May 2013
26 posts
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Pierre Brassau, Monkey Artist, 1964 →
The Museum of Hoaxes on a well-received 1964 art show featuring works by Pierre Brassau:
One lone critic panned Brassau’s work, declaring, “Only an ape could have done this.” As it turned out, this critic was correct. Pierre Brassau was, in fact, an ape. Specifically, he was a four-year-old West African chimpanzee named Peter from Sweden’s Boras zoo.
It turns out that...
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Measles surges in UK years after vaccine scare →
Maria Cheng, AP:
More than a decade ago, British parents refused to give measles shots to at least a million children because of a vaccine scare that raised the specter of autism. Now, health officials are scrambling to catch up and stop a growing epidemic of the contagious disease.
This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last...
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How Bill Clinton could not get Led Zeppelin to... →
AFP report quoting a segment from 60 Minutes Overtime:
Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein “had this great idea that we could enlist Bill Clinton to convince Led Zeppelin to reunite to perform at the 12-12-12 concert.
“So, Harvey and I got on a plane to fly down to Washington to meet with President Clinton who was going to be seeing the members of Led Zeppelin, who were being honoured...
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Deep Space Nine in High Definition →
Update on the high definition remastering of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that’s apparently underway, on the TrekCore blog:
As part of an upcoming feature profiling the original CG artists who worked on Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise, I set about researching and contacting a number of the team who were responsible for CG work back in the day for effects houses such as Foundation...
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Police arrest suspect in New Orleans Mother's Day... →
Lateef Mungin, CNN:
New Orleans police said they arrested a suspect in the Mother’s Day shooting that left 19 people wounded this week.
In a post on its Facebook page, the police department identified the man taken into custody as Akein Scott, 19. It did not provide any more details on the arrest.
I was just reading an opinion piece by David Dennis for the Guardian that mentioned the...
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IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups →
Stephen Ohlemacher writing about some extremely embarrassing stuff for the AP:
The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.
Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or...
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Nevada may become first state to officially allow... →
Sgt. Mark Pope, overseer of the California Motorcycle Safety Program, as quoted by Brian Duggan in the Reno Gazette-Journal:
“Motorcycle safety is kind of an oxymoron,” Pope said. “Motorcycling isn’t about safety. If somebody was interested in traveling the highway safely they’d be in a Volvo.”
The article itself is actually about lane splitting, which is...
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Fast Food Strike Wave Spreads to Detroit →
Good piece from Josh Eidelson The Nation’s website about what is now the largest fast food workers’ strike in the country’s history. This bit about how unions are adapting stuck out to me:
Along with a shared significant supporter—SEIU—the campaigns in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have apparent strategies in common. Rather than waiting until they’ve built support...
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Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two →
Hello, and welcome to KCLN, your number one source for Colin News. We now join a broadcast from our roving correspondent, Allie Brosh, already in progress.
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Report on Military's Growing Number of Sexual... →
Time magazine Washington deputy bureau chief Mark Thompson on Tuesday’s episode of PBS Newshour, talking about an annual Pentagon study on sexual assault in the United States military released on the same day:
This is a longstanding problem. I was on this show 16 years ago talking about it.
That line really stuck with me, although the whole thing isn’t quite as gloomy as those two...
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Wickham: '42' overlooks black journalist →
DeWayne Wickham on Sam Lacy, the first black person admitted to the Baseball Writers Association of America:
Once, during a game in New Orleans, Lacy was forced to sit on the roof of the press box because no blacks were allowed inside. That outrage sparked several white sports writers to join him atop the press box. That act of protest helped shatter baseball’s other color barrier —...
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124 Millimeters of Depth →
George Kokoris, who is stereoblind, on perceiving volume for the first time while playing a Nintendo 3DS:
Not only was I “seeing into the screen” the way so many others feel when playing a 3DS for the first time, I was seeing in a direction that had previously been literally invisible to me. It’s difficult to come up with a metaphor. Maybe it’s what Gomez saw the first...
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The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly →
Back in 2010, Dr. Dan Myers, professor of sociology at Notre Dame, blogged about his search for the shortest theoretically possible game of Monopoly. He found a game where the second player loses in four turns, with seven rolls happening between the two players (rolling doubles allows you to roll again). He even uploaded a video demonstration showing the second player bankrupted in thirteen...
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April 2013
46 posts
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NH Man Loses Life Savings On Carnival Game →
This guy sure is a big idiot.
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We Aren’t the World →
Ethan Watters summarizing some research by Steven Heine, Ara Norenzayan, and Joe Henrich for Pacific Standard:
In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of...
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1940 Hawaii captured in recovered 1940 films →
Here are three 16mm films showing Hawai’i in 1940: one of the island of Kaua’i and one apiece of the Kona and Hilo sides of the Big Island. The 1940 date is exact according to the video descriptions, so these predate Hawai’i’s statehood in 1959.
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Cybermania ’94: The Ultimate Gamer Awards... →
Michael Lowell on Learn to Counter:
This was the original attempt by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences to create an awards ceremony, and it is best described as a two-hour infomercial for “the future of Western video games”, the future of multimedia. It would prove such a failure that the AIAS web site makes no mention of Cybermania ‘94, only the Interactive...
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The New New Atheists →
Theo Hobson, writing in The Spectator:
Atheism is still with us. But the movement that threatened to form has petered out. Crucially, atheism’s younger advocates are reluctant to compete for the role of Dawkins’s disciple. They are more likely to bemoan the new atheist approach and call for large injections of nuance. A good example is the pop-philosopher Julian Baggini. He is a stalwart...
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When a deaf man has Tourette’s →
Emily Anthes, writing on The Public Library of Science blog Wonderland back in 2010:
The case study, which appeared in the journal Movement Disorders in 2000, concerned a 29-year-old man who had been deaf since infancy. We’ll call him Signing Sal. Sal, as it happens, also had Tourette’s. In most people, coprolalia involves randomly blurting out obscenities. Sal, however, wasn’t...
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Why Boston's Hospitals Were Ready →
Atul Gawande, writing on The New Yorker’s News Desk blog:
The bombs at the Boston Marathon were designed to maim and kill, and they did. Three people died within the first moments of the blast. More than a hundred and seventy people were injured. They had their limbs blown off, vital arteries severed, bones fractured, flesh torn open by shrapnel or scorched by the blasts’ heat. Yet it...
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Racism in Hawaii. It needs to be discussed.
Today’s a heavy reading kind of day.
keakealani:
Okay, okay. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I need to get this out because I feel that it’s important to explain, even if nobody is probably going to read it. So bear with me.
It is a common (mis)perception that Hawaii is racist “against” haoles*/white people.
*”Haole” is a Hawaiian language term that is best translated as...
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Arena.Xlsm →
And now, a work of staggering genius: Cary Walkin’s Arena.Xlsm, which is a procedurally generated RPG made in Microsoft Excel.
This is all in a Microsoft Excel workbook.
I can’t even play it because it only works on the Windows version of Excel, but I’m still linking to it anyway.
Here’s an entry from the 1.1 changelog, because video game changelogs are usually pretty...
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Brains as Clear as Jell-O for Scientists to... →
James Gorman, New York Times:
There are several ways to make tissue transparent. The key to the new technique is a substance called a hydrogel, a material that is mostly water held together by larger molecules to give it some solidity.
Dr. Chung said the hydrogel forms a kind of mesh that permeates the brain and connects to most of the molecules, but not to the lipids, which include fats...
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Finland apologizes for "incorrect" Putin... →
Reuters:
Finland apologized to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday after its police accidentally put him on a blacklist of people with connections to criminal activity.
Yeah, Vladimir Putin definitely has no ties to criminal activity whatsoever, so I have no idea how this ended up happening.
Hahaha, I’m just joking. I kid the re-President of Russia!
