January 6, 2013
Mildly Interesting
/r/mildlyinteresting is where to go if you want things which are, you know, neat. Or pretty cool. Or something else which is better than boring but not quite as intense as fascinating. Things like snow meeting high tide, or uniformly-sized bubbles. A bear face or a llama face on a piece of wood. An observation about Tic Tac containers. A poorly-designed drawer. A belligerent tree. An amusing Google trend. Cross-product branding on cereal boxes. Caution: weirdly effective as a time sink.
"There are many species in the asshole kingdom."
"So what is an asshole, exactly? How is he (and assholes are almost always men) distinct from other types of social malefactors? Are assholes born that way, or is their boorishness culturally conditioned? What explains the spike in the asshole population?" -- The Chronicle talks to two professors, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg and philospher Aaron James, about their recent work on, well, assholes. [more inside]
"Until you acquire an education, you will never find out who you really are."
In seventh grade, after school let out, Humaira Mohammed Bachal opened her home in Thatta (Pakistan) to 10-12 friends who weren't allowed to go to school, and taught them what she was learning. By the time she was 16 and ready to take her 9th grade exams, (over her father's objections,) she and four other girls were teaching more than 100 students. Now, her sister Tahira, (age 18,) is principal of the school Humaira founded: with 22 teachers serving more than 1,000 kids in a Karachi slum (yt). All in a country where if you are a young girl in a rural area, you are unlikely ever to see the inside of a classroom, and advocating education for young girls can be life-threatening. [more inside]
America's Postmodern Sweetheart(?)
The Dualities of Taylor Swift: Furries, Bo Diddley, and Country Bears in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” [more inside]
A small island
Britain from Above was a 2008 BBC TV program that used aerial photography and data visualization to depict British
transportation, land planning, police management of public order, ecology and much else. Of particular interest: the effect on the national electrical grid of millions of tea kettles being switched on simultaneously at the end of a popular soap opera airing. [more inside]
Many of history’s—and the present’s—irresistible, beautiful women heartbreakers can’t tolerate mere males.
One Nation Under a Court Order
What do the songs The Electric Spanking of War Babies, Uncle Jam, Hardcore Jollies and One Nation Under a Groove all have in common? Well, sure, they were all written (with a collaborator here and there) by Mr. George Clinton. But that's not all they have in common. As of now, the copyright in these booty-shaker workouts does not belong to the legendary P. Funk mastermind, but rather to the law firm of Hendricks and Lewis. Funk Classics Seized
to Pay Off $1 Million Debt.
Can't seem to find the word...
21 emotions English has no word for. Some things "light us up". Some things "leave us cold". Such dim metaphors only hint at the unspoken universe of feeling, dimensions we can only guess that we share. A new infographic explores "untranslatable" feeling-words from other languages.
The Value of Culture
The Value of Culture is a five part BBC radio series by Melvyn Bragg (which can be downloaded as a podcast) which explores the modern concept of 'culture' from its roots in mid-19th Century Britain, specifically Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (vol. 2), and exploring the discourse and uses of the concept until the present day. There are five episodes, each a little over forty minutes long, focusing in turn on Arnold and the roots of the concept of culture, Tylor and the anthropological conception of culture, C. P. Snow and the 'Two Cultures' debate, mass culture and culture studies, and then ending with a debate on the value of culture today.
This is a thing that exists
The British and their bizarre view of American
The British and their bizarre view of American. "So, while from afar America may seem, to the Briton, a bewildering and Brobdingnagian phenomenon, close up and personal, the Americans themselves take on the more familiar Lilliputian lineaments of his own countrymen and women." Will Self takes a look at the ambivalent relationship the British has with the USA.
Seb Toots Montreal snowboarding run
Commuting Canadian style. Snowboarder Seb Toots (Sebastien Toutant) took advantage of the late December blizzard in Montréal by taking his board to a good launch spot on Mont Royal (Kondiaronk Lookout, according to one Vimeo commenter) and working his way down. Elegant, fluid, hypnotic. Note: Some wildlife may have been briefly bemused or alarmed during the making of this film. No wildlife attempted to eat him.
Beauty matters. Plainness hurts.
Unpacking the Beauty Premium, Borland J & Leigh A, unpub., 2013.
The first Australian study of the financial return to physical attractiveness finds its worth an astounding $32,150 in annual salary, with men of above average looks typically commanding $81,750 compared to $49,600 for men with below-average looks.
Men with below-average looks were 15 per cent less likely than normal to be employed and were typically employed for a 9 per cent lower wage. They were also less likely to be married and less likely to married to a woman of high income.
"Rigor should be seen as pluralistic[....]"
Vengabus Kei
Two goths do a dance to "Norwegian aggrotech band" Combichrist. Then someone realised it had the same tempo as Cotton Eye Joe and We Like To Party (The VEngabus)
Trombone + GoPro
Mastaba Snoopy
An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child's forgotten book and mistakenly believes that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world.
The book is a collection of Peanuts comics.
The book is a collection of Peanuts comics.
Woodsnoopy 45 stares into your open heart. Her yellow head squirms and pukes up feathers.MASTABA SNOOPY
It makes you uncomfortable when she looks at you. She makes a demand.
Her demands come often and always create uncomfortably simultaneous feelings of resentment and obedience.
ACQUIRE NICKELS
That is the territory of the Lucy faction. They are the ones who gather nickels. Woodsnoopy 45 is overstepping her boundaries.
Being a mere Woodsnoopy 799, however, you can do naught but obey."
“Hey, do New Year’s resolutions always have to be good for you?”
Healing Kaleidoscope
Emma Kunz was a telepathic healer and researcher. Even though she didn't consider herself an artist, the hypnotic symmetry found in her hand-drawn healing charts is breathtaking.
the end of history illusion
Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be (NYT): "When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same... They called this phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” in which people tend to “underestimate how much they will change in the future.”" (via exp.lore) [more inside]
"The nature of the photographic process - it is about failure."
"The fact that photographs — they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looks like, but you don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know whether the hat’s being held or is it being put on her head or taken off her head. From the photograph, you don’t know that. A piece of time and space is well described. But not what is happening."Legendary street photographer Garry Winogrand with Bill Moyers, 1982 [more inside]
The Boss in je moerstaal
Sintermerte (Old Dan Tucker), En As Ik Achter Lig (If I Fall Behind) and D'r Vandoor (Born to Run) are tracks from the cd Pollux Duit Springsteen, in which the Venlo born singer-songwriter Frank Pollux translates and transplants twelve Bruce Springsteen songs to his hometown's dialect. So instead of walking his mule down the Erie Canal, he has fifteen Poles sticking asparagus in the Sperjesveld. Perhaps surprisingly, it works. -- The full track listing
The Existential Adventures of Tim Maia
No high fives!
A surprisingly comprehensive animator's guide to King of the Hill. Including: drawing mouths, scenery, lighting, shot composition and other minutiae.
It never occurs to us that she will listen.
"Jenni Greenwald, please commit suicide." In 1986, John Cook and some fellow eighth grade boys wrote an underground newspaper filled with bullying and racism, targeting other students and teachers in their school. He reflects on this, getting in touch with both his co-authors and victims, in Confessions of a Teenage Word Bully.
Cosplays with Color
Green And Blue Mars
And it's my plan if some great man, Dies with a broken head, Sirs, With much bewail I does detail, His death before he's dead, Sirs!
You wouldn't think so from its trendy shops and restaurants today, but Seven Dials was once one of the worst slums in London. Intended as a smart residential area when its construction was completed in 1710, this cartwheel of streets between Charing Cross Road and Covent Garden quickly declined to become an over-crowded refuge for the city's thieves. It was here that London's thriving trade in gallows ballads made its home.A collaboration across more than 100 years, from the jobbing hacks writing ballads and selling them at the foot of the gallows to the historical investigation of the British Library's broadsheet collection by MeFi's own Paul Slade, to modern rock, folk, and blues musicians, and then to your ears. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »