April 12, 2017
DJ Sumirock: "She's got this energy that goes beyond age"
DJ Sumirock is a monthly fixture at DecabarZ, a club in Shinjuku, Tokyo. She always usually starts her sets with the theme to the 1960s Japanese anime series Astro Boy, then transitions to techno, rock, jazz, French chanson and classical music. She's been DJing for about a decade, which generally isn't too notable, except she started in her 70s, and she's now 82. Before this, she was running her family gyoza restaurant, where she has worked since she was 19, but when her husband died, she wanted to try something new. [more inside]
"It doesn't get more physics-y than that"
Famous still-living theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, though British, has been dealing not only with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease) for decades, but with an American accent as well - even after a system upgrade a couple of years ago. Now, however - perhaps nudged by the availability of voices recorded by celebrities for GPS systems - he's decided it's time for a change and is reviewing audition tapes from a few hopefuls. [more inside]
Death Is Real
Phil Elverum has been recording music since the late 1990s, first as The Microphones and then as Mount Eerie. His most recent album, A Crow Looked At Me, chronicles "the feelings and events and realities" in the months following his wife Geneviève's death from pancreatic cancer. The opening words of the first song, "Real Death," are these: "Death is real. Someone’s there and then they’re not, and it’s not for singing about. It’s not for making into art." [more inside]
Thessaly
Crooked Timber ran a seminar last year on Jo Walton's The Just City and The Philosopher Kings.
John Holbo: Walton's Republic
Thanks to Jo Walton for writing an SF novel in which people, including a pair of gods, try to realize Plato’s Republic. (I’ve only read the first Thessaly novel, The Just City. So if what follows is premature? That sort of thing happens.) This is an experimental novel. Succeed or fail, you learn from an experiment. But even well-constructed experiments can be failures. That’s the risk.[more inside]
Diagnosing genetic disorders with your smartphone
Facial-recognition software finds a new use: diagnosing genetic disorders Diagnosing diseases from a face alone presents an additional challenge in countries where the majority of the population isn’t of northern European descent, because some facial areas that vary with ethnic background can often overlap with areas that signify a genetic disorder. [more inside]
Thin line between heaven and here.
William Horton takes spectacular photographs of soap bubbles and mandalas, among other things. This spectacular shot of autumn leaves in Croatia won a prize.
Where does Canada's accent come from?
Take Meow to the Ball Game
An athletic purrformance at Marlins Park
Play is pawsed at Marlins Park in Miami while a cat runs through the outfield and up the scoreboard. [more inside]
Paper-Based Procrastination Project
Setting the Crease is a long-running origami blog with an extensive archive you can dive into. [more inside]
Atmosphere: breathable. Gravity: moderate. Temperature: cold.
"That's a u with an umlaut"
(Better late than never) a teacher sets a fiendish spelling test as an April Fool's prank. Beware the silent letters.
The Arc of Her Survival
A decade ago, Kristina Anderson was shot while in her French class at Virginia Tech, during a morning when a troubled student killed 32 people and wounded 17. [more inside]
One million comic book panels
Mohit Iyyer, Varun Manjunatha, Anupam Guha, Yogarshi Vyas, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Hal Daumé III and Larry Davis decided to train a neural network on ordered sequences of comic book panels to see if they could then determine what was happening in the current panel. (No.)
To feed the network, they created a 120 gigabyte collection of one million comic book panels in isolation. You can download it here. (source code) (h/t Data Is Plural)
To feed the network, they created a 120 gigabyte collection of one million comic book panels in isolation. You can download it here. (source code) (h/t Data Is Plural)
Yardsharing
Matching gardeners to neighbors with access to space. Right now it mostly works in Boston, but I remember when ChipDrop (which connects gardeners with mega-piles of arborists' unwanted woodchip mulch) was this small, and it basically spread like wildfire.
Historic GIFs wot I did
Jacques Pépin doesn't want your water
Jacques Pépin talks about the importance of cooking with wine and Julia Child's surprise calls for beer and Crisco. [more inside]
How to enrich your otter.
Puzzle play. Hoop dreams. Inhaler use. Snow days. Piano playing. Frisbee. Cup stacking. Hoses. Snowmen. Ball pit. Pumpkins (and monkeys). Pumpkins (and goPros). Fish in a bottle. Frozen shrimp in a bottle. Green jello. Rainbow trout. Sea urchins. Clam shells. Water slides. Ice. Candy corn.
Things to stick tiny paws in.
Speaking as an old, I'm here for this
This Post Cost Me $_____
How much is your time worth to you? The answer is, of course, "it depends". Still, if you're trying to decide whether to spend some money to save time it helps to have some idea of how much that saved time is worth to you.
“Like millions around the world, I’m not from one place.”
Where Are You Really From by Zara Rahman [Real Life] “I’m baffled at your sense of entitlement. It’s not that you ask in the first place; it’s that you ask again, after I’ve answered. No, where are you really from? Is there any other personal question to which you would outright reject my answer? Would you say that about my height, or my profession? I can refuse — no, it’s not your role to define my identity, to put boundaries on who I can and can’t be — and yet you do it over and over. I can’t spend too much time thinking about you, though. I meet people like you regularly, at least once a week. It’s exhausting. Sometimes I will say whatever I think you want to hear, anything to make the conversation progress before we get to the awkward part where you realize that you wouldn’t be talking to me like this if I were white.”
"I have judged his behavior for myself, and I do not feel safe"
Odyssey Con, a Wisconsin science fiction and fantasy convention, became the center of controversy yesterday after Guest of Honor Monica Valentinelli withdrew from the convention when she was assigned serial harasser Jim Frenkel (Frenkel previously on the Blue) as her guest liaison. Fellow guest Patrick S. Tomlinson canceled his appearance in solidarity, and authors Catherine Lundoff and Melissa F. Olson revealed that they had refused invitations after finding out Frenkel was on the convention committee. However, rather than taking the concerns of their guests seriously, Odyssey Con's initial response was to defend Frankel as an upstanding member of the convention committee and post private e-mail correspondence with Valentinelli on Facebook without her consent in the name of "transparency." [more inside]
"if the picture is taken with a certain energy, the viewer will feel it"
"Photographer Alexander Petrosyan has spent years and years discovering and documenting infinite layers of St. Petersburg. His wide collection - not only beautiful, but also grotesque - invites outsiders to step inside the raw and unpredictable streets and experience them without a filter..." 170 remarkable photographs by Alexander Petrosyan, each one like a little story. [more inside]
More and more young kids are being prescribed anti-psychotics off-label
In 2014, nearly 20,000 prescriptions for atypical anti-psychotic drugs like Risperdal, Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel were written for children 2 years old and younger, up from 13,000 the previous year.
if it’s not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience don’t understand
"Between 2006-2016, of the films produced in the UK, 59% did not have any black actors in a named character role, and 80% of historical dramas in this 10-year period featured not one single black actor. The problem is not isolated to the United Kingdom by any means."
Race and Roles in Historical Costume Dramas [more inside]
Mambo Del Pachuco
The history of the zoot suit is different from the history of pachuco culture, so is the history of caló, the tattoo of the cross, jive, swing music, and the other associations with pachuco culture. It just so happens that all these historical trajectories came together in a unique way in Los Angeles during World War II. Because of Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots, this unique intersection of histories was photographed, written about, and popularized in a way that froze in time a culture that was actually evolving and expanding.
Pachucos: Not Just Mexican-American Males or Juvenile Delinquents [more inside]
Musta Got Lost, Somewhere Down the Line...
John Warren "J." Geils Jr. founder of the band that bears his name, famous for such boogie smokers as "Musta Got Lost" "Houseparty", "Southside Shuffle" and "Give It To Me" and pop hits "Love Stinks" and "Centerfold" has passed on at 71.
"I think tomorrow I'll go endear myself to about 500 furries."
So, the background about this is that the Rocky Mountain Furry Convention for 2017 and into the foreseeable future has been cancelled. It's a bit of a twisted tale (tail?), involving alt-right/neo-nazi furries, threats of violence, failure to pay taxes, and amongst yet more things, a SovCit "legal" letter. This, somehow, came to the attention of the Lawyers And Liqour blog and he wrote a blog post about it, dissecting SovCit viewpoints in light of the actual law and offering some commentary about the furry fandom. And that's where the fun started. [more inside]
Pictionary just got a lot easier
Google’s latest AI toy may be its most clever: an automated drawing bot that analyzes what you’re doodling in real time to suggest a more polished piece of clip art to replace it. (via)
Baking a Pie in Her Honor
Dorothy Mengering, the mother of David Letterman, passed away on Tuesday. Stephen Colbert and many other took to Twitter to express their condolences to the woman the NY Times dubbed her "the sweetest, nicest mother in America" in a 1995 interview. Letterman and his siblings composed their mother's obituary, full of love and appreciation of a well-lived, well-traveled, happy life.
A legal alternative to academic publishing paywalls
Unpaywall is a web browser extension which finds free versions of paywalled or fee-to-view articles. Launched in early April, it provides an interface to a database of 86+ million digital object identifiers (DOIs). When an Unpaywall user lands on the page of a research article, the software scours thousands of institutional repositories, preprint servers, and websites like PubMed Central to see if an open-access copy of the article is available. If it is, users can click a small green tab on the side of the screen to view a PDF. The developers say Unpaywall doesn't ask for, track or store any personal information. Developed by Impactstory and funded by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Alternatives are available... [more inside]
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