May 13, 2014
so unless you're a rich Indon army guy in the mines, you're screwed.
Australia's 2014-2015 budget was just released. Amongst the casualties: television, young people (and the organisations that help them) and old people, tech startups, postgraduate students, people with disabilities and anyone seeking medical care, foreign aid, Indigenous people, the arts, renewable energy, and the environment. However, if you are in defence, mining, or Indonesian immigration, you should be fine.
The Mathematics of Murder: Should a Robot Sacrifice Your Life to Save 2
"Buy our car, but be aware that it might drive over a cliff rather than hit a car with two people." The Mathematics of Murder: Should a Robot Sacrifice Your Life to Save Two?
My climbing partner, she eats chicken liver.
Chocolate and water DO mix!
Molecular gastronomy at its most basic: Chef Heston Blumenthal makes chocolate mousse in five minutes using nothing but chocolate and water. (Heston Blumenthal (previously, pre-previously) [SLYT]
Real title: I Am Infallible; You Are Lucky To Receive My Wisdom
James Mickens (previously) gives a talk at Monitorama 2014 about distributed computing and security.
All in a day's work (tendril version)
Saving South Sudan
Journalist and author Robert Young Pelton describes his experiences in South Sudan in the most recent issue of Vice Magazine. It's the first time a single issue of the magazine has been devoted to a single topic and written by a single person. It follows Pelton, the photographer and filmmaker Tim Freccia, and a former South Sudanese refugee named Machot as they travel to Machot's homeland, one of the most war-ravaged countries on Earth. For Machot, the trip was an attempt to help South Sudan out of the seemingly never-ending cycle of war, corruption, and power-hungry strongmen that has ruled the country for generations. For Pelton and Freccia, it was the chance to explore and document the conflict that is rapidly turning the three-year-old country into the world's newest failed state—and to find out what, if anything, could stop South Sudan's slide into hell.
"Film is fragile, you know. It's... it's temperamental."
Film is Forever is a 16 minute short film made by students in the Lights, Camera, Action! class at West Ridge Middle School in Austin, Texas in partnership with Creative Action -- a team of teaching artists who run interactive performances, community-based programs and arts residencies in schools. More student-created work can be viewed on their web gallery.
a part of the museum, a cemetery, a forensics lab, or a tomb
How to Honor the Dead We Cannot Name: The problems with the Sept. 11 memorial museum.
TURTLES ON OPRAH
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on "The Oprah Winfrey Show". A slight bit of context can be found on Tumblr.
The Rise, fall, and legacy of the Office of Technology Assessment
On October 13, 1972, the Technology Assessment Act was put into law as a bipartisan effort to promote scientific understanding for Congress members. The act created the nonpartisan Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which released over 750 studies in its 24 years of operation. The OTA was defunded in 1995, part of Newt Gingrich's efforts to "dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it." (Bruce Bartlett, NYT Economix blog). It was seen by some as "Reagan's Revenge" (Google books preview) for OTA's critical reports (Gbp) in 1985 (PDF) and 1988 (PDF) of the potential for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka "Star Wars"). Chris Mooney looked back on OTA in Requiem for an office (PDF), and both the Federation of American Scientists and Princeton University have OTA report archives online. [more inside]
Can we do that there? Be that here? Check Equaldex.
Equaldex: the collaborative LGBT knowledgebase! A crowd-sourced, verified, beautifully presented representation of equal rights (and how they are specifically denied) for LGBT folks. [via reddit]
a living hell has become hopeful under Raúl Castro [?]
For more than 30 years, New York based photographer Mariette Pathy Allen has been documenting transgender culture worldwide; in 2004 she won the Lambda Literary Award for her monograph The Gender Frontier. In her new publication (amazon), TransCuba, Allen focuses on the transgender community of Cuba, especially its growing visibility and acceptance in a country whose government is transitioning into a more relaxed model of communism under Raúl Castro's presidency. (trans 101)
Making photographic images look like paintings.
Sarah Jarrett won the 2012 / 2013 Mobile photographer of the year award.
She lives in Norfolk, England and her landscapes and seascapes are well worth a look.
Here she discusses the technique behind some of her works.
Otherwise just go straight to her frequently updated blog.
She lives in Norfolk, England and her landscapes and seascapes are well worth a look.
Here she discusses the technique behind some of her works.
Otherwise just go straight to her frequently updated blog.
I don't care who started it.
Schoolyard bullies may worry that their victims are free to be sniveling, cowardly worms with almost zero repercussions. But, fortunately, they'll get their comeuppance when they grow up and die of heart disease or cancer. "Bullying Is Good For Your Health." (Being bullied is bad for it.)
The Santa Maria found?
"More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti."
Stop Motion? Robots? CGI? WHAT ARE THEY!?!?
The Energizer Bunny debuted in 1989 and quickly became one of the most successful advertising campaigns in media. Five years later, Duracell decided to do an eye-catching campaign of their own. The result was one of the most bizarre series of commercials of the 1990's. [more inside]
Maybe not.
Studies show that abused or neglected children placed in foster care face lifelong challenges greater than children who remain with their families.
Disco Doesn't Suck
Stayin in Black. What the hell just happened here?
Go Granny Go Granny Go Granny Go!
The world's oldest recorded orca was spotted swimming with her pod off the Seattle coast this weekend. J2, nicknamed Granny, is believed to have been born in 1911, making her 103. [more inside]
Can the evangelical church embrace gay couples?
A small but significant number of theologians, psychologists, and other conservative Christians are beginning to develop moral arguments that it’s possible to affirm same-sex relationships not in spite of orthodox theology, but within it. In books, academic journals, magazines, blog posts, speeches, conferences, and campus clubs, they are steadily building a case that there is a place in the traditional evangelical church for sexually active gay people in committed, monogamous relationships. They argue that the Bible, read properly, doesn't condemn such relationships at all—and neither should committed Christians.Can the evangelical church embrace gay couples? Here Matthew Vines speaks to each of the 'clobber' passages used to attack homosexuality in engaging detail and describes his vision for the role of gay Christians in the church. (1:07:18) [more inside]
The goal is ecstasy.
Swans have a new album out. Called To Be Kind. Financing for the album was supplied by sales of the live album/collection of demos entitled Not Here/Not Now, which, for a price, Michael Gira himself would write and original song and send you a video of him singing it, just for you. Oh and, reviews are in for the new album, and they are very favorable. Links inside. [more inside]
Making B7: Behind the scenes of "The Dirty Dozen in Space"
Before there was Firefly, after there was Star Trek, in between there was… Blake's 7 (previously). The BBC's dystopian space opera ran for four series, ended with arguably the bleakest finale in sci-fi TV, yet never achieved popularity in proportion to its influence. To accompany its DVD release, documentary filmmaker Kevin Jon Davies prepared making-of videos for the first three series, which he has now posted YouTube: Series 1, Series 2, Series 3. Learn the origins of Blake's dysfunctional band of freedom-fighters, the secrets of the show's horrible SFX, watch the cast read aloud their worst reviews, and much more!
"This Phineas was proud, well-dressed, and disarmingly handsome."
On Sept. 13, 1848, at around 4:30 p.m., the time of day when the mind might start wandering, a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage filled a drill hole with gunpowder and turned his head to check on his men. It was the last normal moment of his life. Other victims in the annals of medicine are almost always referred to by initials or pseudonyms. Not Gage: His is the most famous name in neuroscience. How ironic, then, that we know so little else about the man—and that much of what we think we know, especially about his life unraveling after his accident, is probably bunk.—Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient by Sam Kean.
HR Giger has died.
Swiss media report that HR Giger, famous for his dark and iconic Alien design, has died. He leaves behind a large body of work, much of it displayed in his own museum.
"God knew you could handle this!" might be the worst
What shall I do without Euridice?
In a new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice) in Vienna, the part of Euridice is shared between the soprano Christiane Karg, who sings from the stage, and Karin Anna Giselbrecht, a young woman in a persistent vegetative state, who lies in a nearby hospital. "The music is played to her and video cameras relay her image to the stage." [From the opera blog Intermezzo.] [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »