April 11, 2016
Buried Ideas
‘For over two millennia,’ Ian Johnson writes, ‘all our knowledge of China’s great philosophical schools was limited to texts revised after the Qin unification.’ Now a trove of recently discovered ancient documents, written on strips of bamboo, ‘is helping to reshape our understanding of China’s contentious past.’ [more inside]
"To be honest I'm not sure who won."
"the appropriation of his aesthetic by others for commercial means."
Imma Boss Ass (Animated) Bitch
clowns were the creepiest of all
The fourth prediction was that things that make a person unpredictable also predict creepiness. One item among the ratings of creepy individuals (“I am uncomfortable because I cannot predict how he or she will behave”) and one item among the items assessing beliefs about creepy people (“Even though someone may seem creepy, I usually think that I understand his or her intentions”) allowed a direct test of this prediction.— McAndrew, F. T., & Koehnke, S. S. (2016). On the nature of creepiness. New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 10–15
The Wonderful World of Livermush
What is Livermush? Similar to scrapple, Spam, and definitely not the same as liver pudding, liver mush is a common meat in the western parts of North Carolina. So slap some deep fried livermush on a biscuit with some mayo and save the date for the annual Mush, Music & Mutts livermush festival in Shelby, North Carolina!
It's still only April: the US election drags ever onwards
As we enter the last 30 weeks of the election campaign, delegate talk becomes more prevalent. On the Republican side, current Donald (future Donald) did not have a good Saturday in Colorado and South Carolina, with Cruz picking up delegates, and Kasich seeing a path despite lacking delegates. On the Democratic side, Bernie's recent good run has added to his count, although he remains behind Hillary. Voter suppression continues to be a strong issue, while Wikipedia has some interesting data on historical voter turnout. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan may or may not be running, while Kevin Spacey, who plays Frank Underwood in House of Cards series, says some real-life presidential candidates ‘appear to be fictional’. [more inside]
A Target Rich Environment
"A beautiful speech! But of course it has to be demolished."
The Drinking Party (1965): a modern dress re-enactment of Plato's Symposium, written and directed by Jonathan Miller. Leo McKern stars as a rather donnish Socrates. [more inside]
If the AKC had a competition for throwing shade...
😬 or 😀?
Take a look at: 😁. On many browsers, and on Android phones, this looks like a grinning face with smiling eyes (the official label), while on an iOS device, this looks like a painful grimace. A study shows that these differences can lead to difficulties interpreting emotions across platforms (and even within platforms there is a lot of variation)! With linguists arguing over whether emoji can evolve into a language, and with their own distinct grammar, these differences in interpretation can matter. Either way, the real-time tracker lets you see what emoji are being tweeted [prev], and fivethirtyeight sums up the 100 most popular.
Rusting Rainbow
The soothing educational tones of Reading Rainbow combined with the exciting technical explanations of Geordi La Forge: Levar Burton explains how to Combat the Pervasive Menace of Corrosion. In this series of DoD-sponsored educational videos, Levar Burton and various luminaries in the field explain how corrosion works and how to fight it. [more inside]
MFA novels prefer names like Ruth, Pete, Bobby, Charlotte, and Pearl
How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel? We wrote a program to analyze hundreds of works by authors with and without creative-writing degrees. The results were disappointing. [more inside]
Therapy and defiance of planting: make gardens and forests, not war
Back in 2011, Ron Finley took up gardening, planting tomatoes, peppers, chard, melons, squash, pumpkins, onions, broccoli, eggplant, celery, kale and herbs in front of his house in Los Angeles. He reclaimed a strip of useless, scrubby grass between the curb and the sidewalk along his property, except it wasn't permitted at that time, because local ordinances prohibited "overgrown vegetation" in such "parkways." But that didn't stop Ron, the guerilla gardener in South Central LA (YT/TED), who is still spreading his gospel of urban gardens. If you want practice some guerrilla gardening of your own, you can make and hurl seed bombs into vacant lots, which can be scaled up if you happen to have some aircraft and a lot more seed or even sapling bombs, you can really scale up your reforestation efforts. [more inside]
How Natural Language Tech, Holograms Are Preserving Holocaust Testimony
Eva Kor was six when she and her twin sister Miriam were sent to the Șimleu Silvaniei ghetto. Four years later they were taken to Auschwitz where they were selected for human experiments by Josef Mengele. Now she is recording her story for the USC Shoah Foundation's New Dimensions in Testimony project, which will create 3D interactive holograms of Holocaust survivors for museums. [more inside]
I've won the game of not taking myself too seriously.
No more Mr. Nice guy - From Kenfig schoolboy to international drug importer via an Oxford education.
By the mid-1980s Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines and 25 companies operating throughout the world. Wiki is informative
As he said of himself I've won the game of not taking myself too seriously.
A Rhondda man recalls as does another welshman. [more inside]
By the mid-1980s Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines and 25 companies operating throughout the world. Wiki is informative
As he said of himself I've won the game of not taking myself too seriously.
A Rhondda man recalls as does another welshman. [more inside]
Don't you feel eyes moving over your body?
“The concept of male entitlement is represented by male arms and hands performing a variety of actions that are overwhelming intrusive on her body and her life. In each situation she maintains a blank expression, a visual choice that demonstrates how conditioned we as women have become to accept this atmosphere as excusable and even normal.” -- Boundaries, from photographer Allaire Bartel.
No one liked that son of a bitch
Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, argues that, contrary to the popular perception, maybe Ty Cobb wasn't a complete asshole.
Cobb was, like the rest of us, a highly imperfect human being. He was too quick to take offense and too intolerant of those who didn’t strive for excellence with the over-the-top zeal that he did. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he thought too many others fools. He was the first baseball celebrity, and he did not always handle well the responsibilities that came with that.
"We don't know why it came to this."
Yanis Varoufakis: Why We Must Save the EU
"Our European Union is disintegrating. Should we accelerate the disintegration of a failed confederacy? If one insists that even small countries can retain their sovereignty, as I have done, does this mean Brexit is the obvious course? My answer is an emphatic 'No!'"
[more inside]
It's the floofy clouds that get me
Fallout (disambiguation)
"I asked Ralph Eldridge if he would share some of the migrating-songbird photos he has taken as a lighthouse keeper. [We] were slack-jaw amazed by the sight of so many types of songbirds together. The birds were exhausted and in desperate need of rest after flying for untold hours and miles on their journey from wintering grounds as far south as the Caribbean and South America."
NHL Playoffs, Round 1!
It's playoff time in the NHL, and for the first time since 1970, no Canadian teams will be represented. In the Eastern Conference, the wild card Philadelphia Flyers take on the President's Trophy-winning Washington Capitals. The Flyers just lost team founder, owner, and chairman Ed Snider to cancer and the team has dedicated their postseason to him. The Detroit Red Wings just barely squeaked in, extending their playoff streak to 25 years. In the Western Conference, the Minnesota Wild are matched up with the team that used to be the Minnesota North Stars before relocating to Dallas in 1993, while the Battle of California rages on with a San Jose Shark-LA Kings series.
How does Elisheba become Babette?
Maybe in high school you had to translate your given name into a foreign language for foreign language class. If you were an Elizabeth, you may have become an Elisabet or a Liesel or a Jelica. If you were a Steve, maybe you became an Esteban or a Szczepan or a Tapani. Or perhaps you've just always wondered why supporters of King James were called Jacobites, or you'd like to find some feminine forms of Michael for your new baby girl. Whatever it is, Behind the Name's Family Trees will take you all over the world with your name and its variants and diminutives. [more inside]
Canada's Greatest Living Orator
Over the weekend, the federal NDP voted to oust leader Tom Mulcair. But this dramatic turn of events was nearly overshadowed by another event at the NDP convention: The delivery of one of the most powerful political speeches in recent Canadian memory by former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis. CBC's Neil MacDonald calls Lewis "probably Canada's greatest living orator."
Thanks, Obama
Pijul
Pijul is distributed version control system that combines the patch theory based approach of Darcs with the snapshot-based approach of git, mercurial, etc. (NH) [more inside]
“We need help in Attawapiskat,”
Attawapiskat Declares State of Emergency Over Spate of Suicide Attempts [CBC.ca] The chief and council for the Attawapiskat First Nation on remote James Bay have declared a state of emergency, saying they're overwhelmed by the number of attempted suicides in the community. On Saturday night alone, 11 people attempted to take their own lives, Chief Bruce Shisheesh said. Including Saturday's spate of suicide attempts, a total of 101 people of all ages have tried to kill themselves since September, Shisheesh said, with one person dying. The youngest was 11, the oldest 71. The Cree community — home to about 2,000 residents — saw 28 attempts in March alone. Last September, a group of five girls overdosed and had to be medevaced out of the community, Shisheesh said. [more inside]
Losing Motivation
"You know that feeling that you got in school when you had to do some homework?"
Youtuber @mpjme of FunFunFunction talks about how external motivation can mess up your inner motivation. [more inside]
D'oh!
The Dodo is extinct. But apparently not for the reasons we long believed. And those pictures of the bird we're used to seeing? Not so accurate. It's a tale of a tradition of Bad Science and the struggle to fix mistakes made long ago.
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