November 12, 2012
Acqua Alta in Venice
Venice resident, Erla Zwingle documents the city's recent (near record breaking) "Acqua Alta". The high tide left about 2/3 of the city under water. Venice's new flood protection system is due to come online in 2014.
Per SMTP spec, valid email addresses cannot contain a colon
I promise there is nothing gaping here: goatse.cx is now accepting pre-registration signups for a webmail service. Who wants an address at one of the web's most prestigious and notable domain names?
Satellite's gone up to the skies
The kickstarter satellites. Sandy Antunes, the author of the blog post has built his own picosatellite Project Calliope. A project he also chronicled in his blog Satelite Diaries. NPR story. [more inside]
totally unpremeditated and perfectly sincere
More Than Human: Tim Flach's intimate photographs of animal gestures and expressions seem more than a little familiar. [more inside]
No water moccasins were harmed in the making of this video.
Hey, water moccasins! [SLYT]
YOLO with it
Oxford Dictionaries' 2012 words of the year have been chosen: for the US, it's "gif" (as a verb); for the UK, "omnishambles." It contended for this crown with the likes of "YOLO," "superstorm," and "nomophobia." Previous Oxford words of the year can be found here (other notable year-end word lists such as those from Merriam-Webster, the American Dialect Society, and the Global Language Monitor, have yet to appear).
Does Facebook Hate All Women—or just Feminists?
Does Facebook Hate All Women—or just Feminists? An article looking at how Facebook's content standards appear to be unevenly applied in a way that ends up suppressing Feminist content.
Systematic child abuse and paedophilia in Australia
Following recent revelations about apparently systematic cover-ups and a deep failure to cooperate with police by the Roman Catholic Church, the Australian Prime Minister last night announced the establishment of a Royal Commission into institutional responses to child abuse to investigate the matter.
“I thought that modern penology has abandoned that rehabilitation thing”
In Sentencing Criminals, Is Norway Too Soft? Or Are We Too Harsh?
It’s not very often the concept of restorative justice gets much play outside scholarly publications or reformist criminal justice circles, so first, some credit for Max Fisher at The Atlantic for giving it an earnest look last week. In seeking to explain Norway’s seemingly measly twenty-one-year sentence for remorseless, mass-murdering white supremacist Anders Breivik—a sentence that is certain to be extended to last the rest of his life—Fisher casts a critical eye on the underlying philosophy that animates that country’s sentencing practices, finding it to be “radically different” from what we’re used to in the United States.The Effectiveness of Restorative Justice Practices: A Meta-Analysis [more inside]
Cephalopod vs. Cephalopod
We Are Not the Dead
Portraits of Soldiers Before, During, and After War "Photographer Lalage Snow, who is currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan, embarked on an 8-month-long project titled We Are The Not Dead featuring portraits of British soldiers before, during, and after their deployment in Afghanistan."
Meta: word-forming element meaning 1. "after, behind," 2. "changed, altered," 3. "higher, beyond;" from Gk.
Are you enthusiastic ("pertaining to possession by a deity," from Gk. enthousiastikos "inspired," from enthousiazein ) about Etymology? ( ethimolegia "facts of the origin and development of a word," from O.Fr. et(h)imologie (14c., Mod.Fr. étymologie), from L. etymologia, from Gk. etymologia, properly "study of the true sense (of a word)," Then why not explore ( 1580s, "to investigate, examine," a back formation from exploration, or else from M.Fr. explorer (16c.), from L. explorare ) the vast resources (1610s, "means of supplying a want or deficiency," from Fr. resourse) of the ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY [more inside]
The bandura (або, «Яка в бісу арфа, янголи грають на бандурах!»).
Go to War. Do Art. (II)
The permanent collection of the (US) National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago contains more than 2,500 pieces of art by 250 artists, all of which can be seen at NVAM Collection Online. The site includes biographical material on the artists who created the work. Featured Artwork. A small selection. (Via. Images at links in this post may be nsfw, and/or disturbing to some viewers.)
Ultramorph
Alien: Engineers - the original script for Prometheus.
The Expendables: life in the French Foreign Legion
It was simplifying. Forget your civilian reflexes. The task does not require a purpose. Do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that. The Legion is our fatherland. We will accept you. We will shelter you.
Dear Mr. President: An open letter on the state of Physics education
Dear Mr. President: “You're the President of the United States: a country with 5000 nuclear weapons, birthplace of the world's computing and telecommunications industry, home of the first atomic clock and creator of the global positioning system. But chances are, if you just took regular American high school physics, you don't know one iota about the science behind these things (no offense). That's because high school physics students across most of America are not required to learn about pretty much any physical phenomena discovered or explained more recently than 1865.” From Henry Reich of Minute Physics. (Can't watch video? Click the "interactive transcript" button under the video to read it instead.)
Minute Physics previously, previouslier. [more inside]
Big Pork Small Towns
The loss of translators...
Readers of literature from "small" languages treasure their translators, who are rarely recognized and poorly compensated for their months and sometimes years of lonely labor.
Two of the best translators from Czech died in the last month or so. Michael Heim translated not only from Czech but also Russian, Croatian, Serbian, German, French and Dutch. Less well-known and less polyglotish, Peter Kussi translated Milan Kundera as well as Jiri Grusa, Karel Capek, Josef Skvorecky, Bohumil Hrabal and others whose works might otherwise be lost to English readers. [more inside]
Two of the best translators from Czech died in the last month or so. Michael Heim translated not only from Czech but also Russian, Croatian, Serbian, German, French and Dutch. Less well-known and less polyglotish, Peter Kussi translated Milan Kundera as well as Jiri Grusa, Karel Capek, Josef Skvorecky, Bohumil Hrabal and others whose works might otherwise be lost to English readers. [more inside]
"Especially with the country in great need of donation, science should speak louder than stigma in determining who can help."
Tainted: Why Gay Men Still Can't Donate Blood - "Since 1983, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines have disqualified men who have ever had sex with men (MSM) from donating blood... Uneven application of exclusion to at-risk individuals suggests that risk aversion disproportionately impacts MSMs. For example, a non-MSM individual who has had sexual contact with a commercial sex worker or HIV-positive partner is deferred for only twelve months... The fact that the U.S. upholds a lifetime ban on MSM donation while Australian policy allows MSM individuals to donate a year or less after contact reveals a glaring discrepancy. Both ethics and science point to a flaw in FDA policy. That I could have had sex with 365 partners this year and be a perfectly fine candidate for donating blood, while the MSM next to me wouldn't qualify, betrays a faulty line of logic." [more inside]
Artisanal sriracha
Want preservative-free sriracha but don't have time to make your own? Jolene Collins makes (and sells) her own high-end artisanal sriracha. Would you like to watch?
On the competitive eating trail
"Everyone, since the dawn of time, has eaten or they've perished," Sam says. "But that man is the best eater who has ever lived, in the history of the world."
Do you have a flag?
Of all the countries in the world, the British have managed to invade or attack all but 22 (Torygraph), making the US look like absolute pikers. Somewhat inflated by the fact that the authors of the study counted everywhere British forces attacking, including pirate attacks on silver ships in the Spanish Main, not just those places where the UK planted a flag.
Does What It Says On The Homepage
The Useless Web serves a collection of some of the most frivolous, insignificant and worthless websites (many of which were previously seen here).
Obvious Warning: May contain sound, flashing images, old memes or peanuts. Well, probably not peanuts.
Obvious Warning: May contain sound, flashing images, old memes or peanuts. Well, probably not peanuts.
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