September 25, 2015
Angry Women
Walk Off The Earth's cover of I Can't Feel My Face is fun and soulful
These people, one of them about to have a kid are having more fun than us Walk off the Earth are from Canada, you know... america's attic.
They are playing a Harpejji. It's played by tapping the strings.
Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappeared.
In a new podcast from APR, host Lia Haddock investigates the disappearance of over 300 men, women and children from the research community of Limetown, TN. What makes the Limetown tragedy unique, what makes it worth a continuing discussion, in spite of the collective moving on, is the complete lack of context. In the ten years since, no one group or individual has taken responsibility. No explanations have been uncovered or given with any credibility and, most tragically, no survivors have been found. [more inside]
Yoann Hervo's Weird Simpsons VHS
The Simpsons title credits sequence is one of the most delightfully surreal animations in recent history. But when Yoann Hervo recorded it to VHS back in the 90's he must have turned the surreality setting up to 11.
Anis Thomas, Pheynifer Elaine, Whiode Matthew...
"Fact: wearing white and holding your belly is the best way to ensure a healthy baby." Twitter bots 4 momz! is a Twitter list of three humorous Twitter bots from Mefi's own Metroid Baby, spoofing parenting advice from popular media: @FakeMomAdvice, @FakePregAdvice, and @TrendyNames.
[via mefi projects]
HUMAN by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
HUMAN is a film by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand (who is primarily known for his aerial photography, especially as collected in the book Earth From Above). The film combines interviews of people from all over the world (over 2,000 were collected as the film was made) with aerial views of humanity in many contexts. The interviews are loosely organized by subject, and the film (in three 90 minute parts) may be viewed for free on YouTube: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
tracert h -90 bad.horse
You know...there are certain flaws in this film.
The Battle Over The Worst Movie Ever - Just who has the rights to Manos: The Hands of Fate? (SLPlayboy - article SFW)
Android x86
Here is Android x86, an open source project which allows you to put Google's Android OS on PC hardware. While there is some software that won't work, it's surprisingly capable! While obviously best for netbooks it's capable of running on many laptops, or you could consider running it in a virtual machine if you just want to run Android software on your PC for a bit. Here's the download page (the proper boot media can be found under "Android-x86-4.4") and installation instructions.
Solidarity in Space
Really, though, shouldn’t authors be more likely to write about unions now that labor is so gravely imperiled? Don’t we need more novels about what unions are capable of, now that pencil-necked geeks like Scott Walker are eviscerating them in public? - The Seattle Review of Books reviews Windswept, a new science fiction book by MeFi's own Adam Rakunas. Interview. He also posts fiction on Twitter at Adam's Bedtime Story.
Playing 20 Questions with the Mind.
Researchers from the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences recently used a direct brain-to-brain connection to enable pairs of participants to play a question-and-answer game by transmitting signals from one brain to the other over the Internet. The experiment, detailed in PLOS ONE (open access), is thought to be the first to show that two brains can be directly linked to allow one person to guess what’s on another person’s mind. [more inside]
Are Women Funny?
"For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical," wrote Christopher Hitchens in a 2007 Vanity Fair article.
But the evidence against this view mounts. This year, for example, the three finalists for the Thurber Prize for American Humor are all women, guaranteeing that a woman wins the award for the first time. [more inside]
High-fiving will occur in the Last Week Tonight office
BBC: Swiss prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation against Sepp Blatter, the head of football's world governing body Fifa. Telegraph: Criminal proceedings have been opened against him by the Swiss attorney general on two issues: a TV rights deal that FIFA signed with Jack Warner's Caribbean Football Union and an alleged "disloyal payment" of two million Swiss francs made in 2011 to UEFA president Michel Platini. Guardian: Office of the Fifa president has been searched and data seized. LA Times: The new investigation targeting Blatter involves “suspicion of criminal mismanagement as well as -- alternatively -- on suspicion of misappropriation,” according to Swiss Atty. Gen. Michael Lauber.
"Are they stuck to the floor?" "No, to the system!"
"Clad in green robes, Mike Jittlov races at 500 m.p.h. through the Northern California hills, across an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and horizontally along the wall of a downtown Hollywood building. He moves so fast that when he slips on a banana peel, he flies into orbit." [more inside]
Hair is at once of “me” and an alien “it.”
Notes Towards a Theory of Hair: Novelist Siri Hustvedt Reflects on the Cultural Meaning of Coiffure [New Republic]
“Even this simple act of plaiting my child’s hair gives rise to questions about meaning. Why do more girl children wear their hair long in our culture than boy children? Why is hairstyle a sign of sexual difference? I have to admit that unless a boy child of mine had begged me for braids, I probably would have followed convention and kept his hair short, even though I think such rules are arbitrary and constricting. And finally, why would I have been mortified to send Sophie off to school with her tresses in high-flying, ratted knots?”
"the moé-points extracted from the database enable real emotions."
It is curious that while there are erotic works that appeal to otaku, in Azuma’s account the erotic is subordinated to the emotional. For example, “games produced by Key are designed not to give erotic satisfaction to consumers but to provide an ideal vehicle for otaku to efficiently cry and feel moé, by a thorough combination of the moé-elements popular among otaku.”McKenzie Wark on the work of Hiroki Azuma: Otaku philosophy
Call it any name you need. Call it your 2.0, your rebirth, whatever.
Some Friday afternoon inspiration and reminder that everything will be okay: Time to Level Up. Here are the lyrics. Here's more info on Tommy Guns, one of the dancers in the video. [more inside]
The Man Behind The Mascots
The man behind the mascots is a character, too. Jean-Claude Tremblay is a 68-year-old Quebecois whose company, Creations JCT, makes 100-200 mascots per year. The article includes a slide show of the mascot-making process, as well.
Syrian tragedy
Rich people in thrift stores also disgust me.
"Saada: In some ways, “inconspicuous chic” is about a perceived entitlement to money, not money itself. People who flaunt their wealth by wearing tons of brands and being flashy are not considered wealthy; more often they’re seen as nouveau riche vis-a-vis old-monied. ...Maybe if they were bulldozing low income housing to build a huge Barney's I would be concerned, but to be upset about how rich ladies shop is almost pointless."
---- Clothes & Class - An Adult Magazine roundtable discussion of the minutiae of high fashion, low budgets, the history of class signaling and inconspicuous chic. With Saada Ahmed, Katherine Bernard, Durga Chew-Bose, Fiona Duncan, Hari Nef, Steve Oklyn and Arabelle Scicardi. (NSFW main photos and related ads. Extreme fashion nerdery)
Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!
It is inadvisable to leave your reactor unattended.
Reactor Incremental is a clicker game, but there's little spamming of clicks. Instead, you purchase and place fuel cells and heat mitigation hardware carefully to generate and sell power, building from a single uranium core to a mighty nuclear engine- or else accidentally burn the whole thing down and start again!
A Hero For The Ages
The Outbursts Of Everett True, a comic strip by A.D. Condo (more) about a man frustrated with nonsense, up with which he will not put! [more inside]
nobody likes to be reminded, even implicitly, of his own selfishness.
"Julia is a do-gooder – which is to say, a human character who arouses conflicting emotions. By 'do-gooder' here I do not mean a part-time, normal do-gooder – someone who has a worthy job, or volunteers at a charity, and returns to an ordinary family life in the evenings. I mean a person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible. I mean a person who is drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I mean someone who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy."
Boehner out
House Speaker John Boehner will give up his House seat and resign from Congress at the end of October. Boehner has been Speaker since January 2011, and has been a member of the House since January 1991. Boehner made the announcement this morning in an emotional meeting with fellow Republicans, according to the New York Times, which says that his resignation throws Congress and the federal government "into chaos" as Congress faces an imminent government shutdown, the first since 2013.
just like swallowing a baby carrot
A drug mule for a Mexican cartel flies into Dayton, OH, gives up a kilo of heroin to federal agents, and provides a narrow glimpse of the current drug trade. (SLWaPo). [more inside]
The Man Who Got No Whammies
Larson had made a fool of CBS: He'd spun the show's board 47 times. He’d won more than any other daytime game show contestant in history. And he’d done so by finding an inherent flaw in television’s most “technologically impressive” game board.
First solo female author wins Royal Society Winton Book prize
For the first time in 28 years, the Winton Book Prize has been won by a solo female author - Gaia Vince. Vince has published an article today asking why women don't win science book prizes more often. It's an effective round up of everything from early years conditioning to institutional sexism (in publishing as well as science). The first chapter of her winning book Adventures in the Anthropocene is available as a .pdf download. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »