December 6, 2013
The Pit of Bones
What it says on the tin.
Celebrities naked with fish. Photography done for the Fishlove campaign which raises awareness about the destruction of the seas and the unsustainable practices that lead to over fishing. Founded by the restaurant, Moshimo and the actresss, Greta Saatchi it gathers celebrity, professional photography and fish to ask the question, "Are you a fish lover?" [more inside]
Radiant Orchid is the New Black
Pantone's committee of designers and fashion mavens have declared that the 2014 color of the year will be Radiant Orchid. Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore disagree. [more inside]
PATIENT ZERO
You Shall Not Pass, Dog.
You Shall Not Pass, Dog.
Sweet dogs terrified of walking past cats: a dramatic compilation.
Apparently, Gandolf would be a kitty.
"Music"
This poster has written this Metafilter post of music specially to introduce you to the instruments of the orchestra. There are four teams of players; the STRINGS, the WOODWIND, the BRASS, and the PERCUSSION. Each of these four teams uses instruments which have a family likeness. They make roughly the same kind of sound in the same way. The STRINGS are played with a bow or plucked by the fingers. The WOODWIND are blown by the breath. The BRASS are blown too. The PERCUSSION are banged. Now we have taken the whole Orchestra to pieces. We have no intention of putting it together again. [more inside]
Wrist Mounted Gadgets Ahoy!
Drop Kicker is a blog that investigates products on Kickstarter and Indiegogo that look scientifically implausible, outright impossible, or completely scammy
Detainee on board
The Rendition Project is the most recent and the most thorough attempt to render visible the extraordinary scope of the global system of detention sites, linked by the covert transfer of detainees across national borders (via Geographical Imaginations which discusses the project in the context of earlier visualizations). The Project includes first-hand accounts, a timeline, and the Rendition Flights Database and interactive map (the world's largest compilation of public flight data relating to the rendition program). [more inside]
Game 150: A Week in the Life of an Officiating Crew
The MMQB went behind the scenes with NFL referee Gene Steratore and his crew for an unprecedented look at the pressures and responsibilities of the third team on the field on NFL Sundays: the seven men in stripes who enforce the rules.
Part One: The Referee
Part Two: The Crew
Part Three: 24 hours of football: Saturday preparations and Game 150
Part One: The Referee
Part Two: The Crew
Part Three: 24 hours of football: Saturday preparations and Game 150
Turntable.fm shuts down
Turntable.fm (previously), a virtual DJ room where users streamed music together, has lost the fight (previously) to stay alive and has gone silent. Are other streaming music sites like Spotify and Pandora also in danger?.
Portal to a Wiki-Hole
Sexism alive and well at D.C. Metro
DC Metro launched a new ad to promote their rebuilding effort and were immediately criticized for the sexist message. Parodies have begun.
Games people (can) play (by themselves)
Lonely? Bored? Well, the 2013 Solitaire Print and Play Contest is here to help you stave off boredom this weekend (and burn through all of your printer ink). This year's winner is Maquis, a "solitaire worker-placement game with variable goals and a play time of approximately twenty minutes. The player places his resistance agents on spaces around town to achieve his goals - blowing up trains, publishing underground newspapers - but at the same time Milice collaborators and Wehrmacht soldiers patrol the area." [more inside]
Sell, Mortimer, Sell!
Bitcoin is crashing. After reaching a peak of approximately $1150 USD per BTC yesterday, a panic selloff is happening now. The price has dropped below 800USD, a loss of over 30%, and may be lower by the time you read this. Or it could recover and go higher. You can watch realtime charts of the bubble bursting at The Genesis Block and other BTC tracking sites.
The panic began when the government of China has banned banks from using Bitcoins. China is the largest Bitcoin market and restrictions have a significant and unpredictable impact.
Bitcoin panic selloffs have occurred before, but the price has recovered and increased nearly tenfold. [more inside]
Mad Love
Chris Sims examines Harley Quinn, one of the most misused and misunderstood characters in comics, taking in her Batman:The Animated Series debut played by Arleen Sorkin (audio), through to The Batman Adventures: Mad Love and the New 52 incarnation which recently drew ire with a controversial try-out page for artists.
The illuminating history of the Gävle Goat
The Gävle Goat is a house-sized Swedish Yule Goat made of straw erected at the start of Advent each year and sponsored by merchants from the southern half of Gävle. While the 2013 incarnation is currently unharmed, the goat is a magnet for vandalism and 22 of 37 goats since 1966 have been destroyed, usually by burning. Some burn just days after construction even with ice coats and fire-proofing. The event is frequent enough that there are bookmaking odds on whether this year's goat will survive. [more inside]
The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History
In 1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called Research In Motion, or RIM. For years the company tinkered in obscurity, until it focused on a breakthrough technology: an easy, secure, and effective device that allowed workers to send and receive e-mails while away from the office. They called it the BlackBerry.
The Obesity Myth.?!?
Study may bust myth of 'fat and fit' healthy obesity. Being healthy and obese is a myth, researchers say. People who are obese and have normal blood pressure, cholesterol and blood-sugar readings will still be unhealthy and die sooner compared with people who have a normal body weight, according to researchers. [more inside]
Maria, what is it you cannot face?
Last night, for the first time since the 1955 broadcast of "Peter Pan", the NBC television network aired a live performance of "The Sound of Music". [more inside]
If I had wings like Noah's Dove...
In 1904, John A. Lomax recorded Dink, a levee worker, singing a folk song. In 1934, Lomax published the song in his book, American Ballads and Folk Songs. It went on to become a folk staple. Recently, the Coen Brothers used a new recording of the song by Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac in the trailer for the film Inside Llewyn Davis. (Isaac plays the title role.) Jool's Musical Flowers, a blog dedicated to "the ORIGINAL versions of [mostly blues and gospel music] famous songs and songs covered by famous poeople" has compiled a thorough list of covers. The only two I might add are Jeff Buckley's 1992 performance at WFMU, and Joan Baez's 2004 performance at the Bowery Ballroom. (Previously)
you can love me if you want it's not my problem
"Alt lit [previously] is accused of navel-gazing myopia, but technically any writing occurring outside of traditional institutions qualifies for the label. Everyone I know has written alt lit: every status update, every blog post, everything that has ever been said on Twitter. And Twitter, unbeknown to Jonathan Franzen, is especially literary...Which brings me to Heiko Julien," Author (and composer) of "I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death." [more inside]
Hacking a Reporter
Adam
L. Penenberg challenged a white-hat group of hackers to see how much they
could learn about him. Two months later, the result terrified him. SpiderLabs
tells how they did it in three posts: one
two
three
It’s a Midwestern strip
From 1989, when Calvin & Hobbes was still pretty new, The Comics Journal's interview with Bill Watterson. The interviewer was Richard Samuel West.
Traditional Finnish Log House Building Process
This video shows the process of building a log cabin. It was shot in Finland. The narration is in Finnish, but you can turn on the English subtitles.
It is very cold in space
Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise sing "Let it Snow" (SLYT)
The purrfect activity for a coffee break
The worst thing about cats is that you can't play with them unless you're physically present. Being elsewhere means being unable to play with a cat! It's a horrible situation, but now there's a solution. iPet Companion lets you select a shelter and control a camera and trigger toys in the selected shelter's kitty play room. If there's other people on that shelter's page, you'll have to wait your turn, but turns are two minutes long so there's rarely much of a wait.
Where My Ladies At?
Recently Emily Graslie, of the fantastic natural history tumblr and youtube series TheBrainScoop, was asked a question about whether she had personally experienced sexism in her field. Her response is fucking amazing.
Inside is her goldmine of awesome female science educators online with channels that focus on Science Technology Engineering and Math. My work day is fucked.[more inside]
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