June 1, 2018
“No! Maxwell - you’re mean.”
Maxwell the cat gets salty with his owner [SL Twitter]
Pauses matter. (and physics)
The Problem With DC Action Scenes [SLYT, 7:33]
China refuses the world's refuse; what to do with the problem of plastic
Slipped into a New York Times listicle (of sorts) on the 6 things you're recycling wrong as an aspirational recycler is a link to another article: your recycling might not be getting recycled because of a ban on importing 24 types of "foreign waste" that was announced in July 2017, with the restrictions to start in 2018. In December of 2017, there was recycling chaos in the U.S. as recyclers were looking for new importers for the 1/6th of U.S. recycling that was previously heading to China. In April 2018, waste exporters such as the U.S., Europe and Japan were still scrambling for an alternative to China. Ahead of Earth Day 2018, China announced additional bans on waste imports. [more inside]
"In August 1992 ... I set off to walk the county of Suffolk"
"Patience (After Sebald) is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss - an exploration of the work and influence of WG Sebald, told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book The Rings Of Saturn. The source material for the soundtrack was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece Winterreise and subjected to ... perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear."
Truck Transporting Millions of Bees Overturns on Highway
"Local beekeepers were called in to help move the bees to a safer location and try to redirect the bees back into their hives..." "A semi-trailer truck carrying a reported 15-30 million honeybees overturned on an East Texas highway on Memorial Day."
Additional Links:
the bears were getting bolder
In the summer of 2017, the survivalists began to worry—really worry—about the bears. The problem wasn’t the animals’ nighttime behavior; that was just a nuisance. The survivalists were used to catching sight of the hulking intruders emerging from the darkened woods of rural New Hampshire to damage property, steal food, and deposit huge piles of excrement. Recently, though, the bears had started showing up in broad daylight, and not just at the survivalists’ encampment. The survivalists agreed that something had to be done to defend their makeshift home...
"I feel like the queen on the 'Prior' float..."
Andrew Garfield currently has a TONY nomination for playing Prior Walter in the Broadway revival of “Angels in America”. As it happens, Stephen Spinella - who originated the role in 1993 - is in another revival of the same play in Berkeley, California, only this time he's playing the part of Roy Cohn. The New York Times asked the actors, who have never met, to correspond by email during a week’s worth of shows. [more inside]
Zach Woods in the Woods for GQ
Woods is what women would have called an "Internet boyfriend" a few years ago [...] Woods, of course, is not aware of his effect on the Internet because he doesn't read anything about himself, but the news delights him. [via nikkuneko on mltshp ]
Midlife, self-love, vulnerability, and "a series of painful nudges"
"A crisis is an intense, short-lived, acute, easily identifiable, and defining event that can be controlled and managed. Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling." "The Midlife Unraveling" by Brené Brown. "...We are torn between desperately wanting everyone to see our struggle so that we can stop pretending, and desperately doing whatever it takes to make sure no one ever sees anything except what we’ve edited and approved for posting....it seems as if we spend the first half of our lives shutting down feelings to stop the hurt, and the second half trying to open everything back up to heal the hurt."
Welcome to my happy place.
It's just 50 pictures and videos of sweet, sweet dogs and puppies. [imgur gallery]
accessible in principle via algebra and geometry
minutephysics [previously: little bits of science, for SCIENCE!, dear Mr. President, OMG Science!, how to see without glasses] has a series of short videos explaining Special Relativity:
Why Is Special Relativity Hard? - We don't have to follow the same path Einstein did
Spacetime Diagrams - How motion looks from different perspectives
Lorentz Transformations - What do things look like from the moving perspective?
Relativity of Simultaneity - Events that were at different places at the same time are no longer simultaneous (at, say 1/3 the speed of light)
Length Contraction And Time Dilation - Perceiving each other's perception of time
Why Is Special Relativity Hard? - We don't have to follow the same path Einstein did
Spacetime Diagrams - How motion looks from different perspectives
Lorentz Transformations - What do things look like from the moving perspective?
Relativity of Simultaneity - Events that were at different places at the same time are no longer simultaneous (at, say 1/3 the speed of light)
Length Contraction And Time Dilation - Perceiving each other's perception of time
NOFX: Three Chords and Inappropriate Jokes
The band NOFX has a reputation for dark and often confrontational humor. Now the LA based punk rock band has come under fire for making fun of the victims of the Route 91 Harvest Festival Shooting. [more inside]
When the Government Stops Existing
The Secret Buried in the Puerto Rican Death Toll, the ‘official death toll’ from Hurricane Maria was 64 but a new Harvard study puts it closer to 5,000 ( Rolling Stone) A New Hurricane Season Is Starting In Puerto Rico. Thousands Are Still Living Without Electricity. (Buzzfeed) People on Twitter shares stories of those they lost #4645boricuas. Puerto Rico’s DIY disaster relief (NYR books) Anarchists come to aid when the state doesn’t (previously) Hurricane season starts June 1st.
“Press X to fight oppression.”
Detroit: Become Human review: a beautiful vision of the future gets stuck in the past [The Verge] “Like many socially marginalized groups before them, their demands are simple: they just want the same rights as everyone else. Just in case the historical and modern parallels haven’t hit you over the head hard enough enough, your character — the head of the group — can lead them in chanting the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “We have a dream!” But the protesters in Detroit aren’t people of color demonstrating for their human rights. Indeed, they aren’t human at all, but rather sentient androids. And if it seems like a bad idea to bluntly map the complexities of race, slavery, and the civil rights struggle in America on to the struggles of fictional robots — well, it is.” [more inside]
I am a woman’s rights.
Sojourner Truth is famous for giving the "Ain't I a Woman?" speech. Only she never gave that speech. A version of the speech she gave at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1851, substantially rewritten by a white abolitionist during the Civil War to make Truth sound like a stereotypical southern black slave (even though she was a New Yorker with a Dutch accent), is what most of us know today. The Sojourner Truth Project aims to correct that error, providing side-by-side comparisons of the original speech with the popular version, as well as renditions of the original speech by Afro-Dutch women.
"Those are just kills"
“This wasn’t about justice,” Maloney told Epstein. “This was about politics. The world knew something horrible happened, and there had to be an answer for it. It can be us as a Marine Corps. It can be a unit, or it can be a squad, or it can be a platoon, or it can be one man. And one man became the politically expedient answer.”How the US Marine Corps (deliberately?) blew the war crimes trial for the massacre in Haditha. Previously: the massacre, its consequences (2006) and the trial (2007).
the very epitome of the good-bad TV show
Diss and Say Goodbye
NYT Popcast delivers an exquisite excavation of the skeletons animating the back-and-forth between Pusha T and Drake. Latest update.
« Previous day | Next day »