January 4, 2014
What happens when you magnify grains of sand 250 times?
The Selfie Olympics
glitch v2.0
Missing Glitch? A number of projects have sprung up to reboot the game. Whimsy, Children of Ur, and MVURXI have working demos, while Eleven is still under development.
Master of Philosophy, Lord of Debate, Sultan of Reason
The Adventures of Fallacy Man, from Existential Comics.
How Fido Keeps in Alignment
If you've ever wondered why your dog dances back and forth before it squats and drops, now we know. A recent study in the journal "Frontiers In Zoology" has found that dogs align with north-south magnetic fields while pooping. "The researchers found that dogs prefer to point along the north-south axis when they do their business – as long as the magnetic field is stable. When the magnetic field shifts – say, because of an oncoming solar storm – it becomes more difficult to see the pattern.
Labour condemns Michael Gove's 'crass' comments on first world war
Grauniad: Labour has accused the government of using the centenary of the start of the first world war to "sow political division" after the education secretary, Michael Gove, tore into "leftwing academics" for peddling unpatriotic "myths" about the role of British soldiers and generals in the conflict. Gove's original article in the Daily Mail.
Like the Champs-Élysées!
Ernest Flagg (1857-1947) was an architect in the United States, who worked mostly in New York, and in 1904 had a radical plan to remake Central Park.
New York's Central Park That Never Was [more inside]
The Simpsons
The First Entirely New Experience in Entertainment Since Pictures Talked
"The rise in popularity of television is credited with inciting the move to the widescreen systems that flourished throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. This is only partially true. In the early 1950s, studios did begin to compose their movies so that the top and bottom of the picture could be chopped off and a wider screen would show the center of the old 1.37:1 frame. The aspect ratio used by the various studios varied from about 1.5:1 up to the common 1.85:1. But the real reason for the birth of a multitude of widescreen and large format systems was the 1952 opening of a movie made in a process that had its roots in a World War II aerial gunnery trainer. This Is Cinerama (modern YouTube trailer; Wikipedia) shook the industry to the core. The public and reviewers loved it. Its giant screen filled with three oversized 35mm images and an incredible new sound system called Stereophonic were a marvel to behold, and the studios immediately rushed to find something that could do what Cinerama did (Google books preview of the August 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics)." [more inside]
Tracing Skylines
Detroit urban skiing. Poor Boyz Productions takes advantage of Detroit's abandoned buildings and spaces.
Many Ways To Have A Good Time
Sure, the Peacock Spider's mating dance is pretty rad, but what if it was set to the Village People?
That stings!
Macro photos of insects stinging. What it says on the label - don't click if seeing insects biting and stinging squicks you out. Remarkable photos though.
The writer’s lifelong dialogue with violence
Did Your Father Touch You?
NY Mag on the fallout of false testimony that sends an innocent parent to jail.
30c3
While Jacob Appelbaum grabbed headlines with his NSA revelations at this year's Chaos Communication Congress, other presentations provided equally fascinating insight into how the world works. Learn how data mining is bringing perpetrators of genocide to justice (alt), how an artist uses different concepts of secrecy landscapes (alt) to keep tabs on clandestine activities, and how India's surveillance state continues to grow (alt).
previously [more inside]
conspiracy of kindness
A Japanese Holocaust rescuer, it is estimated that Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who served as Vice-Consul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania in WWII, facilitated the escape of more than 6,000 Jewish refugees to Japanese territory, risking his career and his family's lives. The profoundly moving story is now on YouTube: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6. [more inside]
It doesn't track IP addresses
Source Code in TV and Films reveals what the code for that GUI interface in Visual Basic is really for.
we keep hesitating at the notion that sex does not obey strict binaries
Star-crossed
« Previous day | Next day »