July 20, 2012
10 Days in Minsk
"I’m off. It’s been a while since I haven’t travelled alone. Last time was in 2008, I’ve been travelling in Sweden for a week after I put an end to my trip throught Europe. I had understood then that travelling by one’s own is something unlike anything, that this is a true and healthy experience, exiting, insperating. I’m on this train leading me to the unknown, and this feeling of being off on a adventure again is already exciting me. I’m off to spend ten days in Minsk, capital of Belarus."
Does shinto permit instant replay?
Sumo, the Japanese martial art that doesn't have a class at your local gym! Perhaps better known from Freakonomics than ESPN 5, the sport continues to draw crowds and contenders, an odd number of whom are from Eastern Europe, and one of whom is just barely over 200 pounds. Never seen it before? [more inside]
Treasure recovery
SS Gairsoppa was a merchant ship working for the British in 1941. On her final voyage she was part of convoy SL-64, moving cargo from India to the UK. Gairsoppa carried tea, pig iron, and silver ingots worth £600,000 (in 1941). She ran short of coal and had to leave the convoy, hoping to reach a port in Galway. She got spotted by a German airplane, and was torpedoed by U-101. Gairsoppa sank in 4700 meters of water SW of Ireland. On Wednesday, Oddyssey Marine Exploration announced that they had recovered 48 tons (1203 bars, 1.4 million troy ounces) of silver from the wreck. (gallery) This is the heaviest and deepest recovery of precious metal in history, but it may be only 20% of the silver carried by the ship. [more inside]
Death, Death, Death, Revolution!
Mortician Caitlin Doughty - founder of The Order of the Good Death - answers some questions. Episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. She also writes a very interesting blog. [more inside]
New Programming Jargon
This is just the top 30, what I consider to be the most likely candidates for actual new programming jargon based on community upvotes, not just "funny thing that another programmer typed on a webpage and I felt compelled to upvote for hilarity". Because that would be Reddit. Coding Horror presents the top 30 Stack Overflow New Programming Jargon entries.
Christopher Nolan and this Batman trilogy.
The rise of the lever espresso machine
The manual lever espresso machine is having a renaissance. A company in London is about to launch a British made, beautifully designed, state-of-the-art home lever machine on the world. Some home machines have aquired cult status. Is it a nostalgic return to a pre-electronic era, or is it down to the basic mechanics of the piston that simply makes better coffee? [more inside]
How top executives live (Fortune, 1955)
"The executive's home today is likely to be unpretentious and relatively small--perhaps seven rooms and two and a half baths. (Servants are hard to come by and many a vice president's wife gets along with part-time help. So many have done so for so long, in fact, that they no longer complain much about it.)" [more inside]
A reason to be excited about the next fifty years.
Computer Simulates Full Organism for First Time "Maybe they'll computerize an entire human brain one day—or even just a couple of cells. For now, Stanford scientists have created the first-ever software simulation of a full single-cell organism, the New York Times reports."
Long afloat on shipless oceans ...
Its writer refused to record it. Pat Boone almost killed it. Then it was resurrected as a B-side to an indie prestige project. Then it became an A-side in its own right, sold a half a million copies, and ended up being performed by its writer on the last ever episode of the Monkees. - "Song to the Siren's irresistible tang" by Martin Aston. [more inside]
Turtles, Snakes, and Spiders
'like a sort of soul-compass after I was dead.'
Untitled
We've all seen various works that are "Untitled". Reasons given for leaving works "Untitled" include Edward Hopper's "If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint." Others simply wish the art to "speak for itself". Some consider a title a necessary part of enhancing a work's commercial value. Others would never cop to contaminating their art with such a consideration. Some artists speak of "unease" and are conflicted about the subject while others are apparently under the influence of the post-modern tradition. Others think that it is evidence of "laziness" on the part of the artist, or in some way "selling their work short". Even when titles are given the creator has a fundamental choice to make. Some argue against "Untitled" out of sheer practicality.
Friday earworm
Bob Babbitt 1937-2012
Bob Babbitt, longtime session musician and member of Motown's house band The Funk Brothers, has died at 74. [more inside]
Hello! This is a special request from Antoine, this next one.
Le Sexisme Ordinaire
In May new French minister caused a stir by wearing jeans to inaugral cabinet meeting. On Tuesday she wore a floral dress when addressing the Parliament. [more inside]
"They saw what they had to do"
Two days after a juvenile mountain gorilla was killed in a poacher's trap within Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park gorilla preserve, two other juvenile gorillas dismantled several traps. Bushmeat hunters set traps within the preserve for antelope and other game, but sometimes capture apes. Veronica Vesellio, the director of the Karisoke Research Center (a unit of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund), says "I don't know of any other reports in the world of juveniles destroying snares." [more inside]
"Think Rube Goldberg meets the Wizard of Oz"
The Screamotron3000 is a converted boombox that takes a picture when people scream. Its creator, Billy Hunt, hopes to use it to "offer a window through the inherently artificial process of portraiture into real human emotion."
"The FDA recalled more than 60,000 tissue-derived products between 1994 and mid-2007."
"The business of recycling dead humans into medical implants is a little-known yet lucrative trade. But its practices have roused concerns about how tissues are obtained and how well grieving families and transplant patients are informed about the realities and the risks." After an eight month international investigation, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has published an extensive four-part exposé into the black market for cadavers and human tissue: Skin and Bone: The Shadowy Trade in Human Body Parts (Via) [more inside]
SNL writer Tom Davis, RIP
Comedy writing parter to Sen. Al Franken (the two went to high school together and shared an apprenticeship salary when first hired by Lorne Michaels as two of the first writers for Saturday Night Live), Tom Davis has died at 59 from throat cancer. In 2009 he published his memoir of those years, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss.
Franco-Italian Alps cleared of barbed wire
Barbed Wire no longer lines the Franco-Italian Alps. On the 11th of July this year, after working since 2002, mainly in the Mercantour National Park, the last of 134 tonnes of steel was finally removed for recycling by teams of volunteers. [more inside]
First woman StarCraft II champion?
Shooting at Batman Premiere outside Denver
A gas-masked perpetrator entered an Aurora, CO movie theater during the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, threw a smoke bomb and began shooting. Police in Aurora report that 14 are dead, and up to 50 others are injured. The lone gunman is believed to be in police custody. [more inside]
Couldn't they just go with "Czech It Out"?
The result of a search for a logo/slogan/identity for the Czech Tourist Authority is, like, well... *
From the brand identity blog "Brand New"** at Underconsideration.com, which liked the new Canadian identity theme better; well, at least better than MeFi's Own dabitch did. [more inside]
From the brand identity blog "Brand New"** at Underconsideration.com, which liked the new Canadian identity theme better; well, at least better than MeFi's Own dabitch did. [more inside]
Canadian medical professionals react in disbelief, shock and horror to how things work in the US
"I believed based on my politics that government mandated health care was a violation of my freedom." When a "die-hard conservative Republican" woman moves to Canada and encounters the universal healthcare there, hilarity ensues as cultures clash.
It's the end of the world as we know it
Project Zomboid, Zombox, Dead State: Indie games and the zombie apocalypse clearly go well together. But what of that classic end of the world, nuclear armageddon? Peter Sahui covers Armageddon Empires - a five year old game with somewhat awkward controls which he insists still holds its own.
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