, and collections of artistic interpretations from around the web -- including this treasure trove of essays, excerpts, articles, and recommended reading. [more inside]
Life is just one damn relatedness after another
This exhaustive list of useful mental models from the founder of DuckDuckGo, drawing on Charlie Munger's concept of mental models is well worth exploring. It contains a surprising amount of interesting jumping-off points to rules-of-thumb and insights from various fields, from Hanlon's Razor to the critical concept of BATNA in negotiation; and including such useful startup ideas as technical debt, organizational debt, and hunting elephants or flies.
Since we're on a Muppet kick lately....
Something of a rarity on film, Jim Henson and Frank Oz get a chance to "ham" it up without a script, when The Muppet Movie director James Frawley requests some camera tests to see how the puppets look when filmed on location. The hilarious result: Part One | Part Two
Jenn Frank: "I was one of the guys. I was always one of the guys."
I Was A Teenage Sexist - "Girls – the ones we think of as “cool” – don’t trust other women, women who play by gender “rules” that the rest of us cannot quite understand. The most important things those women can seemingly do are spend money on clothes and appeal to the opposite sex. Meanwhile, we ourselves don’t feel particularly female. We only feel like people. It’s a tough fall. People intuitively detect that attitude, go out of their way to remind you that you’re not fooling anybody. You are a woman, and you will only ever be a woman." [more inside]
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
The Big Lebowski as written by Shakespeare.
Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality
The Story of Bohemian Rhapsody: Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. (From BBC Three.) Oh, and... [more inside]