May 19
Daniel Dennett's seven rules for thinking. "A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That's a deepity."
posted by Sebmojo at 5:56 PM - 18 comments
"My intentions here are simple: avoid discussions about what exactly constitutes Chinese photography, evade overwhelming information, and instead visually examine the role that such photographs play in shaping
China’s image"
(English, French, Chinese). Some whimsical — Alain Delorme
Totems, others moving — Song Chao
Miners,
Migrant workers and
Hold.
posted by unliteral at 4:52 PM - 1 comment Lee Buchheit, fairy godmother to finance ministers in distress Lee Buchheit, a lawyer at US firm Cleary Gottlieb, has been present at all the major debt crises of the past three decades. His reputation among investors is as a fearsome and aggressive litigator, but finance ministers in distress see him as something of a fairy godmother.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:12 PM - 1 comment
Web2.Hell collected the names and taglines of real web2.0 start-ups that somehow were actually funded. "Remember Nothing! Zukmo Everything!" "Unlike on other sites, your posts must be one word long!" (The phenomena of baffling name choice lives on in current day successes like Snotr, LiveMocha, Magoosh, Squidoo etc., etc., etc.)
posted by blankdawn at 2:56 PM - 42 comments
On June 6th, 2013, Mel Brooks will be presented with the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award, but this post is about his Tomato and Onion Omelette.
Bon Appétit talks cooking, coffee, and career with
Mel Brooks, Omelette King.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:19 PM - 17 comments "Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two." Thanks to
Smore, you can now
put Microsoft Clippy (or one of its friends) on your websites.
posted by barnacles at 8:25 AM - 26 comments
Improv Everywhere: for our
latest mission we posed as city workers providing a ridiculous solution to the “texting and walking” epidemic in New York.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:14 AM - 37 comments
As Hegel presumably remarks somewhere, all great Tory crises appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as farce, the second as farce. --
Chris Brooke presents a history of "swivel eyed loon" as an insult used against a certain kind of rightwing Tory.
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posted by MartinWisse at 3:42 AM - 40 comments Animated
Aliens in 60 Seconds.
(with some barely intelligible NSFW language) [more inside]
posted by fuse theorem at 12:00 AM - 14 comments May 18
The thrill and rush of possibly winning started to wear off after about the twentieth losing ticket. Each card had a couple of “Life” symbols on them, and every time you got a second you just dreamed of seeing the third one under the remaining graphite. However it never appeared and never will and it just kind of turned depressing. How could people put themselves through this humiliation and teasing every day of their lives?
The classic criticism of the lottery is that the people who play are the ones who can least afford to lose; that the lottery is a sink of money, draining wealth from those who most need it. Some lottery advocates . . . have tried to defend lottery-ticket buying as a rational purchase of fantasy—paying a dollar for a day's worth of pleasant anticipation, imagining yourself as a millionaire. But consider exactly what this implies. It would mean that you're occupying your valuable brain with a fantasy whose real probability is nearly zero—a tiny line of likelihood which you, yourself, can do nothing to realize. . . . Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy. [via]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 8:33 PM - 139 comments Most people visit the city of Burlington, Vermont, for the pleasant waterfront of Lake Champlain, the quirky shops and restaurants on Church Street, and the various cultural benefits that come with being a university town. Those are all the right reasons. I, on the other hand, went to Burlington for the flying monkeys... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:40 PM - 8 comments
Where are my dragons‽ Because if I didn't, some other munchkin would have.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:57 PM - 11 comments
Each event has a different theme, revolving around a past era. Previously, Steam Garden did a Meiji-themed party — a fascinating time when Japan was opening its doors to the West, and fusing Victorian fashion with traditional kimonos and obis. This time, the code word was Celtic Fantasy. Luke describes it as “a blend of industry, fantasy, and epic adventure set to a soundtrack of exciting tribal and Celtic music.” -
Japanese Steampunk, complete with bagpipes, medieval food, fire dancers and wood elves.
posted by Artw at 3:45 PM - 7 comments
"On a beautiful sunny day last week, the
Turning Over a New Leaf project team decided to take a day off from the office to visit
a spectacular chained library in the small town of Zutphen (located in the eastern part of the Netherlands). Built in 1564 as part of the church of St Walburga, it is one of only five chained libraries in the world that survive ‘intact’—that is,
complete with the original books, chains, rods, and furniture."
posted by brundlefly at 3:01 PM - 17 comments
Somtimes a guy just wants a curiously asexual sprite to whimsicaly break the chains of his workaday world for an hour or so -
cue the Manic Pixie Prostitute!
posted by The Whelk at 2:57 PM - 53 comments Rome2Rio is a handy travel search engine site where you put in the place you want to start and where you want to go. It shows you the map, the cost of the ticket (air, rail, coach, ferry and mass transit routes), duration of the journey, etc.
posted by nickyskye at 1:00 PM - 16 comments
Daniel Handler, best known for
A Series of Unfortunate Events and
his accordion work with Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields,
reads a chapter from his novel Adverbs, which made Dave Eggers describe Handler as "something like an American Nabakov". An excerpt from another chapter,
Immediately, is available courtesy of the New York Times. Handler's first adult novel, the nightmarishly satirical
The Basic Eight (think the movie
Heathers with a less reliable a narrator), is also well worth a read (
excerpt from Google Books).
posted by Rory Marinich at 12:47 PM - 12 comments First editions, second thoughts. [The Guardian] "
Interactive: From
Amsterdam to
Wolf Hall, Booker winners and bestsellers – authors annotate their own first editions.
posted by Fizz at 12:44 PM - 1 comment
The horrifying, little-known story of how hundreds of thousands of blacks worked in brutal bondage right up to the middle of the 20th century. It was a crime for for a black man to lack employment and a crime to change jobs without his previous employer's permission. It was a crime to sell the proceeds of his farm to anyone other than the man from whom he rented land. A crime for a black man to speak loudly in the company of a white woman, to walk beside a railroad line, to fail to yield a sidewalk to white people, to sit among whites on a train and, in practice, generally a crime for blacks to be accused of any crime by a white person.
posted by blankdawn at 11:27 AM - 39 comments
PITCHF/x and
SportVU data analysis shows...
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posted by Groundhog Week at 10:27 AM - 6 comments
On the 15 May, Max Fisher of the Washington Post penned an article titled
A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries. Fisher surmised that Anglo and Latin American countries are the most tolerant, linking racism to economic freedom based off of a study by two Swedish economists. Siddhartha Mitter responds, who, in
The Cartography of Bullshit writes, "Although the results don’t pass the sniff test in the first place, I took a look at the data as well, in an effort to identify the exact problems at play..."
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posted by whyareyouatriangle at 9:12 AM - 31 comments Bootstrapping the Industrial Age So you survived the apocalypse. Here’s what would it take to rebuild the world.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:38 AM - 15 comments
We've read about Florentijn Hofman's
giant rubber duck before (
previously), and it made it's way earlier this week to
Hong Kong to
spread joy :D
Well, unfortunately, the duck was also
viciously murdered (warning: may be graphic to younger viewers), and
many already blame chinese mainlanders for it.
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posted by yeoz at 8:16 AM - 18 comments A large portion of scientific research is publicly funded.
So why do only the richest consumers have access to it?
posted by reenum at 8:01 AM - 56 comments Running in the The Times Educational Supplement (
1), between 1971 and 1972 the comic strip
Wokker featured a strange wooden bird who commentates sarcastically on the world, and who can talk to animals, inanimate objects and readers alike.
Here are
some galleries and a
short history by the co-creator Tony Earnshaw, also a
painter and
maker of boxes.
His funeral in 2001 was slightly
unconventional.
posted by adamvasco at 6:36 AM - 3 comments The project centers on nine women in the feminist lesbian porn industry who are recorded for a 24-hour period, with 10-second blips of their everyday lives playing out in five-minute intervals. What’s revealed is an intimate portrait of a marginalized community opening up about sex, gender politics, depression, and their daily grind in a way
that’s downright real.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:20 AM - 4 comments Guest Photographers or: Why You Should Have an Unplugged Wedding
Pro photographer Corey Ann explains, with examples, what causes her so many problems in getting the wedding photographs her clients have paid her for:
their guests.
Pushing in front of her, standing in the frame of posed photos, flooding pictures with flash, and above all assuming that their invitation entitles them to take precedence over a photographer who is being expected to get a perfect record of the couple's perfect day.
Her proposal: politely, but firmly, ask your guests to enjoy the highlights of the wedding themselves, and leave taking photographs of those parts to the photographer.
posted by Major Clanger at 4:33 AM - 94 comments
Street Children - Can you look them in the eye?
posted by Gyan at 1:03 AM - 7 comments
How syphilis took Europe by storm during the 1490s,
and the far reaching effects it's had ever since
posted by Mister Bijou at 12:46 AM - 25 comments On March 26th, 1827 Ludwig Van Beethoven died in Vienna. The day after, a twelve year old boy took a lock of his hair as a souvenir. 167 years later the hair was sold at an auction in London. Its new owners were two Americans, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevera. Between those dates the lock of hair undertook an extraordinary historical odyssey. From hand to hand, from country to country, and from century to century.
This is the story of that journey.
[more inside]
posted by 23 at 12:34 AM - 13 comments May 17
Mooseheart Orphanage, 1948 A haunting image of children's faces from the
Mooseheart Orphanage, 1948. The photo was taken by Stanley Kubrick for the June 8th, 1948 edition of Look.
posted by HuronBob at 9:43 PM - 18 comments
A New Theory of PTSD and Veterans: Moral Injury But as clergy and good clinicians have listened to more stories like these, they have heard a new narrative, one that signals changes to the brain along with what in less spiritually challenged times might be called a shadow on the soul. It is the tale of disintegrating vets, but also of seemingly squared-away former soldiers and spit-shined generals shuttling between two worlds: ours, where thou shalt not kill is chiseled into everyday life, and another, where thou better kill, be killed, or suffer the shame of not trying. There is no more hellish commute.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:43 PM - 17 comments
Nicholas J. Johnson is a no good dirty rotten cheat. So when he invites you to play an incredible new game that he’s invented, you probably shouldn’t come…
posted by filthy light thief at 7:18 PM - 18 comments
The sweetest chopper on the planet is the "
Red Baron", a custom-built motorcycle powered by
a 9-cylinder radial aircraft engine.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:07 PM - 34 comments « Older posts
