August 14, 2012
Online cat food cupcake recipes predicted in 1995
Fifth graders in 1995 predict that we will all be on the internet in the future in this PSA from a Montana elementary school.
"The latest victim of the tumor has been my facial nerve."
Kathi Goertzen, a TV news anchor on KOMO in Seattle, has died after battling brain tumors for 14 years. In 2011, she candidly discussed how it felt to be in the public eye after a tumor caused one side of her face to become paralyzed. [more inside]
If it was good enough for Ted Roosevelt, it's good enough for me
Classicly is a curated collection of pre-1923 books in Kindle format, ranging from haughty epics to intellectual fiction, without taking away from the no-brow everyman's novel and even some timeless non-fiction. A great way to sort your way through their impressive inventory is their annotated collections, but there's enough serendipity going around in the main page that you get around to books you even forgot you wanted to read.
Throw shit at the fan
"Last week, I graduated from the 2012 Clarion Writer’s Workshop. And everything people tell you about it is true—it’s incredible, it’s transformative, it will make you into the writer you were meant to be, it builds unbreakable bonds with a ton of other brilliant writers. AND you’ll be devastated when it’s over. As I attempt to process my grief at Clarion’s end, I thought I would transcribe the copious notes that I took during the course of those six weeks." Clarion 2012: Every Brilliant Piece of Writing Advice (via jscalzi)
No Place For Your Kind
No Place for Your Kind Photojournalist Tim Greyhavens documents sites of anti-Chinese violence in the American West around the turn of the last century. NYT blog post on the project.
It poked its tiny head and looked out from the den.
Zoo workers at the Ramat Gan Safari Park in Tel Aviv said they were surprised by the number of kittens born. [more inside]
Tabor Robak's EXO
EXO, a 35 minute game from Tabor Robak takes the music of electronic group Gatekeeper and sets it to an interactive, 35-minute psychedelic journey. [more inside]
I'm sorry "A Heart of Pure Darkness" is not correct.
What did Michael Milken, Enron, and Goldman Sachs have in common? Not only were they at the centers of three of the biggest financial scandals of the last 30 years, but it turns out they all used the same financial instrument to help pull off their plans.
A Transactional Genealogy of Scandal: from Michael Milken to Enron to Goldman Sachs [more inside]
Play With Your Food
Happy Birthday, Julia
Tomorrow would have been Julia Child's 100th birthday. To celebrate, PBS Digital Studios offers: Julia Child Remixed. They also have created a celebration page, complete with an infographic, recipes, quotes, videos and more. [more inside]
Special Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. Special occupies a strange place in Mario history. It's one of the few Mario games produced for a system other than Nintendo's own, licensed by Hudson Soft for the Japanese PC-8801 computer system. The system was fairly weak compared to an NES, so it didn't scroll; when Mario gets to the edge of the screen, it flips to the next. The game wasn't always designed with that in mind however, leading to a lot of blind jumps. You can play a hacked version of the original Super Mario Bros. designed to recreate this game using the patch found here. And here's a video playthrough of the whole game: World 1, World 2, World 3, World 4, World 5, World 6, World 7, World 8, Last level & ending. And here's a trap room in World 4.
FAST food
Kansas City rapper and budding internet sensation Mac Lethal raps a recipe for homemade Chick-Fil-A.Quickly. (NSFW audio, SLYT)
The Reproducibility Initiative
The Reproducibility Initiative "Here’s how it is supposed to work. Let’s say you have found a drug that shrinks tumors. You write up your results, which are sexy enough to get into Nature or some other big-name journal. You also send the Reproducibility Initiative the details of your experiment and request that someone reproduce it. A board of advisers matches you up with a company with the experience and technology to do the job. You pay them to do the job...and they report back whether they got the same results."
I am the Hammer, they are the nails!
Lowell "The Hammer" Stanley looks like your garden-variety local personal injury lawyer famous for some kooky commercials. Someone remixed them and the result is nothing short of amazing.
Bully Pulpit Games' Fiasco
TableTop’s Fiasco episodes may be the greatest roleplaying documentary made to date. ... Not only are the two episodes it takes to show their session a joy to watch (and they are a pleasure) but they succeed in something that is really difficult to do: capture the essence of a game session. (previously) [more inside]
Buying a Kick in the Face
My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court: After a Baltimore car accident between an insured and an underinsured driver left the insured driver dead, Progressive Insurance took up the defense of the underinsured driver against their own policy-holder. [more inside]
Cats Who Code
Khan Academy unveils its new interactive Computer Science learning platform.
More coder resources: Free Tech Books, WiBit.net, Google Code University, the W3C's Web Standards Curriculum, a Beginner's Guide to HTML & CSS, and codepen.io, a social sandbox for web design.
“When someone hands me a beer I don’t ask how it was made, I just drink it.”
Revealed: The president [or someone affiliated with him] brews his own beer, and brings it with him on the road. [more inside]
We should be nurturing corporate spectacle.
Let's put a stop to the love. You've perhaps heard of comic Mike Birbiglia's forthcoming film, "Sleepwalk With Me," in theaters starting August 24th. (Written and directed by Mike Birbiglia. Co-written and produced by Ira Glass.) [more inside]
Drugs 2.0
Drugs have changed a lot in the past ten years. You have, mainly, these two men to blame/thank for most of the fervor. Laws are flexing accordingly. [Shulgin previously: 1,2]
Wolfgang Amadeus Horshack
Ron Palillo, known for his role on Welcome Back, Kotter, has died at the age of 63. In addition to later guest appearances on television, he performed in a number of theater productions as Mozart, the burglar in PS Your Cat is Dead, and other stereotype-breaking roles. In his later years, he tried his hand at fashion design and worked in Palm Beach county in Florida, teaching at a local acting school.
Would you like to come to a party?
What the fuck has NASA done to make your life awesome?
The Lego Story
Ole was a toymaker. My 8-year-old Lego fan found this charming short movie (SLLegoTube) about the company's history. Happy near-80th, Lego!
Plugging Into Cool Sounds
Computer-based musicians have a wealth of free VST (Windows) and Audio Units (Mac) plugins to use in their favorite DAW software. Here are some of my favorites (primarily Mac, though most are available for Windows as well). If you share my passion for this stuff, you are likely already a fan of the excellent website KVR Audio, the ultimate resource for plugins of all stripes. [more inside]
How The American University was Killed
“'Funding for public universities comes from, as the term suggests, the state and federal government. Yet starting in the early 1980s, shifting state priorities forced public universities to increasingly rely on other sources of revenue. For example, in the University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011.' That’s a loss of more than 1/3 of its public funding. But why this shift in priorities?" How The American University was Killed, in 5 Easy Steps.
Manic Pixie Dream Dudes
Dave and Duncan off the inspirational (and cancelled) MTV reality show 'The Buried Life' star in a parody of Rihanna's We Found Love video along side a bunch of spray paint and candy.
Future Shock. Indeed.
'textbook definition of surrealism' In his epic new bio of James Brown, "The One"--an account of not just the man's life and music, but a panoramic view of African-American, southern and American political and cultural history of the 20th Century--author R.J. Smith briefly discusses "Future Shock," a dance show that Brown hosted in the mid-1970s. It aired on a pioneering Atlanta station, WTCG, a Ted Turner-owned UHF station that would become a satellite channel by the end of 1976. Along with the pay-only HBO (started in '75 in select markets), WTCG paved the way for a cable TV revolution. Its name would be changed to WTBS (otherwise known as Superstation WTBS) in 1979. [more inside]
Bill Shatner speaks
Jeff Greenwald, author of Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, conducted an interview with William Shatner. Comes in both coherent and full Shatner mode versions.
Village, village, village, village, village... buy a village. Done.
"You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion!" Dominion is an award winning game that combines the staples of Eurogaming with the addictive nature of collectable card games. [more inside]
You Can Do Science Too
Citizen science refers to science conducted by average persons, e.g., people who are not full- or part-time professional scientists but nevertheless have a keen interest in scientific inquiry. Citizen Science Center is a resource for books, papers, discussions, and project listings related to citizen science that aims to convince you to get your hands dirty and do science now.
My God, it's full of galaxies
A flight through the universe using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. [single-link APOD]
Now I’m home and I’m blind and I’m broke/What is next?
"Hell Broke Luce" -- a surreal anti-war video from Tom Waits for his powerful song based on the harrowing story of Lance Corporal Jeff Lucey, a 23-year old Iraq war Marine veteran who committed suicide in 2004. From Waits' 22d album Bad As Me (2011, AntiRecords) [more inside]
Of course, bitmaps produced by PaperBack are also human-readable (with the small help of any decent microscope).
Using Broad Strokes to Draw Attention to the Fine Details.
The World in 2 Minutes is a series of videos showing the eccentricities, both good and bad, of different countries as told by their youtube videos. [more inside]
Living With Voices
A new way to deal with disturbing voices offers hope for those with other forms of psychosis.
Hans used to be overwhelmed by the voices. He heard them for hours, yelling at him, cursing him, telling him he should be dragged off into the forest and tortured and left to die. The most difficult things to grasp about the voices people with psychotic illness hear are how loud and insistent they are, and how hard it is to function in a world where no one else can hear them. It’s not like wearing an iPod. It’s like being surrounded by a gang of bullies. You feel horrible, crazy, because the voices are real to no one else, yet also strangely special, and they wrap you like a cocoon. Hans found it impossible to concentrate on everyday things. He sat in his room and hid. But then the voices went away for good.
Mapping the Mapper
THE FULLER MAP This document is a study of the comprehensive designer Buckminster Fuller, an outstanding character of the 20th century, and a kind of practical visionary. [...] This presentation of his ideas is not intended as a slavish devotional exercise, nor a piece of cynical criticism. Part of the plan here is to investigate the logic of synergetics. At this stage the account is verbal, not visual, but what is important in geometry is the logic rather than the pictures. The text is a work-in-progress, begun in August 1991, and originally written to meet the structural requirements of John Wood's IDEAbase system. It was compiled and edited as an experimental, dynamic, interactive, screen-based document. It was not, therefore, intended as a completed linear text to be printed onto paper or other static medium.
Spockanalia sounds dirty
Fan fiction has, arguably,
existed in some form since 1614, and it has certainly been in existence since the Star Trek fanzine, Spockanalia was published in 1967, while derivative works and unofficial adaptations have long existed (such as Edison's Frankenstein) in the mass market, most obviously Nosferatu (unofficial trailer, whole film) and the infamous Tijuana bibles, but in the modern world of extended copyright and Internet commerce are fan fiction and fan art legal?
Happiness Happens
Disney Researchers Develop New Physical Face Cloning Method
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