March 4
Poena par sapientia
John C. Odom, the minor league baseball player made famous last year for being traded for ten bats, has met a tragic end.
It's curtains for your old linens!
Does your linen closet runneth over? Yes, you say, you have a stack of towels you regularly use in the bathroom and for swan origami, but you have others that are getting worn. You have tablecloths and aprons you never use, your dish towels seem to breed in their drawer, and you have pillowcases which have outlasted their matching sheets, king-sized bed sheets for the bed your ex took when you split, and your linen closet contains a selection of linens that are faded or torn or leftover from former decorating colour schemes. What are you to do with them? [more inside]
Oh Say Can You See The Way I Play "In C"?
Terry Riley celebrates the 45th anniversary of his groundbreaking composition, In C. A major work in the history of minimalist music, In C has an incredibly flexible score and performance guidelines, which have inspired many musicians to make their own versions, including a French guitar quintet, a traditional Chinese orchestra, a keyboard ensemble, an all-synthesizer group, CalArts Music students, French-Canadian hippies, a Danish vocal and percussion ensemble, another percussion ensemble, Japanese acidheads, a "laptop orchestra", the Bang on a Can Orchestra, and a rock "orchestration" by the Styrenes. No two versions can sound exactly the same, but it's still an open question how they will compare to the performance of In C at its Carnegie Hall debut next month. No recording of the original 1964 performance has ever been publicly released, but some eyewitness accounts can be found here.
Wall Street on the Tundra
"Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund." Also: exploding Range Rovers and the environmental impacts on elves. (Pre-vi-ous-ly.)
The Saddest Bear of All
The Saddest Bear of All. A children's book about a young girl's friendship with a morose bear. [via mefi projects]
The Artfull Bras Project.
"Members of Quilters of South Carolina have created one-of-a-kind bras for Breast Cancer Awareness. The exhibit consists of fifty original works of art which are unique, entertaining, humorous, and beautiful to make the public aware of breast cancer, to memorialize those lost to the disease, and to honor survivors." via
Beyond Rubik's Cube
No longer an enigma nor a challenge, The Magic Cube a.k.a. Rubik's Cube has been mastered by a many puzzle enthusiasts: two-handed, one-handed, with feet, and heck, even nose!. But despair not! There is a new challenge on the horizon, introducing The PETAMINX! (plus the story behind this insane contraption).
Information Wants to be Free
WikiLeaks: every current Congressional Research Service report in a Torrent (2.2 GB). h/t Jessamyn's twitter. Americans spend $100 million a year on the Congressional Research Service, a private think tank for members of Congress and their staffs. While technically available to the public, their reports were never posted on the Internet by the government. [more inside]
Hacking the Sky
Hacking the Sky: Robert Simpson writes astronomy tools for use with Google Earth, Google Sky, and Twitter.
"Keep breathing, Crewser, c'mon, keep breathing!"
The Ripples From Little Lake Nellie — "Four months after Cleveland Indian pitchers Tim Crews and Steve Olin died in a boating accident, their families and friends are coming to grips with the grief that still washes over them" [more inside]
The Secret Language of Families
Family Words (scroll down, p.9). Do you know what the "Ahh-hee's" are? It describes the feeling you get when you put on a bathing suit that is still damp. What about a "winterpepper?" That would be a backwards flip (opposite of somersault). "Eeksler?" The lever on an ice cube tray, so-called because of the sound it makes. Daw daw, doot-do, to-do to-do, taw taw, der der, drit-drit and hoo-hoo? All refer to the tube of cardboard inside a roll of toilet paper. Featured on NPR's A Way With Words (full episode).
Faith and Ecstasy
Pakistan's believers in Islamic mysticism embrace a personal approach to their faith and a different outlook on how to run their country’s government. The BBC asks "Can Sufi Islam counter the Taleban?" The Economist reports "Of Saints and Sinners".
Meanwhile from two in-depth reporters; William Dalrymple : Pakistan is a country staring disaster in the face); and Moni Mohsin: A personal history of Pakistan on the brink.
The counterinsurgency tactics that seem to have worked so well in Iraq could backfire in Pakistan. (more articles from Nicholas Schmidle)
Meanwhile from two in-depth reporters; William Dalrymple : Pakistan is a country staring disaster in the face); and Moni Mohsin: A personal history of Pakistan on the brink.
The counterinsurgency tactics that seem to have worked so well in Iraq could backfire in Pakistan. (more articles from Nicholas Schmidle)
The Triumphs of Egypt Urnash
The Silicon Dawn Tarot, an exquisite creation by mefite Egypt Urnash. For those craving additional context, there's the Silicon Dawn LJ group devoted to this deck and Tarot in general. Via MeFi Projects
Give me your poor, your tired, your startups
The State of the Economy
So how's the economy doing? Everyone, even google's CEO, seems to acknowledge it's bleak. Of course, panic would not be good, but a glance at the headlines reveals that one in five mortgages are underwater--prompting yet more federal relief--while the FDIC's insurance fund is threatened by further bank insolvency, and the U.S. private sector hemorrhaged nearly 700,000 jobs in February. New revelations about the banking crisis show that as Merrill Lynch foundered, its top 10 earners made $209 million last year, and that some of the companies that caused the mortgage crisis are now benefitting from it. At a time when 87 million Americans can't afford health insurance, and prison spending outpaces all but Medicaid; when we still don't know where exactly $2.2 trillion in bank loans have gone, some analysts are nevertheless cautiously optimistic. One sign of progress is that Obama is taking on the kinds of costly and wasteful U.S. defense contracts that the previous administration let run amok. If he can take on that racket, and make a dent, there may be hope after all.
Neither Steam Nor Punk
We've discussed the beautifully simple Stirling engine. Now witness the variety that a master craftsman (warning: German) can bring to this simple concept.
"No crime is so great as daring to excel." -- Winston Churchill
A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered.Yet another reason not to use Excel as your "database".
Kutiman mixes YouTube
Kutiman, the masterful Israeli funk musician and producer, outdoes himself by creating Thru-You: Multiple YouTube clips (mostly instructional and performance videos) edited into slick mega-mashups. They're not just patchwork assemblages, they're sample-based original creations that coud hold their own on anyone's album... Plus they're 100% audiovisual! It's a work of next-level genius.
(sorry for the hyperbole, but my mind has just been blown)
More Kutiman here. Music video here. And for you Pitchfork aficionados, here.
(sorry for the hyperbole, but my mind has just been blown)
More Kutiman here. Music video here. And for you Pitchfork aficionados, here.
The Dunning of the Dead
"Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry. Those who dun the living say that people are so scared and so broke it is difficult to get them to cough up even token payments. Collecting from the dead, however, is expanding."
Endangered Species Act 2009
Endangered Species Act Protections Restored by President Obama. Previous regulation made it easier to start projects without consulting scientists.
March 3
Surveillance Self-Defense
The SSD Project. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it." [Via]
Transsexual in Iran
Duck Duck Click
What the Duck? a comic strip about a duck photographer.
I was sad, and this cheered me up.
Southern Comfort
Southern Comfort is a 2001 documentary film about the final year in the life of Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual. Eads, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was turned down for treatment by two dozen doctors out of fear that treating such a patient would hurt their reputation. You can watch the film here, part 1 through 10.
Hazy petrol nights, crimson sun on traffic lights
"There's sickly pop, there's cheesy pop and then there's the Lightning Seeds brand of pure shiny pop." The Lightning Seeds mixed slick production with equally compelling melodies and lyrics, and produced a number of critically acclaimed albums in the 1990s. Now there's a new album coming out - their first since 1999's Tilt. [more inside]
Bad paintings of Barack Obama
.... and I love them all Considering artistic interpretation, Barry never looked better. [more inside]
Poor Stock Photo Use
Asthma and tv watching may be linked, which is interesting by itself, but eagle eyes will note a strange choice of a photo of child watching television. Remember this guy?
The Road to Nowhere
We're on the road to nowhere and when we get to the end of this road, nowhere is exactly where this expedition begins.
Only 22 people have ever skiied unsupported to the North Pole, none of them American. Starting today, John Huston and Tyler Fish hope to become the first. If all goes according to plan, they will reach the North Pole in 55 days. They will be blogging from the ice. [more inside]
Peace: Still a Man's Thang
In 2001, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325 on Women's Role on Peace-Building and Security, calling for increased participation by women in conflict resolution and peace negotiations.
Eight years later, "in terms of signing the peace documents and being at the peace table and involved in the peace-making operations, 1.3 percent of all the signatures in the world on these peacekeeping documents have been rendered by women." (Stephen Lewis, former UN special envoy), and as of 2007, women constituted only 1% of peacekeeping military personnel. Could increasing women's participation also help reduce sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers?
Crowdsourcing Activism
A startup is proposing a new model for harnessing the power of the web for activism that gets results: bite sized actions, under written by corporate sponsors.
LOL Asteroid.
Asteroid in the Sydney Morning Herald. An asteroid as big as a ten-story building passed by Earth. What do you think should have been done about it? It came within 600000 km of our atmosphere.
Richard Nixon watched 'All In the Family'
Done means Done
Bre Pettis makes things. He likes to get things done. He likes when you get things done. Do you like to get things done? Then check out the Cult of Done Manifesto.
Tuesday is Francis Ford Coppola Day
After creating four successive masterpieces in the 1970s, culminating in the tortured production of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola began the 1980s by directing "a romantic comedy, a musical
fantasy and an erotic love story set amidst the neon glitter of Las Vegas on
a Fourth of July weekend." [more inside]
The Bethnal Green Disaster
On March 3rd 1943, the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War killed 173 people, including 62 children. During an air-raid alert, the noise of a new anti-aircraft battery panicked the crowd trying to get into the shelter at Bethnal Green tube station. In the dark, wet conditions, someone tripped and fell at the foot of the stairs, blocking the pathway and knocking others over in a domino effect. More and more people continued to pile in at the top leading to a massive and deadly crush. [more inside]
Tom Gauld
Neutral Power FTW
World War II: Simple Version. (SLJPG)
Hey, some of us are reading here.
Readability is a wonderful bookmarklet that strips away all the surrounding cruft on a page so you can focus on the content.
this product reverberates a maximum amount of info known as the web
These mosquitoes, they hum..in harmony
Truce In their seminal paper "Flying in Tune: Sexual recognition in mosquitoes", Gabrielle Gibson and and Ian Russel from the University of Greenwich discovered an inspiring phenomenon: male mosquitoes change their buzzing frequency to match that of a female mosquito. This synchronization brings their wing beats to within a millisecond or less of one another. The authors suggest that this phenomenon facilitates the mosquitoes' ability to copulate mid-flight. We take advantage of this phenomenon to engage the mosquitoes in song, inspired by the North Indian classical vocal tradition of Dhrupad.
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
Cuss all you want, but only around men, horses, and cows
Rush: 2012
Democrat's efforts to paint Rush Limbaugh as GOP leader pay off. Since Rush Limbaugh famously stated that he wanted Obama to fail, Democrats, led by President Obama, have been trying to paint him as the intellectual and spiritual head of the GOP. Eyeing his low 25% approval rating amongst independents, they have hoped to equate the Republicans with Limbaugh. [more inside]
1 in 31.
A new report by the Pew Center of the States finds that 1 in 31 U.S. Adults is currently under Community Supervision. (Full report pdf). Georgia currently tops the charts, with 1 in 13 adults under correctional control. [more inside]
Treasures unburied
You know, I really like it.
Royksopp are celebtrating 10 years as a duo with a new album called Junior. Kicking off the celebration, a video for their new single Happy Up Here, featuring a live-action battle between humans and space invaders! [more inside]
Camilo José Vergara
Invincible Cities "Hundreds of color photographs of Richmond, California, Camden, New Jersey, and Harlem, New York, intended by the artist to be part of a 'Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto.' The photos depict the built environment of these cities as they change over time (1980s-2005). Website features a detailed introduction and databases of photos from each city with interactive maps." [via] [more inside]
I Write, They Answer (Usually)
What if you wrote to Alpo to ask if they have a senior citizen's blend, or to the AARP to inquire about the living status of Abe Vigoda? And what if they wrote back? That's the purpose of Jackassletters.com, part mischief, part mayhem, from MeFi's own cjorgensen. History has demonstrated the fun of hoax letter writing, for instance Kitty Piddle Soda from Avery's Beverages. Someone has to carry on the tradition. Tweaking the noses of power and fame. (via MeFi Projects)
Cast in Stone
This NSFW slideshow helps serve as an introduction into the sometimes ribauld art of the Gargoyle. Here's your site index for the silent orgy complete with an interactive UK map should you wish a more personal experience with stone exhibitionists or Sheela Na Gigs ( previously 1; 2; )
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