January 7, 2013
"The original shark, it turns out, rotted."
Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering - The Unexpected Double History Of Banking And The Art World
In fact, we have long entrusted the task of representing our ideas of value to members of two professions that might seem to have little in common: banking and art. And, in the last seven hundred years or so, it has happened more than once that visual and financial inventors have come up with strikingly similar representations. There is more than a shadow of resemblance between the purchase of the Hirst skull in 2007 and the mortgage-backed-securities debacle that made of Lehman Brothers in the following year one of the great public pictures of vanitas we’ve had. And, when you look further into these intersections, you often find that what is really at stake is a change in the way we feel and understand time.[more inside]
Davy Jones' Video Locker and 66th Birthday
It seems David Bowie recently got a Vimeo account, and is posting lots of videos from across the years on his website. Including one yesterday for his new single, which is being released ahead of his first album in ten years. Way to celebrate your 66th, Ziggy!
Chicken Soup for the Popular Kids
The Superhero Delusion: How Superhero Movies created the Sad Perfect Badass Messiah, and what that says about America Warning: Contains spoilers for Chronicle on the last page.
Word As Image, by Ji Lee
Challenge: Create an image out of a word, using only the letters in the word itself.
Rule: use only the graphic elements of the letters without adding outside parts.
From the mind of Ji Lee [more inside]
Rule: use only the graphic elements of the letters without adding outside parts.
From the mind of Ji Lee [more inside]
Heckling Defended
A Defense of Heckling. The Chicago Tribune defends the indefensible (link closed to comments). Steve Heisler of the Onion A/V Club disagrees. So does Patton Oswalt. A self-confessed former heckler weighs in.
ETAION SHRDLCUM
New letter and word frequency counts Peter Norvig has used Google books data to generate new lists of letter frequency, the most common English words and their frequencies, and lots of other fun stuff (though I don't know if forschungsgemeinschaft is really an English word, unless it means forcing a mine shaft). [more inside]
The Science of Sex Abuse
The Costs and Solutions to American Health Care
Three excerpts from David Goldhill's new book on American health care:
Part One: Focus on Health-Care Costs Causes More Spending
Part Two: Obamacare Math Doesn't Add Up to a Healthier U.S.
Part Three: To Fix Health Care, Turn Patients Into Customers [more inside]
Part One: Focus on Health-Care Costs Causes More Spending
Part Two: Obamacare Math Doesn't Add Up to a Healthier U.S.
Part Three: To Fix Health Care, Turn Patients Into Customers [more inside]
Huell Howser, a fine example of California Gold, passed away
Huell Howser, best known as the host of California Gold, passed away today. He was 67. I hope he's up there swimming in the Neptune pool. (previously)
This is the first time that we use this way to do stuffs
Original Animation film Kung Fu Cooking Girls
Wolf Smoke is a small original animation making studio now in Shanghai, China. We have only a few ppl but we trying our best to make great animtion. Kung Fu Cooking Grils is a short story, we made it for testing new cartoon style and methoud of the way of making movies. We did key frames on paper first then used vector software to do the between frames and color painting. This is the first time that we use this way to do stuffs. Over 4000 key frames hand drawing and over 10,000 betweens in this movie. Any suggestion and comment is welcome!
The Red and the Black
"The lofty vision of a stateless, marketless world faces obstacles that are not moral but technical, and it’s important to grasp exactly what they are." Seth Ackerman for Jacobin Magazine on "thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever."
Overthinking a Plate of Beans
The five scholars explored the question, “What is the meaning of food?” and debated its role in ethnic and religious tensions. They also examined the possibility that “food, which is something that all of us share, albeit in different ways, can be used to bring people together instead of differentiating between us.” According to Goldstein, one of the most important ideas to come out of the group was that food is a social process rather than a commodity and thus is central to multicultural understanding: “[Food] has to do with how we live and it’s not just an object that we ingest.”
Food: History & Culture in the West [PDF], was a 2010 UC Berkley Symposium exploring multiple links between food and culture: [more inside]
Japanese Woodblock Print Database | Ukiyo-e Search
Starting in the early 1700s and exploding in popularity throughout the 1800s, Japanese woodblock prints depicted the fantastic world of Kabuki actors, courtesans, warriors, and nature. Ever since then keeping track of all of the incredible artwork has been a pain, traipsing between dealer and museum websites, awkwardly shuffling through academic library 'websites', wandering aimlessly through GIS, not to mention all the trouble a patron had to go through to see these before the Internets. Well, The Japanese Woodblock Print Database aggregates prints from a number of museums, dealers, and auction houses into a single resource, searchable by keyword and by image, and thereby provides a shining example of web-accessible art database interface. Enjoy! [via mefi projects] [more inside]
Boil the Frog
"Boil the Frog lets you create a playlist of songs that gradually takes you from one music style to another. It's like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. If you heat up the pot slowly enough, the frog will never notice that he's being made into a stew and jump out of the pot. With a Boil the Frog playlist you can do the same, but with music." Here's more about Paul Lamere's new project, where he suggests some fun & incongruent playlists to try. [more inside]
Mobiliario Humano
David Blázquez is a Spanish Photographer whose self portraits have him modelling human furniture. ( Warning: Naked Men no dangly bits)
You are Muhammed Ali! Wanna meet my sister?
One fine day in 1974, at a school in Greenwich Village, some school children talking about their hero Muhammed Ali get the shock of their lives, courtesy of Candid Camera.
One small clarification for a man, one giant scene of drama for mankind
Months after the death of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, a question arises: when did he think of the infamous quote "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind"? His brother Dean says, in a BBC documentary, it was not made up by Neil after landing on the moon, as the astronaut has said for 40+ years. Instead, Neil asked Dean for his opinion on the quote several months before Apollo 11 even launched.
Newspapers headlines asked "Did Armstrong lie", prompting protest, clarifications and remembrances from space historian Andrew Chaikin and longtime friend Dudley Schuler.
Newspapers headlines asked "Did Armstrong lie", prompting protest, clarifications and remembrances from space historian Andrew Chaikin and longtime friend Dudley Schuler.
"Everything is photogenic once it has been photographed."
Photographer Lewis Baltz came to prominence as part of the loosely knit "New Topographics" movement
and its eponymous 1975 exhibition. Largely ignored at the time, it wasn't until Deborah Bright's 1985 essay
Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape photography [pdf]
that critics started examining the movement's significance more closely. Bright called Baltz the "most articulate and complex of the New Topographics artists," a reputation he has lived up to
over the years on film, in interviews and as the eminently quotable professor
of conceptual photography at the European Graduate School. [more inside]
Secret and Lies of the Bailout
Secret and Lies of the Bailout. "The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come." [Via]
Visualization of large scale datasets looks darn pretty
null_sets is a new body of artwork aimed at exploring the gap between data and information. Consisting of a set of images, this project stems from our interest in glitches, code-breaking, and translation. our custom script encodes text files as images, making it possible to visualize both the size and architecture of large-scale data sets through an aesthetic lens. So if you ever wanted to see hamlet as a jpeg and find artistic merit hiding within its code, here's your chance. [more inside]
Houndton Tabby
Houndton Tabby is an Etsy store filled with amazing portraits of the Downton Abbey cast, but as cats and dogs. [via mefi projects]
Counterfeit Monkey
> examine mourning dress
A black vintage gown trimmed with much lace and dripping with jet beads.
> wave U-remover at mourning dress
There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the mourning dress turns into a morning dress. An outfit of striped trousers and fancy coat, such as men sometimes wear to fancy weddings in the morning...
Counterfeit Monkey: a game of word manipulation.
A black vintage gown trimmed with much lace and dripping with jet beads.
> wave U-remover at mourning dress
There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the mourning dress turns into a morning dress. An outfit of striped trousers and fancy coat, such as men sometimes wear to fancy weddings in the morning...
Counterfeit Monkey: a game of word manipulation.
That saw from the side might be.
AskMeFi is (or rather, might be) accused. Metatalk is a beautiful sword (+4 attack). Mefi music is energetic. [more inside]
"Any sufficiently advanced juggling is indistinguishable from magic."
IT IS EXACTLY WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE
Defaced Money
"Defacement of currency is a violation of Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code. Under this provision, currency defacement is generally defined as follows: Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both. Defacement of currency in such a way that it is made unfit for circulation comes under the jurisdiction of the United States Secret Service." - source"Defaced Money" tagged Tumblr posts, 11 more impressive examples of creatively defaced currency, 101 Unusual, Impressive And Illegal Pieces Of Defaced Currency, and some cool guitar picks.
Is it the terrorists?
Illegals -- Aliens as oppressed or oppressing groups in Avatar, Super 8, Attack the Block and... Alf? (Previously)
State of America Print Series
State of America from Julian Montague: I was recently commissioned to create a series of prints for Print Collection.com. The series
depicts the surprisingly diverse and slightly strange official insignia of the American states.
There are 50 (18x24 inch) prints in the series (titled State of America), including birds, mammals,
grains, fossils, minerals, insects and more.
The Physics of Bad Piggies
Not My Department
Jacob Appelbaum speaks about resistance in his keynote address at 29c3 (previously : 28c3, 24c3) [more inside]
The Beatles of Comedy
Working up material for the project, Cleese and Chapman took another pass at the car-salesman idea. It had possibilities, Cleese felt, that they had failed to exploit. What if they shifted the action to a pet shop? What if the malfunctioning car became a dead animal? A dog, say. Or a parrot.
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