June 6, 2013
Todd Vanderwerff was trolling us with the B grade because B is for Bluth
Embrace the mystery: Is repeat viewing the best way to approach complex TV?
Deciphering Maya
Maya Decipherment is a weblog devoted to ideas and developments in ancient Maya epigraphy and related fields. (via)
Physics + Art = Awesome.
Maybe not the warmest color.
The Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World
Businessweek profiles Costco [alt link], with emphasis in comparison to Sam's club. via [more inside]
How long will you forget me? Forever?
This is Our Music [part 2] is a short documentary about naivist composer Tori Kudo, who's best known under the name Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Kudo is fascinated in mistakes and imperfection, and his music is warm and charming, crackly and washed-out like a Polaroid picture, sometimes energetic and surprisingly short, other times calm and gentle, and sometimes just gorgeous folk rock. Some of his most powerful songs are religious in nature: How Long Will You Forget Me is a moving, unpretentious adaptation of Psalm 13, and Moving Without Ark is a soft but powerful epic which could be about the Flood or the Second Coming. Tori's wife Reiko is also a naivist composer; I'm especially taken by her song Son of Man.
Pacifying the Favelas: Preparing for International Attention
Brazilian favelas have a long and sordid history, initially constructed as a shanty town by soldiers who had nowhere to live. Then the poor people from rural areas moved to the cities for job opportunities, expanding the favelas. Today, there are over 500 favelas, with about a third of Rio de Janeiro's population, and they're growing. The three primary drug gangs that fight for control in the favelas formed in the 1970s (PDF), but they were formed not solely by fighters, but also political radicals, and these gangs provide some social services where the government does not. That is, until the Pacifying Police Units were formed in 2008, with the goal of pushing the gangs out and providing government stability from a live-in police force. But this isn't just to an effort to end the gang violence -- the slums are being swept ahead of the tourist rush, and the shanty towns are now seeing a rapid gentrification from non-Brazilians and speculators.
Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts
How to make the biggest hit of all time:
Step 1: Get the most successful female act of the 1960s, the Queen of Motown, to write and sing lead.
Step 2: Get the biggest selling band of the 1970s, the Kings of Disco, to produce and sing backup.
Step 3: Get the biggest selling musical artist of the 1980s, the King of Pop, to co-write the song and share vocals.
Step 4: Profit?
"Phone companies didn't think you were going to blow them up back then."
What's in the database? Roughly 1,000 records of documents related to phone phreaking history. It includes newspaper and magazine articles, letters, memos, FBI memos, audio recordings, you name it.. Extra Goodies! [more inside]
Prominent philosopher resigns, blames confusion over philosophical puns.
Colin McGinn, a distinguished philosopher at the University of Miami, is resigning his post due to allegations that he sent sexually explicit e-mails to his research assistant, a graduate student in philosophy. [more inside]
"I sensed the water was my natural element."
Esther Williams, swimming champion, movie star and inspiration to many, dies peacefully in her sleep, aged 91. [more inside]
Do you miss the boat?
A jam band concert worth of work
Locating the scene from The Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead album cover required an insane amount of research, painstakingly detailed by Bob Egan. He's done this for other famous locations (previously).
A bad day for privacy.
Washington Post: NSA and FBI are mining data from nine major tech companies in formerly secret program. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple are being monitored, with Dropbox "coming soon". The program, called PRISM, is reportedly the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief.
A Premature Post-Mortem
With the imminent release of the much discussed, and utterly doomed film version of Max Brooks' World War Z, Vanity Fair gives an in depth look at the story behind the creation. From the initial bidding war over the film rights, through the troubled production, rewrites, reshoots, and drama behind what is already being called the biggest flop in film history.
The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age
"The Chicagoan, published from 1926 to 1935 in Chicago, was explicitly modeled on the New Yorker in both its graphic design and editorial content. The magazine aimed to portray the city as a cultural hub and counter its image as a place of violence and vice. It was first issued biweekly and then, in a larger format, monthly, ceasing publication in the midst of the Depression. The magazine received little national attention during its lifetime and few copies survive. This digital collection reproduces the near-complete run in the University of Chicago Library with issues supplied from other collections where possible."
I wouldn't say craft is the enemy, but it's no friend of mine
"I just felt suddenly like I had to write and say craft is the enemy! You could labor your whole life perfecting your “craft,” struggling to draw better, hoping one day to have the skills to produce a truly great comic. If this is how you’re thinking, you will never produce this great comic, this powerful work of art, that you dream of. There’s nothing wrong with trying to draw well, but that is not of primary importance." -- Back in 1996 a young James Kochalka made a name for himself by writing a screed against craftmanship to The Comic Journal's letterpage. Now the whole exchange, including responses by Jim Woodring and Scott McCloud, is online at the Journal's website.
Disclosure
America's 50 worst charities
Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families. Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids... In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms... But Kids Wish is not an isolated case... An old-fashioned investigative reporting piece into the worst charities in the US. [more inside]
Life is the Pits
"...there is never a moment when the film doesn't look absolutely realistic, and it isn't about sand anyway, but about life. 'Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?' the man asks the woman, and who cannot ask the same question? 'Woman in the Dunes' is a modern version of the myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down." 1, 2 (NSFW: some nudity). Video essay by James Quandt. Based on the novel by Kobo Abe.
"There is a dog still on the beach today...looking for its masters."
Legendary
war correspondent
Ernie Pyle didn't get to Normandy Beach until the day after D-Day.
In a series of three columns, he described what he saw, and found.
"A Pure Miracle"
"The Horrible Waste Of War."
"A Long Thin Line Of Personal Anguish."
In a series of three columns, he described what he saw, and found.
"A Pure Miracle"
"The Horrible Waste Of War."
"A Long Thin Line Of Personal Anguish."
Thus iMessaged Zarathustra
Towering over Manhattan, a colossal monolith made from the combined screens of every iPhone ever sold. A visualization from Stupid Calculations (via)
SIGGRAPH 2013
This video is a sample of many of the amazing new CG technologies developed over the past year, featured at SIGGRAPH 2013. The video shows things like flowing water, cloth, bouncing blobs, realistic hair, and on-the-fly generation. Previous years' videos inside! [more inside]
Best of the webbing
MIT Media Lab's Silk Pavilion, a geometric structure machine-woven with silk thread and then reinforced by the efforts of 6500 silkworms. Watch the beautifully-done making-of video.
It does exist somewhere. In Amy Poehler’s living room.
It’s entirely possible the whole thing is some sort of comedy-lover’s fever dream. Tina Fey and Paul Rudd apparently met for the first time on the set of a live reenactment of Sixteen Candles, part of an unaired VH1 special based on the UCB Theatre show called Soundtracks Live. Oh yes -- and they also took on Pretty in Pink and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Favorites from Stella/The State, Upright Citizens Brigade, Saturday Night Live and more took part. [more inside]
Previously, on Mad Men
There are only three more episodes in the penultimate season of Mad Men. Let's look back on what we've seen so far. [more inside]
Keeping It All Together: Paper Fasteners at the National Archives
"I think about what has kept me here at the National Archives for all this time. It couldn’t be the bone-wearying monotony of shuffling heavy cartons of records from here to there...No, there’s something else that gets me in the door every morning. Fasteners." A brief survey of various paper clips and their ilk encountered by employees at the National Archives. [more inside]
富士山
"I lived in a hut near the summit of Mt. Fuli, the highest mountain in Japan,[more inside]
for five months straight, four years in a row,
for a total of 600 days. Each morning,
I photographed the dawn from the same spot, chasing the ever-changing
drama that unfolded before my eyes.
Madison, you minx!
Smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies
Bearjacked
Bears searching for food will sometimes smash car windows to look inside. Not this bear, which prefers more of a "gentleman thief" approach. [SLYT]
The answer, surprisingly, is awesome.
Sometimes you have to deal with those big, eternal questions, like what would happen if you put polka music over video of German industrial dance. [slyt | previously | via]
The Department Of War Math
You Are Not So Smart: Survivorship Bias, demonstrated through Abraham Wald's work at the Statistical Research Group in World War 2. [more inside]
the 387 houses of peter fritz
In 1993, while browsing in a junk shop, artist Oliver Croy discovered 387 model buildings, each neatly wrapped in its own garbage bag--the architectural creations of Austrian insurance clerk Peter Fritz.
Makes your rice go bling!
The most astonishing automated sushi roller commercial you'll see today.
howl.
Moon Waltz : a one-button werewolf flash game
Chillin' The Most
Laid off from the Sun Times
A follow up to the recent story about layoffs. A fired staff photographer documents his new life "with an iPhone, but with the eye of a photojournalist trained in storytelling".
The FBI, the NSA and your phone records in 2013.
Glenn Greenwald has produced a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over to the NSA "telephony metadata" of all local and international calls either originating or terminating in the United States on an "ongoing, daily basis," and further barring Verizon from disclosing to the public the fulfillment of this request or the existence of the court order itself. The ACLU refers to the practice as "beyond Orwellian." Direct link to the court order available here. [more inside]
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