September 23, 2013
Terrorism in Nairobi
"all we could hear was screaming and shooting." At approximately 11am on Saturday, September 21, terrorists - believed to be 10 to 15 in number, entered one of Nairobi's upscale malls and began killing people. Today, as the 4th day of the siege began, it is believed all the remaining hostages have been freed. Currently the death toll stands at 62 and 175 have been wounded. Al Shabab, a terrorist group based in Somalia, took credit for the attacks via their twitter account, before it was again suspended. [more inside]
Something is going to happen ... tomorrow.
As previously discussed on MetaFilter, the countdown has now reached one day. Halo? Battlestar Galactica? A new album by Bros? Or something more sinister, as hinted at (perhaps) by the spectograph of the end-video silences?
Miyazaki characters done Mucha-style
Nobody wins.
Nobody brought a complaint against police for their actions at the G20 protests in Toronto. Nobody has been vindicated by this prosecution. Nobody's assault can be seen in this video.
Apple TouchID has been foiled
The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple's TouchID using easy everyday means. [more inside]
Why don’t you-all go and liberate the Indian reservations, or something?
The civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, as described in the New Yorker by Renata Adler in 1965. [more inside]
"This is the voice of Vrillon..."
The alien cult that hacked British TV: In 1977 a British television channel was hijacked by someone claiming to be a space alien called ‘Vrillon’. [Via]
WORST. STATE. EVER.
Jerking guys off is clumsy and weird.
I Do Not Want To Jack Guys Off Is there anything more ludicrous than a woman giving a man a hand job? [more inside]
A hare and a tortoise walk into a bar
How animals perceive time. 'FLIES live shorter lives than elephants. Of that there is no doubt. But from a fly’s point of view, does its life actually seem that much shorter? This, in essence, was the question asked by Kevin Healy of Trinity College, Dublin, in a paper just published in Animal Behaviour. His answer is, possibly not.' [more inside]
Use Only as Directed
ProPublica.org and This American Life partnered for a special report on acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol), the active ingredient in Tylenol, which is also found in many other over-the-counter medications. The narrow therapeutic index of acetaminophen means that often, the difference between safe use and overdose can be as small as one gram. From ProPublica.org: "About 150 Americans die a year by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, federal data from the CDC shows."
Blood in your hands - ethical electronics
The Bangka Belitung islands are a picture postcard tropical paradise, except where the tin is mined. Tin that is used in smartphone solders, and that is responsible for widespread ecological devastation. Following a Friends of the Earth campaign, all of the major manufacturers bar one have acknowledged their role in this destruction, and are seeking improved standards for tin mining. But if you truly want ethical consumer electronics, you'll have to wait for the Fairphone(Fairphone previously).
18 Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time.
18 Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time. "I would rather read again for the first time Anna Karenina, Far Away and Long Ago, Buddenbrooks, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sportsman's Sketches, The Brothers Karamazov, Hail and Farewell, Huckleberry Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, La Reine Margot, La Maison Tellier, Le Rouge et le Noire, La Chartreuse de Parme, Dubliners, Yeat's Autobiographies and a few others than have an assured income of a million dollars a year."
I Can Figure This Out
Naya's Quest is the new game from Terry Cavanagh.
It looks like a simple isometric-view platformer but every level (once the game proper starts) is essentially an optical illusion.
It will do your head in. In the best possible way. [more inside]
Taken to the gleaners
Blackberry will be harvested by a private equity firm for US $4.7 billion. Generally blamed for their own decline by disdaining the massive rush of popularity of competing smartphones and becoming increasingly well-known for the bizarre behavior of their leadership, Blackberry hoped to turn things around by ejecting their co-CEOs, rebranding from Research In Motion to the name of their sole product, and launching a new spate of products: OS 10, new generation of touchscreen phones, and planning a second attempt at tablets. In spite of some misguided punditry predicting a new era, they won no love from either the reviewers or the public. [more inside]
Papercraft project blog Paper Matrix
Paper Matrix is a blog that gives instructions for cool papercraft objects, "reinterpreting the Danish tradition of woven paper hearts and ornaments." Cut paper in the prescribed ways and weave it together carefully to make a mobile of colorful hot air balloons, gorgeous and complex boxes; simple but satisfying pennants and much more... including a full theater for performances by paper dolls.
A Thousand Years In 3 Minutes
They couldn't put one quote up here from my act?
Set List is a live show where "the world’s top comedians get a never-before seen “set list” of bizarre, outrageous, and ridiculous topics as the audience follows along on the screen behind the performer." Edited highlights of this combination of improv and stand-up have just started to be posted on the Nerdist's Youtube channel. Including sets by: [more inside]
Minimalist Breaking Bad Posters
Francesco Francavilla is an artist who has been producing minimalist posters for each of the last 8 episodes of Breaking Bad.
She'll drink to that!
Elaine Stritch Is Really Not Thrilled About Her Golden Years (June 2013), but she's making it work (September 2013). A documentary about her life will premiere this fall. In the meantime, perhaps you'd be interested in the Elaine Stritch Alarm Clock?
Single-Player Co-op
Requiring one player to independently control two characters, one with each hand, the recently released Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Steam/360/PS3) has been receiving high praise for its intertwining of emotional storytelling and gameplay. "Brothers is a compellingly beautiful game, yet remarkably dark... it’s a single-player co-op, executed sublimely." - Rock Paper Shotgun. "The resulting journey is so singularly devoted to creating a specific tone and atmosphere that you won't likely be able to stop thinking about it until long after you've seen it through to the end." - Giant Bomb. "We see so many games striving to be interactive movies, but Brothers is something more akin to poetry. Mechanics are stanzas, and together they pack more of an emotional wallop than some scripts achieve with thousands upon thousands of hollow words." - Polygon. [more inside]
The Star Wars Minute
The Star Wars Minute is a podcast in which each episode subjects a single minute of Star Wars to Seinfeldian levels of analysis, with commentary, childhood reminiscences, underlining of in-universe questions raised, and geekery in the extreme. Hosted by Pete the Retailer from NerdGeekDork and Alex Robinson of the Ink Panthers podcast, the Star Wars Minute runs Monday to Friday, and has so far addressed such issues as stormtroopers' dubious search methods, who the actual antagonist of the movie might be, and a Simpsons cast member's little-known role in Star Wars. [more inside]
"Oh? Breakfast I think. No need to let standards drop"
This is a greeting, that needs to be resurrected. Please use it today.
Ready to learn
An estimated 8.6 percent of parents now wait until their child is six to send them to kindergarten, hoping that their maturity and increased physical size will give them advantages in the classroom and on the sports field. However, the trend, called "academic redshirting" may actually be extremely harmful, according to recent studies.
"Everyone being held was a US citizen."
But that didn't prevent On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and several members of her family and friends from being detained at a Canadian-US border while on the way home from a wedding. The story is all the more frightening as it details Sarah's inability to get any answers about policy from the Border Patrol, including the name of the officers who held her.
"Stopping bad things is a significant public service."
National [US] Beard and Mustache Championship portraits.
In 2013 the U.S. Semi finals took place in Vegas. And a fine parade of facial hair it was. The World Beard and Moustache Championship is a biennial competition that celebrates meticulously coiffed facial hair. [more inside]
Clean up your toys
This is a story of boys following their mother's advice: clean up your toys when you're through playing with them. Recovering a sunk boat when its resting place is in a 6000 cubic foot per second current.
No, this is not an Admiralty Court.
Canadian self-described "Freemen" in Alberta have recently attracted a great deal of public attention to themselves. The justice system generally takes a very dim view of their shenanigans, as laid out in one of the most comprehensively researched and bizarre judgment issued in recent memory. Here's a general overview and debunking of the arguments they use. [more inside]
Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: Why I have gone on hunger strike
You know nothing, Jon Snow
"Nobody misses the reference to Game of Thrones when we say that standing there at the Genius Bar is akin to standing Night’s Watch on the White Wall. You just don’t know what’s coming at you next." -- McSweeneys goes inside the Apple Store and encounters unexpected feelings at the genius bar.
Like your Mother used to make
"It's about coming together as a local community and sharing the fruits of your labour, your creation." In what has been described as a peer-to-peer community marketplace, people are connecting online with local cooks, who provide them with a meal for less than they would be likely to pay anywhere else. In Athens, the price is usually between three and four euros (£2.50 to £3.40). [more inside]
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