August 2016 Archives
August 31
The Secret Furry Patrons Keeping Indie Artists Afloat
Outside of a rarefied top tier, it can be extremely hard to make money in creative fields online. Writers are continually asked to work for pennies or, even worse, “exposure.” Artists may have it even worse. ... But there is still at least one online community that treats artists with respect and pays fair prices for original work — one community that artists can rely on when editors, publishers, and social networks make it more and more difficult to get paid. When it comes to commissioning original works of art, nobody can match the furries.
She was the PTA mom everyone knew. Who would want to harm her?
FRAMED: A Mystery In Six Parts. The LA Times' Christopher Goffard brings you a truly bizarre bit of true crime, involving planted drugs, PTA moms, sexy firemen, self-published novels, cold-blooded revenge, and a whole lot more. [more inside]
But *everything* in New York is loud...
The New York subway exposes riders to noise as loud as a jet engine. (SLGuardian)
5 videos of model trains serving up restaurant orders
Exactly what it says on the tin. Model trains delivering food! Let's start with Prague's Výtopna restaurant; more below. [more inside]
Ask Uncle Phaedrus
*Curls up and purrs a contented purr*
BBC: "Unlike the big cats many people recognise, such as lions and tigers, many wild cat species are small, rare and little-known. But they are just as deserving of our adoration as the pets we keep at home, and far more endangered. So to help raise their profile, we thought we would create our own cat challenge. Can you spot which of the following are wild cat species, and which are breeds of everyday moggy?" [more inside]
"Essentially Ozzfest without the pyrotechnics[...] without the wankers."
In the summer of 2001, Tim Smith threw himself a 40th birthday party. If you know Tim Smith—and you should know Tim Smith (previously)——it won't surprise you that this silly, square little event was attended by some of the most brilliant musicians on the planet. The psychedelic, proto–math rock Monsoon Bassoon—the lead singer/songwriter of whom went on to form Knifeworld—opened the show. Sidi Bou Said, sometimes called the all–woman Pixies, followed. Next up was a shockingly young Stars in Battledress, who you should probably also know, and then William D Drake took the stage, playing rough drafts of songs that in fourteen years' time would form the core of 2015's best musical release. Finally, and this might be the best treat of all, Drake and North Sea Radio Orchestra's Sharron Fortnam took the stage as Lake of Puppies, who never released an album and whose bootlegs are exceedingly difficult to find. (Some of LoP's songs wound up on the Shrubbies album Memphis in Texas, which incidentally is stunning.) The performances are rough and lighthearted, and the recording is mediocre, but this recording is a marvelous treasure trove of musical talents, many of which are still now coming into fruition.
How is babby cosplayed?
Photographer Laura Izumikawa's baby turned out to be a great sleeper, so she used the opportunity to dress her napping baby in pop culture costumes and post the photos to Instagram.
To wage by force or guile eternal Warr
A nine hour radio adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost, starring Linus Roache as Adam and Ian McDiarmid (Dragonslayer, Return of the Jedi) as Satan. [more inside]
We are transmitting from the year two, oh, oh, four
Thanks to Sci-Fi and Horror fiction podcasts are finally a thing.
or perhaps they've been a thing for a bit longer than that.
“You can tell by their finger movements,”
Subway Reads: Free E-Books, Timed for Your Commute [The New York Times] “On Sunday, Subway Reads started delivering novellas, short stories or excerpts from full-length books to passengers’ cellphones or tablets. The idea is for riders to download a short story or a chapter and read it on the train. Subway Reads will even let riders choose what to read based on how long they will be on the subway — a 10-page selection for a 10-minute ride, a 20-page selection for a 20-minute excursion, a 30-page selection for a 30-minute trip. Delays not included.”
You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll plotz
"We’re talking about real, human-powered flight"
Why are so many BASE jumpers dying? The answer [warning, graphic description] is more complicated than "because they are jumping off cliffs". [more inside]
The definition of "parent" has been expanded in New York State
New York's highest court has redefined parenthood in a same-sex parenting case. (SLNYT) The Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in In the Matter of Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A. C.C. and Matter of Estrellita A. v. Jennifer D., that the non-married, ex-partner of a biological parent may seek custody or visitation rights of children they once agreed to conceive and raise as co-partners with their exes.
The Court, in a 6-0 vote, said that given the legalization of same-sex marriages and other societal changes that have upset the notion of "parents" as being a married man and woman, it was time for it to abandon the precedent of its 1991 ruling in Matter of Alison D. v. Virginia M. [more inside]
"We pay our performers, just not in money."
Emma Allen reports from deep inside improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. (SLNewYorker) The UCB improv empire takes in millions a year. "Pyramid-scheme theories have been floated: if U.C.B. is charging so much for classes, does not compensate performers, and makes them pay for practice space and coaches, where's all the money going?"
Mephitis mephitis, the mefites' mustelid
The moment I realize I have skunks living in my yard, I become obsessed with them. Within a few weeks, I have the skunk skull on my desk, a stack of articles on skunks, and a copy of The Biology of the Striped Skunk, by B. J. Verts—the definitive textbook on the animal, published in 1967. (In fact, it’s the only textbook on the striped skunk.) I’m waiting for a bottle of skunk essence to arrive in the mail...[more inside]
What's up everyone. I'm a stump today
It's the middle of the night in tropical Costa Rica, and you're wandering in the forest. Suddenly, you hear a sound like a jaguar having a really difficult bowel movement. But no! Actually it's a bird that looks like Jim Henson was asked to design a stoned alien. [more inside]
Large Maps
It may not have set the charts alight when it was first released in 2003, but it’s entirely possible that Maps by New York art-punk outfit Yeah Yeah Yeahs has been the single most influential song of the 21st century so far. How? Let’s look…
Almost an Island
Hallig Hooge is a tiny German island in the North Sea. It's been occupied since 1593 and it's quite pretty. Lots of German tourists come visit for the day (video of Hooge). The Germans call it a Hallig instead of an island though, because unlike an island, it floods (2 minute video) every time there is a very high tide. [more inside]
The Court That Rules The World
International investors have a private court of appeal even in criminal matters - "A parallel legal universe, open only to corporations and largely invisible to everyone else, helps executives convicted of crimes escape punishment. [ISDS] operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret." (via) [more inside]
August 30
Heaping Handfuls of -- No, No I'm Not Saying It
Among the lesser-known post-Milne works involving Winnie the Pooh is Disney's syndicated comic strip, running from '78 to '88 (following all but one of the theatrical featurettes, preceding the first animated series and beginning before the live-action Welcome to Pooh Corner). It is most well known for its characterizations, as seen in a series of examples aptly named Poohdickery. You can read much more of the comic starting here (earliest comic in archive with working image). And apropos of this post about online Russian movies, the beloved and brilliant Soviet adaptation, Vinni Puh (One, Two, Three Part 1, Three Part 2) (Wikipedia: One, Two, Three).
Waiting
Kevin Gilbert gives us the 1995 track Waiting, a song based on or in tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem I Am Waiting (a truncated version performed by him here with jazz background) [revised text from A Coney Island Of The Mind]. [more inside]
Not Able to Get to the Beach? Not a Problem!
I Am 911
Because most people think of work like customer service when they think of remote jobs, these jobs are usually classified as clerical. 911 dispatchers are no exception. Unlike most clerical workers, though, 911 dispatchers often have to handle talking citizens through traumatic situations, often risking compassion fatigue and trauma themselves in the process. In order to get 911 dispatchers access to mental health services and support, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials are openly campaigning to reclassify 911 dispatchers as first responders. As part of that campaign, 911 dispatchers have been speaking out this week about some of the more harrowing experiences they've talked people in crisis through.
Deep Sadness
Deep Sadness is an artwork.
Your Guide to the Craziest Show on Television
Zoo. Season Two. "...But anyway, the sloth and the ants: The evil four-star general — who has his own plan to save the world, which is called the Noah Objective and involves releasing a gas that kills off all the infected animals, and actually seems kind of reasonable if you think about it, because, like, look at the list of things the animals have done — storms the science plane and starts detaining everyone. But the earthquake sloth gets free and shrieks and ...." [more inside]
Fragrance of choice
Hargeysa International Book Fair, celebrating literature in Somaliland
This year, Somaliland is celebrating its silver jubilee (though there are concerns and disappointments), and recently held its 9th annual Hargeysa International Book Fair in the (unrecognized) country's capital. The theme this year was leadership, and its connection to art, culture, and creativity. HIBF is the biggest annual event in Somaliland, drawing 11,000 attendees this year, it's an advertisement for a republic that showcases itself as a kind of "anti-Somalia." [more inside]
"All we need is music - Sweet music - There's no music anywhere"
Tied for lighthouse keeper as potential dream job
the game within the game
As of August 3rd, it is again legal to play Daily Fantasy sports in New York State. But having spent a fortune on legal bills (and even more on marketing) it may be too late for the two major players in the DFS world, DraftKings and FanDuel (previously) to ever become profitable. ESPN and Outside the Lines go into what went wrong (Spoiler alert: "The implosion of the daily fantasy industry is a bro-classic tale of hubris, recklessness, political naïveté and a kill-or-be-killed culture.")
No More Education for the Future
ITT Tech has ceased enrolling new students. On August 26, the US Department of Education prohibited ITT Tech from enrolling new students who receive federal financial aid. Less than 1 week later, the embattled school will no longer enroll new students at all. Current students may continue their studies this year. [more inside]
Attack of the Killer Robots
A quadcopter one inch in diameter can carry a one-gram charge. You can write some code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target’. A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They could be here in two to three years.
It’s...still the mid-Paleolithic period for far too many.
unce unce unce unce BOOOOoooooo BOOOOOooooo
formerly fundie
Indie Crossword Puzzlers Are Shaking Up A Very Square World
The death of the Buzzfeed crossword puzzle after less than a year leads FiveThirtyEight Senior Writer Oliver Roeder to survey the state of indie crosswords ("The Times is a Budweiser lager; the indies are small-batch saisons and IPAs."). [more inside]
Five years after the tsunami, a husband still searches the sea
"Takamatsu went out with [the] regular dive customers -- the ones who dove for fun. They had no idea Takamatsu was searching for a body." [SLNYT] [warning: some graphic details re body decomposition]
“We have to promote inbreeding of the best bloodlines.”
The Secret Nazi Attempt to Breed the Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts. [Longreads] The bestselling author of ‘The Eighty Dollar Champion’ describes the Nazis’ secret stud farm, where dubious visionaries imagined a breed of perfect (and perfectly white) horse. [more inside]
He loves the man that Batman isn’t.
Object Dreams is a blog that catalogs the output of varying text prediction algorithms. Here's part of a Batman: The Animated Series episode it wrote, "The Penguin makes things worse by killing Batman. He has happened to Batman and he is visibly criminal. Batman isn’t still around. Batman is in a cloud. The Penguin finds that he is astounded by killing the man who loves him most. He feels responsible for the death of Gotham’s prominent Batman. He loves the man that Batman isn’t." These programs create Yelp! reviews of the Paris Catacombs, IMDB content warnings, and scripts for Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown - among other things. [more inside]
Sierra Gets Creative
Jimmy Maher of The Digital Antiquarian tells the story of Sierra Entertainment's gamble on the MS-DOS/IMB platform shaped PC gaming as we know it: from creating the first game with a cinematic score (and later helping to make the Sound Blaster a standard feature of home PCs); to pioneering the genre of adventure games with rich storytelling; to a female-friendly marketing and design strategy that was decades ahead of its time.
Meet the meticulous artist behind those happy trees (SLNPR)
Testing Nexus on 'NIMH' mice
Nanowire Mesh Monitors Mouse Brains - "Injectable 'neural lace'* brain-computer interface works in mice for months at a time." (via) [more inside]
August 29
I Want To Believe
"No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study. Working out the strength of the signal, the researchers say that if it came from an isotropic beacon, it would be of a power possible only for a Kardashev Type II civilization. If it were a narrow beam signal focused on our Solar System, it would be of a power available to a Kardashev Type I civilization. The possibility of noise of one form or another cannot be ruled out, and researchers in Paris led by Jean Schneider are considering the possible microlensing of a background source by HD164595. But the signal is provocative enough that the RATAN-600 researchers are calling for permanent monitoring of this target." [more inside]
Spam, Spam, Spam, Anthropology, & Spam
Beyond Spam: Hormel's secret weapon for predicting the future of food Around 2007, Hormel quietly embarked on a venture that would take it deeper than it had ever been into the cupboards and kitchens of Americans, many of them immigrants, many of them young. It led to a series of acquisitions and a blitz of research and development that helped round out its pantry of products and inoculate it against the fickle modern food trends of a kale-and-quinoa world.
One of the first things it did was hire an anthropologist. [more inside]
One of the first things it did was hire an anthropologist. [more inside]
"One cannot but think of him as a 50-year-old mausoleum exhibition"
Following an admission yesterday by the government of Uzbekistan that its president, Islam Karimov, had suffered a stroke, it is now being reported that he has died. He was the only person to have led an independent Uzbekistan and it is unclear who might succeed him, as his once-popular (at least as far as her father was concerned) daughter Gulnara has been under house arrest since 2014 after a feud within the family. Last year, Daniil Kislov, whose Ferghana news agency was among the first to report Karimov's illness and death, had some reflections on Karimov's last few years of authoritarian rule.
Rudy Van Gelder, influential sound engineer, dead at 92
Rudy Van Gelder, best known for his work at legendary Bluenote Records, influential sound engineer, dead at 92. (Previously on Metafilter, RVG) Spotify playlist of his recordings.
RIP, Leo Bloom
Gene Wilder has died at age 83. Gene Wilder, who regularly stole the show in such comedic gems as “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and “Stir Crazy,” died Monday at his home in Stamford, Conn. His nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman said he died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. [more inside]
Sad Face
Can smiling make you happier? Maybe not. We have no idea. ... The basic finding of Strack’s research—that a facial expression can change your feelings even if you don’t know that you’re making it—has now been reproduced, at least conceptually, many, many times. ... In recent years, it has even formed the basis for the treatment of mental illness. An idea that Strack himself had scoffed at in the 1980s now is taken very seriously: Several recent, randomized clinical trials found that injecting patients’ faces with Botox to make their “frown lines” go away also helped them to recover from depression. [more inside]
Who Should Get Paid for Live Storytelling Events?
It’s not that “exposure” doesn’t exist. It does, sort of, but it’s more along the lines of “networking.” [more inside]
Jellyfish are going to kill us all
There’s only one way for us to win this / Provoke outrage, outright
Donny is flopping about on immigration and his "deportation force," and the view of Donald as a bigot are solidifying, as Hillary's camp keeps up the race-themed attack on Donnie. Meanwhile, Donny bought $10 million in ads for this week, his biggest buy yet, focusing on the economy. Ads will air in battleground states, including Colorado and Virginia, where Clinton’s top aides — citing the growth in minority communities and college-educated white voters — feel confident enough to pull local ads. And to keep things lively, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton trade jabs over their health. With a bit more than 70 days to go, it's too soon for Hillary to run out the clock, so let's go, get back on your feet!
“The Octobot also has its own preservation code. ”
Meet Octobot: Squishy, Adorable and Revolutionary [The New York Times] “This squishy eight-armed machine is the world’s first fully autonomous soft-bodied robot. Researchers at Harvard University created the octopus by three-dimensional printing, using silicone gel, which gives it its flexible, rubbery texture. On Wednesday, they unveiled their adorable step toward the robot uprising in the journal Nature [.PDF]. The scientists said in their paper that their creation could be a foundation for the future of soft-bodied robots.”
Heavily-Delayed Horrors Beyond Human Reckoning
The end of WTF D&D's epic saga of 90's music stars and cosmic horrors has finally begun, half a year after that post (which contains links to the entire story so far). Zack and Steve's zany game logs from the interim: Death Star plans on Naboo (1, 2), Dark Heresy: The Lost Dog Detectives (1, 2), a redneck WWE wrestler, a 90's Marvel character trapped in the Cinematic Universe (1, 2) and a Ghostbusters franchise in North Dakota (1, 2). As evidenced by the site's archives, much pointing and laughing at sourcebooks did indeed also ensue.
of the Free
After conspicuously not standing up during the National Anthem played at a preseaon NFL game on Friday, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick explained that his actions were a tribute to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Moreover, he went on, the song itself has a racist history. If you unfamiliar, here is Jason Johnson of the Root to explain: Lt. Francis Scott Key and the history of the US National Anthem's racist 3rd Verse.
A Swarm of Controversy
In their struggle for survival against killer mites, bees get an unlikely ally: Monsanto. [more inside]
only the lifelong challenge of acknowledging the reality of other people
The BBC goes slow again with a two-hour Yorkshire Dales bus trip.
Following the success of previous BBC Four 'slow TV' programmes, including All Aboard! The Sleigh Ride & Canal Trip, and Slow Week, BBC4 is inviting viewers aboard for a very special journey through one of the most spectacular and beautiful bus routes in Britain.
The 'Northern Dalesman', as the bus on the route is called, has been rigged with specialist cameras as it travels on its journey, snaking across the iconic landscape of the Yorkshire Dales. Filmed in real time, the cameras capture the road unfurling, the passing scenery and the occasional chatter of local passengers.
Two hours of scenery and quiet, no ads, no idiot voice-over ... all television should be this way.
(Previously)
August 28
Nobody Speak
Mojo Magazine’s Best Covers (2004-2016)
Советские Movies
Free Soviet movies, with English subtitles. Cartoons! Comedy! Sci Fi! Melodrama! Drama Drama! Adventure! Everything!
Watch Pompeii be destroyed
The Lego Grad Student
"Eating his stolen sandwiches in the stairwell, the grad student contemplates how his life has come to this." The Grad Student: A hollow head struggling to make it through a blocky world.
Deep-fat fryers and dunking Jaffa Cakes: a nation further divided
As the UK continues to absorb the implications of the Brexit referendum vote, further splits open due to the (possibly overcooked) arguments between TV cooking show hosts. The declaration of one, that “no family should own a deep-fat fryer” leads to the reply that “...the UK was built on chips and spam fritters.” Host hostilities are further inflamed by the cultural flashpoint of whether Jaffa Cakes should, or could, be dunked in tea, with the retort of “We don't do that in the south, you know.” (Previously [1] and [2]) [more inside]
I heard you and Captain America were having some relationship problems.
What was Thor up to during the Captain America: Civil War slap-fight between Thor's earthly comrades? "I guess I'm just taking a break." Starring Thor, Thor's roommate, Mjolnir, and a special Avenger guest. (alternate video link) [more inside]
1 country, 1 movie
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the best of "worldly cinema" according to Reddit users. The individual country threads provide alternate suggestions. The list is as idiosyncratic as can be expected from a Reddit poll: entries on Niger, Nigeria and Palestine had to be deleted because the threads were downvoted to death, Vietnamese cinema does not exist at all and the Best Swedish Movie Ever is [spoiler]. It is, however, a powerful reminder that movies are made everywhere. [more inside]
“the way of the sword, the way of the chef”
Food Manga: Where Culture, Conflict And Cooking All Collide [NPR.org] “In Japan, nearly every interest has a manga dedicated to it, whether it's sports, music or shooting pool. So it's no wonder that food, which has always been tied to Japan's cultural identity, has skyrocketed as a genre of manga, which represents about 40 percent of all books published in that country. Food manga first appeared in the 1980s, when the Japanese economy was strong, says Nancy Stalker, professor of Japanese history and culture at the University of Texas at Austin. One of the first, Oishinbo, ran for more than 20 years and became the basis for an anime series, as have many manga since. Conflict and cooking are at the heart of many food manga: Food Wars, Soldier of Food, Wakakozake, Detective Glutton, Solitary Gourmet, Criminal Grub, Cooking Master Boy, Antique Bakery, High Plains Gourmet.” [more inside]
August 27
Technically still a result
"Babies" made from flour sacks or eggshells have been used for to teach children about the responsibilities of parenthood, but a new study using lifelike simulated babies in Western Australian schools had a surprising result: girls enrolled in the Virtual Infant Parenting Program (VIP) were twice as likely to give birth in their teens.
[original report in The Lancet]
[original report in The Lancet]
De Coubertin medal: 4th Olympic medal, True Spirit of Sportsmanship
68 years after the first modern Olympic Games, a fourth medal was added to recognize athletes who displayed exceptional sportsmanship. Awarded on rare occasions, the Pierre de Coubertin medal, also known as the True Spirit of Sportsmanship medal, was inaugurated at the 1964 Winter Olympics. It was there that Eugenio Monti's kind gestures lead to two gold medals, for the two- and four-man bobsled, but for the other teams. The medal has now been awarded 18 times, with the latest medal going to New Zealand's Nikki Hamblin and US's Abbey D’Agostino, after the pair tangled in their 5,000m race in the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, but got up to complete the race together. [more inside]
Hands–down the best game I've played in years.
else Heart.Break() (trailer) is simultaneously one of the most delightful, and most melancholy, games in recent memory. Welcome to Dorisberg, a town in which reality itself can be reprogrammed—using a variant of BASIC, no less!—and in which a group of aimless twentysomething rebels suffers under the watch of the all–seeing Ministry. The story is short, but the town is ridiculously complex, as hinted at by the sheer length and breadth of its soundtrack. There are secrets within secrets. And sadnesses within sadnesses, too. Users have been writing delightfully complex scripts, too, rewiring the entire city to suit their purposes. eH.B() was created by Erik Svedang, whose ultrashort Blueberry Garden has been one of my favorite games for close to a decade.
Saturday Cartoons - Election Year Edition
It's hard to believe America has never had a woman President, considering that in 1932, theaters across the country were showing the campaign film "Betty Boop for President", which contained many gags that seem just as relevant today. Then in 1948, the same animation studio recycled some of the content for the Popeye cartoon "Olive Oyl for President".
via Miss Cellania, who should have been elected Blog Queen years ago
via Miss Cellania, who should have been elected Blog Queen years ago
It's the pits
"They didn't want people to become too happy with receiving food relief"
"Whatever [the ingredients] taste like together is not particularly relevant." Terry Gross interviews married culinary historians Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe on the culinary history of the Great Depression and their new book 'A Square Meal' (37:00 audio, transcribed sections)
Out of student loans and treehouse homes we all would take the latter
Stressed Out is a song from Blurryface, the fourth studio album by Twenty One Pilots. Released in April 2015, the song reached #2 on the US Billboard Hot 100, #1 on Hot Rock Songs and Mainstream Top 40, and is certified 4x platinum The video features many relatives of the band, and was filmed mostly in the Ohio childhood home of the drummer. The lyrics, a recent NYT review of the band at Madison Square Garden and a New Yorker piece, and a previous mention in MetaFilter.
Scared the hell out of me when I stumbled on them
The Dinosaurs of Crystal Palace: Among the Most Accurate Renditions of Prehistoric Life Ever Made - a longish read by Darren Naish of the tetrapod zoology blog in Scientific American.
"The annihilation of space and time"
“When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description.” British actress Fanny Kemble provides a spirited account of the first passenger railroad trip in 1830.
Fashion, faux-sophistication, youth culture, and 1700s gender panic
Why did Yankee Doodle put a feather in his hat and call it "macaroni?" As you've probably guessed, the song is not about noodles; macaroni refers to a fashion trend in high-society England of the late 1700s. NPR's All Things Considered looked into the history of the rhyme with librarian and author Chris Roberts. But what happened to the macaroni trend? Atlas Obscura tells a story of youth culture, old men yelling at clouds, and social panic over the erosion of gender norms. (Previously: The Etymological Evolution of Dude)
The feel-good gospel of the pastor made famous by Kimye and Bieber
Pastor Rich and the Ministry of Fun "We live in the age of hipster Christianity, a time of multiplying ministries with one-word names, such as Status, Mosaic, Reality, and, most famously, Hillsong, an Australian Pentecostal megachurch whose New York City branch is led by Rich's friend and fellow pastor to the stars Carl Lentz. Most leave untouched fundamentalism's core convictions—opposition to abortion and sex outside of marriage (which is between a man and a woman) and also to false gods (meaning all of them but their own)—but they rebrand the presentation. Rich is only the most mediagenic of whatComplex has described as this "new wave of stylish pastors," just as a young Billy Graham was before him and Billy Sunday before him, stripping away the Bible's subtler teachings to draw the masses. Rich is the latest avatar of a tradition common to Christianity and capitalism, the so-called new-and-improved. His new is burnished with vestiges of the artisanal; "vintage," Rich likes to say, meaning that which is artfully rendered to reference an idea of the old. It's like he's sampling from a song he's never actually heard."
August 26
Are the kids alright?
Season six of American Horror Story premieres in the US on September 14th. Unlike previous seasons of the anthology, however, FX is keeping this season's theme under wraps, teasing the audience with no fewer than 19 promos, each depicting a different potential show (which themselves reference different horror movies.) [more inside]
Syria's worst case scenario is the current one.
Syria’s Paradox: Why the War Only Ever Seems to Get Worse. " The average [civil war] now lasts about a decade, twice as long as Syria’s so far. But there are a handful of factors that can make them longer, more violent and harder to stop. Virtually all are present in Syria." [more inside]
Don't take this sitting down.
A brief history of chairs by architect and professor Witold Rybczynski covers the fascinating (really) history of chairs, the subject of his new book Now I Sit Me Down. He has also written about the lack of thoughtful design in airline seats and how architects have struggled to create the perfect chair (researching this article apparently inspired the book). Don't miss the photographs of the 7 chairs that changed the world.
Sorry to Bug Ya
Yesterday, "A crazed woman trying to sell crickets and worms on a D train suddenly threw them all over the crowded car, sending it into chaos during the evening commute." "The air conditioning shut off and the screaming passengers were all stuck inside the sweltering car with the woman, who then treated them to antics for half an hour as the crickets jumped on passengers. The worms just wriggled on the floor."
Today, actress Zaida Pugh admits she staged the incident, calling it a "a performance art piece meant to highlight the way people with mental and emotional health issues are treated."
Pretty Polly Parrot Portuguese
This Brazilian duo of guitar and parrot are pretty good, but birds and guitars are not unusual. [more inside]
“an ahead-of-its-time innovation and an exactly-of-its-time decadence”
The Legend of the Choco Taco [Eater] “For just about everyone other than the French inventor of the Cronut, the Choco Taco [wiki] is the stuff of nostalgic summer sweet tooth obsession — the most beloved and innovative of all the American ice cream "novelties." Its acolytes are legion. Restaurant pastry chefs and boutique scoop shop owners regularly pay homage.”
"Everybody dies with loose ends"
Poet Max Ritvo has died at 25. His "Poem to my Litter" appeared in the New Yorker in June. His debut collection, Four Reincarnations will be published in October by Milkweed Editions.
…
Semi-Submersible Heavy Transport Vessels
Is The Texas AG Leading A Nationwide War Against Transgender People?
Most of the media focus on Transgender rights up until now have been on "Bathroom Bills" that are being presented across the country, yet in doing so, we are, as Chase Strangio, Staff Attorney for the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project states, ...ceding the terms of this conversation to the people who want to expel trans people from public life and write us out of existence."
But is that really happening? Are there people who want to write trans people out of existence? [more inside]
But is that really happening? Are there people who want to write trans people out of existence? [more inside]
I Came From Nothing
Known as much for his flamboyant style as his prolific output, rapper, singer and weirdo Young Thug [prev] has released a new commercial mixtape (can we call commercial mixtapes albums already?). The project title No, My Name Is JEFFERY asserts a new identity, and the music continues to twist the Atlanta trap sound in new and strange directions. "I always had a Michael Jackson mentality…The message is to go back to who I really am. I really am Jeffery. That’s really my swag." Oh, and the cover art is wild.
Anne Boleyn was a Pointy. Jane Seymour was a ROUND.
How Cuts to Public Universities Have Driven Students Out of State
NYT: "Declines in state support for public universities have helped reshape the geography of public college admissions, leading many students to attend universities far from home, where they pay higher, out-of-state tuition. An analysis of migration patterns among college freshmen shows the states students leave each year and where they go." How does your state measure up? [more inside]
Uber Risky
These days, everybody's betting on Uber. In the firm's seven years of existence, it has attracted nearly $15 billion dollars in funding via a nearly-unprecedented 14 rounds of investment. While Uber's management have made it intentionally difficult for small investors to own shares of the company, big investors are betting on Uber in droves. All this led Quartz's Steve LeVine to wonder — What if they're wrong? Can somebody make the opposite bet? Is it even possible to short Uber? [Spoiler: Basically, no.]. Earlier this year, Uber announced its expansion into subprime lending, and on Thursday, announced that it had lost $1.2 billion in the first half of 2016.
Be a Reporter!
Up until last year, the Newseum in Washington, D.C. had a YouTube channel (preserved at NewseumArchives) that uploaded every video made by visitors who went the the museum's "Be a Reporter!" exhibit and recorded themselves doing a TV news segment. Or practicing their golf swing. Or saying hi to their moms. Or contemplating the abyss. Sage Boggs of Mic has been tweeting out some of the highlights.
Clearly just an excuse for a cool URL
Time to Statham Punch is a helpful reference if you want to know how long it takes in a given movie for Jason Statham to punch someone, "ideally in the face". [more inside]
Little People, Big Woes in Hollywood
The Hollywood Reporter takes a longform look at the history and current status of little people in Hollywood, from the 124 dwarfs (not dwarves) who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz to Peter Dinklage's Golden Globe speech where he called for viewers to google Martin Henderson, a little person who was paralyzed after being picked up and thrown to the ground by a drunk outside a bar. [more inside]
How hot is too hot?
The Food Lab teams up with Adam Savage's (MeFi's own) Tested to find the perfect method for searing steaks.
Philly train station's iconic flipping departures board will be replaced
Philadelphia's 30th Street Station is home to one of the few remaining "split-flap display" departure boards. The flipping, clicking board, which is managed on four desktop computers running Windows 95, will soon be replaced by a digital display. Other stations' split-flap display boards have been replaced by digital displays that try and mimic the look and sounds of the original. Aficionados and nostalgics, take note: the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg may be acquiring 30th Street's board. Interested in seeing a split-flap board in action before they're all gone? Wikipedia has a list of remaining boards around the world.
Fart Touch
Utah doom
Salt Lake City progressive doom band SubRosa play a three-song set at Hellfest 2014. [Fat of the Ram, 0.04; Ghosts of a Dead Empire, 15.40; The Usher, 27:50.] [more inside]
August 25
iPhone security hack
A truly horrendous zero-day exploit has been revealed which targets the iPhone. Apple has issued an emergency update to correct it and advises all iPhone users to update immediately. The latest OS version, and only safe one, is 9.3.5. (More coverage)
How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All
From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
El sueno americano
Tom Kiefer was named one of the 50 best emerging photographers for 2015 in the LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards based on his El Sueno Americano project, which emerged from his work as a janitor at the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Over an 11-year period, he salvaged and cataloged hundreds of personal items thrown away in the facility. [more inside]
Fingerwave Saint
“I wanted to create images that portray black women in a way that would inspire them not to be necessarily pretty, which is what most beauty stuff is about, but to kind of embody that and more within themselves,” Ms. Crowe said [NYT]. “Everything starts within you and how you feel about yourself. It’s just trying to glorify black women and make them imagine themselves beyond their wildest dreams.” [more inside]
Not just a menu item, but a way of lunch
The Slow & Sad Death of Seattle's Iconic Teriyaki Scene (Thrillist) But new Seattle -- with the locals priced out of the area, those that remain forgetting teriyaki exists, and newcomers ignoring it -- risks losing those real shops for good. Teriyaki could be heading the direction of deep-dish… just ask a Chicagoan about it and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s for tourists.” Teriyaki is from a different era, and it’s fading as fast as traffic-free days on I-5. Since teriyaki came to town, Seattle’s waved goodbye to the Kingdome, Kurt Cobain, and the Sonics. A signature stadium, a signature musician, a signature team -- and now, perhaps, a signature dish. [more inside]
Sail Away... Sail Away...
Because sometimes, when the stresses and hardships of earthly existence threaten to overwhelm, you just really need to see two Pokemon dancing to Orinoco Flow.
Una donna americana sta leggendo tutto il catalogo...
New York City's Karen Barbarossa is reading the Biblioteca Adelphi catalogue, in order, from 1965 through now. All of it. That's 653 titles, to date.
Narrative stinginess in binge-worthy shows.
"Delay of audience gratification has been a staple of episodic storytelling for a long time, but no show advanced the practice more than the grandfather of plotblocking, Lost. No matter how well-written the various flashbacks often were, the writers knew that what kept us hooked was the mystery of the island — and that storyline was illiberally meted out like capfuls of water to a thirsty man. Just enough to keep us alive. I’ve actually found that the shows that are the most “binge-worthy” are the most narratively stingy. You start each new episode almost out of frustration, hoping it will deliver a morsel of satisfaction, an inch of forward progress."
Writer-director Andrew Matthews on Stranger Things and his idea of "plotblocking".
The worst of the worst.
Where the Death Penalty Still Lives. In the U.S., 20 states and the District of Columbia have abolished capital punishment and four others have imposed a moratorium on executions. Of the 26 states that remain, only 14 handed down death sentences last year for a total of 50 across the country — less than half the number six years before. California, which issued more than one-quarter of last year’s death sentences, hasn’t actually executed anyone since 2006. A new geography of capital punishment is taking shape, with just two percent of the nation’s counties now accounting for a majority of the people sitting on death row. [more inside]
Edible uses of cheese
In Sweden, they dice it and pour coffee over it, while in Minnesota they dice it and smother in crushed seasoned tortilla chips (previously). Some people add a banana on the side, or perhaps some blackberries. Other people turn it into waffles, or put it inside vegetables. TV chefs bake it with paprika, or turn it into a pinwheel. In Florida, it is hidden in pie crusts, while others hide it inside bread, and others drizzle honey on their balls. But how do you eat yours? [more inside]
Finger Lickin' Good
Ledington continues to leaf through the family scrapbook, pausing here and there to share a memory or an anecdote about his uncle [Harland Sanders]....But what I'm really interested in is the handwritten note on the back of the document. At the top of the page, in blue ink, it reads, "11 Spices — Mix With 2 Cups White Fl." That's followed by an enumerated list of herbs and spices. Eleven herbs and spices. And the measurements for each. [more inside]
"I encourage ESPYs to…change the category to Best Adaptive Athlete"
Bethany Hamilton: surfing with only one arm isn't as hard as beating the stigma (Guardian)
In Bethany Hamilton’s mind, winning the ESPY award for best female athlete with a disability would have been like “rewinding back to square one”—square one being the fateful day 13 years ago when she was attacked by a 14ft tiger shark and lost her left arm.
Which is why, this year, she withdrew her name from consideration. [more inside]
In Bethany Hamilton’s mind, winning the ESPY award for best female athlete with a disability would have been like “rewinding back to square one”—square one being the fateful day 13 years ago when she was attacked by a 14ft tiger shark and lost her left arm.
Which is why, this year, she withdrew her name from consideration. [more inside]
Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature
Microsoft Excel blamed for gene study errors. [G]ene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to ‘2-Sep’ and ‘1-Mar’, respectively.
All mixed up
What do we call people of multiple backgrounds? Leah Donnella writes about the complexities of naming yourself and being named by others. She also links to Evoking the Mulatto, a project to explore black mixed identity in the 21st century. [more inside]
Come See the Softer Side of Sears
In the wake of Sears Holdings' reorganization of its assets, which included the liquidation of several of its brick-and-mortar outlets (including its former flagship store in Chicago), the Canadian arm of the retailer announced it was following in the stead of Yahoo! by revealing an in-house redesign of its logo as a reflection of the future, and its expected perseverance amid online competition.
What's it like to be a woman in comedy? Oh, it's my favorite question.
"If you watch a lot of television and you don't know what could happen to lesbians if they don't die, this is a show about that. I promise you, no lesbians die in this show." Rhea Butcher and Cameron Esposito play a lightly fictionalized version of themselves -- a married couple who co-host a standup comedy show in Los Angeles -- in their new sitcom, Take My Wife. [more inside]
An actual crime, or just “suspicious activity”
“Fear is a natural response,”
One Third of Parents Avoid Reading Children Scary Stories, Study Finds [The Guardian] “A survey of 1,003 UK parents by online bookseller The Book People found that 33% would steer clear of books for their children containing frightening characters. Asked about the fictional creations they found scariest as children, a fifth of parents cited the Wicked Witch of the West from L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with the Child Catcher from Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang in second place. Third was the Big Bad Wolf, in his grandmother-swallowing Little Red Riding Hood incarnation, fourth the Grand High Witch from Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and fifth Cruella de Vil, from Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians.”
Loomings
"Do I save the robin, or do I eat it?"
Margaret Atwood (and artist Johnnie Christmas) have created Angel Catbird, a comic book about a winged human/cat/bird hybrid. It will be published by Dark Horse, and chronicles the adventures of a genetic engineer whose DNA is mixed with that of a cat, and an owl. The comic is part of her advocacy work for Keep Cats Safe and Save Bird Lives.
The Mammoth Pirates
In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush is under way: With the sale of elephant tusks under close scrutiny, “ethical ivory” from the extinct woolly mammoth is now feeding an insatiable market in China. This rush on mammoth ivory is luring a fresh breed of miner – the tusker – into the Russian wilderness and creating dollar millionaires in some of the poorest villages of Siberia. [more inside]
Zoe Quinn's new game.
The Country Restaurant
The Most Exclusive Restaurant in America
Damon Baehrel’s methods are a marvel, and his tables are all booked until 2025. Or are they?
Damon Baehrel’s methods are a marvel, and his tables are all booked until 2025. Or are they?
They do what they can, then move on.
For years, passengers on Washington State ferries have spent their trip working on communal jigsaw puzzles. It is a delightful, adorable thing. Here are some pictures. Here are a few more. The New York Times is on it.
Nobody's Perfect...
Best Supporting Weirdo is a movie mashup of " interesting, eccentric, and iconic characters", introducing themselves, making famous moves and saying famous quotes, and reacting to everything (often with NSFW language).
Turn and look
John V. Muntean's magic angle sculptures: The Shape of Imagination | Knight Mermaid Pirate Ship | Dragon Butterfly Jet
Your Call: A young black man's education
Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, discusses his new book: "We have to be willing to let go of the things that we think that we like about ourselves because if they are things that deny others access to respect and dignity and humanity, then they're not things worth having. So we have to be willing to let go." (MDS: previously) [more inside]
August 24
It's science, not mind-control!
The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is an Alaska-based research facility that studies an energetic and active region of the upper atmosphere. It is a group of high-frequency radio transmitters that send a focused beam of radio-wave energy into the aurora zone. Last year, instead of shutting it down, the US Military sold HAARP to the University of Alaska Fairbanks . But conspiracy theories abound: for example, HAARP caused the Haiti earthquake, or controls the weather”
This weekend, HAARP's new owner will hold an open house to prove the facility 'is not capable of mind control’
A large pot of tea would have already been prepared
The light had to be wound up like a giant grandfather clock every 30 minutes. Every 20 minutes we pumped up the air pressure to the paraffin. This was a subtle ruse to keep us awake and alert, as was the little hammer that banged away on the brass every second through the night. At the highest level the light itself burned and the giant mirrors, the reflectors, turned like a slow-motion merry-go-round supported on a huge bath of mercury. To light the paraffin you had to cause a mini explosion in the light room, allowing a small cloud of paraffin vapour to form in the air, shielding your face while igniting the gas with a burning taper.
Company Hop Farms, Brew Tanks, Distributors Oh My!
What "Selling Out" Allows a Craft Brewery to Do (Serious Eats) Far be it from me to act as a propaganda arm for a $200 billion company headquartered in...uh, is it Belgium at the moment? But I thought it was time someone went to the original founders and employees of the numerous craft breweries that have been acquired, not just by ABI but by other corporate beverage behemoths, like Constellation Brands, Heineken, and Mahou San Miguel, to try to get the full story. What's been going on since these acquisitions—for better or for worse? Does anything actually improve when Big Beer buys you? [more inside]
It's a feel-good story
Rings is a movie that is a sequel to the movie Ring, a heart-warming tale about a little girl who falls in a well. Here, she gets out of the well again and gets to meet lots and lots of people, including everybody on a plane! I mean she kills them all, but those are the times we live in.
Read Like a Victorian
VictorianSerialNovels.org is a project by Dr. Robyn Warhol and her student Colleen Morrissey that helps you read Victorian novels in serial, as they would have been experienced by readers at the time. The site currently covers three time periods: 1846 - 1848, 1859-1861, and 1864-1866. Texts are sourced from project Gutenberg and Librivox (when available).
Green Homes, With a Dash of Hyperbole
Green Homes That Will Make You Want To Go Off The Grid And Live In A Forest If living in a tropical bamboo home nestled inside a green village on the island of Bali doesn't sound better than a skyrise apartment in a concrete jungle, then I just can't even.
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor
After almost two weeks of speculation, it has been announced in Nature:
At a distance of 1.295 parsecs, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri is the Sun’s closest stellar neighbor and one of the best-studied low-mass stars. Here we report observations that reveal the presence of a small planet with a minimum mass of about 1.3 Earth masses orbiting Proxima with a period of approximately 11.2 days at a semi-major-axis distance of around 0.05 astronomical units. Its equilibrium temperature is within the range where water could be liquid on its surface. (paywalled article w/ abstract) [more inside]
El Paquete Semanal
The Cuban CDN El Paquete is a weekly service where someone (typically found through word of mouth) comes to your home with a disk (usually a 1TB external USB drive) containing a weekly download of the most recent films, soap operas, documentaries, sport, music, mobile apps, magazines, and even web sites. [more inside]
(what the dormouse said)
"Welcome to Five Course Trivia! Five days a week, we’ll post five questions about something from the culinary world, from soup to nuts and all dishes in between."
A project of the Rational Dress Society
"Just as we reject the mini-mansion in favor of the city, refuse the automobile in favor of the train, JUMPSUIT offers a way to forego the insular logic of self-expression in favor of forming communal bonds." [more inside]
Have You Ever Tried to Buy an EpiPen?
Many adults and children with severe allergies rely on the EpiPen for emergencies. However, since 2008, the cost for a package of two has gone from $95 to $608, a price jump of more than 450%. This jump coincides with the purchase of the device by Mylan Pharmaceuticals. But why has the price of EpiPens skyrocketed? (NYT) [more inside]
#breakfast
"By elevating the otherwise ordinary experience of eating breakfast into a social event, even if that socializing is all digital, the solitude of many breakfasts becomes more bearable." Breakfast on Instagram Is Magical and Insanely Popular, by Alana Massey for Extra Crispy.
dragging around your case files vs. telling the truth with vulnerability
"...there's no lasting glory there, in the middle of a dude entourage. Sometimes you feel like the smartest of the lot, the funniest, the most insightful, the most interesting. But then you realize you're just the girlfriend. And after that, you're just the ex-girlfriend. You don't matter at all. Everyone pledged to be friends forever, but you were the one who didn't matter."
The good, the bad and the downright disgraceful.
The Best and Worst of Olympics Reporting on Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas
The international media is aflutter with assessments of the Olympic Games, but how did the media themselves fare in reporting on the city of Rio and its favelas?
The international media is aflutter with assessments of the Olympic Games, but how did the media themselves fare in reporting on the city of Rio and its favelas?
This post is under 24 hour video surveillance
Brockville, Ontario is the newest place to add an Internet Purchase Exchange location to their municipality -- this one in a video surveilled section of the police parking lot. The idea seems to be relatively recent, but catching on, starting with one of the first in Mobile, Alabama and now with locations in Texas, Massachusetts, Virginia, Utah, and across Canada. With over 100 murders now linked to Craigslist, is this an idea whose time has come?
Sega Digitizes What Nintendon't
The sky over Baltimore city was the color of a dull nickel...
‘OK, this is it,’ ” Stanley recalls. “I said to myself, ‘This is where the rubber hits the road. The technology has finally arrived, and Big Brother, which everyone has always talked about, is finally here.’Monte Reel at Bloomberg in his article "Secret Cameras Record Baltimore's Every Move from Above" about how Persistent Surveillance Systems Inc. brought an air force surveillance system from Fallujah to Balitmore.
Bandcamp Daily
According to the NYT, Bandcamp has "hired a smart staff to create about 20 times the amount of editorial content that had been there previously, writing about music that had just been posted as well as parts of its deep and woolly catalog, in a feature called “Bandcamp Daily.”" [more inside]
Rio Olympics : Did the IOC's gamble pay off
BBC: Awarding the Olympic Games to the Brazilian city of Rio in 2009 was viewed as a gamble by some critics.
However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) saw it as the perfect opportunity to re-emphasise its core message of taking the spirit of sport to as many people as possible.
IOC president Thomas Bach maintains it was a risk worth taking.
"The Brazilians were great hosts and really united behind these Games," he said. "They turned this great competition into a party for everybody."
“It’s time to rethink this system.”
The 50 Most Segregating School Borders In America [NPR.org] “The grass is greener ... if you're a student in Detroit, looking across your school district's boundary with the neighboring Grosse Pointe public schools. Nearly half of Detroit's students live in poverty; that means a family of four lives on roughly $24,000 a year — or less. In Grosse Pointe, a narrow stretch of real estate nestled between Detroit and Lake St. Clair, just 7 percent of students live at or below the poverty line. To recap, that's 49 percent vs. 7 percent. Neighbors. Which is why a new report from the nonprofit EdBuild [Fault Lines] [.pdf] ranks the Detroit-Grosse Pointe boundary as "the most segregating school district border in the country."”
An apartment roughly the same size as the coffin you'll be buried in
Awwwww Cute meets Ewwww Puns
For four years now, artist Piper Thibodeau has created a charmingly cute painting every day and posted it to her Deviant Art gallery and her Tumblr, as well as a Twitter account showing 'work in progress'. [more inside]
Bauhaus Online
Harvard Art Museums has made available a searchable digitized collection of over 32,000 Bauhaus artifacts: including paintings, photographs, drawings, textiles, sculptures, periodicals. [more inside]
“How am I the bad guy in that situation?” she asked.
In March of 2011, 12-year-old Cristian Fernandez was taken into an interview room at a Jacksonville, Florida, police station and interrogated by Michelle Soehlig, a ponytailed female officer. Before Soehlig began questioning him, she told the child, “These are your constitutional rights,” and slid over a document listing the Miranda warnings, familiar to anyone who’s seen an episode of Law & Order. [more inside]
6.2 Earthquake rocks central Italy
August 23
Alexander Polli, brought down.
"In the long-run, this can't end well." Previously on Metafilter: A sadness for those who lived not too wisely, but too well.
Wherein your local chamber of commerce lets its hair down
Looking to buy Boardwalk and Park Place? How about Torrance, California's Mulligan Family Fun and Golf Practice Center or the dental offices of Gary D. Weber in Sterling, Colorado? If you've spent time in the board game section of your local thrift store, you might be familiar with Wheeler Dealer, a Monopoly-like board game designed by a Michigan production company and localized for over 1,200 cities and towns across North America (long before localized editions of Monopoly existed). Marketed to rotary clubs, chambers of commerce, and other civic organizations as a fundraiser that would boost civic pride while supporting local business, the game board featured small ads, complete with businesses' phone numbers, on each space. But did the idea pan out? A resident of Brookfield, IL isn't so sure. [more inside]
"He makes his work look effortless."
Will somebody please give Norm Macdonald another TV show? by Geoff Edgers, Washington Post
"If we could have, we would have had Norm on every damn week,” Letterman says. “He is funny in a way that some people inhale and exhale. With others, you can tell the comedy, the humor is considered. With Norm, he exudes it. It’s sort of a furnace in him because he’s so effortless. The combination of the delivery and his appearance and his intelligence. There may be people as funny as Norm, but I don’t know anybody who is funnier.” -- David Letterman
(Norm Macdonald, most recent previously: 1, 2, 3, 4)
"If we could have, we would have had Norm on every damn week,” Letterman says. “He is funny in a way that some people inhale and exhale. With others, you can tell the comedy, the humor is considered. With Norm, he exudes it. It’s sort of a furnace in him because he’s so effortless. The combination of the delivery and his appearance and his intelligence. There may be people as funny as Norm, but I don’t know anybody who is funnier.” -- David Letterman
(Norm Macdonald, most recent previously: 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Master Theorem Stirs.
After a near 5 year hiatus the diverse and devious puzzles of M have returned. As of yet, we don't know how frequently we'll be given our next challenge from the shadowy M. Previously puzzles were posted weekly, while further puzzles lurked within the seals. All the puzzles, prior to the interregnum are still up and waiting for you to have a crack at them.
“We really don’t know how many sign languages there are"
But just as linguists were substantiating its existence, HSL stood on the brink of extinction, remembered by just a handful of signers. Unless the language made a miraculous recovery, Lambrecht feared that her announcement might turn out to be HSL’s obituary.
Ask your bank for permission to pay!
"Our concern was an intuitive one about a potential future world in which we'd have to report our every economic move to a bank, and the effect this could have on marginalised people."
Leading Lady
"“A lot of our audiences are kids and teens, and they want to be in on the joke. And they’ll listen again. We’re just a little looser with this stuff than most traditional first ladies.”" -- Michelle Obama, interviewed by Variety.
👺
If you tweet @NYPLEmoji an emoji, it will respond with a related image from NYPL’s digital collections. (It’s not same fancy algorithm -sadly?- but rather a diligently-curated list - feel free to contribute!)
Stanford Revises Alcohol Policy, Continues To Not Understand The Problem
In response to the recent conviction of Stanford student and rapist Brock Turner, Stanford University has revised their alcohol policy, claiming to be doing so to combat sexual assault. But as observers and critics point out, the revisions place the blame on women and alcohol consumption, while protecting rapists. [more inside]
Clean that wind instrument
A new case study of a 61-year-old bagpipe player who died of hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a chronic inflammatory lung condition, found that it was likely caused by fungi growing inside his bagpipes. The study also notes that "there have been previous case reports of HP in saxophone and trombone players attributable to isolated fungi and Candida." [more inside]
From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration
The Legacy Of Lynching, On Death Row - "In Alabama, Bryan Stevenson is saving inmates from execution and memorializing the darkest episodes of America’s past."
Grad Students Can Now Unionize
The National Labor Relations Board ruled today that graduate students at private universities can unionize, reversing a previous decision in 2004. [more inside]
"I'll tell you what's unnatural in the eyes of God. Contact lenses."
Masai Graham has won the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival's best joke competition, with "My dad has suggested that I register for a donor card. He's a man after my own heart." [more inside]
King gets promotion
A post to celebrate the ascension of Sir Nils Olav III to Brigadier. The UK and Norway have a long history of mutual support. Not long after Norwegian independence explorers from each country raced for the South Pole. The UK had a lead role in efforts to liberate Norway in WW2, including hosting the king in exile, as commemorated by the annual gift of a Christmas tree from the people of Oslo to the people of London, another goes from Bergen to Newcastle, and there are numerous others. [more inside]
"‘Jette ce jouet’ — ‘throw that toy away’, get a real instrument"
"Toots" Thielemans died in his sleep in Brussels on Monday, August 22, 2016. He was 94. [more inside]
At whose sight all the stars, Hide their diminish'd heads.
Um, spoon?
Compare and contrast:
The new The Tick (Amazon, ep 1)
The old The Tick (YouTube, ep 1)
From the middle The Tick: vs. a vending machine
The new The Tick (Amazon, ep 1)
The old The Tick (YouTube, ep 1)
From the middle The Tick: vs. a vending machine
4, or Security
The South Bank Show, 1982, Peter Gabriel documents the recording of his fourth album. [49m] [more inside]
The Ray Bradbury Theater
All 65 episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater are available in full. (via boingboing) It ran on HBO 1985-1986 for two seasons and on the USA Network 1988-1992 for four more seasons. "All 65 episodes were written by Ray Bradbury and many were based on short stories or novels he had written..." The DVD set is available on Amazon.
August 22
A puzzle wrapped in an enigma
Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds. The rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014, a new study has found, for an estimated maternal mortality rate that is unmatched in any other state and the rest of the developed world.
Cinema isn't dying, it's evolving
The 100 greatest films of the 21st century (so far), as determined by 177 film critics from around the world.
"Military recruiting is a sophisticated psychological pursuit."
High School Students' Test Results Are Being Sent to Military Recruiters Without Consent
Data released by the Department of Defense on August 1st shows the military administered its 3-hour enlistment exam to nearly 700,000 students in 12,000 high schools during the 2013-14 school year, a 2% increase over the prior year. [...] For instance, North Little Rock High School tested 680, almost all of its juniors and seniors. All of the data was shipped to recruiters without mom and dad in the loop, while the Pentagon’s database reports that the students took the test voluntarily
Data released by the Department of Defense on August 1st shows the military administered its 3-hour enlistment exam to nearly 700,000 students in 12,000 high schools during the 2013-14 school year, a 2% increase over the prior year. [...] For instance, North Little Rock High School tested 680, almost all of its juniors and seniors. All of the data was shipped to recruiters without mom and dad in the loop, while the Pentagon’s database reports that the students took the test voluntarily
How Things Implode
Why the lids on beer steins? [1] The real reasons!
Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead.
Christopher Knowles (author of Our Gods Wear Spandex) has a remembrance of rock producer Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult, The Clash), who died July 16, on his Secret Sun blog: Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. [more inside]
"There were Americans everywhere." U.S. partiers wash up in Canada.
An estimated 1,500 Americans illegally and unexpectedly washed up in Canada late Sunday after strong winds blew them across the St. Clair River near Sarnia, Ont.
Did the ‘Two-Fingered Salute’ really come from the Hundred Years War?
I found this after giving my 9-year-old daughter the apparently incorrect version of the story. ”However it really came about, we can be pretty sure that it’s bugger all to do with medieval archers.”
It was utter fucking pandemonium.
On June 14th, 1991, Morrissey appeared on The Tonight Show to perform "Sing Your Life," and "There's a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends," as part of his Kill Uncle tour. This is the story of how Morrissey (and his fans) upstaged and perplexed Johnny Carson and now-disgraced celebrity guest Bill Cosby. 25 Years Ago, Morrissey Ruined Bill Cosby’s Appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ [more inside]
“it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial”
U.N. Admits Role in Cholera Epidemic in Haiti [The New York Times] “For the first time since a cholera epidemic believed to be imported by United Nations peacekeepers began killing thousands of Haitians nearly six years ago, the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial outbreak and that a “significant new set of U.N. actions” will be needed to respond to the crisis.” [Previously.] [Previously.] [more inside]
“The world’s first organic universal bitter blocker”
In its Aurora, Colorado production facility, MycoTechnology is fermenting mycelia, later blast-drying them into an odorless, tasteless powder called ClearTaste—what marketing manager Hahn would call “the world’s first organic universal bitter blocker.” Not a black coffee drinker? You could be with just a tiny sprinkle of the stuff. It works on the molecular level, bonding to taste receptors on your tongue and blocking signals to your brain that translate to perceiving bitterness. Such a substance could have big implications for the health of the United States’ sugar-addicted society. But like all food additives, it has its mysteries—and no one is sure exactly what your body does with it once it’s inside. (SLWired)
The autopen is mightier
In April, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe issued an executive order reinstating the voting rights of 200,000 convicted felons who had completed their sentences. [previously] Gov. McAuliffe's plan produced some unintended consequences, and incurred the ire of the General Assembly's top Republicans. The Supreme Court of Virginia overturned the original order in an opinion that rejected the Governor's "blanket use" of his restoration authority. Gov. McAuliffe is now proceeding in accordance with the Court's ruling, signing the first 13,000 individual orders with the assistance of an autopen.
The Homeless in America's National Forests
As Homeless Find Refuge in Forests, ‘Anger Is Palpable’ in Nearby Towns To millions of adventurers and campers, America’s national forests are a boundless backyard for hiking trips, rafting, hunting and mountain biking. But for thousands of homeless people and hard-up wanderers, they have become a retreat of last resort. [more inside]
laughing and not being normal.
The US military industry _is_ 'complex'
U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds - "The Defense Department's Inspector General, in a [July 26 (pdf)] report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up... The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress' annual budget – spends the public's money."
If you ain't got it, flaunt it.
Henderson informed the man that he had a tyre waiting for collection.
Dr. Donald Ainslie "D.A." Henderson, the Chief Medical Officer of the World Health Organization's fight against smallpox, has died at the age of 87. [more inside]
Girls of the Golden West
The San Francisco Opera, in a coproduction with the Dallas Opera, the Dutch National Opera, and Venice's Teatro La Fenice, will premiere Girls of the Golden West in November 2017. The new opera by composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars tells the story of "mining camps in the Sierra Mountains during the California Gold Rush of the early 1850’s. The libretto texts are drawn from first hand accounts by Mark Twain, newspaper articles, letters, journals, original Gold Rush song lyrics and political speeches and slogans."
X.
When he crossed the marathon finish line as a silver medalist, in 2 hours, 9 minutes and 54 seconds, earning a silver medal, Feyisa Lilesa put his hands above his head in an "X." He later explained that the gesture was meant to demonstrate his solidarity with his Oromo people in Ethiopia. "Amnesty International reports that at least 97 Oromo were killed in peaceful anti-government protests earlier this month. This is the latest in a string of protests that Human Rights Watch estimates have resulted in over 400 deaths in all. In addition to the killings, many more have been arrested and detained by the government."
Globalization is ancient
Mapping the Mercantilist World Economy Our current globalized capitalist world economy was built on Mercantilist foundations, put in place in the first phase of global European expansion, the second phase being that of the formal European empires of the industrial age. In the case of the “New World” in the Americas, Europe’s Mercantilists were creating entirely new trade networks and hinterlands. In the Old World of Afro-Eurasia however, Europe was rearranging the existing, much older, world economy it had been part of since the Middle Ages. I wanted to illustrate this first phase of global capitalism with thematic maps.
Peace and Quiet and Open Air / Wait for Us / Somewhere
76 trombones days to go in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and the candidates have a lot on their minds: Clinton makes a $95 million ad buy; Trump and his band of Steves yearn for calmer days when they'll be able to discuss Morning Joe gossip in peace, as Minion "9/11" Rudy spreads Clinton conspiracy theories; Egg McMuffin continues to do his thing.
Only 4400 miles to go
An older man who has been watching the entire time approaches me and tells me that he’s sorry that I lost control of my boat and that he’s sure it’ll wash up on the beach somewhere. I assure him that the boat is on autopilot, going exactly where it’s supposed to be going. “And where is that?” he asks. “Hawaii.” [more inside]
John Locke: Against Freedom
If Locke is viewed ... as an advocate of expropriation and enslavement, what are the implications for classical liberalism and libertarianism? The most important is that there is no justification for treating property rights as fundamental human rights, on par with personal liberty and freedom of speech.In an essay in Jacobin entitled John Locke Against Freedom, Australian economist John Quiggin argues that Locke's "classical liberalism offers no guarantee of freedom to anyone except owners of capitalist private property." [more inside]
Wandering New York
Wandering New York is a blog where amateur photographer Joseph Raskin posts new photos of various New York City neighborhoods every night.
Choose Your Poison... I mean, Sugary Cereal
It's the one election that truly matters: General Mills Monster Cereal Election. A three-way race with Boo Berry, Count Chocula and Franken Berry. So far, the Count is winning with 42% of the total vote and leading in 43 states. (registration required to vote, but there are prizes for participating, unlike other elections... no, you may not write in the Lucky Charms Leprechaun - I tried)
Kakonomics, or the strange preference for low-quality outcomes
‘I think that an important concept to understand why does life suck so often is Kakonomics, or the weird preference for Low-quality payoffs’—Gloria Origgi. [more inside]
The Millennial Whoop
The “Millennial Whoop” is a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs. A singer usually belts these notes with an “Oh” phoneme, often in a “Wa-oh-wa-oh” pattern. [more inside]
August 21
Dinosaurs are still, still alive!
Through an online contest, six fans are selected to film Dinosaur Jr. performing Bug in its entirety at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC, June 2011. Experience the fans' joy as they witness a classic performance and meet their heroes face to face in an exclusive interview with the band. Under the direction of Dave Markey (The Year Punk Broke), In the Hands of the Fans brings the fans closer to the band and the music closer to you. Includes bonus footage of Henry Rollins speaking candidly to Markey about the the band, and interviewing them on stage before the show. Single link Youstoobe so well recorded.
Teaching at the University of Dante
"a brief and non-linear pictorial history"
Does Marge have friends?
A poem, in tweets, about Marge Simpson by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, show runner and co-creator of Bojack Horseman.
"never met a Spanish cape or Siberian squirrelfur lining he didn't like"
Matthäus Schwarz was a 16th Century German accountant with a taste for fine clothing who managed to parlay his fashion sense into a noble title. He documented his life and clothing in an illuminated manuscript that has been recently translated, annotated and republished as The First Book of Fashion by Professor Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward, and includes reconstructed outfits by Jenny Tiramani. The process of remaking one of Schwarz's outfits is shown here. As befits a scholarly tome about a work often likened to modern style blogs, there is a First Book of Fashion Tumblr. Schwarz's son, Veit Konrad, also made his own illuminated style diary, but did not continue after his father's death in 1574. A slightly inaccurate copy was made in the 18th Century, a scan of which is available on Wikimedia Commons. Prof. Rublack puts Schwarz in context as a man of the Renaissance.
Nicol-ton an American Musical
“A place with so much atmosphere you have to push it aside to get in.”
As TGI Friday's goes minimalist, signalling the demise of restaurant Americana kitsch, what happens to all the antiques? Containing a pretty fascinating and comprehensive history of the development of the "good-time" chain restaurant/bar and the antique-picking and design work that created its signature feel. Previously.
“When you are a minority, it is no small thing to finally see yourself.”
What We Lose When POC Entertainers Crack Into The Mainstream [Buzzfeed] How Lilly Singh’s Superwoman and Jasmeet Singh’s JusReign navigate between two worlds.
good good splosions
BeamNG.drive is "a dynamic soft-body physics vehicle simulator capable of doing just about anything." Nick Robinson and Griffin McElroy are two guys who looked at that description and thought "...anything?" Welcome to CAR BOYS! (Currently there are only four episodes of this, but I hope and dream that there will be dozens or hundreds more.)
The women in my family had to be good with money
"I was twelve, in that liminal state between childhood and womanhood, still playing with dolls but also shopping for training bras. Eager to soak up lessons about what it meant to be a woman, I watched, and learned, never once questioning why a woman who had a job had to hide money from her husband."
(Previously somewhat related on mefi: The Fuck Off Fund.)
It's a ghost that sits on the skyline forever
August 20
Democrats- we put the fun back in funding!
Instead of inevitable forces, the New Liberal Economics argues that these changes are the result of the changing rules of the economy. The way that markets are structured and enforced, what the Roosevelt Institute calls the “rules” of the economy, are powerful determinants of who the economy works for.
[mechanical voice] ro. to. po.
You are a stick figure. In 3D. On squares. Don't fall down.
"The real award is the warm regard and respect of our peers and fans"
On Thursday, the 1941 Retro-Hugo Awards were presented at the 74th Worldcon. Relevant material online includes Slanology: An In-Depth Guide to A.E. van Vogt's Slan, "A Study of 'If This Goes On--'," 1950s radio adaptations of "The Roads Must Roll", comments/links on "Robbie", and Batman #1, as well as a review round-up of many finalists. The 2016 Hugo Awards ceremony set for 8pm CDT this evening will have both video and text coverage (see also #MAC2 on Twitter). The nominees have been broken down by slate at File 770, and Alexandra Erin offers timely remarks in anticipation of the outcome.
Inside the darkroom retreat movement
"A darkroom retreat is the modern day version of a yogi meditating in a cave in total darkness for an extended period...We got to reconnect with something the modern human race has completely lost touch with: just BEING. Not DOING anything…just being." [more inside]
Here, we see a mefite in her natural habitat!
Ride the Tube at 3 a.m.
Joining such cities and Berlin, Copenhagen, and — of course — New York, London inaugurates 24-hour Tube service (weekends only, limited lines).
"Because we know Pussyfoot is fine, we can laugh..."
Saturday Morning Cartoons: Feed the Kitty (1952) "This brief moment of black humor is a perfect example of how sophisticated Jones’ cartoons really were under the surface." by Brandie Ashe, The Retro Set
“A building heavy with secrets"
In 2005, junior Harvard historian Caroline Elkins's controversial first book, Imperial Reckoning: Britain's First Gulag, resurfaced the history of Britain's brutal internment camps for the ethnic group the Kikuyu, believed to be supporters of the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. She then found herself working for survivors of the camps in a landmark case seeking reparations from the British government. The plaintiffs were aided by the stunning discovery at the time of their case of massive archives--1.2 million files worth--held in illegal secrecy by the Foreign Office which included files systematically removed from former colonies as the British withdrew.
(Note: many of these links contain descriptions of violence against civilians.) [more inside]
"Tattoo With Heritage Since 1300"
El Hombre de 1000 Caras
MAMBO! with Luciano Rosso and Yma Súmac. Perhaps you prefer the Macarena? Don't miss his duet with a charming young lady.
There's more. [more inside]
There's more. [more inside]
From Montreal to Minnesota, by Inland Sea
"I was so used to driving and flying, my understanding of North America had become distorted. Then I took a slow boat through four Great Lakes. I saw every mile." [more inside]
Oh how I hate the morning
"Sexual pleasure as a theme in heavy metal largely died out with glam, but Type O revitalized the topic by turning the tables on the idea of the male frontman as mere sexual conqueror." Invisible Oranges: Type O Negative's October Rust turns 20.
It is as if you were playing chess
You’ve always wanted to be a chess master! But you aren’t one! Are you! Now you can at least look like one! Pretend you’re playing chess! Make moves! Act like you feel things! Smirk! Frown! Weep! Chess!
Poor Bugger Me, Gurindji
[This post includes links to names, images and audio of Aboriginal Australians who have died.]
It is fifty years this week since the start of the Wave Hill Walkoff of 1966-1975, which led to the first victory of the land-rights movement in Australia. Indigenous workers went on strike at the Vestey mega-station in Australia's Northern Territory. Walking off the job and sitting down in Daruragu country, the Gurindji people began a nine-year campaign to regain control of their land. To mark the occasion, I give you Gurindji Blues, recorded during that struggle in 1971 by Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Vincent Lingiari and written by Ted Egan. I have long lost my copy of this single and wanted to hear it again tonight. Thanks internet! [more inside]
Fictitious Feasts
A series of pictures of food as eaten in world famous scenes in literature. Charles Roux creates these fictitious meals, photographs them and then eats them. His goal is to collect the photographs in a book, putting the meals back on paper, where they belong.
there exists no evidence for ontological nihilism...
John O'Leary Hawthorne and Andrew Cortens:
TOWADS AN ONTOLOGICAL NIHILISM
(JSTOR, Springer, Academia.edu )In this paper, we wish to motivate a radical cluster of metaphysical pictures that have tempted philosohpers from a variety of traditions. These pictures share one important theme - they refuse to accord countable entities any place in the fundamental scheme of things. Put another way, they all suggest that the concept of an object has no place in a perspicuous characterization of reality. Such pictures suffer from a number of fairly obvious prima facie difficulties. They seem to fly in the face of common sense. They seem to suggest that just about everything we say is false. They seem to gesture at a noumenal reality that human language is unable to describe. And so on. Our aim is to meet such difficulties head on, and by doing so, vindicate this sort of radical picture as one that deserves to be taken seriously.[more inside]
August 19
Eat your breakfast
Music from Melbourne: the sounds of Wondercore Island
Wondercore Island is a Melbourne-based label/ artist management and PR company label that supports a range of future soul, alternative and hip-hop acts, including Clever Austin, Ainslie Wills, Jaala, Oscar Key Sung, Vulture St. Tape Gang, Hiatus Kaiyote, and Sampa the Great, to name a few groups and artists. You can check out more from this umbrella group/ thing on Vimeo, YouTube, Soundcloud and perhaps most conveniently on Bandcamp, where they have a number of mixtapes and other musical collections available to stream and download for free.
Auto mechanics pay homage to the legendary Renaissance painters
Graphs of the Economy
Macrotrends has tons of economic graphs. Interactive historical charts of the Dow Jones Industrials Index, gold, crude oil not to mention oats, wheat, silver and aluminum. Also US unemployment perspectives, US debt-to-GDP, US National debt by President and everyone's favorite the 1929 Stock Market Crash. The data and the graphs are free to download.
Murmiland
Marble sculptures by Ortwin Gruettner.
- Cheese, Mice, Marbles, Surprise!
- Murmi Does Not Like His Food
- Dragon Castle, Land, Village
- Marble Run Palace
Authority radiates from his neon orange vest
The people who measure the race courses for the Olympics.
Sorry, The Therapist Can't See You — Not Now, Not Anytime Soon
"More than 43 million Americans have depression, anxiety, or another mental health condition. But more than half never get help. Recent laws were supposed to make it easier for Californians to access treatment, but many still face roadblocks, even with insurance. In this special series by KQED's The California Report and State of Health we travel across the state to find out why it’s so difficult to get mental health care." A half-hour radio special by April Dembosky. (Links with written versions of the individual stories inside.) [more inside]
“Hands to the sky”
Frank Ocean Releases Visual Album Endless: Frank Ocean has released a 45-minute long video titled “Endless.” A representative from Apple Music calls it his new “visual album.” The rep also told Pitchfork to “keep an eye out this weekend for more from Frank.” It features new Frank songs and takes place in the same warehouse where Ocean has been hosting a web stream. The new songs feature contributions from Jonny Greenwood, James Blake, and more; two songs were recorded at Abbey Road. The status of Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry and its long-reported accompanying print publication are currently unclear. Find the tracklist below, and watch “Endless” here (iTunes). [via: Pitchfork Media] [more inside]
Search: catastrophic Martian tsunami
NASA’s new online archive is a treasure trove of free research articles: NASA launched a free online archive for science journal articles that were funded by the space agency. The archive, which was announced this week, is called PubSpace, and it will make available research and data that are often hidden behind the subscriptions and paywalls of scientific journals. [more inside]
"Around the world in the LRB Archive"
One Hundred Diaries is a map with links to a selection of a hundred short personal essays that have appeared in The London Review of Books throughout the years. The essays revolve around a place somewhere in the world , including Neal Ascherson writing about Ilullilat in Greenland, Jenny Diski writing about Christchurch in New Zealand, Perry Anderson writing about Nantes in France, Rebecca Solnit writing about New Orleans in the US, Hilary Mantel writing about Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Anneke van Woudenberg writing about Kilo in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
What would birds in flight look like if time was all smushed together?
Due Process
A Family Matter. Each year, California’s child protective services agencies remove thousands of kids from their homes. Some parents decided to fight back.
Paper Calculator
Becoming Disabled
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes for the New York Times: "Disability is everywhere once you start noticing it. A simple awareness of who we are sharing our public spaces with can be revelatory. Wheelchair users or people with walkers, hearing aids, canes, service animals, prosthetic limbs or breathing devices may seem to appear out of nowhere, when they were in fact there all the time."
Women and hunger
"To desire effort from a man, we are taught, is to transgress in several ways. (This is true even if you’ve never had or wanted a romantic relationship with a man.)... For a woman who has learned to make herself physically and emotionally small, to live literally and figuratively on scraps, admitting that you have an appetite is a source of cavernous fear."
SMPTE Fanfic
Fantasy Test Cards is a YouTube channel that features dozens of fake television test patterns, each accompanied by an hour of relaxing music. [via] [more inside]
Munchausen and Murder
Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered Dee Dee Blancharde was a model parent: a tireless single mom taking care of her gravely ill child. But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out things weren’t as they appeared — and her daughter Gypsy had never been sick at all.
Chilundu Leopards
What Latin Sounded Like and How We Know
NativLang, brainchild of linguist Joshua Rudder, has a series of videos dealing with various aspects of language, orthography, and so forth. For example:
What Latin Sounded Like and How We Know.
Kanji Story - How Japan Overloaded Chinese Characters... The Tribe That Cursed Too Much
...
How Korea crafted a better alphabet...
India's awesome hybrid alphabet thing...
Semitic's vowel-smuggling consonants...
The Hardest Language To Spell [more inside]
In the midst of a vast solitude
In the 1920s the US industrialist wanted to found a city based on the values that made his company a success – while, of course, producing cheap rubber. The jungle city that bore his name ended up one of his biggest failuresDrew Reed, Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon, The Guardian (19 August 2016). [more inside]
Folding space time
August 18
"I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall"
Artsy presents a well-edited 4-part series of videos on The Art Market: Auctions, Galleries, Patrons, and Art Fairs
Cats and dogs, living together, mass adorableness
Side effects of growing up with Bull Mastiffs, this cat thinks she is one. She's cute, but she's no Rosie. As a kitten, she was save by the maternal Lilo the Husky (Facebook), a cat-loving Husky (YouTube) who lives in a household (Instagram) with other feral cats that are trapped, neutered and released (TNR) or raised and a couple more Huskies. Now a much larger cat, Rosie likes to walk and hike with the Huskies.
"There's No Good Reason to Support Nate Parker"
"They believed the power of a film, and the potency of Parker’s narrative, would be enough to “deflect” from the events “17 years” in the past. . . . But a different mode of accountability is necessary: on the part of those who perpetuate the abuse, but also from those within the industry whose machinations have, in the past, made it disappear and, in so doing, effectively enabled its continuation. To “spin” a story, after all, is to discredit, erase, or deflect so that one’s client’s viability within the industry remains unfettered — which is exactly what has happened to victims of sexual assault for decades." Anne Helen Peterson on Nate Parker's Alleged Rape and The Limits of Hollywood Damage Control (tw: rape, suicide) [more inside]
Gawker.com, 2003-2016
"After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week." [more inside]
Reasons I'm fat
Why Am I So Fat? Sara Benincasa answers a fan's question.
“Pesticides and beekeeping have been butting heads for 50-plus years”
Did you know, Mom? Dad?
New Merck ad for Gardasil is sparking controversy - do they tell the hard truths, or are they guilt-tripping parents? Earlier this summer, Merck began airing new commercials for Gardasil. These commercials (which show an adult man and an adult woman talking about how they had cancers caused by HPV, and then show video clips in a "rewind" to a child actor who asks if their parents knew that their cancer could have been prevented), have upset some who say that the ad bullies parents. Proponents of the ads say the ads give parents the facts necessary to hold them accountable. [more inside]
From Jingoism to Feelings - the aesthetic response to collective trauma
Lindsay Ellis' (previously) new video series 'Loose Canon' (Previously) takes a look at the different media takes on the same cultural character or property. She takes on the longest and most detailed one yet with the media reaction to and portrayal of the 2001 9/11 attacks. Part 1 (21:21) Part 2 (27:37) (Warning for photos and video of attacks)
The Art World Is Like Being In Mafia: Some Things Aren't Discused
I'm going to imagine you have the basics: over ₤10M in the bank, a yacht, luxury London apartment, second home in Monaco, offshore bank account, and if not a private jet, at least access to one. Good, are you sitting comfortably in your designer Italian armchair? Then we can begin.
-The Banker's Guide To Art
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Justice Department to end use of private prisons. The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.
Because who has time to read whole articles?
Explain To Me is an automatic text summarizer, that utilizes TextRank, a graph based algorithm to scan through the contents of a website and extract a concise machine generated summary. Python Code
Going undercover against extremism
"A long-running undercover police operation in the Bedfordshire town of Luton, which has contributed evidence to two recent counter-terrorism trials, helped build up an incredibly detailed picture of the depths of loathing for Britain felt by the men at the heart of the investigation.
Kamal switches on the recorder and speaks into the microphone, stating the date, the time and where he's about to go. And then he leaves the house, leaves his true self behind, and walks towards danger."
Troubling, enduring work of New England’s strangest son
A new wave of Lovecraftian stories confront, rather than ignore, the racism and antisemitism that permeated Lovecraft's work, and, indeed, served as the basis for much of the horror. This roundtable of authors discussing how they address the problems of Lovecraft is worthwhile. Some authors are explicitly using Lovecraft as a lens on contemporary racism, such as in Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country [PDF preview], while others mine Lovecraft's fear of the other to examine bigotry, as in Ruthanna Emrys's lovely Litany of Earth [full story] (Emyrs is also part of the Lovecraft Reread, which looks at both the Mythos-building and uncomfortable aspects of Lovecraft's stories). Previously, on the World Fantasy Awards and Lovecraft.
American Beauty: Our Hair, Ourselves
Candacy Taylor spent seven years studying American beauty shop culture. Her 20,000-mile journey among salons catering to African-American, Appalachian, Cajun, Dominican, Gullah, Jamaican, Japanese, Orthodox Jewish, Lumbee Indian, Pakistani, and LGBT communities led her to this conclusion: "[R]ace matters, you know? And more specifically it's about hair texture....Practically every ethnicity has developed a specialized product or procedure to change their hair texture, and as a result, beauty shop culture is a window into contemporary understandings about race, segregation, and integration." Transcript [txt doc] of her 2014 lecture, from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. [more inside]
I needed to finally find Carmen Sandiego once and for all.
Our show is 100 percent African
“An African City” features music from Ghanaian hip-hop artists like Jayso, chic home décor from Ghanaian interior designers highlighted in detail on the show’s Instagram page, and clothing from fashion designers like Christie Brown, Archel Bernard, Kiki Clothing, Osei-Duro and Afrodesiac. The vibrant colors and pop patterns have been the toast of the series, especially as members of the African diaspora have begun to incorporate kente cloth crop tops into their wardrobes and wear traditional patterns to big events like prom. Vogue cannot get enough of them. Previously
Tanks for Sale
The Normandy Tank Museum is selling it’s entire collection.
August 17
The Grey Lady's Big Plans
Can Anyone Save the New York Times from Itself? "In 2014 the New York Times Media Group generated just over half the advertising revenue it did in 2002. The organization now generates more revenue from its subscribers than its advertisers. And while the Times now has more than 1 million paid digital-only subscribers, an estimated 70 percent of the company revenue still comes from print subscriptions and advertising. (... the Times’s individually paid weekday print circulation as of September 2015 was 528,000, compared to over 1 million for The Wall Street Journal and 330,000 for The Washington Post. Its Sunday circulation is more than 1.1 million...) In other words: digital revenue is nowhere near enough to support a 1,300-person newsroom—a number that even [executive editor] Dean Baquet has acknowledged must shrink." [more inside]
NSA malware released by "The Shadow Brokers"
Was the N.S.A. Hacked? A group calling itself The Shadow Brokers [Google cache], widely supposed to actually be Russian state-backed hackers, released an archive of purported NSA Tailored Access Operations/'Equation Group' malware, including zero-day exploits on commercial routers. NSA insiders confirm likely legitimacy. The archive dates to mid-2013, shortly after the Snowden revelations, leading him and others to ponder whether the resulting cleanup operation shut out the hackers. Schneier guesses the timing was meant to signal the Obama administration against sanctions for the DNC hack.
Story of Your Life
Trailer for Arrival, the new Denis Villeneuve film based on a Ted Chiang short story, starring Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker and Jeremy Renner. Ted Chiang on seeing his stories adapted to the screen. Previous Ted Chiang.
We Built This Robot to Explain Rape Culture to Men
Reductress Is Devoting Its Entire Site to Rape Jokes That Punch Up: "In response to a sexual assault controversy that’s currently engulfing the New York comedy scene, women’s satire site Reductress has devoted its entire landing page to humor articles (primarily written by women) about rape."
[warning: pointed satire about rape, rape culture, and abuse] [more inside]
Somewhere Between A Bottle Of Nail Polish And A Can Of Soda
FiveThirtyEight's "Science Questions from a Toddler" series aims to "use the curiosity of kids ages 5 and younger as a jumping-off point to investigate the scientific wonders that adults don’t even think to ask about. The answers are for adults, but they wouldn’t be possible without the wonder only a child can bring." Their most recent article is "How Big is a Fart?" [more inside]
“Wronnnng!”
John McLaughlin, TV Host Who Made Combat of Punditry, Dies at 89 [The New York Times] John McLaughlin, a former Roman Catholic priest who became an aide to Richard M. Nixon in the White House and parlayed his fierce defense of the president into a television career as host of “The McLaughlin Group,” the long-running Sunday morning program of combative political punditry, died on Tuesday at his home in Washington. He was 89. [more inside]
I am the Potter Who Was
George Ohr: The Mad Potter of Biloxi. Visit the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum in Biloxi, where his twisted, flowing, lumpy, misshapen, crimped, dented, folded, and shimmering ceramic pieces are on display. [more inside]
‾‾‾MAKE‾IT‾‾‾‾ ‾‾‾‾STRANGER‾‾‾‾
makeitstranger.com is a toy that lets you generate Stranger Things-style logos with the text of your choice. Spaces, alas, are forbidden.
"The hair stood up on the back of my neck. There's two of them!"
Stealing Bitcoins with Badges: How Silk Road’s Dirty Cops Got Caught. Ars Technica explores the investigation into two federal agents/contemporaries who were, unbeknownst to one another, simultaneously robbing the online drug marketplace they were tasked with bringing down. [more inside]
Jeffrey Wood
In 1996, Jeffrey Wood was sitting in a getaway car, when, inside a convenience store, his friend Daniel Reneau shot and killed a clerk during a botched robbery. Wood was sentenced to death in Kerr County in March 1998, and will be executed next week in Texas. He was sentenced to death under Texas’ felony murder statute, commonly known as the law of parties, which holds that anyone involved in a crime resulting in death is equally responsible, even if they weren't directly involved in the actual killing. Under the law, prosecutors are not required to prove that a defendant had any part in committing a crime, or even intended to commit it. [more inside]
Some of these methods have proven invaluable. Others less so.
As of August 23rd, NPR.org is discontinuing its Disqus-based comment system and will not replace it. [more inside]
Pac animal
World-record-holding balloon fiend Twinkie hunts down ghosts and balloons (but mostly balloons) in Pac-Dog
She’s never ever cute or soft or scared of you.
"Her hair is done. Her makeup is flawless; her coat, luxurious. She’s single...We love her and we hate her in equal measure. We feel that way because she revels in being all the things that we are told we aren’t allowed to be."
Burkinis interdits
Beach bans on the Burkini in France sparks widespread debate. Burkinis (or burqinis) are a type of swimwear for women that offers full coverage. They are mostly, but not exclusively, worn by Muslim women. Now three French cities have banned the burkini from their beaches: Cannes, Villeneuve-Loubet and Sisco on the island of Corsica have done so, and Le Touquet on the Atlantic coast is planning to do the same. This has understandably lead to a lot of discussion. [more inside]
Queering up the big screen... in teensy tiny steps
The Guardian wonders about why queer characters are coming along on the big screen so slowly and attempts some answers drawing on recent examples like Star Trek Beyond, Deadpool and Ghostbusters.
Lucien Blyau 1925-2016
"He started passing up water to Criquielion and his team mates. Then others saw him handing up bottles and wanted some too. He could hardly say no." [more inside]
"the ad indicated whether the A, B or C ending was playing..."
“[John Landis] thought it would be really great box office,” director Jonathan Lynn told BuzzFeed. “He thought that what would happen was that people, having enjoyed the film so much, would then go back and pay again and see the other endings.” Here’s The Odd Way Audiences Experienced ‘Clue’ 30 Years Ago (Andrew Husband, Uproxx) Previously: Mrs. White, in the marketing office, with a focus group
FBI Seeks Spy-App Developer
Are you an app developer? Are you covert as hell? Do you think we should all throw our privacy cautions to the wind? Boy, does the FBI have the job for you: design an app to help the government spy. [more inside]
Are there exercises he could do?
"Buckle up."
With his campaign chair Paul Manafort mired in scandal and polls showing Arizona and Georgia on the brink of going blue, an increasingly agitated Donald Trump has launched a major shake-up of his political staff. Reportedly infuriated by talk of being "tamed," the Republican nominee has rejected Manafort's moderating sway in favor of Breitbart News CEO Steve* Bannon, an alt-right firebrand who Bloomberg has called "the most dangerous political operative in America." Washington Post reporter Robert Costa foresees a vicious campaign in the making, a prospect further suggested by rumors that disgraced Fox News founder Roger Ailes will be advising Trump ahead of next months' debates with Hillary Clinton (whose odds of a landslide are currently on par with that of any Trump victory). [more inside]
Nice exchanges there, be a pity if anything happened
On August 16, major healthcare provider Aetna announced that it was pulling plans in exchanges under the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") in 11 states, claiming they were losing (and expecting to lose) too much money under the new law. But the story doesn't end there. [more inside]
Sobriety, Wine O'Clock, and the 24-Hour Woman
"But knives and booze, yoga and booze, 13 mile runs and booze? What’s next to be liquored up: CPR training? Puppy ballet class? (Not really a thing, but someone should get on it.) Is there nothing so inherently absorbing or high-stakes or pleasurable that we won’t try to alter our natural response to it? Maybe women are so busy faking it — to be more like a man at work, more like a porn star in bed, more like 30 at 50 — that we don’t trust our natural responses anymore. Maybe all that wine is an Instagram filter for our own lives, so we don’t see how sallow and cracked they’ve become." Writer Kristi Coulter on making it to "the other side of the pool."
Who you gonna call? (An-ces-tors!)
15 Funky Things Chinese People Burnt for their Ancestors A quirky look into a mainstay ritual of the Hungry Ghost Festival. What's that? From the Straits Times: All You Need to Know and Heed about the 7th Month Celebrations. From The Beijinger: Everything You Need to Know About this Year's Ghost Festival. And maybe you're familiar with the festival and all its taboos. Or are you?
there’s so much more diversity in our fiction, if we just look for it
152 published authors of speculative fiction, of Asian descent. (includes links to stories by the authors, if available online.)
"I could sit here and read figures until I'm blue in the face..."
Australiafilter: MeFi fave and science hearthrob Professor Brian Cox responds to climate change denier, sovereign citizen and Australian senator-elect Malcolm Roberts on ABC panel show Q&A. [more inside]
Hot f***ing Wheels
August 16
The rise of anti-intellectualism online
Fik-Shun at World of Dance
World of Dance is a dance competition that's been running for a few years. Fik-Shun is a professional dancer, a regular in the competition and on So You Think You Can Dance. Here are three of his World of Dance performances: Las Vegas 2014, and Bay Area 2015, Hawaii 2016.
You are worth having coffee with.
Francis Su is a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and the first non-white president of the Mathematical Association of America. In 2013, he presented his Haimo Teaching Award lecture, The Lesson of Grace in Teaching. For Su, when we learn the lesson of grace—that we have dignity irrespective of accomplishments—and when we impart that lesson to our students, we make good teaching, enthusiastic learning, and honest evaluation possible. [more inside]
"To read a Saki story is to hire an assassin."
One hundred years ago, a soldier named Hector Hugh Munro was shot in the head as he crossed no-man’s-land. The night had been dark. Some of the soldiers accompanying him had lit up when they stopped to rest, and the glowing cigarettes attracted a German sniper’s attention. His last words were reported to be: ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’ The soldier was perhaps the wittiest writer Britain had; his other name was Saki.–Ferrets can be gods, a short essay by Katherine Rundell on the Edwardian short story writer Saki. His stories are available online.
Googly-Eyed Stubby Squid
Puppies!!!
It is time once again for Denali's Sled Dog Puppy Cam. 'Nuff said.
Colloquially known as the 'underboob selfie'
As Thailand is discovering, the smartphone — for all its indispensability as a tool of business and practicality — is also a bearer of values; it is not a culturally neutral device.
And if digital imperialism is happening — if smartphones and other gadgets are bearing cultural freight as they cross borders — there is little doubt as to which nation’s values are hiding in the hold.
@Kyle_MacLachlan can you explain Dune to me please
Simon and Garfunkel: two voices, one guitar, live on stage 50 years ago
Fifty years ago, a few months before they released their third studio album, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel took to the stage in Holland on a TV Show called 'Twien' with just their two voices and one guitar. Here's 23 minutes of music and some interludes with information about selected songs. Playlist: 'Richard Cory,' 'Homeward Bound,' 'Leaves That Are Green,' 'I Am A Rock,' 'A Most Peculiar Man,' 'A Poem On The Underground Wall,' 'He Was My Brother,' and 'The Sound Of Silence.' [Alternative link - slightly longer, but watermarked video.] [more inside]
“We said we wouldn’t do that!”
Harry Potter and the Possible Queerbaiting: [The Guardian] JK Rowling’s Cursed Child has drawn fire over its story of male friendship, which some readers feel flirts coyly with gay romance – but it is a change from the usual stereotypes. [more inside]
Let memesplain Harambe
On July 27, Abby Ohlheiser at The Washington Post explained how “the Internet won’t let Harambe rest in peace”, and Brian Feldman at New York Magazine tried to characterize “the dark internet humor of Harambe jokes.”
As of today, the fact that over 60,000 people now want Harambe to be a Pokémon has prompted another hot take from Ben Guarino at the Post. For a business angle, Fruzsina Eordogh at Forbes explains how Harambe can grace indie tees but remain “too dark for brands”. Meanwhile, Brett Milam of Cincinnati.com has a rundown of the gorilla’s appearances, and Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Verge reviews recent memes and declares Harambe to be one of three Memes of the Summer.
As of today, the fact that over 60,000 people now want Harambe to be a Pokémon has prompted another hot take from Ben Guarino at the Post. For a business angle, Fruzsina Eordogh at Forbes explains how Harambe can grace indie tees but remain “too dark for brands”. Meanwhile, Brett Milam of Cincinnati.com has a rundown of the gorilla’s appearances, and Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Verge reviews recent memes and declares Harambe to be one of three Memes of the Summer.
Cupcake ATM
Tired of the gelato crises? Let me share the joys of the Cupcake ATM (also in Chicago!) It was a long day at a local anime convention, and my comic creating friends and I hopped into a van and trekked out to the cupcake atm on 50 east walton street. [more inside]
Sex Pigs Halt Traffic
Sex pigs halt traffic after laser attack on Pokémon teens. Tiny Insjön in central Sweden isn't known for pig mask-wearing couples shooting lasers at Pokémon hunters before having sex against a waterwheel. But that could be about to change. (SLSwedishlocalnews)
Winner, winner...
Are rotisserie chickens a bargain? The short answer is "probably not," except for Costco (and Smart and Final, which I have never heard of). The long answer is an interesting detour through Boston Market, chicken sourcing, and Mark Bittman's famous simple roast chicken recipe. Which rotisserie chicken is the best is subject to somewhat more debate. If cost efficiency isn't your thing, you can dive right in with the $79 version at The NoMad - with foie gras and black truffle.
“Have you noticed,” she asked, “the clothes thing?”
Stand your ground laws don't include domestic violence victims
Libby Anne has a well researched and sourced post about stand your ground laws and how they apply, or rather don't apply, to the victims of domestic violence The TL;DR is that in 11 states stand your ground laws explicitly do not apply to the victims of domestic violence (unless they have a restraining order). As a result many women nationwide are serving long prison sentences for defending themselves.
Are spoilers protected by copyright law?
The last scene of the sixth season of The Walking Dead was a cliffhanger in its purest (if not most literal) sense -- the newly introduced villain Negan (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bashed his barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat (a.k.a. "Lucille") repeatedly into one of the good guy's heads, presumably killing that person. But who was it? AMC doesn't want you to know, arguing that it is "the most critical plot information in the unreleased next season of The Walking Dead" and sending at least one cease-and-desist letter to a fan site, claiming copyright protection against the release of spoilers.
" vision of a world full of code, a cyborg world"
Go Hack Yourself: Richard Marshall interviews Samir Chopra, CUNY Philosophy professor, cricket writer, and more. [more inside]
Herald of the infant spring
Poetic Botany is a new exhibition from the New York Botanical Garden devoted to the transformation of botanical science into both verse and illustration. Using examples from nine different plants, the exhibit traces the ramifications of poetic botany for both science and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture. [more inside]
The Terrifying, Already Forgotten JFK Airport Shooting That Wasn’t
"When the first stampede began, my plane had just landed" - NY Magazine features a personal experience with Sunday's false reports of a shooting at JFK airport in New York City. "Horrifying" video of the police response, which is being investigated.
“It looks like a war zone,” he said. Because it is.
Bill McKibben asks us for a WWII-scale climate change mobilization. Maybe it's time to think of climate change as a war, argues Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org).
"I wanted to try something a little bit different."
August 15
Are rich nations turning their back on the world?
The end of internationalism: Are rich nations turning their back on the world? is a piece covering the World Food Programs report: A World At Risk: Humanitarian Response At A Crossroads. [more inside]
Totall recall
The Detectives Who Never Forget a Face
London’s new squad of “super-recognizers” could inspire a revolution in policing.
[Super recognizers previously]
London’s new squad of “super-recognizers” could inspire a revolution in policing.
[Super recognizers previously]
‘Suck It Up’
"With neighborhoods in Brooklyn along the L line — among the city’s busiest subway routes — in anguish over losing their train to Manhattan for 18 months, New Yorkers living in so-called subway deserts have a message: Welcome to the club." [more inside]
Association of American Publishers Pick on Wrong Librarian
"...it seems pretty ridiculous for the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to freak out so much about an academic librarian just mentioning Sci-Hub while on a panel discussion, that it would send an angry letter to that librarian's dean. But, that's exactly what AAP did." [more inside]
My bellybutton is not the center of my world
In the ’70s, she motorcycled around the world. Today, she’s fashion’s unlikely new muse. Meet Chloé’s freewheeling inspiration, Anne-France Dautheville. [NYT] [more inside]
get back to the sponges
The NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer is currently livestreaming its exploratin of the uncharted deep sea ecosystems and seafloor the Wake Atoll Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Tune in between 0830 and 1630 Fiji time for coverage; come for the corals, stay for the scientist banter. (Previous voyages from 2013 and 2014.)
TV Illustrated
In the days before widespread cable TV with electronic menus, people relied on print guides to know what to watch and when to watch it. The regional New York paper Newsday had its resident staff artist Gary Viskupic provide illustrations for the movies, specials, and day-to-day programs. Nostalgia blog don't parade on my rain has a collection of scans showing Viskupic's trippy, macabre line art, giving a certain amount of panache to the rather pedestrian world of TV Scheduling. Part 1 (including: Kubrick's 2001, NBC Reports: But is this Progress?, Hellstrom Chronicle) and Part 2 (including: Rosemary's Baby, The Marx Bro's Coconauts, Bunny of the Year Pageant). [more inside]
The sound of one hand saxing
Neill Duncan is a jazz saxophone player who lost an arm in 2012. He now plays a saxophone designed for one-handed players by Maarten Visser. Two of Visser's designs for tenor and soprano saxophones won this year's One Handed Musical Instrument Trust instrument competition. But Duncan isn't the only player using one, Visser isn't the only one designing them, and saxophones aren't the only instruments adapted for one-handed players. [more inside]
The aftermath of the attempted Turkish coup of July 15, 2016
A month ago, forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan quashed a coup attempt by the some members of the military that began on the evening of July 15, 2016, and ended with at least 290 dead and more than 1,400 injured. Over the month since the attempted uprising, more than 23,000 people have been detained and nearly 82,000 have been suspended or removed from their jobs. Amidst the series of dismissals and detainments and the five straight days of rallies by Erdoğan supporters, Erdoğan declared a three-month long state of emergency. What it's like living in Turkey after the failed coup: pride and fear one month on. [more inside]
The best there is at what he does...
...with Channing Tatum as the mermaid
"I want to see a gender-swapped remake of every movie. Literally every one. And some television shows.
I will elaborate."
No wand for you!
Richard Carter hand-makes magic wands for sale at Mystical Moments in Slaithwaite, England. And these are not toys for Harry Potter fans, he will have you know. [more inside]
Interactive Dynamic Video
From Abe Davis's PhD work at MIT comes Interactive Dynamic Video, a technique that uses video recording and vibration analysis to produce interactive estimated interactions. (slyt)
From the Kerner Commission to Milwaukee
In 1967, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission) started with the mandate to answer three questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?
Milwaukee resident Reggie Jackson explores those questions in light of systemic issues affecting Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the most segregated metropolitan area in the US, in light of the civil unrest following a police shooting on Saturday.
Milwaukee resident Reggie Jackson explores those questions in light of systemic issues affecting Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the most segregated metropolitan area in the US, in light of the civil unrest following a police shooting on Saturday.
Sailing the seven seas of Microhouse
MusicMap is an interactive music infographic developed by Kwinten Crauwels that traces the evolution and influences of several genres/sub-genres in contemporary popular music, ranging from Gospel from the 1870s to the electronic music of the late 70s.
Very much like the classic Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (previously), zoom in from the super-genres and clicking on a genre gives you its' genealogy, as well as a brief history, historical context, and samples (here, full videoclips).
"Yo man, how's your blackout?!"
"As New York City continues to wilt its way through a stifling heat wave, it's appropriate to remember that things could be worse: 13 years ago [yesterday], a massive 30-hour blackout began, thanks to an overgrown tree branch in Cleveland." [more inside]
"We don't deserve what is being offered right now as dessert."
There's a crisis in Chicago. A gelato crisis.
ack! thppt!
Political Animals Last summer, after a decades-long hiatus, Berkeley Breathed resurrected his beloved, prescient comic strip ‘Bloom County’ — on Facebook. Can a Reagan-era political cartoon make sense of the internet age? [more inside]
The first casualty of the new late-night wars
"In the midst of a wild and unpredictable presidential campaign, Comedy Central is upending its late-night lineup and canceling Larry Wilmore’s show." "The cancellation makes Mr. Wilmore, 54, an early casualty of a television late-night comedy slate that has been vastly reordered over the last two years. With the retirement of David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert’s move from Comedy Central to CBS, a series of new hosts have stepped into the spotlight, including James Corden, Samantha Bee and Mr. Noah. Jimmy Fallon, the host of “The Tonight Show,” has most formidably filled the power vacuum left by his predecessors, with the highest ratings of any late night show." [more inside]
Microsoft™ Professional White Background 365 Essentials RT Edge Edition®
Microsoft Branding Generator [warning: autoplaying audio]
Bucolic for visitors, but less so for those working on them.
"Eddie had a certain kind of showbiz swagger for a 15-year-old"
If you wanted to see the Beatles when they came to DC in 1966, you could stand outside their hotel to catch a glimpse. Or, you could impersonate the opening act.
Ancillary Justice Fan Trailer
August 14
"Welcome to last year."
Last summer, the Rocky Fire, followed by the Valley Fire, followed by the Jerusalem Fire, tore through Lake County, California.
Yesterday, the Clayton Fire began. Now, just over 24 hours later, the fire is at 2000 acres with 5% containment, and has destroyed most of Lower Lake. Thousands are evacuating in a small community that is primarily low-income families, and there are reports that the elementary and high school are burning.
Once again, the traditional news organisations are less useful than Twitter in distributing updates, videos, and devastating pictures. Many people following the fire on Twitter have had to teach the traditional media how to use Twitter. [more inside]
The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free..
President Obama's Summer Reading List [The Guardian] The White House released [whitehouse.gov] Barack Obama’s summer reading list on Friday as the first family vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a mix of prize-winning novels and the memoir of a surfer who spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, something the president can appreciate. [Previously.] [more inside]
Map of Roads Leading to Rome
Explore the Peutinger Map is a website companion to Prof. Richard J. A. Talbert's Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Google Books, Amazon). It presents The Peutinger Map in different ways, including with overlays and lists of geographical features. But what's The Peutinger Map? Also known as Tabula Peutingeriana, it is a Medieval copy of highly stylized 4th Century map of the Roman road network, extending to India. Jacob Ford explains why it is often compared to modern public transit maps [pdf] and then redraws one section as a New York Metro map. Euratlas has scans of the Medieval manuscript stored at the Austrian National Library and Wikimedia Commons has a high quality scan of Konrad Miller's authoritative 1888 facsimile edition.
"To be masculine-presenting is to be weird, abnormal, ugly, bad"
Why Does Hollywood Have A Problem With Unfeminine Girls? [spoilers for Stranger Things]
[Poke Sheep]
Moirai is 10-minute-long free game that you should play without reading anything about it besides maybe this RPS article. [more inside]
Venezuela: Another Nightmare
Hard Times in Venezuela Breed Malaria as Desperate Flock to Mines. "With the economy in tatters, at least 70,000 people from all walks of life have been streaming into this mining region over the past year, said Jorge Moreno, a leading mosquito expert in Venezuela. As they hunt for gold in watery pits, the perfect breeding ground for the mosquitoes that spread the disease, they are catching malaria by the tens of thousands." [more inside]
Disco's Last Party with Nicky Siano
Nicky Siano is an iconic disco DJ credited with being the first person to beat match successive songs. He was a founder of seminal disco club, The Gallery. Here is 4+ hours of his Last Party playlist, from his 60th birthday bash.
The sea roiled like water in a pasta pot about to boil
William "Barry" Brockett of Tallahassee, FL, is the 34rd grand-prize winner of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges writers to concoct the worst opening sentence of a hypothetical novel. (Or, to look at it another way, the best sentence in the genre of "bad opening sentences.") The full list of winners, runners-up, and dishonorable mentions. [more inside]
L Delaney Miniatures
L Delaney is an artist who creates miniatures that look like they belong in a haunted house. [more inside]
PUTANA DA SEATBELTZ
Every Joke in Airplane!, Ranked.
We rated each joke only in reference to other Airplane! jokes. Airplane! threes and fours are probably equivalent to most other movies’ nines and tens.
August 13
Louisiana Drowning
A 500-year rainstorm is currently underway in Louisiana with record flooding and daring rescues of life. [more inside]
Most popular assassination target: Fidel Castro
How many ways have his enemies tried to kill Fidel? A whole bunch.
SANS! STOP PLAGUING MY LIFE WITH INCIDENTAL MUSIC!!!
Jason M. Yu analyzes music from Cave Story, Undertale (Part 1, Part 2), and Chrono Trigger at a friendly, hand-holding pace. (Major spoilers for Undertale!) [more inside]
Rat Poison and Brandy: The 1904 St. Louis Marathon
In the newest episode of Pretty Good, Jon Bois talks about the worst Olympic marathon of all time.
[slyt], Jon Bois Previously
To honnold is to face fear, literally.
Rock climber Alex Honnold (previously), the most famous and daring free solo climber in the history of the sport, undergoes an MRI to see whether he even has an amygdala. Spoiler: yes, but with caveats.
Indian government blacks out internet in Kashmir
Kashmir, where over 50 civilian protesters have been killed in recent days and where the Indian government has imposed a physical curfew in places to prevent more protests, has also been subjected to a total "e-curfew": both mobile and broadband internet have been shut down by the Indian government, the former for over a month now (link, link, link). [more inside]
A look at Hindu Nationalism under Modi
The New Face of India Is the Anti-Gandhi - "The violence, insecurity, and rage of Narendra Modi." (via)
"Does Dolly Parton win?" Hogan asks. "Always," I answer.
My Virtual Brunch With Dolly Parton is an autobiographical essay by Heather Hogan of Autostraddle about growing up as a gay, southern Dolly Parton obsessive. [more inside]
when the chips are down
Steve Blank has been writing an occasional series: The Secret History of Silicon Valley, on Uncle Sam's most successful startup. [more inside]
Kenneth George "Kenny" Baker (August 24, 1934 – August 13, 2016)
After a long illness and declining health actor Kenny Baker has passed away today. He was active in film making for over 50 years and will be best remembered for his portral of droid R2-D2 in the Star Wars series.
Screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo
Make-up artist Lisa Eldridge recreates David Bowie's make-up from the final Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert at the London Hammersmith Odeon in 1973. [more inside]
What if they had colors back then?
Only shooting stars break the mold
I am Star Man! This is my latest audio transmission, pairing Tori Amos' 'Winter' with Smash Mouth's 'All Star'! God help us all. [more inside]
August 12
Brendan Dassey's conviction overturned in federal court
In a 91-page decision, a federal judge today overturned Brendan Dassey's conviction in Teresa Halbach's murder. (Full opinion available here.) The Teresa Halbach case recently made headlines in the popular 2015 Netflix documentary Making a Murderer, which focused primarily on the case, circumstance, and trial of Dassey's uncle Steven Avery. The case against Brendan Dassey was based in large part on a confession that documentary filmmakers, lawyers, and ultimately a federal judge deemed to be involuntary and coerced. In granting the writ of habeas corpus, the federal judge ruled that the State has 90 days to either release Dassey, or schedule the case to be re-tried by a jury, presumably without the inadmissible confession.
40 years of partying like a punkette
The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs: From Patti Smith to Bikini Kill, the songs that have crushed stereotypes and steered progress (Pitchfork). More than a list of songs, it's an overview of feminist expression through raw music, from 1975 to 2015, with an introduction by Vivien Goldman. "Because nothing beats jamming and singing with your sisters. That is punk. Punk freed female musicians. It is yours. Sing it, play it, live it now." [more inside]
...a moment in history where it is almost hard to catch your breath.
Today, the Hillary Clinton campaign launched a new "With Her" podcast, chronicling her historic run for office. Clinton also released her 2015 tax returns while Sen. Tim Kaine released 10 years’ worth of his. With just 87 days until Election Day, 538's "Election Forecast" looks dire for Republican nominee Donald Trump, who continues to rely on wild, desperate claims to capture each news cycle.
Welcome to McMansion Hell
Worst of the McMansions If you love to hate the ugly houses that became ubiquitous before the bubble burst (1980s-2009) you've come to the right place. Highlights include: McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad?, and this brief opinionated history of the garage.
Regular Car Reviews: 2004 Chrysler PT Cruiser
"The PT Cruiser: The official car of getting your 9-year-old son a balloon-tired mountain bike to make up for pawning his DS Lite in order to buy 'loose tobacco' and zigzags." [more inside]
The bell's already been rung
An Open Letter To Warner Bros CEO Kevin Tsujihara About Layoffs, Zack Snyder, and Donuts from a very disgruntled former employee. [more inside]
We've got the beat.
The River Blindness Eradication Program
How Worm Warriors Are Beating An Unbeatable Worm When the program began, in some areas the disease was so widespread that riverbank communities had been abandoned, he says. Now, "people are suffering less," and people and agriculture have returned to areas where the disease was eliminated. (TW: Graphic medical descriptions.) [more inside]
GMHC
Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the founding of what would become known as the the Gay Men's Health Crisis. On August 11, 1981, Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Lawrence Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White met with Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien and discussed the "gay cancer" that was affecting their friends and lovers. "In 1983 Larry Kramer, one of the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, was kicked out of the organization he helped create, due to his loud and often controversial methods of raising public awareness about the AIDS epidemic." Today, GMHC serves more than 10,000 people per year. [more inside]
fnord
"TECHNOLOGICAL TENTACLES CONTROL US:
In the form of likes, hashtags, imagery and sounds.
It’s our turn to wake up and recognize.
It’s time to think for ourselves and #CONSUME our own thoughts, not what they tell us.
We must CONSUME or we will be CONSUMED."
—Hal Hefner
In the form of likes, hashtags, imagery and sounds.
It’s our turn to wake up and recognize.
It’s time to think for ourselves and #CONSUME our own thoughts, not what they tell us.
We must CONSUME or we will be CONSUMED."
—Hal Hefner
The Curious Case of Dorothy L. Sayers & the Jew Who Wasn’t There
"More than her actual portraits of Jews, what comes through most clearly is the confused urgency of her emotions about them." -- For Moment, Amy E. Schwartz looks at How Dorothy L. Sayers treated her Jewish characters. Some spoilers, some antisemitic quotes.
All Adele covers can go home now
Dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you
At least our overlords will have sick tats.
This robot does tattoos. Appropriate Audiences has modified a 3D printer to tattoo human flesh. [more inside]
Behind scenes video of how the special effects in 'Aliens' were created
Stan Winston School of Character Arts celebrates the 30th anniversary of James Cameron's Aliens with fascinating behind the scenes videos of alien creation and animation.
Slurping Up The Goodness
How Spiders Eat. Infinite Spider Blog is a science and nature blog aimed at nature lovers, naturalists, and outdoor educators.
Everything is Fucked: The Syllabus
PSY 607: Everything is Fucked. What does it mean, in science, for something to be fucked? Fucked needs to mean more than that something is complicated or must be undertaken with thought and care, as that would be trivially true of everything in science. In this class we will go a step further and say that something is fucked if it presents hard conceptual challenges to which implementable, real-world solutions for working scientists are either not available or routinely ignored in practice.
[more inside]
Iceberg, right ahead
If you will it, it is no dreamboat
Reinventing the Hebrew language, so transgender campers can fit in. When Zev Shofar, a 14-year-old from Takoma Park, started going to Jewish summer camp seven years ago, the children all learned the Hebrew words to introduce themselves. “Chanich” means a male camper; “chanichah” means a female camper.
But what if Zev didn’t feel male or female — neither a chanich nor a chanichah?
Zev’s camp didn’t have a word that worked for Zev. In fact, the Hebrew language doesn’t have any words. Like many other languages — Spanish, French and Russian, for example — Hebrew assigns each noun a gender.
In Israel, or anywhere else that Hebrew is spoken, there’s no linguistic solution, either. But now there is at camp. Zev is a chanichol.
Fun Fact: Ramen and spaghetti are related and must never lay together
The The Katering Show is back for season two! Join food intolerant, Kate McCartney and her intolerable smug foodie co-host, Kate McLennan for their 2nd Season, as they take a Sassy Swipe™ at the Food Culture Revolution and make a range of vaguely edible recipes. [more inside]
San Fransokyo
Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices - "The city had more housing starts in 2014 than the whole of England. Can Japan's capital offer lessons to other world cities?" (via) [more inside]
August 11
Rogue One Official Trailer
A Slaptstick Masterpeice.
Sailing off to nowhere
Dr. Robert Zubrin with a brief, passionate, and well-articulated answer to the question: why should we go to Mars?
"Birth is a monstrous thing, and it has no moral component."
"Bodies do have a sort of wisdom but it’s easy to lose track of how that wisdom is not moral. It’s the stories we tell about bodies that overlay them with moral values."
"Monstrous Births: Pushing back against empowerment in childbirth" is an essay by Sarah Blackwell on the moral valence of birth, what we tell ourselves about empowerment, and a side of historical narrative. (SLHairpin)
"Monstrous Births: Pushing back against empowerment in childbirth" is an essay by Sarah Blackwell on the moral valence of birth, what we tell ourselves about empowerment, and a side of historical narrative. (SLHairpin)
"I put the wig on and people laughed.”
"Joanne the Scammer lives for drama. Branden Miller is just trying to live." Performer and comic Branden Miller is a quiet young man who collects fragrances. His comic persona Joanne The Scammer is a fur-wrapped con artist moving from one stolen credit card to another and a Twitter sensation. The Fader talked to Miller about racial indenity, growing up gay, sex work, the fragility of internet fame, and getting scammed.
Long in the Tooth
"She was born during the reign of James I, was a youngster when René Descartes set out his rules of thought and the great fire of London raged, saw out her adolescent years as George II ascended the throne, reached adulthood around the time that the American revolution kicked off, and lived through two world wars. Living to an estimated age of nearly 400 years, a female Greenland shark has set a new record for longevity, scientists have revealed." [more inside]
“Twitter is the free speech wing of the free speech party,”
According to 10 high-level former employees, the social network’s long history with abuse has been fraught with inaction and organizational disarray. Taken together, these interviews tell the story of a company that’s been ill-equipped to handle harassment since its beginnings. Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but — to use the Silicon Valley term of art — a fundamental feature.[more inside]
Is acute psychosis a brain disorder? Hypothetically yes, but...
Over three years, those never treated with antipsychotics had much better outcomes – 8 per cent relapse versus 62 per cent for the drug-treated. I could cite other, more recent studies with similar findings. This is why we may be holding the tail of a tiger. We may be unwittingly turning an acute and generally time-limited condition into a chronic disability.
The Insult
You know Mac, the beach weakling. Now read his new adventures. Based on the often spoofed old comic book ad, The Insult puts "Mac" facing a change in lifestyle after his unfortunate incident on the beach. Watch him become an Improv Performer, a Vinyl Collector, a Jedi Knight, a Tudor King, or a Muppet.
(via).
Part Finnish, part Native American
In the Great Lakes region there are people with roots in Finland and among indigenous North American peoples. It’s impossible to know how exactly many of these so-called ‘Findians’ exist, but their numbers are estimated in the hundreds. Author Katja Kettu, journalist Maria Seppälä and photographer Meeri Koutaniemi documented their lives over the course of three years. Their experiences form the basis for their book, ‘Findian country’.
You Won't Believe What Aliens Have Done In The Outer Solar System!
There's something weird going on beyond Neptune - A mysterious object has been discovered with an inexplicable orbit.
Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom.
But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?
But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?
The only known recording of Virginia Woolf
The splendid word "incarnadine" for example, who can use that without remembering "multitudinous seas?" "In the Only Surviving Recording of Her Voice, Virginia Woolf Explains Why Writing Isn’t a “Craft” (1937)"
Surely this...
In the fall of 1988, Massachusetts Governor and Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis needed a way to demonstrate to the American people that he, as President, would be committed to building up the nation's conventional military. So, before a speech on national security at a Michigan factory, he put on a military helmet and rode in on a battle tank. Spoiler Alert: It didn't go well for him. [Remember when all it took was a bad photo op to destroy a presidential campaign?] [more inside]
"Then it all went horribly wrong."
Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart "The geography of this catastrophe is broad and its causes are many, but its consequences — war and uncertainty throughout the world — are familiar to us all. Scott Anderson’s story gives the reader a visceral sense of how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Accompanying Anderson’s text are 10 portfolios by the photographer Paolo Pellegrin, drawn from his extensive travels across the region over the last 14 years, as well as a landmark virtual-reality experience that embeds the viewer with the Iraqi fighting forces during the battle to retake Falluja."
Crowdsourcing is Only as Representative as the Crowd Doing the Sourcing
Great journalism. Lots of it.
“Dr. Meowthiarty is the Mew Two of Crime!”
Live-Action Trailer for Great Detective Pikachu (Only a videogame (。•́︿•̀。) )
Nick Statt at The Verge: “The first ever live-action Pokémon movie will be Detective Pikachu” ヾ(@^∇^@)ノ
Jeff Grubb at VentureBeat: “‘Detective Pikachu’ movie was in the works long before Pokémon Go”
Nick Statt at The Verge: “The first ever live-action Pokémon movie will be Detective Pikachu” ヾ(@^∇^@)ノ
Jeff Grubb at VentureBeat: “‘Detective Pikachu’ movie was in the works long before Pokémon Go”
My Venezuela Nightmare
Mind Over Matter
Virtual Reality and Exoskeleton Help Paraplegics Partially Recover, Study Finds One patient, previously unable to stand due to a spinal cord injury, became capable of walking using a walker, braces and the assistance of a therapist, according to the study. This was all the more surprising because of the severity of the patients' injuries.
All I remember is her request that I not use her name.
When NBC commentator Al Trautwig felt it necessary to point out that U.S. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles' parents are biologically her grandparents, some on Twitter pushed back. Trautwig briefly dug in, tweeting "They may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents.", then deleted the tweet and apologized. Cece Lederer of the Daily Dot says that this is just another example of how we still don't know how to talk about adoption.
"For God’s sakes, it’s just a snake vagina."
Among the Lizard People: Silent Connections at the Reptile Expo
The People's Car Gets PWNed
On the heels of reports of Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche models being outfitted with firmware designed to fool environmental emissions tests, there now comes news that a vulnerability in keyless entry mechanisms of 100 million VWs made within the last 21 years can permit the cars to be unlocked by intruders carrying an Arduino kit.
it has only a vague personal sense of connection to me
Pharmaduke: bot combining Marmaduke comics + Erowid trip reports at random. (Previously, Previously)
Dan's Space Van
Canadian musician Danny Michel has a vintage 1978 Star Trek van, in which he interviews musicians in the front seat, before having them perform in the red velvet back of the van. Guests have included The Milk Carton Kids , astronaut-guitarist Chris Hadfield, and many other (mostly Canadian) musicians.
Rocky Mountain Construction makes roller coasters
Rocky Mountain Construction designs some of the best roller coasters in the world. Here are some first-person POV videos, from newest to oldest: Wildfire, Kolmården (T); Lightning Rod, Dollywood (T); Joker, SF Discovery Kingdom (IR); Storm Chaser, Kentucky Kingdom (IR); Wicked Cyclone, SF New England (IR); Twisted Colossus, SF Magic Mountain (IR); Goliath, SF Great America (T); Medusa Steel Coaster, SF Mexico (IR); Iron Rattler, SF Fiesta Texas (IR); Outlaw Run, Silver Dollar City (T); New Texas Giant, SF Over Texas (IR). [more inside]
August 10
Smile! You've got cancer
Cancer is not a problem or an illness – it's a gift. Or so Barbara Ehrenreich was told repeatedly after her diagnosis. But the positive thinkers are wrong, she says: sugar-coating illnesses can exact a dreadful cost
Hikea
Building Ikea furniture is hard. Building it under the influence is much, much harder.
"Revisiting America’s master musical miniaturist, Scott Joplin."
"The Rag Man," a review of Edward Berlin's King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (2nd edition): "As such, to Mr. and Mrs. America circa 1908, ragtime was not “The Entertainer,” but peppy little songs with peppery little lyrics, that you could get up and dance to. Only through these could one make a living, and Joplin had other ideas...." [more inside]
A Drawing Of A Crying Lady Liberty At The Pearly Gates
In 1967 political cartoonist Pat Oliphant drew an editorial cartoon just to win the Pulitizer - "one of the worst cartoons I've ever drawn" - trying to appeal to the judges' tastes and prevailing political opinion. And guess what happened.
In The Name Of The Place
Melrose Place served as a covert yet visible exhibit by Mel Chin called In The Name Of The Place, shown in 1997 at MoCA as part of "Uncommon Sense."
Hilarious Proms encore with audience participation
Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto performs and has the audience perform with him a Finnish folk song My Darling is Beautiful (Minun kultani kaunis on).
...detected human presence in the Americas as early as 14,700 years ago.
How Did People Migrate to the Americas? Bison DNA Helps Chart the Way [The New York Times] “Two teams of scientists have succeeded in dating the opening of the gateway to America, only to disagree over whether the Clovis people — one of the first groups from Siberia to reach the Americas — ever used the gateway to gain access to the New World.” [more inside]
Madam you have got to be joking. You cannot contain the Boris.
NO BS, JUST SHOOTING - DOOM overview is a heartfelt game review from Life of Boris. Boris will inform you about many aspects of Slav life, including How to squat like slav and Why Slavs wear Adidas. Also Russian language. [more inside]
The Drone Presidency
"Remote killing outside of war zones, it seems, has become business as usual [...] a remarkable development [for] Obama, who came who came to office as an antiwar president" "The question for President Obama is whether he wants to be remembered as the leader who ushered in the era of permanent, low-level drone warfare. His actions will be looked to for justification by those that follow, here and abroad. As David Reisner, former head of the Israel Defense Forces legal department, has said, “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it…. International law progresses through violations.”"
The Sudden Closure of Canada's Only Deepwater Arctic Port
The sudden closure of the Port of Churchill leaves Canada without an Arctic deepwater port, and a tenth of the town's population without work. Manitoba's premier thinks the port's private owners are trying to get more money from the government. Others see the closure as a response to changing economic conditions (including the end of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly), leading to questions about the future economic viability of transportation infrastructure development in the North.
Get on mah belly if you want to live, seal
Humpback whales are rescuing seals and other animals from orcas. Are the humpbacks being altruistic? Or do they just really hate orcas? National Geographic tries to explain.
No surprises for Table Tennis
I fix 1950 or '60 at the latest for the discovery of Europe.
Once upon a time there was a tiny brown ant who lived by a swamp at the end of the Paraná River in Argentina. Her name, Linepithema humile, literally means “humble” or “weak”. Some time during the late 1800s, an adventurous L. humile crept away from the swamp where giant river otter played and capybaras cavorted.
She stowed away on a boat that sailed to New Orleans. And she went to war.
Indian activist ends 16-year hunger strike to enter politics
In 2000, Irom Sharmila began a hunger strike to protest the Malom Massacre and India's statutory immunity from judicial oversight for military and paramilitary personnel in "disturbed areas". After years of detention (attempted suicide is illegal in India), forced feeding, and recognition from human rights agencies, Sharmila ended her hunger strike with a lick of honey and a declaration that she will run for office to work against the Armed Forces Special Powers Acts. [more inside]
Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever – CRISPR
Designer babies, the end of diseases, genetically modified humans that never age. Outrageous things that used to be science fiction are suddenly becoming reality. The only thing we know for sure is that things will change irreversibly. [more inside]
"A sexist remark is not just a professional discourtesy."
"Mr. Bertling, 56, said in an interview that he had not heard what he considered sexist remarks in his decades of practice.
But after the fine, he asked a lawyer in his office if she had. She showed him inappropriate comments in deposition transcripts, but said she did not seek penalties for them because, like many female lawyers, she thought doing so was futile." As of this Monday, after months of debate, that may no longer be the case: Goodbye to 'Honeys' in Court, by Vote of American Bar Association. [more inside]
Floating in space
Anamorphic 3D graffiti by Sergio Odeith.
How I Learned to Love the Tragically Hip and Still Be Punk
"He talks about music in a way that makes you believe that maybe it can do some good in the world." Damien Abraham, lead singer of Toronto punk band F*cked Up, recounts coming to terms with loving the Hip and his unexpected friendship with Gord Downie. (slVice) [more inside]
maris pipers
Spaceplan A new incremental/idle browser space-based potato-powered web game thingy by Jake Hollands.
Crowdfunding for journalism in tough places
We need a new approach to supporting independent media — especially in partially free societies We all know how this story ends. In some cases, especially in Eastern Europe, the influx of foreign investors into the media market instead led to the appearance of collusion between the new media owners and the government (a sell-out hardly worth making for many, who ended up losing money and fleeing those markets a few years later). Many media properties that stayed in local hands fared even worse, bought up and reduced to hand-puppets by well-connected business people. [more inside]
My guess is Schopenhaur will kill a lot of people.
Who would win in a knife fight between all the philsophers. Unlike the United States Presidency, Philosophy has been going on for thousands of years, so instead of 44 contestants there are a whopping 89. Don’t be afraid of the numbers, for I guarantee you won’t get bored; philosophers are a very interesting bunch of people, and the most rewarding part of this post has been researching their lives and finding out how crazy they all are. This will be a wild knife fight. [more inside]
"It's time to witness my POWER!!!"
Anime Baseball [SLYT]
We’re in a Low-Growth World. How Did We Get Here?
If you live in the US, EU or Japan, and feel like economic growth today has not been like it was for your parents' or grandparents' generation, you are correct. Growth in mature markets has been very slow since the late 1960s. Economist Robert J. Gordon calls 1870-1970, the "Special Century" because of how abnormally strong the growth was in that period. [more inside]
Is America Any Safer?
By my calculation, over the past 15 years, the American government has spent $100 billion to $150 billion on failed or unworthy homeland-security programs and on acquiring and maintaining equipment that hasn’t worked. However, as with the equipment procured for port inspections, launching the TSA, and grants for protecting New York’s subway tunnels and running emergency drills in Boston, much more than that was well spent. Steven Brill takes a deep dive into the post-9/11 security state. [SLATLANTIC]
August 9
how many have you read?
60 Essential Science Fiction & Fantasy Reads. Though you might want to quibble with the "essential" as it's somewhat biased to more recent books but a valuable introduction to the genres nonetheless, the occasional tokenism not withstanding.
its hour come round at last
If you've been feeling like 2016 might be some harbinger of a coming Apocalypse with all the bad things happening this year, here's another symbol for you to add to your growing list: America's pungent corpse flowers are all mysteriously blooming at once [more inside]
The Flying University of Poland
RT is not an endorsement
Are internet populists ruining democracy for the rest of us? by Vyacheslav W. Polonski, Network scientist, University of Oxford
Why Teach Business to Artists?
"On the physical and emotional shocks of truly inhabiting our bodies."
Break My Body: "What I’m trying to unravel is the difference between merely existing in a body and truly inhabiting it—to untangle passivity from receptivity. My woman-body has never been as easy for me to love, with its big breasts and disorienting cycles, as the girl-body that hurled me so beautifully through the air. To be sure, the woman-body has been good for sex, for attracting my husband’s touch, but sex is just one aspect of the whole—one that for me has never felt like a primary purpose. And as I find myself choosing not to use the body to create a child, it now seems that the one act its whole design evolved toward will be one it never performs. I’m looking for a new working definition." -- an essay by Marin Sardy [CW: suicide, mental illness]
The best drum solo you've seen today
Just a kid playing makeshift drums in the subway. Oh, and he's bloody amazing.
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
Of Thee I Read: The United States in Literature [The New York Times] Reporters and editors on the National Desk of The New York Times were asked to suggest books that a visitor ought to read to truly understand the American cities and regions where they live, work and travel. There were no restrictions — novels, memoirs, histories and children’s books were fair game. Here are some selections. Recommend a book that captures something special about where you live in the comments, or on Twitter with the hashtag #natbooks. [more inside]
"Thank you so much!"
Speed Enforced by Aircraft. A tale of tragedy, triumph, death, and new life. [SLYT]
just look at it, it's obvious
O Sister, Where Art Thou?
This past May on Metafilter, we looked at “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls”, a wildly popular variety show that was broadcast every Wednesday night in the 1930's and 1940's from the state prison in Huntsville, TX. It featured performances by male and female prisoners. No recordings of the show have ever been found. In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree State Farm prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country and their performances were broadcast on Thirty Minutes. The Goree All Girl String Band captured the hearts of millions of radio listeners but never cut a record or went on tour and have thus been ignored by music historians. When they were paroled, they nearly all vanished forever. [more inside]
You're going to need a bigger bylaw.
Martha's Vineyard is well known as an idyllic summer vacation spot, but all is not well on the island. Affordable housing is hard to find. Housing for seasonal workers is hard to find. 57% of the dwellings on island are seasonal... [more inside]
As religious missions go, it was a pretty sweet deal
Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname is one of history’s greatest travelogues - Edward White, The Paris Review. [via]
"There's a lot about privilege in Singapore, that's not said."
What is your privilege? (Singapore edition) On the occasion of Singapore's 51st Independence this month, UNSAID -- a youth-led arts collective -- staged their country's own version of checking their privilege [original Buzzfeed video] [more inside]
My feminism will be capitalist, appropriative and bullshit merchandise
"Five years ago I wrote something that became kind of popular.... It was bizarre to see my name in pink fonts, being sold as a commodity when the entirety of my work has been against the commodification of feminist ideas and the misuse, appropriation and subsequent lack of credit of feminism of color." (SL Medium, by Flavia Dzodan)
“Maps codify the miracle of existence.”
Free, Printable USGS Quads National Geographic (the one now owned by Fox?!) has put together a website where you can download USGS (previously) maps that have been processed to print on standard letter paper.
Minimally Conscious State
"Untold thousands of patients misdiagnosed as vegetative are actually aware. Theirs is the civil rights fight of our times." By Joseph J. Fins, a professor of medical ethics and a professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
Previously.
Po co ci kapusta
Yes, it's true. This collab has no DiC.
90's dub by moonlight, Bartkira trailer by daylight, 300+ animators (you heard right), a new collab of Sailor Moon! (Japanese with English subtitles. Previously, Akireviously.)
August 8
How To Vote In Every State
In order to help people get out and vote this coming election the VLogBrothers havre created How To Vote In Every State: a YouTube channel with videos detailing how to register and vote in each state (as well as military personnel, unincorporated territories and abroad, and DC residents.) [more inside]
How do we increase accessibility?
What Works: The Train That Saved Denver - "How Denver overcame regional factionalism to build a rail system that is a model for 21st century growth... it all happened, Hickenlooper and others note, because Coloradans across the base of the Front Range were willing to set aside crippling rivalries and make some big collective investments in themselves." (viz. Spain, cf. California & Florida; via) [more inside]
Fuck Yeah Tarot Decks
Kitten Summer Games 2016
Get ready for the Kitten Summer Games, Hallmark’s catty, pun-filled Olympics counter-programming, complete with cat-thletes named Felina Williams, John MacNMeow, and Pawdre Ag-Hissy—and that’s just in tennis. In the same style as the Puppy Bowl (another video, previously), which the Hallmark Channel matched with Kitten Bowl in 2014. Kitten Summer Games is going for the gold in groaner puns. Watch a preview of Road to the Kitten Summer Games: Track & Field (KTRK), exclusive videos and more.
The Only True eSport: Quake
Greetings everyone, Tyrone here to tell you about the only true eSport: Quake! [con Grand Finals 2016--greatest Quake Duel of all time!! ...] I suggest you stop playing your filthy-casual baby tier MOBAs, and bow to the king. Quake.
BILLY MAYS HERE BILLY MAYS HERE BILLY MA-
Cue that XKCD comic, you know the one
Because there's nobody else to do it, every year the Curiosity Rover sings itself a happy birthday song.
The new New Deal
Here's the drill: There will be no drill.
A Silver Bullet for Dental Cavities. "Nobody looks forward to having a cavity drilled and filled by a dentist. Now there’s an alternative: an antimicrobial liquid that can be brushed on cavities to stop tooth decay — painlessly. The liquid is called silver diamine fluoride, or S.D.F. It’s been used for decades in Japan, but it’s been available in the United States, under the brand name Advantage Arrest, for just about a year." [more inside]
How do you plead?
Dredding Every Minute of It: MeFi's own Artw lays down the law on Dredd at the Seattle Review of Books, lightly framed as a review of John Wagner's Judge Dredd: America. As a Judge, I sentence you to READ, CITIZEN!
“Revolver” by way of funk and soul
To celebrate the 50th birthday of The Beatles’ Revolver, Larry at the Funky 16 Corners blog has assembled a track-for-track mix of funk, soul and jazz covers: Revolving in Soul. He also calls out Amd Whah over at the Any Major Dude With Half A Heart blog for pulling off a similar trick: Beatles Recovered: Revolver.
(Larry has actually done the funk-soul-jazz-Beatles-covers stunt six times before. Back in 2010, for John Lennon’s 70th birthday, he reposted all of the old mixes, and the links still work fine. Previously)
(Larry has actually done the funk-soul-jazz-Beatles-covers stunt six times before. Back in 2010, for John Lennon’s 70th birthday, he reposted all of the old mixes, and the links still work fine. Previously)
I just want to talk! It has nothing to do with mating!
Morbotron: From the folks who brought you Frinkiac, here's a nifty tool for making screencaps and GIFs from every Futurama episode and movie.
Liquidity index of fillings carefully regulated
Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik has an idea. And it's one of those ideas that is definitely close to one of the ends of the brilliant-stupid spectrum: I Have Invented The Ultimate Food To Eat While Driving. [more inside]
"This is Samoan cologne."
How to Make Fire by Rubbing Sticks is the latest video in the Polynesian How-To Series. [more inside]
Two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve, neither more nor less?
Why was Turkish Delight the ultimate temptation in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?
Why Buyers Shunned the World's Largest Diamond
The high-end diamond game is played on a very small field by only a few players. Not many diamantaires have the financial muscle or the nerve to cut big diamonds. If they did not want to “contend in the open arena,” where would they contend? Well, they would contend in the shadows. Even before I had set out to see the diamond—when not a soul outside Lucara had yet seen it—I had heard dealers put it down. (slVanityFair)
The Great Badminton Rant
During the late-night coverage of the 2004 Athens coverage of Olympic Badminton, Mary Carillo delivered a rant for the ages.
I want to be in the room where it happens
Evan McMullin, former policy director, ex-CIA agent, and devout #NeverTrump-er is running for president. Why should we care? Because he could help turn Utah blue.
1996 in music
It's 1996 week over at the AV Club, and they're taking a look at the year alternative rock died. In non-AV Club news @bestalbum95 has rolled over a year and has started polling for Best Album of 1996 - the first face-off being Belle and Sebastian verus John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey.
The Fix Is Out
Manufacturers have made it increasingly difficult for individuals or independent repair people to fix electronics. A growing movement is fighting back. -- The Fight for the "Right to Repair"
“Behold the mystery, the mysterious, undeserved beauty of the world.’’
The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams [The New York Times] The writer’s new story collection establishes her as one of the greatest chroniclers of humanity’s insignificance. [more inside]
Good News For Oregonians - Stoned Sex Beats Drunk Sex
"How will legal marijuana affect our children? Our jobs? Our relationships? Or how about our sex lives? That latter question inspired a research project by Joseph Palamar and his colleagues at New York University. "Since the landscape is changing, and marijuana continues to increase in popularity, research is needed to continue to examine if and how marijuana use may influence risk for unsafe sexual behavior," they write in the July issue of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior." [sl-wapo]
It's International Cat Day!
There are so many to choose from: cats that sound like humans, very angry cats, cats who hate cats that aren't really cats, narc cats, epic cat fight featuring arsehole birds, keyboard cat, ceiling cat and so many more. [more inside]
The Moral Machine
The Moral Machine: Welcome to the moral machine! - you are a self-driving car, unfortunately something has gone horribly wrong - who put that wall there? Regrettably, you are now about to crash and must choose the lesser of two evils. Do you kill your passengers or that old lady and her cute little doggy crossing the road? - A new MIT project provides a public exploration of the kinds of trolley problem style dilemma's that self-driving cars may have to face and allows us to compare our shared moral intuitions.
Love, Loss, and Kimchi
" I’d create true fusion one mouthful at a time, using chopsticks to eat strips of T-bone and codfish eggs drenched in sesame oil, all in one bite. I liked my baked potatoes with fermented chili paste, my dried cuttlefish with mayonnaise."
Michelle Zauner writes on how Korean food helped her connect with her mother after her death, winning Glamour's 11th essay contest.
Michelle Zauner writes on how Korean food helped her connect with her mother after her death, winning Glamour's 11th essay contest.
Bringing back the fedora bins
"Passengers who stopped to get their hand luggage put 300 lives at risk last week, after a fire broke out on an Emirates airliner in Dubai. Luckily, everyone escaped before the plane was consumed by flames - but it could have been different. What can be done to make people leave their bags behind?"
Murky origins. Feuding chefs. How the lobster roll went national.
But what I like best of all about my matchbox is that it is an empty one
A letter of thanks for an unusual gift, a poem about a dying queen (with audio of the poet reading it), and a short story about a devoted couple with a shocking secret (with an introduction by Edith Pearlman): all are from the pen of the English novelist, short-story writer, poet, musicologist, translator & biographer; feminist, lesbian & communist Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978). [more inside]
August 7
Carlos Fuente Sr. Passes Away.
Carlos Fuente Sr. has passed away. The patriarch and longtime chairman of Tabacalera A. Fuente y Cia., died on Friday night in Tampa, Florida, after a battle with stomach cancer. He was 81 years old.
Fuente ran one of the world's largest handmade cigar companies, presiding over such storied brands as Arturo Fuente and Fuente Fuente OpusX, and making many brands for others, among them all Ashtons and Diamond Crowns.
More here.
I'm Buffy and You're History
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a role model for the modern feminist "After more than a decade of reading Buffy academia, to which Patricia Pender’s I’m Buffy and You’re History is a very laudable addition, I’m starting to know why this show continues to inspire sincere and thoughtful devotion among intellectual people who need to talk about gender and about what it means to be a woman in our world." ~ Naomi Alderman, The Spectator [more inside]
Heads Up! (literally)
The Perseids is said to promise the best show in a decade. They say is gonna be a very good one. [more inside]
Dr. Teeth & The Electric Mayhem LIVE!
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem played Outside Lands today. (SLYT) The world-famous Muppet band played their first festival gig today — San Francisco's Outside Lands. Aside from "Can You Picture That," the opening number, they also did a number of covers, ending with "With A Little Help From My Friends" done with the Oakland Tabernacle Choir. Hotcha!
You've got your Firefox in my Fat Agnus!
The Internet Archive's Amiga Software Collection -- runs emulated in the browser, so you don't even have to load Workbench!
“the format still represents only 12 percent of physical album sales”
What It Takes for an Independent Record Store to Survive Now [Pitchfork Media] Even as legacy music shops continue to shutter across the country, Midwestern institution Used Kids has managed to stay afloat for the last 30 years and counting. How do they do it?
If you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine
Marianne Ihlen, 81, died in Oslo on 29 July. She was an old friend and sometime lover of Leonard Cohen, whom she met in the 1960s on the Greek island of Hydra, and was the inspiration for his songs So Long, Marianne and Bird On A Wire. Before she passed away, Cohen wrote her a letter.
...And they sit at the bar, and put bread in my jar...
Over the course of its company history, Hampton Creek Inc. encountered many controversies in its attempt to market an eggless alternative to mayonnaise; from an intense battle with the Egg Lobby of the U.S. food industry to accusations from disgruntled staff concerning the startup's questionable research and work environment, comes the revelation that Hampton Creek instructed its own employees to purchase its product from store shelves in bulk quantities to drive up sales figures. [more inside]
The Tanzanian wives
In the Mara region of northern Tanzania, Abigail Haworth discovers an empowering tribal tradition undergoing a modern revival
Another #$%# Pidgey?!
It's been a month since Pokemon GO was first unleashed in a few countries. Now with most of the world going outside, the servers somewhat stable, yet tracking eliminated and a bug that make the game harder, how's your Pokedex coming along?
Chill Indian cooking
Indian cooking doesn't get any more genuine than this guy cooking all kinds of delicious dishes in his village: chicken kulambu, prawns, fish kulambu, octopus kulambu , duck. There's also these street food videos on nendran chips, making biryani for 500 people, egg noodles for 40 people.
The World's Biggest Asshole
"After all the arguments, lack of tips and constantly sending back food I finally learned the name of my worst customer, Coleman Sweeney. And I'll never forget it." More from Forbes, Adweek, The Drum, UPROXX. Organ donor websites: USA, UK, Canada, Australia.
August 6
Shiny!
Liquid Shard is a massive public art installation in L.A.'s Pershing Square by artist Patrick Shearn of Poetic Kinetics.
Smart Dust Is Here
Engineers Create The First Dust-Sized Wireless Sensors That Can Be Implanted Into The Human Body. Relevant paper here.
Underground music, echoes of war
To forestall a German blockade, at the beginning of World War II the Royal Navy built huge, multimegalitre subterranean oil storage tanks across the country. In 2009, the facility at Inchindown in the Scottish Highlands opened for visitors - and something remarkable came to light. [more inside]
Boots, Stiefel, Stivali, Bottes
We started watching Orphan Black last night and were suitably impressed by Eileen's German take on Nancy Sinatra's classic These Boots were Made For Walking. This led to a discussion of how such a clipped song would be hard to do in Italian. [more inside]
Ship Dreams
Filmmaker Corinne Anderson was bored on a cruise and decided to shoot a short film about a dreamworld starring her little sister. (via)
Some really endless ocean ahead now..,
Crossing the Atlantic in a Beechcraft 76. "In 2013 the flight school I worked at in Sweden decided to sell their two old Beech 76's in favor of a new DA42. The buyer was in San Diego, Cali. So me and three friends had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to fly them across the Atlantic and through the US. These are some of the pictures I took on that trip."
“This is a here for us to find us.”
The Deaf Poets Society is an online literary journal that publishes poetry, prose, cross-genre work, reviews of disability-focused books, interviews/miscellany, and art by writers and artists with disabilities. Founded in 2016, our mission is to provide a venue for disability literature and art, as well as to connect readers with established and emerging talent in the field. [more inside]
August 5
Download and print your own clitoris!
Modelling and 3D printing an anatomically correct clitoris (Vimeo) . Sociologist Odile Fillod teamed up with photographer Marie Docher and digital mediator (and Blender user) Mélissa Richard (from the Cité des Sciences) to create the first downloadable, printable and open source 3D model of the complete structure of the clitoris. The model was created specifically to be 3D printed in schools (in French) in order to provide science teachers with a more accurate and less anachronistic representation of the organ during sex education classes. Short text in English about the project. (All links potentially NSFW) [more inside]
Monumental Proof to Torment Mathematicians for Years to Come
Nearly four years after Shinichi Mochizuki (previously, previously, previously) unveiled an imposing set of papers (1, 2, 3, 4) that could revolutionize the theory of numbers, other mathematicians have yet to understand his work or agree on its validity — although they have made modest progress. [more inside]
😢 [single-tear emoji]
"OVER A POUND OF MEAT. Extra napkins free!”
Xtreme Eating Awards 2016 If you're thinking of giving yourself heart disease this weekend, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has compiled this handy list of highly salted and calorific dishes available in many great restaurants across the U.S.
Tromp is going to make Proof-of-Work systems great again
John Tromp is a computer scientist whose interests include mazes (playable: 1, 2), chess problems, Go (previously), graphical representations of combinatory logic, Connect-4, code obfuscation, darts, pop music, and much, much more.
EMI: the inside story of Britain's biggest music company
Electric & Musical Industries was formed in 1931, initially releasing classical music, but went on to launch the Beatles, who changed the record label's operations and funded the company for years and years. The label's recording rules were further broadened by Queen and Pink Floyd. EMI ushered punk into the mainstream with Sex Pistols, and then embraced the New Romanticism and the polished excesses of Duran Duran. They made music videos big with Pet Shop Boys and made Brit Pop a thing with Blur, and were home to Radiohead. This is the inside story of EMI, one of the greatest British brands in recording history, as told by people involved with the record label's storied history, augmented by company and performance footage. [more inside]
"A Remarkable New Photo Map of Old London"
Citylab: "Launched last week, Collage, The London Picture Map allows you to trace London’s visual history street by street. Supported by the City of London Corporation, it’s the result of two full years of digitizing and mapping images from the London Metropolitan Archive and the Guildhall Art Gallery, which together possess the largest collection of London images in the world." [more inside]
Private Companies.....IN SPACE
Florida Company Gets Approval to Put Robotic Lander on Moon. Moon Express, a small startup based in Florida, is the first private enterprise to receive approval to land on a celestial body. If successful, such a feat would win the Google Lunar X Prize. [more inside]
human human? human!
The Human Utility
How to Save a City Through a Website There was a make-a-payment button, and I thought, What if we collected the PDF full of account numbers? What if we built a website to find people who were having problems paying their bills and we get their account numbers and we say we'll log into their account and just pay some bills for them? That's pretty much how we've paid the bulk of the first early bills.
Barber bottles and fire grenades, demijohns and carboys
1. How old is my bottle?
2. Where did my bottle come from?
3. Where can I go for more information? [more inside]
What. Are. The. Lyrics?!
Four years ago, the US Olympic swim team sang "Call Me Maybe." (Previously) For the 2016 Olympics, they hit the road again for carpool karaoke.
Tiny Feminists
Tiny Feminists is a set of three very short films about three very short feminists: Juliette, Yasmine, and Linda are three middle schoolers who are mad as hell and ready to take down the patriarchy. Created and directed by Yulin Kuang (previously on MeFi: the Lizzie Bennet Diaries).
Then I got just two words for you, bub...
Originally known as Maneuver Seven, the Fastball Special -- wherein a superhero throws another superhero at a villain -- was made famous by Chris Claremont's run on Uncanny X-Men, particularly using the combination of Colossus (thrower) and Wolverine (throwee). However, plenty of other strong (or telekinetic or suchlike) superheroes have chucked Wolvie at bad guys too, and even My Little Pony got in on the action.
Whooza good puppy?
A British man set out to run a grueling seven-day, 250-kilometer marathon across the Tian Shan mountain range in northwestern China called the "Gobi Desert March." Dion Leonard had his sights set on racing to the finish line as fast as he could, or at least that was the goal until he met a friend along the way... [more inside]
Food allergies: a risk poorly grasped in restaurants
Quebec waiter may be the first in Canada to be charged with criminal negligence after a nearly fatal error with customer's meal. (slCBC) [more inside]
A traffic cop who speaks with the voice of God
At the Belmont Stakes in 2011, someone threw a can of beer at him, and he caught it one-handed, opened it, chugged some, lobbed it back from the victory stand, and proceeded with his interview of the winning jockey and trainer.--The chaos of the Olympics has arrived. Fortunately, we have Bob Costas.
Everybody eats!
Meet the "the Dominican Snow White" and the deer family he befriended. "In the span of a week, Kelvin Peña has made deer bffs, become an internet sensation, and flexed his entrepreneurial skills. It all started when the 17-year-old visited his cousin, who fed a deer named Canela."
We call it a somnambuliform possession.
Literature has more dogs than babies
When I became pregnant four years ago, I was writing a book about 19th-century British poetry and war while teaching classes about the history of war literature. I began to think about the discrepancy between how we narrate these experiences. We have a rich, challenging, and complex canon of war literature...The same cannot be said about a literature of pregnancy or childbirth or parenting, though these are also extreme experiences that stretch our understanding and push us beyond comfort or even comprehension. [more inside]
Now just imagine Michael Cera starring in it
Bruce Wayne Vs. The World (SLYT)
“Not many people have the will, character, and strength to do it.”
The Alternates [Victory Journal] “Coaches and staff do their best to prepare them, and former alternates often give them advice. They’ve heard the stories: autograph seekers pulling their pens away when they hear the word “alternate”; security guards barring them from locker rooms, fields, and athlete lounges. Then there’s the tale of the 2008 women’s gymnastics alternates who not only weren’t allowed to stay in the Beijing Olympic Village, they didn’t even stay in China, but instead found themselves in Tokyo due to visa complications. “We knew we had a really important role,” says gymnast Anna Li. “But we weren’t going to be treated the same.” Yet until they live it, they can’t really understand it.”
The Evolution of an Accidental Meme
"I was trying to clarify why, to me (and, I generalized, to liberals), “equal opportunity” alone wasn’t a satisfactory goal and that we should somehow take into consideration equality of outcomes (i.e., fairness or equity). I thought the easiest example of this concept is kids of different heights trying to see over a fence. So, I grabbed a public photo of Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park, a stock photo of a crate, clip art of a fence, and then spent a half-hour or so in Powerpoint concocting an image that I then posted on Google+... [Afterwards], my original graphic was being adapted, modified, and repurposed in a mind-blowing variety of ways, and then shared and redistributed all over the place."
August 4
I’m a Lebowski, you’re a Lebowski, we’re all Lebowskis
David Huddleston, who portrayed the Big Lebowski as well as the mayor in Blazing Saddles and countless other character parts in movies and tv, passed away Tuesday in his Santa Fe home at 85. [more inside]
Murder in the 4-0
The life and death of each person murdered this year in the 40th precinct is examined with surprising care by the New York Times, along with the surrounding issues that contribute to the 40th precinct's status as the most deadly precinct in a city where crime has fallen to historic lows.
I want to remove the stigma of male nudity being taboo and threatening.
"In 2012, photographer Abigail Ekue embarked on a mission to photograph the unclothed male body in a truthful, expressive and direct manner, a style Ekue saw was lacking in the larger cultural lexicon." (NSFW)
Life is just one damn relatedness after another
This exhaustive list of useful mental models from the founder of DuckDuckGo, drawing on Charlie Munger's concept of mental models is well worth exploring. It contains a surprising amount of interesting jumping-off points to rules-of-thumb and insights from various fields, from Hanlon's Razor to the critical concept of BATNA in negotiation; and including such useful startup ideas as technical debt, organizational debt, and hunting elephants or flies.
James Barry, pioneering nineteenth century army surgeon, had a secret
"Sophia Bishop was laying out the body of Dr James Barry, on July 25, 1865, when she screamed. Her master was a woman." [more inside]
AirSpace
How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
Every time Schwarzmann alights in a foreign city he checks the app, which lists food, nightlife, and entertainment recommendations with the help of a social network-augmented algorithm. Then he heads toward the nearest suggested cafe. But over the past few years, something strange has happened. "Every coffee place looks the same," Schwarzmann says. The new cafe resembles all the other coffee shops Foursquare suggests, whether in Odessa, Beijing, Los Angeles, or Seoul: the same raw wood tables, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs.[more inside]
Feed the trolls
Troll hunters: the Twitterbots that fight against online abuse (New Scientist, h/t TrollBusters) [more inside]
“Fracking: Helping You Catch Them All”
"It did not have to happen."
Wasn't it easier in your firefly catching days?
For over three decades, children across the U.S. spent their summers hunting fireflies for profit. The Sigma Firefly Scientists' Club, a subsidiary of the Sigma Chemical Company (now Sigma-Aldrich), paid kids a penny for each lightning bug they captured and returned to the company before quietly shuttering in the mid-1990s. Today, one of Sigma-Aldrich's few remaining jars of desiccated firefly tails (lanterns) can be yours for the low, low price of 392USD. But what did they want all those fireflies for in the first place? [more inside]
Histori(an) Has Its Eyes On You
A painting at Christie's sheds new light on how watermelons have changed over time. Depictions of The Last Supper tell us how portion sizes have changed over time. Medieval paintings of Noah's Ark tell us how ships have changed over time. Can you think of other examples in this genre?
Your favorite web dev stack sucks.
Tired of dealing with oldfangled frameworks and hopelessly uncool databases? Want to get on board with the newest technology for making web sites?
"This Is What a Feminist Looks Like"
SL Glamour. "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like" by Barack Obama
For his birthday, some wonderful pictures of President Obama.
A very nice collection of 55 photos taken by White House photographer Peter Souza. "Since 2009, Souza has compiled an annual “Year in Photos” gallery; a collection of 75-100 of his favorite photos from the previous 12 months. I went through all of the albums and have compiled 55 highlights. "
Sharing is part of mourning
Something*Positive creator R. K. Milholland reflects on learning about the death of his readers.
Come on like a wrecking bull
Minotaurs, charging things. From the surprisingly excellent if questionably monikered Total War: Warhammer. Contains blood (contents under pressure).
Gevaldike nayess
Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath of Teaneck finishes her father’s Yiddish dictionary: Yiddish has a word for it
August 3
You think they ever get backed up at the gates of Heaven?
Comedian Billy Domineau has written a spot-on spec script that takes place 3 years after the show went off the air: "Seinfeld - The Twin Towers".
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Bagpipe Blues
Rufus Harley debut jazz recording in 1965 was unexpected, mostly because one featured instrument was bagpipes. In seven tracks: Bagpipe Blues, Kerry Dancers, Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me), More, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Sportin', Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.
“We’re in a crystal arms race,”
The Bedazzling of the American Gymnast [The New York Times] So it begins: the flag-waving excitement, the teeth-grinding anticipation, the blinding sparkle. The Olympics. Wait … hang on. The sparkle? Indeed. Because if Simone Biles — the 19-year-old American who is often called by sports pundits the best female gymnast ever, and whose performance in Rio de Janeiro will be among the most watched of these Olympics — does what most everyone seems to expect and makes off with multiple gold medals, it is very likely that when she climbs the podium, the shininess of the discs around her neck will pale in comparison to the shininess of something else. Her leotard.
Possibilia
POSSIBILIA is an interactive love story set in the multiverse.
The collector who was collected
at once distant, unknowable, and somehow feverishly intimate
Listening to a Jai Paul song sounds like a tuning into a pirate radio station being broadcast directly from someone’s brain. [more inside]
2016 Christmas shopping: underway
As the (northern hemisphere) summer rapidly disappears, the nights draw in and temperatures plummet, so the English are Christmas shopping. Seasonal foods appear on shelves, while the Selfridges Christmas store is now open and big supermarkets flag the approaching holiday. At Harrods, the Christmas range has been launched, while in Derbyshire Christmas pudding production is ramping up, and inns and hotels in towns such as Durham compete for Christmas Day meal bookings. For shoppers too impatient to wait, the 2014 British video game "Christmas Shopper Simulator" (play through). Days to go.
Missouri governor appointed as a public defender to an indigent
As authorized by law, the director of the Missouri State Public Defender office just used his authority to appoint the state's governor, Jay Nixon, as public defender counsel to an indigent. The director is authorized to appoint *any* member of the state bar to represent indigent defendants as a public defender; Jay Nixon is a member of the Missouri bar. This move is the latest in a battle over the governor's big cuts to the public defender department: $3.5 million cut from a $4.5 million budget, leaving the public defender system unable to provide anything other than brief, cursory counsel, which may not meet the requirements of the law.
Foreign Influence
President Obama:
With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.The Intercept: A series exploring how money from abroad has entered the 2016 presidential election thanks to Citizens United. [more inside]
Kim Jong Il: The man who brought love to North Korea’s silver screen
Among the many weird manifestations of Kim Il Sung’s tyranny was a prohibition of romance in the works of North Korean culture ... Growing up on the very best of Soviet and Hollywood movies, Kim Jong Il comprehended that romance could be an essential spoon of sugar to help people better swallow the bitter medicine of social mobilization and various other political campaigns. “People love love,” he once claimed in his characteristically laconic manner. “We must show it on the screen”.[more inside]
"Our world is in constant flux"
Vestige, a set of person-shaped mirrors placed in the Scottish woods, is one of the Reflective sculptures by U.K.-based artist Rob Mulholland.
The six male and female figures represent a vestige, a faint trace of the past people and communities that once occupied and lived in this space…They create a visual notion of non-space, a void, as if they are at one moment part of our world and then, as they fade into the forest, they become an intangible outline.
The six male and female figures represent a vestige, a faint trace of the past people and communities that once occupied and lived in this space…They create a visual notion of non-space, a void, as if they are at one moment part of our world and then, as they fade into the forest, they become an intangible outline.
ENGAGE
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand / A mighty woman
The 2016 US general election is fully underway now. In 96 days, Americans will go to the polls. Current opinion polls show a significant bump for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton coming out of the major party conventions, and according to most polling aggregators she is currently on track to win the election. [more inside]
Now this is a BUS
China has created a Transit Elevated Bus or "straddle bus" and just unveiled a working prototype in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province. Be sure to scroll down for the video of it in action.
London Road: a verbatim musical about the Ipswich serial murders
The film London Road [trailer], based on the stage production of the same name, is a verbatim musical by playwright Alecky Blythe All dialogue and lyrics are drawn word for word from Blythe's 2006 interviews with residents of the street, as Ipswich police tried to solve the murders of five local women: Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nicholls (previously on MeFi). The play and film both focus on residents' attempts to regain neighbourhood pride after the media coverage of the murders. However, the musical has not been without controversy. [more inside]
Do your future self a favor.
Set it and forget it. "When your willpower is depleted, you are even more likely to make decisions based on the environment around you. After all, if you're feeling drained, stressed, or overwhelmed then you're not going to go through a lot of effort to cook a healthy dinner or fit in a workout. You'll grab whatever is easiest. And that means that if you take just a little bit of time today to organize your room, your office, your kitchen, and other areas, then that adjustment in choice architecture can guide you toward better choices even when your willpower is fading."
I am my things and my things are me
"Single, childless, I’m all I’ve got: me – and the accumulated external markers of who I am, which are also narrative prompts for the ongoing story of my life. These stories connect me to the past, present, future, and live in nearly everything I own. "
Lee Randall explores the anchoring of self-identity in possessions. [more inside]
UFC Sold -- What's Next?
Last month, UFC, the largest mixed martial arts promotion in the world, was sold for $4 billion. [more inside]
Subway Simulator 2016
Brand New Subway is a browser game that lets you build the New York City subway system, either starting from scratch or working from an existing model (including a few past and future plans). Predictably, this leads to all sorts of idiosyncratic designs which score poorly on the game's metrics for ridership and cost, but do much better on metrics such as Number of Figure 8s Through Hoboken. [more inside]
this is not fine
my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing
Fences: A Brexit Diary
" When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?" Author Zadie Smith (lotsa previously on the Blue) ruminates on Brexit, as well as class, race, and an uncertain future. (slNYRB)
Putonghua or bust
In China: Chinese dialects fight for survival. Outside China: Meet the Hong Kong academics fighting to safeguard the Cantonese language (Hong Kong); Taiwanese: a doomed language? (Taiwan); Do you speak Singlish? || The Death of Dialects in Singapore (Singapore); Penang Hokkien will be ‘dead’ in 40 years if people stop using it (Malaysia) [more inside]
August 2
"Right here in the tree, my man."
Lionel Powell is an artist, a teacher, and TREEMAN — a Plantlike Amphibious Celestial Being in Venice Beach. [Vimeo, 2:47] [more inside]
Bivalve EHarmony Ads
Male bivalve looking for female (no hermaphrodites – I’m not prejudiced, just know what I like). Please be into drawing lots of water containing my sperm through your inhalant siphon. Reproduction not the goal for now.
$4,100 Gets You 6 Almonds
"During one of the hikes, she sat down in the middle of the trail and refused to go any further. She was screaming and crying, and then the trainer sat down next to her and realized she was high. Later, the program directors discovered she had a cache of pot brownies in her room. (Edible marijuana products were not on the DO NOT PACK list, specifically.)" Inside The Ranch 4.0 "wellness retreat" where celebrities and the wealthy drop in for long weekends of brutal exercise and just enough food deprivation to feel ecstatically light-headed.
Do not attempt to ford any river that is over 3 feet in depth
Little Jazz Man
will blow your mind.
Joey Alexander is an Indonesian jazz pianist and child prodigy. He released his first album, My Favorite Things, on May 12, 2015, at age 11. Joey is the youngest person to ever take the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. [more inside]
Americans call them...white trash. I call them... friends and family.
"Q: ...the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that?
J.D. Vance: I know exactly what you mean. My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively. She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it. “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.”
An interview with J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a family and a culture in crisis. [more inside]
你为什么不
"Biologists have found that human language, like bird song, may evolve to accommodate its environment through acoustic adaptation. In the internet, a similar phenomenon happens to our visual languages: our memes hold something of the digital landscapes they proliferate in. In China, the digitally-active keep folders of 表情 (biǎo qíng) [gifs], which literally means “facial expression.”
An introductory field guide to the Chinese biaoqing.
An introductory field guide to the Chinese biaoqing.
VDAP turns 30
30 Years Saving Lives from Volcanoes VDAP was established in 1986 in response to the tragic eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia that killed more than 23,000 people. Recognizing that the tragedy could have been averted with assistance before the eruption, the USGS and USAID/OFDA formed VDAP.
An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest
Fluxblog 1980s Survey Mixes
Matthew Perpetua of the mp3 blog Fluxblog has curated a "series of survey mixes designed to give more context to the music of the 1980s. The frustrating thing about [how] we typically deal with cultural history is to focus on specific niches and canons, but in doing that, we lose track of parallel and overlapping cultural trends. I hope to create a set of collections that will give you – and me! – a better understanding of chronology for the music of this era, and to highlight a lot of music that for whatever reason usually gets cut out of retrospectives today." [more inside]
Now you're playing with POWER
"All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.”
Death metal band Dead Territory performs John Cage’s seminal avant-garde work 4’33”. A significantly different version, performed by EntertainmentMIG, demonstrates the range of expression and emotion that the work makes possible. Finally, drummer Edo Animus offers notes and outtakes on his solo performance. [more inside]
It's literally the worst thing created by humans as a species
Back to the future mixes / Radio DT64 / Paul Kalkbrenner
Musician Paul Kalkbrenner, perhaps best known for the (hard-to-get in region 1 but fantastic) movie Berlin Calling (trailer, Sky and Sand video, Revolte scene) grew up in East Berlin listening to electronic music on East-German Youth Radio DT64 (German wiki info, soundcloud archives). While reconnecting with memories of this time he has spent 18 months compiling a free 3-part mix series with 2 released so far, constructed from online recordings of DT64 broadcasts from the late 80s and early 90s, mostly from the years immediately after the wall fell until the station closed in 1993. [more inside]
Equal Pay For Comparable Work Becomes Law In Massachusetts
As of 2018, Massachusetts will bar employers from asking for salary history before making a job offer as part of a law mandating equal pay for comparable work. [more inside]
For Men* Who Desperately Need Autonomy
Nora Samaran writes on men, autonomy, and how it is created, not taken. "Emotionally immature men who believe that autonomy is something you take, rather than something you create, may live their lives in a continual nightmare of ‘needs they can’t meet’ that they never come to understand."
Part Two: The Tricks of Shame and Hope
Eureka! Mycorrhiza
Do trees communicate with each other? "If you're a mother and you have children, you recognise your children and you treat them in certain ways. We're finding that trees will do the same thing. They'll adjust their competitive behaviour to make room for their own kin and they send those signals through mycorrhizal networks."
anadramous techbros
A Blow to the Waxed-String-Industrial Complex
In a letter to the Associated Press, the US Department of Health and Human Services was unable to provide any evidence that flossing is an effective way to prevent gum disease or cavities. Its Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are required by law to be based on scientific evidence, had removed the section on flossing earlier this year.
Voter suppression in America
When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites. But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote. - From the county and town level to the state level, voter suppression in America is all about race.
"Toddlers and elderly women get to stand outside the male gaze."
Toddler Grandma Style, like any style, does have a message. The message is “boys, this isn’t about you.” [more inside]
Nate Wooley's guide to American Weirdos
[Nate Wooley, T]he New York trumpeter and composer celebrates the USA’s lesser known maverick composers. "So here I attempt to give positive form and definition to this term while presenting some music that exemplifies the work of those American weirdos that have inspired me in the past 15 years. I define the artists below as having committed themselves to working outside of an established musical dialectic. Instead, they hurl themselves into the void of an idea with only their personal context and history as aesthetic anchor points. The starting point of their work is self-contained. Tradition, history, theory be damned. "
I Saw the Number 9 in Gold
Tony Fitzpatrick's blog, No. 9: An Artist's Journey, is a gorgeous collection of drawing/collages from a former tattoo artist and boxer turned maker. His self-taught style will be familiar to fans of Steve Earle's albums; the Chicago-based artist's works also hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. [more inside]
Porta Polonica: culture and history of Poles in Germany
Porta Polonica is a site (courtesy of the Westphalian State Museum of Industrial Heritage) devoted to the culture and history of Poles in Germany. Some examples of the dozens of articles therein: an account of the novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s year in Berlin; a biography of the pioneering harpsichordist, pianist and composer Wanda Landowska; a piece about Jan Łukasiewicz, who devised what was once known as ‘Reverse Polish Notation’; a brief account of Rosa Luxemburg’s career; an article about star of stage & (silent) screen Pola Negri; and a piece about the letter ‘P’ worn by the millions of Polish forced labourers in wartime Germany.
Telefone, the vision and voice of Noname that is singularly her own
A few months back, Chance the Rapper released Coloring Book mixtape (Soundcloud), "one of the strongest rap albums released this year, an uplifting mix of spiritual and grounded that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to." (Pitchfork) That mixtape features a ton of guests, including Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Future, Justin Bieber ... and Noname. Who? She's a Chicago rapper, formerly known as Noname Gypsy, and with her own mixtape, Telefone (Soundcloud), she "has only further solidified her reputation as a deft and hyper-intelligent young rapper, at first a one woman Digable Planets for the melodic Chicago contemporary, but quickly something wholly unique." (Noisey/Vice)
August 1
Singing in the Masjid-e Shah in Isfahan
An Iranian student visiting Isfahan's Masjid-e Shah, or Shah Mosque, also known as the Imam Mosque, takes advantage of the mosque's excellent acoustics to sing a brief and lovely song. [more inside]
Echo's Rift
Raised by a paranoid father in the foothills of California's Sierra Mountains, 15 year old Eliot Emory has grown up in isolation with records and VHS tapes as his only connection to the outside world [...] But when his father mysteriously vanishes, Eliot is propelled into a world far greater than he ever imagined...and far more perilous.
So begins Echo's Rift, a graphic novel by Jennifer Potter. New pages featuring her beautiful artwork appear 3x a week. It's 3 months and 35 pages old so far, and 'spans many worlds and encounters monsters, aliens, telepaths, mad scientists, and the occasional adorable bunny.'
So begins Echo's Rift, a graphic novel by Jennifer Potter. New pages featuring her beautiful artwork appear 3x a week. It's 3 months and 35 pages old so far, and 'spans many worlds and encounters monsters, aliens, telepaths, mad scientists, and the occasional adorable bunny.'
When Nature Happens, Live
Explore.org's live webcams have become wildly popular over the last few years, allowing viewers to watch, from the comfort of their home or office, livestreams of grizzlies, walruses, belugas, puffins, eagles and more in their natural habitat. Truly the best of the web. But there is a danger in becoming too attached. Today at a little after 7 pm Eastern time, fans of the osprey cam in Bremen, Me., watched nature in its most brutally real. [Warning: nature.] [more inside]
"I think it should actually be possible to break the law."
The Anarchist Sailor “Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100 percent effective, such that any potential offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed,” he wrote. “How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same-sex marriage should be permitted?”
Cathedrals inside you
Vaults are large, barrel shaped protein complexes. Found in most eukaryotic cells, their exact function is currently unknown. [more inside]
Listen over cocktails in your garden
As the sun begins its downward descent on summer, we pause to take a deep breath of humid air with Pablo Grossi, Argentinian grandmaster-level vinyl digger and selector. 50 miles out from Buenos Aires, Pablo has discovered and traded in thousands of records around the region so that "people from here can know them and have them". Comprised mostly of his vinyl recordings, this exemplary showcase of Exotica is warm to the touch. Best served with ice and lime garnish.
PENUP
Seymour Papert, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Logo Foundation went PENUP today. Many of us who learned programming in the 1980s started with LOGO, which spawned other langauges like StarLogo. Today, its spiritual successor is probably Scratch.
Convexity is a bothersome dimension
Ink4ink -- Portland librarians matching tattoos and books
"Steve Roskoski, a library assistant, said he and his fellow librarians (some with their own tattoos) came up with the idea to match readers with books based on their tats. It’s Portland after all.
“Book recommending and finding people good reads is something we do every day here at the Multnomah County Library,” Roskoski said. “Social media is a great way to interact with those people - and we’ve seen a great response. We had over 150 awesome tattoos sent in.”
That number will continue to grow, Roskoski suspects, as the word gets out." [more inside]
no hanky panky
"Below are sixty wee puzzles. I’ve tried to provide a heads-up where there’s a whisper of off rhyme or a slight shift of emphasis. The one consistent exception I’ve allowed to perfect rhyme is that at the center and fulcrum point of the puzzle, there may be a possessive “s.” The answer to “White whale’s home haircutting gizmo,” then, would be “Moby[’s] Flowbee.”" [more inside]
"Traitor." "Too much make-up." "Dressed as a woman but a hawkish man."
Tokyo elects Yuriko Koike as first female governor Ms Koike is a member of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but it did not endorse her so she ran as an independent. (SLBBC)
The movement for Black lives
A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice. (Platform, Downloads/Briefing)
Chernobyl going solar
The world’s most famous and damaging nuclear meltdown is now being considered for the world’s largest solar power plant. “The Chernobyl site has really good potential for renewable energy,” Ukraine’s environment minister Ostap Semerak, 44, said at an interview in London. “We already have high-voltage transmission lines that were previously used for the nuclear stations, the land is very cheap and we have many people trained to work at power plants.”
Daddy can you multiply triples?
A group of Science YouTubers got together to perform a tribute to a scientist Hamilton, in the style of his political musical namesake.
"... and rough beasts come slouching through it to be born."
"British politics has never seen a purer example of the Overton window than the referendum on membership of the EU."
Brexit Blues, John Lanchester for LRB [more inside]
A plate of beans
...all good fights have to be between blue and red, that’s how wars work. (Even bean wars.) Literal beans.