June 22, 2011
The Welikia Project
The Welikia Project goes beyond Mannahatta to encompass the entire city, discover its original ecology and compare it what we have today.
"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Tightening The Net
Telstra and Optus, two of Australia's biggest ISPs, will start censoring the Internet next month. The two companies will block more than 500 websites.
The music 2.0 crusade continues at Turntable
Turntable.fm DJ for a virtual room at the newest attempt at music-sharing 2.0. Listeners can vote songs up or down, or DJ themselves. Other similar projects like Muxtape and Listening Room have unfortunately not survived long.
Not on the list: Helping people
Before "Thriller," "Starlight"
The title track on Michael Jackson’s hit album “Thriller” began life as a very different song - called “Starlight.” WNYC's Soundcheck gives us a listen.
"You know what? You're gonna go to jail."
Rochester, NY woman arrested for videotaping police from her front yard. Because cops have civil rights too?. Because "you have to stand somewhere while videotaping, right?" In this case, it's apparently obstructing governmental administration.
Previously: [1], [2], [3].
This post embodies an idiosyncratic view of X, yet the familiar imagery allows for a connection between Y, and Z.
Dorothea Lange on historical impact of images
2-part KQED documentary about Dorothea Lange, from 1965. Lange meditates on the historical impact of images and how they can be used to examine/change society [more inside]
The Bravest Woman in Seattle
The Bravest Woman in Seattle "The reason for her sitting on the witness stand of a packed and sweltering eighth-floor courtroom at the King County Courthouse on June 8, in jeans and a short-sleeved black blouse, hands clasped over knees, a jury of strangers taking notes, a crowd of family and friends and strangers observing, a bunch of media recording, was to say: This happened to me. You must listen. This happened to us. You must hear who was lost. You must hear what he did. You must hear how Teresa fought him. You must hear what I loved about her. You must know what he took from us. This happened." (Trigger warning for rape and violence.)
Uncle Adolf's Holiday Camp
"A vacation complex along the Baltic coast with 10,000 sea-view rooms in eight identical six-story blocks of steel-reinforced concrete, each one the length of five football fields." Built to last but never finished, Prora has been largely unknown until recently, as Germans debate its future use or demolition. [more inside]
"The problem stems not from there being 'too much' casual sex on campus but from the overall dissatisfaction with sex on campus and the lack of alternatives."
So suddenly, everyone was talking about hookup culture, and they wanted to know: "What is this thing? What is it?" And they were afraid that somehow college was some alcohol-fueled Bacchanalian orgy.The Promise and Perils of Hookup Culture: a talk by sociologist Lisa Wade (previously).
The Invisible Army
The U.S.'s military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq are mostly staffed by Third Country Nationals (TCN), who are often victims of human trafficking. [more inside]
Poems About Internet Dating
Poems About Internet Dating. Does what it says in the profile.
Victoria Azarenka's Wail
The continued tragedy of Argentina's Dirty War
Ernestina Herrera de Noble heads up The Clarin Group and the Clarin newspaper (in Spanish), the largest in Argentina. She is the mother of two adopted children, Felipe and Marcela, heirs to the Clarin Group fortune.
She has been a controversial figure for much of her life. Currently, her paper stands in staunch opposition to the administration of President Cristina Kirchner, who in 2009 successfully pushed through legislation forcing the Clarin group to sell off some of its holdings. President Kirchner recently announced she will be seeking a second term.
However, Mrs. Herrera de Noble's legacy will probably rest on the suit brought against her by the Grandmothers of the Plaza del Mayo, forcing her children to submit DNA samples to ascertain whether they are the children of detainees killed by the military during Argentina’s “Dirty War”. The siblings and their mother have fought to avoid DNA testing, claiming it is a violation of their privacy, but there are families who claim that Felipe and Marcela are the natural born children of women pregnant when they were detained and subsequently disappeared. Ernestina insists that the adoptions were “legal”, and her children stand by her side. If a genetic link is proven to former detainees, Mrs. Herrera de Noble may face a criminal investigation.
What's in a name? Would an app store by any other name smell as sweet?
Who owns the term "app store"? Apple wants to, but Amazon and Microsoft, among others, think it is generic. Will Steve Jobs's own words come to haunt him? In any case, the first casualty of the fight between giants seems to be Amahi, a small open-source media server. [more inside]
27 Xs Followed By An L
All together now
German photographer Peter Langenhahn has an unusual approach to sports photography: he combines multiple images from numerous times in the competition into a collage, with striking effects.
Radio Free Song Club
Radio Free Song Club is a monthly-ish podcast featuring a mix of New York veteran songwriters. The only (lazily enforced) rule is that each participant perform a song she's written in the past month. Listen to recent episodes or browse mp3s of individual songs.
To the people who stole my Les Paul
The old switcheroo.
“Enhance... enhance... enhance”
Lightfield cameras capture the entire photonic information of a scene with essentially infinite depth of field, meaning that pictures can be focused after the photo is taken, and low-light conditions do not require a flash. Lightfield images are also “3D” without the need for stereo lenses.
Lightfield (aka “plenoptic”) technology was developed in the 90's: the first working prototype required dozens of separate cameras and a supercomputer. Professional plenoptic cameras have been available for the past year; the Lytro startup intends to release a consumer-ready shirt-pocket lightfield camera later this year. [more inside]
Lightfield (aka “plenoptic”) technology was developed in the 90's: the first working prototype required dozens of separate cameras and a supercomputer. Professional plenoptic cameras have been available for the past year; the Lytro startup intends to release a consumer-ready shirt-pocket lightfield camera later this year. [more inside]
Fela! the aftrobeat musical
Fela! is a musical based on a period in Fela Kuti's life when the musician faced off against Nigerian government soldiers. The musical was off-Broadway for a month in 2008, and about a year later opened on Broadway, running until January of 2011. Nominated for a number of awards, the musical presented a number on the 2010 Tony Awards show, where it won 3 awards. The show is now touring, including an opening in Nigeria just before the recent elections. If you can't catch it touring, the Broadway cast recording is streaming. Bonus: M.O.P (Movement of the People), Fela's 37 minute long song for the political party he founded. [more inside]
Where there's a will, there's a way...
A heroin substitute called "Krokodil" is having destructive effects on Russia's active user population. [more inside]
Life is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work
"I can't tell you about all the suicides and the accidental deaths where I work. ... One guy was 38. He went home after a really long day, poured himself a drink, sat down in his armchair, and died."
Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans. First person stories of doing more with less, from warehouses and classrooms to operating rooms and air-traffic control towers. [more inside]
No more seafood? So what? It was all lousy with mercury anyway.
"Ocean Life on the Brink of Mass Extinctions," warns a new comprehensive study from "a 2011 workshop of ocean experts staged by [International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO)] and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at Oxford University." The most likely culprits in the unfolding, large-scale disaster? Pollution and climate change, say the experts. What else is new, you say? Well, the schedule's been changed up: "Marine life facing mass extinction 'within one human generation,'... says global panel of scientists." [more inside]
Woolite is Blue, Isn't It?
FBI Raid curbs Curbed
The F.B.I raided a data center in Reston, VA yesterday morning, seizing three racks of servers and disrupting service to the Curbed Network, Pinboard.in, Instapaper, altlabs.co.au, and took the physical servers of tens of other clients. Curbed and AltLabs are currently still down. The F.B.I was reported in pursuit of one individual user, and agents took entire server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that “one enclosure is = to one server” according to DigitialOne, the Swiss hosting company.
My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant
Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on the Virginia Tech Shootings for the Washington Post, interviewed Mark Zuckerberg for the New Yorker(previously), and explored the AIDS epidemic in Washington, D.C.
He is also an undocumented immigrant.
Dang kids with their coal-burning music! ::shaking cane for emphasis::
ViolaGate, wherein a world-weary techno-busker wails on some catgut and twiddles some knobs (presumably), whisking veteran violinist Bernard Zaslav (slyt) into a cane-shaking frenzy. [more inside]
"But there is sometimes room to use painful language to reclaim our own history."
Heated Debates, Burning Books [Via NewYorker.com] The Canadian writer Lawrence Hill recently received the unsettling news that a Dutch political group would be assembling on Wednesday in Amsterdam to burn copies of his novel, “The Book of Negroes” (published in the Netherlands under the title “Het Negerboek,” and in the U.S. as “Someone Knows My Name”). So what exactly does this historical novel have to do with the Dutch? [more inside]
I wonder how a book about the Sims would start...
Meet Australia's and possibly soon the world's richest woman.
You probably haven't heard of Gina Rinehart. However, she's Australia's richest person and will quite possibly be the world's richest person in a few short years. Her currently limited political activity appears primarily directed at maintaining profitability, avoiding taxes and stopping a price on carbon pollution.
The Long Finger of the Law
Delicious Closet Queen
Etat Libre D'Orange is a niche perfume house - the olfactory equivalent of arthouse cinema. So, in keeping with a company that claim to be challenging what we think of as perfume, it's no surprise that their most infamous scent is intended to smell literally like sex. [Here's a NSFW image of the label.] But what happens when you try it for the first time?
Like no other bagel in the world
"Schmeared by the rent" - Manhattan's H&H Bagels is closing its iconic and much-loved Upper West Side location.
Its like TED but with more fluffy armchairs, tents and english accents
HowTheLightGetsIn is an annual festival of philosophy and music where "Leading thinkers in every field mix with cutting edge musicians to excite the imagination and renew the spirit." Talks from the 2011 event have recently been posted online and are well worth a watch. Highlights include Gerald Moore, Lewis Wolpert & Mark Vernon discussing faith , Richard Schoch on happiness, Lauren Booth discussing her conversion from "hedonistic libertarian to islam" Frank Furedi on the rules of the political elite and the Funny Women Awards
which does what it says on the tin.
You all need to have your heads examined
The epidemic of mental illness plaguing the Americans and the overmedication of psychiatric patients are in part artifacts of the diagnostic method. [more inside]
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
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