September 18, 2015
Hit Charade
"The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles." [more inside]
The Linguistics of Writing Email Like a Boss
Gilbert, when he published his article, noted that being able to identify hierarchy from the text of emails could have practical applications. A company could apply his methods to its own internal communications and discover informal structures of power within its ranks. Maybe a mid-level manager is laying the groundwork for a coup, gaining authority over subordinates on other teams....Or, less cynically, you could identify promising young hires for promotion: “Imagine a study investigating who in an organization disproportionately attracts upward language. Do they move up the ladder faster? [more inside]
120 views?
Jack hair cut - A fantastic home scene you don't see everyday. (By the guy who took this drone video)
The love that dare not speak its name
An abstract look at the life of a VFX artist in a big game studio
Genetic modification via parasitic wasp
It's well understood that many species of parasitic wasp, when they lay their eggs on host caterpillars, also inject viruses that prevent the host's immune system from attacking the eggs. But it was recently discovered that some of those virus genes, as well as genes from parasitic wasps themselves, have become a part of the genome of some lepidopteran species (even protecting these species from a different type of virus), thus demonstrating horizontal gene transfer between insect species (link to paper).
"...unfamiliarity does not equate to impracticality."
The Case for More Traffic Roundabouts — "Here’s why: Using simple principles of physics, roundabouts dramatically reduce crash rates, as well as injuries and deaths. They diminish vehicle emissions. They are a more effective use of road space, and cost less to maintain than traditional four-way intersections. And it’s time that America learns to love them."
"The Multiverse is surrounded by grazing pastures"
Atop the twin spires of the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies the eerie call-and-response of bagpipe players echoed across the valley. I watched four siblings race one another up to the top of the Multiverse's spire as their mother, standing at the base, tried to maneuver a cell phone around the fifth child strapped to her chest.-The Duke, the Landscape Architect and the World's Most Ambitious Attempt to Bring the Cosmos to Earth by Alina Simone is an article about the Crawick Multiverse in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and its designer, landscape architect Charles Jencks. The garden is designed to represent modern cosmological theories.
New Evidence Strengthens Link Between Football and Brain Trauma
PBS's Frontline reports that a new study of the brains of deceased NFL players shows that 87 of 91 brains, 96%, had signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The condition, caused by repeated head trauma, has been discovered in 79% of the 165 NFL athletes studied to date. These new findings are released just as the NFL gets its 2015-16 season underway and weeks before the release of the new Will Smith film Concussion, about the neurologist who first discovered the degenerative brain disease in a deceased NFL player's brain ten years ago. [more inside]
Our cinema is a joyful deformation of the universe
[Warning - flashing lights in some links] Bradley Eros & Tim Geraghty have collaborated on some interesting de/re/constructive film making, with the blockbuster buster TransTrans (TransformersTransformed) (11:58) - "a radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic
collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes," blending film imagery with text from the Futurist Cinema/Manifesto and soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten | Eros C'est Lamour, a wedding gift (7:57) - "The missing link between Rose Hobart and Maria Montez via Rrose Selavy's bride stripped bare by the song of the sarong" | FOOLS! (30:11) - "Remember, fortuna favet fatuis [fortune favors fools], but fortuna caeca est [fortune is blind]."
The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes
The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes: "So let’s go one level deeper into some iconic movie scenes that involve a chess match. This exercise involved a lot of pausing and rewinding and probably wouldn’t have been possible without 1080p. To pick apart these cinematic chess clashes, we also spoke to chess grandmaster Robert Hess, a former U.S. national championship runner-up, and turned to the raw silicon-powered strength of the chess engine Stockfish. (We showed Hess the positions over email, without telling him anything about the movies the games were from.)" [SL538]
And his consort, Tyrannosaurus Bathory
Here's Dinosaur Dracula, a pop culture retro nostalgia site from the guys who formerly brought us X-Entertainment (currently "down for repairs"), the subject of many many MeFi posts. Some pages of interest:
- TV Guide listings for Halloween 1990
- Excerpts from the 1989, 1992, 1998 and 1999 Sears Wish Books.
- Comic Book Ads.
- The Masters of the Universe Slime Pit, which had great instructions, and the sliming of Jimmy "Mouth of the South" Hart. There's more....
Meet Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Black Woman Theoretical Physicist
Dr. Prescod-Weinstein talks about her inspiration, teaching herself what she needed to know, how she keeps balance in her life, and being one of 89 black women with a physics Ph.D., and the only theoretical physicist. [more inside]
EXCLUSIVE NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN COLOR PIN-UPS!
The rise, decline, and possible comeback of Tiger Beat (with free poster of Justin!).
"The movies’ premise is ludicrously simple (emphasis on ludicrous):"
EPA Accuses VW of Emissions Cheating
The EPA and the State of California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Act Violations via an intentional defeat device [more inside]
How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis
Was David Hume inspired by Buddhist thinking in the 18th century? Alison Gopnik explores the idea in a touching article about her recovery from depression and divorce along with her discovery that Hume may have been influenced by more than just Descartes and Spinoza. [more inside]
Inside a German U-boat
Trucks + Sentience
Laurie Anderson's new film Heart of a Dog: loss, grief, and acceptance
Heart of a Dog is musician and multimedia artist Laurie Anderson's first feature film in decades--a mix of live-action images and animation. The film is a personal reflection that grew out of a difficult period when Anderson lost her mother Mary Louise, her husband Lou Reed, and their beloved piano-playing dog Lolabelle within a short span of time. Although Heart of a Dog is a meditation on personal loss, grief, and acceptance, it also examines these themes on a larger scale when Anderson reflects on life in downtown New York in the period after 9/11. [more inside]
Over an hour of swingin' jazz
Finally, if you are still with me, you hardy reader...
Tindallgrams is a collection of snarky memoranda of Howard W. "Bill" Tindall, Jr., a NASA Orbital Mechanics specialist working at MIT to coordinate software development for the Apollo spacecraft guidance systems. His memos, dating from 1966 through 1970, are epistles of triumph, frustration, and incomprehension that will be familiar to project managers throughout time. [more inside]
Tastes like candy! Honest! HAHAHAHA!
This Is Meta, Even For MGS
Based on a cutscene discovered in the PC version of Metal Gear Solid V, players have formed a faction in the online portion of the game devoted to ridding the game world of nukes.
The faction's name: the Metal Gear Philanthropists. They have created guides to removing nukes from other players and have set up leaderboards tracking individual disarmament efforts. In return, a pro-proliferation counterfaction has popped up, calling themselves the Metal Gear Patriots, supporting the spread of nukes within the online game.
“...lot of dogs dont like black people but theyre fine w/everyone else.”
Our Racist Dogs by Kelly Mays McDonald [The Awl] Why do certain dogs attack certain people? Because they’re weaponized.
“Weaponized dogs are ever-present in humanity’s long legacy of colonialism and slavery. They have fought alongside many instances of human atrocity to perpetrate acts of physical and psychological violence that supersede the scope of a simple gunshot. European colonizers of the New World notably trained their dogs to “relish Indian flesh” by explicitly feeding them the bodies of the victims after a battle. Throughout America’s early history, slave masters and bounty hunters adopted bloodhounds as the primary means of tracking down runaway slaves by scent, which is widely depicted in popular media. What is left out of the popular narrative, however, is the fact that when they encountered people on the run, the dogs were often trained to bite and tear the flesh of slaves to hold them there until they could be shot, shackled and dragged back to their masters for public lynchings and beatings.”
Moving towards a future of sex with robots whether we like it or not
Robot ethicists have launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, seeking a ban on the development of robotic sexytimes. Robot ethicists Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University and Erik Billing from University of Skövde are the co-creators of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, which seeks to bring awareness to the issue and proposes a robot sex ban. They compare it to similar campaigns that seek to limit development of “killer” robots.
lifebeagle
True Tube Topography
Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, Transport for London have released a geogrphically-accurate map of the tube. [PDF] [more inside]
"I'm gonna ask you to sing along with me, but let me get in tune first..."
Pete Seeger - Concert in Sweden 1968. Seeger sings a mix of folk songs, protest songs, and songs from around the world. And as usual, he gets the audience to sing along with him sometimes.
Professor Refuses To Wear Device To Help Hearing-Impaired Student
For the second time, Memorial University professor Ranee Panjabi refuses to wear an FM transmitter that will allow a hearing-impaired student to hear her lectures. The student, history major William Sears, is forced to drop out of her History of Espionage course. Now Memorial University has discovered an agreement that it signed with Panjabi nearly 20 years ago that allows her to refuse to wear the transmitter on religious grounds.
Deception for Journalism's Sake: A Database
The NYU Libraries have compiled a database of undercover investigative journalism dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. "The site, designed as a resource for scholars, student researchers and journalists, collects some of the best investigative work going back almost two centuries." [more inside]
Ig®25
The 2015 Ig® Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night at the 25th First Annual Ig® Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.
About the awards.
previously here [more inside]
About the awards.
previously here [more inside]
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