July 1, 2019
oh deer
Deer antlers are a 'controlled' form of bone cancer growth - "Deer can completely regenerate an organ. No other mammal has that ability." (Science! ;) [more inside]
Moving across sea ice and glaciers
Fantastic arctic fox: animal walks 3,500km from Norway to Canada "Epic journey by female fox includes fastest movement rate for species ever recorded" [The Guardian]
Wear midi controllers in your hair
Solo artist Elise Trouw plays every instrument in live loop mashups. Foo Fighters Meets 70's Bobby Caldwell. Radiohead Meets The Police.
The Scarlet E -- Brooke Gladstone (On The Media) does eviction in the US
WNYC and On The Media and the Eviction Lab at Princeton University come together for a 4-part series (~170m total) The Scarlet E, about the social and economic problems created by mass eviction as currently experienced in the US. The above page has links for all episodes that include download and transcript links, such as for Part I: Why?
Just Keep Going North
At the border with William T. Vollman Uplifting their heads, my fellow citizens applauded, cheered, and murmured to one another. A woman’s spectacularly eye-shadowed peepers were shining with excitement. The lady who had caught me not applauding now repeatedly turned to glare at my laptop’s clickety-clack. (Had I been outed as a media agent?) A white-haired old man shared yet another secret with a middle-aged blonde’s ear, which neither twitched nor wiggled. A man in a pinstriped shirt was beaming, and a man in a soft sweater leaned thirstily forward. Ladies and gentlemen, I dub this democracy!
Pop Music Theory
Pop Music Theory is an introduction to music theory and songwriting basics, comprising about 50 short lessons. [more inside]
Device Orchestra
Finlandia Hymn on 4 Electric Toothbrushes A Finnish fellow makes music with various appliances and equipment: "I turn different devices into instruments and I make them play music together. So far I've mostly played electronic toothbrushes and credit card machines but there's more to come!" [more inside]
All opinions are my own and not sponsored
Sarah has a YouTube channel that may seem familiar to you.
Sarah's Beauty Routine
A haul video
A makeover
Sarah's daily routine
What's in my bag?
Bloopers
[more inside]
Sarah's Beauty Routine
A haul video
A makeover
Sarah's daily routine
What's in my bag?
Bloopers
[more inside]
Rest as Resistance
Ambrose would surely approve...
A Devil's Dictionary for the Silicon Age [SLGuardian]
The Rise of the Million-Member Subtle Asian Traits
How ‘Subtle Asian Traits’ Became a Global Hit: "Powered by global immigration and the borderless procrastination magnet of social media, the Facebook group has become a gathering place for laughs and reflection on the complicated experience of first generation Asian immigrants who have grown up reconciling the expectations of their heritage and the identity of the country they call home. [more inside]
Why San Francisco Techies Hate the City They Transformed
By Julia Carrie Wong for The Guardian:
A quarter of a century after the first dot-com boom, the battle for San Francisco’s soul is over and the tech industry has won. But what happens when the victors realize they don’t particularly like the spoils? Tech workers are increasingly vocal about their discontent with the city they fought so hard to conquer. [more inside]
👁️
The Strange Politics of Facial Recognition [The Atlantic] “Your face is no longer just your face—it’s been augmented. At a football game, your face is currency, used to buy food at the stadium. At the mall, it is a ledger, used to alert salespeople to your past purchases, both online and offline, and shopping preferences. At a protest, it is your arrest history. At the morgue, it is how authorities will identify your body. Facial-recognition technology stands to transform social life, tracking our every move for companies, law enforcement, and anyone else with the right tools. Lawmakers are weighing the risks versus rewards, with a recent wave of proposed regulation in Washington State, Massachusetts, Oakland, and the U.S. legislature.” [more inside]
I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners totally destroyed it
This is my game. It is a good simple platformer that I spent over 1 Year Making. It is my first Steam game so I purposely made it very small. In fact, the entire game fits on this one screen. What you see here is the entire game. Your goal is to get through it as fast as you can. [...] What I wasn't expecting was to have every challenge totally torn apart by Speedrunners. They attacked my game like a hundred little ants taking down a grasshopper.
circle circle dot dot
The terrifying unknowns of an exotic invasive tick. Last summer, in a town just outside New York City, a tick bit a man. This ought to sound unexceptional. [more inside]
Orcs are my problematic fave.
Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth Part I - Part II :: We say Tolkien invented orcs as we know them today. More precisely, he synthesized their nature from various traditional characterizations—not of mythical beings, but of real-life humans. Some of those characterizations came from popular European conceptions of the greatest threats to Western civilization. Others came from pseudoscientific frameworks of racism, some of which Tolkien would have encountered in his academic training. But Tolkien would meet the most germane theory to his orcs in his military service with the British Army: the fallacy of the martial race.
content warnings: racism, colonialism/imperialism, examples of racist images, cultural conflation, sexism, sexual violence
"It feels like you are in India, you see your community all around."
As the U.S. trucking industry is facing critical shortage of drivers (NPR), more than 30,000 Indian-American Sikhs have entered the trucking industry in 2 years (CBS News, 2018). Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking. Take a ride along the Punjabi American highway (Los Angeles Times with a short video). As the number of drivers of Indian heritage increase, so do the number of Indian food restaurants in truck stops -- for example, One Of The State’s Best Restaurants Is Hiding Inside A Nebraska Truck Stop (Only In Your State), a peak inside the Punjabi-style Indian restaurant in Overton (Lexington Clipper-Herald).
Dangerous But Not Unbearably So
Optical scientist Janelle Shane has helped demonstrate the inevitability of our AI dominated dystopian future by using the (scarily plausible) GPT-2 model from Open AI to show that AI tends to prefer names that sound like ships from Iain M Banks novels. [more inside]
Grubhub's predatory practices against small restaurants
Grubhub is using thousands of fake websites - up to 23,000 domains are allegedly used - to upcharge commission fees from real businesses. This includes listing phone numbers that don’t belong to the actual business, and using logos and food photos without permissions. Example: restaurant's real site vs. Grubhub's fake site.
What's left behind
Eviction Quilts "You are never far away from that idea that this material represents real lives and real losses for these people. You never want to lose sight of that. The material has been transformed into something that hopefully is looked upon as beautiful. It holds within it a tension: This beauty comes from tragedy. The signage with the quilt tells how it's made, its source. The quilt is not complete without this knowledge, that it came from tragedy." [more inside]
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