October 2014 Archives
October 31
Dr. Zissou or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shark
He who laughs last, laughs longest
Victor Hugo, famous for Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris, wrote L'Homme Qui Rit, or The Man Who Laughs in 1869 on the isle of Guernsey. The story was adapted for film in 1928, directed by Paul Leni and starring Conrad Veidt. You can watch the film whole or in parts. [more inside]
ghosties & ghoulies & lang-legged beasties
For others stuck at home tonight, as I am, answering the doorbell for little spooks, some between-rings amusement.
From poetry.about.com, a very fine link farm to some spooky halloween poems. If you don't know Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," go there first.
More inside. [more inside]
longer than the Bible and with a better afterlife scenario
Alan Moore's Jerusalem - "The frequently confusing cross-currents of Moore's late work make much more sense, in fact, when one sees them not just as entertainment products but as attempts at building a better reality."
Where stray or personal thoughts have intruded, you may delete them.
Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me candy to trade for cash
Halloween is not good for the teeth of trick-or-treaters. There's a plethora of candy, and kids will eat candy they wouldn't normally eat, because hey, it's there. What's a parent to do? Offer cash for candy, with the help of a local dentist. Halloween Candy Buyback, complete with zip-code dentist search, the website for the movement that has expanded from it's quiet start in 2005 with a single dentist in Wisconsin. Now, thousands of dentists across the U.S. buy back tons of candy at a dollar a pound, then send the candy with toothbrushes and toothpaste to Operation Gratitude to be added into care packages for active U.S. Military. If you're having trouble getting a younger child to part with their candy, there's the Switch Witch, who will take a pile of candy and switch it for a special switch gift. And if you want to start at the source, you can always make your own candy with one of the various sugar substitutes, or go with a teal pumpkin and avoid the candy all-together.
Spaceship Two has crashed
IN THE EYE IN THE EYE RIGHT IN THE EYE
Ecto-1 and the Working Cadillac
Ecto-1 and the Working Cadillac - While a lucrative business for Caddy in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, these professional vehicles weren’t all that common. In 1959, just 2102 chassis were made, the lion’s share going to the Miller-Meteor company in Ohio. Divided again between ambulance, limousine, dual-purpose and the odd flower car or two, not many more than several hundred Futura Duplexes were made in total. - A history of the Ecto-1, chariot of the gods Ghostbusters.
It's a graveyard smash!
You might know the Monster Mash, but how much do you know about the original artist, Bobby "Boris" Pickett? The article includes a link to the official website of The MoNsTeR mAsH, a revenant from Web 1.0 [more inside]
My God! It's full of Gondolas!
Sea levels are rising, the land is sinking. It's going to become a big problem for some cities on the US East Coast, so in Boston people are thinking the unthinkable - copying Venice and Amsterdam, and becoming a city of canals. [more inside]
Add it up and there outta be more
So wait, there's a band with Jim Jarmusch on keys and a bunch of experimental Horror film directors that released a record in the early 80s of spooky surf-funk and you're NOT listening to it today? Get on it y'all. It's the story of The Del-Byzanteens. [more inside]
A journey through the horror films of Ramsay brothers.
Disclaimer: The facts are taken from the journal "Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of Ramsay Brothers" by Kartik Nair. I personally declare that the journal is only used as a reference & no intentions copying the content for any benefits, it's only to spread the knowledge regarding the working ways of Ramsay brothers. [more inside]
"YOU'LL ALL BE DAMNED!!"
Express yourself sexually in an ill-fitting wig.
The Cut presents 14 Halloween costume hookup stories. Something Awful's FASHION SWAT on costumes for cats.
My Pet The Giant Snail
Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence
“Select a note,’’ [Robert Fripp] told them, “and then, in silence, establish a relationship with that note. Keep it within you until you can no longer contain it and must give it voice.’’
"Surviving a Weekend with the Wizard of Prog Rock"
Viewpoint Magazine roundtable on the state
The recent issue of the online Viewpoint Magazine (previously) contains a roundtable discussion on state power and revolutionary strategy featuring historian Geoff Eley, political theorist Jodi Dean and others. [more inside]
We're Witches Of Halloween... Woo-Ooo!
Words And Pictures was a long running BBC television series created to help small children to learn to read and write. From back in an era when most broadcasting seemed designed to utterly terrify its younger viewers here is the Halloween episode that managed to traumatized several generations as it was repeated year-in year-out (if not on television, then on scratchy VHS recordings in school classrooms) seemingly forever. [more inside]
Psych-o-Lantern
About 55 000 Blue whales. (That’s quite a lot of Pumpkin.)
Jack O’lanterns: Pumpkins and turnips and fungi, Oh My!, a brief but informative blog post by Kirsty Jackson at Plant Scientist.
Mind the Gap
We used to think that the ultimate in security was a stand-alone (that is, off the network) computer, sort of like a room with no doors. How can an attacker get in If there's no way to get in? Such computers are referred to as air-gapped. But as early as 1985, it became clear that we might be able to read the contents of a monitor screen from the next room using Van Eck phreaking (dramatized by Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon). Now it appears things are even worse. [more inside]
I scared people in Walmart and got popular. No Excuses
You're Nick Santonastasso, you got an ...interesting... sense of humour so you team up with uber prankster Vitaly Zdorovetskiy to scare the shit out of people, making full use of the fact that thanks to Hanhart syndrome you only have one arm and no legs by playing a dismembered viction of a chainsaw wielding maniac. [more inside]
UKIP:Robert Iwaszkiewicz::The Tories:Right wing scandanavians
UKIP have done a deal with a right-wing Polish Party to ensure their Euro group continues to recieve funding. Huffpo: "The Polish MEP recruited by Nigel Farage to save Ukip's group in the European Parliament has joked about wife beating and defended Adolf Hitler's tax policy." Guardian: "Britain’s leading Jewish organisation has accused Nigel Farage of putting Ukip’s credibility on the line by striking a deal with a far-right Polish party whose leader has a history of Holocaust denial and racist and misogynistic comments." Meanwhile, the Tories own European Conservatives and Reformist (ECR) group have done deals with Right-Wing Danish and Finnish groups, for the same reason. Euroactive: The eurosceptic Danish People's Party, and The Finns party, have left Nigel Farage's Parliament group, Europe of Freedom and Democracy, which they previously belonged to. Guardian: Moderates warn that inviting Danish People's party to join Conservative group would damage Britain and the Tories
Cheers: 5 Cast Members, but mainly Kirstie Alley
Complexity and the dysfunctions of central government
One of the most interesting psychological aspects of Whitehall is that their inability to fix their own lifts in no way dents their confidence in advocating that they manage some incredibly complicated process. If one says, ‘given we’ve failed to fix the bloody lift in four years, maybe we should leave X alone’, they tend to look either mystified or as if you have made a particularly bad taste joke.
Dominic Cummings, a former special advisor writes a cutting dissection on the issues of complexity in modern politics and the increasing dysfunction of the executive branch via Bond movies, the First World War, political screwups and some unfixable lifts.
Dominic Cummings, a former special advisor writes a cutting dissection on the issues of complexity in modern politics and the increasing dysfunction of the executive branch via Bond movies, the First World War, political screwups and some unfixable lifts.
On science, social issues and liberal bias.
The subject was first surfaced by Jonathan Haidt in a 2011 talk at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Video here. The NYT reported at the time: Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. But, this week, it resurfaced with two new pieces.
One on The New Yorker:
"By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a “sea of hands,” comprising about eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians. Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands."
And Chris Mooney from the WaPo also took a look at the subject:
"Sure enough, the study found that these liberal academics showed a pretty high level of resistance to evolutionary explanations for phenomena ranging from sexual jealousy to male promiscuity."
Beware The Moon!
An American Werewolf In London [Part 2] [~2h total], a radio drama adaptation of John Landis' original script, written and directed by Dirk Maggs.
October 30
Library Hack
When you have a problem, you must...
Fastening Days is a 11-minute long Anime short commissioned by YKK, the mysterious company responsible for the Clasp Locker that helps hold your jeans together. [more inside]
I will be very proud if I have changed our city in some ways that last.
Tom Menino, Boston's 53rd and longest-serving mayor, dies at 71. He had recently published his memoirs, but announced last week that he was suspending both his book tour and his cancer treatments. "Because of his leadership," current Mayor Marty Walsh said in a released statement, "Boston is a better place today." That is an understatement -- some polls showed that more than fifty percent of Bostonians had met him at one time or another; Tom Menino was the People's Mayor. [more inside]
Patience
Skyharbor has recently released their new song, Patience. The animation is by Jess Cope and she has been developing a reputation for doing fantastically creative work with other brilliant musicians.
Happy Jack: The Grave Dancer
"I can't remember where I was the first time I saw the KXVO Pumpkin Dance several years ago, or who sent it to me, but I remember the feeling: that I would one day show this video to my children, and their children after them. It effortlessly combined so many facets of contemporary pop culture: the Ghostbusters theme song, an inane costume, dancing so bad that it's good, and — perhaps most important of all — it ran on a local TV station in Omaha, Nebraska."-The Story Behind the Greatest Halloween Video Ever in the History of the Internet
A little creepy audio fiction for your Halloween-eve enjoyment
Pseudopod 401: The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife Be careful what you wish for, and be careful of things with labels you can't read. [more inside]
Very 70s Halloween tv specials. How very? Paul Lynde and KISS very.
Some 70s television programming for your Halloween viewing pleasure:
AeroMobil Flying Car
On October 29, the Slovakian company AeroMobil began flight-testing their Aeromobil 3.0 flying car.
New York State Of Mind
MOLDOL!
A few pages from Dr. Evil's playbook
When lobbyist Richard Berman gave a speech to the Western Energy Alliance, he was seeking to raise millions from energy companies for his Big Green Radicals campaign attacking groups like the Sierra Club and NRDC. What he didn't know was that one of the executives in the room would be so offended that he would secretly record the talk and hand it to the New York Times. The transcript (pdf) reveals Berman's strategies for creating non-profit groups to influence public debate and policy. [more inside]
If you are holding a snake right now, press 4.
Here And There Along The Echo is "a guide to the Echo River for drifters and pilgrims" by the Bureau of Secret Tourism and Cardboard Computer, the creators of magical realist adventure game Kentucky Route Zero. Call (270) 301-5797 or download the "dialing software" and hear about historic sites along the Echo River, learn about the river's flora and fauna, or just get help identifying unfamiliar sounds.
Hey, remember that time it rained meat in Kentucky?
The other day Mrs. Crouch, of Olympian Springs, Ky., was employed in the open air and under a particularly clear sky, in the celebration of those mysterious rites by which the housewife transmutes scraps of meat, bones and effete overshoes into soap. Suddenly there descended upon her a gentle shower of meat. (PDF) That's right, in Bath County, Kentucky, flesh fell from an otherwise clear sky on March 3, 1876. Mentalfoss gathered a collection of old news articles about what people said the sky meat was based on taste and more scientific investigations. Theories for the localized "meat rain" ranged from meat descending from space like meteorites, star jelly, and the most likely, overly full vultures who vomited (Google books preview), but while in flight. One Hundred and Thirty Nine years later--on Sunday, March 3, 2015--Kurt Gohde will re-seed the clouds over Olympia Springs with meat. [more inside]
bad and dumb and needless and not matt taibbi’s fault
Matt Taibbi has left Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media before Taibbi's digital magazine, Racket, ever debuted. First Look is still publishing The Intercept, and that magazine's Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and John Cook have chosen to tell the inside story on Taibbi's leaving. [more inside]
"It's Jim Crow all over again."
There are 6,951,484 names on the target list of the 28 states in the Crosscheck group; each of them represents a suspected double voter whose registration has now become subject to challenge and removal. According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.[more inside]
That was the sales pitch. But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. The Crosscheck instructions for county election officers state, “Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match.”
In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state.
Gangster Life – And Death – in London's East End
"Mid-afternoon on a weekday is a good time for a discreet liaison at The Carpenters Arms – the pub that used to belong to the Krays in Cheshire St – especially if you are meeting a jewel thief." From Spitalfields Life: So Long Lenny Hamilton, Jewel Thief, "a tribute to one of the East End [of London]’s most celebrated rogues." Hamilton co-authored an account of "the Firm," "a criminal organization based on racketeering, fraud and vicious bloodshed" and ruled over by the Kray twins. [more inside]
Success is the thing that kills bands. We haven't had any success.
So there's this UK punk band. First wavers, '77. Cohorts of Gang of Four (whose pictures were inadvertently printed on the back of their first album). Rivals of The Clash, to whom their first single was an answer record. Their energy is so gregarious, their working-class politics so pointed but relatable, they make a mark for themselves despite the limitation of barely being able to play. They get to the part where they're supposed to break up or fade away. Instead, they learn to play, to play very well, even. They become an ever-shifting collective, picking up new members, people from The Rolling Stones, or people who'd played with The Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello, The Cure. They made roaring post-punk records, shimmering power pop, pint-raising Irish/British folk, and booze-saturated country records. They found a fascination with folk music, American country music in particular. Actually, they may have accidentally invented alt-country. Lester Bangs says they're "The most revolutionary group in the history of rock n' roll." Hyperbole? Nah. Hyperbole was when he called them "better than the Beatles." 37 years in, they're still making records that odds are, you either love dearly, or have never heard of at all. They're The Mekons, friend, and Joe Angio's new documentary looks at them in all of their shambling, lovable, raucous glory. [more inside]
Goblins: how do they work?
The Pumpkin Menace
Trick or Treat? Anchor Brewing's Bob Brewer on pumpkin beers and why Anchor hasn't produced one.
Pumpkins, by themselves have very little – if any – real flavor that will survive brewing and fermentation. It’s sort of the “tofu” of the squash world in that it tastes like what you put on or into it. The flavor that everyone associates with pumpkins is pumpkin pie. What we are tasting in a pumpkin pie is actually the huge load of sugar dumped into it along with the allspice, cinnamon, clove, vanilla, ginger and other spices.[more inside]
IN ANY CONVERSATION YOU ARE ALSO DEALING WITH AN EMOTIONAL TRUTH
Film Crit Hulk is back with a long essay about more-than-gamergate. Building off his previous ethical criticism (especially his multipart James Bond series) Film Crit Hulk gives us his opinions on "THE VOID OF THIS PARTICULAR HOUR". [more inside]
Because you need more in life than love.
Love is not Enough is a fantastic breakdown why Love, as many people imagine it, is not all that is needed for a healthy relationship. It then provides realistic suggestions as to what you do need when choosing a partner. [more inside]
Tim Cook - I'm Proud to be Gay
Throughout my professional life, I’ve tried to maintain a basic level of privacy. I come from humble roots, and I don’t seek to draw attention to myself. . . . At the same time, I believe deeply in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ” . . . While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.
Safe at any speed -- until the ignition cuts out
Countless articles have been written about General Motors and its massive recalls earlier this year. What hasn’t been fully told is how GM might have gotten away with multiple counts of consumercide were it not for the efforts of three men: a Georgia lawyer, a Mississippi mechanic, and a Florida engineer.How an unsafe ignition lock helped kill tens of people and the people who found out the truth about it.
You say H-O-R-S-E, I say S-K-A-T-E
The Secret Lives of the Mentally Ill
In a Slate Article by David Rosenberg, side-by-side images and descriptions illustrate the "dual lives" of those coping with mental illness.
I cried and cried in my Mad Men dress.
If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason
Sofiya Tolstoy’s Defense [The New Yorker] In her own writings, Leo Tolstoy’s wife offered a rebuttal of the views that he set out in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” [more inside]
"I was just using it to sound different"
T-Pain performs without auto-tune for NPR's Tiny Desk Concert.
Rock and Rule.
"It just might be the most classically animated teeth-gnashing and hair-flipping metal you’ve seen in your lifetime." Master animator Juanjo Guarnido had a successful Kickstarter to assemble a killer crew to make a music video for the "face-meltingly awesome" Swedish metal band Freak Kitchen. The finished video Freak of the Week is a tour de force of Old Skool hand-drawn animation, and I believe it rocks pretty hard. [more inside]
Guide to the Races of Star Wars
georgelucasfan1 here. I was a little boy in 1979 when Episode 3 The New Home came out. These films and shows have been a big part of my life. And I would like to share with you my Star Warms knowledge. So step into my Millionaire Falcon, as we take a...... 'warp tour'... of these alien races that lived in this galaxy far, far ago.Neil Cicierega's Guide to the Races of Star Wars
"I agreed to a scouted-out project!"
The Dissolve's "Movie of the Week" on this week leading to Halloween has been The Blair Witch Project, which it describes as "the most widely despised great horror movie". They discuss the legacy of the film fifteen years after its release and the future of the genre that it helped to create: found-footage horror. And where are the people who made it these days? Heather Donahue is growing pot. Josh Leonard is still acting (Michael C. Williams less so). And the directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez seem to want to catch that same lightning in a bottle, but with very underwhelming results.
Age ain't nothing but a number
One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.
Butch Cannon, Bear Detective
In 2010, BEAR Magazine introduced an occasional single-page comic by Logan Kowalsky, Butch Cannon: The Bear Private Eye, full of pretty typical gay magazine comics tropes. [Entirely NSFW] [more inside]
If everyone sees your dickpic hanging in a gallery except you is it art?
In light of Dries Verhoeven's public art of his Grindr interactions (since cancelled), Arne Svenson's show, "The Neighbors" (previously) and Future Femme's piece, Show Me More: A collection of DickPix, and amid questions of legality and ethics, the Guardian examines art, consent and privacy.
October 29
Corpse pose
Real Amazons wore pants
Forget the stories about cutting off breasts and murdering boy children. Also the ones about an all-female lesbian society. And definitely forget about the golden lasso and the invisible plane. Real Amazons were formidable warriors who wore trousers, rode horses, got tattoos, smoked cannabis, drank fermented mare's milk and were part of "a people notorious for strong, free women", according to Adrienne Mayor in her book The Amazons:
Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. [more inside]
Dunkin' Cronuts
Starting November 3, Dunkin' Donuts will introduce a limited edition "Croissant Donut" across the nation. Just don't call it a you-know-what. "Are we copying a specific bakery in New York? The answer is no," says John Costello, Dunkin's President of Global Marketing and Innovation. When asked about the similarities between Dunkin's product ($2.49 each) and the one trademarked by Chef Dominique Ansel ($5 each), Dunkin's Executive Chef Jeff Miller responded: "I've tried the product that you mention... I like ours better."
See my grotesque grin: I smile for YOOUU
The only song you need for Halloween: Skeletons by Inflatable Boy Clams. Play it over and over! [more inside]
The story behind an iconic photo of jazz-induced hysteria
In 1951, photographer Bob Willoughby took a now-iconic photo of jazz saxophonist Big Jay McNeely and some fans in the clutch of the music during a concert at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. In 2009, Marc Myers of JazzWax contacted Willoughby to discover the story behind the photo. "You could taste the energy in that air. To this day I have never seen or heard anything to match it."
Naked Scripture Vs. Geopolitical Influence
Berkeley Students Rally To Remove Bill Maher As Commencement Speaker following critical comments about Islam.
"Freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion you want without fear of violence, freedom to leave a religion, equality for women, equality for minorities, including homosexuals, these are liberal principles that liberals applaud for," Maher said, "but then when you say in the Muslim world this is what's lacking, then they get upset."
In what began as a debate over Islam between Maher, Sam Harris, and Ben Affleck on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, tensions rose. [more inside]
"Freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion you want without fear of violence, freedom to leave a religion, equality for women, equality for minorities, including homosexuals, these are liberal principles that liberals applaud for," Maher said, "but then when you say in the Muslim world this is what's lacking, then they get upset."
In what began as a debate over Islam between Maher, Sam Harris, and Ben Affleck on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, tensions rose. [more inside]
Indie Beef
Mark Kozelek aka Sun Kil Moon is a personality.
Recently he played the Ottawa folk festival and there was sound bleed from another strage from the band The War on Drugs.
This irritated Kozelek and he wrote a song about it.
It had mixed results.
Kozelek has apparently been watching the Internet for mention of him and The War on Drugs because the second diss track has been released based on the criticism Kozelek has received.
A Dispatch From The Future
Evgeny Morozov writes for the New Yorker: The Planning Machine, on Project Cybersyn (previously) and Big Data.
Greg Grandin in The Nation responds: The Anti-Socialist Origins of Big Data
The new terror
Speaking of global memes... it started first in California, where a man dressed as a clown has been threatening people with an axe. And then it spread to France, where armed clowns have been assaulting people all over the country. Where will this horror strike next? (Me, I think they're space aliens.)
Needs More John Carpenter
FACT magazine runs down the 100 greatest horror soundtracks (that's a lot of horror soundtracks). Also, there's a companion streamable YouTube playlist.
Cookies!
Just in time for the new season, it's The NBA Fan’s Guide to Talking Trash During Pickup Basketball
You were't planning on sleeping this week, were you?
Lauren Davis rounds up webcomics to give you thrills and chills on io9, calling out 18 specifically, then listing additional titles in some of the descriptions. [more inside]
Please read the form again.
a man's home is his castle, a woman's body has never been wholly her own
"Trust Women" is a popular motto in the pro-choice movement. It sounds a little sentimental, doesn't it? Part of that old sisterhood-is-powerful feminism it is fashionable to mock today. But "Trust Women" doesn't mean that every woman is wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no one else can make a better decision, because no one else is living her life, and since she will have to live with that decision—not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court—chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot.How Pro-Choicers Can Take Back the Moral High Ground: an excerpt from essayist and poet Katha Pollitt's latest book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. [more inside]
Goodbye
Putin on the ritz
Most people in the English-speaking parts of the world missed Putin's speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi a few days ago, and, chances are, those of you who have heard of the speech didn't get a chance to read it, and missed its importance. (For your convenience, I am pasting in the full transcript of his speech below.) Western media did their best to ignore it or to twist its meaning. Regardless of what you think or don't think of Putin (like the sun and the moon, he does not exist for you to cultivate an opinion) this is probably the most important political speech since Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946.Via includes tl;dr of top 10 points
Scroll through the horror movie memories
Why not just quit your job and spend all of your savings on a horror-themed road trip where you visit the real locations of some iconic scary movies. If that sounds like too much effort, well we've done a Google-based trip ourselves.
Here's what we found... [more inside]
Here's what we found... [more inside]
"Didn't Lady Gaga just donate a million dollars to you guys?"
The Red Cross' Secret Disaster — ProPublica and NPR report on the American Red Cross' poor responses to Hurricanes Isaac and Sandy. [more inside]
Hollywood Ending
Hollywood Ending Near for Orson Welles's Last Film. The Other Side of the Wind due in theaters next year.
Joni Mitchell in colour
This isn’t the earliest TV footage that exists of Joni Mitchell, but it’s surely the earliest footage of her performing that’s in color. -- Joni Mitchell on Canadian television in 1966.
Verdingkinder
"I bind you, Hollywood, from doing harm"
Halloween is almost here which to me means one thing: overanalyzing horror flicks for any feminist undertones! ... [N]o season has better metaphors for misogynistic fears and powerful female sexuality than the scary movies that permeate almost every channel and film festival throughout October.At Autostraddle, Nina suggests nine horror films she likes in the "Blossoming-Teenage-Girl-Becoming-A-Woman" sub-genre. She is far from alone in her search for interesting feminist themes in horror cinema and literature. [more inside]
October 28
"TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am..."
The Tell-Tale Heart by Annette Jung Ed hates the disgusting eye of his father and so he made up his mind to take the life of the old man to rid himself of the eye forever. Based upon the short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. [Previously]
Perhaps the 4 most intelligent things you can read about Ebola today.
The 4 most intelligent things you can read on Ebola today?
1) This week I received a "monograph" for review from an unlikely, politically removed scientist. It was plainly titled "Summary of Ebola Virus Disease," and written in exhaustive scientific detail. The author was Steven Hatfill. If the name rings a bell—I don’t want to dwell on this, but it's germane to the context of his perspective I'm sharing here—it’s because he was very publicly, very falsely accused of killing several people with anthrax in 2001... What he does know, at a depth that can rival any scientist’s knowledge, is Ebola. An interview, with Steven Hatfill and more: 21 Days. [more inside]
Photos of Veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, c. 1858
Antares rocket explodes at the Wallops Flight Facility
An Antares rocket with the Orbital Sciences Corporation Cygnus CRS Orb-3 spacecraft bound for the International Space Station exploded today shortly after liftoff from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. [more inside]
Weapon of choice? 100% Cotton, poly-fill twin.
The Pillow Fight Prank demonstrates that many people are remarkably ready and more than happy to play suprise-pillow-fight. [slyt]
Crisis in Mexico: the government is killing students - again
Something happened the night of September 26th, 2014 near the town of Iguala, 100 miles from Acapulco, Mexico. According to The New Yorker: “Scores of uniformed municipal police and a handful of masked men dressed in black shot and killed six people, wounded more than twenty, and rounded up and detained forty-three students in a series of attacks carried out at multiple points and lasting more than three hours [...] The forty-three students taken into police custody are now ‘disappeared.”
All 43 students, all young men who were studying to become rural teachers, are still missing, presumed dead. [more inside]
From a Mefite, Announcing a Compendium of Letter Templates
The Art of Letter Writing investigates The New Century Standard Letter-Writer (1900), a collection of example letters for people to use as templates over the course of one's whole life," from A Clerk Apologizing to His Employers, and A Young Lady Desirous of Securing Farm-House Board, to A Gentleman to a Young Lady Friend of His about a Misunderstanding (from Wondermark)
Of bells, harps, accordions, the kalimba and a saw: amiina
If you've encountered delicately uplifting chimes and bells or a singing saw, seen the contributions of a string quartet in a Sigur Rós video, heard the last recording by Lee Hazlewood and noticed the gentle singing and music, or listened to Yukihiro Takahashi consider words, then you've possibly encountered the Icelandic band amiina. [more inside]
Haters Gonna... Eat at BK?
McDonalds' latest marketing push includes a variation on their ubuquitous "I'm Lovin' it" slogan. (WSJ link... if you prefer, AVClub)
"lovin' beats hatin'"
Article also covers the new "Our food, Your questions" campaign with an ex-Mythbuster. They hope to rebound from sagging same-store sales in the U.S. and the growing buzz for competitors like Chipotle (which, almost obviously, is mentioned in the article).
"lovin' beats hatin'"
Article also covers the new "Our food, Your questions" campaign with an ex-Mythbuster. They hope to rebound from sagging same-store sales in the U.S. and the growing buzz for competitors like Chipotle (which, almost obviously, is mentioned in the article).
That's regulatory capture!
LEMONADE WAR: a short film starring Patton Oswalt, Taylor Buck, Mo Collins and Werner Herzog. View more films here from We The Economy: 20 Short Films You Can’t Afford to Miss.
√2N
At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law
The law appeared in full form two decades later, when the mathematicians Craig Tracy and Harold Widom proved that the critical point in the kind of model May used was the peak of a statistical distribution. Then, in 1999, Jinho Baik, Percy Deift and Kurt Johansson discovered that the same statistical distribution also describes variations in sequences of shuffled integers — a completely unrelated mathematical abstraction. Soon the distribution appeared in models of the wriggling perimeter of a bacterial colony and other kinds of random growth. Before long, it was showing up all over physics and mathematics. “The big question was why,” said Satya Majumdar, a statistical physicist at the University of Paris-Sud. “Why does it pop up everywhere?”
Still No Howard the Duck
Marvel reveals yet more superhero-laden movies in the pipe for the next 5 years.
"And let's acknowledge that between Marvel, DC, Sony and Fox there are now 29 comic book movies coming out between now and 2020" [more inside]
An internet of firsts, some of them still online
The Webpage FX blog compiled a list of 13 internet "firsts," from the first email sent (1971) and the first spam, sent out to 400 people (1978), to the first photo posted online (1992) and much later, the first Instagram photo, (2010).
when your food label is bumpy, you must toss it
A WaPo profile of industrial design student Solveiga Pakštaitė and her latest invention, a bio-reactive food expiry label called Bump Mark: Landfills are overflowing with food. Here's a gelatin label that could limit the waste.
Misleading labels are one reason that consumers waste nearly 40 percent of the food they buy — and one of the inspirations behind Bump Mark, a new bio-based food label made with gelatin. As the food in a package starts to decay, so does the gelatin; when it finally expires, the gelatin reveals a layer of bumps. If the label is still smooth, a consumer finally knows unequivocally that food is still safe to eat... By changing the concentration of gelatin, the designer can match the label to specific foods. A weak concentration breaks down faster, and works for foods such as milk and meats that don't last as long. For any given food, the label can be adjusted to degrade at exactly the same rate.[more inside]
"Limitless wealth was a craft project."
The Great Paper Caper: Wells Tower (previously) reports on how one guy in Canada, Frank Bourassa, manufactured over $200 million in counterfeit U.S. twenty-dollar bills and more-or-less got away with it.
Vintage Supercars Rotting away in a Forest
“Nature is stronger than technology, and that I will show here,” said Michael, who has no doubt succeeded in displaying the power of nature that triumphs over even some of the most revered examples of man-made machinery.
"It's something of a puzzle, this electoral politics thing."
The Persuadables
How strategists see the 2014 Senate battlefield, state by state, featuring exclusive voter data.
How strategists see the 2014 Senate battlefield, state by state, featuring exclusive voter data.
If? When? Why? What? How much have you got?
For their annual contribution to the AV Undercover series, GWAR has their way with Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls". New singers Blothar and Vulvatron (the ass-kicking, blood-spewing-from-her-bosom new female face of GWAR!) then transition the song into a weirdly moving, personalized take on Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" in tribute to fallen comrade, Oderus Ungerus, aka founding member Dave Brockie. [more inside]
Their stories, in their own words
Sometimes when I'm with [the boys], I feel like I'm not a girl.
The Afghan Women's National Cycling Team trains six mornings a week in the quiet predawn streets of Kabul to futher their dream of one day qualifying for and participating in the Olympics. "In a country where girls have faced acid attacks just for going to school, the dangers of doing sport in public go beyond insults or the momentary impact of a well-aimed stone." [more inside]
Could you patent the sun?
Today is Jonas Salk's 100th birthday. Salk, who reimagined the idea of a vaccine by suggesting that immunity could be established in the body by using inactivated viruses chose not to patent his polio vaccine, which he first tested on his own family. [more inside]
The internal threats of Stephen King's books
The closest a film has ever come to adapting King’s internal-horror aesthetic is a film King himself has publicly lambasted: Kubrick’s version of The Shining. It’s the most artful, scary, and beautifully directed of the King adaptations, and even excludes some of the novel’s more overt (and potentially silly) visual elements, such as the hedge animals that come to life and stalk the family in the yard. Yet, the film never tackles the serious human horrors that infect Jack Torrance throughout the novel, specifically his alcoholism, along with the themes of cyclical abuse and mounting financial pressure. King’s criticism of the film is that Torrance, as played by Jack Nicholson, is portrayed as unhinged right from the start, whereas the novel slowly unravels the man’s sanity, the haunted house he occupies pushing him deeper into madness and violence. [more inside]
Proper pastrami is a painstaking, labor-intensive process.
The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise
David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell, writes for the Pacific Magazine on how confidence and incompetence often go hand in hand:
We Are All Confident Idiots
poli sci is dirty business
Profs Bumble Into Big Legal Trouble After Election Experiment Goes Way Wrong Montana Secretary of State Linda McCulloch filed a complaint Friday alleging that Stanford University and Dartmouth College researchers broke four laws by sending 100,000 election mailers to voters that appeared to come from the state. Their peers in the field have ripped their social science experiment as a "misjudgment" or -- stronger still -- "malpractice." [more inside]
Old Masters
After 80, some people don’t retire. They reign. A collection of portraits of and interviews with men and women of a certain age. Here there be wisdom.
The plant crime of the century
In January, one of the last remaining specimens of a nearly extinct water lily was stolen from Kew Gardens. Collectors and nursery owners continued to beg Magdalena for the plant. “All the time,” he said. “All the time.” He sensed that people were willing to break the rules. “When there is no way of getting it, people grow sick and obsessed.” When the water lily was taken from the Princess of Wales Conservatory, Magdalena wasn’t shocked in the slightest. “What surprised me is that it took so long,” he said.
Pop art synth art
Modern art generator Suitable for framing! /via boing boing
Robert Wyatt's soundtrack of his life
When I’m not watching Russia Today, obviously, I’m watching pop TV. Even my son’s embarrassed by the infantilism of my tastes, but there’s some good stuff out there now. Pharrell Williams’s Happy– that’s absolutely fucking knockout. Williams is as good as any 60s soul singer and the song is brilliantly put together. It’s a great drum track, and there are only four chords or so, but they’re just enough. It’s really subtly done, absolutely spot-on. My granddaughter tells me I should totally disapprove of that other song he did, though. With someone else... something lines? Blurred Lines! That’s the one. Take it from me that I don’t like that one at all.Robert Wyatt talks to the Grauniad about The Soundtrack of his Life. (Robert Wyatt previously) [more inside]
Gender-Based Prize Money Differences In Sport
A BBC Sport study into prize money found 30% of sports reward men more highly than women.
The biggest disparities in prize money were found in football, cricket, golf, darts, snooker and squash. [more inside]
October 27
THUD
Bringing back memories of the Windows OS that never was...
Experience Windows93, the OS that never was and never should be. Managing to sit somewhere between nostalgia for 1990s-era Windows (is that a thing?) and an OS from an alternate timeline, Windows93 is... something. Enjoy the CRT graphics, watch the entire ASCII version of Star Wars (mentioned on MeFi in 2000!), play Windows Solitaire, and use a full fledged browser. Also, watch out for viruses and amazing 1990s easter eggs. I don't think there is anything NSFW, but there is so much here, a it is hard to know...
“The desserts are over there,”
Water, Air, Fire, and the Drop
Heroes of Cosplay's Holly Conrad's Advice on Dressing up for Halloween
just remember that it’s “all about passion about your character, what you can wear to connect with people on a different level of being a fan of something. Cosplay and Halloween can be merged together for a better world!”
Markets in Clinical Trials for the Mega Rich?
If mega-rich people could buy places on clinical trials, would this help drive forward the development of new treatments that could benefit everyone? [more inside]
A people of four lands.
Kurdistan
The Kurdish people have had a pretty brutal recent history.
Adam Curtis explains that the Kurds have a vision of creating a completely new kind of society that is based on the ideas of a forgotten American revolutionary thinker, Murray Bookchin. [more inside]
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The Kurdish people have had a pretty brutal recent history.
Adam Curtis explains that the Kurds have a vision of creating a completely new kind of society that is based on the ideas of a forgotten American revolutionary thinker, Murray Bookchin. [more inside]
Dead ant, dead ant. Dead ant dead ant dead and dead ant dead aaaaaaaant.
Pipino, the real-life gentleman thief. Pipino had a simple philosophy: Aristocrats liked to flaunt their wealth; thieves liked to take it. Sometimes the burglar took something important and aristocrats would pay to get the item back. Pipino had heard that some palazzo owners took it as a badge of honor that he had slipped through their windows because it confirmed their good taste.
The Naysayers
Alex Ross writes for the New Yorker: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture.
OK Go won't let you down
OK Go's latest video for their new song "I Won't Let You Down" is as always, a great video with interesting choreography mixing modern dance numbers with stuff often seen in old musicals and then goes kind of nuts at the end.
"What do you do when you think you have a murderer in the family?"
My Grandma the Poisoner. And now, once again, I feel like I’m supposed to care. Like there should be closure. Either I purge my past, forgive her, and arrive at a higher vibrational state, or I find proof of what she’s done over the years and expose her once and for all. I’d always planned to search her house one last time, but now the house is gone. And nobody is exhuming any bodies, and Grandma doesn’t even know what Grandma did. And there’s not going to be any grand finale. And as I sat there listening to Grandma sing with my children—not quite crying, I wasn’t quite crying—I realized that I didn’t care what had happened, that nobody cares what happened, that caring is for cops on CSI and doctors on ER and muscle-bound Marines in the movies. [more inside]
Begun, the Wallet Wars, have.
Apple recently launched Apple Pay, a contactless payment system that uses NFC, tokenization, and TouchID for an easy and secure payment experience. Now retailers like CVS and Rite Aid are turning off their NFC support to lock out Apple Pay (and other payments systems that use NFC such as Google Wallet). Why? [more inside]
Get these M*therf*cking snakes out of my theater!
I kick people out of my Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters without a refund for texting and talking. AMA. From tales of snake handlers spraying blood all over the theater, to angry patrons yelling at security guards, the Alamo Drafthouse still remains raucous after all these years. [more inside]
How to Win the Lottery
Darius Kazemi: Every Talk Ever Given by a Successful Creative Person (SLYT)
Note: It's worth watching to the end.
Star Wars in Real Life
Bye Bye Mrs. Kot-ter
Marcia Strassman most famous as Mrs. Kotter, but also known for roles on M*A*S*H, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, and her brief foray into music recording has died of breast cancer at 66. [more inside]
Read a pristine copy of Action Comics #1 online, starring Superman!
There are a ton of free sources of Golden Age comics (Comic Books Plus, Digital Comic Museum, Fury Comics, and more scans on Archive.org, to name some of the major sources), but Certified Guaranty Company (CGC) has recently posted a very significant issue in near pristine condition: Action Comics #1, with the first appearances of Superman, Louis Lane and Zatara, which was recently auctioned off for a record-breaking $3,207,852 USD. [more inside]
Jian Ghomeshi fired from CBC
Jian Ghomeshi, host and co-creator of Q, has been fired from the CBC ‘over “information” the public broadcaster recently received that it says “precludes” it from continuing to employ the 47-year-old host of the popular Q radio show.’ [more inside]
Riding on a high and windy day
Rest In Power: John Holt, composer of The Tide Is High, early hero of the Legalize It movement, and singer of the spookiest reggae song ever, "Ali Baba", passed away October 19th. Long Live His Music.
What the garbageman doesn't know
After a New Yorker piece (previously) on one of Cairo's trash collectors went viral in Cairo, several issues regarding consent of the illiterate Sayyid, as well as possible threats against him, have come up. The author, Peter Hessler, responded in a Facebook post to some of these issues, but it seems that the story is more complicated with accusations that Hessler did not adequately inform Sayyid of what had been written, resulting in retaliation by the people he works for.
"At least, boobs should be able to fire lasers, shouldn’t they?"
What if, wrote Jenn Frank (previously), there was a computer game that involved a sexy character shopping for a bra but ended with her crying softly because she could not find one that fitted. "Everyone thought I was kidding," Ms Frank told the BBC. "I thought I was kidding, and then two hours later I was building a website for it." "It" is Boob Jam, a weekend-long event during which game developers will go without sleep to create games that offer players a more truthful and accurate depiction of breasts and what it means to have them. [more inside]
October 26
Land of the Frei
In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America.US spy agencies employed Nazis of all stripes, including SS officials with the blood of 10s of thousands on their hands, and a man described as Eichmann's mentor. They helped many Nazi war criminals immigrate to America, and protected them from prosecution. Of course they lied to Congress about it. The New York Times's Eric Lichtblau reports. (Lichtblau's reporting partner, James Risen, with whom he shared the Pulitzer Prize, continues to face jail time for refusing to turn over confidential sources to the Obama administration.)
Menagerie Phantasmagoria
Face-ism Exists
Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Your face can visibly answer this question, a Carnegie Mellon University professor argues.
How do astronauts take such great photos? Telescope lens!
Mayberry, Metropolis and Rigel VII
It was called a number of things in its fifty years of existence, but the RKO Forty Acres (which actually measured just over twenty-eight) was above all a prolific movie and television studio located in Culver City, California. It started off as a film studio during the silent era that continued prominent use in sound films including Gone With The Wind, The Magnificent Ambersons and King Kong. Later, it was widely used for television shows like Bonanza, The Adventures of Superman and, most prominently, The Andy Griffith Show. It even got used in a number of classic Star Trek episodes (and be sure to visit this site for some nice screen caps revealing Enterprise crew members walking around Mayberry). The RetroWeb has a very thorough history of the studio, complete with prodigious pictures.
It’s so starving, Aleppo, it’s so exhausted
It sounds like a jet approaching, and all of you, for a matter of instants, stare at one another, your words stifled in your mouths; but it’s only a gate that slides and shuts. A hatchet chopping firewood is a burst from a Kalashnikov; the step of a woman’s heel, a sniper shot. We look normal, in Aleppo. Fear is a cancer that wears us out only from within. [more inside]
Barbie is D'Artagnan. Really.
There had to be a way for humans to coexist with the right whales.
Chasing Bayla
Biologist Michael Moore had waited all day — really, all his life — for the whale to surface, the suffering giant he thought he could save, that science had to save. It had come down to this.
Biologist Michael Moore had waited all day — really, all his life — for the whale to surface, the suffering giant he thought he could save, that science had to save. It had come down to this.
“I wanted this to be the saddest thing I’d ever written,”
Closing a Chapter of a Literary Life [New York Times] Ahead of the American publication of his latest work, “The Book of Strange New Things,” Michel Faber discusses it and why it will be his last novel.
Pretty Persuasion
Michael Stipe of R.E.M. writes about being queer: It’s been 20 years since I announced to the world that I was queer – and that I had found the strength and the voice to say that, and to move forward with my life as a completely out, publicly queer individual.
I CAN TOLERATE ANYTHING EXCEPT THE OUTGROUP
"today we have an almost unprecedented situation...We have a lot of people...boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine...And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups---straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American...This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point...people who conspicuous love their outgroups, the outer the better, and gain status by talking about how terrible their own groups are. What is going on here?" (Slate Star Codex) [more inside]
No wonder it can't be buggered
'Phisiologus dicit quod herinatius figuram habet porcelli lactentis. Hic deforis totus est spinosus. Sed tempore vindemiarum ingreditur in vineam, et ubi viderit uvam bonam, ascendit super vitem et exacinat uvam illam, ita ut cadant omnes racemi in terram. Deinde descendit et volutat se super illos ita ut omnes racemi figantur in spinis eius, et sic portat escam filiis suis.' -- By Obrazki nunu & Discarding Images (previously), based on this medieval bestiary.
Aamir Khan discusses sexuality on Satyamev Jayate
Satyamev Jayate is an award-winning Indian talk show hosted by Aamir Khan. In this episode, he discusses sexuality with members of the LGBTQ community (1:10:39, SLYT, Subtitled).
The Secret Life of Nuns
Alex Mar writes for the Oxford American on spending time in a convent:
I traveled here, arriving just yesterday on an early flight, to answer a question that I’ve had for years: Why would a woman make the very specific choice to marry God? I’m imagining a certain kind of woman—let’s say a woman like myself, in her mid-thirties and smart and not hard-up and with a few options in life. Why would she choose to live with his many brides and very little privacy and pooled resources; to abandon any and all romantic partners, along with the possibility of ever again touching someone else’s naked body; to set aside every personal need and closely held ambition in favor of the needs of others? I wanted to understand who this woman was—call her a nun or a sister or a woman religious—and why I’ve harbored a fantasy about her since I was a young girl.
R.U.R.
Will Killer Robots Destroy Humanity? What The Future Of Robots Reveals About The Human Condition. Peter Thiel says 'Robots Are Our Saviours, Not the Enemy,' via. Brad DeLong reponds with The Rise of the Robots. Don't forget your 'Terrifying Robot Update,' especially when robots grow our food. Or maybe we'll get the Robots of Resistance, with human values.
New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy. AI, Robotics and the Future of Jobs. [more inside]
Once outsold Dickens - now called "the other Dickens"
As the nights are beginning to draw in and Halloween approaches, how about something to make the flesh creep and send a shiver down the spine? Charles Dickens was a master of the macabre, whether it’s in his Christmas ghost stories such as A Christmas Carol, in the chilling Gothic emptiness of Satis House in Great Expectations or the dirty squalor of London in Oliver Twist. But there was another novelist who most people have never heard of, whose books also offered the Victorian reading public a good helping of horror. At the height of his career, he sold more copies of his work than Dickens, who is widely thought to have been the bestselling novelist of the age. This other writer’s name was George W. M. Reynolds, and he has recently been called ‘the other Dickens’. 2014 marks the bicentenary of his birth.
(Tweet & Tell Them To Support 2FA)
twofactorauth.org is a site that catalogs digital services based on whether or not they support two factor authentication.
The Forest Man of India
How one person singlehandedly created a forest, saved an island, and changed the world. [more inside]
One World Trade Center
Tomorrow, One World Trade Center will begin the process of opening its doors for the first time, and sometime next week, the employees of Condé Nast will move in. [more inside]
And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy.
"A child’s body is very easy to live in. An adult body isn’t. The change is hard. And it’s such a tremendous change that it’s no wonder a lot of adolescents don’t know who they are. They look in the mirror — that is me? Who’s me?
And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy."
Ursula K. Le Guin on Aging and What Beauty Really Means
And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy."
Ursula K. Le Guin on Aging and What Beauty Really Means
Russian empire changes clocks to Putin Time, expands to 11 time zones
BBC: Russia will turn back its clocks for the last time on Sunday to permanently adopt winter hours. It will also increase its time zones from nine to 11, from the Pacific to the borders of the European Union. For the last three years, Russia experimented with keeping permanent summer time, but it proved to be highly unpopular with many Russians. The Soviet Union introduced Daylight Saving Time in 1981. [more inside]
October 25
Keep To The Beaches You're Used To
"A little child shall be born in a grocery store in Whittier..."
"And on the Seventh Day, He gave a Barbecue." - Based on the 1969 book of the same name, The Begatting of The President is a parody Biblical retelling of the fall of Johnson and the rise of Nixon as narrated by Orson Welles. [Youtube playlist]
What could possibly be worse than this Halloween costume?
What could possible be worse than an "Ebola Containment Suit" Halloween costume? That would be a "Sexy Ebola Containment Suit" costume.
"What Does Joan Say?": The question that the president habitually asked
Joan Quigley has passed away on Tuesday at the age of 87. Brought on as an advisor in response to the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, she had been in contact with the First Lady up to three times a day via private lines set up for her at the White House and Camp David. The President is said to have asked his wife "What does Joan say?" habitually. Donald Regan, Chief of Staff in the Reagan White House, wrote that "Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with (Quigley)". She was an astrologer.
When a drag club dies in San Francisco, a classy cocktail joint is born.
Queens vs. the Machine - a look at nearly two centuries of drag culture in San Francisco and how it survives in today's tech economy.
Mysterious giant sharks may be everywhere
"They can be as big as great white sharks, but that's about as far as the comparison goes. Their maximum speed is a lethargic 1.7 miles per hour, many are almost blind, and they are happy to eat rotting carcasses. They may be common throughout the ocean, but you've probably never heard of them. Meet the Greenland shark." Here's video of an encounter with one.
on a frolic of his own
‘You do not need to deliver the fatal blow or even be at the actual scene of the killing to be found guilty and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ [more inside]
The Murderers Next Door
The Edwards were spooked. Christopher stole £10,000 from his employer and they ran away to Lille, De Gaulle’s birthplace. But they couldn’t access the Wycherleys’ account from abroad, Christopher couldn’t find work, and their money ran out. Instead of selling the memorabilia they’d brought with them, in desperation Christopher rang his elderly stepmother, Elizabeth Edwards, confessed to burying Susan’s parents and asked for money to save him and Susan from prison. If the memorabilia hadn’t mattered so much, no one would know today that the Wycherleys were under the lawn. It could have been the perfect crime. But Elizabeth Edwards called the police. The Murderers Next Door.
48 minues of 1978 radio
Charly Jones, KZEW-FM Dallas, 1978.
they played songs and Disc-Jockeys talked about nudists...Also
1975 KZEW-FM
1967 Top 40 KVIL
Demos '82-'83
...dig those groovy sounds.
they played songs and Disc-Jockeys talked about nudists...Also
1975 KZEW-FM
1967 Top 40 KVIL
Demos '82-'83
...dig those groovy sounds.
Nicki Minaj, Cheeky Genius
This is what she does. She takes a pretty good song, waits until you are popping along to it, then a little longer, until it feels repetitive and you start to see through to its flaws, and then boom, she comes in and makes it a completely different song—a better song. She is the best part even of great songs; her featured verse on Kanye West's "Monster" is the best of several, including ones by Jay Z and Rick Ross. She did that song because she was asked and because "Kanye's a genius." She did "Bang Bang" because she "knew it would be big."
As seen in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
Ever woken up on a Saturday morning wondering how a modern wind tunnel works? (Rhetorical question; I know you haven't.) The Sauber F1 team has posted a 44 minute video explaining the ins and outs of using a wind tunnel. The video covers everything from wind tunnel design to how F1 cars are tested.
RIP Jack Bruce, 1943-2014
Jack Bruce, best known as bass player and vocalist for 60s supergroup Cream has died of liver disease at the age of 71. [more inside]
The Force Is Strong With This Dad
When a seven-year-old girl wants to be Han Solo for Halloween, what's her father to do? Dress as Princess Leia, of course.
WHY MAUREEN WHY
"It was all about me, my life, and my choice."
So I had no choice. At work, I spoke to my friend Shirley, who promised to call around her Bronx neighborhood that night. She knew someone who knew someone, and in a few days, it was arranged. I would stay with her and everything would be all right.What having an abortion was like in 1959.
Welcome to the jungle!
Oh btw just beat Baumgartner's skydiving record LOL
Google executive Alan Eustace beats Felix Baumgartner's skydiving record. It took more than two hours to hit an altitude of 135,890 feet (41,419 metres), where he separated himself from the balloon and started plummeting back to Earth. Eustace hit a top speed of 822mph during a freefall that lasted four-and-a-half minutes. [more inside]
October 24
No, not 6 minute abs, 7! Seven is the magic number!
For those of you who wanted to follow the exercise plan featured in the NY Times on the 7 minute workout (previously), they now offer an app to make it easier to follow their program. [more inside]
Do you like vintage training/educational fims? Meet Jeff Quitney.
Jeff Quitney has curated hundreds and hundreds* of YouTube playlists with thousands and thousands of vintage educational, training and institutional films and documentaries. If you hate multi-link posts you can jump right in because the playlists aren't organized. In addition to including extensive background information and links to other resources in the video descriptions, he has restored or improved the video and audio in most of the films. Space, the military, and biology are well represented, but so are pets, food, and outdoor recreation and survival. Armchair travelers will be able to travel around the world, but you can also stay at home and watch cartoons. Travel back in time for the latest breaking newsreels, and add your own weather reports from vintage USAF meteorology films. And if you like women’s tennis, then you’ve just hit the motherlode.*I stopped counting at 480
[more inside]
Non non non
Unless you are a monomaniacal specialist of the 80s, there is very little chance that Cha Cha Guitry will ring any bell. And yet this band, buried away in Saint-Etienne – at the very heart of France – could have rivalled easily with Elli & Jacno or Telex. Emblematic of that French touch which tinged new-wave with a bit of sunshine, their electro, retro-futuristic songs have that slight sweet and sour flavour between casualness and sophistication.
I love tortoises, and I love to crochet.
Disrupting Healthcare
'We Are Going For Change': A Conversation With 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki. 'After spending seven months in the Food & Drug Administration’s penalty box, the consumer genetics testing firm 23andMe recently submitted a new health-related test for FDA approval.'
'It was a significant step following last November’s FDA slapdown of 23andMe’s genetic tests, which included health reports outlining customers’ chances of getting a wide variety of diseases from celiac to melanoma. In a sharply worded warning letter, the FDA said the $99 tests, analyzed from a vial of customers’ saliva, constituted a medical device under its regulations, and the company needed to get explicit approval for providing risks of getting specific diseases.' [more inside]
Anarchy in the Pre-K
Martha Stewart Living inspires parents to throw a Punk Rock Inspired Party for their children. Instead of advising parents to hijack the school's photocopier and use ransom-note letters from shoplifted magazines for invites; to get their child's mohawk ready to withstand the "nosh pit" with a fresh shave and white glue; perhaps piercing their cherubic cheeks with a safety pins; or even offering lessons in gobbing on the entertainment, the author suggests serving Spinach Ricotta Skulls and printing the sheet music of your favourite punk song on fondant-covered cupcakes. It's no wonder that the real party is in the comments.
I was so taken by the chief
How he can move gigantic marble blocks, but his own movements are light? An excerpt from Il Capo by Yuri Ancarani, which follows a foreman at a marble quarry.
Poor Teeth In A Rich World
"But it wasn’t sugar, heaps of which are sucked down daily by the middle and upper classes, that guided his and my grandma’s dental fates. And it wasn’t meth. It was lack of insurance, lack of knowledge, lack of good nutrition – poverties into which much of the country was born." Sarah Smarsh in Aeon on the sociological, political, and medical intersection of bad teeth.
a.k.a. the sky is falling and the Boogeyman is chasing me
Chapman University has released The Chapman Survey on American Fears, a comprehensive, scientific survey of 1500 Americans on what they fear the most. [more inside]
Scifi and comets
How do you get the world excited about space exploration? With a promotional scifilm. Come see Ambition produced by the European Space Agencacy (ESA) to promote excitement about Rosetta's mission and upcoming landing of the space probe Philae on the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November. [more inside]
"So no I don't always believe them and yeah I let them know that."
While working within the Chicago Police Department, Rebecca Campbell (PhD, Professor, Michigan State University) was told by a detective that "most victims lie" about sexual assault. She, on the other hand, was certain that most victims told the truth. Wondering how both she and the detective could be so certain, she began to do the research to find out. Her work examines how the legal and medical and mental health systems respond to the needs of adult, adolescent and pediatric victims of sexual assault. [Warning for graphic descriptions of assaults] [more inside]
Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance
Tower of Silence
A dakhma, or "tower of silence" is an ancient structure created by Zoroastrians for the disposal of the dead. Within an elevated courtyard, surrounded by high walls the bodies of the deceased are laid out in a circle. Vultures descend into the structure and consume the bodies. Like the Tibetan sky burial the gift of one's flesh to the birds is seen as a final act of charity by the deceased. After the bones bleach in the sun they are put into a ossuary or placed into a central pit to crumble to dust. While Iranian Zoroastrians ended their use 40 years ago the tradition continues in India. A pesticide related decline in vulture population is endangering the practice.
Geometric Lathes!
"...a tragic and extreme version of a familiar pattern"
One-Fifth of Detroit's Population Could Lose Their Homes — Many families could stay put for just a few hundred dollars, if only they knew how to work the system. (SLAtlantic)
100 Scifi-Themed Songs, best or not
io9 has come up with a surprisingly good list of 100 science-fiction-themed songs. The comments are actually pretty great, with a lot more songs. There's rap, heavy metal, folk, polka, you name it. Still missing: more coverage of songs in languages other than English. [more inside]
A New Hope for Egyptian Archaeology.
Five years ago, if archaeologists digging up pharaonic ruins in Egypt found any human bones, they would usually throw them away. “Most Egyptian archaeological missions looked at human remains as garbage,” said Afaf Wahba, a young official at Egypt’s antiquities ministry.
Now, however, a new generation of Egyptian archaeologists, including Wahba, are pushing to reform the ossified ministry for antiquities. [more inside]
ACTUALLY
Sex and Drugs and a £1.7 Billion EU bill.
Robert Peston, BBC : "Well you may recall that the Office for National Statistics recently recalculated the size of our national income to take account of unreported or under-reported parts of the economy, such as research and development, illicit drugs and prostitution.
So thanks in part to the inclusion in the official economy of our productive sex workers, our EU membership fee has been augmented." - The BBC's economic editor's take on the UK's new, increased (by £1.7 billion) EU subscription. [more inside]
Painting with plywood, returning scrap wood to organic forms
Henrique Oliveira "paints" in three dimensions with plywood, as he describes it in a short interview with Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. The video focuses on a 2012 work in progress, Carambóxido, which is made from, and still smells like, industrial debris found in the Flats and along the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The artist, who hails from São Paulo, is most recognized for his large installation pieces that burst through gallery walls and coil around pillars, appearing to grow from the spaces around them. You can see many more of his paintings, sculptures and installations at Oliveira's own website, which requires flash to navigate.
People thought dot-com...was crazy. Dot-bong is going to be awesome
"The next day, over breakfast, he said: 'At the peak in my account, I was at $640,000, but now I'm at $381,000. But I've taken out five times what I've put in along the way, so now it's like Monopoly money. I'm still buying more shares, though, because of my followers. I'm sticking with it for them. I'm like the Jesus of trading. I'm, like, letting myself get nailed to the cross just because I don't want them to suffer. I mean, I'm not really upset about losing all that money, which is shocking to me sometimes.'"Meet the Wolf of Weed Street, (@WolfOfWeedST, natch) the man who's introducing stoners to the world of penny stock scams.
" ... and what a stunning voice it is"
We wanted to create something quite muscular and meaty. I was getting a little disenchanted with boring wet music. I wanted something with some kind of punch to it ...Esben and the Witch formed in 2008 after neophyte guitarist Thomas Fisher bumped into old friend Rachel Davies on the street in Brighton and asked if she'd like to be in a band. Together with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Copeman, they started making a kind of bruised, ghostly electro goth-pop that drew comparisons with dubstep and witch house. Then things changed. Their third album, A New Nature, recorded with Steve Albini after a successful Kickstarter campaign, sees the band step away from their electro-pop origins, combining English-major Davies' lyrical obsessions with Herman Hesse and Jack London with the band's love of uncompromising noise, psych, and transcendent post rock. A New Nature, released last month, can be streamed via Stereogum.
Some U.S. hospitals weigh withholding care to Ebola patients
"The possibility of withholding care represents a departure from the 'do everything' philosophy in most American hospitals and a return to a view that held sway a century ago, when doctors were at greater risk of becoming infected by treating dying patients. 'This is another example of how this 21st century viral threat has pulled us back into the 19th century,' said medical historian Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan.
Fall
Autumn. Requires a modern browser that supports WebGL.
The Secret State and the Historians
The UK's National Archives has today released the formerly secret files detailing MI5's monitoring of the British Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill [PDF downloads available]. The Guardian reports. An official historian explains. [more inside]
The secret history of alternative manga
Without komaga (literally “panel pictures”), there would have been no gekiga. Moreover, because by the mid 60s gekiga had become lingua franca in comics for adolescent boys and young men, and because without gekiga it is unlikely that the “cinematic” would have become the obsession that it did amongst manga critics and historians, one could also say that without komaga neither manga or its discourse would exist as we know them.Ryan Holmberg looks at the work of pioneering manga artist Matsumoto Masahiko and his influence on manga as an artform.
Despite this, komaga’s creator, Matsumoto Masahiko (1934-2005) has only recently been resurrected from the archive. Yet still has his work barely registered within the mainstream of manga scholarship, which remains stubbornly Tezuka-centric in focus.
Seriously, it's not an RPG supplement
Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has just released brand new scans of the Voynich Manuscript. The entire collection is available in JPEG and TIFF, and the new scans look pretty nice. The Beinecke's main page for the Voynich (previously) gives a high-level overview of what the Voynich is, but René Zandbergen's site is probably a better place to start. Just want to poke around? Try the Voynich Manuscript Voyager, which lets you zoom in and bookmark any location in the book. Or the Voynichese Query Viewer, which provides visual search results. And don't forget the text, which the Voynich information browser provides in your choice of transcription. [more inside]
October 23
Main Street ran east to west, land astride platted into tidy rectangles
Maps of street layouts, coloured based on their orientation. Includes San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Chicago, Berlin, Boston and London.
I ate roadkill raccoon
Reanna Alder eats roadkill raccoon so you don't have to. (Article has no images except a highly processed one of a live raccoon.)
What to read when pressed for time.
17 Brilliant Short Novels You Can Read in a Sitting by Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature:
This week author Ian McEwan expressed his love of short novels, saying “very few [long] novels earn their length.” Certainly it seems like a novel has to be a minimum of 500 pages to win a major literary award these days, and many genre novels have ballooned to absurd sizes.[more inside]
I love a good tome, but like McEwan many of my favorite novels are sharpened little gems. It’s immensely satisfying to finish a book in a single day, so in the spirit of celebrating quick reads here are some of my favorite short novels. I’ve tried to avoid the most obvious titles that are regularly assigned in school (The Stranger, Heart of Darkness, Mrs Dalloway, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, The Crying of Lot 49, etc.). Hopefully you’ll find some titles here you haven’t read before.
"Because we're here, lad. Nobody else. Just us."
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the film Zulu, which depicts the Battle of Rorke's Drift (previously) in 1879. Here's a little history of the production, as well as ten things you may not know about the film and an argument that it's the best British war film ever made. Film Historian Sheldon Hall discusses the film's legacy, and Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi (who portrayed his own great grandfather in the film) reminisces about the shoot.
Far beyond "every good boy does fine"
Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People Toby W. Rush's "Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People" covers a massive range of topics like pitch, rhythm, scales, intervals, and harmonics. The online book itself is arranged as a collection of about 50 PDFs that offer diagrams, notes, and tips for everything music theory related. [more inside]
“I’m Emanuela Orlandi and I attend a science high school.”
The Orlandi Code: [Toronto Star] The Mafia, communist spies, the Pope and the twisted mystery of a kidnapped Vatican girl.
The new single from Aphex Swift
EVE Online: Phoebe changes everything about capital-class ship travel
Possibly one of the largest game changes ever seen. Being over ten years old, Eve has started to suffer from stagnation in its null-security space operations and politics. After the large $300k+ battle of B-RVRB, many of the large alliances and coalitions settled in to rebuild their massive capital ships. Many of them brokered deals to not attack each other and this has been going on for quite some time.
Without high-end targets to go after, those operating large capital fleets get bored and find ways to PvP on lesser well-equipped players with their Titans and supercarriers. This type of PvP has been around for a long time of course, but now it is to the extent that CCP Games has announced highly drastic changes to the way that capital ships and others travel via jump mechanics (teleportation), bridging structures and gate travel.
All jump ranges by most capital ships, usually in the 11-15 light year range, will be reset to a 5 light year range in the upcoming Phoebe expansion in early November. This, along with the introduction of fatigue timers, will drastically alter the travel map for very large ships in that old routes between regions will no longer exist for most areas of the galaxy. The player base has been split between being overly-exhilarated and highly-wronged. But all agree, the in-game universe size has been re-writ enormously. [more inside]
A biomechanical analysis of coitus
Objective: To describe male spine movement and posture characteristics during coitus and compare these characteristics across 5 common coital positions. Results: Based on range of motion, the least-to-most recommended positions for a male flexion-intolerant patient are mSIDE, mMISS2, mQUAD2, mMISS1, and mQUAD1 (NSFW).
boo
Neanderthal and Sapiens, sitting in a tree...
"Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia.
And the genome, extracted from a fossil thighbone found in Siberia, added strong support to a provocative hypothesis: Early humans interbred with Neanderthals."
Micropower’s Quiet Takeover
Small-scale, low-carbon generation now produces one-quarter of world electricity (Rocky Mountain Institute)
Who Wears The Pants Around Here?
In 1938 Los Angeles, Helen Hulick went to jail for wearing slacks in courtroom. 'Kindergarten teacher Helen Hulick made Los Angeles court history — and struck a blow for women's fashion — in 1938. Hulick arrived in downtown L.A. court to testify against two burglary suspects. But the courtroom drama immediately shifted to the slacks she was wearing. Judge Arthur S. Guerin rescheduled her testimony and ordered her to wear a dress next time.' 'The next day, Hulick showed up in slacks. Judge Guerin held her in contempt. She was given a five-day sentence and sent to jail.' [more inside]
That New Costume Smell
If you were a child in the 70s who dreamed of being Boss Hogg or an 80s baby desperate to be a Rubik’s Cube, your dream could come true for less than $5. For that was the Golden Age of Ben Cooper and Collegeville Costume. Relive their glory days by perusing some vintage catalogs. [more inside]
He looks like a reverse Benjamin Buttons
You probably should play all of these...
With thousands of reader suggestions, Kotaku has published a directory of "Classic PC games you must play". The most voted for free games [links go to places you can download games]: Star Control II, Tyrian, Zork, Battle Zone, Myth II, and Daggerfall. Some of the most votes for games that are available for $10 or less:Master of Orion ($5),Quest for Glory ($10), Planescape ($10), Total Annihilation ($6), Heroes of Might and Magic III ($9), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis ($5), Little Big Adventures 2 ($5), Descent ($10), and Betrayal at Krondor ($6). More idiosyncratic than PC Games list of the top games, but the people have spoken...
Car model diorama-rama
Instagram user takupon0816 is a constant stream of the most incredible model car dioramas. The weathering and lighting are so spot on that most barely give away they are in fact small scale models and not life-sized photoshoots. Weathering is a big thing in scale modeling with tools and techniques specifically made for it. There are also diorama model museums in Japan dedicated to showcasing the craft.
Michaelangelo: You’re not a quitter, dude. Finish what you started.
#Krogisnotforsale
Atlanta's graffiti filled Krog Street tunnel erased in protest. Artists and residents of Atlanta's Cabbagetown neighborhood, angry about an upcoming ticket-holders only masquerade ball (promising a "sultry underground experience" where "taboo will be the norm" for $40 not including drinks) have, in protest, painted over all the graffiti art that made Krog street tunnel remarkable to begin with.
Through the Eyes of a Monster, tales from a different vantage point
About 40 years ago, Edward D. Wood, Jr. published a number of short stories in "girly" mags (cover images likely NSFW), but those stories haven't been republished, until now. Blood Splatters Quickly collects 32 stories from Ed Wood, and you can read The Day The Mummy Returned on Boing Boing. If you like tales told by the monsters, io9 collected more of such stories, videos, and video games, and there's a related AskMe post, looking for stories where humans are the monsters, many of which can be read online, as linked below the break. [more inside]
100 Years of Martin Gardner!
In Honor of the Centennial of Martin Gardner's birth (October 21, 1914), we've lined up Thirty-One Tricks and Treats for you: Magazine articles, new and classic puzzles, unique video interviews, and lots more. ✤ The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner [46min video] ✤ The College Mathematics Journal, January 2012 dedicated to Gardner with all articles readable online.
Moderation Exasperation
So companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of MySpace who now runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue, estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed
Translation: I love mom
AutoRap is an app that will take words spoken into it and automatically tune them into one of several pre-set rap beats. Here, a young girl makes an adorable rap about her mother.
Why I Left
"It’s about readers and their trust in us." Dave McKinney, longtime Chicago Sun-Times political reporter, resigns after the paper appears to cave to pressure from billionaire Illinois Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner to punish McKinney for writing an article that portrayed Rauner as a thug. After supporting McKinney publicly but attempting to remove him from the political beat, the paper reversed its three-year-old policy of not endorsing candidates by endorsing Rauner, who until recently owned 10% of the company that owns the paper.
Photographing Today's Solar Eclipse
This afternoon/evening, North Americans will be treated to a partial solar eclipse, making for some great photography opportunities from Chicago to LA and points northward (coverages as high as ~60% in the Northwestern US and Canada) -- even if there are some clouds! Not sure how to photograph an eclipse safely? Here are some detailed guides. [more inside]
f-bombs for feminism?
Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs For Feminism (YouTube; NSFW), FCKH8's new video campaign, has gone viral - attracting both praise & criticism. FCKH8's campaigns have sparked similar mixed reactions before. [more inside]
hassled by the cops for taking too many photographs of freight trains
Abomination
A prolific vandal has defiled natural features in at least ten US National Parks. And then posted about it on social media. Reddit is on the case.
Really, really old dogs
"Photographer Pete Thorne has discovered that, just as photographing the elderly can make for powerful portraits, the same can be said for old dogs as well. His “Old Faithful” photo series takes a warm and intimate look at man’s best friends as they live out their golden years."
"I write as a reader, not knowing what the author will say next."
Russell Edson was a prose poet whose poetry had the "the sustained wackiness of old Warner Brothers cartoons." When he passed away this year Charles Simic wrote in appreciation of his work, as did J. Robert Lennon, whose article included two audio clips of Edson reading. In interviews, Edson spoke with the same mix of seriousness and humor as he did in his poetry. Here are two interviews, one with Peter Johnson [pdf] and another with Mark Tursi. But, of course, the important thing is his poetry, so here are a few examples: 1, 2, 3. And finally, here's a video of him reading (starts after the 9th minute). [Edson previously. I especially recommend reading the linked appreciation by Sarah Manguso.]
October 22
"My father directed his stupid humor at me."
Louise Bourgeois Peels an Orange. A short film about her father, a little girl, and an orange.
Sexagenarians
Playboy models from Miss March 1954 to Miss January 1979 on meeting the male gaze then—and now. (NSFW!) "There is, according to Playboy magazine’s official style guide, no such thing as a former Playmate." [more inside]
Dogs reenacting U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments
If there is any justice in the world, this will revolutionize the way you consume Supreme Court news. Fed up with the Supreme Court's refusal to allow cameras at oral arguments, John Oliver has proposed an alternative to existing television coverage that relies on artists' renderings of the justices. Oliver has released more than ten minutes of raw footage of dogs dressed up like the members of the Court, and has challenged news outlets to use the footage to create less-boring recreations of oral arguments. [more inside]
When Baby gets that first haircut, Mother saves the hair.
"Hair work mourning jewelry served as a sentimental and tangible memorial to the deceased. In the late 1700s, hair work started to become professionalized, but tradesmen were soon deemed untrustworthy. Customers would send the hair of a loved one by mail, expecting it to be returned worked into a piece of jewelry. Instead, some tradesmen returned pre-made pieces containing anonymous hair... Some makers even replaced human hair with sturdier horsehair—leaving the jewelry with none of the sentimental attachment Victorian women coveted." [more inside]
Nothing Lasts Forever
"The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God."
Antonio Gaudi [YouTube] a 1984 Japanese documentary film by Hiroshi Teshigahara about the works of Antoni Gaudi. In the film the director visits the buildings including houses in Barcelona and the Sagrada Família. [more inside]
Detroit with a Boardwalk
"Wonder why Atlantic City is failing? The better question, the one asked by people who know the town: Why did anyone think it would ever succeed?"
The Kids At Duke Are Going To Love This
Over a period of 18 years, 3100 students at The University of North Carolina were afforded the opportunity to pad their GPA by taking classes that had no actual requirements, and never even met. Over 1/2 the students were athletes, who without the help presumably would not have stayed eligible to compete make money for the University.
FTDI driver destroys devices
USB-to-serial chip manufacturer FTDI has deployed a new version of their Windows device driver, with a small bug: it doesn't work with many Arduinos and is damaging devices that used to work. Turns out that it isn't a bug -- FTDI's new driver is deliberately "bricking" devices if it thinks the chip is counterfeit (which is fairly easy to see). FTDI says it is in the license agreement and claims that they are "definitely not targeting end users", despite the fact that their actions are destroying end-user devices where the purchasers had no idea about the provence of the chips inside. Various communities respond and some question if the new driver is malware.
"Portraits carry a weight, they are seen as markers of respect"
South African artist and activist Gabrielle Le Roux is in San Francisco for the first time to show the "Proudly African & Transgender" portrait and story series she co-created with trans* activists from Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, Burundi, Uganda and Kenya in 2008, together with a selection of portraits from the "Proudly Trans* in Turkey" collaboration with eighteen trans* activists from across Turkey. The portraits and stories will show at the SF LGBT Center at the invitation of the Queer Cultural Center and SFSU Sociology Dept. Galería de La Raza will be showing the 18 part video installation of the Proudly Trans* in Turkey exhibition, through which trans* activists from across Turkey explore the issues they want to discuss on film. [more inside]
If I'm unworthy
Blake Mills is a Venice Beach-based guitarist who combines lo-fi folk with smart pop-rock song craft. Described by Eric clapton as "the last guitarist I heard that I thought was phenomenal" Premier Guitar interview (long), Rolling Stone interview, soundcloud: If I'm unworthy
Woof.
“unusual horrible hand”
It's been a big couple of months for very large (and very strange) theropod dinosaurs. The eight-foot-long arms of Deinocheirus mirificus were discovered in the Gobi in 1965 and the animal has remained a source of speculation since then. Now a team of paleontologists from the Korea Institute of Geoscience & Mineral Resources has discovered two well-preserved specimens, and it seems that Deinocheirus was even weirder than we thought. Here's the Nature link.
You're Doing It Wrong: Peeling Oranges edition
...just don't try this at home and don't take it too seriously
"A hypocrite knows right from wrong; they know they sin when they sin," Chmielarz said. "They find excuses for these sins just like we find excuses to mow down another hundred enemies in a video game. And even though they don't follow it, deep down they know which way the moral compass is pointing. Hatred takes the excuses away from us and asks us to enjoy the sin out there in the open." Outrage and debate over the announcement of the upcoming video game "Hatred," in which players take the persona of a mass shooter. (Disturbing content in both video and company website.) [more inside]
the lifeblood of our business
In the Billfold: a tale of a day-long tryout for an early stage startup, the author dubs The Start-up From Hell. The COO responds in Valleywag, "While it posted today (October 21), the article [...] relates to an experience she says she had 15 months ago. [...] At that time, Handybook employed less than 15 people. Today, Handy is two and a half years old and employs 200 people. [...] In short, as we continue to grow we're working every day to ensure the happiness of our customers and employees." [more inside]
Pay Any Price
Jury convicts Blackwater guards in 2007 Iraq deaths
Seven years after American security contractors killed 14 unarmed Iraqis by firing machine guns and grenades into a Baghdad traffic circle, a jury in Washington on Wednesday convicted all four Blackwater Worldwide guards charged in the incident on at least some of the charges.
Help Joe Find the Best Shirt Ever
Joe Archibold, 12, is hunting for a specific polo shirt. He has a little less than a year to find it, and he needs your help.
It has blue, white and gray stripes and a blue collar, and it's pretty much the best shirt ever. Joe has the same shirt in size small and medium. He needs a large, to be able to keep intact his now five-year tradition.
Joe has worn the same shirt for every school picture since second grade.
(Related previously.)
style blogger fashion babes
Lydia is a black Canadian queer femme and in-betweeny who writes about fashion for Autostraddle.
Rosariummm sews herself adorable crop tops and throws the cutest cat parties ever.
Chelsea has a wicked sense of humor and gives dating advice.
Rosariummm sews herself adorable crop tops and throws the cutest cat parties ever.
Chelsea has a wicked sense of humor and gives dating advice.
Gunmen on loose in Downtown Ottawa
The Canadian Parliament and several blocks of Downtown Ottawa are unlocked down following shootings inside Parliament Hill and at the War Memorial a block away. A soldier at the memorial was shot. One shooter is dead inside Centre Block of Parliament Hill but at least one is still on the loose.
Reports that shots have been fired inside the Chateau Laurier. University of Ottawa and large chunks of downtown Ottawa are on lockdown. Said one officer: "if you can see Parliament Hill, you're not safe."
Live coverage from CFRA in Ottawa.
Footage of exchange of gunfire inside Centre Block (Via Globe and Mail).
This comes a day after another Canadian Forces officer was deliberately killed by a car that targeted him.
There were angels dining at the Ritz
Tim Hauser, founder of the jazz vocal group The Manhattan Transfer, has died at the age of 72. [more inside]
What It’s Like To Be Stoned At The Grocery Store
What It’s Like To Be Stoned At The Grocery Store (Buzzfeed video)
The results confirmed her findings: Thomas had Rh-null blood.
Rhnull blood was first described in 1961, in an Aboriginal Australian woman. Until then, doctors had assumed that an embryo missing all Rh blood cell antigens would not survive, let alone grow into a normal, thriving adult. By 2010, nearly five decades later, some 43 people with Rhnull blood had been reported worldwide.
Hurrell-Harring v. New York
After seven years of litigation, the New York Civil Liberties Union has announced a settlement in Hurrell-Harring v. New York, which will reform the way in which low income criminal defendants are represented in court. [more inside]
Increase Your Trumpet Range With This One (Stupid) Trick
Getting a double G on Trumpet (SLYT, stupid trick)
To modern ears they sound like nothing short of anarchy
The BBC looks back on the Free Schools movement
There would be no timetable, no compulsory lessons, no uniform, no hierarchy. Teachers would be called by their first names. The children would make up the rules and decide what they wanted to learn.
There'd be no fees, fixed hours, term times or holidays. They were to be schools without walls - and open whenever the community wanted them.
Many of them quickly folded - with some communities not receptive to the idea of educational anarchy. But a few put down solid roots.
one of the most boring things in the world is watching a person write
Hayley Campbell: nobody cares about you writing a novel.
\|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ practical (& fun) conservation in coppicing \|/ \|/ \|/
It is easy to think of woodlands as wild places, but in the UK and Europe, most have been carefully managed for centuries. If you visit an ancient woodland in Europe at this time of year, you may well see small areas where the trees are being cut down to the base, but the stumps left behind. This is likely to be part of a traditional woodland practice called coppicing. Until about 150 years ago, most deciduous woodlands in the UK were coppiced to produce wood for use in a variety of industries, but today coppicing is largely only practised for woodland conservation. [more inside]
Let me tell you about being publicly separated from your truth.
"But having survived myself, what I want to do now is help other victims of the shame game survive too. I want to put my suffering to good use and give purpose to my past."Monica Lewinsky gives her first major public speech to speak out against online abuse. Full transcript here.
The answer: TB
While volunteering for the Peace Corps in Ukraine in 2010, I contracted a severe version of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Two years of painful, isolating treatment taught me the vital role social media may play in finally eradicating this disease.
Inconspicuous Consumption, a longform autobiographical essay.
!!!YADKCOLSPAC
OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!!! EVERY YEAR WE GET TOGETHER AND MAKE SALMON FOR TOAST, EVERY YEAR WE GET A CROCKETY BLOAT, EVERY YEAR WE GET DRUNK ON THE DOCKS, AND EVERY YEAR WE HAVE SEX WITH OUR CAPS LOCKS!!!!
I own five hundred Moleskines.
October 21
Cøme play with üs
Rob Cantor has been having a very good year
You may know Rob Cantor for his work with Tally Hall (previously), or for his hit meme-song Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf (also previously), for which a new, amazing video was released today, or for the time he faked a bunch of celebrity impressions (previously again!). But wait - there's more! [more inside]
"I’m actually kind of surprised that no one has made one by now."
I tend to spend months on a piece here and there, but once this one got in my blood, I couldn’t stop. It all started with the Cyberdemon by Reaper Miniatures my friend Chris Fields gave be back in 2004. After doing a paint job on it back then I wanted to build an environment for the little evil cyborg.-Icons of Doom
And yet, I still haven't discovered what the heck "Snarf Farms" are.
Figuring out some of the more obscure references in an episode of MST3k is a labor of love for some devoted fans. The folks over at The Annotated MST3k (previously) have been at it for eleven years now and have 113 episodes completely annotated. But for those who prefer their annotations in real time, you're in luck. The official YouTube channel for the show has posted two completely annotated episodes (Mitchell and Manos - The Hands of Fate) for your viewing pleasure.
Marriage Equality in the Equality State
At 10AM Mountain Time on Tuesday, October 21, Wyoming began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The U.S. Supreme Court had announced its decision to "let stand appeals court rulings allowing same-sex marriage in five states," including Wyoming, on October 6—16 years since gay college student Matthew Shepard was abducted, tortured, and left to die outside Laramie, WY, in a homophobic attack that galvanized LGBT activism across the country. The Matthew Shepard Foundation posted today: "Congratulations, Wyoming. Thirty-two down, 18 to go." [Previously: The 10-year anniversary of Matthew Shepard's death.]
music video: The Tropics, "Fireproof"
"Fireproof" is the new music video from San Francisco pop group The Tropics. It features an enjoyable, upbeat, punchy song with a vibrant vocal from lead vocalist Claire George. Lighthearted, smile-inducing bonus: The video is also a spirited, shot-by-shot homage to the video for Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's 1991 hit "Good Vibrations".
We have no sense of scale for this...is it some kind of pipe?
...and then Druids for some reason!
Keene, NH Pumpkin fest: come for the jack-o'-lanterns, stay for the riot
Keene, New Hampshire tried to set a new world record for most pumpkins carved at their 2014 Pumpkin Festival, but failed to reach their goal. Instead, the news coverage of the Pumpkin Festival is for the vaguely related mayhem that erupted in neighborhoods near Keene State campus. It has been reported that the chaos was due to an influx of young people, up to 2,000 congregated in some areas, who threw billiard balls, rocks, debris and bottles full of liquor, and overturned at least one car. Police used tear gas and pepper balls to quell the crowds, and arrested 84 individuals. There were dozens of injuries, but no fatalities. In the larger discussion of various group gatherings and actions and the police response to such events, comparisons have been made between the Keene "pumpkin riot" and Ferguson. To which Luke O’Neil wrote Keene Is Not Ferguson—Despite the Police, Fires, and Tear Gas. Jordan Lebeau responded with a piece titled Actually, Comparing Keene to Ferguson Is Precisely What You Should Do (last two articles on Boston.com). [more inside]
JUST HOOK IT TO MY VEINS
Following a record-breaking $750 million syndication deal with parent company Fox, the FXX network most recently made headlines back in August with its twelve-day marathon of Every. Simpsons. Ever. But that was just the prelude to the real deal launching today: Simpsons World, a staggeringly comprehensive multiplatform video database including clips, news, featurettes, curated playlists, a heartbeat tracker of each season's popularity, and (for the intrigued who'd like to subscribe to their newsletter network) on-demand streaming of all 552 episodes and counting. Coming early next year is an even greater expansion of features, bringing full-series dialogue search, real-time script tracking, and "geolocation" of all scenes throughout Springfield -- something very close to Myles McNutt's vision for a shareable Simpsons clip database (previously).
I, for one, welcome our new Simpsons-quoting overlords. [more inside]
HAL Remastered
For the upcoming digitally restored theatrical re-release of Kubrick's classic Sci-Fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (previously, and previously) a beautiful new trailer for the movie has been put together by the British Film Institute. Via Polygon.
"How are things in the Land of Youth?" Ursula Le Guin blogs from 85
Legendary science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin blogs about her 85th birthday. For those who don't already know about her, here's a Wikipedia selected bibiography. For those who do, here's an Appreciation of Le Guin following her receiving the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters last month.
"Would the cook were of my mind!" ~ William Shakespeare
Cooking the Books
"Cooking the Books is an internet cooking show hosted by Emily Gould in which she invites famous authors into her kitchen to make food inspired by their books."[more inside]
Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces?
Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. This is a promise. For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact.Orson Welles' cinematic confidence scam, F for Fake, gets a new two disc Blu-Ray Criterion Collection release this year. Ben Sampson offers a visual analysis in two parts, breaking down the film's layers of paradoxes. [more inside]
Smells like....cold fusion?
A man who was completely paralysed from the waist down can walk again after a British-funded surgical breakthrough which offers hope to millions of people who are disabled by spinal cord injuries. Polish surgeons used nerve-supporting cells from the nose of Darek Fidyka, a Bulgarian man who was injured four years ago, to provide pathways along which the broken tissue was able to grow (Guardian report). [more inside]
Artists Report Back
What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees? A new report (PDF) by activist collective BFAMFAPhD laments the shrinking job prospects and growing debt burden for art school graduates. [more inside]
Bill Cosby/Hannibal Buress
Hannibal Buress called out Bill Cosby for the sexual abuse charges against him onstage in Philly recently:
"Thirteen? And it’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom. Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches. I don’t curse on stage. Well, yeah, you’re a rapist, so, I’ll take you sayin’ lots of motherfuckers on Bill Cosby: Himself if you weren’t a rapist. …I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns. …I’ve done this bit on stage, and people don’t believe. People think I’m making it up. …That shit is upsetting. If you didn’t know about it, trust me. You leave here and Google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ It’s not funny. That shit has more results than Hannibal Buress."
Timeline of Abuse Charges.
(TW: Sexual Abuse)
Nothing has ever been this Internet before.
Bijin&Co. are a modeling agency with a unique solution to the two-pronged need of attracting new models and figuring out which ones are the most popular with the public: put a pretty lady clock on the Internet. [more inside]
Get paid for busy work, get the real work done while fooling around
"Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues."
Isaac Asimov Mulls “How Do People Get New Ideas?” [more inside]
“Can I do anything to help?” - “Trade kids with me.”
By Noon They’d Both Be In Heaven By Hanna Rosin
KELLI STAPLETON, whose teenage daughter was autistic and prone to violent rages, had come to fear for her life. So she made a decision that perhaps only she could justify.
KELLI STAPLETON, whose teenage daughter was autistic and prone to violent rages, had come to fear for her life. So she made a decision that perhaps only she could justify.
O bravenew.world, that has such gTLDs in't!
Do you fold it or wad it?
Buzzfeed conducted a(n unscientific) poll of over 300,000 readers on their bathroom habits. Some startling findings: most people pee in the shower, some people take their pants and/or their shirt off to poop, and 21% of respondents have their toilet paper facing the wrong way. The gulf between sitters and standers is widening, and the sitters contingent is winning. (Previously on sitters vs. standers.) [more inside]
'write it on a piece of paper and stick it through a letterbox’
Central to this inheritance for the Liberal Democrats was the role of leaflets. If one image can sum up the approach to campaigning taken by the Liberal Democrats across twenty-five years, it would be a piece of paper on a doormat emblazoned with a bar chart and a headline screaming that ‘Only the local Liberal Democrat can beat Party X round here’.Mark Pack takes a long, indepth look at Liberal Democrat electoral campaigning and its history. Surprisingly interesting even for non-wonks.
Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege.
'She (and it is always a she) cherishes uninspired brands — a mix of Target products, Ugg boots over leggings, and Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes (the ultimate signifier of basicness) — and lives a banal existence, obsessed with Instagramming photos of things that themselves betray their basicness (other basic friends, pumpkin patches, falling leaves), tagging them #blessed and #thankful, and then reposting them to the basic breeding grounds of Facebook and Pinterest.'
Anne Helen Petersen on why 'basic' is just another word for class anxiety. [Single link Buzzfeed] [more inside]
October 20
life is short. fly to mars
i build rocket in my back garden for 10 year
i build rocket from spare car part and old nuclear facility
in month of march i buy 10,000 of my favourite protein bar
in month of april i launch rocket with me in it towards planet mars
now i am on mars
Evghenia is on Mars. She has enough water to survive for another two hundred and eighty days. In the meantime, she reminisces about her favorite and least favorite things on earth, comments on the space-speculation of poets Bowie and Elton, writes about her heroes, and criticizes Elon Musk and NASA and all the many people who have failed to be on Mars first. (She is understandably proud of her significant accomplishment.) She also writes about goatbot, who she built herself and who is her only friend, and occasionally tells jokes and sings songs and reminisces about her past and present. Definitely a Twitter account worth following.
i build rocket from spare car part and old nuclear facility
in month of march i buy 10,000 of my favourite protein bar
in month of april i launch rocket with me in it towards planet mars
now i am on mars
Evghenia is on Mars. She has enough water to survive for another two hundred and eighty days. In the meantime, she reminisces about her favorite and least favorite things on earth, comments on the space-speculation of poets Bowie and Elton, writes about her heroes, and criticizes Elon Musk and NASA and all the many people who have failed to be on Mars first. (She is understandably proud of her significant accomplishment.) She also writes about goatbot, who she built herself and who is her only friend, and occasionally tells jokes and sings songs and reminisces about her past and present. Definitely a Twitter account worth following.
The sound of space
like sitting on a back porch in Tennesse in mid-July Space is a vacuum, but there is still "sound" in the form of electromagnetic waves. These recordings, taken from various sources, capture the electromagnetic sounds from 20-20,000 HZ--the range of human hearing
The Phantasmagoric Work of Mr. Gober
Robert Gober's 40-year survey "The Heart is Not a Metaphor" is now on view at the MoMA, and it's a fantastic freakin' spectacle to the eye.
kafkarna
On Gottland
Gottland is not a novel, but that proves difficult to remember. The book, playfully subtitled Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia, is technically a work of reportage, and its author, Mariusz Szczygieł, one of Poland’s best-known journalists. Most of Gottland’s tales, however, seem better suited to Soviet science fiction—or even Russian absurdism—than to actual European history. Szczygieł, aware of his essays’ incredibility, alludes to it not only in Gottland’s subtitle but also in a more blatant disclaimer to his readers: “From here on, most of what we know . . . should be labeled with the first sentence from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which goes: ‘All this happened, more or less.’”
When you meet a stranger, look at his shoes.
The Rise Of Men’s British-Made Shoes
The most famous Northampton technique is the 'Goodyear welted' shoe. Invented in 1869 by Charles Goodyear, Jr., the Goodyear welted process is the footwear equivalent of the off-side rule: until somebody sits you down and talks you through it, it’s quite hard to understand.
The process involves approximately 75 components and 200 separate operations. On average, the whole process, from start to finish, takes eight weeks to complete. The main benefit of footwear that is made using Goodyear welted construction is that it can be resoled repeatedly, giving the shoe a longer lifespan.
Sandtable
ARES is a new tabletop wargame technology by the US Army. STTC briefing. Article. A modern take on one of the oldest forms of simulation: drawing stuff in the ground with a stick. Gary Gygax had a sandtable in his basement when creating D&D in the 70s, here's some recent pics of it.
Rick Was Here, a short film on the NYU dorm room where Def Jam started
30 years ago, Rick Rubin was a college student, living in NYU's Weinstein Residence Hall, room #712. It was there that Def Jam Records was formed, shifting the focus of hip-hop from the MCs to promote the DJs, too. Rubin and his label quickly outgrew the dorm, and he hasn't been back since. Recently he returned, and the adventure was captured and put into context by Rolling Stone Film's mini-documentary, Rick Was Here. New footage rolls alongside old, with some animations to bring a few audio-only stories to life. [more inside]
It's time...
Gough Whitlam, the progressive Labor prime minister of Australia from 1972 to 1975, has died aged 98. [more inside]
Don't Let's Stop
Why is the world in love again?
Why are we marching hand in hand?
Why are the ocean levels rising up?
It's a brand new record
for nineteen-ninety,
They Might Be Giants' brand new album:
FLOOD (43m)
Or, if you'd rather meet James Ensor, there's John Henry (57m)! For something Fingertippy, there's Apollo 18 (43m)! More recent: Nanobots (45m) - Join Us (47m) - The Else (38m) (Official links from the band's YouTube channel! Oh, and they also have a podcast.) [more inside]
Why are we marching hand in hand?
Why are the ocean levels rising up?
It's a brand new record
for nineteen-ninety,
They Might Be Giants' brand new album:
FLOOD (43m)
Or, if you'd rather meet James Ensor, there's John Henry (57m)! For something Fingertippy, there's Apollo 18 (43m)! More recent: Nanobots (45m) - Join Us (47m) - The Else (38m) (Official links from the band's YouTube channel! Oh, and they also have a podcast.) [more inside]
Tuck Me In
One minute horror film. By director Ignacio F. Rodó, based on this two sentence horror story from an AskReddit thread last year.
Picohorror previously.
I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their boedgas
Last Week, Buzzfeed posted "110 Reasons Why You Should Never Leave New York City," which is somehow even more vapid than you'd expect it to be. Today, Brooklyn Magazine reviewed the list, and offered some feedback.
And the lunatics yelling at the moon!
In early March of this year, the New York City Philharmonic staged what initially seemed like a restrained concert of Stephen Sondheim's musical “Sweeney Todd.” Per the
New York Times review : "The director, Lonny Price, started the evening with a wink toward the formalities of classical concertizing, as the cast of principals lined up in front of music stands at the lip of the stage, clad in tuxedos and staid dresses, binders in hand, as if they were about to sing a little Schubert. Oh dear." But then . . . [more inside]
The best chime
"Their mothers were distant cousins long estranged..."
Exquisite Corpse [New York Times]
Taking their cue from the Surrealist parlor game, 15 renowned authors take turns contributing to an original short story.[more inside]
You'll hear of a wife murdered before you hear another one come forward.
Whenever Dewan Smith-Williams sees Janay Rice on television, she feels like she's looking into a mirror. Smith-Williams, 44, remembers the denial, the secrecy, the sense of isolation, the shame. But most of all, she remembers the fear of ruining her husband's career as a National Football League player — the feeling that coming forth, or seeking justice, would destroy her four children's financial security. She understands that struggle not only because she, too, was a domestic-violence victim, but because she watched so many other NFL wives, many of them her friends, go through the same nightmare. For each of them, it began with their husbands' attacks and worsened with a culture that, they felt, compelled silence.Simone Sebastian and Ines Bebea investigate for WaPo: For battered NFL wives, a message from the cops and the league: Keep quiet.
[TW: domestic violence] [more inside]
I was like "I know a guy who can eat a whole grape."
certainly not “95% unexplored”
Political geographer Phil Steinberg reacts to marine ecologist Jon Copley's piece on the new gravity model of the ocean floor from David Sandwell and others at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. "Instead of understanding the ocean as something to see through as one seeks to map the seabed, water is reframed as something to see with. Volume, rather than being understood as a barrier to vision, becomes a means for achieving that vision." Copley asks: "Philosophically, when it comes to exploring anywhere on our dynamic world, how and when do we decide that somewhere has 'been explored'?" (via)
I know who you are and I saw what you did.
How secure is public wi-fi? A lot less than you probably imagine.
I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees...
Whether you are a scholar looking for more knowledge and pleasure in life, a bluesman looking for more talent and success, or a 4th grade boy looking to make a quick buck, perhaps the time is right to leverage that one thing for which there was previously no market? The soultradingcompany.com is here to help!
Two Ships That Pass In The Night
This is a picture of a comet heading for Mars. Mars is the big red thing and the comet, named C/2013 A1 ('Siding Spring'), is the green-tailed beast to the lower left. [more inside]
With a Little Help From My Fwends
One week from today, The Flaming Lips will release their full album cover of The Beatles' iconic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. NPR is now streaming the entire record for preview. [more inside]
Had NASA believed in merit
“I would give my life to fly in space. It’s hard for me to talk about it but I would. I would then, and I will now.” The terrible injustice of Jerrie Cobb, who deserved to be the first female astronaut, yet never made it to space at all.
Streaming Music Has Left Me Adrift
Like blasted pecs or a little rhinestone flag pin, esoteric taste in music is an indicator of values. Under the heel of the major-label system in the early ’90s, indie taste meant more than liking weird bands. To care about obscure bands was to reject the perceived conformity of popular culture, to demand a more nuanced reading of the human experience than Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby” and therefore to assert a certain kind of life. That assertion was central to my identity as a young adult, and I found that people who shared it were more likely to agree with me on seemingly unrelated issues. Like all aesthetics, taste in music is a worldview.
The Obama Legacy
The Obama Brief: The President considers his judicial legacy. (SL New Yorker)
She says I’m always “Apollo 13 this” and “Lunokhod that”
Tom Hanks, somewhat of an authority on going to the moon, wrote about it in The New Yorker. (You, too, can write like Tom Hanks!)
Mayokero by Roy Kafri
In this amazing new music video, a bevy of music legends performs a human beat box ditty a-capella. It's part fun game of "recognize that album cover", and part heart-wrenching story of a man with great taste in music but awful taste in consumer electronics. And all in just over two minutes. (SLYT)
They are, once again, your Joey Ramone
On October 21, Sub-Pop will be releasing Get Up, a vinyl box set of remastered versions of Sleater-Kinney's discography. Included with the expected content was a 7" labeled 1/20/15 containing a new song. Titled "Bury Your Friends", it can be streamed at Consequence of Sound. Plugged into Shazam, the song gives you the cover art for an as-yet non-extant album, No Cities To Love. The band has officially let the cat out of the bag, and reunion tour dates are on their website.
Fake deaths, cheap resurrections, and dealing with real grief
William Hughes writes movingly about the death of his partner and how it has changed how he reacts to the portrayal of death and resurrection in media.
I also check my skeletons twice. You can never be too careful.
I waited silently for her to explain that the female pelvis is shaped slightly differently from the male’s, with a larger opening for childbearing. That part was the giveaway. The real purpose of the exercise was to make her prove her conjecture with measurements--to translate the theory to practice. I also wanted her to explain why this sexual dimorphism--that is, this sexually determined physical difference--is not nearly so pronounced in nonhuman primates, such as chimpanzees.When teacher Robert S. Root-Bernstein got this answer to his question on how you should distinguish between male and female skeletons, he had to find a way to make her realise her error without disparaging her religion.
She spoke: Males have one fewer pair of ribs than females.
October 19
Cubist Reggae
Cubist Reggae. From the mind of Aaron Funk, aka Venetian Snares, comes an EP of sharply angular, yet weirdly chill, grooves, all in a variety of unusual time signatures (7/4, 5/4, 15/8, and 21/16).
The bitterer the betterer.
As a taster, it’s important to know that compared with sour or salty, bitterness is slow to affect our palates. The first two are very simple chemical phenomena and require only the simplest of cellular mechanisms to fire off their signals to the brain. Bitterness, like sweetness and umami, requires an intermediate molecule, something called a G-coupled protein. It takes a little longer to do its thing, and this time dimension of tasting is something that you always need to pay attention to.
An enthusiastic public reading journal.....
Super Intelligent Humans are Coming
The story of the Mamas and the Papas, as "an epic tone-poem"
Mama Cass opened a live performance of Creeque Alley with the following: "Everywhere we go, people ask us how we got together. We got tired of answering that question, because everybody does ask us*.... John has written an epic tone-poem of historical nature describing our very get-together, and so we'd like to sing it for you now. Cue the tape." If it's a bit too fast for you to catch all the references, Creeque Alley (dot com) spells it all out line by line, thanks to "painstaking research, some guesswork and a lot of help from many people," including Richard Campbell and his official Cass Elliot website. [more inside]
And if the guest wants to stay at the house, the house is there…
On 27 June 2014, Puʻu ʻŌʻō Crater of the Kīlauea Volcano in Hawaii started a new lava flow, beheading a previous flow. The flow headed northeast through the Puna district towards Pāhoa, passing right by the Kahoe Homesteads subdivision. At the moment the flow is stalled short of Apa`a Street in Pāhoa, but it could resume and ultimately cut the town in half. What to do? [more inside]
"A master gambler and his high-stakes museum."
Walsh agreed to pay Boltanski for the right to film his studio, outside Paris, twenty-four hours a day, and to transmit the images live to Walsh, in Tasmania. But the payment was turned into a macabre bet: the agreed fee was to be divided by eight years, and Boltanski was to be paid a monthly stipend, calculated as a proportion of that period, until his death. Should Boltanski, who was sixty-five years old, live longer than eight years, Walsh will end up paying more than the work is worth, and will have lost the bet. But if Boltanski dies within eight years the gambler will have purchased the work at less than its agreed-upon value, and won. "He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses. He’s probably right," Boltanski told Agence France-Presse in 2009. "I don’t look after myself very well. But I’m going to try to survive." He added, "Anyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the Devil."—Tasmanian Devil is the story of David Walsh and his Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, as told by recent Man Booker winner Richard Flanagan.
The author admits that he ought to know better
Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock. Hat tip to Kate Beaton's tumblr, where Nonsense Novels is also available as a pdf download from the NYRB, with an introduction by Daniel Handler. [more inside]
"...to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."
carne vera sacra
Family Planning: The short, long and speculative issues
Some interesting recent links on family planning in the short, long and speculative senses.
- Catherine Rampell examines the "information gap" surrounding birth control and family planning amongst young people with lower levels of education.
- Sarah Perry examines the history of fertility transitions over the last 300 years.
- Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom examine the potential effects of human genetic selection in the next 50 years. [more inside]
- Catherine Rampell examines the "information gap" surrounding birth control and family planning amongst young people with lower levels of education.
- Sarah Perry examines the history of fertility transitions over the last 300 years.
- Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom examine the potential effects of human genetic selection in the next 50 years. [more inside]
“Look! Sister Mary Lydia, look. There’s a fireball out there.”
"Only the pen of a Dante could do justice to the sights and sounds that occurred in the St. Clair-Norwood neighborhood that hellish afternoon." Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the East Ohio Gas Explosion, “when fire rained down and streets literally collapsed." Three above ground tanks holding liquified natural gas leaked, caught fire, and exploded, leveling one square mile in Cleveland and killing 130 people. It also served the backdrop to local author Don Robertson's beloved novel The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, which follows the adventures of a nine-year-old boy on that day.
Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We've All Been Waiting For
I am a white, middle class male professor at a big, public university, and every year I get up in front of a hundred and fifty to two hundred undergraduates in a class on the history of race in America and I ask them to shout white racial slurs at me.
The results are usually disappointing. [more inside]
Alzheimers Insiders
How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal.
As Dr. Sid Gilman approached the stage, the hotel ballroom quieted with anticipation. It was July 29, 2008, and a thousand people had gathered in Chicago for the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease. For decades, scientists had tried, and failed, to devise a cure for Alzheimer’s. But in recent years two pharmaceutical companies, Elan and Wyeth, had worked together on an experimental drug called bapineuzumab, which had shown promise in halting the cognitive decay caused by the disease. Tests on mice had proved successful, and in an initial clinical trial a small number of human patients appeared to improve... There would be huge demand for a drug that diminishes the effects of Alzheimer’s. As Elan and Wyeth spent hundreds of millions of dollars concocting and testing bapineuzumab, and issued hints about the possibility of a medical breakthrough, investors wondered whether bapi, as it became known, might be “the next Lipitor.” Several months before the Chicago conference, Barron’s published a cover story speculating that bapi could become “the biggest drug of all time."[more inside]
"Tell me if you hear the fence rattling..."
Life Academy of Health and Bioscience is a small public high school in Oakland, California. In 2011 a small group of student poets evolved, calling themselves "Rapid Fire" .
"At a recent “spoken word” event, senior Monica Mendoza performed her poem "Faggot" . With steady determination backed up by thoughtful research, Mendoza explained why people should never use the word. Her crescendo invoked the names of young gay men who lost their lives because of their sexuality. “Every time you use the word faggot…tell me if you hear Bobby Griffith’s prayers begging for God to forgive him for being gay/ tell me if you heard the truck smash him to death…/ tell me if you hear the fence rattling after Matthew Shepard was tied and tortured."
(The original article in the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Teaching Tolerance" project site)
Nyeah nargh eeah fwa fwa
Cursors
Cursors is a fascinating maze game where you have to cooperate with others with very limited ways of communicating.
October 18
On Sewing as a Universal Language
Cousu Main (which starts here) is an adaptation of The Great British Sewing Bee, and the blog of one of the participants features significant spoilers for this season. Although it's in French, the show is not hard for an English speaker to follow, just as Project Runway Vietnam (2013: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8), Project Runway Korea (2009: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ...), and Projeto Fashion from Brazil--among others--make some sense to those familiar with the English-language series Project Runway Australia, Project Runway Canada, Project Runway Malaysia (2007 finale: 1-5 and 6), Project Runway Philippines (2008: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15), and Mission Catwalk from Jamaica.
UnScientific American
Things happen. "Psychic" events mainly take place in dramatic and family-based situations. Not in a lab. Here is one example. [more inside]
It's ALL THE RAGE with the HIP YOUTHS.
"Dadcore?" "Momcore?" What the heck are these trendy lingoes?
Spinach dip and pork rinds for dinner? Heavy cream on everything? Yes.
The "Keto Diet" is deigned to keep your body in a constant state of ketosis. Originally designed to help people with sever epilepsy, it has become quite a popular way to lose a large amount of weight in a short period. [more inside]
With the Juice of This I'll Fill Her Vessyl
Paper shredders are fascinating
"It just doesn't seem quite fair."
Is Sampling Tom Petty Like Plagiarizing from Moby-Dick? [SLYT] Mini-documentary on 'sampling' circa 1989.
Practice makes prefect
Álvaro Franca's Typewritten Portraits is a time-lapse video showing the artist using the typewriter to progressively, manually build portraits of favorite authors. Other works also deal with the idea of repetition in type, including calligraphy, a multilingual silkscreen and patterns of icons.
It takes a lot of listening. Good art isn’t obvious
Getting Out of the Woods: A Primer on Not Being a Music Hater
Success means doing X, Y and Z, just like {company} did!
In this video from the 2014 World Domination Summit Author Scott Berkun talks about narrative bias: our tendency to tell stories about, well, everything. He said Hollywood will keep making the same cheesy blockbuster action films with predictable plots simply because we like and recognize the story. He also applies this frame to entrepreneurship, writing, and art.
Always remember it is YOUR project and YOUR paper and YOUR thesis.
"As the academic year begins again, new PhD students across the country (and further) are slowly settling into their fresh surroundings. I stayed at the same university when I made the switch to postgraduate research but I still remember feeling quite lost at the start, not knowing what to do or where to be. I’m now entering the final year of my studies and have (I hope) picked up some useful knowledge along the way.
"So I’ll cut right to the point: below is a list of handy tips, tricks, general advice and things I wish I knew when I started my PhD. The list was put together from chats with other PhD friends of mine, but is by no means exhaustive (nor is it in any particular order, though it did get quite long…). Hopefully it will help somebody. Please share your comments at the bottom if you have things to add – the more the merrier." Things I wish I knew when I started my PhD… from Between a rock and a hard place.
"So I’ll cut right to the point: below is a list of handy tips, tricks, general advice and things I wish I knew when I started my PhD. The list was put together from chats with other PhD friends of mine, but is by no means exhaustive (nor is it in any particular order, though it did get quite long…). Hopefully it will help somebody. Please share your comments at the bottom if you have things to add – the more the merrier." Things I wish I knew when I started my PhD… from Between a rock and a hard place.
'Am I being catfished?' An author confronts her number one online critic
Who Wins The Scene
Who wins the scene.... Tony Zhou dissects the initial Clarice/Hannibal scene in Silence Of The Lambs.
More of Zhou's work can be found on his website "Every Frame a Painting".
We still have no idea what we are doing, but it keeps getting better
How to plan your own tour: using the Internet and your fans.
People started to demand, in tweets and comments, that we play in their city. And the most important thing we’ve ever done is reply to them with this: “sure. where?” That’s the important question. At first we would track down and e-mail these fans who were making the demands, asking for advice on venues. Once we had a mailing list, we used it to send targeted “please help us” emails... And then we created our holy grail: THE MAGICAL FORM OF TOUR PLANNING.Angela Webber, of geek-folk sister duo The Doubleclicks (previously), provides a rundown of how the band plans its tours.
I've fallen, and I can't get up!
Tiny little people charge enthusiastically into the breach. The tiny, shiny rectangular spinning breach. No tiny little people were harmed in the making of this video. I think.
What The Hell Is All This Mess?
FOR I HAVE ONE OF THESE THINGS IN COMMON: AND MY NAME IS TIGTONE!
October 17
Friends With Siri
What if The Decemberists put out an album where nobody died?
“Society Is Functioning Pretty Well (Here In The Past Where We Live)”. Shared by the band on facebook, both comment sections have (of course) extended the list far beyond the original.
Buy now, pay forever
Continuing the exposure of how "being poor is expensive," the Washington Post takes a look at rent-to-own purchases in its article, Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa. [more inside]
Vrooooom!
Your secret pneumatic tube fantasy just got a little more real
A couple of Norweigians put a GoPro camera in a pneumatic tube and sent it on its way. Things get tubular around 01:00. [SLYT]
It's like the movie Drumline, in real life.
Ladies and Gentlemen: Power Coffee
"I am seldom considered liberal, but happily so when regarding the quantity of healthy fat in my coffee. " [more inside]
Miss Aloha Hula 2011 Farewell Performance
"Provocative" Christmas tree rasing eyebrows in Paris
“We’re all smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind.”
Philosopher Brian Leiter announced that he will be stepping down as editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, a highly influential reputational ranking of philosophy Ph.D. programs he created in 1989 while he was a graduate student, and which has been published on the Internet since 1996. [more inside]
The Big 'E'
You can read on Buddy Emmons' Wikipedia page how by the age of 19, he had already mastered and redesigned the pedal steel guitar, slowly turning it into the instrument whose sound we are all familiar with, in one form or another. You can read on his website how his peers revere him, and how he gives back to the community whom he's profoundly influenced. (Or, watch a 100-minute concert and tribute.) But perhaps it's just best to marvel at The Big E as he backs up legends in their own right; on television in 1965; how he destroys the world in a 1970's Redneck Jazz Explosion (with Danny Gatton, previously); in the mid-'80's with the Lawton Jazz Kicks Ensemble; at the 1988 British Steel Guitar convention; at the at the 1997 International Steel Guitar Convention; and in 2007, the year he retired. Or just messin' around with Nashville's top session musicians or reinterpreting the classics. There's also a great AskMe thread of Pedal Steel Guitar recommendations, if you want to hear more.
Tory Peer: "Pay disabled people £2 per hour"
A Conservative welfare minster has apologised after suggesting that disabled people are "not worth" the national minimum wage and some could only be paid "£2 an hour".
Lord Freud, the Welfare Reform minister admitted the comments were "offensive” after they were disclosed by Ed Miliband during Prime Minister's Questions this afternoon. The Labour leader has called on the Tory peer to resign.
The "How Does Stephen Colbert Work" Edition
In its inaugural episode, Slate's Working podcast spends ~35m talking to Stephen Colbert (not the character Stephen Colbert) about exactly what a work day is like for him. [more inside]
The Common Cold Unit: 1946-1989
‘Free 10 Day Autumn or Winter Break: You may not win a Nobel Prize, but you could help find a cure for the common cold.’
Mmm, Tastes like...Sunshine
Computer-brain interface device aims to help blind people 'see' Mark Pappas, who has been blind for 14 years, searched for a packet of sugar on the table in front of him by running his tongue across the 400 electrodes in his mouth... he was able to locate the sugar, a white plastic spoon and a white paper cup that had been placed on a black cloth. [more inside]
scientists are finally opening the black box of parasite mind control
The Board Would Like To Cringe Its Nose At....
Writer/Actor Justin Elizabeth Sayre hosts The Meeting Of The International Order Of Sodomites - a monthly show honoring LGBTQ figures and idols. The Meeting includes a signature segment "The Rulings Of The Board" featuring Justin as Chairman delivering a caustic and revealing monologue on current issues in gay culture and politics - highlights include "Rufus Wainwright Is An Idiot." "Returning Shame To Gay Culture." "The New Hanky Code." "Resetting The Gay Agenda." "The 20-year Olds Hate Us." and oh so many more. (NSFW language) [more inside]
The Troller System
Here's the last ideo-political-philosophico-temperamental spectrum chart you'll ever need.
Arizona gay marriage legal; couples to marry immediately
"...there is no 'gay exception' to our U.S. Constitution's guarantees of liberty and equality for all, including the freedom to celebrate love, commitment, and family with the person of one's choice in marriage."
"It was like getting slapped in the face with a giant wang." SLYT
Mango is back. Aging SNL character gets called up for a video. Warning: assorted stereotypes.
Birth Control
Will having kids soon be out of reach economically for many American families? 'Parenthood should be affordable in this country, but the cost of raising a child from birth to adulthood is now a quarter of a million dollars and projected to double by the time today's toddlers reach their teens.' 'For evidence to suggest that middle-class parents might already be getting priced out of parenthood, look to the national birthrate. It fell sharply in the recession but, unlike in previous economic rebounds, has continued to drop. This makes sense in financial context, given that most families haven't seen their incomes grow since the recovery began and the median net worth of households has actually fallen below what it was 15 years ago. Most families today don't have enough saved to meet basic needs for three months, let alone save for college or retirement.' [more inside]
Opera On Demand
Top hat at the cleaners? Opera glasses broke? Lost your box? Watch The Metropolitan Opera, the Bavarian State Opera (Deutsch, English) Vienna State Opera, or concerts from the Berlin Philharmonic and a variety of options from medici.tv and The Young Vic, The Globe, The Royal Opera House, The Royal Shakespeare Company, and more. [more inside]
Félix le Chat
Surprisingly, Atillas are fairly liberal; Adolfs less so
How Liberal or Conservative is your name? A rare "what x are you?" online tool which is apparently based on real data. There is no need to search for the most liberal of all (past and present) MeFi moderator names, I've already done that for you.
There are no new ideas
Stop me if you've seen this one before. A desperate man on the run, fleeing a squad of hired killers, all for the entertainment of the audience of the country's most popular television show. No, of course it's not The Running Man, that would be too easy, nor is it Le Prix du Danger, the 1983 French-Yugoslav movie with the same theme, but it is based on the same 1958 Robert Sheckley story, The Prize of Peril, as Le Prix du Danger was. It's Das Millionenspiel, the 1970 West German movie which is now available on youtube in its entirety, with English subtitles.
This exhibition... has ushered ecstatic experience back into the world.
Thrown by Kerry Howley chronicles the author's exploits as a philosophy grad student turned devoted follower of a succession of MMA fighters; the connection is less odd than it sounds. The Paris Review has an excerpt from the book (parts one and two), detailing the weigh-in process for fighter Erik Koch before his victory over Cisco Rivera in 2010 in Las Vegas. At Salon, Lydia Kiesling writes that Thrown recalls the best of literary fiction: The nearly hysterical circumlocutory gymnastics of the narrator, and her dual position as a predator and supplicant to her fighters, reminded me of nothing so much as Humbert Humbert, with immense cauliflower-eared men in the startling role of Lolita. More reviews of Thrown at Time (paywalled) and Oxford American.
Superhero costumes are still not allowed
The Day Care center in Los Feliz, Los Angeles is tweeting announcements and news. Updates include weddings, slacktivism, billing, sunscreen and the Special Person Of The Week. It alleges to be a real day care center. [more inside]
cooking.nytimes.com
As hinted in the leaked digital innovation report which outlined how the venerable newspaper could leverage a substantial archive to compete with clickbait, The New York Times has been developing cooking.nytimes.com, a beautifully searchable repository of every recipe ever published in the newspaper. [more inside]
Comics from Flynn Gleason: Zombie Apawcalypse and George and his Pencil
If you're looking for a zombie webcomics with a bit of gore and a lot of kitties, you may enjoy Flynn Gleason's Zombie Apawcalypse. Flynn's work may be vaguely familiar to you if you remember a Calvin and Hobbes type comic from the mid- to late-1990s, called George and his Pencil, with archived comics still in their rough pencil-drawn form. [more inside]
Taking the '70s more seriously
Style Gone Wild: Why We Can't Shake the 1970s
Collectors Weekly: What prompted such radical changes in popular fashion?[more inside]
Lutyens: One reason was that people in the West were becoming increasingly affluent, and this gave young people the confidence to question their parents’ values. Because they had money, they could be more independent. Society was also becoming much more liberal as well because you had things like the legalization of homosexuality and the legalization of divorce. People were allowed to be themselves more without being judged by other people.
Then the three main minority movements — feminism, black civil rights, and gay liberation — all these minorities had been marginalized until the late ’60s. In the ’70s they began to assert themselves more and become more visible. So their style became more visible, and it influenced mainstream fashion.
"There's progress in imperfection."
ohhno ima barfed onna shoes
Drunk JCrew. Ever notice how drunk the models for J. Crew are? (Single link Tumblr)
Daschle, Frank, Lott, Livingston; they fight gridlock...
A bipartisan commission convened by Esquire magazine has reported its findings on how to make Congress work better. [more inside]
NASA sounds
Here's a collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions.
"Like lost children we live our unfinshed adventures."
Excerpts from Guy Debord’s “The Muppets.” "Though the name 'Guy Debord' is now synonymous with two things: Situationist philosophy and The Muppets, this pairing of passions was not as easily reconciled as you might think. 'I had to fight really hard not to be pigeon-holed as a Marxist theorist in the puppeteering community,' Debord once said. 'They told me 'Kids don't want to hear about how the concrete life of everyone has been degraded to a speculative universe, Guy.' I said 'How about we let the children decide that?' Decide they did..." [Previously, Via]
October 16
It was for the best, every time.
ლ(ಠ益ಠ)ლ
I am here for other women
The Correct Word
The Internet has been bitten by POODLE
POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy
Encryption) is the latest exploit found in SSL, a protocol used widely across the Internet for secure connections. Engineers at Google discovered the exploit, and they have written a white paper discussing it. In response, Google is disabling SSL in all Google products. Some are calling this the death of SSL. For web users, disabling SSL in your browser is recommended. Here is a tool to identify if your browser is potentially affected by the POODLE exploit.
In which the host cannot pronounce his own name or the name of the show
It’s been a while, but tomorrow night, Scott Aukerman and Reggie Watts (previously) return to finish the third season of the Comedy Bang Bang TV show (previously). You could watch a new episode streaming right now or check out CBB podcast classics (previously) after the jump (most links NSFW, some in poor taste). [more inside]
Bill Gates reviews a book on inequality
Bill Gates pens a review on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (multiple previously). He agrees with the book's central thesis on the problem of high levels of inequality and the need for government role that the market alone cannot solve, and calls upon the imposition of a progressive consumption tax, rather than a tax on capital as Piketty proposes.
Women in Clothes
Through original interviews, conversations, surveys, projects, diagrams and drawings from over six hundred contributors – including Miranda July, Cindy Sherman, Elif Batuman, Mac McClelland, Lena Dunham, Molly Ringwald, Tavi Gevinson, Rachel Kushner, Roxane Gay and Sarah Nicole Prickett – Women in Clothes explores the wide range of motives that inform how women present themselves through clothes, and what style really means.Feeling inspired? Answer the book's inaugural survey here. A selection of completed surveys, sorted by author or by question, can be found at the Women in Clothes website. [more inside]
"It's when you get into the urban areas that it just turns crazy."
Don Francis, epidemiologist and member of the World Health Organization team that investigated the first documented Ebola outbreak in 1976, gave a fascinating interview on KPFA's "Letters and Politics" in September.
Francis shared more recollections and some of his photos from the investigation with an audience at UC Berkeley in August.
Some people are so poor
When I knew the Clippers were drafting me, the first thing I did was type Donald Sterling’s name into Google. The first hit that came up was “Donald Sterling is a racist.” I read an article on how he didn’t want minorities to live in his apartment buildings. My first thought was, Wow this guy is really, really a racist … how is he an owner of an NBA team? My second thought was, Wow, these articles are from 2003 and 2008. I guess everybody already knows about this stuff and just doesn’t care. As players, we’re not supposed to really care about anything but basketball. We’re just supposed to perform. To be honest, I didn’t ever really think about bringing up Sterling’s past. What was I supposed to do? Just picture me at the press conference my rookie year. “Uh … hey, guys, before we talk about today’s game, did you happen to see that investigative report on my owner?”
--
The Boss. An Essay about working for the NBA, by Blake Griffin. [more inside]
It takes a village
Rich Evans’s widow—Ornuma “Ao” Evans—was born in Thailand. She hadn’t spoken to her own relatives in years and knew very little about her husband’s. There was no family to take her and her children home from the scene. She didn’t have the name of anyone—not a friend or a neighbor or even a business associate—who might help sort things out. She also didn’t have a phone, a driver’s license, or house keys.
Guardian/Whisper
Revealed: how Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users
10 Centuries of Music in 4 Minutes
You came here in that Great Sun Bear? You're braver than I thought.
In his Alliance Rebellion series, artist Scott Erikson combines two distinctive visual styles to striking effect.
When Arctic methane scientists disagree
Ignoring the Arctic Methane Monster: Royal Society Goes Dark on Arctic Observational Science. "The exclusion also highlights a large and what appears to be growing rift between those who observe the Arctic system and some that model it. Concern for larger carbon release from the Arctic system appears to be steadily rising among Arctic observational specialists, while some modelers appear to have retreated into silos in an attempt to defend previous understandings that were based on earlier work." [more inside]
Bobby drank too much and fell in the Clyde
Your next favorite band is probably from Glasgow. Sure, we know Mogwai, Belle & Sebastian (previously and very previously), Frightened Rabbit (previously), The Twilight Sad, Glasvegas, and Chvrches (previously). Step inside for some of Glasgow’s current talent explosion. [more inside]
Welcome to BLAH
Virgin Airlines has released a nearly six-hour video showing what's it like to fly from New York to San Francisco with BLAH airlines, which is fictional, gray, boring, and non-Virgin; all in excruciating detail.
(Warnings: SLYT, mannequins, Lynchian, Virgin Pepsi Blue)
“To navigate, you must be brave and you must remember.” - Mau Piailug
... imagine for a moment that you didn’t have to rely on maps to navigate the unknown—that your memory, instincts, and knowledge of the environment sufficed. This is the art of Polynesian wayfinding. An article by Lily Bui, a researcher at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, summarizing how Polynesians managed to reliably navigate between more than a thousand islands in 10 million square miles of water, an area slightly larger than the size of Canada, with limited instruments and great memories for details. [more inside]
Why chemicals are like blenders, not margarita machines.
"As a chemist, I can tell you that no chemical is 100 percent safe all the time, under all conditions. Even I occasionally do a double take when I hear about the ingredients in some of our foods. But our fear of chemicals – what is often called chemophobia – needs to be tempered. [more inside]
Marriage advice for chart enthusiasts
What makes for a stable marriage?
About a decade ago, the gossip on everyone’s lips was that “1/2 of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.” That factoid was later disproven, but it left a lasting impression on the eligible bachelors and bachelorettes of America. In an effort to not become a part of that statistic, I started doing a little research on what makes for a stable marriage in America. [...] What struck me about this study is that it basically laid out what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S. I’ve highlighted 7 of the biggest factors below.The Atlantic points out:
Part of the study echoes what we already know about marriage: That it's increasingly for rich people—who make a lot and can afford honeymoons.[more inside]
The Mother of All Supercuts
In Final Cut: Ladies and Gentleman (IMDb) Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi creates a feature length love story by editing together clips from some 500 different movies. This "recycled film" was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. (SLYT, NSFW: This would probably be rated NC17; sexy-time scene with at least one clip from Deep Throat.)
The new trend in movies actually is new
Tired of movie sequels? Good news, The Sequel Is Dead -- The Universe Is Where It's At [more inside]
But who WAS presenting the Nine O'Clock News on 24 November 1995?
Ever wanted to know who was on BBC Radio 1 at 1pm on Sunday 6 February, 1994*? Or what happened in EastEnders on 13 October 1998**? Or who was on the Top of the Pops Christmas special in 1971? Genome can answer that. [more inside]
Barry-gate
Barry Spurr, an expert on T. S. Eliot and the Virgin Mary, is Australia's first Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Appointed as one of two English subject specialists to the new Australian Review of the National Curriculum PDF, his concerns that "the Western literary canon" has been neglected and "the impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on literature in English in Australia" overemphasized in the existing curriculum are quoted liberally in the final report, which recommends that: "There ... needs to be a greater emphasis on dealing with and introducing literature from the Western literary canon, especially poetry," in Australian schools. The report has met with approval in the right-wing Australian press.
Now, emails leaked to the New Matilda show that Spurr has spent the past several years sending messages from his University of Sydney email account referring to Native Australians as "Abos" and human "rubbish" and Asians as "chinky poos," calling Nelson Mandela a "darkie," Desmond Tutu a "witch doctor," and his own Vice Chancellor "an appalling minx," comparing Methodists to "serpents," and referring to women generally as "whores." Now, in the wake of the New Matilda exposé, the University of Sydney is investigating the emails and the Australian Education Minister is denying that the Abbott administration had anything to do with Spurr's appointment. Spurr, meanwhile, maintains that the emails were nothing more than "a whimsical linguistic game" and "repartee" shared with friends, which went right over the heads of the New Matilda journalists. There is also a petition to dismiss Spurr from the Review Commission.
'This Impromptu Dance'
I start the music, take his hands and start leading him, swaying them back and forth. And he lets go of me. He's gonna wing it as he was prone to do when he was younger. Breathing on his own for the last time, Geoffrey Holder, eyes closed, performs his last solo to Bill Evans playing Fauré's Pavane. From his deathbed. The arms take flight, his beautiful hands articulate through the air, with grace. I whisper "shoulders" and they go into an undulating shimmy, rolling like waves. His Geoffrey Holder head gently rocks back and forth as he stretches out his right arm to deliver his trademark finger gesture, which once meant "you can't afford this" and now is a subtle manifestation of pure human spirit and infinite wisdom. His musical timing still impeccable, bouncing off the notes, as if playing his own duet with Evan's piano. Come the finale, he doesn't lift himself off the bed as he planned; instead, one last gentle rock of the torso, crosses his arms and turns his head to the side in a pose worthy of Pavlova. All with a faint, gentile smile.Leo Holder talks about his father's last dance.
Inflammatory Seattle pastor of Mars Hill Church steps down
Following an investigation by church elders that cleared him of behavior disqualifying for a pastor, "charismatic but choleric" Mark Driscoll has voluntarily stepped down after 18 years as the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Dozens of elders and church members disagreed with the ruling of the investigation, and the megachurch has been steadily bleeding members and donations over recent months. [more inside]
Taxis, Rainbows and Stars
Earlier this year, Chris Whong made a FOIL request to the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, receiving fare and trip data for all licensed cabs in New York in 2013. (previously) The data was anonymised, but as Vijay Pandurangan realised, only partially. [more inside]
Let Me Tell You About Homestuck
5 years.
7,000 pages.
13,000 panels.
700,000 words. [Approximately the length of the Bible.]
Over 3 hours of animation.
Over 23 hours of soundtrack.
15 separate games, in 3 unique styles.
PBS once called Homestuck the "Ulysses of the Internet". Its author, Andrew Hussie — who resembles Joyce in his impishness, stylistic maximalism, and fondness for disturbing smut — calls it "a story I've tried to make as much a pure expression of its medium as possible". It has become a cultural phenomenon, inspiring proms and dominating Amazon makeup reviews. But most importantly, it's a rollicking good read, equal parts slapstick and epic, bildungsroman and cultural commentary.
What on earth about it makes its fans so overly zealous? And how the hell does one start the daunting process of reading Homestuck? If you're even the remotest bit curious about this Internet phenomenon, the following is a teensy-weensy introduction to just what makes Homestuck so terrific. [more inside]
7,000 pages.
13,000 panels.
700,000 words. [Approximately the length of the Bible.]
Over 3 hours of animation.
Over 23 hours of soundtrack.
15 separate games, in 3 unique styles.
PBS once called Homestuck the "Ulysses of the Internet". Its author, Andrew Hussie — who resembles Joyce in his impishness, stylistic maximalism, and fondness for disturbing smut — calls it "a story I've tried to make as much a pure expression of its medium as possible". It has become a cultural phenomenon, inspiring proms and dominating Amazon makeup reviews. But most importantly, it's a rollicking good read, equal parts slapstick and epic, bildungsroman and cultural commentary.
What on earth about it makes its fans so overly zealous? And how the hell does one start the daunting process of reading Homestuck? If you're even the remotest bit curious about this Internet phenomenon, the following is a teensy-weensy introduction to just what makes Homestuck so terrific. [more inside]
RIP Loukanikos
October 15
It was a good time for name-dropping.
"What does sound sound like when no music is happening?"
Tuning '77 - a seamless audio supercut of an entire year of the Grateful Dead tuning their instruments, live on stage. Chronologically sequenced, this remix incorporates every publicly available recording from 1977, examining the divide between audience expectation and performance anxiety. [more inside]
Seven cover versions of Ghostbusters from Dream Syndicate's 1984 tour
The earliest version is fairly straightforward, aside from the homage to “Werewolves of London.” By the time they reach D.C., though, they can do anything with it. At the 9:30 Club, guitarists Wynn and Precoda quote “Rock And Roll Part 2” before shredding in the style of Television—it’s a shame the tape runs out. In Stockholm, Wynn sees an opportunity to stir up the audience, and in Bochum, Germany, it becomes the basis for a long jam that turns into “Suzie Q.,” “Sister Ray,” and “L.A. Woman.” Frankfurt gets a slow take on the song that is actually kind of spooky. Seven cover versions of Ghostbusters from the Dream Syndicate's 1984 tour.
I too have flattened India
The Gentrification of the Dosa: "I worry dosas will become their Western definitions—“lentil crepe” or “lentil pancake,” that sanitized screen."
First virus antibiotic has been (partially) figured out.
I killed the monster. Goodnight.
Amid escalating tensions of disease and terror around the world, the national media has focused on yet another Hollywood scandal: is pop singer Janna Hospice really a mass of voles? The social media storm has raged on both sides of the debate, but in a recently released video interview The Onion gets to the bottom of the mystery.
"something so stable about our school was about to change"
"First and foremost was her faith, then came literature..."
I Can't Give Anymore
Hailed as successors to The Beatles, the British band Badfinger had an extended stay in Milwaukee—a bizarre nightmare from which it never recovered. [more inside]
Where the hell is there a gorilla in the movie? We don’t need a gorilla!
Ebola Deeply
Now just 5 years away
Lockheed Martin Says they made a breakthrough in fusion technology:
Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade. Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.
Five seconds of pure joy in dog form
A pair of dogs team up to retrieve a tennis ball from a backyard swimming pool. I could watch this all day.
“I just don’t buy into the nonsense about discrimination.”
The Whiteness Project is a multiplatform investigation into how Americans who identify as “white” experience their ethnicity.
When Science Fiction Grew Up
How renegade sci-fi writers of the 1960s paved the way for today's blending of literary and genre fiction [more inside]
"There was a BEE in my THING!"
The 2014 Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Nanning, China ended this weekend. The biggest story line of the meet on the women's side was American Simone Biles, who successfully defended her world title in the All-Around competition and was attacked by a bee. [more inside]
Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso
Brains vs. Brawn in Baseball
The Economist examines the cult of the genius GM.
In sports, just like the rest of life, the rich keep getting richer. Anyone who saw or read Moneyball knows that the deck is stacked against small-market Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Their only hope of competing, Michael Lewis’s story goes, is to acquire brilliant, innovative general managers (GMs) like his protagonist Billy Beane, who have mastered the “art of winning an unfair game” by outmaneuvering wealthier clubs. The problem with this narrative is that there is nothing to stop the sport’s plutocrats from hiring the finest minds money can buy, just as they sign the best athletes.The deep-pocketed Dodgers have lured away small market Tampa Bay's heralded GM Andrew Friedman to find out what happens when a man who consistently builds winners with one of the smallest revenue streams in the game can do with a payroll in excess of $200 million.
"When you hold a weapon, you don't cry, you just shoot."
Commander Pigeon is a collector of lost and exiled men. The quietest soldier once belonged to the Taliban. He had been captured by local police, escaped, and having heard about Commander Pigeon, walked miles to reach her home. He fell to his knees and begged for protection. She made him swear loyalty. I asked how she knew he wouldn't rebel. "I'm watching him closely," she said. "I'm converting Taliban to normal people."[more inside]
Jen Percy for TNR: My Night With Afghanistan's Only Female Warlord, Commander Pigeon.
“ 'Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,”
"The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West."
- The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons (SLNYT) [more inside]
Selfie with Comet
The Rosetta Mission to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko took this picture of itself with the comet 16km away in the background.
European Space Agency description of the image.
Phil Platt's Bad Astronomy story.
A Game of Thrones
HBO Says It’s Going to Start Selling on the Web Next Year . Maybe because Netflix now has more subscription revenue than HBO? But wait, is A la Carte the Worst Idea Anyone Has Ever Had?
We could use a few pointers on prudence.
"During the 2013-2014 flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 46 percent of Americans received vaccinations against influenza, even though it kills about 3,000 people in this country in a good year, nearly 50,000 in a bad one." [more inside]
Simmons is free.
Bill Simmons returns to ESPN today after a three-week suspension for calling Roger Goodell a liar. There's a lot of speculation over his next move.
America's Worst Colleges
Washington Monthly has attempted to identify America's worst colleges.
Mad for Ads? Add Ads to Mad
Madison is a new Vintage Ad archive from the New York Times. "But the Times is inviting readers to do more than just view the ads. It's also asking readers to help shape the archive by sifting through the ads, identifying them and even transcribing their text." [more inside]
October 14
All cities are mad, but the madness is gallant.
Planned cities are not a new idea (Palmanova, Italy, 1593). From Washington, D.C. (1791), to Canberra, Australia (1911), to Brasilia, Brazil (1957), planned cities have long been an urban dream (from space), perhaps most frequently applied to national capitals. But they don't always work out as planned. [more inside]
The mysterious Permutations, by Chrimères
If you're looking for about half an hour of unusual instrumental music, something that could possibly be classified in the mélange of a genre that is "post-industrial music," you might well enjoy Permutations, by Chrimères. I don't know anything about this beyond what is on Soundcloud, which is that this is a "work in progress" from sometime in/around 2012.
"BDSM stands for Bondage Discipline Spider-Man"
The creators of the popularly controversial comic book "Sex Criminals" (previously here), Matt Fraction (birthname Matt Fritchman, previously here) and Chip Zdarsky (birthname Steve Murray, previously here too), are bringing out the perfect companion volume for their saga of a couple whose sex stops time (giving them the opportunity to rob banks)... a sex manual titled "Just The Tips". This 23-page preview (PDF!) includes such advice as "Role playing can help spice up your sex life. Pretend to be someone who’s good at sex." and "Make love, not war, and never to Gwar." plus exotic new positions like "The Dutch Microwave", "The User Agreement" and, of course, "Brimping", as well as lots of other Dirty Talk (in very large type to make it totally embarrassing to read on the bus). Perfect for anyone who considers "tongue in cheek" one of the sexiest positions.
Available in non-respectable comic stores the day before American Thanksgiving, real bookstores early December.
Available in non-respectable comic stores the day before American Thanksgiving, real bookstores early December.
"In the fourth year of the reign of Emperor Trajan..."
Tobias Frere-Jones (creator of the Gotham typeface) explores the history of font names. [more inside]
New traditional videogames
Locomalito describes himself as "a free developer of NEW TRADITIONAL VIDEO GAMES", and his games- all freely downloadable- bear that out. "I grew up with arcade gaming values", he says, and he wears his influences on his sleeve while creating his own style. From the horror platforming of Maldita Castilla to the autoscrolling shmup Hydorah, Locomalito's games have that old school feel- beautiful pixel art, music by frequent collaborators Gryzor87 or RushJet1, and a difficulty which is challenging, yet fair. Each game also has downloadable posters, trading cards, box art, and more to complete that old-school feel. [more inside]
Iggy Pop on free music in a capitalist society
"Son cœur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne."
The Fall of the House of Usher (1928): [YouTube] a [silent] film version of Poe's story by Melville Webber and J. S. Watson Jr. [wiki]
The Enemy of my Enemy is . . . Richard Posner?
Richard Posner last week issued a remarkable dissent destroying every rationale for photo voter ID laws. This is particularly notable because Judge Posner, a brilliant but conservative Ronald Reagan appointee to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, authored a 2007 decision later affirmed by the United States Supreme Court which upheld Indiana's voter identification law -- a decision he appears now to regret. Read Posner's powerful and persuasive dissent decimating the rationale for such laws here (beware, pdf format.) [more inside]
You can't really dust for vomit
My daughter, myself
My deli meats contain trade secrets?
Sure, highly paid tech workers often have to sign non-compete clauses when they hire on at a new firm, and some people think this is a problem. But what about when it's fast food employees? [more inside]
The Wild?
Some of the world’s most powerful conservationists are giving up on wilderness. They are making a big mistake [more inside]
A digital replica of the classic Spirograph toy
Do you have fond memories of afternoons spent making geometric patterns and designs with your Spirograph? If so, enjoy Inspirograph, a digital version. [more inside]
The great thing about standards...
Today, October 14, 2014, is World Standards Day! Except in the USA, where it's celebrated October 23, 2014. (Canada splits the difference by celebrating it on October 15).
To #Hashtag or Not To #Hashtag
The #Hashtag debate continues and it seems as though the only ones debating it are the ones who don't completely understand it.
A classic New Jersey staple: Pork Roll.
What is pork roll most people not from New Jersey/Philly might ask? Pork roll (also known as taylor ham, though this a matter of some contention) is a form of processed meat that is a breakfast favorite of the New Jersey and Philly region. [more inside]
Do you want more?
?uestlove and Black Thought of The Roots are interviewed by Marc Lamont Hill of HuffPost Live. Highlights include how Boyz II Men cheated in the high school talent show (glitter) and the pros and cons of signing on as the house band with Jimmy Fallon.
My outdoor beach cafe is on fire. Apparently. So relaxing!
White noise a little too stuffy? Nature sounds a little too outdoorsy? Wish Starbucks had a cricket infestation? Mix it up with a custom ambient noise generator!
Flying lemur, sloth bat, whatever. I don't care. It's delightful.
Presented for your delight: lovely photos of a Sunda Flying Lemur, also known as the Sunda Colugo or Malayan Flying Lemur. Despite their most common name, Sunda Flying Lemurs are not lemurs and do not fly. Galeopterus variegates, to give their Latin binomial, are arboreal, spending their entire lives gliding and perching among the treetops of tropical rainforests. This species "belongs to the mammalian order Dermoptera. It is now widely (if not universally) accepted that the Dermoptera, along with the Scandentia (tree shrews), are the closest living relatives of the Primates, although the precise relationships among these three groups remain a matter of some debate."
Love is the Message
Electronic music pioneer and one half of LFO, Mark Bell, has died following complications after an operation his record label has announced. [more inside]
A pleasure delayed...
In a Magic the Gathering unboxing video, when opening an alpha starter pack, the author is stunned by a Black Lotus.
"I guess everybody has something they’re not very grown-up about."
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, author of 43 books for children and young adults, died from complications of a stroke on October 7, 2014.She won three Newberry Honor Awards
The Exotic World of Tax-Scam Record Labels
"The thought of someone releasing records to not make money always struck me as a fascinating example of how economics and music sometimes make for strange and uncomfortable bedfellows." For a couple of years in the mid-to-late 70's, a few strange record labels popped up with the sole purpose of taking advantage of a little-known loophole in the tax code that allowed record labels to take valuable tax write-offs for unsuccessful releases. These records were often released without the musicians' knowledge and either quickly destroyed, kept in a warehouse, or given in small quantities to a handful of record stores. [more inside]
A Field Guide To The True American Diner
Mister Rogers tried to sue us!
The Making of Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted , an excerpt from Brian Coleman's upcoming Check the Technique 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (SLMedium)
It's like “Politically Incorrect”, but with less politics and more wine
In 2001, long before he helped launch the Marvel Cinematic Universe juggernaut, Jon Favreau could reasonably be described as “that guy in Swingers”. But sometime between Swingers and Iron Man, Favreau used some of his clout to create and host a new show for the Independent Film Channel. It was called "Dinner for Five". [more inside]
"But the Skinner box is still real."
The role of game mechanics should not be the oppressive tyrant telling you to fetch and grind and be thankful for your crumbs of XP and DPS as the scenery blazes past. It should be an à-la-carte menu of options which is opened up for your benefit and at your direction. Slow enough that you can get familiar with each element in turn, but fast enough not to frustrate and limit. Unlockables and crafting should be a way to enable new abilities, not just busywork. Level ups should let you specialize in certain tactics, not just keep up with the Joneses who all bought new glass armor and plasma rifles overnight. Compulsion is just a stick, not the carrot.Steven Wittens: the Cargo Cult of Game Mechanics.
Da da da Dead
Beethoven's bad influence - Alex Ross ponders if veneration of him stifled his successors.
Dropbox (not) hacked, but hackers claim 7 million accounts for sale
ArsTechnica: "7 million Dropbox username/password pairs apparently leaked" Reports started to come in late Monday evening about the cloud file storage service Dropbox having been "hacked" by a group that was offering up the complete list of millions of email+password combinations for Bitcoin donations. Later reports, including a statement by Dropbox, point to the potential list being several million combinations culled from various third-party sites, and then tested against Dropbox. [more inside]
Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community
BBC: Vatican family review signals shift on homosexuality - "Senior clerics taking part in a review of Catholic teachings on the family have called on the Church to adopt a more positive stance on homosexuality.
A preliminary report written by bishops during a Vatican synod said homosexuals had "gifts and qualities to offer"."
October 13
#Gamergate, as we know it now, is a hate group.
I do not say this to make the people of #Gamergate seem any more important, or effective, or powerful, or to give any sort of new credence to their ideas. Rather, this is just a structural designation: as immediately dismissible as their tactics and stances might be (at least to anyone who has not become victim to them), I believe it's important to note that group was formed like a hate group and functions like a hate group in every way.Social researcher Jennifer Allaway examines the ways in which #GamerGate functions as a hate group, using a 2004 study by Linda Woolf and Michale Hulsizer called Hate Groups for Dummies: How to Build a Successful Hate Group as her framework. In it, she identifies four essential elements to any hate group:
- the leadership which originally inspired the movement,
- the recruitment strategy it uses to appeal to insecure and impressionable gamers,
- the social-psychological techniques by which it spreads its message and enflames its members' beliefs,
- and, finally, the process by which it dehumanizes its victims, and turns them into targets whose attacking earns group praise.
Adorable Animal Family Portraits
Animals (especially wild animals) don't have the vanity or the discipline to pose for organized family photos, but wildlife photographers will still do their best to capture photos that look like they could be corny family holiday post-cards.
I spent 10 years doing New York all wrong
Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., was a lonely aspiring writer in New York, generally unhappy. Then she moved to Brooklyn and found that community made all the difference.
A little night music with interpretive dance
Race and indigeneity
Can New Zealand teach the US anything about race?
The US was founded on the idea of freedom and liberty. But freedom and liberty, which might be called the “sacred” values of American society, were exclusive ideas. In the colonial period there was, writes Dee Brown in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, “an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.” Treaties are the mechanism to extend that freedom and liberty – that is, the right to self determination – to indigenous peoples who were promised it, but do not have full exercise of it.
Moscow, we have a problem
The First Spacewalk. How the first human to take steps in outer space nearly didn't return to Earth.
Miners, Gnomes, Kobolds, Wolves, and the Hooded One of the Harz Mountain
"It is somewhat of a mystery why the English-speaking world has had to wait until 1981 for the first translation of the Deutsche Sagen (German Legends) by the Brothers Grimm. After all, the Legends, which first appeared in 1816 and 1818, were translated into French, Danish, and even Rumanian in the nineteenth century, and have always been considered a vital source book for folklorists and critics alike. Perhaps we have always assumed that the German Legends had been translated since many of them are known through romances, novels, adaptations, selective translations, films, comic books, and references in critical studies. The two most famous examples are Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser and Robert Browning's 'The Children of Hameln.'"-Jack Zipes, in an approving review of Donald Ward's translation of the Legends. Ward's work has since fallen out of print, but you can read select legends at the eclectic Golden Scales folktale collection.
All in the Family
Groots, Black Widows, and Every Johnny Depp
Visualizing Game Flow
Reversing the Design: The Two Games of Chrono Trigger is an essay that examines the way that Chrono Trigger tells a story in two parts to the player using every aspect of the game's design. Aside from analyzing the game story itself, the authors also look at things like weapon power, player agency, quest design, graphics, dungeon layouts, boss scripting, and the battle system. The essay concludes with a list of design considerations that can be applied from Chrono Trigger to games of all genres.
Candyland
Sugar: the evolution of a forbidden fruit
Sweetness was meant to be irresistible. We are born with a sweet tooth. Babies drink in sugar with their mother’s milk. Sweetness represents an instant energy boost, a fuel that kept our ancestors going in a harsher world where taste buds evolved to distinguish health-giving ripeness and freshness from the dangers of bitter, sour, toxic foods. Sugar gives us drug-like pleasures – lab rats deprived of their sugar-water fix exhibit classic signs of withdrawal. When things are going well, we blissfully say, “Life is sweet.”[more inside]
"You hide, they seek."
Worst. Landlord. Ever.
The Public Advocate for the City of New York has released an interactive map, The NYC Landord Watchlist, which maps the city's most poorly managed buildings. The map uses data from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to list over 6,800 buildings across New York. You can search the map by address and by borough. If you select a property listed on the map you can view the number and type of violations it has received. [via]
Zach Anner's (usually) comedic adventures with friends
"Hey America, my name is Zach, I'm from Austin, TX. I think we met at Jeanine's party once and really hit it off, but I think we should get to know each other bit better ... I have a lot to say, but I don't know where I would fit, because I have something called cerebral palsy, which I believe is the sexiest of the palsies...." That's Zach Anner's audition for Oprah's Your OWN Show, a reality competition show, where Zach was one of the two winners. His show was called Rollin' Around the World with Zach Anner, which got shortened to Rollin' with Zach, and you can see many clips from that on OWN's YouTube channel. But the show didn't last, and instead Zach and friends turned back to the internet to get involved with a travel show about more realistic travel adventures, called Riding Shotgun (YouTube playlist). But that's not all ... [more inside]
Oh what could compare to a day in the swaaaaamp...
For those of you celebrating Thanksgiving today (and anyone else), here's Dick Cavett's 1971 Thanksgiving Special. [more inside]
Researchers grow Alzheimers's in a petri dish
Breakthrough Replicates Human Brain Cells for Use in Alzheimer’s Research In the past, what once seemed to be promising breakthroughs in Alzheimer's Disease research have later petered away to nothing, but this latest announcement in the New York Times sounds like genuine good news. A new method of creating a brain in a dish can clear away one major obstacle in research, by providing an truer medium on which to test drugs, and a clearer indication that the theory that amyloid accumulation that leads to plaques and tangles is correct.
Crack, the CIA, and the Contras
In 1996, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News exposed a shocking series of facts: that the CIA and the Reagan administration were covertly funding the Contras in Nicaragua by aiding and abetting the flow of crack cocaine to America, particularly inflicting terrible damage on inner-city black communities. In response, the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all began vicious campaigns to attack and discredit Webb. Although Webb was later vindicated by a CIA Inspector General report among other things, the damage was done, and the story still has an air of obfuscation and confusion around it. Along with the release of a new documentary, Freeway: Crack in the System, as well as a feature film starring Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger, key figures in the CIA-crack cocaine scandal are beginning to come forward. Could this be the start of a renewed exploration of the government's complicity in the rise of crack in America?
The Math Behind the Rolling Shutter Effect.
Here's a pair of blog posts explaining the math behind the "Rolling Shutter Effect":
Playing Detective with Rolling Shutter Photos and Rolling Shutters.
Star Trek Fact Check
Sifting through decades of publications, oral history and archival records, Michael Kmet sets the record straight on numerous aspects Star Trek: TOS production history lore. Was "Spock's Brain" originally conceived as a comedy episode? Did Roddenberry write the lyrics to the theme song as a cash grab? Which of the Mercury Seven did Roddenberry try to get as guest stars? [more inside]
the dangerous precision worship
Among a rising chorus of folks speaking out about problems caused by America's obsession with football at every level, author (and fan) Steve Almond's voice stands out the loudest. His new book Against Football argues that "our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia." In a nutshell "Fans should stop watching." Needless to say the book has provoked a strong reaction in fans (and defensive sportswriters), most notably in New York Mag, with Jonathan Chait's personal story of how football made him a better person: "In Defense of Male Aggression: What Liberals Get Wrong About Football". [more inside]
The NSA and me
The NSA and Me is an essay by James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, an early book on the agency. It details how he came to write the book, and the NSA's efforts to keep him from publishing it in the late 70s/early 80s.
A rumbling sound then three sharp knocks -- Ba-ba-ba-dook-dook-dook.
The horror genre is traditionally even more of a boys' club than Hollywood at large. In a nice break from convention, though, two of this year's most acclaimed horror films were written and directed by women.
Honeymoon, about newlyweds whose getaway is disrupted by... visitations from... something, is the feature film debut of Leigh Janiak. It got strong reviews from The Dissolve and The New York Times, among others, and is now available on iTunes and on VOD in the US. Here's Janiak talking about how she got the film made.
The Babadook, about a woman whose son develops a pathological fear of a monster in their house, was written and directed by Australian actress Jennifer Kent. It premiered at Sundance this year and currently boasts a 96% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Some have tossed around terms like "flat-out masterpiece" and blasphemies like "outdoes Stanley Kubrick." The high-brow likes of Film Comment ran an interview with Kent. The film will be released in the U.S. later this month.
Honeymoon, about newlyweds whose getaway is disrupted by... visitations from... something, is the feature film debut of Leigh Janiak. It got strong reviews from The Dissolve and The New York Times, among others, and is now available on iTunes and on VOD in the US. Here's Janiak talking about how she got the film made.
The Babadook, about a woman whose son develops a pathological fear of a monster in their house, was written and directed by Australian actress Jennifer Kent. It premiered at Sundance this year and currently boasts a 96% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Some have tossed around terms like "flat-out masterpiece" and blasphemies like "outdoes Stanley Kubrick." The high-brow likes of Film Comment ran an interview with Kent. The film will be released in the U.S. later this month.
My favorite ice cream comes from ~cow
A day in the life, imagined 50 years from now, by ftrain: "It’s interesting when you scan old history scrolls to learn just how panicked everyone was about total global micro-surveillance. They just didn’t see it as a means of liberation, like we do now. Of course they lived in the era of giant government-run spying computers like Multivac. No one could imagine the upside of having every human interaction observed by penny sensors at all times. I’m glad to live in a world where a young woman can hop into a self-driving car with a total stranger and not feel a bit of concern." [more inside]
"The ESF ... considers that the statement cited above is slanderous"
Last year, Dr. Amaya Moro-Martin, an astrophysicist specializing in circumstellar disks and planetary systems, started a great deal of discussion in the astronomy community when she wrote an open letter to the Spanish Prime Minister explaining that she was leaving Spain because of the bizarrely oppressive bureaucratic policies of the Spanish government and their broken promises to scientific researchers. This year, she has written an opinion piece in Nature arguing that Europe's drastic research budget cuts are short-sighted. In response, the European Science Foundation (ESF) has threatened to sue her unless she retracts the statement that called an evaluation process supported by ESF "flawed".
"It's not gonna hurt me when you cry"
I'm still here, but yet I'm goneI'm Not Gonna Miss You is Glen Campbell latest and last ever song. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease back in 2011, he embarked on his farewell tour which finished 2012. Now checked into a long term Alzheimer's care facility, "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" is his farewell song to his wife in the knowledge that the disease is taking away his memories of her.
I don't play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you 'til the end
You're the last person I will love
You're the last face I will recall
And best of all, I'm not gonna to miss you.
A Word for Autumn, by A.A. Milne
"There is a crispness about celery that is of the essence of October. It is as fresh and clean as a rainy day after a spell of heat. It crackles pleasantly in the mouth. Moreover it is excellent, I am told, for the complexion. One is always hearing of things which are good for the complexion, but there is no doubt that celery stands high on the list. After the burns and freckles of summer one is in need of something. How good that celery should be there at one’s elbow".
October 12
Dunham Coach Motor Car Company
Dumbing of Age
As a college student, cartoonist and then-Christian fundamentalist David Willis wrote a newspaper funny called Roomies!, which inadvertently documented the beginning of his departure from his faith. Roomies! segued abruptly into a sci-fi drama after two years, which then branched into two new comics — one about domestic married life, and one about employees at a toy store.
In 2010, however, Willis began writing a new strip set in Indiana University, the same setting as his original Roomies! With Dumbing of Age, Willis takes advantage of the decade-and-a-half he spent developing his characters and refining his craft — but just as importantly, he brings to this new strip the perspective and wisdom of his own experiences with faith. It is an explicitly autobiographical comic, at the heart of which is the relationship between homeschooled Christian Joyce Brown and her best friend, Dorothy Keener, who is ambitious, studious, and unabashedly atheist. It is marvelously well-made, and even if you are not usually a fan of webcomics (I'm decidedly not), Dumbing of Age is worth your giving a look.
In 2010, however, Willis began writing a new strip set in Indiana University, the same setting as his original Roomies! With Dumbing of Age, Willis takes advantage of the decade-and-a-half he spent developing his characters and refining his craft — but just as importantly, he brings to this new strip the perspective and wisdom of his own experiences with faith. It is an explicitly autobiographical comic, at the heart of which is the relationship between homeschooled Christian Joyce Brown and her best friend, Dorothy Keener, who is ambitious, studious, and unabashedly atheist. It is marvelously well-made, and even if you are not usually a fan of webcomics (I'm decidedly not), Dumbing of Age is worth your giving a look.
Tiger moms and helicopter parents: The economics of parenting style
The return to pushing children hard consists of the increased likelihood that they will do well later in life. How important this is to parents depends crucially on the degree of economic inequality, and in particular on the return to education. In an economy where education and effort are highly rewarded and where people with little education struggle, parents will be highly motivated to push their children hard. Thus, we expect economic inequality to be associated with intensive (authoritarian and authoritative) parenting styles. In contrast, in an economy where there is little inequality and artists and school dropouts earn only slightly less than doctors and engineers, parents can afford a more relaxed attitude, and permissive parenting should be more prevalent. [study here]
Si no fuera por el Almirante, que quería más el tributo
The Relación of Fray Ramón Pané famously records what one Hieronymite friar learned about the religious beliefs and healing practices of the Taíno between 1494 and 1496 (bilingual PDF with another translation and more introductory material), supposedly at the request of Christopher Columbus. Research published in 2006 on a "Lost document [that] reveals Columbus as a tyrant of the Caribbean" indicates that Pané was also a key witness in the trial of Columbus, partially responsible for sending Columbus home in chains, as depicted on the Columbus Doors of the U. S. Capitol building (detail).
from Baudrillard, you know, "inventor of the Matrix"
Understanding Jean Baudrillard with Pumpkin Spice Lattes "Back in the day you were stuck with what was seasonal – you ate tomatoes and watermelon when it was summer, and when old man winter rolled in, you were stuck with nature’s shit bag – like potatoes and kale – a vegetable god intended you to hate and smite you with."
The only reason to not work Oktoberfest: being pregnant or a broken leg
"You Hockey Puck!"
Don Rickles roasts Jerry Lewis (and gets slapped in the face by Milton Berle) A few other roasts: Sammy Davis Jr. Ronald Reagan Barry Goldwater Red Foxx Jonathan Winters roasts Johnny Carson Jackie Gleason Jimmy Stewart [more inside]
The True Story of a Fake Name on Some Scientific Papers
"I asked Ciccotti what they meant. When he explained it to me, I thought that Stronzo Bestiale would have been the perfect co-author for a refused publication. So I decided to submit my papers again, simply by changing the title and adding the name of that author. And the researches were published."
With a few other examples of of the intentional overlapping of scientific publications and foreign profanity, including one relevant to every American worker who gets a FICA deduction on their paycheck. May be NSFW in Italy.
Afrofuturism: The New Wave
A New Wave of Black Filmmaking: Experimental and Black Speculative Indie Films "A brief survey of the contemporary Black independent film scene yields a long and ever-growing list of experimental and Black speculative (including horror, Afrofuturism, sci-fi, fantasy, fan fiction) short cinema, film trailers, music videos and other projects. (/The Atlanta Black Star) [more inside]
Tuesday's Child
Five year old Iris Grace has taken up painting. Iris is autistic, and her parents introduced her to painting as a means to help with her speech therapy. She has attracted attention worldwide and her paintings have sold quite well. Iris in action. Originals, prints, and calendars can be purchased here. Iris has a constant companion, her name is Thula. The homepage of irisgracepainting.com.
Duncan Campbell's Secret Society - BBC Documentary Series - 1987
This is Duncan Campbell's BBC documentary series Secret Society which shows the never broadcast episode on secret groups, committees and societies that operate silently within British government. The first episode about secret cabinet committees features author Peter Hennessy, Clive Ponting and MP Clement Freud amongst others. It also contains the infamous Zircon spy satellite epsode. [Warning - Vimeo - alternative links for four of these are at Archive.org.] [more inside]
How to Destroy a Public-School System
How to Destroy a Public-School System — In Philadelphia, education reformers got everything they wanted. Look where the city’s schools are now. [more inside]
Concerts from Pavement, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, The Frogs and Sebadoh
Full Pavement concert from the Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain tour in Frankfurt, March 6th 1994. The audio comes from the soundboard and two people shot the whole thing on camera, one to the side of the stage and the other from the back of the room. Here's the set list and a little bit more info. The same production company, now defunct, has a few other concerts up on YouTube: Sonic Youth in 2004, Yo La Tengo in 2000, The Frogs in 1988, and a whole host of Sebadoh clips, including a whole concert from 1996.
Why don’t we all just play.
A Property Rights Dispute at a Playground in San Francisco “It’s 6:55 and the homies are playing. They [the permit guys] are waiting for the field at 7. It’s about to go down.” An interesting standoff between neighborhood kids with an ad hoc system for everyone to use the playground, and a team of folks in Dropbox jerseys who have obtained a permit for exclusive use of the space.
Current record: 2:02:57
What Will It Take to Run a 2-Hour Marathon? (Warning: data viz, annoying design)
Es ist eine kleine Welt, nachdem alle
Tiny Planet is the newest short video by German photographer Jonas Ginter. His webpage [translation] [previously] shows how he can use off-the-shelf hardware, some 3d printing, and a clever use of timelapse to capture these wonderfully disproportioned short films.
Zomething different
There are a million ways to slight a rival's manhood, but to suggest that he enjoys Zima is one of the worst. Zima was the precursor to Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Breeze, Mike's Hard Lemonade and the entire genre of alcopops. And now, you too can make Zima, even though it's gone now.
Trash Can Challenge
Ukrainian activists and radicals have devised a challenge of their own, throwing politicians in dumpsters to protest Ukraine’s rampant corruption.
A trip or three back in time, with LSD and mescaline in the 1950s
Dr. Sidney Cohen talks to an unnamed housewife who volunteers to take LSD at Veteran's Administration Hospital circa 1954*, "Schizophrenia Psychosis Induced by LSD25" circa 1955**, and Mescaline (peyote) experiment with Humphry Osmond testing on Christopher Mayhew*** in 1955. [more inside]
My Africa Is...
My Africa Is Lagos: WeCyclers. The Floating School. Avante Garde Fashion Photography. Dakar: Le Journal Rappe. Malika Surf Camp. Sunu Street Project. Diaspora: Sonic Diaspora. Os Kuduristas. Technologie Democracy. (via)
October 11
Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really. -- Agnes Sligh Turn
Crashing a pool party
No big thing, just a base jump at night from a 1,099 foot tower into a swimming pool on the roof of an adjacent hotel. The helmet cam gives a nice first person perspective. [more inside]
Linux for Lettuce
Linux for Lettuce - Myers contends that, when applied to plants, patents are stifling. They discourage sharing, and sharing is the foundation of successful breeding. That’s because his work is essentially just assisting natural evolution: He mates one plant with another, which in turn makes new combinations of genes from which better plants are selected. The more plants there are to mix, the more combinations are made, and the more opportunities there are to create better plants. Even some breeders who work for the companies that are doing the patenting still believe in—indeed, long for—the ability to exchange seed.
PIZZA: The Brooklyn Story
PIZZA: The Brooklyn Story - Scott Wiener (from Scott's Pizza Tours) gives a lecture weaving together the history of Italian immigrants, Pizza and Brooklyn.
the cost of a Calvin
How much damage can a 6 year-old possibly do? An analysis of the cost of raising a child like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes [more inside]
"The Empire Strikes Back Uncut" is a remake made up of fan-made films
"The evil lord Cat Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, has dispatched thousands of remote minivan probes into the far reaches of the swimming pool... Ahem... Space."
In 2009, Casey Pugh asked Internet users to remake Star Wars into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. In a few months time, thousands of fans responded with extraordinary creativity from around the world. Five years later, Star Wars Uncut (previously) was released. It was was such a success that in 2012 he solicited more fan-made films to create the next installment. A panel of 20 judges culled through over 1500 submission and more than 480 were chosen to create the shot-for-shot remake of the newest release, The Empire Strikes Back Uncut.
SHORTS: long as hell. Pockets everywhere. It’s 2000.
Why You Looked Weird in High School by Jaya Saxena "The key to any good performance is intention. We choose our clothes based on what we want the world to see, sometimes before our inner selves match the outer picture. I couldn’t live up to the punk rock image when I was 14 because I was timid and awkward and called my mom before going out at night. (And borrowed her clothes.) The look is what I valued, but a second of talking to me showed you it wasn’t who I was—not yet. By college there I was, wearing all black, intimidating those around me, convincing people I was confident and hard, and starting to convince myself a bit of the same."
If a process yields discrimination, then we need to examine the process.
Bias in the Box. "This is where Bryan Stevenson’s 'undeveloped understanding' comes into focus. A prosecutor may say with the utmost sincerity that he doesn’t exclude blacks [from a jury] because of their race, but because they or someone in their family has been a victim of discrimination, which leads them to distrust the system. Because of their experiences, they are believed to be less motivated to sentence someone to die and are therefore less desirable on a jury." (slVQR) [more inside]
"A term that is somehow both loaded and meaningless."
The Washington City Paper has shared its delightfully-snarky extension of the AP Style Guide, detailing how the paper would like its writers to cover topics relating to the District of Columbia. For starters, don't follow the paper's eponymous mistake, and call it Washington.
This one's for the fellas who've been asking themselves questions...
The Rubberbandits (featuring Gabriel Byrne) present a message for all the Fellas of the world. (NSFW)
(Previously and Previously) [more inside]
(Previously and Previously) [more inside]
Our home is beautiful and amazing.
"Using footage from NASA's Johnson Space Center, filmmaker Fede Castro creates a captivating time-lapse video of Earth from space. In a little over four minutes, 'Nuestra Tierra—Our Earth' takes us around the world, sighting major cities and even catching the breathtaking aurora borealis." More from Fede Castro.
The Elderly Unicorn and His Girl
Beautiful story and photos of a senior horse and the little girl he shared his last year with before returning to The Secret Forest. Part of Paper Horse Photography's Senior Horse Project.
SELL THE PAINTING
“I want to install it in my house,” Ségalot recalls Bryant saying, “but my wife hates it. She can’t live with a work that says ‘SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS.’ So do you know anyone who might want to buy it?” What the 350,000% rise in value of a single painting by Christopher Wool says about the contemporary art world.
What do we expect? They're Dick's.
12-year-old calls out Dick's Sporting Goods chain for being sexist. We might never have known about her exceptional letter, but one of her parents is a reporter.
How Madewell Bought and Sold My Family's History
How Madewell Bought and Sold My Family's History: In 1937, my great-grandfather started a workwear company in New England called Madewell. In 2006, 17 years after the last factory shut down, J.Crew relaunched a women’s clothing company with the same name and logo, based on a 50-year history in which it had no part. (single link buzzfeed)
"rights and responsibilities"
At the heart of the reform will be a new British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities that will restore common sense to the application of human rights in the UK. A draft of the Bill will be published for consultation before Christmas. Among other things the Bill will stop terrorists and other serious foreign criminals who pose a threat to our society from using human rights to prevent deportation. It will make it clear that people have clear responsibilities to society, and that there is a proper balance between rights and responsibilities in British law.If you follow UK politics you know the Tories (as well as a large chunk of Labour) have an obsession with the European Court of Human Rights and its "interfering" with British domestic matters. The party has now proposal to scrap the 1998 Human Rights Act and break the UK's ties to the court. [more inside]
lightening + Jurassic Park + Charlie Chaplin + wine + Mirah
Companies have been down-sizing little girls
This mom got fed up. Companies have been down-sizing their clothing for years as fashion trends call for "slimmer" cuts and silhouettes.
Clothing sizing is an issue. Maybe there needs to be a mandated standard of clothing sizes? No cutting corners or skimping on measurements. [more inside]
pay attention, gals
Singaporean student Agatha Tan wrote an open letter to her principal after noticing major flaws with a sex ed program at her junior college. Specifically, the Focus on the Family-created program posited relationship advice for "guys" and "gals" and what they really think that seem to be directly cribbed from a joke book. Focus on the Family claimed that it wasn't designed as sex ed but as a "relationship education" program (here's Singapore's actual sex ed curriculum) and that it was supposedly based on research studies about the neurological differences between men and women. The principal says that the facilitators were "ineffective", and the Ministry of Education says that they will cease their working relationship with FotF soon.
October 10
The Toughest Sailing Race on Earth
The 2014-2015 Volvo Ocean Race begins today, leaving Alicante, Spain headed for Cape Town, South Africa. The longest and most dangerous sporting event in the world, the epic sailing regatta covers 38,739 nautical miles and will take nearly 9 months to complete, covering the toughest conditions on earth, including the dreaded Southern Ocean.
This year's race shares almost nothing in common from the original Whitbread in 1973, save for one thing; there is no prize for winning. [more inside]
This year's race shares almost nothing in common from the original Whitbread in 1973, save for one thing; there is no prize for winning. [more inside]
A New Golden Age of Falconry
Long live Þórr
In recent days, news stories have emerged about a wilderness expedition company, Amaruk, rejecting an applicant due to her religious beliefs and affiliation with a restrictive Christian evangelical school. [more inside]
Pylon of the Month
"It tastes like soap. Why am I eating soap right now?"
The New York Times Magazine treated a group of second graders to a seven-course meal at a pricey NYC restaurant. Culinarity ensued. [video, via]
Colloquially, I would imagine that the compound is known as "Oh, @#&!"
So we're back to nothing! What should we do to make something of it?
Paul Klee: The Silence of the Angel (2005; 51:14) is a documentary about the painter whose lectures/notebooks, The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature, have been called "the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist ... it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton's in the realm of physics."
Frontline - Ebola Outbreak
Frontline - Ebola Outbreak 30-minute Frontline piece on Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone televised in September 2014. It shows the human toll of the disease by interviewing doctors, aid workers, and family members.
His writings fuel the biggest threat to abortion rights in a generation.
behind-the-scenes of nonfiction longform pieces
annotating Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's profile of Dave Chappelle, "If He Hollers Let Him Go" [more inside]
No more mojo
Code Name: The White Mouse
Blisteringly sexy, she killed Nazis with her bare hands and had a 5 million-franc bounty on her head. That was one of her obituary articles in 2011 and it also called her "the real Charlotte Gray." [more inside]
No Simpsons Quotes, eh?
From Uproxx:
" 'Hey guys. Hey, hey guys. Yes you. You guys right there. I like this group. I like all of you too. But can we cut it out with the quotes already? I like the discussion posts, related news links, original contributions, etcetera, but this group is BLOWING UP MY NEWSFEED! Half the time when I’m scrolling through my posts, the first twenty will be composed of five friend statuses, one ad, four original posts from here, and ten quotes from here.
" 'Look, I love the Simpsons. You know I do, and I know you do too, but sometimes I need my space. I don’t want to do something as drastic as unsubscribing from notifications, because I don’t want to break up; I want to work through this together. We all love classic Simpsons, but we’ve seen it. It’s hilarious. I see at LEAST five things every day that remind me of a Simpsons quote, and sometimes my friends have to tell me to knock it off with the quotes already. Please, guys: Babies love balls, but stop adding more balls (the balls are a metaphor).' [more inside]
" 'Hey guys. Hey, hey guys. Yes you. You guys right there. I like this group. I like all of you too. But can we cut it out with the quotes already? I like the discussion posts, related news links, original contributions, etcetera, but this group is BLOWING UP MY NEWSFEED! Half the time when I’m scrolling through my posts, the first twenty will be composed of five friend statuses, one ad, four original posts from here, and ten quotes from here.
" 'Look, I love the Simpsons. You know I do, and I know you do too, but sometimes I need my space. I don’t want to do something as drastic as unsubscribing from notifications, because I don’t want to break up; I want to work through this together. We all love classic Simpsons, but we’ve seen it. It’s hilarious. I see at LEAST five things every day that remind me of a Simpsons quote, and sometimes my friends have to tell me to knock it off with the quotes already. Please, guys: Babies love balls, but stop adding more balls (the balls are a metaphor).' [more inside]
That's Бумбокс as in Boombox.
Бумбокс: a 'funky groove' trio from the Ukraine. Funky and mellifluous. Slick video production and 0.5 megapixel performances.
Too many links? Try one of the following for a potential jumping-off point... [more inside]
"...the expansion and contraction of this particular timespace..."
The Last Saturday by Chris Ware [The Guardian]
" A brand new graphic novella by the award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware, tracing the lives of six individuals from Sandy Port, Michigan, published in weekly episodes on this page."The page always shows the latest instalment and a new part appears every Friday. Use the arrows beneath the strip to read previous episodes.
Vigilanteville
"Revenge is never pretty, but when done meticulously, intelligently, and psychotically, it sure is a thing of beauty." Al Jazeera tells the story of James McGibney, founder of BullyVille and CheaterVille.
Gunther, Christine and Otto: The 26 Year Road Trip
Gunther, Christine and Otto: How a man met a woman and they set off on an epic journey across six continents in one amazing unbreakable car. 26 years road trip: Gunther Holtorf and his unbreakable Otto.
The rise of Direct to Consumer advertising of perscription drugs
There are various changes that come with the greying of the traditional television audience, including the kinds of ads being aired, as the median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer is increasing faster than the median age of the US population at large. Older people are treated to a litany of drug ads, filled with lists of horrifying side effects, thanks to the ability for drug companies to market directly to customers. The rise in such advertising is now the most prominent type of health communication that the public encounters, but it hasn't always been the case.
How To Talk To Terrorists
Above all, what these experiences demonstrate is that there isn’t really an alternative to talking to the terrorists if you want the conflict to end. Hugh Orde, the former chief constable in Northern Ireland, rightly says, “There is no example that I know of, of terrorism being policed out” – or fully defeated by physical force – anywhere in the world. Petraeus said that it was clear in Iraq that “we would not be able to kill or capture our way out of the industrial-strength insurgency that was tearing apart the very fabric of Iraqi society”. If you can’t kill them all, then sooner or later you come back to the same point, and it is a question of when, not whether, you talk. If there is a political cause then there has to be a political solution. [more inside]
American mothers around the world
Joanna Goddard has been interviewing American women raising their children in other countries, to hear how motherhood around the world compared and contrasted with motherhood in America. She's talked to parents in
Norway,
Japan,
Congo,
Northern Ireland,
Mexico,
Abu Dhabi,
India,
England,
China,
Germany,
Australia,
Turkey, and
Chile. [more inside]
They didn’t see the whole system was going to sour so quickly
The Boston Globe reports on the post-doc crisis in science research:
The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease.
But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand.
6 months - 1 year: Appearance of Vengeance Limbs
Visualizing MNIST
Congratulations! Now You're Both Jerks!
How To Correct A Date About Nerd Knowledge: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Comic
He's like a Freight Train Coming
Jim Gillette, best known for his work as lead singer for the band Nitro, and their hair-metal masterpiece Freight Train [Warning: Loud. Embarrassing. Potential and unexpected earworm.], has also helped out the Mythbusters, and now, the intent has provided his greatest gift; Vocal Power Voice Lessons.
Fear on Film
Find Your Beach
"Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city." [more inside]
Papierflieger-Maschinenpistole
Youtube user Papierfliegerei really likes paper airplanes, but all that folding can really get you down.
Thankfully, 3D printing technology has finally caught up to the point where his dream of a Paper Airplane Machine Gun can finally be realized. [more inside]
City Raccoons: Smarter than their rural counterparts.
Jude Isabella has written a fascinating piece on the intelligence of city raccoons:
City raccoons also appear smarter than their rural counterparts. Suzanne MacDonald, a comparative psychologist who studies raccoon behavior at York University in Toronto, has compared the problem-solving skills of rural and city raccoons. The result? Urbanites trump their country cousins in both intelligence and ability. For the past few summers, she videotaped rural and urban racoons toying with containers baited with cat food. While both rural and city racoons readily approached familiar containers, they dealt differently with unfamiliar ones. Where rural raccoons took a long time to approach novel containers, city raccoons would attack them the moment she turned her back.
How D&D created the female gamer
While it did not set out to rectify the gender imbalance in gaming, Dungeons & Dragons opened the door just enough to let women gamers in. TSR’s early efforts to include women explicitly in its fantasy games sometimes did more harm than good, but the foremost rule of role-playing games is that gamers are free to innovate, to vary the system to suit their needs. Both men and women have since used these tools to invent and enjoy their own adventures, both through Dungeons & Dragons and the many games it influenced.Jon Peterson looks at the history of female gamers and how Dungeons & Dragons was so much more successful at getting women to play than earlier war and fantasy games. (For those interested in the early history of roleplaying Peterson's blog may be of interest.)
Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 quintillion
Intel’s manuals for their x86/x64 processor clearly state that the fsin instruction (calculating the trigonometric sin) has a maximum error, in round-to-nearest mode, of one unit in the last place. This is not true. It’s not even close.
Nobel Peace Prize 2014 goes to an Indian and a Pakistani
"Kailash Satyarthi, the child rights activist from India, and Malala Yousufzai, the activist for girls education in Pakistan, were announced as the joint winners of this year's Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday."
October 9
Norway's new bank notes
Norway, which is not part of the Euro currency cooperation, has new design for its bank notes. Whereas the older note design from the 90s featured prominent Norwegians, the theme for the new currency is the ocean. One side features a pixelated motif from design giants Snøhetta, and the other side features detailed nautical images designed by The Metric System. Visual News has some coverage here, and you can look through all the submissions, including the discarded ones, in a Norwegian language PDF from Bank of Norway here. The winning design will be worked over slightly to incorporate security features, and the new bills will be in circulation from 2017.
"Part of the job": Sexual harassment in the restaurant industry
This past week, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United published a report on sexual harassment in the restaurant industry. [more inside]
boiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnng
When you were a kid, maybe you played with the spring doorstop. I know I did. Maybe you play with it now. I know I do. Anyway, here's The Electric Spring Doorstop, which is, as the kids say, totally awesome.
Sex is sex, but money is money.
3.5/5 BONES: "THIS DOG IS A WIFI HOTSPOT."
Let me introduce you to Barkwire.com, a social network in which residents of the small town of Shaggy Butte rate their favorite four-legged friends, and gossip about all the gang fights and animal murders. Wait, what?
Written by Josh Boruff, who's become known 'round these parts for his interest in assigning ratings to dogs, Barkwire is an unexpectedly-engaging drama which plays out across user comments on social networking pages. Its first "season" [chapters 1-16], written in 2008, revolves around the emergence of the nightmarish El Cráneo Negro, who plunges the town into fear. Its second "season" [chapters 17-now] started earlier this year, and revolves around the unsolved murder of the much-loved Hope. (My advice: start with the newer story first.)
But the town of Shaggy Butte does not stop with Barkwire. There's more. Much, much, much [more inside]
Written by Josh Boruff, who's become known 'round these parts for his interest in assigning ratings to dogs, Barkwire is an unexpectedly-engaging drama which plays out across user comments on social networking pages. Its first "season" [chapters 1-16], written in 2008, revolves around the emergence of the nightmarish El Cráneo Negro, who plunges the town into fear. Its second "season" [chapters 17-now] started earlier this year, and revolves around the unsolved murder of the much-loved Hope. (My advice: start with the newer story first.)
But the town of Shaggy Butte does not stop with Barkwire. There's more. Much, much, much [more inside]
What if You Just Hate Making Dinner?
Eating healthy food and eating together is important. But if you hate to cook, what's the best way to do that? (SLNYT)
hasbro: 11 points.
Can you claim copyright on a list of words? When it comes to Scrabble, Hasbro seems to think so. This isn't the first time they've filed copyright claims related to the game, though it may not have been so effective.
Tarantino has done for Mother's Day what Charlie Brown did for Christmas
ER One Shot (YT): one long opening shot from the Quentin Tarantino-directed episode of the TV series ER. Blog post | less bloggy, more pagey, format. [more inside]
Not on my watch, baby!
"Don't you dare 'bubbeleh' me, Gene!"
People ask me why my mood's always so acrid. This is why.
Microsoft CEO to women: Don't ask for a raise. CEO Satya Nadella spoke at the Grace Hopper Celebration and told women to use their "super powers" to get raises. [more inside]
More than just Granny Squares
Yarn Bombs: In the '70s, Knitting Was Totally Far Out is a fun and frightening collection of knitting patterns from the 70s.
Say "Fuzzy Pickles!"
Dance like no one is watching, even though a lot of people are.
When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks.
Why beheading? First some History and and also from The War Nerd: The long, twisted history of beheadings as propaganda.
Decapitation was highly popular in Biblical times.
Where does the Islamic State's fetish with beheading people come from?
“The Mentality of Brutality”: Islamic State Beheadings and “Civilized Barbarity”
Why ISIL beheads its victims. Article from 2005 Beheading in the name of Islam.
Decapitation was highly popular in Biblical times.
Where does the Islamic State's fetish with beheading people come from?
“The Mentality of Brutality”: Islamic State Beheadings and “Civilized Barbarity”
Why ISIL beheads its victims. Article from 2005 Beheading in the name of Islam.
Breakups are hard.
In 1966, Weaver was flying an SR-71 at full speed, Mach 3.18, when it abruptly and catastrophically disintegrated. Somehow, he survived the breakup. He didn't eject; the plane just tore itself apart around him and scattered in all directions. In other words, he suddenly found himself flying along at Mach 3.18 ... without his plane. (via)
There's No Basement At The Alamo!
Jan Hooks - Actress, Comedian, Reason to Watch SNL, has died at the age of 57.
Ms. Hooks was a Georgian, a Groundling, on Saturday Night Live from 1986-1991, a Designing Woman, the original Manjula, and so, so, soooo much more.
From SNL: "Love is a Dream," with Phil Hartman. SNL, again: "Brenda the Waitress," with Alec Baldwin. From "Pee Wee's Big Adventure," "Alamo Tour"
suan.fm: online mixtape creator
From off the streets of Cleveland comes . . . Château Hough
Château Hough is a "microappellation" vinyard and winery that occupies three ¼ acre city lots in Cleveland's inner city Hough neighborhood. . . . a confluence of social empowerment and environmental stewardship goals, more than just growing grapes.
We have a strong, razor-sharp purpose. . . . That purpose, all along, has been to employ the formerly incarcerated, teach youth viticulture, and create more economic opportunity in a neighborhood that doesn't have enough.
-- founder Mansfield FrazierIn operation only since 2010, Château Hough has taken 2nd prize at the Great Geauga County Fair for its Traminette white wine. There's a lot of domestic wines available nowadays . . .
but none have a story like ours: Inner-city, award-winning wines made by dudes fresh out of prison. Let me see anyone top that shit.”[more inside]
"Donkey Kong Variations"
Like a radio but with five O's
The Cafeteria Wars
The New York Times on regulation and lobbying around cafeteria food:
"The average school-nutrition director is not unlike the chief executive of a medium-size catering business, but with a school for a landlord and a menu regulated by the government. With lower subsidies, the lunch ladies needed cheaper calories, and they turned to the increasingly efficient processed-food industry to find them. School cafeterias also began to rely more on revenue from so-called competitive foods — snacks and lunches that are not regulated by federal guidelines and “compete” with the regular school lunch on cafeteria à la carte lines."
Bringing back the bacon
THE EYE CAPTURES DOG PROTONS TO BE PROCESSED INTO POINTS
Just Kick The Damn Ball Charlie Brown!
Apparently (or maybe allegedly) there was a lot more going on between Charlie Brown and Lucy when it came to kicking footballs.
“Not everybody wants to read about vampires and dystopia,”
To Lure Young Readers, Nonfiction Writers Sanitize and Simplify: [New York Times]
"Inspired by the booming market for young adult novels, a growing number of biographers and historians are retrofitting their works to make them palatable for younger readers."
The Price of Black Ambition
2014 might well be "the year of Roxane Gay," but even as Ms. Gay experiences unprecedented personal success, the price of black ambition is never far from her mind.
I am thinking about success, ambition, and blackness and how breaking through while black is tempered by so much burden. Nothing exemplifies black success and ambition like Black History Month, a celebratory month I've come to dread as a time when people take an uncanny interest in sharing black-history facts with me to show how they are not racist. It's the month where we segregate some of history's most significant contributors into black history instead of fully integrating them into American history. Each February, we hold up civil-rights heroes and the black innovators and writers and artists who have made so much possible for this generation. We say, look at what the best of us have achieved. We conjure W. E. B. Du Bois, who once wrote, "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." We ask much of our exceptional men and women. We must be exceptional if we are to be anything at all.[more inside]
The wreck of Columbus' Santa Maria is still undiscovered.
Earlier this year, Underwater explorer Barry Clifford claimed to have found the Santa Maria, one of Christopher Columbus' three ships, off the coast of Haiti. But a few days ago, A UNESCO mission of experts has concluded that a shipwreck is actually from a much later period, citing the bronze or copper fasteners found on the site that point to shipbuilding techniques of the late 17th or 18th centuries, and the journal of Columbus (translated text online; Archive.org scan of the 1893 translation from the Hakluyt Society), which indicates that this wreck is too far from the shore to be the La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción. Despite this setback, Haiti will continue to search for the historic shipwreck.
Rise and Shine
She's a vocaloid!
Noted computer program and pop singer Hatsune Miku performs on The Late Show with David Letterman. What's a Miku!? you ask, and Buzzfeed answers in list form. Previously on Metafilter.
The Empire Reboots
Can Satya Nadella Save Microsoft? (Longform) Great Vanity Fair article that spends a lot of time examining the Gates/Ballmer dynamic.
The psychology of bat-making
The judgement of these clefts is the bat-maker's primary skill. They lie in their thousands in the drying shed, awaiting a grade that will decide their fate. Gray-Nicolls makes 60,000 cricket bats per year. Most of those are shaped in India, where bat-makers are more plentiful and demand can be met. The bulk of the clefts will be judged good enough to produce the bats that club cricketers buy (or at least the bats that they should buy), and they will be packed and shipped to the subcontinent and Australia, where Gray-Nicolls has a parallel operation. Some will come back once they are finished, others will journey onwards around the world to wherever the game is played. These few English fields and farms must support them all. [more inside]
Atom Town Krasnoyarsk-26
This town in Russia is called Zheleznogorsk, read the initial post. Their flag and coat of arms is a bear splitting the atom. That is all.
But that certainly wasn't all: Um, so. My grandfather actually built this town, and helped run it for many years.. [more inside]
But that certainly wasn't all: Um, so. My grandfather actually built this town, and helped run it for many years.. [more inside]
Look at that!
2014 Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Patrick Modiano
2014 Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Patrick Modiano who is a French novelist and memoir writer. This article from 2011 is a good overview over his career and life. He was born in Italy to a Jewish father and a Belgian mother. Much of his writing deals with recent Jewish history such as in the book Dora Bruder. His detective novel Missing Person, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1978, has been called a postmodern mystery novel.
Coming soon to a health store near you?
AS THE SUN set over Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, nearly thirty minutes had passed since I had inserted a turkey baster into my bum and injected the feces of a Hadza man – a member of one of the last remaining hunter-gatherers tribes in the world – into the nether regions of my distal colon. I struggled to keep my legs in the air with my toes pointing towards what I thought was the faint outline of the Southern Cross rising in the evening sky. With my hands under my hips – and butt perched against a large rock for support – I peddled an imaginary upside down bicycle in the air to pass the time as I struggled to make sure my new gut ecosystem stayed put inside me.Jeff Leach's attention grabbing opening starts a fascinating overview about researching gut fauna, microbiomes and the hunter-gatherer diet of the Hadza people of Tanzania in the quest to rediscover humanity's "natural" guts. [more inside]
Thar she blows...
A manifesto for the new man: how the Great White Male can stay relevant The days of the Great White Male are numbered. So how should men live now? Stephen Fry, Mary Beard, Andrew Marr, Margaret Atwood and others offer their survival tips.
Call Her Name
Japanese women, when they marry and have children, often are no longer called by their given names. Instead they are addressed as Okaasan "Mother, Mom," Okusan "Mrs," or Mama. This video shows the reactions of several women when they are once again called by their first names. (SLYT) [more inside]
October 8
Fake Food in Japan
Making Japanese Food Samples. A look at some of the techniques used in the creation of sampuru, the multi-million yen industry of handcrafted custom plastic fake food.
The most radical thing I can do as a woman scientist is, well, science.
When words fail: women, science, and women-in-science – [Trigger warning for this and all following links] by Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill):
The seminars, workshops, blogs, op-eds, research, policy papers, luncheons, and happy hour discussions are all valuable, and important, and they need to continue. But when the beer is drunk, and the pizza gone cold, and the printed articles relegated to the recycling bin, we are left with words: words written by us and about us, spoken in confidence, tossed like poisoned barbs in the comments sections, smoldering as craters in our in-boxes, pounding in our ears when we run it out at the gym.[more inside]
I’m sorry, you guys, but words are not enough. Not anymore.
"If I sound angry here, it's because I am."
Social Justice Warriors and the New Culture War, by Laurie Penny and her in-your-face feminism. [more inside]
The Ten Golden Rules of Argument
See it MY way Do you think that if you explain why you believe it, that any intelligent person would agree? See: The Ten Golden Rules of Argument October 1, 2014 by Shane Parrish
Why Obama is "a historic success"
"Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don't care about the fact that Obama hasn't lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn't quite say, a big deal."
Paul Krugman (previously) writes "In Defense of Obama" for Rolling Stone.
Spiraling out through Tool's lawsuits
Earlier this year, a Rolling Stone interview with Tool guitarist Adam Jones and drummer Danny Carey revealed the legal trouble that has prevented the band from producing an album since 2006's 10,000 Days. [more inside]
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you
Shortly after the Civil War, an ex-slave was asked by his master to return to the plantation. He dictated a reply that would have made Mark Twain proud, and which has been previously featured on Metafilter. In fact, the letter was so good that some folks began to question whether it was real. New research shows it was, and gives details about the lives of the master and slave.
Some say Ebola is the Milosevic of West Nile virus.
Before the Sistine Chapel
Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art. Recently discovered Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia is some of the earliest cave paintings produced by humans. 'Early artists made them by carefully blowing paint around hands that were pressed tightly against the cave walls and ceilings. The oldest is at least 40,000 years old.' 'The dating of the art in Sulawesi will mean that ideas about when and where this pivotal moment in our evolution occurred will now have to be revised.' ' [more inside]
The Evolution of "Bitch" in the English Language
Bitch: A History This past semester at MIT I took a really wonderful class called “Feminist Political Thought” which had a very open ended essay assignment. I wrote a history of the word “Bitch,” and several of my classmates requested to read the whole paper so I thought I’d post it here.
Voluntary tonsuring did not carry the ignominy of shearing under duress.
Scissors or Sword? The Symbolism of a Medieval Haircut:
"Simon Coates explores the symbolic meanings attached to hair in the early medieval West, and how it served to denote differences in age, sex, ethnicity and status."
Shh! Secret Songs!
A few months ago, DJ/Producer Ryan Hemsworth (previously) started Secret Songs. It's "not really a label or a blog" but two weeks ago Secret Songs released its fantastic first free compilation: shh#ffb6c1 [more inside]
That’s true, that’s fine, but why can’t he relate to a white guy too?
SLIMED! Author Mathew Klickstein not a fan of Nickelodeon's approach to diversity. I think it’s worse when they shove it in there. Sanjay and Craig is a really good example, which funnily enough is written in part by Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi from Pete & Pete. That show is awkward because there’s actually no reason for that character to be Indian — except for the fact that [Nickelodeon President] Cyma Zarghami and the women who run Nickelodeon now are very obsessed with diversity. Which is fine — do what you’re gotta do, and Dora [the Explorer] was certainly something of a success, but there’s no reason for [Sanjay] to be Indian at all. No one working on that show is Indian. They’re all white. It’s all the white people from Bob’s Burgers and Will and Chris. [more inside]
To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child
Jordan Davis's mother, Lucia McBath, reflects on the guilty verdict in his murderer's trial. by Ta-Nehisi Coates (SLAtlantic) [more inside]
GIFYouTube, for those times when you want a YT GIF right now
If you don't want to bother with a program like GIFGrabber or GIFBrewery to make a YouTube video clip into a looping GIF animation, simply add "GIF" to a YouTube URL you get a tool to make a quick looping GIF! Or you can go to GIFYouTube.com to enter a YouTube URL, and view creations from other folks. [more inside]
A body of dense ice that is moving under its own weight
Twitter Will Destroy The Nation-State, Argues Marketer
In an essay for the Wharton School of Business' blog, confessed 'social media evangelist' and marketer Curtis Houghland argues that the advent of twitter and other social media heralds the destruction of the nation state over the coming century. Literally.
Formal nationhood as the basis for a social contract with its citizens dates only to the 17th century. It is a relatively new phenomenon. As Pankaj Mishra points out in Bloomberg View, 'Few people in 1900 expected centuries-old empires — Qing, Hapsburg, Ottoman — to collapse by 1918.' The belief in the centralized nation as the default political organization is grossly misplaced. And we are seeing the de-evolution of nationhood before our eyes in our daily newsfeeds....As there are now more than 30 brands of Mountain Dew, there will be more nations in Europe.
The Last Guru
The plots of all of these books were basically the same: Smart, mildly misfit, possibly fat boy with lamebrain parents teams up with an unattached older male relative, meets a nutty fraudster-type, eats lots of great-sounding junk food, goes on an adventure. Locations recur, too: Chicago, Hoboken, Rochester and the invented Hogboro and Baconburg. The name MacTavish turns up a lot, as does the name Ken, as do fat people and chickens.
How Pinkwater Became My Own Personal Guru
Philosophical science fiction - suggested reading lists
A collection of philosophical science/speculative fiction reading lists, (with decent amount of short fiction and some media thrown in) with short "why you should read this " blurbs. The suggestions are made by professional philosophers and philosophy-trained SF writers, and curated by Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside. Part 2, Part 3 With more suggestions promised to come.
(Previously, a course on Science Fiction and Political Science , previouslier - curated lists of anarchist and socialist science fiction
Get ready! Fight!
Street-fighting 'roos. Irritable marsupials duke it out. Who will be crowned king of the cul-de-sac?
Trouble at the Koolaid Point
God Only Knows
God Only Knows that this is an interesting production of one of your Beach Boy favorites.
More here.
Make that fiftyone years
Any list like this will inevitably leave deserving people out, and probably this list is biased toward U.S.–based physicists. It is not intended to be comprehensive or a “top 10 list,” or to be the last word on the topic, but rather to spark a discussion. And most importantly, it is intended to show that the 51-year streak of male physics laureates cannot be blamed on a lack of viable female candidates. So with that out of the way, let’s hope to soon see this tired streak broken by a third—and fourth and fifth—woman accepting the Nobel Prize in Physics.The nobel Prize committee have decided to honour the inventors of the blue light LED with the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics, extending the half a century streak of only having male winners with another year. Yet as Gabriel Popkin's list of worthy female Nobel Prize candidates shows, there's no lack of female contenders.
“If we don’t work, we die.” Excellent!
Tour the mega-slum Dharavi, one of the most materially deprived places on earth, transformed by TED-like pundits into a "most inspiring economic model" that gels quite well with their vision of a world without public aid and guarantees to needy.
October 7
Safely crossing solid centerlines
Crossing the Double Yellow Line
If you are like most motorists, you take the first opportunity to pass the cyclist safely, regardless of the stripe. After all, the purpose of the solid yellow line is to indicate where it is unsafe to pass, and the purpose of prohibiting drivers from crossing a solid yellow line to pass another driver is to prevent unsafe passing. So if it is safe to pass, then why is the solid yellow line there in the first place?[more inside]
"Socialism Is Our Launching Pad!"
Russiatrek.org's blog has a nice collection of Soviet propaganda posters. Soviet space program 1958-1963 Part 1. Part 2. International Workers' Day. Soviet Patriotism. Soviet propaganda - the beginning 1917-1923. Stalin's Soviet Union tourism posters. Socialism vs. Capitalism. WWII Part 1. Part 2. Soviet posters of the 1970's. The blog's art category.
What The Fuck Was That?
Just in time for Halloween, the original 2003 Toronto production of Evil Dead: The Musical is online, in a glorious multi-cam VHS YouTube transcription. You can Do The Necromonicon and doubt your holiday weekend companions while singing out a strong broadway melody, and do it all without having to get stage blood on your outfit.
Blondie Is a Group!
Dazed by the recent Blondie retrospective at the (former) Chelsea Hotel? Celebrate Blondie at 40 with some music videos : = Dreaming Union City Blues Hanging on the Telephone Rip Her to Shreds Heart Of Glass (modern retake) Denis X Offender Atomic Rapture The Tide Is High One Way Or Another
knot just a scarf
Arietta Yin lists over 120 ways to wear a silk scarf with tutorials and photographs.
"What do we say to the dead?"
On the fiftieth anniversary of its theatrical release, Slate is taking a look back at the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (trailer), which stars Henry Fonda as a U.S. President who has to deal with a computational accident that risks nuclear war. The film was preceded at the box office by Dr. Strangelove, a film very similar in plot but drastically different in tone. Fail Safe bombed as a result of the comparison with Kubrick's masterpiece, but the story itself would have a second chance at reaching audiences come the year 2000. [more inside]
If it ain't broke, break it: the unspoken motto of The Kinks
"HH [Henry Hauser]: Ryan and Nina are right on target. The Ray-Dave sibling rivalry sparked many of The Kinks' most spontaneous (and brilliant) musical moments. The Storyteller, Ray's riveting account of early life in the Davies household and his band’s rise to prominence, has him describing how he and Dave exchanged scornful looks while recording "You Really Got Me". The elder Davies swears that if you listen closely, you can actually hear Dave yelling "Fuckkkoffff" right before his guitar solo. Ray salvaged the track by covering up Dave's profane exclamation with his own unscripted outburst ("Owwwww noooooo!"), and the impromptu rock scream turned into one of the most memorable quirks in Kinks history. It perfectly captures the animalistic agony that accompanies hopeless infatuation. Without the Ray-Dave rivalry, it would never have happened."
Henry Hauser, Ryan Bray, Nina Corcoran, and Stevie Dunbar at Consequence of Sound hold a round-table discussion in "Dusting 'Em Off: The Kinks – The Kinks". [more inside]
Henry Hauser, Ryan Bray, Nina Corcoran, and Stevie Dunbar at Consequence of Sound hold a round-table discussion in "Dusting 'Em Off: The Kinks – The Kinks". [more inside]
Return of the Avant-Garde
This summer Kino Lorber's Redemption Films released the final of six French avant-garde films in their series The Cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet (link is to a promotional short, possibly NSFW. Potential triggers include scenes of bondage, domination, and an unrepentant Gallic male gaze). [more inside]
The One Crime the Media Won't Blame on Black Men
Among other common myths and misconceptions regarding serial murder in America, one curious myth bears closer examination: the idea, propagated heavily in the media, that serial killers are almost always white men. This fascinating (though weirdly formatted) essay discusses this phenomenon, and suggests possible reasons for the anonymity of African-American serial killers, including historical racial bias, stereotypical media portrayals of African-Americans, and the FBI’s promotion of static ethnocentric criminal profiling. [more inside]
100% NZ Wool
For ye said, that he said, that I said, wote ye what?
John Skelton's "Speke, Parott" is a poem in Middle English. More about the poem. More about the Skelton Project. More about John Skelton. More about Skeltonics.
One name for this place is “The Land the Gods Refuse to See.”
The Best Monster: Playing Dungeons and Dragons with Zak Smith "Once below the lake, things go south. There are multiple floors of ogres, 50-foot-tall colorless rooks with swimming pool heads full of floating vampires, chanting evil clerics — the phantasms of Zak’s mind. Each time we need to go down a level or into a room, Tyler, least likely to survive, goes in first. We get attacked by giant green boars, throw fireballs, and now have flaming giant angry wild boars. Laney manages to charm one. She likes pigs, she tells me, and shows me a tattoo she has of a flying pig on her back."
What the Garbageman Knows
On a different floor, we picked our way across a landing covered with rotting food; a pile of trash bags had been ripped apart by stray cats. “This one’s a foreigner,” Sayyid explained. “I’m not supposed to touch her garbage. The landlord isn’t happy with her; there’s some kind of fight. He told me not to remove her trash.” (SLNewYorker) [more inside]
But baby, it just won't feel as good.
The American Dream has really good PR.
Guernica: In propagating a vision of life that's about wealth in the individual, perhaps the influence of these churches lies in what they obscure.Meara Sharma at Guernica talks to Anthony Pinn about the ongoing embrace of prosperity gospel by preachers and parishioners at black megachurches across America: Divine Acquisition. [more inside]
Anthony Pinn: Right. It hides the larger problem. The problem is poverty. And it hides the problem. We often associate black churches with a history of protest. But prosperity gospel and megachurches tend to be rather soft on political issues. T.D. Jakes doesn't take a major stand on political issues. Creflo Dollar certainly doesn't.
But it's the American way. So it seems to me that what they are doing is training black people to be even more American. To buy into this system rather than critique it. And if you're not gaining from it, to assume that the problem's with you. It provides a spiritual lesson that's very similar to the idea of "poor people want to be poor; if they just worked harder they could have more." Here, spiritual people could have more if they were just more spiritual and lived out scripture more authentically. So the prosperity preachers are training people to be better US citizens [laughs].
Oh no they didn't!
On the way to infamy, some believe, [Oh No They Didn't] lost its original mission, becoming infamous more for its trolls than for its vision of a celebrity-gossip utopia. Today, few users even know three black girls founded the site.
Dinner tonight: four containers of gravy and a Diet Sprite
Imagine you're hungry for dinner, stuck at home and don't really want to cook. But you're also deeply ambivalent about what to order--Chinese? Pizza? Sushi? Well, Mike Lacher has you covered. Give his new web app Seamless Roulette your Seamless.com account details and a maximum cost, and it places an order for you at a random nearby restaurant, for something it randomly selects from the menu. If you like surprises and giving up the power to choose your own meal, this might just be for you.
Meet the Mumbles Train, the very first fare-based passenger train
Mumbles Railway, the first public railway On 25 March 1807, the very same day that the British Parliament passed a Bill to outlaw the transatlantic trade in slaves, Swansea took its place in history with the inauguration of the world’s first passenger railway. [more inside]
Adobe Digital Editions 4 spying on users
Adobe's Digital Editions 4 Epub app is spying on users by collecting data on all of the epub books on a users system and transmitting that data in plain text. Adobe's index of epub data includes title, publisher, and other metadata about the book. Digital Editions 4 also collects and transmits if the ebook has been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. [more inside]
The insane conspiracy theories of Naomi Wolf
Max Fisher of Vox describes how Naomi Wolf has turned to rather outré conspiracy theories. Via Ayelet Waldman on Twitter, who commented "I think maybe we need not to condemn Naomi Wolf but to consider the possibility that she's having a psychotic break."
clickety clack
It's Not Unusual
Alfonso Ribeiro, best known as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's Carlton Banks, brings back his character's famous dance on Dancing with the Stars.
Runnin' with the Sympathy for the Meat Puppet the Beatles
~tildemash is a dada mashup generator that grabs isolated vox and instrument tracks out of youtube's hat to create random sonic soup, courtesy of waxy's brain.
"Where ignorant armies clash by night."
Sea of Faith: a six-part documentary television series, presented on BBC television in 1984 by Don Cupitt. [youtube]
"The programme dealt with the history of Christianity in the modern world, focussing especially on how Christianity has responded to challenges such as scientific advances, political atheism and secularisation in general"[more inside]
Oral Histories/United States Foreign Service
The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training has an extensive archive of oral histories by and about individuals in the foreign service and also about countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
I don't mind stealin' bloop
8-bit Hunger Strike [SLYT]
Accidental robot impacts: elaborations on the first law of robotics
Though we're not (yet) to the point of actually implementing any strict laws of robotics, the limits for how much workplace robots can accidentally harm their human co-workers are now being discussed by standards-setting agencies. It's easy enough to say robots and humans cannot work in the same space, but once robots start collaborating with people (aka: COBOTS), large companies look to standards for safety measures and risk assessment. That's where the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance (German: Institut für Arbeitsschutz der Deutschen Gesetzlichen Unfallversicherung, IFA) come in, with BG/BGIA risk assessment recommendations according to machinery directive (36 page PDF), based on real-world tests with robots on human subjects.
When Martian war machines hit the Western Front
This may be the best War of the Worlds movie ever made, and it's barely three minutes long. And it's not exactly doing HG Wells per se. It's a trailer for or clip from The Great Martian War 1913-17, which concerns "the catastrophic events and unimaginable horrors of 1913-17, when Humankind was pitted against a savage Alien invasion."
The video seems to use a mix of reenactors, period film, and f/x.
(SLVimeo) [more inside]
The rural school to prison pipeline
On the awards for 'exceptional creativity'
A cliché almost as common as the Parable of the Phone Call in genius journalism is what we might call the Delirious Apprehension of the Eclectic, in which the writer is simply amazed by the overwhelming diversity of the fields that have been honored. “They’re historians and scientists and one of them is a stringed-instrument bow maker,” as a gee-whiz NPR story from 2012 had it. “A neurologist who studies dementia. A jazz drummer who celebrates Latin rhythm. A remedial-reading teacher who writes poetry,” begins a Chicago Tribune account from 2011. And were those geniuses somehow to get together in one place—wow! Thomas Frank on the MacArthur "genius" grants.
"Montaigne was Montaigne, a mountain in more than name."
It's said that even a century and a half after Montaigne's death, when the marquis d'Argenson subtitled a book with that word, Essays, he was shouted down for impertinence. Not a context in which many people would find themselves tempted to self-identify as "essayists." When the French do finally start using the word, in the early nineteenth century, it's solely in reference to English writers who've taken up the banner, and more specifically to those who write for magazines and newspapers. "The authors of periodical essays," wrote a French critic in 1834, "or as they're commonly known, essayists, represent in English letters a class every bit as distinct as the Novellieri in Italy." A curiosity, then: the essay is French, but essayists are English. What can it mean?—The Ill-defined Plot is an essay about the history of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
Settling is not how Marvel fights usually end
Marvel and the Kirbys’ eleventh-hour settlement—just as SCOTUS was poised to decide whether to take up the case—has been interpreted by some as an admission on Marvel’s part that the Kirbys’ case was stronger than they first allowed. It does seem reasonable to infer that Marvel was incented to settle before things got more complicated, or hazardous, for them. Yet the fact that the case never came to trial (the original 2011 decision was a summary judgment, not a trial verdict) makes it hard to know just what the calculations were on both sides. Interpreting the result as an unalloyed triumph or affirmation for either side would probably be too big a leap. Again, nothing is yet known publicly beyond the official joint statement: a single sentence.The long running lawsuit Marvel had undertaken against the estate of Jack Kirby was recently settled. Kirby scholar Charles Hatfield examines what this settlement might mean for the Kirby estate and comics in general. [more inside]
October 6
It's 11:30 – do you know where your children are?
Saturday Night's Children: "Saturday Night Live has been home to over a hundred cast members throughout the past 39 years. In our [2011-2014] column Saturday Night’s Children, we present the history, talent, and best sketches of one SNL cast member each week for your viewing, learning, and laughing pleasure."
Impediments to an Otherwise Delightful Life
Banning club drugs hasn't made users safer
In her quest for answers, Goldsmith came to a startling realization: Molly didn't kill her daughter. Federal policies that promote drug abolition and discourage education about safe drug use killed her daughter.
"The way we deal with it has got to change because people are dying," said Goldsmith. "My heart says: if you're gonna try Molly, you better make sure you know what you're taking." - Vox: Banning club drugs hasn't made users safer, A grieving mom hopes her plan will [more inside]
Hey Kids, What Time Is It?
Out, damn'd spot!
Stain Solutions. The University of Illinois Extention tells you how to tackle all the messes you've made.
Seasons change, time passes by, as the weeks become the months...
Time Magazine's Seasonal Beer Guide shows you when some breweries release various seasonal beers.
Daily Life in Raqqa under Isis
"Vanityfair.com received the below text from a Syrian who claims Raqqa as a hometown[...]Artist Molly Crabapple has completed sketches based on the scenes presented in the source’s photos."
Germany's 2014 Africa Prize for rescuing Timbuktu manuscripts
Abdel Kader Haidara awarded Germany's 2014 Africa Prize for rescuing Timbuktu manuscripts. Under his direction centuries' worth of texts were smuggled out when the city was taken by book-burning religious conservatives in 2012. The collection is currently in Mali's capital Bamako where it is being preserved and digitized. More text, slideshow, video, previously previously previously [more inside]
Overtone Singing
Polyphonic overtone singing - Anna-Maria Hefele. "Overtone singing is a voice technique where it seems like one person sings two notes at the same time. You can sing the overtone scale on one fundamental. Another fundamental has its own overtone scale, so in order to have more overtones to sing nice melodies, you can use different fundamentals and change them while singing." [more inside]
sex work: fantasies as commodities, consent, and emotional labor
"In my experience, the reminder that the sexual fantasy isn’t real, that the women who perform availability aren’t ACTUALLY available, that we aren’t ACTUALLY clamouring to be sexualized by men, that we control when the fantasy starts and stops, and that our performance is just that, a performance that requires compensation… well, some men find that hard to swallow." [more inside]
Can I make this without the ingredients?
All The Comments on Every Recipe Blog is a list of, well, the most common comments on every recipe blog.
These boots are made for rolling... for about ten miles or so...
For years, people have dreamed of adding a little extra horsepower to their roller skates.
With batteries improving and motors shrinking, one company has decided to try again. Enter ACTON RocketSkates. Ars Technica takes them for a spin.
A man who wants to hear a Yes will find a way to drag it out of you.
I do not believe that most women — that most victims of sexual assault — freeze or shut down when faced with the prospect of coercive sex because they don’t really care what happens next, or because they're excited to push through the moment for the sheer joy of accusing the aggressor of rape after the fact. I believe that these women, these people, have a finely tuned sense for their safety, that when a woman reports having "a feeling that it would turn into an ordeal if I rejected him," she is not crazy and she knows what she is talking about.Mallory Ortberg explores the ongoing debate surrounding passive versus active consent as its effects echo through the Alt Lit community: On Deciding What Counts: Elizabeth Ellen and What Makes A Victim.
[TW: rape, sexual assault, child abuse]
Geoffrey Holder 1930-2014
The great Geoffrey Holder died on Sunday at the age of 84 Mr. Holder was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad on August 1st, 1930 and danced with his brother Boscoe’s dance troupe as a child. He arrived in New York in 1952 at the invitation of the legendary choreographer, Agnes de Mille and, to pay his fare, he sold 20 of his paintings. [more inside]
Because "there’s much more to Tetris than simply clearing lines."
Coming soon to a theater near you, it's Tetris! The Movie.
When we do this, we feel alive. And when we feel alive, we are happy.*
While Prohibition may have withered the American drinker’s palate and understanding & sent the most talented drink-slingers into exile, cocktails are back, and better than ever! And who are the people that have brought the all-but-dead art of America’s contribution to world drinks culture (and the profession & craft of the Bartender) back to stunning, exuberant life? Hey Bartender! [more inside]
Surf City USA
Where would you say the big US surf towns are? Santa Cruz? Haleiwa? Montauk? Paia? Ocean City? How about Missoula, Montana. River Surf Session [more inside]
25 Years Later
Showtime officially announces David Lynch and Mark Frost's cult TV series "Twin Peaks" will return in 2016. David Lynch confirms via Twitter, and Frost speaks to Variety, confirming that the new episodes "will be set in the present day and continue storylines established in the second season."
"Once there was a tree . . . "
‘The Giving Tree’: Tender Story of Unconditional Love or Disturbing Tale of Selfishness?
Anna Holmes and Rivka Galchen reconsider Shel Silverstein’s classic, published 50 years ago.
One fuzzball special, coming up!
In the next of a series of comics with female protagonists (Thor, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel), Marvel Comics has just announced the (aptly-titled) Unbeatable Squirrel Girl solo comic. [more inside]
A Medical First: Woman Successfully Gives Birth With A Donated Womb
In January, we heard that several women in Sweden had received uterine transplants. This weekend, for the first time in history, a woman born without a womb gave birth to a living child. [more inside]
We Hunted The Mammoth
We Hunted The Mammoth digs deep into the varied worlds of Mens Rights Activism to examine anti-feminism through such lenses as giant harassment machines, pro-life horror movies, MRA automation, Islamophobia, Metafilter's own Scott Adams, and flatulence. Trigger warning: every imaginable type of MRA language. Also, explaining the mammoth thing.
Tenny mucho mucho deniro in su trucky-trailer?
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver takes on the issue of civil asset forfeiture, including "Law & Order: Civil Asset Forfeiture Unit", a preview of how police procedurals could handle the topic. [more inside]
Denied.
This morning, the Supreme Court denied cert petitions in all seven same-sex marriage cases that had been brought to the SCOTUS level. [more inside]
Character and ideology and ethics and every day life are all intertwined
Ian Welsh on The Role of Character and Ideology in Prosperity and Why We Live In a Shitty Economy for Most People
Awesome artist's description of how he won a design competition
Interested in art, architecture, design, numismatics, software? Then you will be fascinated by Dutch artist Stani's detailed description how he won the competition to design the 2008 commemorative 5 Euro coin themed "Netherlands and architecture". A brilliant insight into the designer's thought process and the technology used to implement his concepts.
La plus ca change...
Inside Orania, South Africa's "whites only" town. In the sparsely populated Karoo desert in the heart of South Africa's Northern Cape, apartheid lives on. [more inside]
October 5
Seinfeld in Yiddish
There are a lot of, um, strong opinions about Seinfeld at MeFi. To those let us add criticism of the goofy iMovie title card animation, the horrific sound design, but also the cosmic brilliance of these Seinfeld excerpts dubbed in Yiddish (5x SLVimeo).
THIS SLAM OF MINE JAMS WITH A BALLIN' POWER
I hear people complain daily that there just aren't enough mashups of the Space Jam theme song with stuff like video game music or TV show themes.
To that I say, I have just the thing for you.
“I love advertising because I love lying”
Jerry Seinfeld gave the best/worst/most honest/cynical acceptance speech ever as he received an Honorary Clio Award (that's "the world’s most recognized international awards competition for advertising, design, digital and communications"), and got cheers from a crowd of modern-day Mad Men when he said "I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy."
full transcript here
full transcript here
This didn't come in the mail. ... What the ... ?
You may now make your first move
"When critics and journalists discuss John Darnielle’s new, first full-length novel, Wolf in White Van, which was just nominated for a National Book Award, they often point out the storytelling aspect of his songwriting. But Mountain Goats songs are as much incantation as narrative—they imply the advent of the trauma with declarations and appeals to dead gods, which deny it or try (futilely) to ward it off." Carl Wilson reviews the novel--about the inventor of a role-playing by mail game with a cult following--in depth on Slate. Listen to the first chapter read by Darnielle here. Autoplay
And the Other Way is Wrong
"The Twist was a form of therapy for a convalescing nation."
Music historian/nerd Neil Transpontine's blog "History is made at night" covers the "politics of dancing and musicking" -- from the riots at Lou Reed's concerts in Italy in 1975, demonstrations against the "anti-rave" Criminal Justice & Public Order Act of 1994 (UK) to present-day protests in New Orleans against a proposed noise ordinance. [more inside]
It's Family Circus, but about birding.
TOUCH THE SKY
A short portrait of Alex Zanardi, Formula 1 driver turned Paralympian hand bike world champion. [SLVimeo] [more inside]
October 4
Uhhhhhhhhhhh
Overthinking a plate of American Chop Suey
American Chop Suey (aka Goulash) gets the Food Lab treatment from MeFi favorite J. Kenji López-Alt. (American Chop Suey was the subject of two recent questions on The Green.)
I cut my teeth on series rings... in the 80's
A surprisingly prescient cover of Royals, made back in March 2014. Today the parody is a timely paean to the boys in blue from Kansas City: they have won all three of their post-season games... their first since 1985.
“Deaths exist in all countries,”
Jean-Claude Duvalier, ‘Baby Doc’ of Haiti, Dies at 63: [New York Times]
"Jean-Claude Duvalier, a former president of Haiti known as Baby Doc who ruled the country with a bloody brutality and then shocked the country anew with a sudden return from a 25-year exile in 2011, died on Saturday."
Of course, everyone knows about levers...
Elementary Mechanics from a Mathematician's Viewpoint [direct link to large PDF] by Michael Spivak - notes from his eight 2004 lectures (which eventually became a book). See the quote inside to get the flavor of it. [more inside]
Censorship of the Arts in Australia
"Not since the days of Mike Brown’s conviction of obscenity over 50 years ago have Australian police successfully prosecuted an artist over such charges. These repeated failures have not, however, stopped the police from trying." [more inside]
Why War?
It's a question Americans should be asking. Professor in the history department at West Point, Gregory A. Daddis, explores the changing utility of war in the post WWII environment. 'As the United States charges once more into war, little debate has centered on the actual utility of war. Instead, policymakers and pundits have focused their comments on combating the latest danger to our nation and its interests as posed by Islamic State militants.' 'For well over a decade — one might suggest over multiple decades — the United States has been engaged in war, yet so few in the public sphere seem willing to ask, as a Vietnam-era hit song did: “War, what is it good for?” It seems plausible to argue that war is a phenomenon increasingly serving itself rather than any durable political goals.' [more inside]
End of an era
"a kind of weirdo, a loner, but the most interesting of all"
Yes means Yes > No means No
The groundbreaking decision in California to address rape culture with a new standard that aids in defining sexual consent was signed into law this week by Governor Jerry Brown. The men's magazine GQ immediately provided a useful (and progressive!) guide called "Nine Signs She Wants to Have Sex with You (Even in California)".
Earth is a Special Snowflake
World Space Week 2014: Unusual Facts About The Solar System
1. Earth is Special[more inside]
Earth's atmosphere is completely unique and the only one in our solar system able to support life. There is no other planet which has breathable oxygen in its air and oceans on its surface.
Serial: the podcast
The folks at This American Life are behind a new podcast called Serial. The premise behind Serial is that one story will told over 10-20 episodes, which together will constitute a "season." The first two episodes of season 1 have just been released: over the course of the next few months, creator Sarah Koenig will attempt to unravel the mystery of the 1999 murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee.
Cowspiracy is a documentary now being screened
Cowspiracy is a crowdfunded documentary now being screened that examines the environmental impact of animal agriculture and seeks to examine why prominent environmental groups have apparently not made it a focus of their efforts. David Robinson Simon, the author of Meatonomics who appears in the film, interviews filmmakers Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn. [more inside]
Ello is soooo summer of 2014. Autumn is tilde.club
While Ello burns out and MetaFilter goes 2014, tilde.club appears as a defiantly old school minimalist blogging platform. What is tilde.club? It's a community developed social network, initiated by MeFite ftrain. As described, "The only goal is for tilde.club to be a place where you can make weird web pages that you might not want to put anywhere else." Community activity involves the updating of home pages, sometimes to creative effect, discussions and thoughts on historical Internet culture, working on teccie stuff and donating towards costs via new methods and old. Live for several days now, the cultures of established and new users are differing, while interest means there is currently a new user waitlist. There is also a web ring.
Retired NSA Technical Director Explains Snowden Docs
"I had an opportunity to attend a presentation by retired NSA technical director, William Binney, which provided context for some of the published documents released by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden. Because of the public value of Binney's expertise on the subject, I decided to publish his presentation and comments on my website." Via Bruce Schneier. (Previously: We Are Watching; Not My Department.)
Why I Refuse to Let Technology Control Me.
October 3
The smell never bothered me anyway.
An offbeat & off-key remix of "Let it Go" as performed by Emily Mandelbaum, age 8. NSFW.
Please enjoy this interactive fiction fantasy!
Jandek and Lustmord and Geto Boys, oh my
FACT mag's 100 Best Albums of the 1980s. Inspired, sometimes surprising selections slightly off the beaten path: Whodini, Whitehouse, Suzanne Ciani, Nurse With Wound, and Godflesh while no Talking Heads, R.E.M., or Clash. Complete with free downloadable mixes guaranteed to make you shake your ass like a dork at work. [more inside]
~~~~(;,,;)~~~~
Why not eat octopus? [New Yorker]
"I like to think of an octopus as a blobby, eight-fingered hand with a mind of its own. And then I’m suddenly not so keen on the idea of eating it."
THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF THE WEST WING
15 years after the pilot episode, Empire interviews Aaron Sorkin, the cast and the producers of The West Wing. Amazing sidebar pieces including Snuffy Walden on Scoring the West Wing, Allison Janney on The Jackal, and a 29-take Anatomy of a Walk and Talk.
The Brown Sisters, in forty portraits
Who are these sisters? We’re never told (though we know their names: from left, Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie; Bebe, of the penetrating gaze, is Nixon’s wife). The human impulse is to look for clues, but soon we dispense with our anthropological scrutiny — Irish? Yankee, quite likely, with their decidedly glamour-neutral attitudes — and our curiosity becomes piqued instead by their undaunted stares. All four sisters almost always look directly at the camera, as if to make contact, even if their gazes are guarded or restrained.*
Another number-one jam for the pyorple
Announced today by Strong Bad Actual, there's a new Homestar Runner cartoon. (As was foretold earlier this year!) You have a choice of watching it on their site or on YouTube. [more inside]
"It's The Fall, The Fall, The Fall of course, and by The Fall, from The Fall"
For Oprah, the bracelet glows the purest white.
"Author jumps up and down with joy when book does arrive"
When a wheelbarrow and a bicycle love each other very much
Water color and computer concept illustrations by Tucker Cullinan
Tucker Cullinan is a concept artist whose styles span vivid organic/sci-fi scenes in water colors and lost worlds from the imaginary past, to colder, sharp-edged futuristic worlds, and computer illustrations of imaginary prototypes. More on his blog and his portfolio site, plus two interviews.
Undersea river
Where's the last place you'd expect to find a river? How about at the bottom of the ocean?
tv intro party
Has your day been woefully free of potentially irritating nostalgic sitcom earworms? Worry no more, because they're all here, just waiting for you to press play. [more inside]
Do you know the mumble man?
Adam Levine shows that not only does he have moves like Jagger, but also the croons like Sinatra, as he dethrones the reigning champion on his home turf during Tuesday night's "Wheel of Musical Impressions" on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
Is that gum you like going to come back in style?
David Lynch and Mark Frost tweet: "That gum you like is going to come back in style" #damngoodcoffee. Special Agent Dale Cooper said: "When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry we must always pay strict attention!" - Are we going to see a third season (on Netflix perhaps?) or will there be a sequel (or another prequel) to the Twin Peaks movie?
Social Networking Gone Realllly Bad
Jennifer Williams shares the story of how she became a Twitter star amongst ISIS sympathizers.
"A beautiful, obviously mixed race little girl"
"What happens, exactly, when a white family that wants a white sperm donor gets a half-black child instead? In the case of a lesbian couple from Ohio, it means a "wrongful birth" lawsuit against the sperm bank — two years after the fact. " [more inside]
Your College Football Team Sucks
The NYT, following up previous maps examining the relationship between geography and baseball and basketball fandom, has released a college football fandom map. Like the previous maps, it's based on Facebook Likes and zip code data, so its accuracy may be a little suspect. But it's still fun, especially when it supports your preconceived opinion of a rival school!
We discussed the baseball map previously.
Storm Troopers, TIE Fighters, Star Destroyers, OH MY!
Tonight on Disney channels around the world, Star Wars returns to the small screen with the premier of Rebels! Set only a few years before a protocol droid and R2 unit entered the lives of a moisture farmer, Luke Skywalker, the show follows the adventures of a nascent band of rebels in a galaxy heavily influenced by acclaimed Star Wars artist Ralph McQuarrie and a production intent on recreating the original Star Wars experience.
Previously. [more inside]
"Jump scare; hi, I'm Kris Straub."
Scared Yet? is a creepypasta review series produced by Kris Straub, himself the creator of the infamous "Candle Cove" creepypasta. Episodes one, two, three, and four critique "Jeff the Killer," the SCP Foundation, "The Russian Sleep Experiment," and The Josef K. Stories, respectively. [more inside]
Annoying beasts and where to find them
The CIAs' Bestiary of Intelligence Writing (PDF) is an illustrated guide of buzzwords written by CIA employee ███████ and published in 1982 in the Agency's newsletter "Studies in Intelligence": Older employees may recall that when the Headquarters Building was being constructed, guard dogs stalked the corridors by night to sniff out trespassers. Practically no one is aware, however, of the collection of strange fauna in a corner of a sub-basement, the location of which must remain secret. This collection known as the Bestiary of Intelligence Writing, consists of specimen samples of cliches and misused or overused word combinations that CIA editors have encountered frequently over the years.
More information about the bestiary at War is Boring. [more inside]
Bad News Beards
Who's the hairiest team in baseball? The Washington Post weighted the style of facial hair, or lack thereof, of all active ballplayers on a scale of 0 to 8 — zero being clean shaven, eight being the grizzliest — then calculated the average hairiness of each team.
Women make up only 29% of all movie characters
The Herculean Effort Taken By One Group To Show Hollywood Is Sexist. "In dissecting the top 100 grossing films each year, Smith and her team have analyzed a total of 26,225 characters in 600 films for gender, body type, age, race and more. In their most recent annual review, released in July, they found that in 2013, only 29 percent of characters were female, and a mere 28 percent of the films had a female lead or co-lead." [more inside]
My new desktop image.
The Osmonds meet Led Zeppelin: A secret history of Mormon heavy metal Money quote: "...the Osmonds’ metal moment even won them converts among no less an infernal cabal than the mighty Led Zeppelin."
Invokes fond memories of an era in which "boy bands" could come out with concept albums.
How Cubic Bézier Curves Work
Have you ever wondered how Cubic Bézier Curves work in digital graphics programs? Peter Nowell created an interesting video to go "under the hood" and show the underlying geometry of the process. He has more discussion of Bézier Curves here.
Welcome to the 1099 economy
Silicon Valley's Contract Worker Problem Earlier this year, I hired a house cleaner. I wouldn't have done so normally, but my place was a mess, I was busy at work, and I saw an offer on Facebook that looked too good to be true — a San Francisco start-up called Homejoy was offering home cleanings in the Bay Area for $19. (Not $19 per room or $19 per hour. Just $19.) So I booked an appointment through Homejoy's website, and a day later, a young man showed up at my door. [more inside]
Lattes...in...spaaaaaace!
SPACE.com has reported that a prototype of the ISSpresso, an espresso machine heading to the International Space Station (ISS) next year, was recently displayed at the 65th International Astronautical Congress 2014. [more inside]
Then he pulls himself together and emerges as a better person.
Aboard Amtrak
Aboard Amtrak A hauntingly beautiful description of one man's unintentional half year long Amtrak journey. [more inside]
запомнить практики запоминать практика запоминать практику
Time after time, professors in mathematics and the sciences have told me that building well-ingrained chunks of expertise through practice and repetition was absolutely vital to their succes Understanding doesn’t build fluency; instead, fluency builds understanding. In fact, I believe that true understanding of a complex subject comes only from fluency.
Don't expect them all to be Casablanca
ComicsAlliance writer Benito Cereno has put together a collection of links to horror films available for streaming on Netflix this October: The Haunting of Netflix House 2: Your Sister is a Netflix
October 2
Mark Your Calendars and Create Your Bookmarks and SCREAM!
Fun Size Horror is a film collective which is creating enough variety of scares to make this Halloween really special. Starting October 27, five websites (DreadCentral, Bloody Disgusting, Shock Till You Drop, Hitfix, and Collider) will each host one of 31 horror shorts for 24 hours, and then the next day each will bring you a new horror short. The trailer for the entire series is on Vimeo. I assume you can get links and information from @FunSizeHorror on twitter.
"art-typing"
Here is a picture of sexy ham!
How the law turns battered women into criminals
Arlena Lindley’s boyfriend Alonzo Turner beat her for months and murdered her child — so why was she sent to prison for 45 years? "...looking back over the past decade, BuzzFeed News identified 28 mothers in 11 states sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for failing to prevent their partners from harming their children. In every one of these cases, there was evidence the mother herself had been battered by the man." [article contains graphic descriptions of abuse]
"I hope Jason has a bedpan or something in his car..."
Jeff Gerstmann and Dan Ryckert of Giant Bomb infamy (previously) were looking for a more challenging mode in Super Mario 3. How about playing on a roller coaster?
"Mess with the best, Die like the rest!"
JPMorgan Chase Says More Than 76 Million Accounts Compromised in Cyberattack [New York Times]
"The breach is among the largest corporate hacks, and the latest revelations vastly dwarf earlier estimates that hackers had gained access to roughly 1 million customer accounts."
It's the bravest satellite of all.
"[M]y 5-year-old son goes to bed worried, sometimes in tears. He is worried about the Voyager Interstellar spacecraft, the fact that it is out there all by itself. He wants it to come home to be safe. What do we tell him?"
Commander Hadfield responds. [more inside]
Cheese your patter
A Dictionary of Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, by A London Antiquary. If Lord Palmerston is known by name to the tribes of the Caucasus and Asia Minor as a great foreign diplomatist, when the name of our Queen Victoria is an unknown title to the inhabitants of those parts—as was stated in the Times a short time ago,—I have only to remark that amongst the costers and the wild inhabitants of the streets he is better known as PAM.
The people who take the bullet
The United States Secret Service finds itself deep in turmoil, with Director Julia Pierson resigning this week after an increasingly alarming series of security failures and oversights in the agency's role protecting the President of the United States.
Pierson had been widely criticized for scaling back security around the White House, during international summits, and a recent visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She startled supervisors with her view that the Secret Service needed "to be more like Disney World. We need to be more friendly, inviting." (multiple WaPo links) [more inside]
"The Odd Couple" at UCLA, 1971
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau speaking at UCLA 12/1/1971 (audio with rotating pictures, 45 min 25 sec) [SLYT]
Why do you watch me on the toilet?
My cat's a dick. But he's, like, my dick. SLYT Drunk Dudes Talk About Their Cats.
It's not all that easy to 'just cook healthier meals'
Three North Carolina researchers spend 18 months learning about the food and cooking choices of almost 200 households. They learned, perhaps unsurprisingly, that simply encouraging households to cook healthier meals at home was unlikely to address the challenges to healthy eating most families face. [more inside]
Organic mega-flow batteries, inspired by rhubarbs
There are a number of grid energy storage methods, including flow batteries, which have the potential to be scaled up with increased tank sizes, but that would be expensive due to the cost of metals involved in the process. Enter a research team from Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who have developed an organic mega-flow battery that utilize quinones, similar to those found in rhubarbs. The quinones serve as charge-carriers in chlorophyll during photosynthesis, with minimal degradation during the process, which is ideal for batteries used in large-scale energy storage and distribution. Some day, energy may be stored in "rhubarb batteries." (Abstract on Nature, paywalled article).
The Ultimate in Misdirection
Why They Called It the Manhattan Project By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.
"Homeland Is Good Again: For now, at least."
Homeland season 4 debuts this Sunday, Oct. 5 at 9:00 pm EST on Showtime. (Spoilers in the links following) After receiving heavy criticism for season 3 (previously), reviewers who have had the chance to view the season 4 opener seem cautiously optimistic. Slate: Homeland Is Good Again. The Daily Beast: A Stripped-Down and Surprisingly Badass Return to Form. Variety: Meet the new, improved Homeland. [more inside]
Dutee Chand & Sport & Gender
"Like South African 800m sensation Caster Semenya before her, Chand discovered - in bold newsprint - that she had natural levels of the hormone testosterone normally only found in men. It did not take long before reporters were outside her parents' humble home asking them and her six siblings if she was a boy or a girl." [Via BBC Sport] [more inside]
Some Essays on Heidegger's Black Notebooks
Heidegger in Black. The King is Dead: Heidegger's Black Notebooks. Heidegger's Black Notebooks: Extreme Silencing. Release of Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ Reignites Debate Over Nazi Ideology. Is Heidegger Contaminated by Nazism?
The Toast and The Butter
The business side of The Toast. FastCompany profiles everybody's favorite feminist humor site (previously) on the heels of the announcement of a spin-off site to be headed by Roxane Gay (previously).
Wonder
Spotlight on HAY
"Welcome to the inaugural issue of Dagger & Dill. If it’s local, we love it. If it’s handmade, we fetishize it. If it’s old, we worship it. If it’s baked in a wood-burning oven, painted on a salvaged farmhouse door, or hand-engraved on a pewter cup, we dig it." With step-by-step plans for the perfect fall dinner party. ("Three hours before: Write out name cards for each jam at the jam-tasting station. Roast the vegetables, roll out the crust, and assemble the pot pie lovingly in a heavy cast iron pan. It must be cast iron.")
bot love
Beautiful image conversations between Twitter bots: @badpng and @pixelsorter, @a_quilt_bot and @pixelsorter
Cats drink water "as if they're doing the equations in their head."
"You've been cockblocked by Zeus, stupid boy, she says. "
"He makes love to her, his first time with a woman, but she's not really a woman—is a woman, then a man, then his exact double, then a peacock, feathers alluringly erect. " Rumaan Alam's "Scene From A Marriage" imagines the domestic bliss of Zeus and Hera and assorted boytoys.
La Carnada
Josh Soskin's latest short film La Carnada is about a 13 year old drug mule named Manny. Funded by Kickstarter, it is a prequel to a planned feature-length exploration of the drug trade.
The Distortion of Sound
The Distortion of Sound is a documentary about the decline of sound quality and how technology has changed the way we listen to music. It will open your ears and inspire you to reach for richer, more soul-stirring musical experiences.
"I am a planet, not minor-planet designation 134340"
Is the epically orbiting Pluto, the only planet to be named by a female, about to be reinstated its first class status asks the Independent, eight years after the International Astronomical Union controversially downgraded it to dwarf or minor planet. Since this move, more moons have been discovered and the case for righting this alleged planetary prejudice has continued to be made. While some headlines of today misleading claim that its planetary status has been restored, the public vote has so far been in favor. Scientists have debated, but questions remain over whether returning planetary citizenship to Pluto would also mean having to greencard the larger Eris, Ceres or other bodies in our solar system.
An Alternative Tour of Northern England
Let's start with Fred Dibnah (RIP) whose house (complete with a mine in the garden) is now a heritage centre. His TV career gives an idea of the sheer scope of his interests. [more inside]
True, False, Unverified
October 1
Trip Report: The Hajj
The Trip Reports section of the venerable Flyertalk forums contains a lot of things you might expect: a fastidious appraisal of AA Flagship Suites, a Taste of Turkey in TK economy class, even a review of the business class product from Paris to Havana. But every once in a while someone posts something really out of the ordinary: Hajj, A Journey of a Lifetime: An Insiders Look.
A post about a short film that cannot be described in 72 characters.
Circle of an Abstract Ritual is the latest stop motion timelapse from artist Jeff Frost (previously)who creates short films that defy description. This latest work gathers hundreds of thousands of photographs taken over the last two years during wildfires, riots, and inside abandoned houses where he created a series of optical illusion paintings. Frost says the film “began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing,” and that it is in part “a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.” [via]
The Scarecrow Project
Scarecrow Video (previously), also known as "the largest independent video store in the world", announced back in August that they were closing its doors. But Wait! There's More! Scarecrow also announced their plans to soon after re-open as a non-profit. And after a successful Kickstarter effort that ended two weeks ago, they have now launched the first phase of The Scarecrow Project with the "singular purpose of protecting the invaluable collection of Scarecrow Video under a four-pillared mission of preservation, access, education and community".
“The Rick Scott is perfect”
Democrats are like a bad wedding dress. College Republicans make "Say Yes To The Dress" themed ads for governor races across the country. Because, you know, it's culturally relevant.
Some people, they like to post on MetaFilter
Standin'
on
a
corner
Suitcase in my hand
Jack's in his corset, Jane is in her vest
And me, I'm in a rock 'n roll band.
Huh. [more inside]
Suitcase in my hand
Jack's in his corset, Jane is in her vest
And me, I'm in a rock 'n roll band.
Huh. [more inside]
Ghost Gunner
Ghost Gunner is a computer-numerically-controlled mill that sells for $1200. Using it, and datafiles from the manufacturer, you can create your own AR-15 "lower receiver". All the rest of the parts necessary can be purchased legally, to permit you to create your own fully-automatic AR-15 with no serial number. [more inside]
76 of 79 Deceased NFL Players Found to Have Brain Disease
The Elon Musk Mars Interview
When Musk went to price the mission with US launch companies, he was told transport would cost $60-80 million. Reeling, he tried to buy a refurbished Russian intercontinental ballistic missile to do the job, but his dealer kept raising the price on him. Finally, he’d had enough. Instead of hunting around for a cheaper supplier, Musk founded his own rocket company. His friends thought he was crazy, and tried to intervene, but he would not be talked down. Musk identifies strongly as an engineer. That’s why he usually takes a title like chief technical officer at the companies he runs, in addition to chief executive officer. He had been reading stacks of books about rockets. He wanted to try building his own. The Elon Musk Mars Interview.
When the Feds move away, statehood makes a play?
Lately, Washington DC has been abuzz with the FBI's plans to relocate outside of the District. But for some, the movement of major government agencies to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs means something potentially revolutionary: legal grounds for DC to finally achieve statehood. [more inside]
Preamble
"One day one of the producers of Schoolhouse Rock, George Newall, passed by and casually asked me if I’d like to try writing a song for Schoolhouse Rock."
Lynn Ahrens wrote the music and some, but not all, of the words to the song 'Preamble'.
“Well, I guess that’s the last we’ll hear from her.”
Geraldine "Jerrie" Mock, the first woman to fly solo around the globe, has died. She was 88 years old. In 1964, housewife and amateur pilot Jerrie Mock took on the task of completing what Amelia Earhart had attempted over a quarter century earlier: flying around the world. To the surprise of many, she was successful. [more inside]
Jon's Bushcraft
Ever wondered how to make a basket out of willow rods or birch bark? How about a bow drill for lighting fires? Maybe you'd rather make your own cordage out of nettles and then use it to make a wood-and-thorn fishing hook? All this knowledge and more can be your at Jon's Bushcraft. (Bonus: he also makes fine art.)
Ryan Adams
An alt-country wunderkind who hates country music, a restlessly prolific songwriter stifled by his label, a reformed hell-raiser determined to maintain privacy in a celebrity marriage. For 20 tumultuous years, Ryan Adams has done things the hard way, but thanks to a thriving new studio-cum-clubhouse — and a surprising amount of pinball — he’s finally at ease.
Don't worry, mother.
Fitter. Happier. More Productive. Not visiting MetaFilter too much.
Before The Law
In
Before The Law,Jennifer Gonnerman, writing for The New Yorker, tells the story of Kalief Browder, who was unjustly accused of taking a backpack. He spent the next three years on Rikers Island before the charges were dismissed.
Leaving the uncanny valley
Charlie and the Zuckerlwerkstatt
dog + water trifecta complete
"The United States is a lot more interesting than it’s given credit for"
Southern Gothic: Hunting for the peculiar soul of Georgia
Hail, Guardians of the Watchtower of the East
Hey, remember when the Supreme Court ruled that every religion needs to have a shot at opening a legislative session with a prayer? Well, ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for David Suhor, Agnostic Pagan Pantheist. Wait, where are you going?
Wolves at the Door
Wolves in Wyoming are once again being protected under the Endangered Species Act, just two years after those protections were taken away. A federal judge’s ruling last week found the state’s management plan for the animal “inadequate and un-enforceable.” In February, NPR’s Nate Rott took a comprehensive look at the wolf situation in the Western U.S. [more inside]
THRU YOU TOO
Thru You Too has been released. Kutiman's followup to his landmark video album Thru You, Thru You Too is made up entirely of sampled musicians from YouTube, none of whom with any prior knowledge of the project. Previously and previously.
Take that, Keanu Reeves.
Privilege and oppression explained through math - specifically, matrices and Venn diagrams.
I get around
Rodney Durham stopped working in 1991, declared bankruptcy and lives on Social Security. Nonetheless, Wells Fargo lent him $15,197 to buy a used Mitsubishi sedan. “I am not sure how I got the loan,” Mr. Durham, age 60, said.
Mr. Durham’s application said that he made $35,000 as a technician at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, N.Y., according to a copy of the loan document. But he says he told the dealer he hadn’t worked at the hospital for more than three decades. Now, after months of Wells Fargo pressing him over missed payments, the bank has repossessed his car.
_______________
The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender.
_______________
This is the face of the new subprime boom. [more inside]
Mr. Durham’s application said that he made $35,000 as a technician at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, N.Y., according to a copy of the loan document. But he says he told the dealer he hadn’t worked at the hospital for more than three decades. Now, after months of Wells Fargo pressing him over missed payments, the bank has repossessed his car.
_______________
The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender.
_______________
This is the face of the new subprime boom. [more inside]
'Guns will get you into more trouble than they will ever get you out of'
Soon after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin more than two years ago, George's loyal family learned that sharing his name meant sharing the blame. It also meant a surreal new life filled with constant paranoia, get- rich-quick schemes, and lots and lots of guns. Amanda Robb meets the Zimmerman family and finds out what it's like being related to the most hated free man in America.
Essays in English yield information about other languages
Essays and longer texts written in English can provide interesting insights into the linguistic background of the writer, and about the history of other languages, even dying languages, when evaluated by a new computer program developed by a team of computer scientists at MIT and Israel’s Technion. As told on NPR, this discovery came about by accident, when the new program classified someone as Russian when they were Polish, due to the similarity in grammar between the languages. Researchers realized this could allow the program to re-create language families, and could be applied to people who currently may not speak their original language, allowing some categorization of dying languages. More from MIT, and a link to the paper (PDF, from the 2014 Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics).
“There is such a thing as the courage in remaining baffled.”
Obviously, you're not a minigolfer.
I just dropped in to see what condition the new Big Lebowski prototype pinball table was in.
Cassetteboy - Cameron's Conference Rap
"I'm hardcore and I know the score
And I am disgusted by the poor..." [NSFWish lyrics] [more inside]
This cat fails on all levels
The Worst Cat (SLTumblr)
'the jingle allegedly contained a grammatical error.'
Why Academic Writing Stinks, by Steven Pinker
The curse of knowledge is a major reason that good scholars write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to them that their readers don’t know what they know—that those readers haven’t mastered the patois or can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention or have no way to visualize an event that to the writer is as clear as day. And so they don’t bother to explain the jargon or spell out the logic or supply the necessary detail. Obviously, scholars cannot avoid technical terms altogether. But a surprising amount of jargon can simply be banished, and no one will be the worse for it.Pinker's new book, a style guide, The Sense of the Style, has ten grammar rules it's OK to break (sometimes). He talks to Edge on Writing in the 21st Century, which includes the occasional fMRI.
Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It
According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, addiction is “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” However, that’s not what the epidemiology of the disorder suggests. By age 35, half of all people who qualified for active alcoholism or addiction diagnoses during their teens and 20s no longer do, according to a study of over 42,000 Americans in a sample designed to represent the adult population.
Only a quarter of people who recover have ever sought assistance in doing so (including via 12-step programs). This actually makes addictions the psychiatric disorder with the highest odds of recovery.Metafilter's own maias on myths surrounding the disease(?) of substance addiction, and their impact on medicine and policy.