February 7, 2017
The School Kids Who Built Us A Race Bike.
The Design & Tech students of Adam's Grammar School in Shropshire, UK built a race bike from scratch and then watched as it was raced in a criterion.
You've Made Me So Very Happy
David Axelrod, A&R and producer for Capitol Records, arranger and composer, has finished his walk on the edge, passing at the age of 83. Pitchfork has a fantastic article about the Axe. [more inside]
World's Foremost Authority dies at 102
We'll all miss you, Professor Irwin Corey (1914-2017). • Why do you wear tennis shoes? (1966, on the Smothers Brothers Show) • At the Cutting Room, 2008 • At Lord Buckley's Birthday Bash, 2007 • Being interviewed by Christopher Lydon, from WGBH's 10 O'Clock News, sometime in the 1980's • Accepting the 1974 National Book Award on behalf of Richard Python for Gravity's Rainbow; transcript provided by irwincorey.org [more inside]
Felgercarb.
Richard Hatch, best known as Captain Lee Adama (Call sign Apollo) in the original version of Battlestar Galactica and Tom Zarek in the remake of Battlestar Galactica has died at the age of 71.
I’ve never seen so much publicity. It was madness.
I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook. You Should Stop Playing Right Into It. In which Ryan Holiday [former director of marketing for American Apparel] writes for The Observer about creating desire and popularity by courting dissent and scandal, how effective it is, and how possibly to combat it with defined strategies.
Don't Panic
Hans Rosling (prev), Swedish statistician, medical doctor, media presenter, and co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation, has died of pancreatic cancer. [more inside]
"…cats do not need moral instruction."
What cats can teach us about how to live — One of the most attractive features of cats is that contentment is their default state. Unlike human beings – particularly of the modern variety – they do not spend their days in laborious pursuit of a fantasy of happiness. They are comfortable with themselves and their lives, and remain in that condition for as long as they are not threatened. When they are not eating or sleeping, they pass the time exploring and playing, never asking for reasons to live. Life itself is enough for them.
Dialing Up the Pressure
We are Condemned to be Free
Shows like Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman are explicitly existential in their philosophy and others such as Black Mirror and Westworld dip their toes in the water. Is it fair to say that society itself might be going through a kind of existential crisis? [more inside]
get a thousand miles lower
Ever wondered how 50 Cent's In Da Club would sound with Yellowcard's Ocean Avenue? How about Nelly's Country Grammar and Fall Out Boy's Sugar We're Going Down? Wonder no more! The Magic iPod is here for all your Get Low/A Thousand Miles needs.
Now that's what I call a gooooood dog.
Doesn't this make you the real Nazi?
"Has violent resistance ever solved anything?" it asks, along with a Yes or No option. The Nazi, by the way, is still pumping bullets into me. Thinking of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, I hesitantly click "yes." I fire off another shot at the Nazi, but then there was another popup:"Wait, wait, isn't it important to protect their free speech as well?" -- introducing the modern nazi fighting game:
Two-armed Bandits
...the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a [slot machine] they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat—And Casinos Have No Fix
1. g4 d5 2. f3 e5 3. d3 Qh4 4. Kd2 h5 5. h3 hxg4 (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Current Women's World Chess Champion Hou Yifan (侯逸凡) resigned after five (horrible) moves in the tenth and final round of the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival, in a protest against being paired against seven women in the previous nine rounds of the open (not segregated into male and female players) tournament. Organizers "firmly reject the suggestion of any 'fixing' of pairings". [more inside]
Building Type: The airport as public square and protest central
"I can’t say I’ve ever covered a scene quite like the one that played out last weekend at LAX and other airports across the country. ... If the rush to enact the order and the outraged response from protesters seemed similar in their freneticism, which may well be the default tone of this administration, what was new about the airport demonstrations was the way they used urban space — specifically, how they used what we think of as airports’ architectural deficiencies and turned them to their political advantage."
boxer crabs
This Crab Clones Its Allies by Ripping Them in Half "It wields sea anemones like boxing gloves; if it loses one, it makes another by bisecting the remaining one."
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