December 16, 2015
"Here is a fascinating game of wits for a party of any size."
Minute Mysteries (1932) by H. A. Ripley is a recent addition to Project Gutenberg: "In these accounts every fact, every clue necessary to the solution is given ... Each problem has only one possible solution. Written in less than two hundred and sixty words, these little stories can be read in a minute. Here is your chance to work on an absolute equality with the Professor; to match your wits with his and the criminal's. You know as much as the Professor does. Now you have an opportunity of proving just how good a detective you are and what poor detectives your friends are." [more inside]
What ever happened to the charity of yesterday?
Spicy Christmas Wrapping
Go ahead and make your 'balls' jokes; it really is stunning in person
Greensboro, NC has a unique holiday tradition: the lighted Christmas balls. Every year, the trees of Sunset Hills and surrounding neighborhoods are suddenly filled with thousands and thousands of lighted Christmas balls. Here's a video explaining the history of the balls - and here's how you can make your own!
And this year, there's finally drone footage! [more inside]
I thought we were giving the world what it wanted. But we destroyed it.
On September 9th, 2015, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced Pokémon GO, a multiplayer location-aware mobile game for iOS and Android, due for release in 2016. Their development partner, Niantic, recently revealed details on how the game will work and how it will draw upon their experience with their earlier location aware game, Ingress [Ingress, Previously: 1, 2]. [more inside]
Whatever makes you happy, you put in your world.
"Painting is beside the point: the paintings in The Joy of Painting don’t matter." The joy of writing about The Joy Of Painting. In Which Bob Ross is Compared to God, Creator of Worlds. [more inside]
Reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science
José L. Duarte is one author of an upcoming paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, "Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science." The authors review how academic psychology has lost its former political diversity, and explore the negative consequences of this on the field's search for true and valid results. Duarte has blogged about his own experience of bias when he was denied admission to a Ph.D program, possibly for for his perceived political views in another blog post. [more inside]
A reasonably long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away...
Star Wars minus Star Wars is a video collage that tells the story of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, in twenty minutes, without using any sounds or images from Star Wars itself.
Seasonal Hazards
The holiday season is especially stressful for women. In rare occasions, that stress plus bad luck may actually contribute to heart problems. “We have seen more than a few cases of stress-induced cardiomyopathy around the holidays,” said Dr. Karla Kurrelmeyer, a cardiologist with Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center. “This occurs when women are under great amounts of stress for a short period of time and that stress is compounded with another traumatic event ... If it is ignored it can be fatal.” Yikes! Of course, men are hardly immune to seasonal hazards. In Canada (and elsewhere), men are the primary victims of Christmas décor trauma. Here's a brief guide to common holiday horrors and tips for staying safe and sane. [more inside]
Stop Idolizing Penny Pinchers
A Slate piece discusses the problem with our society lionizing individuals who engage in extreme forms of thrift, and how it obscures the actual financial issues people face. (SLSlate)
Myth and reality of the Hardanger fiddle and Myllarguten
Norwegian legends and fairy tales are full of references to subterranean or supernatural beings, many of which have the fiddle as a symbolic attribute.... Even today, some people believe that anyone hoping to become a real fiddler must be apprenticed to Fossegrimen.... The Hardanger fiddle is inextricably linked to such legends, and it is the folk tunes which have kept them alive.And Targjei Augundsson is at the crossroads of legends and folk tunes, whose skill with the fiddle is said to have come at the price of his soul from a deal with Fossegrimen, making him something of the Norwegian predecessor to Robert Johnson. [more inside]
Gamifying Patriotism
The crew at Extra Credits take a break from their usual videogame-focused content to provide a video overview of Alibaba's gamified Sesame Credit system. The system is one of eight government-overseen pilot programs to establish a "social credit score" for Chinese citizens. [more inside]
A brief history of sending letters to Santa
Children have been sending letters to Santa for well over a century now, and for much of that time those letters don't look very different from today's. Children want toys, and they want to convince Santa that they ought to get them. But where did that tradition come from, and how did it develop into its modern form? How did we come to believe that Santa lives at the North Pole and that the postal service can carry letters to Santa? What kinds of things have changed in the things children ask for over time? The Smithsonian's trying to deliver some answers for the holidays. (Previously: 1, 2).
Casey died alone in the dirt in the dark
"...what is really needed is an anti-racist, anti-transphobic movement that draws from women of color feminism and its trenchant critique of racism and police power." - Broadly, with the help of Judith Butler, digs into the lives and deaths of the 23 trans women murdered in 2015. [more inside]
Jimmy Diresta makes things
Jimmy Diresta has a youtube channel where he posts timelapse videos of him making stuff, like a kitchen knife, a fireman's axe, a dagger, a leather compact case, a business sign, and a distillery model.
The dollar, in pegboard
that amazing light
Despite the dwindling membership, there are still around six million Freemasons all over the world. The photographer focused on capturing the lodges in California, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado where he’s based. Despite the different locations there’s a uniformity between all of Jamie’s images and they begin to blend into one archaic space where dingy doorways and curtain-clad assembly rooms are the norm. - Jamie Kripke: Freemasonry
Hijab-Wearing Professor Suspended by Evangelical College
Associate Professor Larycia Hawkins has been suspended by Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian school near Chicago. Some say that it's because she has chosen to wear a hijab as a gesture of solidarity with Muslims, but the school says it's because she posted on Facebook:
I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.[more inside]
You would be so pretty if...
Throughout our lives, women hear insidious, often-conflicting messages about what it means to be a woman, about how we should act, talk and look. [more inside]
Tent City, America
Tent cities are now so common that advocates are campaigning to make them semi-permanent settlements of micro-housing. But is this a genuine solution or merely a quick fix? Chris Herring for Places Journal.
normal blood feelings
RailFolk: The human side of railroading
North Bank Fred, described in the New York Times as "[p]erhaps the most well-known recreational hobo," runs a website that's packed with fascinating photographs and stories of the life on the rails. Want to know more about nomadic rail ways? Then let's visit the The Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture, "preserves and promotes railroad culture by documenting and furthering the art, music, literature, community, and work of those who, historically and in modern times, travel or work on the railroads of North America." [more inside]
A Day in the Life of Americans
BMJ Christmas Edition
"It was fantastic being myself."
"To live one's life openly as a transgender woman, let alone one as a black trans woman, simply wasn't done. The only option, really, was to 'pass' in straight society. But Norman wanted to do more than pass — she wanted to excel in the most scrutinized realm of femininity." The story of Tracey "Africa" Norman.
Miami Is Flooding
Dog with shark? I don't care.
The BVG, the Berlin Transport Company (Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe), would like you to know what behaviors they do and do not care about on public transportation. [more inside]
"An Unbelievable Story of Rape"
An incredible story by ProPublica and The Marshall Project. What happens when police believe rape victims? What happens when they don't?
Mariah Carey + MIDI + MP3 = Xmas Insanity
Abandon hope
Cards Against Humanity Survey
As part of our mission to advance our understanding of the human condition, we gave each subscriber the chance to answer some extremely invasive and ethically dubious survey questions. Our hope was to find a Malcolm Gladwell-esque correlation between two seemingly unrelated things. At first we didn’t find anything like that in the data. But then we p-hacked our way to statistical significance, and we couldn’t believe our eyes when we found...
“Words without experience are meaningless.”
Lolita Turns Sixty by Lolita Book Club [New Republic] Ten writers reconsider Nabokov’s novel, page by page.
Though Vladimir Nabokov was living in America when he wrote Lolita, the novel was first published in Paris in 1955—by Olympia Press, whose list included many pornographic titles. On the sixtieth anniversary of Lolita’s first publication, we asked ten writers to reflect on their changing experiences with the novel in the course of their reading lives. Each day for five days, we are posting two reflections, each revisiting a section of pages from the book—we are using Vintage’s 2005 edition, a complete, unexpurgated text.[more inside]
The Depth of Simplicity
The Depth of Simplicity Lewis Bond looks at stylistic choices in the films of Yasujiro Ozu (slyt)
A post about grammar and pro sports. What could go wrong?
Footbal fans ,NOT, writ, so gud. Aficionados of basketball, however, are erudite. Baseball fans are ok. Grammarly has graded a number of comments from sports related websites for grammar and spelling, then tabulated the results by league, team and city.
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