January 8, 2013
Blue Sky Mine
An environmental group's hoax e-mail dropped the more than $300 million from share price of Australian mining company Whitehaven Coal. The Australian Greens party has supported the economically destructive attack, drawing ire from the conservative Coalition party.
It's quite simple, really.
Visiting Australia? There are just a few things you need to know when ordering a beer ... [more inside]We’ve got ponies, glasses, middies an’ pots, see,the first man said.Now a pony’s four ounces –The second man said,Two to four.All right, two to four. But who the hell drinks two’s?[more here]
Discipline, Punish or Runaway
Run away from Michel Foucault. Cameron Kunzelman is a games journalist and creator. He has made a little web game where you try to evade the French historian. His blog. His twitter. More Kunzelman Previously.
Trove
Trove, an initiative of the National Library of Australia, is a vast online repository of digitised books, images, historic newspapers, maps and more.
Literary magazine throwdown
Garmin's Edge
Garmin, the well-known navigation company also makes bike computers. Today they unveiled a GPS-enabled bike computer that adds bluetooth to pair with your phone (and piggyback on your network connection). The resulting product video featuring Garmin's pro team riders is a little Hollywood and a little silly showing riders competing virtually against each other but paints a pretty impressive picture for real-time stats, weather, maps, and data sharing among cyclist friends. More at Wired's Gadget blog and a complete review at the DC rainmaker cycling site.
An increase in Cabin Pressure is imminent
Bing bong! This is your captain speaking. This week sees the return of the BBC Radio 4 comedy Cabin Pressure, which follows the trials and triumphs (okay, mostly trials) of MJN Air, a tiny, one-plane, four-person charter airline. It was created and written by John Finnemore, a comedian and writer with credits including Mitchell and Webb, David Mitchell’s Soapbox, and his own sketch comedy radio show, John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme. [more inside]
The first rule of Banjo Club
Aalto Barragan Calatrava
The ABC of Architects. A bouncy animation of 26 well-known buildings.
Teaching Computers to Hear Emotions
New research can detect five different emotions with 81 percent accuracy. [Additional project information].
Everyone wants to pet Riker
How RCA Lost the LCD
So high, so low, so many things to know.
January 13, 2013 marks the 125th anniversary of the National Geographic Society. The Magazine is celebrating by taking a yearlong look at the past and future of exploration. [more inside]
She was my mother
Jeanne Manford, the former schoolteacher and founder of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays , has died at 92 years old. [more inside]
New work from George Saunders
George Saunders has released a new book of short stories titled Tenth of December. The short story of the same title has been published previously. Last week, the New York Times Magazine profiled Saunders, and this week, the Paris Review published Saunders' full preface to his first collection of stories. Saunders previously.
CES 2013
The International Consumer Electronics Show has been hosted in some form or fashion since 1967. But with the absence of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, journalists are asking if the show is still relevant.
This one goes deep purple
It's so hot in Australia they've added a new color to the weather map, a Tasmania-sized deep purple blob 50 degrees or more (123 F). In the USA 2012 was the hottest year ever recorded, smashing through previous records by a healthy margin. 2012 was also the second-worst on a measure called the Climate Extremes Index, surpassed only by 1998. Globally, 2012 is expected to be ranked as the eighth-warmest year on record, with that announcement coming later in the month. "Climate change has had a role in this,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA.
16 hours = overnight, 64 hours = overweekend, > 7 days = forgotten about
Stop Motion Animation
Mother Goose gone Addams
The Charles Addams Mother Goose
Three blind mice, see how they run!
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a sight in your life
As three blind mice?
Charles Addams, longtime New Yorker cartoonist illustrates the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose.
Three blind mice, see how they run!
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a sight in your life
As three blind mice?
Charles Addams, longtime New Yorker cartoonist illustrates the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose.
Hello Stark
Quadcopter finds moose
Fellow Norwegians used a quadcopter in the woods and came up on a moose. The audio when they discover it is funny, even if you don't understand Norwegian.
"The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances."
Duane Michals: An unofficial celebration. From portraitist and pioneer of the photographic narrative [Warning: sidescrolling] to metaphysician and poet, Michals' work has done much to promote the idea of photography as an inventive art form. As a gay artist, an oft repeated factoid about Michals is that he has not been involved in gay civil rights; Michals' response to this claim is simple: "I think anybody who does any piece of art or work on a political subject is an activist. A person has to be what he wants the world to be." [NSFW: Nudity]
Hey what's that down there?
'Meet Sluggo – a green semi-subterranean inhabitant of Ann Arbor, Michigan. This strange little creature first appeared back in 2008 on a sidewalk, and since then started peaking out of walls cracks, chilling on ledges or doing his daily routines all over the town. Turns out, it was drawn by a local graphic artist David Zinn.'
NPR Snap Judgment Performance of the Year 2012
15-year-old Noah St. John won this year's Snap Judgment Performance of the Year for his moving story about his two moms and the moment he thought he might lose the family he had always known. (SLYT)
(Snap Judgement previously: 1, 2, 3)
Firing on Air Force Kind of a Drag on Navy Career
The U.S. Senate has declined to promote Captain Timothy W. Dorsey to the rank of rear admiral (lower half). Dorsey, currently serving as Navy Reserve inspector general, was involved in one of the more bizarre friendly fire incidents in U.S. Military History, intentionally shooting down a U.S. Air Force jet during military exercises some 25 years ago. [more inside]
The uncanny beauty of decayed Daguerreotypes
Daguerreotype portraits were made by the model posing (often with head fixed in place with a clamp to keep it still the few minutes required) before an exposed light-sensitive silvered copper plate, which was then developed by mercury fumes and fixed with salts. This fixing however was far from permanent – like the people they captured the images too were subject to change and decay. They were extremely sensitive to scratches, dust, hair, etc, and particularly the rubbing of the glass cover if the glue holding it in place deteriorated. As well as rubbing, the glass itself can also deteriorate and bubbles of solvent explode upon the image.
Do the pug bounce, yeah, do the pug bounce!
Away, we're bound away, 'cross the wide Missouri...
Tom Waits and Keith Richards record the classic shanty "Shenandoah". From Son of Rogue's Gallery, a new compilation of pirate "ballads, sea songs and chanteys," itself a sequel to the 2006 release Rogue's Gallery (mentioned previously).
"We need this everywhere, at all times."
Andrew Hales and his sister Jacqueline made videos of hugging strangers at Venice Beach and in Rome. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it's can be very heartwarming. [via]
Unexploding
Super Duper!
Is the Steam Box here?
"Level four can withstand an AK-47"
Reportero (alternate link) - follows a veteran reporter and his colleagues at Zeta, a Tijuana-based independent newsweekly, as they stubbornly ply their trade in one of the deadliest places in the world for members of the media. In Mexico, more than 50 journalists have been slain or have vanished since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón came to power and launched a government offensive against the country's powerful drug cartels and organized crime. As the drug war intensifies and the risks to journalists become greater, will the free press be silenced? [more inside]
An uncivil discussion on gun control
Piers Morgan stares his chief critic in the face. Alex Jones [previously] is a controversial radio DJ responsible for, amongst other things, starting a petition to have CNN's Piers Morgan deported for comments critical of the Second Amendment. Jones was invited by Morgan to debate gun rights on Morgan's primetime show. This is what happened.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a 1992 RTS.
Play Dune II in your browser.
Suds for Drugs
Can filming one second of every day change your life?
BBC News article: to document the year, Kuriyama filmed one second of video every day.
"After just six weeks, I realised I was going to be doing that for the rest of my life," he says.
Call Me Maybe × 147
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