July 14, 2014
The Boring Generation
The staid young: Oh! you pretty things. The Economist on how young people are not the alcohol ridden hooligans they were thought to be (and how changing parenting styles, amongst other factors, may have contributed).
A Half-True Game About Half-Truths
After a decade!
Bug spray. Don't forget the bug spray.
Welcome to Utopia. On a remote island, a former airline executive and his wife are preparing for the world to end. Others are starting to join them. By Trent Dalton.
A bristling unbroken current of mongoose-osity
Writing in Slate, James Parker pronounces Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi The Greatest Short Story of All Time. "To read it as an authoritarian fable is to miss the real action of the story, which is down in the unconscious, down with the prima materia, down by the bathroom sluice, where the creepy-crawlies hiss and fiddle and not even Father, the big man, can keep you safe." [more inside]
A dance between math and intuition: Beer pricing
When you go out to a bar or restaurant, have you ever wondered why your beer costs what it does? Here's your chance to find out. [more inside]
If Horses Were People
24. A house designed by a three-year-old is built.
1. A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being. 2. The world is drawn from memory. There are missing countries, altered borders. [more inside]
Japanese Artist Megumi Igarashi Arrested for 3D Printed Artwork Based on
Japanese Artist Megumi Igarashi Arrested for 3D Printed Artwork Based on Her Vulva (nsfw) [more inside]
Designs for sitting
The exhibit Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting, at the Royal Ontario Museum through January 25, 2015, showcases the work of designer Izzy Camilleri, whose company IZAdaptive features chic, stylish, comfortable clothing — all of it designed for seated people who use wheelchairs. [more inside]
The Princess of Hammersmith
"Micronations" have been founded for many reasons -- to pursue libertarian ideals, or progressive ones, or fetishes, or simply to make fun of the whole idea. It is not often, however, that a micronation is founded entirely in order to make a seven-year-old American girl a princess. [more inside]
X-Rays of Toy Robots
Pinboard Turns Five
Five years ago, a new bookmarking service called Pinboard was launched. To commemorate the occasion Maciej Cegłowski, the creator and sole caretaker of the 24,000 subscriber service, ruminates:
"Avoiding burnout is difficult to write about, because the basic premise is obnoxious. Burnout is a rich man's game. Rice farmers don't get burned out and spend long afternoons thinking about whether to switch to sorghum. Most people don't have the luxury of thinking about their lives in those terms. But at the rarefied socioeconomic heights of computerland, it's true that if you run a popular project by yourself for a long time, there's a high risk that it will wear you out."Pinboard featured on the blue previously, here, here, and here. [more inside]
There’s lots of brutality...Horrible brutality.
1. Write your mistake 2. Ingest one mushroom 3. Go to sleep 4. Wake anew
Four years after finishing his incredibly successful comic book series, and its somewhat less successful movie adapatation, after a prolonged delay, Bryan Lee O'Malley is back with a new graphic novel, Seconds. [more inside]
Dance of life and death
On Sunday, July 13th 2014, Africa's Nobel Laureates in Literature balanced the eternal dance of life and death. On that day, Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka celebrated his 80th birthday with Presidents and paeans, even as South African author Nadine Gordimer passed away that night at age 90. Each, in their own way with words, took on the challenge of race and colour.
Fear is the highest fence.
After years of debates, notoriously contentious public meetings, and the looming specter of a civil rights lawsuit, a federal mediation agreement between the Town of Hamden and the City of New Haven, Connecticut resulted in the removal of a 10-foot chain-link fence that separated New Haven's West Rock public housing projects from Hamden's Woodin Street neighborhood for nearly half a century. NYT's Benjamin Mueller reports: In Connecticut, Breaking a Barrier Between a Suburb and Public Housing. [more inside]
Animated Women
The infamous letter denying women creative work at Disney Animation in the 1930s (previously) has an interesting addendum in a 1941 announcement by Walt Disney that the studio would be starting to admit women into the animation training program. Disney ends with a shoutout to "little Rhetta Scott, of whom you will hear more when you see Bambi."Rhetta Scott was to be the first credited female animator at Disney and drew the complex sequence of attacking hounds.Women's progress in the industry since has been slow but is recently accelerating quickly, so here is a random roundup of dazzling hand-drawn animated shorts by women: [more inside]
“Go buy everything from 1984 out of Minneapolis" -- Tommy Stinson
Prince's Purple Rain (previously) celebrating its thirtieth (!!!) anniversary, but the skinny MFer with the high voice wasn't the only great thing coming out of the Twin Cities in the mid-1980s. Bob Mould of Husker Du, Babes in Toyland's Lori Barbero, singer-songwriter Craig Finn, Tommy Stinson of The Replacements, and up-and-coming MC Lizzo take a look back in Noisey's documentary Made in Minnesota. [more inside]
"Tacky"
"Weird Al" Yankovic is back with his new album "Mandatory Fun". To help with the launch, he's releasing a video a day for eight straight days starting today with "Tacky", which captures the infectious fun of of Pharrell's "Happy" with a suitably Weird Al twist.
Go to bed, old man. I am working out like Olivia Newton-John!
Spending eternity with Miles Davis
Fans book burial plots to be near jazz greats. "Nearly all the 70 burial plots which were advertised for sale earlier this year in 'Jazz Corner' – right behind the shiny, granite gravestone of Miles Davis, etched with his trumpet and bearing the honorific 'Sir' to mark the knighthood bestowed on him by the Knights of Malta – have already been taken." Other jazz greats interred at Woodlawn: Celia Cruz, Illinois Jacquet, Duke Ellington.
Jazz at Woodlawn, June 11, 2014;
Photos from the concert.
(Previously and previously, in comments.)
Hey, Taxi!
NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life - A Data Visualization displays the data for one random NYC yellow taxi on a single day in 2013. See where it operated, how much money it made, and how busy it was over 24 hours. [more inside]
A New Underground Railroad?
A group of American Quakers say they are offering a way out for some desperate Ugandans fleeing the country’s new Anti-Homosexuality Act. If their account is accurate, it is a remarkable feat for a handful of individuals with very little experience in international aid.... Most Ugandan activists and international human rights groups are discouraging LGBT Ugandans from fleeing, since they largely go to Kenya and wind up in enormous refugee camps that are often just as dangerous for LGBT people as Uganda itself.... But the stories of people fleeing arrest or attack tug at the hearts of foreigners who want to offer direct help to people in crisis. The complex reality on the ground makes that hard to do through established channels — and the donors may never know the individuals they’ve helped. [more inside]
A red cent on the red planet: the story of a semi-rare 1909 coin on Mars
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), aka the Curiosity Rover is something of a robotic geologist, so it makes sense to include the tools of the trade in some form, including a calibration target. For giving a sense of scale with smaller geologic features, pennies are often used for scale, as a common item with a standard dimension. But why is there a 1909 penny on the Rover? That's thanks to Kenneth Edgett, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) principal investigator and an amateur coin collector who appreciates the history of the controversial 1909 V.D.B. Lincoln Cent.
Happy Birthday, MetaFilter
Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
Wrong Answer
In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice. A look inside the standardized-test cheating scandal in Atlanta.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Akira
Medical student syndrome
'Death will not correct / a single line of verse'
Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014) was a renowned Polish ‘poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, satirist and translator.’ Reckoned by Seamus Heaney as ‘one of the great European poets of the 20th century,’ he died in April at the age of 92: Guardian obituary; NYT obituary. [more inside]
The Saga of ‘Sambo’s
Not too long ago, Sambo’s had 1,117 locations in 47 states—and a reputation for pushing racist iconography along with its breakfasts.
Poor sanitation and childhood stunting
New research on malnutrition, which leads to childhood stunting, suggests that a root cause may be an abundance of human waste polluting soil and water, rather than a scarcity of food. (SLNYT) [more inside]
damn, that's a lot of light pollution
The End of Unrestricted Celebrity Medicine?
A policy before the Medical Society of the State of New York to regulate celebrity medical expertise
An increasingly-frustrated Google Guy
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