February 17, 2017
In these words I often think you'd recognize me
The Kids Think I'm A Shoe
Stan Smith and the iconic shoe that bears his name are profiled in New York Magazine.
A president's words. A supervillain's mouth.
Behold the Red Skull-Donald Trump mashup. D.M. Higgins replaces a classic Marvel villain's dialogue with choice president Trump quotes. [more inside]
"Al is unique. There’s nothing like him in the history of funny music."
WaPo: Was ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic the real star all along? After nearly 40 years of parodying celebrities, the accordion-playing nerd has become a legend in his own right.
"Pac-Man," a spoof of The Beatles' "Tax Man" from the new Weird Al box set, Squeeze Box.
"Pac-Man," a spoof of The Beatles' "Tax Man" from the new Weird Al box set, Squeeze Box.
Sit Down or Get Out of the Way
Slow death on Manus, the sad story of Eaten Fish
(Content warning: attempted suicide, sexual assault, other awful stuff that goes on in Australia’s offshore gulags). Eaten Fish is the nom de plume of a 24-year-old Iranian cartoonist who has been imprisoned in a detention center in Papua New Guinea since trying to seek asylum in Australia by boat in 2013. Fish — real name Ali — has severe OCD and anxiety, and says he has been abused and sexually assaulted while in the prison camp. [more inside]
If 60's Were 90's
In 1993, UK music collective Beautiful People released Rilly Groovy [official video], the first single from the electronica/EDM/house album If 60s Were 90s, an album built largely around Jimi Hendrix samples. [more inside]
That outward sign of an inward or unseen calamity.
The Age of Rudeness. An essay by Rachel Cusk. "Society organizes itself very efficiently to punish, silence or disown truth-tellers. Rudeness, on the other hand, is often welcomed in the manner of a false god. Later still, regret at the punishment of the truth-teller can build into powerful feelings of worship, whereas rudeness will be disowned. Are people rude because they are unhappy? Is rudeness like nakedness, a state deserving the tact and mercy of the clothed? If we are polite to rude people, perhaps we give them back their dignity; yet the obsessiveness of the rude presents certain challenges to the proponents of civilized behavior. It is an act of disinhibition: Like a narcotic, it offers a sensation of glorious release from jailers no one else can see." [more inside]
“Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.”
Philip Pullman Unveils Epic Fantasy Trilogy The Book of Dust [The Guardian] “The as-yet-untitled first volume of The Book of Dust [Amazon], due out on 19 October, will be set in London and Oxford, with the action running parallel to the His Dark Materials trilogy [wiki]. A global bestseller since the first volume, Northern Lights, was published in 1995, Pullman’s series has sold more than 17.5m copies and been translated into 40 languages. Pullman’s brave and outspoken heroine, Lyra Belacqua, will return in the first two volumes. Featuring two periods of her life – as a baby and 10 years after His Dark Materials ended – the series will include other characters familiar to existing readers, as well as creations such as alethiometers (a clock-like truth-telling device), daemons (animals that are physical manifestations of the human spirit) and the Magisterium, the church-like totalitarian authority that rules Lyra’s world.” [Previously.]
Une Femme Coquette
Calculating inequalities at math camp
Equations and Inequalities: Math, Race and Fellowship looks inside a math summer camp aimed at low income non-white and non-asian kids in New York. This program aims to scoop up kids who have a natural aptitude for math, but don't have a privileged family background. Fighting against systemic inequalities like family income, race, parental education, and media portrayals of who is a mathematician. Francis Su, the outgoing President of the Mathematical Association of America (and the first non-white holder of that title) addresses similar issues in his beautiful outgoing speech. [more inside]
James Hogue - Alexi Santana
He woke up one morning and decided to become someone else. (SLNewYorker)
The questions I was asking him weren’t real questions, he explained. They were the products of a story line in my head, whose relation to his life was at best coincidental. [more inside]
The questions I was asking him weren’t real questions, he explained. They were the products of a story line in my head, whose relation to his life was at best coincidental. [more inside]
Turnbuckles everywhere sigh in relief - RIP George "The Animal" Steele
Wrestling legend George "The Animal" Steele (real name Jim Myers) has died at the age of 79. [more inside]
“Keeping Up With The Kattarshians.”
An Icelandic news website has released a live, reality-style YouTube show featuring four, nine-week-old kittens living in a dollhouse stocked with bunk beds, toys and of course cameras.
This question of library handwriting is an exceedingly practical one
In September 1885, a group of librarians spent four days discussing major issues for libraries, including handwriting. Though typewriters had been commercially available for over a decade, librarians were still handwriting their catalog cards to catalog their expanding collections, but their writing was without consistency . Thomas Edison was cited for his described handwriting style for telegraph operators (paywalled source), and from this, Melvil Dewey and his crew of “a dozen catalogers and librarians” hashed out the rules of library hand, a precise, almost mechanical style. If you enjoy that summary, you may enjoy The (Lengthy) Context and History of Library Hand, with ample notes and references. [more inside]
Tinkertoys CEO Peg Wheelsticks declined to comment
How many ways can you stack six 2x4 lego bricks? In 1974, LEGO said it was 102,981,500. But! High school student Mikkel Abrahamsen and mathematician Søren Eilers revisited the problem and got 915,103,765. Here's the paper [pdf] with the details and some nice graphs and illustrations. And if that's not enough for you, see also On the entropy of LEGO [pdf] by Eilers and Bergfinnur Durhuus.
Remembering the SS Mendi
"In February 1917 the SS Mendi, a First World War troopship, was carrying 802 men of the South African Native Labour Corps (SANLC), bound for the Western Front. Many had never seen the sea before.
The men had signed up because they believed that, despite being oppressed by the white South African government, if they demonstrated loyalty to the British Empire, it would gain them a voice in their deeply divided land." so writes Historic England writing about one of the more tragic events in British history:
"On 21 February 1917, the British ship, the SS Mendi was sunk off the Isle of Wight. It was hit not by a German torpedo, but by another British ship, the Darro, in thick fog....The Darro made no attempt to rescue the men in the water, and the Mendi’s Royal Navy escort ship was able to find only a very few." [more inside]
"On 21 February 1917, the British ship, the SS Mendi was sunk off the Isle of Wight. It was hit not by a German torpedo, but by another British ship, the Darro, in thick fog....The Darro made no attempt to rescue the men in the water, and the Mendi’s Royal Navy escort ship was able to find only a very few." [more inside]
Moving the heaviest item in the museum's collection
Did they build the building around it? No, they did not.
4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump
In which Dale Beran traces the rise of 4chan and how a bunch of lulz-loving guys in their parents' basements seized on the loser-winner Trump as the ultimate prank on an outside world they had long abandoned.
Long, but full of insights and well-worth the read. Ends with a challenge and note of hope for the left.
The Anton Chekhov-George Saunders Humanity Kit
A little over three years ago I asked George Saunders whether I could sit in on one of his MFA classes at Syracuse, and, flabbergastingly, he said okay. In an effort to transmit the benefits of the taking the class to readers more widely, Maria Bustillos put together the Chekhov–Saunders Humanity Kit.
"It's almost like the oceans are getting ready for a heart attack."
A new study published in Nature says that the overall oxygen content of the ocean has declined by 2% over the past 50 years. Because oxygen is always unevenly distributed in the ocean, that 2% average represents a larger drop in some areas than others. Bacteria in areas of low oxygen tend to produce nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that has risen in a way similar to CO2 over the decades since the industrial revolution. Low O2 leading to more N2O from the ocean is another likely global warming feedback loop. Projections indicate that we could lose 7% of the ocean's oxygen by 2100. [more inside]
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