August 14, 2015
A Wiseguy Ossuary
Although most New Yorkers haven't been there, the Hole hides in plain sight. Many pass it on the way to John F Kennedy International Airport, on a bleak road above which jets wheeze in on their final descent toward the runways along Jamaica Bay. Behind a tatty curtain of trees and weeds, there is a strange depression in the land, as if a sinkhole had opened here on the desultory border between Brooklyn and Queens. It looks less like a New York neighbourhood than an Arkansas village, only with housing projects on the horizon instead of the Ozark Mountains. Welcome to the Hole.
"It has to do with the Netherlands, and with racism."
Dutch newspaper uses n-word in headline of review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book On July 31, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published a review of several books on race and racism in the United States. The series, written by the paper’s Washington correspondent Guus Valk, leads with a review of Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, “Between the World And Me.” Somewhere along the editorial process, the editors thought it would be a good idea to headline the article, “Nigger, Are You Crazy?” (Washington Post) [more inside]
The Sims
Interactive simulations for science and math for teachers and interested students, from acids and bases to waves
Hai! 🚀 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 🍦yes yes 🍦 yes yes yes
"Before Destiny’s Child came along, it was the Pointer Sisters."
Anita Pointer: Civil-Rights Activist, Pop Star, and Serious Collector of Black Memorabilia [more inside]
"Don't threaten me with a dead fish"
"Hollywood brings glitz, glamour and big budgets to movie-making; France has avant-garde artistry. But what about Britain?
Looking at our selection of the 75 greatest British movies of the past century, you'll find that Britain excels at genres you'd expect (kitchen sink and period drama, class-obsessed satire) and plenty you wouldn't (strange sci-fi, blood-freezing contemporary horror). Here are the essential home-grown films to watch, listed in the order they were made..." [SLTelegraph]
The good advice Lockheed Martin just didn't take
"Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes. And yet, while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the polygraph, sodium pentothal and its successor compounds, “brain fingerprinting” and associated neuro-physiological imaging techniques, etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony."
Are you G'd up?
Now I've never played, but it looks like in an effort to give Destiny players a little taste of egalitarianism, everyone's favorite merchant Xur will be selling the Gjallarhorn this weekend. [more inside]
Singing Schubert While Having Brain Surgery, No Bigs
Feline asana
Have a seat, Red. (SLFB) (has a cat, but was filmed in portrait).
The Closing of the Canadian Mind
Americans have traditionally looked to Canada as a liberal haven, with gun control, universal health care and good public education. But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.
It's Friday, so let's all relax with some CPU design theory
Raymond Chen breaks down the itanium processor in a 10 11 part series on his weblog.
- The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up
- The Itanium processor, part 2: Instruction encoding, templates, and stops
- The Itanium processor, part 3: The Windows calling convention, how parameters are passed
- The Itanium processor, part 4: The Windows calling convention, leaf functions
- The Itanium processor, part 3b: How does spilling actually work?
- The Itanium processor, part 5: The GP register, calling functions, and function pointers
- The Itanium processor, part 6: Calculating conditionals
- The Itanium processor, part 7: Speculative loads
- The Itanium processor, part 8: Advanced loads
- The Itanium processor, part 9: Counted loops and loop pipelining
- The Itanium processor, part 10: Register rotation
It's not all joy and kisses
A study of 2,016 Germans has found that, "on average, the effect of a new baby on a person’s life is devastatingly bad — worse than divorce, worse than unemployment and worse even than the death of a partner."
“Obama is the most bookish of modern residents of the White House,”
Mark Lawson Unpacks President Obama's Summer Reading Picks [The Guardian]
Barack Obama has reached the stage of his administration when plans are being made for the construction in Chicago of the Presidential library that former American leaders get to set up in their memory. But, before that, he – or his aides – have also had to think about a smaller library: the shelf of books that the American people are told their leader plans to read on his summer vacation.[more inside]
Take a Gander
A War Of All Against All
Why Turkey is bombing the Kurds more than Islamic State - "Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's bombing campaign — capitalizing on the nationalist, anti-Kurd sentiment that has been steadily growing inside Turkey — could help him regain his AKP party's absolute majority in parliament now that coalition talks have failed and snap elections are likely." [more inside]
Why Taylor Woolrich Wanted A Gun
"For four years, a Dartmouth student had been relentlessly stalked by an older man. The legal system couldn’t protect her, so she wanted permission to carry a gun on campus. One year after becoming a gun-rights poster girl, Taylor Woolrich tells her story."
OVERKILL
Blue Velvet
SYTL The Internet God demands I share.
Apparently I am still indestructible
Lemmy is as much a collection of myths and legends as a man. In the popular imagination, he’s made up of equal parts Jack Daniel’s, amphetamine sulphate, Nazi memorabilia and extreme-velocity noise.
Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles
Daylong live reading of Homer's Iliad with more than 60 artists, presented by The British Museum and Almeida Theatre. [more inside]
Au Revoir, Mogadishu Vol. 1 — Songs From Before The War
"This Mix (Soundcloud) of '70s and '80s Somali sound is a rich blend of traditional Somali folk music infused with Western funk, rock and reggae and a touch of Indian, Arabic and African flavors. There are hardly any proper releases of this soulful sound of guitar, synthesizer and drums. I spent some months finding, compiling and editing rips of TV and live recordings on old VHS tapes and radio broadcasts to cassette tapes and here is what I got. Enjoy! With love from Mogadishu." [more inside]
Cut. It. Out.
The Ghosts of Pickering Trail
How do violent acts affect home value, and what should be disclosed by the seller? A family's effort to find healing and recompense after tragedy (trigger warning: discussions of violence, suicide and murder)
"A Piece of Meat and a Bun with Something On It."
First We Feast: An Illustrated History of Hamburgers in America. "The rise, fall, and resurgence of America's greatest cultural export." [more inside]
Featuring "Diligent Cube" and "Gary Kasparov’s Extreme Beach Chess"
On becoming African-American
I knew that my sister was smarter than her husband; I also knew that she knew this. But I also knew that her husband thought little of women, and nothing of their intelligence. Yet, here he was losing a shouting match on his home court. He was embarrassed. After seeing how the French language had betrayed him, a bittersweet subtlety slipped from his lips like licorice. In plain-vanilla English he said, “This is exactly why I shouldn’t have married a black girl.”--Coming to America
Han shot ... well, you know
haha look out your window
The Arrogance of Unacknowledged Playstyles
Bell of Lost Souls user YorkNecromancer talks about different approaches to playing games (specifically about 40K and Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, but the points made apply to all games) and how particular playstyles can cause confusion and pain when unexpected.
tw: child abuse mentioned, panic attacks depicted
Honest tales from the trenches of AAA game writing
“Even that didn't work," she said. "One of the directors on God of War 3 said, 'I need your input on this, this is what design's doing. And I said ‘this is bullet proof, there is no way you can ruin my narrative moment.’ -- "I come back the next week and they ruined my narrative moment."Gamasutra talks about writing for AAA games
Don't need a cure, need a final solution
First you had changing the Australian migration zone, then the Pacific Solution, and then boat turnbacks (and paying people smugglers for the same - a policy supported by both major parties), and then a murder in custody on Manus Island, and then allegations of rape, trafficking and traumatising children (some of whom try to hang themselves at 6yo) and spying on parliamentary oversight, and now a whistleblower says staff members at the Australian detention centre on Nauru - "a diverse workforce and provides continuing cultural awareness training" - employed waterboarding on asylum-seekers. [more inside]
Forty-Seven Creatures You've Probably Never Heard Of
Gold Key Comics once put out the call to young aspiring artists to submit drawings of monsters, some of which were featured in issues of the publisher's various comics. Here's two example pages (and a Monster Museum page), and here's 47 monsters' worth of submissions: 1 2 3 4 5 pages, another two pages, nine more monsters and one duplicate. And here's some big duplicates of eight of them, and a hi-res duplicate page at the end of Lancelot Link Secret Chimp #6. If you can find any others, please post them in the comments. [more inside]
Attention to detail
"In July 2012, Roger wrote about viewing 'Spirited Away' for a third time and how he was then 'struck by a quality between generosity and love.' It was during that viewing he 'began to focus on the elements in the picture that didn’t need to be there.'" An analysis of some of the amazing level of detail packed into the Miyazaki classic.
#046 - I hate smiling
365 Parisians by fellow Parisian (born in Kazakhstan, raised in Spain) photographer Constantin Mashinskiy: I decided to take one street portrait, every day, of a random Parisian stranger until I had reached 365 pictures, and met 365 people. Mashinskiy at work in the streets of Paris and short interview.
Think of it as the Briggs Garfield Myers test
The Intercative (sic) Experiment is a personality test for your cat, from the makers of the Poopy Cat brand of cat litter, so it must be totally serious, right? Note: you must have your cat with you and near the screen so you can judge its response to certain stimuli.
Good neighbors keep your pigeon population down
“It’s almost the norm for locals now,” he says, “just grilling on your balcony barbeque, right there next to one of the fastest animals in the world.” [more inside]
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