September 10, 2016
About Ratboy Genius
Domino Spiral
This is a pretty good domino spiral. It took 25 hours to build over 8 days with 15,000 dominoes.
"the naive approach is often to use a Gaussian blur"
Have you ever wondered what your graphics card is doing every time it displays one frame of a game? Turns out quite a lot. [more inside]
Britain's Secret Wars
For more than 100 years, Britain has been perpetually at war. Some conflicts, such as the Falklands, have become central to our national narrative, but others, including the brutal suppression of rebels in Oman, have been deliberately hidden.
What Asian American Kids Bring for Lunch
Have You Ever Had a ‘Lunch Box Moment’? NBC Asian America has a video project called Jubilee Project: Voices in which Asian Americans are asked a single question about the Asian American experience.
In the first video, Asian American adults recall what it was like to bring their family's tradition foods to the school lunchroom when everyone else had packed peanut butter and jelly.
Björk's eclectic musical beginnings (disco, flute and Beatles)
When Björk was ten, a teacher submitted her recording of Tina Charles’s disco hit “I Love to Love” to Iceland's radio station RÚV. This eventually led to her first album, Björk, released when she was all of eleven years old. Dangerous Minds takes a look at the history behind Björk's first album, including excerpts from an interview with her mother, who did the cover art. You can listen to mp3s of the songs on WFMU's Beware of the Blog, including Björk's original flute instrumental, "Johannes Kjarval" (a tribute to the Icelandic painter) and her Icelandic-language cover of the Beatles' "Fool on the Hill". [more inside]
If we're not in pain, we're not alive
Do we really want to fuse our brains together? Mefi fave Peter Watts writes on research into merging minds in Aeon.
The most diverse school system we have ever had?
The UK's new Prime Minister, Theresa May, wants an increase in the number of selective state schools. [more inside]
Greta Friedman
Greta Zimmer Friedman, 92, has died. According to the New York Daily News, Mrs. Friedman led a long, eventful life. As a girl, she fled from the Nazis in Europe, and settled in New York, where she later studied theater and costuming at the New School. But her place in history is marked by a single snapshot. She was ambivalent, at times, about that place in history, which can well be characterized as sexual assault. Nonetheless, many years later, she became friendly with the man in the photograph, who had been, at the time, a stranger. (Previously, if incorrectly)
Eleven days
The Evolution of Bacteria on a “MEGA-Plate” Petri Dish - a cinematic approach to visualizing drug resistance
The Failed Coverup of the CIA Torture Report
Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets. "The first part of the inside story of the Senate investigation into torture, the crisis with the CIA it spurred and the man whose life would never be the same." [more inside]
"What is UP with that CAT?!"
The View from Medina
My mother begins a slow, thorny grieving. Time wrinkles around her periodically heaving body. In May, she decides we will make umrah, pilgrimage, in my grandmother’s memory. My immediate family doesn’t do field trips. I can’t remember the last time that we, all seven strong, went anywhere together—we are always too busy or too dispersed.
By month’s end, we are flying to Saudi Arabia for the first time in fifteen years.
they should have sent a poet (of chickens)
Fancy chickens were all the rage in the late 19th century, so Lewis Wright's Illustrated Book of Poultry was a big hit. With hundreds of pages of high density chicken information and dozens of beautiful chromolithographs by ornithological artist J.W. Ludlow, the book stayed in print for more than 40 years. Harvard University just digitized the book for public viewing. Here's their blog post about it. [more inside]
Gewgaws, Knickknacks, Tchotchkes, etc.
Found & Chosen is a blog from a collector of small toys, trinkets, charms, junk, baubles, whatnots, curios (and so on). Often arranged and presented as visually pleasing displays.
Airline workers living in trailers on a parking lot near LAX
Vimes Short documentary on an airport parking lot in Los Angeles, where pilots, mechanics and flight attendant live in trailers. Feels like a J. G. Ballard novel.
All Black Everything
Daveed Diggs, recent Tony Award Winner of “Hamilton” fame, just released an Afrofuturistic space opera-themed noise-rap concept album, Splendor & Misery, as part of his experimental rap collective, Clipping. [more inside]
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