Favorites from rory
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Displaying post 3401 to 3435 of 3435
Light On
Someone is reliable but grouchy. Something very bad might have happened.
I got my neighbour to play the accordian.
In the Rain
Written last year for the sole purpose of having an easy, super-poppy song to learn to play the crappy used drum kit I had just bought in Kensington Market.
This song wanted to go in a Beatle-y direction, but sadly I think it came out sounding more like The Oneders.
It is what it is.
Olivia
Some stuff that happened. A mild case of OCD.
A neighbourhood mom played the violin.
Miss Me in the Morning
A second pretty much complete song for the RPM Challenge.
Fancy ears will be able to pick out my attempt at learning to play the Cuatro that was hand-delivered to my front door from the awesome and amazing Micayetoca in Venezuela.
It looks so cool though...
GM has been touting the Volt as it's triumphant entry into green transportation, but 2011 is a long way off and the big three aren't doing so hot and neither is the Volt, it would seem. Meanwhile, Dean Kamen shows off a working Hybrid Electric/Stirling Engine car based off the TH!NK, a car Ford canceled over a half decade ago (and shipped to Norway where they still live on).
The full Frontline Documentary, Heat, which is about the current state of energy policy, implementation, and the climate (which is not good!) is online and well worth watching.
Soros on the Banking Crisis
Soros on the banking crisis:
"A deep recession is now inevitable and the possibility of a depression cannot be ruled out. When I predicted earlier this year that we were facing the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, I did not anticipate that conditions would deteriorate so badly." - Soros lays out some ideas about what can be done to fix the markets ... Planet money had another nicely done piece on the debacle last Friday.
"A deep recession is now inevitable and the possibility of a depression cannot be ruled out. When I predicted earlier this year that we were facing the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, I did not anticipate that conditions would deteriorate so badly." - Soros lays out some ideas about what can be done to fix the markets ... Planet money had another nicely done piece on the debacle last Friday.
Liar's Poker was not intended as a how-to manual.
The End of the Wall Street Era.
“We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number.
The author of Liar's Poker on the collapse of the subprime industry.
The author of Liar's Poker on the collapse of the subprime industry.
We have the facts and we're voting...
At 12:00am EST, in the Ballot Room of the Balsams Resort in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the 2008 Presidential Election began.* The vote was 15-6 Obama -- the first time a Democrat has carried the village since 1968. Despite their "first in the nation" status, though, they have only picked the winner 50% of the time.
How Obama Did It
How Obama Did It: an in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.
Free music!
Celebrating 120 years, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is offering 10 symphonies as free downloads, available until November 24!
All your base are belong to us?
Internet memes. Will they come and go, dying with their creators? Or will they continue to replicate, posing a danger to life as we know it?
Pink foam walls reveal national character.
Tunnels no Minasan no Okage Desu
is a Japanese game show where contestants strike poses to fit through cutouts in pink foam walls.
International reproductions of this game show reveal much about national character; reproductions exist in Italy, Russia, France, Denmark, Hong Kong, Korea, and Australia.
All Night Long
MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for later use.
Geekin' out on your Grandma's Gramophone
[PREVIOUSLY on METAFILTER] Each week between 2005 and 2007 (and sporadically thereafter), Basic Hip Digital Oddio's Kiddie Records Weekly offered children's recordings issued by big labels during the 1940's and 1950's. This cache now holds approximately 214 phonograph records, the covers and sounds therein lovingly digitized, ready for you to absorb.
Galleries of awesome pure CSS web designs using no/few images?
I'm looking for a showcase/inspiration gallery of imageless (or at least minimal graphics) pure CSS web designs. I figured this would totally have been done as a "Top X" list somewhere, but it doesn't seem to exist. Not necessarily "minimalist" design, but what can be done with great colour, layout, typography, and clever CSS.
Help, I'm reading Proust!
I've started In Search of Lost Time and found I like it. Should I keep going? At page 80 I'm barely 2 percent of the way through the whole work; it would likely take me 2-3 years to get through all seven volumes.
Has anyone finished the whole thing? Was it worth it? I don't want to read a couple thousand pages only to lose interest ...
Impostor Syndrome
Do you feel like a fraud?
Holden Caulfield used to hunt phonies a few blocks from here, but times have changed. Now the phonies — or people who think they are, anyway — hunt themselves.
Scientific publishing and names
Identity crisis in scientific publishing
:"Chinese authors are publishing more and more papers, but are they receiving due credit and recognition for their work? Not if their names get confused along the way."
Things you never thought you could do with your camera
One of the most amazing user-led projects out there, CHDK firmware turns cheap Canon cameras into photography powerhouses. You can take take time-lapse movies as in this stunning sunset example; automatically photograph lightening; easily make pretty HDR images and stereograms; have unlimited depth-of-field; and, perhaps most impressively, take photographs with shutter speeds of 1/60,000 of a second!
Hark! A Vagrant History Comics by Kate Beaton
Canadian artist Kate Beaton draws wonderfully expressive comics which she publishes variously on her website and her LiveJournal, Hark! A Vagrant. In December 2007 she asked her readers to suggest historical figures and promised to draw comics based on the first twenty submissions. Highlights of the resulting series include Mary Shelley, Genghis Khan, and yes, even Søren Kierkegaard.
Book Scavenging in Manhatten
Book Scavenging. Hundreds of homeless people eke out a living scavenging books from dumpsters and sidewalk trash in Manhattan. Sidewalk is a book about the subculture of sidewalk book scavengers and vendors.
A single sheet of paper, folded many times
Eric Joisel
may be the greatest living origami artist. Here is how he does it. Here is a short documentary about him.
Content Aware Image Resizing
Content Aware Image Resizing.
Every year SIGGRAPH rolls around I get a reminder of how smart everyone else is, especially people who do computer graphics research. From Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. The algorithm resizes images non-uniformly and, well, somewhat magically.
Der Papalagi wohnt wie die Seemuscheln in einem festen Gehäuse
The Papalagi.
"Then many of these thought-mats are tied into bunches and pressed together ('books' the Papalagi calls them) and sent to every part of that great country. Very soon, everyone who takes these thoughts into themselves is infected. They devour these thought-mats as if they were sweet bananas ... [Y]oung and old gnaw at them like rats gnawing at sugar cane. That is the reason why so few of them are still able to think reasonable, natural thoughts, like those that every honest Samoan has.'
That hokum recording of Bruckner's
pronunciationguide
- for aspiring classical radio announcers
On living with a mental illness.
Borderline personality disorder described firsthand.
A very personal look at BPD - including the implications of sharing the news in a public setting - his blog.
John Safran vs the World
In 1997, the ABC gave John Safran, "Australia's most exciting guerilla filmmaker", his big break on Race Around The World. Although he came last in the competition, it's not too hard to fathom why he won the popular vote, with these submissions: Don't screw with the rules in Japan, The ambulance chaser (Mumbai), Anarchy in the Renault family hatchback (Bristol), The right to bare grudges (Cote d'Ivoire), Mum I'm not Jewish any more (Cote d'Ivoire), Father Pino vs the Devil (Sicily), Mohammad's guide to busting a move (Lebanon), Football's my religion (Jerusalem), The series of unfortunate events and The happiest place on earth, my butt (Disneyland). youtube; each ~6 minutes
A Cabinet for the Curious
The Queer, the Quaint, the Quizzical (1882). A Cabinet for the Curious.
From Albanian to Wayuunaiki, Arabic to Welsh
Lyrikline: A German site showcasing more than 300 international poets reading their work in 39 different languages.