March 3, 2018
How does it feel like to breathe with everything?
Released on Summer Solstice 1999: Surrender [YT album, ~1h] was the third album from The Chemical Brothers: Side A: Music: Response, Under The Influence; Side B: Out Of Control [video], Orange Wedge, Let Forever Be [video] [short making of video] [more inside]
Technologies of Mass Individualization
The Tyranny of Convenience. "Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries. But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear...." [more inside]
David Ogden Stiers Has Passed Away
Stiers, who was 75, is best known for his role as Dr. Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H and for a number of Disney animated roles including Cogsworth from Beauty and Beast. [more inside]
"Does anyone have a picture of sheep in a really unusual place?"
Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?
Bring sheep indoors, and they're labeled as cats. Pick up a sheep (or a goat) in your arms, and they're labeled as dogs. Paint them orange, and they become flowers. And if goats climb trees, they become birds.More neural net weirdness from Janelle C. Shane. [more inside]
cluck cluck cluck
The Hunting Accident
The Hunting Accident, a graphic novel written by David L. Carlson and illustrated by Landis Blair, follows the true story of Charlie, the son of Matt Rizzo, a blind Chicago poet, as he learns the truth about his father. As Charlie becomes entangled with small-time criminals and faces jail time, his father reveals that he was not blinded in a hunting accident, as he had always said, but rather, in an armed robbery gone bad. Incarcerated in Stateville prison, Rizzo was put in a cell with the infamous thrill killer Nathan Leopold, who taught him to read Braille and, by way of Dante’s Inferno, to love literature and to embrace life again.
brilliant at the basics
Shock of the Mundane:
Conventional wisdom focuses on technological superiority as the key source of American dominance on the battlefield. Even though the United States is clearly still struggling at the strategic level in its fight against terrorists and insurgents, it is supremely confident in its ability to defeat these groups in combat at the tactical level, due in no small part to technological advantages such as total air superiority, remote surveillance, command-and-control systems, precision munitions, and night-vision capabilities. Observers are largely focused on these technologies – such as drones and night-vision goggles – and their potential diffusion to violent non-state actors. What has been overlooked in the debate over the combat potential of violent extremists is the diffusion of something much more rudimentary and potentially more lethal: basic infantry skills.
Mostly not.
How Do Writers Get Paid? is a wide-ranging, informed, critical, and in-depth panel discussion on the ways authors are remunerated for their work, featuring copyright lawyer Zoë Rodriguez, SF writer Cory Doctorow, and literary agent Alex Adsett, moderated by Prof. Rebecca Giblin. The discussion takes place at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, so has a bit of an Australian focus, but the US, Canada, the UK and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, are discussed as well, and anyone with an interest in the topic will find much there. It can be watched as a video or listened to (podcast link).
Robota, "Forced Labor"
Kyle Kallgren (Previously previously) discusses everyone's favorite streamed depressive, Black Mirror and its place in the history of science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy . (19:08)
Yes! There I am! And there I always was.
The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews Black Panther stars Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong'o at Harlem's legendary Apollo theater. [1:09:05 video.] [more inside]
“I got enemies in Bourton-on-the-Water.”
Guardian: "From This Country to Reservoir 13, a new breed of TV dramas and novels are exposing tensions in England’s hidden corners." This Country: BBC iPlayer, trailer, Wikipedia. Daily Telegraph: "Is BBC Three 'mockumentary' This Country the best British comedy since The Office?" Guardian review: "This Country: perfect, horrifying TV for anyone who grew up in a village." Independent: "Not, that is, the Cotswolds the tourist folk like to portray..." Radio Times: "Pursuits chronicled in the first series included the chaos of a scarecrow festival, the ill-fated homecoming of an incarcerated uncle, and the search for a boy they bullied in their Year Six woodwork class."
Bourton-on-the-Water: Cotswold TV promotional video, Wikipedia, Flickr.
"No, thank you, I'm not homeless."
There seems to be no simple answer to Nakesha Williams's life of brilliant promise undone by mental illness. "She said she loved novels, and they discussed the authors she was reading, from Jane Austen to Jodi Picoult. She and P.J. chatted as time allowed, or until Nakesha veered into topics that hinted at paranoia: plots and lies against her. " [more inside]
Mental Disease treated with anti psychotic drugs do not always help
“don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee, too.” Being an active part of a community, I believe, could be helpful for many ails though it’s important for those with schizophrenia.
Yes, bacon really is killing us
The real scandal of bacon, however, is that it didn’t have to be anything like so damaging to our health. The part of the story we haven’t been told – including by the WHO – is that there were always other ways to manufacture these products that would make them significantly less carcinogenic. The fact that this is so little known is tribute to the power of the meat industry, which has for the past 40 years been engaged in a campaign of cover-ups and misdirection to rival the dirty tricks of Big Tobacco.
A Delightful Discovery on the Danger Islands
Presentation Day
You and your new oven
Elton John apparently can create music on-the-fly for any set of lyrics. Here he is challenging the audience to provide him with material and getting Ibsen's Peer Gynt handed to him, instantly creating a pleasant tune. Too easy, you say, with Peer Gynt being all lyrical and stuff? Well then, here he is being challenged by a different audience, getting an oven instructions booklet up on stage.
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