Favorites from Foci for Analysis
Subscribe:
Displaying post 101 to 150 of 753
Well of course you do, you rambunctious little pumpkin!
Composer and YouTuber Alex Ball explores the neglected genre of 40s and 50s orchestral Light Music in his continuing series, My Utterly Spiffing Guide to Light Music: Part 1: Harmony Overview, Part 2: Block chords, Part 3: Complex Harmony, Part 4: Woodwinds.
книги всех стран, соединяйтесь!
Mir Publishers was a major publisher in the Soviet Union. The short wikipedia entry is not even clear on its mission. The aim of the publishing house was to translate works of eminent Russian scientist into other languages and distribute them around the world. They were very high quality, cheap and "also published in many Indian languages: Hindi, Marathi and Bengali I know for sure" -- all printed in the Soviet Union. The group blog/portal Mir Books used to collect scans of questionable legality (ironically, mostly sourced from the darker corners of the russian web), but since a while, the English collection is also available on Archive.org. Books range from introduction to the sciences aimed at elementary school students to advanced textbooks, mostly in physics, mathematics, chemistry and engineering.
Monty Don, England's most beloved gardener
Good news! England’s beloved gardening guru Monty Don, is now streaming on Netflix with his make-over show Big Dreams, Small Spaces. [...] Unlike the outdoor make-over shows that HGTV’s programming has devolved to, it’s the right kind of make-over show, produced by people who really know gardening and aren’t trying to fool anyone about how easy it is. (Garden Rant) ‘Big Dreams, Small Spaces’ Is Like A British ‘Queer Eye,’ But With Plants (Decider) But who is Monty Don (personal website), and why to the British love him?
Likely still up to their old tricks
Among the fireworks this week were continuing revelations in the the ongoing trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, aka “El Chapo.” What has been left unsaid indeed. Friday, the NYT reported:
While American authorities have acknowledged that Mr. Zambada met with federal agents, they have long denied there was any quid pro quo agreement. In a recent ruling, Judge Brian M. Cogan, who is hearing Mr. Guzmán’s case, said that Mr. Zambada’s claims regarding his cooperation with the Americans cannot be mentioned at the trial.
Abandoned Frank Lloyd Wright in Iran
A tour and history of Shams Palace in Iran, now abandoned.
Shams Palace (or Pearl Palace) was designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation by William Wesley Peters, Wright's son-in-law and protégé, for the older sister of the last Shah. The palace has been given national recognition, but likely won't ever be restored.
Exploring Victorian London
A huge trove of information and original documents about Victorian London. A little difficult to navigate but stick it out for such gems as original ads, maps (some links broken), cartoons,and an entire serialized penny dreadful.
Late Nineteenth Century Japanese Firework Catalogs
Catalogs of the Hirayama Fireworks Company
with line and color illustrations of the company’s products are provided by the Yokohama Public Library. [via Present/&/Correct and other people …].
Violin Sonatas, etc.
Mozart wrote three dozen of the things; Beethoven composed ten; Charles Swann was obsessed with M. Vinteuil’s. The violin sonata (and is cousins featuring the viola, or the cello, or, much less often, the double bass) is a commonplace of the classical repertoire: below the fold you’ll find links to more of them than you’ll have time to listen to. For those in a hurry, try investing 6½ of your minutes on the finale of the Violin Sonata in A major by César Franck.
Chicken Noodle Doom
Japanese noodle company Nissin's mascot Hiyoko-chan has done something incredibly dangerous! Oh wait, that when they opened the Ark of the Covenant. I'm talking about when they made an unholy bargain and became some kind of Demonperson. More recently, Nissin's search for a solution continues, but will it just drag on?
We all die alone, but some more than others
Miyu Kojima cleans the apartments of those who have died alone. These lonely deaths (kodokushi) are often undiscovered for months, and the work is difficult and grim. But in her off hours she takes these experiences and turns them into art, memorializing the apartments she's cleaned in painstakingly constructed dioramas.
Love and death have long walked hand in hand
Memento Mori, Memento Amare [was] a three-person exhibition featuring art nouveau body horror sculptures by Isabel Peppard (NSFW), absurdist vanitas paintings by Beau White (NSFW) and neogothic etchings by Jonathan Guthmann (NSFW).
& as I went to grab her buttcheeks she screams "NO MY GLASSES!"
please tell me about a time you laughed so hard you cried. (SLTwitter)
Currently best viewed via the user's timeline, since she's retweeted the best ones, but I made the original tweet the main link for posterity. Also, I am deceased. Happy Friday!
The Art of Japanese Funeral Flowers
The lavish display of funeral flower arrangements is only 30 years old.
But it's become really big business. A lot of money is spent on funeral flowers in Japan. In fact, in 2006 Beauty Kadan became the first publicly traded Japanese company specializing in funeral flowers when it listed itself on the Mother’s section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Youkaen, a general flower company that entered the funeral flower business in 1972 now says that roughly 75% of their 50 billion yen in sales (roughly $44 mm USD) comes from their funeral flower segment.
Morbidly beautiful medical illustrations
Dr. Frank Netter was a surgeon during the great depression, though as a child growing up in Manhattan, he aspired to be an artist. As it turns out, Netter became both a great artist as well as a doctor [NSFW] […] His use of color is in line with schemes used in classic pulp novel illustration, and he used real patients for his subjects when depicting various medical issues, such as a man suffering the after-effects of a brain injury[…], or what goes on inside the human body during a fit of unbridled rage. [NSFW] Netter’s paintings and illustrations are as remarkable as they are often strange and off-putting at times.
“You need to see this.”
'The Dragon Prince' Is What 'The Last Airbender' Fans Have Been Waiting For [Vice News]
The dynamic duo of Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond, the minds behind Avatar: The Last Airbender and the Uncharted franchise, respectively, have created what just might be Netflix’s most engrossing original series this fall—and the show The Last Airbender fans have waited ten years to see.
“The Dragon Prince is set in the kind of epic, elemental world that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen an episode of The Last Airbender. The land of Xadia is dominated by the six primal sources of magic: the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the sky, and the ocean. But humans have invented dark magic, which steals from the essence of magical creatures, and the elves and dragons exile them to the eastern half of the land. When the humans slay the dragon guarding the eastern border and steal its only egg, Xadia is launched into factional war.”The Dragon Prince [YouTube][Trailer]
Medicare for All (for Less!)
Why Americans Spend So Much on Health Care—In 12 Charts
- "Prices are hidden behind insurance deals, hospital consolidation pushes up costs and the health sector is a growing power in the economy."
(I would title the Björk one "Broomin' Behavior")
- David Lee Roth as microwave popcorn.
- Ozzy Osbourne as windshield wipers.
- Michael Stipe getting a friend’s attention in a busy restaurant.
- Prince sips a cup of really bad coffee.
- Stevie Nicks as a VCR, rewinding a tape.
- John Mellencamp enjoying a summertime snack. [potentially NSFW]
Horror and Mystery, in a Podcast
The Magnus Archives is a weekly horror fiction anthology podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organisation dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. Listen to a trailer or two. Start with episode 1.
La Scarzuola
Deep in Italy, One Man’s Surrealist Mini-City Sleeps.
t’s a labyrinthine citadel more surreal than even the weirdest of Fellini sets. “La Scarzuola” is a modern wannabe-Utopian estate imagined by one man and built amongst the pointy trees of Italy’s Montegabbione in the 1950s. This esoteric wonderland and its elaborate surrealist structures are awaiting your visit. It's what happens when an idealistic Milanese architect, Tomaso Buzzi, finds a ruin.
We ban it immediately
Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
“...it doesn’t matter that there’s no Wi-Fi or online multiplayer.”
The video games of Ecuadorean fishing village Santa Marianita [Polygon]
“Yet wherever you go, people seem to find ways to play video games here, despite odds like agonizingly slow internet, limited technology access, low wages and even lower computer literacy. If someone in Santa Marianita was able to research the games they wanted, it’s unlikely they’d have the PC or console to play them, much less the internet speeds to keep them updated or play online with friends. But thanks to those small electronics stores in nearby Manta and the occasional console shipment on trucks inbound from distant Guayaquil, local kids and 20-somethings are circumventing some of these challenges and kindling a ferocious love for games.”
the dawn of time is a separate edge case
Years ago, I worked with a friend who had built a few scheduling calendars in a previous freelancing gig. Sometimes we’d be working on something that tangentially related to time, and as kind of a recurring in-joke he’d always tell me: Zach, whatever you do: just don't ever build a calendar.
Anyway, I’m Zach Holman and I’m building a calendar.
Anyway, I’m Zach Holman and I’m building a calendar.
Rethinking journalism through the lens of mediation and psychology
Amanda Ripley of The Atlantic spent three months working with mediators, psychologists, and rabbis to learn how to disrupt toxic narratives and help people open up to new ideas. After spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I’ve overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives now people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I’ve been operating like an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s.
Life Between Buildings: Life Lost and Refound, by Ingrid and Jan Gehl
“Why are you architects not interested in people?” Ingrid Gehl asked her new husband, Jan. “What do you think about the fact that your architecture professors take their photos at four o’clock in the morning . . . without the distraction of people in the photos?” The little-known behavioral scientist who transformed cities all over the world is the story of Ingrid Gehl, the psychologist who helped her now famous husband, Jan Gehl, in his battle to make cities livable. See also: Live Between Buildings (20 minute video, "annotated" links below the break)
In Search Of Forgotten Colors
Sachio Yoshioka is the fifth-generation head of the Somenotsukasa Yoshioka dye workshop in Fushimi, southern Kyoto. When he succeeded to the family business in 1988, he abandoned the use of synthetic colours in favour of dyeing solely with plants and other natural materials. 30 years on, the workshop produces an extensive range of extremely beautiful colours.
Officially recognized as one of the toughest types of dirt in the nation
"Scientists had speculated such a soil should exist but it had never been seen—until this discovery four years ago." The Wauneta duripan in northern Arizona is now "officially recognized as one of the toughest types of dirt in the nation." But how does the competition stack up?
"Awwwwwwwwwwww!"
my moms kindergarten class watching a chick hatch and then singing happy birthday to it
Twitter | ThreadReader
Twitter | ThreadReader
Main Job: Mathematician. Hobby: Secret Street Photographer
The eminent mathematician, Carl Stormer, had a secret hobby as a 19-year-old student.
He hid an early camera in his clothes and took photos on people on the streets of Oslo in the 1890s. Supposedly, he took a shot of Henrik Ibsen but there are no identifications of the people in the photos. In his later years, he exhibited many of his photos at a show in Oslo.
Here is his wikipedia page.
Small beer
Looking for a nice little speakeasy? Next time you're in NYC, check out the fine bars listed in Zagrat. Better go fast before they get too popular--they're already getting some hip press. Hey, it beats visiting a bedbug hotel or falling into a hipster trap.
How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war
"But in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history. [...] Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators."
“Alter Dark allows you to patch NES ROMs in the browser via a REST API.”
“Alter Dark is a new project that lets you create your own screensavers out of NES ROMs. It was put together by Rachel Weil, an NES homebrew expert and glitch enthusiast, and recently shown off at NodeConf EU in Dublin. For Weil, it combines two of her favorite things: messing around with NES software and the dated aesthetics of screensavers. The name is also a play on the After Dark software package release in 1989 which consisted of, among other things, a flying toaster screensaver.” API files and code at GitHub. Rachel Weil also discusses how screensavers influenced her work, spurring a years-long obsession with putting screensavers where they don't belong. [YouTube]. [via: Kotaku]
A national seance
“I wanted the whole nation to be terrified,” he continues. “And yet they would be creating the very thing they’re terrified of. What if they wanted to see a ghost to the extent that they actually created it? What if they supernaturally held hands in the dark, millions of people all wanting the same thing to happen at the same time?” - 25 years later the cast and creators tell tell the story of Ghostwatch, the one of the BBC's most spooky and controversial shows. (Previously)
Only the best people
BuzzFeed's Joseph Bernstein tells the story of Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream. Reporting from a cache of Breitbart documents, the story depicts in exhaustive detail how white supremacist thought was laundered through Milo Yiannopoulos and repackaged for Breitbart's audience, with stops along the way to discuss the hidden support Milo received from tech workers and media figures, the role of the Mercer family in backing the entire operation, Nazi-themed passwords, and Steve Bannon, who emails Yiannopoulos to describe mosques as "ALL ‘factories of hate.'" Not to mention the video of Yiannopoulos performing a karaoke version of "America the Beautiful" for well known white supremacists doing Nazi salutes.
He presented himself as ”Erik Hallberg”, a political refugee from the l
25-year-old Patrik Hermansson went undercover with American and British Nazis for a year. He presented himself as ”Erik Hallberg”, a political refugee from the left-wing dictatorship of Sweden.
"Great travel writing makes no pretense of objectivity,"
The Secret History of Dune
- Islamic theology, mysticism, and the history of the Arab world clearly influenced Dune, but part of Herbert’s genius lay in his willingness to reach for more idiosyncratic sources of inspiration.
Destruction- annihilation that only man can provoke only man can prevent
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.
Accused of Genocide; Nobel Peace Prize winner Aug San Suu Kyi's (wiki) armed forces are pursuing a scorched earth policy towards the Rohingha in Rakhine state.
What created the blueprint for Rohingya genocide in Myanmar? Western colonialism.
Borders, Bureaucracy And The Rohingya Crisis – Analysis.
Accused of Genocide; Nobel Peace Prize winner Aug San Suu Kyi's (wiki) armed forces are pursuing a scorched earth policy towards the Rohingha in Rakhine state.
What created the blueprint for Rohingya genocide in Myanmar? Western colonialism.
Borders, Bureaucracy And The Rohingya Crisis – Analysis.
"We see your dragons and have escaped in this bathyscaphe"
It started with a simple question on Twitter: "Who would win in a staff battle between @sciencemuseum (The Science Museum) and @NHM_London (Natural History Museum) what exhibits/items would help you be victorious? #askacurator"
The Natural History Museum was the first to weigh in: "We have dinosaurs. No contest."
The Science Museum was quick to respond: "@NHM_London is full of old fossils, but we have robots, a Spitfire and ancient poisons. Boom!"
What followed was a donnybrook for the ages. (Or for the Twitter-averse, a recap via the London Evening Standard.)
The Natural History Museum was the first to weigh in: "We have dinosaurs. No contest."
The Science Museum was quick to respond: "@NHM_London is full of old fossils, but we have robots, a Spitfire and ancient poisons. Boom!"
What followed was a donnybrook for the ages. (Or for the Twitter-averse, a recap via the London Evening Standard.)
That's the situation from the content of the beautiful things
Procedural Generation is a tumblr that collects procedurally generated content.
The truth has got its boots on: an evidence-based response to James Damore's Google memo
In which I have a very, very thorough walk through the relevant literature about gender and the workplace, and.... uh, cite over a hundred peer reviewed works in doing so while I refute effectively ever point I can find in Mr. Damore's 'memo.' I'm currently working on getting the footnotes linked within the piece and getting a functional table of contents rolling, but this is up and linkable for anyone as of right this second. All effort has been made to find non-paywalled PDFs of all links cited in the document.
The truth has got its boots on: an evidence-based response to James Damore's Google memo
The truth has got its boots on: an evidence-based response to James Damore's Google memo
[via mefi projects]
Mefi's own sciatrix drops science on Damore's unlistening head. Long, dense, and (from where I'm sitting) pretty darn definitive.
Mefi's own sciatrix drops science on Damore's unlistening head. Long, dense, and (from where I'm sitting) pretty darn definitive.
Kasou Taishou, from a history of bunraku and practical effects
Kasou Taishou, or 欽ちゃん＆香取慎吾の全日本仮装大賞 (translation: Kinchan and Katori Shingo's All Japan Costume Grand Prix), is a semi-annual television show in Japan in which groups or individuals perform short skits that are rated by a panel of judges. Nothing exceptional yet, you say? In the last decade or two, many of the skits have expanded from the bunraku-inspired performances and revolved around clever methods of "faking" cinematic special effects on a live stage. The most famous is probably "Matrix ping pong" from 2003 (YT re-post; previously), but as gathered in this Imgur gallery and this YouTube playlist titled "Masquerade Japan", there's a lot of creativity to discover. Or sit back and enjoy the complete 2017 94th All Japan Kasoh Grand Prix on Daily Motion.