September 13, 2019
Ig Nobel 2019
The 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes (previously) are here. The winner attracting the most media attention this year was a study about the testicles of French postmen, but there are many other unworthy winners.
"I guess it was 37 and a half cents an hour for women, 52 cents for men"
Union Maids: Women Activists Share their Experiences (1976, 52 min) "This is the story of three women who were part of the rank and file labor movement during the tumultuous 1930s. Their lives were like many other young working women. But all three rose to the demands of their time and became militant organizers for their class." [more inside]
Who doesn't love animal pictures?
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year finalists have been announced, as have the finalists for Comedy Wildlife Photography. (Wildlife photography previously)
Milton's Shakespeare
Earlier this week a Cambridge University scholar announced an astonishing literary discovery: John Milton's annotated copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, hiding in plain sight in the Free Library of Philadelphia. If the identification is confirmed (and the scholarly reaction on Twitter, initially cautious, is now becoming increasingly positive), it will be only the tenth book (or eleventh, if you count his family Bible) known to survive from Milton's personal library.
Salafi Islamic economics and a different definition of capitalism
An answer to the question: "what is ISIS's economic policy?" discusses the Salafi view on capitalism, Zakat (a wealth tax to fund welfare programs) and Jizyah (a tax punishing non-Muslims), the prohibition of Riba (interest), anti-trust laws, women in the workplace, labor unions, and more. (Single Tumblr link, found via thetransintransgenic)
On Chandler Bing’s Job
Twenty-five years ago, Friends anticipated a time that would both romanticize and mistrust the culture of work. "Chandler Bing entered his profession in that most relatable of ways: He got a job because he had to, and he failed to get a better one, and that failure extended over a period of years, and soon enough, through inertia’s bland inevitabilities, Chandler’s job became his career."
Zhaaarrr
A full minute of Alex Trebek saying "genre", assembled by Jeopardy! champion Alex Jacob, because he hates everything and everyone.
Edited By: Women Film Editors
A survey of one hundred and thirty-nine editors who invented, developed, fine-tuned and revolutionized the art of film editing (via Criterion).
On having sufficient complexity to allow for arbitrary computation
Surprisingly Turing-Complete: A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability
Restrictions in Canada's assisted-dying laws struck down
Medical assistance in dying (MAID), known elsewhere and previously as physician-assisted death, assisted suicide, and voluntary euthanasia, has been legal in Canada since 2016, following the historic Supreme Court decision in Carter v. Canada, in which two women, Gloria Taylor and Kay Carter (represented by her family posthumously), successfully challenged the government's restriction on MAID. But that was not the end of the story. [more inside]
“It’s just not a comfortable work environment.”
Inside The Ghosting, Racism, And Exploitation At Game Publisher Nicalis by Jason Schreier [Kotaku] “For this story, Kotaku spoke to four external developers who worked with Nicalis and seven former Nicalis employees, most of whom requested anonymity because they were afraid the company would retaliate against them. (Some of those employees left the company out of frustration; others were let go.) Some shared anecdotes about the company ignoring them for months on end. All described Nicalis’s founder and president Tyrone Rodriguez as a friendly but often difficult boss, prone to behavior that some called controlling and exploitative. Multiple former Nicalis employees said Rodriguez pressured them to drink heavily, made racist jokes in the workplace, and would oscillate between berating them and ignoring them. A few shared Skype logs of Rodriguez using racial and ableist slurs, racist jokes, and antisemitic comments during work conversations. (We’ve included some of those logs later in the piece.)” [Nicalis Founder Tyrone Rodriguez Responds to Investigation into His Racism and Mistreatment of Employees] [more inside]
Freeing ourselves from the unfree will
A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked. "The notion that our brains make choices before we are even aware of them... pop[s] up in cocktail-party conversation or in a review of Black Mirror. It’s covered by mainstream journalism outlets, including This American Life, Radiolab, and this magazine. Libet’s work is frequently brought up by popular intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari to argue that science has proved humans are not the authors of their actions." .... [more inside]
RIP Eddie Money (1949-2019)
National Geographic likes to describe spiders by what they could hug
Sri Lanka is home to a new[ly discovered] species of tarantula—and its females are fuzzy, turquoise-tinged, and big enough to comfortably hug a donut (National Geographic), as recently reported in the British Tarantula Society Journal, with more pictures of Chilobrachys jonitriantisvansicklei. [more inside]
He finds rare, unusual cuts from great artists, creates new albums.
Albums I Wish Existed A web site jam packed with albums that could have been made, perhaps should have been made, and now they are made, by a man who just seems to be doing what he can to make the world a better place for those of us who love music. [more inside]
Now This, Back Then
Venturing beyond the first page of search results for a term (like
webobjects) can result in felicitous finds. “WebObjects offers every benefit for … Internet applications” quotes Steve Bogart’s blog post for August 11, 1999. Yes, Now This is one of the original weblogs. (Just ask the Chicago Tribune in their September 7, 1999 article.) [more inside]To kill with the point lacked artistry.
Dune is a massively influential novel that also had many influences. Khalid Baheyeldin maps the Arabic and Islamic themes and the etymologies of words. Some words have shifts in meaning or spelling, some probably intentional, others surprising. Why is a Kindjal - a dagger - spelled like that? Baheyeldin locates this spelling on the Indian subcontinent, but then there's this article by Will Collins about Dune and The Sabres of Paradise, "a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus." Herbert borrowed liberally from the book's language and its description of fierce people fighting in unforgiving lands.
« Previous day | Next day »