May 22, 2009
...Am now bereft, unbelieving, angry.
every hour my watch emits a chime. this is my signal to become mindful, document the moment, and decide what to do with the next hour. this site is an archive of such moments. The site's named after the terrorist-abetting Casio F91W wristwatch. Apparently they now come with a free Thesaurus.
"Somehow managed to destroy my lovingly sculpted firefox profile of all its passwords and add-ons. Am now bereft, unbelieving, angry." [more inside]
Thought Suppression
Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive: How pushing a thought out of consciousness can bring it back with a vengeance. [Via]
The Man Who Fooled Houdini
Dai Vernon chased down card cheats and swindlers to make him a better magician. It paid off. One of the best magicians of the twentieth century, Dai first made his name in 1919 when he became The Man Who Fooled Houdini. Watch his version of the classic routines the cups and balls and the linking rings. Vernon also mentored many magicians throughout his life, including Ricky Jay. Vernon died at the age of 98 after years as the Magician in Residence at Hollywood's Magic Castle.
Harlem Children's Zone
David Brooks is very excited about the results reported by the Harlem Children's Zone. But do the statistics back up his excitement?
It takes a lot to be always on form
Imogen Heap (previously video) has been having loads of fun recording her newest record, Ellipse. She's putting up half hour long sessions of her playing piano, having album art contests, and losing her keys. Oh and beatboxing.
How about this stimulus package?
Del The Funky Homosapien has two song packs available for free download. His newest album, Funk Man (the stimulus package), is available for the price of your email. All available at Bandcamp.
Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism
Lens is the new photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it will draw on The Times' own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century. Features in their first week include: Essay: Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age, about what it means to shoot on large-format film in the digital age; Showcase: A Prom Divided, a multimedia feature about a segregated prom in 2009 south-central Georgia.
Pets are people, too
Now preparing for departure: PetAirways, an airline exclusively for animals that begins service to five US cities in mid July. Entrepreneurs Dan Wiesel and Alysa Binder came up with the idea of catering to the in-flight comfort of your four-legged friend, using specially modified cabins with pet attendants. Will it take off? The most recent APPA National Pet Owners Survey estimates that US pet owners spent $45.4 B on their animals in 2009.
They're sending their love down the well
Gather round the microphone, friends, put your headphones over one ear, and wave your hands in the air like you do care, very deeply. It's time to celebrate the benefit song. [MLYT] [more inside]
The Adventures of Tintin
Travels of a Boy Reporter - Track Tintin's travels across the globe. Click on the map to find out more about the locations or books they appear in.
The Quotable Tracy Jordan
“This is better than a family. No one around here asks me for my damn bone marrow.” Everything Tracy Jordan said in season 3 of 30 Rock. (Via A Special Thing.)
Learn to draw Les Animaux!
Les Animaux tel qu'ils sont is a delightful 1920s French art instruction book, showing one how to draw various animals, from the previously discussed Agence Eureka.
Albini that for a dollar
In 1997 Steve Albini produced a re-recording of Cheap Trick's (warning: may automatically start playing awesome music) In Color album. It is suspected that it was released by a disgruntled employee. It contains an awesome version of Lennon's I Want You to Want Me even though Yoko didn't approve
We won't dance, we won't sing, we won't talk / We just gonna watch how it bends
Mix one part music from indie-pop band, one part hand-drawn animation, and one part found 8mm film footage (mostly reels randomly bought off eBay without knowing the contents). Result: "Sunlight" music video (hosted on vimeo), inspired by said track from the band Harlem Shakes. [via mefi projects]
Handley pleads guilty
Christopher Handley has pleaded guilty to Possessing Obscene Visual Representations of the Sexual Abuse of Children. He faces a maximum of 15 years in prison, a maximum fine of $250,000, and a three-year term of supervised release. What Handey was arrested for was not child pornography, however, but Japanese Manga. Previously on MetaFilter. [more inside]
Black and White People Furniture
How a Civil War Amputation Was Performed
How a Civil War Amputation Was Performed NSFS [not safe for the squeamish]
Gleaming the Time Cube
Pascal Boyer explores the field of crackpottery in his article How I found glaring errors in Einstein's calculations. "For some time now, I have been an avid reader and collector of webpages created by crackpot physicists, those marginal self-styled scientists whose foundational, generally revolutionary work is sadly ignored by most established scientists. These are the great heroes, at least in their own eyes, of alternative science." [more inside]
The Amazing Flying Scotsman
The hour record is one of the greatest challenges in bicycling, with seemingly the simplest rules: Ride as fast as you can for exactly sixty minutes, zero seconds. If you go farther than anybody else, you hold the record. In 1993, Graeme Obree held that record for one day. Fifteen years later, at the age of 44, Graeme Obree will fly again. [more inside]
The Truth About Bender's Brain
The Truth About Bender's Brain - part of IEEE Spectrum's 25 Microchips That Shook the World (one page) (previously)
On College and Cubicles
The Case for Working With Your Hands.
In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?
You Voted for Change?
Glyphs...in...spaaaaaaace!
Pope 2.0
Marguerite Young
Marguerite Young - whom Kurt Vonnegut called "unquestionably a genius" - first achieved success with a study of the utopian commune at New Harmony, Indiana called Angel in the Forest. She then spent 18 years writing Miss Macintosh, My Darling - a 1,198 page novel that William Goyen praised in The New York Times Book Review as "a masterwork". She spent the last 30 years of her life writing an unfinished biography of Eugene V. Debs that was posthumously published, in heavily edited form, as Harp Song for a Radical. [more inside]
Arresting photographs of pollution.
Drug war
The Portugal experiment. On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal
took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including
cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal
framework, all drugs were “decriminalized,” not
“legalized.” Thus, drug possession for personal
use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited,
but violations of those prohibitions are
deemed to be exclusively administrative violations
and are removed completely from the criminal
realm.... The data show that, judged by virtually every
metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework
has been a resounding success. Within this
success lie self-evident lessons that should guide
drug policy debates around the world. (pdf of complete paper) [more inside]
Thread and pixels
Better than never
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