February 14, 2013

Playing the ancient Chinese meritocracy game

Shengguan Tu (升官圖) "Promoting the Officials" is a Chinese board game " where players assume the of an aspiring mandarin, moving through the imperial examinations and through the bureaucracy, eventually rising to the “Da Nei” or inner sanctum Grand Secretariat in the imperial household. Along the way, players pay “donations” to higher ranked players in each department." It has existed in some form since the Tang dynasty (618 - 906 CE) at least and now it's a Flash game. Programmed by Dave Lyons who also wrote a quick introduction to the game, from which the above is taken.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:57 PM PST - 7 comments

Meteors: Nature's way of asking "How's that space program coming along?"

Video of a meteorite hitting russia today.
posted by empath at 10:24 PM PST - 265 comments

BUNK - a rock video for Nardwuar + the Evaporators

BUNK - a rock video for Nardwuar + the Evaporators ... mefi projects meets the awesomeness of narduar This mefi project (music video) [via mefi projects] brought back fond memories of the bizarreness of Narduar, UBC's CITR radio icon, and interviewer of everyone from world leaders to punk rockers (always with the quirkiest questions) ... previously) and also previously.
posted by chapps at 10:10 PM PST - 11 comments

Link between number of romantic partners you have and substance abuse

The correlation discovered at Otago University between the number of romantic partners you have and substance abuse [more inside]
posted by mataboy at 9:21 PM PST - 49 comments

Carmageddon!

Ever wondered what would happen if someone hacked Grand Theft Auto IV so that car tires had negative friction? Here you go. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:04 PM PST - 49 comments

??????-style pizza

Geography of Pizza
posted by unliteral at 7:43 PM PST - 141 comments

The Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs

The World’s Oldest Pornography. The Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs in the Tien Shan Mountains: A Fertility Ritual Tableau.
posted by homunculus at 7:00 PM PST - 21 comments

Today Indian Country Is Strong. I could not always ... tell you that"

Only about 36 hours after the State Of the Union Address, National Congress Of American Indians president Jefferson Keel gave today the 2013 State Of The Indian Nations address before the NCAI. The address was followed by a response from Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), who was recently appointed the new Chairwoman for the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The entire program runs for 1h13m. Text of the speech. NCAI's Securing Our Futures report [pdf]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:34 PM PST - 23 comments

Time lapse Sketches

Sketch Theatre is a site where you can watch over the shoulder of artists like Molly Crabapple as they draw.
posted by Sailormom at 6:04 PM PST - 9 comments

The Black Community cannot afford the luxury of ... that subject

In which Neil deGrasse Tyson is asked a simple interview question and responds with a powerful story of perseverance and epiphany in the face of institutional bias and the intra-racial pressures which once pushed him to abandon his dream of becoming an astrophysicist.
posted by Scientist at 5:49 PM PST - 113 comments

the mundane face of evil: Chinese state-sponsored hackers

A new report, the National Intelligence Estimate, released by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence "represents the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, describes a wide range of sectors that have been the focus of [China-based] hacking over the past five years, including energy, finance, information technology, aerospace and automotive." One face of Chinese state-sponsored hackers profiled by Bloomberg Business Week is Zhang Changhe, an instructor at the People's Liberation Army Information Engineering University in Zhengzhou. [more inside]
posted by gen at 4:38 PM PST - 11 comments

"Maybe Don’t Talk Shit About Ads If You Make Money On Affiliate Links."

Maria Popova's Brain Pickings is a very popular blog with over 500,000 visitors to her website every month. "Brain Pickings provides the bulk of her income. She eschews ads on the site, but openly solicits donations..."* "But there’s something Ms. Popova doesn’t mention in her appeals to donors, amid her talk of operating 'ad-free.' She might not run banner ads, but she appears to earn income from affiliate links. You read a glowing review, you click through to order the book, and Ms. Popova gets a commission. The accusation comes from an anonymous Tumblr [update: he has now named himself as Tom Bleymaier]..."* [more inside]
posted by ericb at 4:12 PM PST - 76 comments

It's a Mash-Up...in a Sausage and Mash Shop...

Cockney English, once frowned upon as an unsavory dialect in the UK, has endured over the centuries, becoming a hallmark of London's East End culture. Though the demographics of that area have changed within recent decades, the rhyming slang of old still persists in that region's streets - on ATM machines.
posted by Smart Dalek at 4:03 PM PST - 8 comments

Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator

Push The Sky Away, the new album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is streaming now. It's already garnered one negative review.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:01 PM PST - 38 comments

This is no domestic moggy.

Earthflight is a BBC nature documentary narrated by David Tennant that takes a breathtaking flight on the wings of birds across six continents and experiences some of the world's greatest natural spectacles from a bird's-eye view. There are some full episodes up on YouTube (including South America, Africa, and the Making Of), but in particular these two clips caught my eye: Feral Cat Hunting and Peregrine Falcon Hunting.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:53 PM PST - 9 comments

"A lesson about the success of Great Men"

And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:40 PM PST - 32 comments

"What twists and turns will your story take?"

Acclaimed interactive fiction guru Emily Short has teamed up with Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, to launch Versu, an interactive storytelling platform that "focuses on character interaction as its primary form of play." The first two stories are free, and Short says authoring tools are on the way. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 1:36 PM PST - 26 comments

Mood Music for Work

Music may be able to improve productivity at work, especially music without words. There are some services that stream music intended for work: Focus@Will (US Only) offers a wide range of choices, Groovesalad is more ambient, while Get Work Done is decidedly more fast tempo. If music is too distracting, you can use a white/pink/brown noise generator or Buddha Wall, which loops relaxing sounds. Other people prefer particular songs or albums, since researchers suggest you should listen to what you like.
posted by blahblahblah at 1:25 PM PST - 53 comments

Welcome to the Malware-Industrial Complex

“On the one hand the government is freaking out about cyber-security, and on the other the U.S. is participating in a global market in vulnerabilities and pushing up the prices,” says Soghoian, who says he has spoken with people involved in the trade and that prices range from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Even civilian law-enforcement agencies pay for zero-days, Soghoian says, in order to sneak spy software onto suspects’ computers or mobile phones.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:32 PM PST - 15 comments

Are we having fun yet?

As over 4,000 hungry and doubtless pretty funky passengers and crew of Carnival Cruise Line (Yeah, the Costa Concordia was theirs, too) ship Triumph, who've been without ventilation, hot food, and working plumbing [NYT link] since a fire broke out in the engine rooms last Sunday, near land (they hope) it's a good opportunity to re-read David Foster Wallace's classic piece on luxury cruises, "Shipping Out"[.pdf] (also published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.") And personally, I don't care if he may have made some of it up.
posted by mojohand at 12:12 PM PST - 135 comments

One Day Prop Build

Watch Mefi's Own™ asavage create a carrying case for his Blade Runner Blaster in just a single day.
posted by tocts at 11:47 AM PST - 30 comments

Playing with God is indeed playing with fire

Beloved Legal Philosopher Ronald Dworkin Passes Away. Dworkin was described as "perhaps the most influential legal philosopher of the last century" in a 2005 profile. A surprisingly comprehensive collection of his essays for the New York Review of Books are available online. You can also watch his lecture on truth and interpretation. Or you can read about his recent book Justice for Hedgehogs. [more inside]
posted by likeatoaster at 11:21 AM PST - 20 comments

We don't have teleology in this country, but we do have television.

In 2003 blogger Billmon (previously) exhaustively outlined a dialectical history of U.S. politics [gif] in two parts. Now, he asks whether the Obama presidency represents the beginning of a new political cycle:
My analysis starts with the observation that there are some striking similarities between the current political cycle (the Age of Reagan) and the previous one (the Age of Roosevelt). I realize that probably doesn’t go down well with the Obama fans out there, so let me add immediately that it isn’t meant to be taken literally. Nixon really was a sociopath, if not a psychopath—a criminal of monstrous dimensions (See: Hanoi, 1972 Christmas bombing of). And that’s not even bringing Watergate into the discussion. Unless Michelle Bachmann’s paranoid fantasies about Solyndra are actually true, or the drone program is much worse than we now know, Obama isn’t even close to being in Nixon’s league. He actually seems to be a pretty good guy, for an Emperor. But in the current political cycle, Obama sits right there in Tricky Dick’s spot—after the Democratic Eisenhower (Clinton) but before the Democratic Reagan, i.e. the one who will free the Matrix and bring balance to the force.
posted by ennui.bz at 10:56 AM PST - 40 comments

Depression Quest

Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game about living with depression. Pay what you want, or play for free. A portion of the proceeds go to http://iFred.org. Here's a rather perfect trailer for the game. [more inside]
posted by naju at 10:15 AM PST - 60 comments

Super No

Superman is a good guy. More than that, Superman is the best guy. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster in 1932, he's the archetypal superhero, a man of enormous power who places himself in service to the powerless. To borrow a famous phrase from the 1940s Superman radio serial, he stands for "truth, justice and the American way". - Why Orson Scott Card isn't the right man to write Superman. [more inside]
posted by Artw at 10:04 AM PST - 256 comments

And the pick-up lines are well-rehearsed...

It's not the season for this song but it's certainly the right day for it: Summer's the Worst, a ballad about love and idiocy that's melancholy, clever, and (ahem) really quite lovely.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:57 AM PST - 2 comments

Flashing and Flamboyant Epochs of European Style and a Shipwreck

As part of his Sinking World series Andreas Franke combines studio models with underwater photography of the wreck of the SS Stavronikita. The results are amazing, beautiful, and unearthly. [via] [more inside]
posted by quin at 9:35 AM PST - 2 comments

Oliver Heaviside

Surely you've heard of the physicist Maxwell, but what about Oliver Heaviside? Oliver Heaviside: A first-rate oddity.
posted by Evernix at 9:29 AM PST - 14 comments

I don't think Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright will be at all surprised.

It's good to be the Kinga Micklethwait. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a new study of unusual surnames offers some depressing insights into the lingering impact of class on social mobility.
posted by Diablevert at 9:13 AM PST - 14 comments

Any dub can find shady nooks. Work fast; the garden closes at sundown.

In an article titled "So You're From Brooklyn," Brooklyn is declared a "bourgeois borough" full of "baby carriages, rubber plants, gold fish and green grocers.” The author warns that "Your average Manhattanite's conception of that great unexplored area beyond the three bridges is at once as naive as a child's idea of Alice's mythical Wonderland and as weird as a futurist artist's impression of Heaven."
The Brooklynite magazine (1926-1930) rediscovered and reviewed.
posted by griphus at 8:33 AM PST - 12 comments

Bucket of Sloths.

From Lucy Cooke's Slothville comes a bucket of sloths in support of her new book, A Little Book of Sloth.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:22 AM PST - 19 comments

Parnassien de coeur.

In the heart of the neighborhood of Montparnasse,
live the memories of a forgotten photographer: Émile Savitry.
In 1930 he was with Django Reinhardt and in 1939 He photographed the Spanish refugees who migrated to Perpignan after the fall of Barcelona.
He photographed some of the movie sets of Marcel Carné and Pigalle and Anais Ninn.
In 1945 he photographed Tahitian soldiers of the French Pacific Battalion and later 1950's fashion. For those who read French here is a little more about him.
posted by adamvasco at 8:17 AM PST - 4 comments

I have been monitoring your transmissions on this frequency.

Biblionaut. [more inside]
posted by obscurator at 7:27 AM PST - 12 comments

'I’d have to date an astronaut to get a longer distance relationship.'

Artmaking, a love story. How viral I Have Your Heart film brought two creators together from worlds away. [Different Kim Boekbinder video previously]
posted by shakespeherian at 6:56 AM PST - 1 comments

Happy Birthday Hurricane Hazel

Hazel McCallion, one of history's longest serving elected leaders, turns 92 years old today. McCallion is current mayor of Missisauga, Canada's 6th largest city, where she has served for 34 years, winning 12 consecutive elections. Her political clout and public persona show no sign of slowing.
posted by 256 at 6:14 AM PST - 18 comments

Janey Mac!

Curious about contemporary Dublin slang? C'mere to me and have a look at this YouTube video yoke. It's only massive! [more inside]
posted by DarlingBri at 4:58 AM PST - 36 comments

Meet Afghan military's first female helicopter pilot

"Malalai has seen more of Afghanistan than many of the white-bearded men who run this country. She's been travelling in the cockpit of military helicopters since she was two months old; her mother is an Afghan army pilot." This is a beautifully illustrated long read.
posted by puffl at 3:35 AM PST - 8 comments

Goats Yelling Like Humans

Goats Yelling Like Humans. Does what it says on the tin. [SLYT]
posted by olinerd at 2:25 AM PST - 61 comments

« Previous day | Next day »