February 22, 2017
An escalator can never break, it can only become terrifying
Ser Pounce
In the greatest Hellmouth in the world
Hamilton in Sunnydale: Buffy the Vampire Slayer screencaps with Hamilton lyrics.
It's Constituent Work Week!
It's Constituent Work Week, a time when, traditionally, members of Congress return to their districts and hold in-person townhall meetings. This year, however, more than 200 Republicans are skipping townhalls, despite calls from their constituents to hold them. [more inside]
AT THE END OF EVERYTHING HOLD ONTO ANYTHING
Night In The Woods (yt trailer) is a story-focused adventure/exploration game about the adventures of Mae Borowski after she drops out of college and returns home to the crumbling former mining town of Possum Springs. It is the creation Infinite Fall a development team consisting of Alec Holowka (Aquaria), Scott Benson (Late Night Work Club, But I'm A Nice Guy), and Bethany Hockenberry with a game-within-a-game rogue-like by Adam Saltzman (Canabalt). [more inside]
Data Driven Depression
Much of Radiohead’s music is undeniably sad, and this post catalogs my journey to quantify that sadness, concluding in a data-driven determination of their most depressing song. Spotify’s Web API provides detailed audio statistics for each song in their library. One of these metrics, “valence”, measures a song’s positivity. ... So valence provides a measure of how sad a song sounds from a musical perspective. Another key component of a song’s sentiment is its lyrics, and it just so happens that Genius Lyrics also has an API to pull track-level data.
To see how sadness evolved across all nine albums, I calculated the average gloom index per album and plotted each song by album release date.
Caught in the closed fist of the bean.
This is Coffee, Comforting video for uneasy times.
The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster
The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom that's so ingrained in the public consciousness and so politically safe that a law to ban ticket bots passed both houses of Congress unanimously late last year. But no one actually involved in the ticket scalping industry thinks that banning bots will do much to slow down the secondary market.
Theory 7: Putin is named Vladimir
At no time in history have more people with less knowledge, and greater outrage, opined on the subject of Russia’s president [...] And what does Putinology tell us? It turns out that it has produced seven distinct hypotheses about Putin. None of them is entirely wrong, but then none of them is entirely right (apart from No 7). Taken together, they tell us as much about ourselves as about Putin. They paint a portrait of an intellectual class – our own – on the brink of a nervous breakdown.Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: the many myths of Vladimir Putin
Set Course for TRAPPIST-1, Make 12 Parsecs Joke Now
Astronomers have never seen anything like this before: Seven Earth-size alien worlds orbit the same tiny, dim star, and all of them may be capable of supporting life as we know it, a new study reports. The exoplanets circle the star TRAPPIST-1, which lies just 39 light-years from Earth — a mere stone's throw in the cosmic scheme of things. So speculation about the alien worlds' life-hosting potential should soon be informed by hard data, study team members said.
Major Discovery! 7 Earth-Size Alien Planets Circle Nearby Star [more inside]
Shakeup at the Oscars
In June, the Academy released a list of six hundred and eighty-three new members—a record number; forty-six per cent of them were female and forty-one per cent were nonwhite, representing fifty-nine different countries. They included the actors John Boyega, America Ferrera, Ice Cube, Idris Elba, Daniel Dae Kim, and Gabrielle Union; the directors Ryan Coogler (“Creed”), Marjane Satrapi, and the Wachowski siblings; and three Wayans brothers, Damon, Marlon, and Keenen. “I think they were just, like, ‘Man, there are six thousand members. We’ve got to put at least two Wayanses in!’ ” Marlon told me. “You want diversity, just go to the Wayans tribe.” Led by Cheryl Boone Isaacs, its first black president, the Academy tries to solve its diversity problem.
Jumping the air gap silently
Malware lets a drone steal data by watching a computer’s blinking LED The pinpoint flickers, emitting from the LED hard drive indicator that lights up intermittently on practically every modern Windows machine, would hardly arouse the suspicions of anyone working in the office after hours. But in fact, that LED was silently winking out an optical stream of the computer’s secrets to the camera floating outside. [more inside]
Menses or Men Says?
Laydeez! Wish you had more options to deal with your period? Mensez can help!
A Kansas chiropractor has invented a product that is an adhesive in lipstick (get it? lip-stick?) form that is "used to seal the vagina during menstruation until the woman goes to urinate". [more inside]
"...and still the viol shrieked on without slackening."
Revel in the mad piping errrr... foot stompin' rock of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets' newest opus, "The Dukes of Alhazred". The Lovecraftian-inspired jam-masters have been at it for aeons now (25 years in linear time), and this is their first full length release since 2007's "The Shadow out of Tim". [more inside]
"Abhorrent [...] blatant violation of academic freedom"
An Iowa senate bill would require candidates for professor positions to disclose their political party registrations, and would prohibit state universities from hiring professors who would skew the "partisan balance" of the faculty by more than 10 percent in either direction. [more inside]
TECHIE AMONG THREE BURNT ALIVE IN GARUDA BUS MISHAP
"In one occupational boogeyman, Bangaloreans can see their future and their fears." IT worker as hated yet envied figure in India. Is this about class divides, cultural gaps, ecological stress, spousal abuse, or something else? (SLBloomberg)
Does the hydrogen atom offend you? Then pluck it off.
Derek Lowe on the first synthesis of triangulene by a team of researchers at IBM Zürich using a scanning tunneling microscope:
This is a molecule that we’ve known for a long time could exist, but no chemist had ever seen it or been able to make it. Now we can reach in and tug on individual atoms, though, and that does the trick – just the thought of direct mechanical synthesis being the way to make an elusive species like this is enough for me.[more inside]
We've Got Movie Sign!!!
Netflix has announced a release date for the new MST3k. AVClub also did a cool interview with Joel and some of the new cast. (previous mst3k)
Instrumental music from Brazil
Programa Instrumental SESC Brasil is an on-going series of videos (each ca. 50-55 minutes long) on YouTube of live performances of Brazilian instrumental music, much of it more-or-less jazz-tinged. See for example: veteran percussionist Wilson das Neves leading a 14-piece band; or accordionist Renato Borghetti (with Arthur Bonilla on guitar), a virtuoso exponent of gaucho music; or Drummer Vera Figueiredo & her trio, joined part-way through their set by the trombonist Bocato; or guitarist Renata Montanari & her quartet; or São Paulo pianist Louise Woolley & 12-piece band; or the funk outfit Black Mantra… but that merely scratches the surface: there are dozens of other fine performances to be found. [more inside]
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