September 30, 2008
Venetian Flair
The Most Serene Republic, quite possibly the most underrated of all the acts on the Arts & Crafts label, create music in a similar vein to fellow Canadian indie rockers Arcade Fire, Stars, and Broken Social Scene. Experience their explosive, big-band, polyphonic, experimental flair by listening to their 3 releases in full: Underwater Cinematographer (2005), Phages EP (2006), and Population (2007). A few video music videos as well: The Men Who Live Upstairs, Oh God, Content Always Was My Favourite
Horror for the casual insomniac
Doomed Moviethon exists as an excuse for Richard Schmidt to go on insane, caffeine-fueled horror movie benders and record his impressions as sanity erodes... Could you do 28 Giallos in 60 hours? [more inside]
Man saves dog from shark attack
Great Cyber Crimes and Hacks
The best criminal hacker is the one that isn't caught — or even identified. These are 10 of the most infamous unsolved computer crimes as selected by PC Magazine. However, some do get caught. Here are nine of the most infamous criminal hackers to ever see the inside of a jail cell. PCMag also reached back into the early days of computing and dredged up the most inspiring examples of hacker brilliance they could find. [more inside]
What's in a game?
What can one learn from the design choices of past games? John Harris discusses different game aspects, 20 games at a time, at Game Design Essentials. You can read on 20 Open World Games (where generally the player is left to his own devices to explore a large world), see your destroyed controllers in a new light with 20 Difficult Games or check out 20 Mysterious Games (that rely on algorithmically-generated content or emphasize secret-hunting), 20 Unusual Control Schemes and 20 Atari Games. What about roguelikes, you say? [more inside]
Search like it's 2001...
To celebrate their 10th birthday Google have brought back their oldest available index dating back to 2001.
The Ghosts of Futures Past
"We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF" – why Charles Stross might have to market his next novel as fantasy.
I'm writing in Stephen Colbert
Bother Voting doesn't care who you are going to support this election, as long as you get out and vote. Now all you have to do is use their creative e-cards and banners to convince your friends to hit the polls.
RIP Hayden Carruth 1921-2008
"Why don't you write me a poem that will prepare me for your death?" Hayden Carruth's wife, thirty years his junior, asked him. He did so, and it became one of his most popular poems. Carruth, who celebrated his 87th birthday last month died last night at his home in Munnsville New York. Carruth was the winner of the the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his poetry collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey. He edited Poetry magazine from 1949-1950 and was a poetry editor at Harpers. [more inside]
Neverdrinkmilkagain, neverdrinkmilkagain, I promise, neverdrinkmilkagain...
I don't care how creative you think you are. You can't top this for terrifying imagery. "She was chasing children in a cow costume."
Real Relevant?
Considering DVDs seem a bit long in the tooth, this recent foray into the world of DVD ripping seemed a thinly veiled attempt to pick a fight with the MPAA. After invoking the Glaser Doctrine this morning, guess they got what they wanted. [more inside]
The $1.4 Trillion Question
"Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China." James Fallows on how the trade deficit between China and America works and what it means for the future.
Cats Defending Henhouses
Worried about social-network data mining? Facebook hires Ted Ullyot, former right-hand man to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as its general counsel. Tapping Ullyot, who worked on the infamous torture memo and other illustrious projects, is a sign that the burgeoning Scrabble platform "is a little more grown-up," says Facebook public-policy VP Elliot Schrage.
Termite Mounds
Photoshopping Community @ Flickr
"The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate -- I don't think it could sustain itself in the meantime. Anyway, I can't think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own." —Ruling the global masses, one image at a time. The art of moderation as practiced by Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr. [more inside]
IMDB has movies and TV now
The IMDB is hosting movies and TV. If the expanding collection doesn't yet do it for you, there's always http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/, or, for your silent film needs, plain old youtube.
fortunately we only lost a few onions.
So one time, Dave Secretary provided much happy distraction. Consequently, I thought a link to his blog might be welcome. [more inside]
Video Panorama
A most unusual panorama: a proof of concept combining 180 degree panorama photography along with camera movement.
The camera mounted with a fish-eye lens is placed on a trolley traveling in a circle.
New York Subway
London Underground blogger Annie Mole experiences the New York subway for the first time here -> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Collaborative handwritten Bible created across America
"To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, the best-selling translation with more than 300 million copies in print, Zondervan has launched Bible Across America, a cross-country RV tour. Bible Across America features an RV, piloted by a four-person team, that is traveling across the continental United States, making stops at churches, universities, retail stores and special events where people are invited to contribute a verse to complete a handwritten Bible – America's NIV." [more inside]
shake shake shake
"The Quake-Catching Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world's largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers." The Economist's writeup notes that, since network communications are (sometimes) faster than the speed of sound in the earth's crust, a distributed network's observations of a temblor might reach a warning network before the quake itself reaches a traditional seismometer. [more inside]
Stochastic cascades, credit contagion, and large portfolio losses
"In the limit of an infinite economy, the number of initial downgrades is Poisson distributed. This captures the idea that the shock initially affects only a small number of firms.
Nonetheless, the distribution of the total number of defaults has slowly decaying tails ... A firm might well be able to absorb its shock, but it might not be able to absorb both the shock and the resulting deterioration in the average rating. The initial downgrades may thus trigger additional defaults that, in turn, further deteriorate the average rating, and so on. In
a large economy, this cascade can be described by a branching process." Ulrich Horst, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2007. (Internet supplement!) [more inside]
Acoustic performances at LiveDaily Sessions
Concert promoter LiveDaily has an acoustic live sessions program (video starts playing). It's been running since March of this year and so far 33 artists have performed: Priscilla Ahn, The Raveonettes, Black Lips, Paddy Casey, Dawn Landes, Lykke Li, The Duke Spirit, Frightened Rabbit, Foreign Born, The Dodos, The Virgins, Radar Bros., Langhorne Slim, Shwayze, Joseph Arthur, Missy Higgins, Wild Sweet Orange, Le Switch, Deadly Syndrome, Steve Poltz, Weather Underground, Imaad Wasif, Rogue Wave, David Ford, Takka Takka, Black Ghosts, The Airborne Toxic Event, Tally Hall, Lionel Loueke, Calico Horse, Rademacher, Judith Owen and Carrie Rodriguez
Oooh!
Jump to it
Sometimes with Youtube, there's a specific part of a video you want people to see. Splicd generates a url to send people that clip. For instance: cooking a rat or an interesting part of a lecture. (On load, a small amount of each clip's beginning is played.) [more inside]
Completely new websites!
Tired of the current web? Have all the cool domain names already been registered? The second web bills itself as geocities 2.0 with a web browser-esque interface stuck on top of it "a completely new World Wide Web. A new Web Browser, a new domain name system and completely new websites."
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