June 2, 2016
You've never met America, and you oughta pray you never do.
Charlie Daniels' latest promotional video for the National Rifle Association contrasts strongly with the more easygoing persona on display when he recorded Uneasy Rider... [more inside]
Facebook's forays into intent extraction
On Wednesday, Facebook introduced DeepText, a neural network AI engine that can understand text with near human accuracy, including slang and word-sense disambiguation. DeepText's first application will be on "intent extraction" on Facebook's Messenger app. Of course, there are already privacy concerns.
“It’s more like meat than anything I’ve ever seen that wasn’t meat.”
A meatless burger that bleeds vegetable juices just debuted at Whole Foods [The Washington Post] [more inside]
The vultures are waiting to pick your bones
Wow! Check out this supercut of every time Oprah said "The vultures are waiting to pick your bones" on her show! (SL Clickhole)
North vs South Vietnam
Protestant Work Ethic ...for kids!
"None of that for the Boxcar Children, who are so Puritan that Henry worries, out loud, that building a pool on Sunday would be amoral—before Jessie justifies the activity by saying that the pool will help them keep clean. " The Spirit Of Capitalism and 'The Boxcar Children' - Jia Tolentino for the 'New Yorker'
tronc
Publishing giant Tribune is changing its name to... tronc. Originally incorporated in 1847 with the founding of the Chicago Tribune, Tribune owns both the Chicago Tribune as well as the LA Times and numerous newspapers across the US.
Wir leben in der Krise
Via the Princeton Blue Mountain project, 336 issues of Der Sturm (german, but with art)
Der Sturm, originally published weekly, covered the visual arts, and also included fiction, poetry, cultural criticism, and political essays. The magazine became well known for the inclusion of woodcuts and linocuts, including works by Marc Chagall,Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, László Moholy-Nagy, and others.(via, english)
Excerpts from The Winds of Winter.
The Forsaken (Aeron I TWOW) is a new excerpt chapter from The Winds of Winter, told from the point of view of Aeron Greyjoy. It was transcribed by fans after George R.R. Martin read it to the audience at Balticon last weekend, and it may lend credence to an insane fan theory. This comes a few weeks after he released another chapter from TWOW, this time from the POV of Arianne Martell (a character who isn't on the show) which highlighted the growing divide between the show and the books. GRRM also revealed a new backstory for Brienne of Tarth.
Clueyness: A Weird Kind of Sad.
Clueyness: A Weird Kind of Sad. "Pretty random story for my dad to tell me, right? The reason he did was because it was part of a conversation where I was trying to articulate a certain thing I suffer from, which is feeling incredibly bad for certain people in certain situations—situations in which the person I feel bad for was probably barely affected by what happened. It’s an odd feeling of intense heartbreaking compassion for people who didn’t actually go through anything especially bad."
In France, a Political Football
The French Socialist government is facing increasing unrest over its proposed labor reforms, which may disrupt the Euro 2016 soccer championship. [more inside]
Ergo, jabot.
New praying mantis honors Ruth Bader Ginsburg, equality and frilly neckwear This research establishes the validity of using female specimens in the classification of praying mantises. It is my hope that our work not only sets a precedent in taxonomy but also underscores the need for scientists to investigate and equally consider both sexes in other scientific investigations
Why can't we get these templates in Microsoft Word?
Letter-Writing Manuals Were the Self-Help Books of the 18th Century. Need to kindly but firmly chastise your son for buying a horse? Read the manual.
Slashed Beauties
The anatomical Venus re-examined. “One of the things that makes the Venus so hard for us to understand is that we’ve now divided up all those things in ways that wasn’t divided in the time that it was made... We have this division between art and science, and between religion and medicine, that didn’t exist at that time.” (Photos of nude wax anatomical models that may be NSFW or disturbing to some.)
Every sea of every ruined star
Lytton Strachey, in a sympathetic overview of his life and work, called him the Last Elizabethan. He was morbid, eccentric, and homosexual. His idiosyncratic and macabre style lives somewhere between Shakespeare and Lovecraft. In his short life he composed two complete blank-verse dramas (The Brides' Tragedy and Death's Jest-Book), dozens of shorter fragments, and scores of poems. Today, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) is almost completely forgotten.
Mais let's see what those T-Minous is up to
TundaMinous is clips of Thundercats with Cajun English overdubbing. The plot of the eight (so far) episodes has villain Mumm-Roux trying to get his Magnalite pot from the shed out back of Lyoneaux's PaPaw's camp, while Lyoneaux hires the Roberts (Robear Berbils) to build him a screen porch off the carport. Created by Lafayette comedian Ash Reese, the show includes numerous Cajun Country references, including KATC chief meterologist Rob Perillo, and getting in fights outside Cowboy's bar. Some NSFW language.
a code that's difficult to filter whose meaning incites waves of hate
Chronic pot use is as bad for your health as not flossing!
A new study from Arizona State University that followed over a thousand New Zealanders from birth to 38 years of age has found that people who smoked marijuana had no worse health than people that didn't. Except that the pot smokers suffered from gum disease at a higher rate than the general public. So, make that hygienist appointment today!
Yay, multi-dimensional best fit!
Uncovering Big Bias with Big Data, by David Colarusso - "What follows is the story of how I used those cases to discover what best predicts defendant outcomes: race or income. This post is not a summary of my findings, though you will find them in this article. It is a look behind the curtain of data science, a how to cast as case study. Yes, there will be a few equations. But you can safely skim over them without missing much. Just pay particular attention to the graphs." [more inside]
Hot Air Millionaire
Sex. Race. Class. Inequality. Personal branding. Millenials. Selfies. Affordable luxury. Femvertizing. Unattainable beauty standards. And a glass of free champagne. Put it all together and what do you get? $100 million a year in less than a decade. Buzzfeed's Sapna Maheshwari takes a deep dive into the success of Drybar.
Understanding Climate Radicalism
What do climate radicals actually want? An excellent and detailed review at Naomi Klein's latest book "This Changes Everything: Captialism vs The Climate" (Previously) attempts to understand what exactly it is that climate radicals want to do and whether it is sufficient or helpful in tackling climate change.
Elevator pitch: It's like Dukes of Hazzard crossed with ET.
Purple Rain
Amanda Palmer and Jherek Bischoff create a pretty great (IMO) cover of Purple Rain, with proceeds from sale of the song on Bandcamp going to Prince + Shelia E's music education/therapy charity Elevate Hope Foundation. [more inside]
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