January 10, 2018
Fire and Flood
Montecito, CA: At least 17 people killed. Hundreds stranded. At least 100 homes destroyed. Thirty miles of highway 101 closed. The aftermath of the Southern California 2017 fire season. [more inside]
But don't ever take sides with citrus against the Family again. Ever.
Space Hamilton w/ cats
In a recent interview Brian K Vaughn and Fiona Staples bucked the trend and said they weren't interested in an adaptations of their comic Saga, but there's one exception... if Lin-Manuel Miranda wants to make a musical out of it.
In celebration of the goddesses in us all...
... and the goddesses must dance! Happy New Year of the Woman, should this be a thing. A cheery thank you to artist Ms Nina Paley as well!
Doggo in the dictionary
On the occasion of Merriam-Webster considering "doggo" for inclusion, Andrea Valdez writes about linguist Gretchen McCulloch's research into the origin of the word. [more inside]
Every word of this article is fact.
"“We were looking for something creative to do during CES that would sort of match what was happening in town,' [Sapphire Las Vegas Managing Partner Peter Feinstein] said. 'We’re offering a different place to go. If you’re six people from a company and there’s two women and four guys, you can still here and have some fun and see the robots and not feel like you have to be part of a strip club.'”
Las Vegas Strip Club Imports Robot Strippers for CES.
Facebook is Broken
Mark Zuckerburg recently said he would fix Facebook, but this cannot be done while retaining its current business model which is expected to result in at least $16 billion in profits in 2017 says John Batelle, who suggests the remote possibility that "Zuckerberg does the equivalent of dropping corporate acid and realizes the only way to fix Facebook is to make a massive, systemic change." [more inside]
You know, for kids!
Kafka for children is a selection of short stories by Franz Kafka, with illustrations.
Carried aloft on a shield by his warriors, he conquered England
The Strangest Viking: was Ivar the Boneless (son of Ragnar Lothbrok and commander of the Great Heathen Army that attacked and conquered most of England in 865 C.E.) born with osteogenesis imperfecta, aka "Brittle Bone Disease"? Author/actor Nabil Shaban, himself born with the condition, explores the question: was the most savage viking of the sagas both disabled, and still capable of becoming the leader of the largest band of bloodthirsty killers ever to sail their longboats up an English river? [more inside]
In nature, none more black than the birds of paradise (plus a relative)
The mating dance of the male superb bird of paradise is like nothing else on Earth. To win the affection of a female, he forms a sort of satellite dish with his wings, displaying dots and a stunning band of blue against a deep black background, and hops around a female. He and his relative don't only share a unique dance, but unique feathers that absorb light, as described in an article recently published in Nature Communications. In fact, as the feathers structurally absorbs up to 99.95% of directly incident light, it's almost as black than Vantablack with 99.965% light absorption (previously), and blacker than the more commercial 'spray-on' form of Vantablack, which only absorbs 99.8 percent of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light. [via Wired] [more inside]
This is due to the repetitive and simplistic nature of ADD, CALL & MOVs
Infosec whiz Greg Linares found that Microsoft's Spectre & Meltdown KB4056892 Patch when converted to MIDI makes psytrance @ 115 BPM, and he posted the MP3 to YouTube. In another tweet he demonstrates his method by EDMifying the Careto exploit (here's the unrolled thread for the Twitter-averse). More of his music is available on SoundCloud.
Brill’s Language & Linguistics Blog
Stumbled on the cited site when looking for Brill's Dictionary of Ancient Greek, which is the English translation of Franco Montanari’s Vocabolario della Lingua Greca. The good professor has interesting things to say on his chosen subject. If you’re more an audio/visual person, there is a 24 minute interview with the fellow. (Getting back to the blog - it does not update frequently, but the archive is worth your time if words are your sort of thing.) [more inside]
Sport is a mechanism of control in America
"Sport is a mechanism of control in America" [Jaylen] Brown admits that, when he was 14, “It wounds you. But when I got older and went to the University of California [Berkeley] I learnt about a more subtle racism and how it filters across our education system through tracking, hidden curriculums, social stratification and things I had no idea of before. I was really emotional – because one of the most subtle but aggressive ways racism exists is through our education system.”
"I’m beginning to understand that I don’t even know what I know."
Daniel Wallace writes about his mother, Child Bride - "So, everyone knew about it. It was her great tale of youthful misadventure. She was an open book like this. She would tell you about anything, the more outrageous the better. If you had a scandalous story to tell, she would love to hear it, but she would have a better one, like this one, and yours would pale in comparison.
Married when I was 12 years old: Beat that.
But what I came to learn, 40 years after hearing the story for the first time, is that it wasn’t really true. It didn’t happen like this at all."
Thanks for the fish!
Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on.Dolphins are so much smarter than we think that they know how to game the system to get more and better rewards. -- Original Grauniad article from 2003 by Anuschka de Rohan, but doing the rounds on Twitter thanks to Julia Galef's tweet about it.
"I went from resenting the American flag to thanking it."
"The standard view of 9/11 is that it 'changed everything' - but in its rhetoric and symbolism, the WWII nostalgia laid the conceptual groundwork for what was to come." - "The Good War," a graphical adaptation and update of an article by Chris Hayes by Mike Dawson. [more inside]
One of its distinctive characteristics is its often offensive content
The Anatomy of the Urban Dictionary: The first large-scale study of the Urban Dictionary provides unique insights into the way our language is evolving. [more inside]
Trashy Journalism
“After much debate, we resolved to turn the tables on three of our esteemed public officials. We embarked on an unauthorized sightseeing tour of their garbage, to make a point about how invasive a "garbage pull" really is--and to highlight the government's ongoing erosion of people's privacy.”
Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs. - Willamette Week
punished for what she did, but also for what she didn’t do
She is Tonya Price but you cannot deny that she is also Tonya Harding. This is basically how this entire story goes: There are facts, and then there is the truth, and you can’t let one get in the way of the other or you’ll never understand what she’s trying to tell you. But therein lies the problem: Whatever her name is, she looks an awful lot like Tonya Harding. So even when she meets a stranger and says, “Nice to meet you, I’m Tonya Price,” the person will narrow his eyes and say, “Wait, aren’t you….?” Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NYT
You are working with an interactive narrative in the form of a book
A gallery of Choose Your Own Adventure-type books in graph form, created and discussed by a team of undergrad researchers at UCSB. Check out this Google doc on methods (including what the symbols mean), and these posts on what the graphs reveal.
“Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
All the Whites You Cannot Name
Delightful Yarn
Fiber designer Abi takes self-striping and self-patterning yarns to unexpected, wonderful places: carrot cake, sock monkey, cheeseburger, eggplant, and Wonder Woman.
Double double Tim Horton's is in trouble
My First Hundred Years
The Z List Dead List podcast talks to Brenna Hassett about Margaret Murray, leading Egyptologist-cum-folklorist/influential folklorist-cum-Egyptologist (you pick). [more inside]
Men have right to hit on women
In one of those polémiques the French media love so much, 100 women published an open letter in the daily newspaper Le Monde condemning the risk of "puritanism" sparked by recent sexual harassment scandals. French actress Catherine Deneuve, perhaps the most famous among the the signatories, insists that #BalanceTonPorc (Call out your pig) is akin to a witch hunt.
In reply to which, a very strongly worded piece was published this morning in French only)
To be continued...
In reply to which, a very strongly worded piece was published this morning in French only)
To be continued...
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