March 2012
55 posts
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Modern Mechanix: Mars Refuses to Answer Radio... →
Modern Mechanix time, this time from the May 1929 issue of Modern Mechanics:
The latest evidence of the unsocial nature of the Martians came recently when Dr. H. Mansfield Robinson, shown in the picture at the left, attempted to send a message to a woman on Mars who, he reported, had been in communication with him. Although listeners all over the world were on the alert for her response, it...
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Earl Scruggs dies at 88 →
Steve Martin, writing in The New Yorker earlier this year:
As boys in the little community of Flint Hill, near Shelby, North Carolina, Earl and his brother Horace would take their banjo and guitar and start playing on the porch, then split up and meet behind the house. Their goal was to still be on the beat when they rejoined at the back. Momentously, when he was ten years old, after a fight...
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Science decodes 'internal voices' →
Jason Palmer, BBC News:
[T]he team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.
With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.
They were even able to reconstruct some of the words,...
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Church Stages Kidnapping of Youth Group Members →
Colleen Curry, ABC News:
A church pastor in Pennsylvania could face felony charges for staging a fake kidnapping of youth group students in order to teach them about religious persecution.
Teenagers at the Glad Tidings Assembly of God Church in Middletown, Pa., were surprised when they attended a youth group meeting at the church on March 21 and were ambushed by what seemed to be real...
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Video of Nas performing "Illmatic" live at SXSW →
This is not to be missed. DJ Premier is on the turntables (and acting as hype man), and AZ and Pete Rock both show up. Seriously, this is really, really great stuff.
(Probably my favorite part is that Premier is wearing an Illmatic T-shirt. That’s a level so completely beyond “wearing the band’s T-shirt to their show” that I don’t even know if it’s cool or...
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Remembrances of First Dates Past →
What if scenes from our lives were critiqued by reviewers?
Here’s a short piece by John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, that ran in Book magazine in 2002. It’s also featured in expanded form in Warner’s book Fondling Your Muse, which I recommend if only just for the best burn of Tom Clancy ever committed to paper.
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Debunking the Universal Grammar... or not →
Fantastic profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Tom Bartlett of the “war of words” (I’m so sorry) that has erupted between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky on whether Everett has debunked Chomsky’s ill-defined “Universal Grammar”. The whole piece is fantastic, but this was my favorite bit, from later on in the article.
Everett is far from the only...
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PBS NewsHour (2012-03-22): Ahmed Rashid: 'Enormous... →
PBS NewsHour had a nice segment yesterday a few days ago with journalist Ahmed Rashid on the complex relationship between the U.S., Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. This is how the interviewer Ray Suarez introduced what I found to be the most interesting tidbit:
In the book, you take us deep inside those negotiations begun quite clandestinely in Germany with go-betweens, safe passage for...
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Henry Farrell's Part in Stephen J. Dubner's Upfall →
Apparently in 2005 Crooked Timber held an online seminar discussing the book — the content in the seminar seems honest to me. But somewhere along the lines, something went wrong, and Farrell now regrets it:
But even if it seemed a good idea at the time, I should have known better. Yes – Levitt is an interesting and original economist, but the glib contrarianism and breezy confidence...
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Israeli law eyes super-thin models as bad examples →
Daniella Cheslow writing for the AP about a new Israeli law that regulates the thinness of models in advertisements:
The new law requires models to produce a medical report no older than three months at every shoot for the Israeli market, stating that they are not malnourished by World Health Organization standards.
The U.N. agency relies on the body mass index, calculated by factors of...
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Mali troops declare coup, loot presidential palace →
AP:
Drunken soldiers looted Mali’s presidential palace hours after they declared a coup on Thursday, suspending the constitution and dissolving the institutions of one of the few established democracies in this troubled corner of Africa.
Mali adopted a democratic constitution in August of 1991. The coup that lead to that constitution happened on March 26, almost twenty-one years ago...
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Michael K. Williams is going to play Ol' Dirty... →
Great casting choice. Dirty comin’, yo!
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Letters of Note: The Empire State Building (Helen... →
Letters of Note here with a description by Helen Keller of her experience at the top of the Empire State Building.
What did I “see and hear” from the Empire Tower? As I stood there ‘twixt earth and sky, I saw a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary. I saw it stand erect and serene in the midst of storm and...
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Swiss ‘Satellite Janitor’ Aims To Clean Up Space... →
Carl Franzen, writing for TPM’s IdeaLab:
The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a “janitor satellite” that will begin to clean up Earth’s orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth’s atmosphere on a suicide mission, causing both the janitor satellite and the piece of junk to burn up.
Franzen...
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F.A.A. to Review Policy on Gadgets →
About time.
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"That’s one of the things about freeways: They... →
Fantastic interview with John Norquist in Next American City about how freeways hurt cities and what can be done to improve the situation. I’ve been saying this same stuff for years. Probably my favorite bit, naturally about San Francisco:
A robust street grid, with lots of connections, will distribute traffic much better than a few large freeways. […] For example, when the...
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Crystals may be possible in time as well as space →
Alexandra Witze, writing in ScienceNews:
In two new papers, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek lays out the mathematics of how an object moving in its lowest energy state could experience a sort of structure in time. Such a “time crystal” would be the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space.
MOTHERFUCKING TIME...
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Scientists Claim Brain Memory Code Cracked →
ScienceDaily:
Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.
In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS...
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Wikipedia: Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go... →
However, two years later, when Seuss was challenged by political columnist Art Buchwald for never having written a political book, Seuss took a copy of the book and crossed out “Marvin K. Mooney” and wrote in “Richard M. Nixon.” Buchwald was so delighted that with Seuss’s consent he printed the text as his column for July 30, 1974. Nixon resigned ten days later on...
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A gay jock takes off the mask →
Heartwarming piece in the Ottawa Citizen about a teenage hockey player who came out. Don’t miss his daily Youtube videos that documented the process.
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The Spanking Machine: A Resilient Myth in Popular... →
C. Farrell put together a piece for his site World Corporal Punishment Research on the concept of a spanking machine through time. I don’t really need to say any more than that.
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A Child's Reaction to a Gay Couple →
It’s a talking point so overused it’s almost a trope by this point. “How will I explain this to my children?” Obviously that’s a question parents have to answer for themselves. Unless they don’t explain anything and let the children work things out for themselves. What would that look like? It might look a little something like this classic video, where a...
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Male Fruit Flies, Spurned by Females, Turn to... →
Benedict Carey, New York Times:
Fruit flies apparently self-medicate just like many humans do, drowning their sorrows or frustrations for some of the same reasons, scientists reported Thursday. Male flies subjected to what amounted to a long tease — in a glass tube, not a dance club — preferred food spiked with alcohol far more than male flies that were able to mate.
The study, posted...
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Apple and the Time Machine
This is what Mike Daisey had to say for himself when confronted by Rob Schmitz of Marketplace about his aforelinked fabrications.
“Look. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work,” Daisey said. “My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism. And it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”
I...
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$100 to Fly Through the Airport →
So here’s the latest thing really rustling my jimmies, courtesy of Scott McCartney of The Wall Street Journal:
The Transportation Security Administration is rolling out expedited screening at big airports called “Precheck.” It has special lanes for background-checked travelers, who can keep their shoes, belt and jacket on, leave laptops and liquids in carry-on bags and walk...
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Retraction →
This American Life:
Regrettably, we have discovered that one of our most popular episodes was partially fabricated. This week, we devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” Mike Daisey’s story about visiting Foxconn, an Apple supplier factory in China.
The episode itself isn’t available yet, but it should be available this...
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Romney, rivals court Southern support ahead of... →
David Espo, AP:
In the Deep South, one of the most conservative regions of the country, Romney and his Republican rivals polished their credentials with attacks on President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy and the nation’s use of energy. “The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” said Rick Santorum.
Hahahahahahaha.
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After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops... →
Owned.
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Rebekah Brooks arrest: phone-hacking scandal isn't... →
Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor:
The re-arrest of Rebekah Brooks this morning suggests little official let-up in a British tabloid phone-hacking scandal that captured the world’s attention last July and threatens to drag Prime Minister David Cameron into questions about his ties to Ms. Brooks and other journalists.
Yes, that’s right. Re-arrest. Really good run-down of the...
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The Colbert Report (8/3/12): Don Fleming, Elvis... →
Don Fleming, Elvis Costello, and Emmylou Harris stopped by The Colbert Report last week to talk about Alan Lomax and American folk music. The three and Colbert also performed “Good Old Mountain Dew” and “Goodnight, Irene.” Highly recommended.
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Lists of Note: The Fake Books of Charles Dickens →
Lists of Note time:
When Charles Dickens moved into Tavistock House in 1851, he decided to fill two spaces in his new study with bookcases containing fake books, the witty titles of which he had invented.
Included are such classics as “Downeaster’s Complete Calculator” and “King Henry the Eighth’s Evidences of Christianity. 5 vols.” What the heck, dude.
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Facebook 'friend' offer exposes man's other wife →
Manuel Valdes, AP:
Facebook’s automatic efforts to connect users through “friends” they may know recently led two Washington women to find out they were married to the same man, at the same time. That led to the man, corrections officer Alan L. O’Neill, being slapped with bigamy charges.
According to charging documents filed Thursday, O’Neill married a woman in...
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Debate intensifies over animal undercover filming →
David Pitt, the AP:
Animal welfare groups reacted with outrage Wednesday after the Iowa Legislature made the state the first to approve a bill making it a crime to surreptitiously get into a farming operation to record video of animal abuse. … The Iowa measure would establish a new penalty for lying on a job application to get access to a farm facility, making it a serious misdemeanor. A second...
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California Teacher on Leave Over Porn Video... →
Jeff Wilson, AP:
Student claims that a junior high teacher was moonlighting as a porn star were initially dismissed after school officials said they couldn’t find any images of her on the Internet.
The investigation was quickly restarted, however, when other teachers showed them downloads from smartphones, and the officials realized the school computer system blocked access to sex...
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Harvard group seeks degrees for expelled gays →
Denise Lavoie, Associated Press:
Students and faculty at Harvard University are calling on the school to award posthumous degrees to seven students expelled nearly a century ago for being gay or perceived as gay, and they’re timing a rally for their cause to coincide with a visit by Lady Gaga.
But Harvard says it doesn’t award posthumous degrees, except in rare cases where students...
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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Gammell vs.... →
Did you ever read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? Collection of American folk scary stories written by Alvin Schwartz and frighteningly, staying-awake-all-nightingly illustrated by Stephen Gammell.
HarperCollins has reprinted a thirtieth anniversary edition of it, with new illustrations by Brett Helquist. Here’s a kind of rage-y comparison of the art changes.
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Swarm of Bees Delays Giants-Diamondbacks Game →
As part of our continuing coverage of bees, here’s a report from the Associated Press:
The Diamondbacks’ grounds crew used a combination of cotton candy and lemonade to help disperse a swarm of bees that delayed the San Francisco Giants split squad’s 11-1 win over Arizona for 41 minutes in the second inning Sunday.
With runners on second and third and one out in the second...
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