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Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement? "The continuing debate over a murky sexual encounter at a 2008 convention for cheekily anti-establishment skeptics underscores a broader dilemma: How can a progressive, important intellectual community behave so poorly towards its female peers?"
posted on Sep-12-14 at 3:26 PM

A mesmerizing pendulum wave demonstration with 16 bowling balls in a North Carolina forest. [Previously]
posted on Sep-10-14 at 10:00 PM

How to Use Your Cat to Hack Your Neighbor’s Wi-Fi.
posted on Aug-9-14 at 10:30 PM

What if Ingmar Bergman Directed The Flash? [Via]
posted on Jul-7-14 at 2:08 PM

Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot. "Since he first became a household name a year ago, Edward Snowden has been a modern Max Headroom, appearing only as a face on a screen broadcast from exile in Hong Kong or Russia. But in the age of the telepresence robot, being a face on a screen isn’t as restrictive as it used to be." Indeed: Snowdenbot performs tele-diagnosis and offers aid to reporter who had first epileptic seizure.
posted on Jun-13-14 at 2:08 PM

Know Your Double: A doppelgänger field guide by John Martz (previously).
posted on Jun-12-14 at 9:42 AM

50 photos de la Libération de Paris se fondent dans le présent. [Via]
posted on Jun-6-14 at 12:02 PM

Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW]. "Installing magnets, microchips and sensors in their own bodies — this is how cyberpunk biohackers went from fiction to reality." [Previously, Via]
posted on May-30-14 at 8:42 PM

Hidden Paintings Revealed at Ancient Temple of Angkor Wat. "New, digitally enhanced images reveal detailed murals at Angkor Wat showing elephants, deities, boats, orchestral ensembles and people riding horses — all invisible to the naked eye." [Via]
posted on May-29-14 at 4:16 PM

Signs from the Near Future: What the Near Future Is Actually Going to Look Like.
posted on May-22-14 at 8:00 PM

Inside the Strange New World of DIY Brain Stimulation. "Inspired by scientific studies, ordinary people are buying and building devices to send electrical current into their brains. Some say it has improved their memory and focus. Others have found relief from depression and chronic pain. But are they getting ahead of the science?" [Via]
posted on May-7-14 at 5:20 PM

In pain and forced to use a wheelchair, a young woman opts to amputate her clubfeet. "New prosthetics have made active life possible for many with injuries and congenital defects​." [Via]
posted on May-5-14 at 10:20 PM

Nietzsche and the Burbs.
posted on Apr-30-14 at 10:30 PM

Clones Are People Too: The Science and Science Fiction of BBC America’s Orphan Black. BBC America's science fiction series Orphan Black has returned for a second season, with Tatiana Maslany reprising her extraordinary performance playing half a dozen different clone characters. Meanwhile, in the real world, scientists have created cloned embryonic stem cells from the DNA of two adult humans. [Previously]
posted on Apr-26-14 at 10:15 PM

Bonfire of the Humanities. "Nobody goes to Timbuktu, right? Patrick Symmes did, to discover what happened when jihadi rebels set out to burn one of the world’s finest collections of ancient manuscripts. Bouncing around by truck, boat, and boots, he got an intimate look at West ­Africa’s most mythic locale." [Via]
posted on Apr-21-14 at 6:30 PM

OMEGA - A Stop Motion Animated Short. "The mechanical life form Ohm inhabits a bleak and devastated planet. The thousands of mechanical creatures of this world share a single cycle of energy. In this cycle, Ohm is a rogue element. His nature is to devour and absorb others. When one day a gargantuan foreign object appears in the skies. Drawn in by mysterious creatures of light, the Ohm tracks them across the planet, changing the known order of matter, time and space." [Via]
posted on Apr-20-14 at 5:10 PM

The Exit Room. "In 2021, an imprisoned journalist facing execution contemplates a desperate escape attempt in order to return to his wife and newborn child." [Via]
posted on Apr-19-14 at 5:00 PM

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain. "The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt."
posted on Apr-14-14 at 7:30 PM

Gritty Cityscapes by Jeremy Mann. Dramatically and skillfully rendered, the cityscapes and figurative works of Jeremy Mann give visual form to the emotive essence of modern life (nsfw).
posted on Apr-12-14 at 4:24 PM

Peter Matthiessen’s Homegoing. "He is the only writer ever to win the National Book Award for nonfiction and fiction, but it’s not just the writing: Born into the East Coast establishment, Matthiessen ran from it, and in the running became a novelist, a C.I.A. agent, a founder of The Paris Review, author of more than 30 books, a naturalist, an activist and a master in one of the most respected lineages in Zen. As early as 1978, he was already being referred to, in a review in The New York Times, as a 'throwback,' because he has always seemed to be of a different, earlier era, with universal, spiritual and essentially timeless concerns." Peter Matthiessen, Lyrical Writer and Naturalist, Is Dead at 86.
posted on Apr-5-14 at 11:50 PM

Cyber Threat Real-Time Map. This Map Tracks Cyberattacks Around the World in Real Time. [Via]
posted on Apr-1-14 at 9:30 PM

Alexis Diaz’s Surreal Murals Explore Metamorphosis.
posted on Mar-28-14 at 7:20 PM

The Interpreters We Left Behind. "As our troops pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we're abandoning fixers and translators to the dangerous countrymen who view them as traitors. Asylum in the U.S. could be their last hope. If only we'd let them in."
posted on Mar-27-14 at 4:40 PM

"Heaven Is a Place on Planet X" by Desirina Boskovich. "Break! Break! Break!" by Charlie Jane Anders. "System Reset" by Tobias Buckell. These three short stories are from The End is Nigh anthology, the first volume of The Apocalypse Triptych, three anthologies of stories about life just before, during, and after the apocalypse. "Post-apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that have already burned. Apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that are burning. The End is Nigh is about the match."
posted on Mar-16-14 at 11:55 AM

Let Me Live That Fantasy. "In search of Puddles, the saddest clown of all, whose voice — along with Lorde’s music — made him an Internet star."
posted on Mar-12-14 at 10:10 PM

Twilight in the Box. "The suicide statistics, the squalor and the recidivism haven’t ended solitary confinement. Maybe the brain studies will." [Via]
posted on Feb-28-14 at 9:10 PM

The Mammoth Cometh. "Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad." [Previously, Via]
posted on Feb-27-14 at 6:15 PM

A Star in a Bottle. "An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out."
posted on Feb-25-14 at 12:00 AM

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet. "Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever." This is the latest and last article for Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, who is moving on to join First Look Media.
posted on Feb-21-14 at 8:40 PM

Creation and Destruction of Sand Mandalas. Spontaneous Temporary Sand Paintings by Joe Mangrum. New Flower Mandalas by Kathy Klein. Geometric Paintings Inspired by Sacred Mandalas by Amy Cheng.
posted on Feb-19-14 at 11:44 PM

La bella vita: True beauty pleases the eye and the mind – but can it help us to become better people? "In 1795, the German dramatist and poet Friedrich Schiller published a book with a fearsome title – On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. It has never become well-known, which is a pity, because it contains some of our most useful insights into the nature and value of beauty. Schiller’s starting point is an analysis of the human condition. He wants to understand our delight in what we find beautiful. Instead of asking which things are beautiful, Schiller is curious about what is going on in us when we respond with this distinctive, intimate thrill and enthusiasm that leads us to say ‘that’s beautiful’. Different things might provoke this response in different people. But why do we have it at all?" [Via]
posted on Feb-18-14 at 10:40 PM

Graffiti: 40 Years of Hacking New York City. "City as Canvas is a reminder that this is, in a very literal sense, criminal artwork." [Via]
posted on Feb-17-14 at 9:55 PM

Gentlemen, Formerly. "A gentleman in 1720 could read Greek while mounting a running horse. Today’s gentleman reads GQ in the bathroom. From rapists to stylists, a history of the American gentleman."
posted on Feb-16-14 at 9:15 PM

What Does Pussy Riot Mean Now? "With all eyes on Russia, two members of the country’s most notorious band of shit-stirrers are free after nearly two years of political imprisonment and enjoying the rock-star treatment during their first trip to the U.S. But the group’s unlikely journey from art-school project to international icons shows just how rotten Russia has become and how much the mission has changed."
posted on Feb-7-14 at 10:00 PM

Just Ella. A short film from Jim Munroe, the creator of Ghosts With Shit Jobs, for the Lo-fi Sci-fi 48 Hour Film Challenge. "Just Ella posits a future overrun by gibbering monstrosities. Ella takes refuge in a 'the Ossington Safehouse, a collectively-run space dedicated to human sovereignty.' But despite doing the assigned tasks on the chore list, the Safehouse isn’t safe — the terrors outside are nothing compared to those within." [Via]
posted on Feb-6-14 at 9:45 PM

The Empathy Exams: Acting out pain until that pain becomes real, for $13.50 an hour. "My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour. Medical students guess my maladies. I’m called a Standardized Patient, which means I act toward the norms of my disorders. I’m standardized-lingo SP for short. I’m fluent in the symptoms of preeclampsia and asthma and appendicitis. I play a mom whose baby has blue lips..."
posted on Feb-4-14 at 6:28 PM

Dating an Impressionist's Sunset. "Famed French Impressionist Claude Monet created a striking scene of the Normandy coast in his 1883 painting, Étretat: Sunset. Now a team of Texas State University researchers, led by astronomer and physics professor Donald Olson, has applied its distinctive brand of forensic astronomy to Monet’s masterpiece, uncovering previously unknown details about the painting’s origins." [Via]
posted on Jan-25-14 at 11:00 AM

Deep Dark Fears. Comic strips of people's lurking fears by Fran Krause. [Via]
posted on Jan-23-14 at 3:48 PM

Gender Swap - Experiment with The Machine to be Another. "Gender Swap is an experiment that uses The Machine to be Another system as a platform for embodiment experience (a neuroscience technique in which users can feel themselves like if they were in a different body). In order to create the brain illusion we use the immersive Head Mounted Display Oculus Rift, and first-person cameras. To create this perception, both users have to syncronize their movements. If one does not correspond to the movement of the other, the embodiment experience does not work. It means that both users have to constantly agree on every movement they make. Throughout this experiment, we aim to investigate issues like Gender Identity, Queer Theory, feminist technoscience, Intimacy and Mutual Respect." [NSFW, Via]
posted on Jan-21-14 at 5:45 PM

60 Words And A War Without End: The Untold Story Of The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History. "Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world. Here’s how it came to be, and what it’s since come to mean." [Via]
posted on Jan-17-14 at 4:40 PM

B E A U T Y. "A path of sighs through the emotions of life. A tribute to the art and her disarming beauty." A short video by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro. [Via, possibly nsfw]
posted on Jan-16-14 at 11:44 AM

Organisms Do Evolve. An evolution-themed parody of "Wrecking Ball" (possibly nsfw) by Carin Bondar.
posted on Jan-14-14 at 2:20 PM

Losing Aaron. "After his son was arrested for downloading files at MIT, Bob Swartz did everything in his power to save him. He couldn’t. Now he wants the institute to own up to its part in Aaron’s death." [Via]
posted on Jan-5-14 at 12:40 PM

The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges. [Via]
posted on Jan-4-14 at 11:22 AM

Collision Detection. "They sit cross-legged, facing each other, six thousand miles apart. Then he strokes her cheek." [Via]
posted on Dec-20-13 at 6:55 PM

DARPA Tried to Build Skynet in the 1980s.
posted on Dec-19-13 at 6:15 PM

The Sculpture on the Moon. "Scandals and conflicts obscured one of the most extraordinary achievements of the Space Age."
posted on Dec-16-13 at 1:20 PM

The humorously horrible, nauseatingly positive and cheerfully grotesque art of Rachel Maclean.
posted on Dec-10-13 at 1:20 PM

In Dreams is an experimental documentary that visualises the dreams of ordinary individuals...
posted on Dec-8-13 at 12:32 AM

Baffling 400,000-Year-Old Clue (NYT) to Human Origins: The pit of bones hides our oldest DNA.
posted on Dec-6-13 at 10:40 PM