April 15, 2010
One Drop
In "honor" of Confederate History Month, The Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates presents a contemporaneous indictment of the American institution of slavery in the form of a fund-raising letter for the education of freed slaves. The content is presented without editorial in the original post, but there is a very interesting discussion of related issues in the comments section below. (via)
Why Novels are a Weird Technology and Constructed Realities
Purchase risky debt on a massive scale and then place a bet that the debt will fail!
Betting Against the American Dream. In 2005, just as Wall Street started to get cold feet about the housing market, the Magnetar hedge fund helped create a new wave of billion-dollar mortgage-backed securities, pushed bankers to include riskier sub-prime mortgages, and then shorted the securities, making millions when the bubble finally burst. Traders on both sides of the deals pocketed enormous fees even if their banks went under when the securities failed. Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, This American Life, and NPR's Planet Money track down some of the big winners in the housing/financial crisis. No time to read or listen? It seemed so much like a scheme from The Producers, they even recorded a show tune to explain it all. (Previously, 2, 3)
WHAW?
In recognition of World Homeopathy Awareness Week I give you "The Science of Homeopathy" Also, from the horse's mouth "homeopathy awareness week 2010". James Randi of course gets his licks in as well. [more inside]
Polyrock. Polyrock. Polyrock. (imagine it cascading down an LP cover)
Polyrock "could be pitched as Talking Heads under the tutelage of Philip Glass." With cover art that looked like it had been dollar bin for years, Polyrock may have been doomed from the beginning. Somehow their obscure, angsty-but-therapeutic sound has yet to be stolen, despite a semi-recent CD re-release. Romantic Me. No Love Lost Live. (Better than that "No Love Lost," if you can believe it). Cries and Whispers. Love Song. Changing Hearts. Bucket Rider. Working on My Love. [more inside]
Dwarf powered computing
Computation doesn't require complicated electronic circuitry. It can be done with mechanical gears, fluids, marbles, tinkertoys and dominoes, even the human eye. Recently folks have been building computers inside of virtual realities. It's been done with Minesweeper, Little Big Planet, and perhaps most ambitiously, a complete 8-bit computer built within Dwarf Fortress.
One small step
MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES -- By this memorandum, I request that you take the following steps: 1. Initiate appropriate rulemaking, pursuant to your authority under 42 U.S.C. 1395x and other relevant provisions of law, to ensure that hospitals that participate in Medicare or Medicaid respect the rights of patients to designate visitors. It should be made clear that designated visitors, including individuals designated by legally valid advance directives (such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies), should enjoy visitation privileges that are no more restrictive than those that immediate family members enjoy. You should also provide that participating hospitals may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. The rulemaking should take into account the need for hospitals to restrict visitation in medically appropriate circumstances as well as the clinical decisions that medical professionals make about a patient's care or treatment.
-- BARACK OBAMA [more inside]
Hello, Ivy League
Now that Stevens, a Northwestern Law grad, is retiring, all eight remaining Supreme Court justices hail from either Harvard or Yale law school. Is it time for some educational diversity on the court? Many think the court needs to expand its educational horizons. Complaints aren’t limited to the Justices themselves. Both Congress and Justice Thomas are concerned with a lack of different educational backgrounds among the clerks.
TED talk: Nurturing Creativity in Education
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. (c. 2007 SLYT TED talk)
Who rules America? Wealth, income and power.
Who rules America? Wealth, income and power Next time you hear "Fair and Balanced" Fox News whining about the socialist wealth redistribution agenda of the Obama "regime", refer back to this. Goes a long way towards explaining why 47% of Americans don't pay income tax.
Truth vs. truthiness
The Truth According to Wikipedia (SLYT)... A 48-minute documentary about Wikipedia, the internet, democracy and knowledge.
“A mule has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity”
Those familiar with the equestrian discipline of dressage, might imagine it as populated exclusively by stuck up riders and spoiled, excessively shiny overbred horses. A few mule trainers beg to differ. [more inside]
¡Lucharán... a dos de tres caídas sin límite de tiempo!
English-speaking fans of lucha libre may have gotten hooked through MST3K's take on "Samson" versus the Vampire Women (prev), or seen the Incredibly Strange Film Show's el Santo episode. [more inside]
Pessimism
Pandora, Prometheus, and Pessimism. "Pessimism deserves serious consideration in today’s culture of Oprah-quick-fix happiness, Prozac induced euphoria, and unjustified optimism for our species. Unlike Oprah and Prozac, pessimism is not easy to swallow. It is time we consider this tradition in a culture steeped in farcical, puerile conceptions of happiness; an environment where every person who is able to grin on a book-cover can tell us how to achieve happiness now; where angels or god or some other fairy-tale character cares about our actions in this world. Life is not a grand, heroic narrative with a happy ending. It is not a place where we are overcoming obstacles in order to achieve a time in our lives of perfect serenity. In order to combat such serious obstructions to clear-thought, boundaries to reality and gateways to delusion, pessimism can help us shape our thoughts on matters which resonate with all us rational, bipedal apes."
Taxation of our Representation
The Obama and Biden tax returns are already on line. The President and First Lady made a lot of money, and they also paid a lot in taxes, as well as donating generously to charity. The Vice President and his wife made a lot less, and apparently didn't keep track of all their cash donations. Here are the returns for the Obamas and the Bidens (pdf format). (P.S. -- Dick Cheney's reported income in office outstrips the President's.)
As the academic freedom levee breaks...
ColdChef (2006): "Also, Dr. Ivor van Heerden is the fucking man. And he wrote a hell of a book, which will probably eventually get him fired." It did. van Heerden is suing LSU for wrongful termination, and the AAUP is investigating. [more inside]
Under the covers with Lady Gaga
Virtual New York City
Maybe We Love Spam and Viruses
Why aren't we furious about email's dysfunction? Spam just keeps getting worse. And it's been bad for a long time. The spam/virus anti-spam/anti-virus arms-race continues to generate profits for spammers and anti-spammers at everyone else's expense. Attachments maybe weren't a good idea. And neither was the reply-all button. Attempts at "fixing" email are the subject of ridicule, and perhaps deservedly so. Google Wave was released as an alternative to email; few seem to care. What gives? Are we really stuck with this crap?
Life that lives on man, cont'd
For a little welcome diversion from your political, financial, climatological and other worries, how about orificial hirudiniasis? Here's a new species of nose-dwelling leech. Its ancestors may gave lived in Tyrannosaurus rex noses but our new friend here will be perfectly happy in yours. (The linked fulltext research paper is from the Public Library of Science's flagship peer-reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, but it's the Beeb's notice that has the absolutely OMG EWW pix.) Nature is so cool.
Its better with a union man...
"Seiri, Seiton, Seisō, Seiketsu, Shitsuke and Safety"
The National Labor Committee, a watchdog group that investigates working conditions at foreign factories producing goods for US corporations, has released a report on the KYE Factory in Guangdong, China. KYE manufactures outsourced products for Microsoft (their biggest customer), HP, Best Buy, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech, and ASUS. The report focuses heavily on the workers producing Microsoft products. In response, Microsoft says they will investigate the allegations, as their vendor code of conduct (pdf) bans much of the abuses uncovered by the report. Photo Slideshow / NLC report summary [more inside]
Charting Imaginary Worlds
Comic Book Cartography is more than maps of make-believe lands. It also covers cutaways ga-lore, robot schematics, and diagrams of Batman's utility belt. In the same vein, there was The Marvel Atlas Project (M.A.P.), and though it is now offline, some pictures have survived. There is also the two-part Marvel Atlas, a subset of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. The Atlast of the DC Universe is limited to Earth, (sourced from the DC Heros RPG book and Secret Files & Origins Guide to the DC Universe 2000), and Mapping Gotham is a single blog post which collects some maps from Batman's world, as found from a variety of sources. The Map Room collected a few more, some which require some digging into the archives. [more, previously]
Wheeee!
Dog Sledding (SLYT, not what you think)
Northwest Coast Archaeology
Not Editorializing
Is the Tea Party movement politically active in your community?
50% of the Tea Party thinks so. 51% of the rest of the community says no.
Explore what other agreements and disagreements the Tea Party has with the rest of the country.
Tom Hanks vs Mattress Factory! War of 1812 vs Wally Cleaver!
The Most Awesomest Thing Ever. The Most Awesomest Thing Ever is scouring the universe for the Most Awesomest Thing. Ever. By endlessly pitting two things against each other, we’ve created a stage set for destruction. You will battle, winners will emerge. Only the strongest shall reach the hallowed halls of the Most Awesomest.
National High Five Day 2010!
The Radium-Age Apocalypse Microfiction Contest
i can haz apps
Moving Remy in Harmony
Farewell to a Civil Rights icon.
Dr. Benjamin Hooks, Whose Moral Leadership Bridged Populations, Dies at 85. Dr. Hooks was the first African-American judge in the South since Reconstruction, the first African-American appointed to the board of the FCC, and executive director of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992. [more inside]
Oppugn.us
"Life is killing me", indeed
It's been verified by the band - Peter Steele, frontman of reknowned gothic/doom metal band Type O Negative, is dead of heart failure at age 48.
Never Before, and Never Again
December 9, 2001, at a singular event called Muppet Fest, Muppet performers and special guests came together to perform a very special edition of The Muppet Show - a live performance. Until now, those of us who could not attend were only able to read the script, but recently a (slightly edited) video of this unique performance has turned up on YouTube: Part 1 [more inside]
Time to play Spot Your Grandma!
Photographs of New York City from the 1940s in color via the Charles W. Cushman collection. The Lower East Side. Downtown - 1960. Landmarks and Times Square (via)
The Single Mother's Manifesto
The Single Mother's Manifesto. "But wait, some will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter? No, I’m afraid not..." J.K. Rowling on welfare, patriotism, and the upcoming UK election. (via Crooked Timber)
Hola hola hola, oatmeal and granola.
You're breakfast. From Parra of Rockwell. NSFW, unless your work consists of gorgeous hand-drawn typography and voluptuous bird women cavorting together.
Iceland takes its revenge
Air traffic in much of northern Europe halted – due to ash from a volcanic eruption under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland. The volcano under the glacier erupted for the first time in 200 years last month and whilst Iceland is renowned for its volcanic and geologic activity the sheer ferocity of the latest eruption (thought to be 20 times more powerful than the initial eruption on the 20th March) and prevailing wind conditions have culminated in the current traffic chaos. Flightradar24.com shows the current impact on the skies. Whilst the particles will disperse at high altitude and pose no threat to those on the ground, the volcanic ash is very dangerous to aircraft . Not only is there the problem of it clouding pilot vision but the ash can cause engine malfunction and damage the delicate airframe skin. One silver lining in all this is the anticipated glorious red sunset that should follow.
« Previous day | Next day »