Favorites from Foci for Analysis
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Catch Me If You Can: Real Estate Edition
Ryan Mullen was on the run for over 14 years. Then, a professional skip tracer named Michelle Gomez got on the case.
The Politics Of The Next Dimension: Do Ghosts Have Civil Rights?
The Awl presents the article that would've accompanied that Atlantic Monthly cover from Ghostbusters.
The Bible as fanwank and flamewars
Confused about who wrote the Bible we have, and why? Jim MacDonald has the answers.
How was the Canon of the Christian Bible selected? There really isn't a better, or funnier, short account than this. After all, if fandom is a religion, then religions must work like fandom, right? And the epistolatory disputes of late antiquity were just Usenet to the Greeks. So if you want to know how the Doctrine of the Trinity became important, this will explain it:
You are either In or you are Out
There is a fundamental disconnect between large-scale, for-profit media and the crushing power of enthusiasm, which is that when they try to control it, it instantly isn't real. It's patently unreal. It's excitement given life by force, Pet Sematary-style.
But when they don't control it, it isn't profitable. And that means that when they run into people excited about their stuff, they vacillate between an Ebenezerian lack of generosity and a Professor-Harold-Hillian smarm. To own enthusiasm and to exploit it are competing instincts, much as they often seem to be twins. You can, in fact, sometimes best exploit it — or only exploit it — by leaving it alone. -- In what could be considered a Metafilter Manifesto, Mefi's own Linda Holmes takes on the multivariate economics of fandom and the internet.
Evidence-based software development
Greg Wilson talks about What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True (slides for one iteration of this talk)
Porn comments on stock photography
Pornhubcommentsonstockphotos combines the (NSFW) comments left on porn sites with stock photography. (NSFW because of text).
if P and Q are polynomials, let O1 be the order of blessed
King James Programming
– "posts generated by a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs." SLTumbler
LET THE MACHINE LIVE YOUR FANTASY
FETISCHPRO: UR DESIRES R NOW MET (Blinky, NSFW)
The next Shakira, strong female Latin musicians to take the mantle
"Shakira aside, the female presence is a little light. Why are there no more big female acts in Latin music right now? I look at my charts, and there's very few female names.... you have a lot of these pretty, sexy young women, who women now are identifying less and less with. I really wish that were different." That's a quote from Leila Cobo, executive director of Latin Content & Programming for Billboard, that opened an NPR piece that countered with a few names to watch, featuring input from Latin Alternative co-host Ernesto Lechner.
Island of silt and sand
So it's well known that apart from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, queen Elizabeth also rules the so-called crown dependencies, not part of the United Kingdom. The best known of those are the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands countries, Guernsey and Jersey. But who would recognise that other Channel Islands dependency, who could say even when presented with its distinctive outline that this is Jinsy?
“The Untouchables in pursuit of the unintelligible”
The FBI files on being and nothingness.
"From 1945 onwards, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI spied on Camus and Sartre. The investigation soon turned into a philosophical inquiry…" [Via]
Extreme Measures May Mislead
How to think about "Science Studies Prove My Position", for politicians and all non-scientists.
Any collation of measures (the effectiveness of a given school, say) will show variability owing to differences in innate ability (teacher competence), plus sampling (children might by chance be an atypical sample with complications), plus bias (the school might be in an area where people are unusually unhealthy), plus measurement error (outcomes might be measured in different ways for different schools). However, the resulting variation is typically interpreted only as differences in innate ability, ignoring the other sources. This becomes problematic with statements describing an extreme outcome ('the pass rate doubled') or comparing the magnitude of the extreme with the mean ('the pass rate in school x is three times the national average') or the range ('there is an x-fold difference between the highest- and lowest-performing schools'). League tables, in particular, are rarely reliable summaries of performance.
NEETS
For anyone interested in various fundamentals of electrical engineering without too much detail on the gritty math (and more focus on the concepts), check out the US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series (NEETS).
The Sound Da Vinci Invented, but Never Heard
Leonardo Da Vinci is well known as a man who invented many things on paper that never found their way into three-dimensional reality. Some would later prove to be unworkable in reality. Others would later prove to be potentially life-saving. But not all of Da Vinci's inventions were of a practical nature. Consider his plans for the viola organista, a keyboard instrument containing a system of revolving wheels, strings and other machinery to create a kind of cello that can be played with a keyboard. Never constructed in Da Vinci's lifetime, the inventor himself could only imagine what it would actually sound like. We no longer have to imagine that.
"Everybody gets a hot meal regardless of caste, creed and religion."
"Anyone can eat for free here, and many, many people do. On a weekday, about 80,000 come. On weekends, almost twice as many people visit. Each visitor gets a wholesome vegetarian meal, served by volunteers who embody India’s religious and ethnic mosaic. “This is our tradition,” said Harpinder Singh, the 45-year-old manager of this huge operation. “Anyone who wants can come and eat.”" Behind the scenes at the kitchen (langar) at the Golden Temple that feeds 100,000 daily. More information from the Golden Temple's website.
The Yellow Dogs, RIP
The Yellow Dogs was a NYC-based group of young expatriates who fled their native Iran for Williamsburg, Brooklyn in order to freely pursue their dream of playing rock music, saying what they wanted to say, and, well, having fun, which were three things they couldn't do back home. Three members of the band were found murdered today. A sad farewell to The Yellow Dogs.
the majority of the themes in this comic are based on real experiences
Qahera the hijabi superhero, in Arabic and English
London Pigeons; a ten year study
A website by Luke Taylor has all you ever needed to know about the London pigeon.
The Box of Crazy
"So a friend of mine found this box by the trash, it is full of wonderful, crazy illustrations. Clearly something happened to this guy that was very memorable."
Make my home a factory for living
I figure, at this point, somebody has done exhaustive operations research on pretty much all of my daily chores. Assuming I don't care about hominess or aesthetics, what does industry have to teach me about getting through all the little maintenance work of life with less time, effort, and attention?
These guys are fucking AMAZING.
Kiyohiko Senba is a composer who’s been likened to Zappa for his ambition, talent, madness, and virtuosity, but his music is considerably easier to get into. Get ready, because his large-scale orchestra project, Kiyohiko Senba and the Haniwa All-Stars, is about to blow your goddamn mind.
Let's start simple and ramp up. Hohai Bushi sounds a bit like an Ennio Morricone composition but with more electric guitar. Taiikusai is so heartfelt, yearning, and soaring that I cried when it got to the climax. They cover both Franz Schubert’s “Standchen" and Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t To Say You Love Me” in ways that are all kinds of awesome. But the real treasure for me is this one, which begins with them playing the Village People’s “YMCA” but then transitions into Daimeiwaku, a freaking phenomenal good original piece that sounds – I don’t know how else to describe it – like James Brown and John Philip Sousa decided to play Katamari Damacy together and had a really good time. (With some klezmer and Leonard Bernstein thrown in there too, for good measure.) But wait! There’s
Let's start simple and ramp up. Hohai Bushi sounds a bit like an Ennio Morricone composition but with more electric guitar. Taiikusai is so heartfelt, yearning, and soaring that I cried when it got to the climax. They cover both Franz Schubert’s “Standchen" and Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t To Say You Love Me” in ways that are all kinds of awesome. But the real treasure for me is this one, which begins with them playing the Village People’s “YMCA” but then transitions into Daimeiwaku, a freaking phenomenal good original piece that sounds – I don’t know how else to describe it – like James Brown and John Philip Sousa decided to play Katamari Damacy together and had a really good time. (With some klezmer and Leonard Bernstein thrown in there too, for good measure.) But wait! There’s
List of reasons for admission to an insane asylum in the late 1860s
Here's what could have got you admitted to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane (Weston) aka Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the late 1860s: Imaginary Female Trouble... Jealousy and Religion... Tobacco and Masturbation... Carbonic Acid Gas... Parents were Cousins... Fell off Horse in War... Dangerous Minds
Go To Bed, Scum
GWAR's Oderus Urungus Reads 'Goodnight Moon' [NSFW]
I Was Short and Ugly and I Had a Speech Impediment
My Life as a Young Thug
(Mike Tyson, for New York magazine)
The Julia Childs
If you become a cultural icon, those who come after in your field will almost certainly be compared to you and your achievements. And if you were the late Julia Child, ground-breaking television chef and champion of French cooking in the United States, you would find your name to be the first half of a lot of comparisons. The Julia Childs, as it were.
There Must Be Something in the Water in Iceland
Icelandic band Árstíðir sings the hymn "Heyr himna smiður" a capella in a German train station, to beautiful effect.
Let the enlargement of knowledge be one constant view and design in life
The Improvement of the Mind by hymnwriter Issac Watts provides surprisingly relevant and modern advice on how to learn, listen, read, debate, and converse. It proved to be inspirational to the great experimentalist and scientist Michael Faraday. Full version on Google Books.
There isn't any tension-destroying, mood-killing fanservice.
Kotaku dubbed it one of the shows to watch this season, later said that it was not living up to its potential, and finally proclaimed it "damn good." Its over the top, but really fantastic, soundtrack has spawned a bit of a meme and, of course, it has inspired the requisite minecraft recreation. After all of that, though, and with the anime's first series coming to an end recently, one of the most high comments that can be paid to the series thus far is that it handles gender in a way that is head and shoulders above many other series.
Classical Roman Cooking
Pass the Garum is a cooking blog focused on the recipes and cuisine of ancient Rome.
Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse
The RAND Corporation's National Security Research Division has released a 297-page report on the likely consequences of a collapse of the North Korean regime, within the Korean Peninsula, as well as to China, Japan, the US and others (PDF).
Digital Covers for Over 400 Children's Books
Digital Covers for Over 400 Children's Books
MeFi User Toekneesan has been digitizing covers from his children's book collection and posting them to his Flickr account.
[via mefi projects]
This ain't chemistry. This is Art.
With the momentous series finale of Breaking Bad just hours away, fans of the show are hungry for something, anything to wile away the time before the epic conclusion tonight. So why not kick back and chew the fat with your fellow MeFites with the help of a little tool I like to call "The Periodic Table of Breaking Bad."
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.
TechNinja
What is the fashion known as techninja? The basis is the high-tech materials popular with hikers, bikers, and climbers, but worn as street wear. It takes inspiration from a military aesthetic, from science fiction (NSFW), and Goth Ninja. Want to know more? Here's a guide (2, 3, 4, 5), and here's some inspiration (pinterest, tumbler, 2).
Weilue: The Peoples Of The West
This country (the Roman Empire) has more than four hundred smaller cities and towns. It extends several thousand li in all directions. The king has his capital (that is, the city of Rome) close to the mouth of a river (the Tiber). The outer walls of the city are made of stone. - A Third Century Chinese Account Composed between 239 and 265 CE, Quoted in zhuan 30 of the Sanguozhi. Published in 429 CE. Draft English translation
USG Black Budget Revealed.
Using documents obtained from whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Washington Post reports on the United States' $52.6 billion "black budget" for 2013.
░n░i░c░e░ ░&░ ░w░a░r░m░ ░i░n░ ░h░e░r░e░
The Problems of the 1st and 3rd Worlds have been well covered. And in 2011 we found out about 5th World Problems and 6th World Problems. But there are new worlds and new problems (and new ways to express them). Let's explore some shall we?
Project Needles: not a hipster knitting collective
It's 1963. You're in a cold war with Russia. You want to keep up communication capabilities globally. Communication satellites haven't come into their own. The ionosphere is fickle and jammable. What do you do? You fire 480 million tiny copper wires into space to create an artificial dipole antenna belt around the earth. You call it Project West Ford. It works.
We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when...
Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove is a fascinating, informative and often surprising 46 minute documentary that offers a thorough and loving look at the creation of Stanley Kubrick's classic of modern cinema.
A world in upheaval
A map of every protest everywhere since 1979 (some caveats are noted in the accompanying article).