May 5
Global Breakfast Radio aggregates radio stations from across the world, constantly streaming broadcasts from wherever it’s breakfast-time right now. (via)
posted by davidjmcgee at 7:00 PM - 2 comments
"
Card Tricks by
James Hannaham recommended by Jennifer Egan"
"By invoking the existence of artworks involving the gallery space, the people inside it, and the larger world (quite literally), Hannaham performs an ingenious reversal: the subject illuminated by the plaques ends up being us, the reader-viewers. And our experience of reading and viewing them—in what order we choose, in what state we’re in that day or night, in what company, in what mood, in what weather, is the narrative."
posted by davidstandaford at 5:53 PM - 0 comments Rabbi Myer Kripke, of Omaha, dies at 100.
The New York Times obituary tells the story of the Kripkes and a couple they played bridge with and became friends with, Susan and Warren Buffett. In 1966, they approached Buffett to manage their savings, and they wound up making $25 million, all of which they gave away.
The
Times piece also devotes a half a sentence to Rabbi Kripke's son, "Saul Kripke, a Princeton scholar who has been called the world’s greatest living philosopher" (cynics should note that Saul Kripke shot to prominence before his parents were rich).
posted by grobstein at 5:02 PM - 13 comments 57-minutes of a live-stream concert from French composer/musician Yann Tiersen playing from a secret location today.
[more inside]
posted by foxhat10 at 2:18 PM - 14 comments
"Arabic programming languages with the honest goal of bringing coding to a non-Latin culture have been attempted in the past, but have failed without exception. What makes my piece قلب different is that its primary purpose was to illustrate
how impossible coding in anything but English has become."
posted by invitapriore at 1:44 PM - 30 comments Dogs.... Dogs playing "Dueling Banjos"
posted by HuronBob at 12:37 PM - 17 comments
How fast do you read?
(previously.) The average adult allegedly reads 300 words a minute, but if that's too slow,
there are ways to improve it.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:16 AM - 70 comments
Today is the 150th birthday of Elizabeth Jane Seaman, née Cochran -- best known by her pen name
Nellie Bly. She is perhaps most famous for her re-creation of Jules Verne's epic
Around the World in 80 Days, but this real-life Phileas Fogg did it in a record-breaking 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, and
wrote a book about her adventure. She was a pioneering investigative journalist, brave enough to get herself committed to an insane asylum to expose its practices, which resulted in the book
Ten Days in a Mad-House. As she wrote, "I was too impatient to work at the usual duties assigned women on newspapers."
[more inside]
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:21 AM - 24 comments Exactly ten years after one of the most traumatic events in Tulip Time history, festival-goers (and children) are finally afforded a chance to turn a negative into a
positive. Plus, the original
headlines and the awards-filled
aftermath.
posted by saintjoe at 10:19 AM - 5 comments The Supreme Court
ruled (PDF) this morning that the town of Greece, New York did not violate the Constitution
by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:55 AM - 122 comments All of Bach: Every week, you will find a new recording here of one Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1080 works, performed by The Netherlands Bach Society and many guest musicians.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:47 AM - 11 comments
Another day, another Wes Anderson film parody trailer -- this one's for a tasteful, adults-only offering called
The Grand Sausage Pizza. (The NSFW tag is for dialogue and premise, rather than nudity.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 8:07 AM - 13 comments May 4
The Department of Immigration and Border Patrol of Australia's secret blacklist of immigration lawyers and agents has been discovered. DIBP claims that the list is used for "risk assessment" for partner visas and has "no impact" on assessing cases. The Migration Alliance, the lobby group of Australian migration agents that
broke the news of the list,
is not convinced.
posted by divabat at 10:24 PM - 38 comments
For one reason or another, no one has done a thorough evaluation of rock-paper-scissors. That is,
until recently: Zhijian Wang and a group at Zhejiang University in China carried out a study with 360 students recruited from the University. The students were split into 60 groups of six players, and each group played 300 rounds of Rock-Paper-Scissors, with an additional financial incentive to the winners of each group.
Winners stuck with with their selected action, while losers cycled through actions (rock, paper, scissors). No word on how well this works with
expanded versions of the game (
previously).
posted by filthy light thief at 6:42 PM - 24 comments Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology. The fourth book from the
digitalculturebooks imprint of the University of Michigan Press,
Pastplay includes a wide range of essays, all
available online for free. T. Mills Kelly reflects on his historical methods course which resulted in a historical hoax, “the last American pirate,” declared one of the 10 biggest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s first ten years. Matthew Kirschenbaum discusses if board games work better than computer games for teaching history. The book's chapters cover successful combinations of play, technology, and history. Yet, many are wary, as a
"playful approach to teaching and learning with technology can seem like the worst of all possible worlds: the coupling of strategies developed for entertainment with tools created for commerce." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:12 PM - 13 comments
90's Southern Gothic rockers
The Rock*a*Teens have reunited and are going on
tour. Their
unique mixture of dark, swampy rock influences have been praised by
Dan Bejar as "the most underrated American rock ’n roll band of the ’90s," and Will Sheff of
Okkervil River as, "
masterpieces buried in muck." The band features Chris Lopez, who you may know from aughties band
Tenement Halls, and
Kelly Hogan, who's worked with Neko Case. Playlist after the jump.
[more inside]
posted by gorbweaver at 4:41 PM - 16 comments VOMICA is a short horror film about a British commando raid that finds an ancient evil in the crypts and tunnels of occupied France. It recently won Best Short Film prize at the 2014
H P Lovecraft film festival, and is available to watch on Vimeo—for today only—if you go
here and use the password 'mayday'.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 4:26 PM - 27 comments
Have you ever wanted to visit Japan? Enjoy this
tranquil video journey. ありがとう!
[more inside]
posted by taro sato at 3:21 PM - 10 comments Bonding over Bond:
Superego’s Matt Gourley and Matt Mira of
The Nerdist Podcast love James Bond so much they decided to make a podcast about it. Each episode they invite a guest to take a serious — and seriously funny! — deep dive into “the greatest film franchise known to man.” Oh, and it's called
James Bonding! (Of course there are Paul F. Tompkins epsiodes, why do you ask?)
[more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 2:34 PM - 12 comments Inside, please find a list of forty-three movies, TV episodes, and short subjects by
Werner Herzog, all of which can be streamed, along with some short descriptions of their content. One or two of the films are in German without subtitles; this is noted in the description.
[more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 10:40 AM - 61 comments The
Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Projects has been tackling this and other vital subjects from the world of popular culture. As well as the
Winnie the Pooh question, they consider whether
Miley Cyrus really can come on like a wrecking ball, where a
tiny frog gets the extra mass to turn into a human prince,
Sherlock's ability to see dog hairs at a great distance, how many lies
Pinocchio could tell before the weight of his enlarged nose caused his neck to snap and the feasibility of
Gus Fring's last walk. Word of warning: they're all PDFs.
[more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 10:12 AM - 9 comments For the
Explore the North (Dutch) festival held in Ljouwert, Fryslân last year, British electronica group / video slingers Public Service Broadcasting was requested to make two songs/videos over the 1963 Elfstedentocht, perhaps the toughest edition of that tour ever held. Taking footage and voice overs from the Fries Film Archief, the results are
Elfstedentocht part 1 and
Elfstedentocht part 2 (English subtitles in the commentary section). (further reading:
goodnewsfortheinsane explains the Elfstedentocht;
Public Service broadcasting previously.)
posted by MartinWisse at 10:04 AM - 4 comments "
The GOP Has Finally Found a Way to Defeat the Tea Party"
Electability was trumping ideological purity—just as the establishment had planned.
posted by davidstandaford at 9:18 AM - 84 comments In a small gallery of six images wired.co.uk shows how the branded chocolate eggs are created. The pictures don't seem to show you *precisely* how they make get the fondant middle into the 'egg' but the six pictures do illustrate some of the chocolatey magic.
[more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 8:11 AM - 41 comments
In honor of May the Fourth, I present to you more information about Ewoks than you ever cared to know: The Return of the Subaltern (
Part One and
Part Two)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:04 AM - 8 comments May 3
"
Integer BASIC, written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter of the Apple I and original Apple II computers. Originally available on cassette, then included in ROM on the original Apple II computer at release in 1977, it was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners. Thousands of programs were written in Integer BASIC." Metafilter's own
Steve Wozniak discusses
how he wrote BASIC for the original apple from scratch.
(Previously.)
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:41 PM - 51 comments Your mind tells you there is a problem whenever it detects a somewhat possible unpleasant future experience, which it can do all day, and it happily will if you don't call its bluff. Of course there's an infinite supply of potential disasters.
These are just thoughts, but they seem like realities, and any one of them can create an emotional pitfall now no matter what actually happens later.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:06 PM - 25 comments Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever (average people have a vocab of 5,000 words). I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
posted by cthuljew at 6:29 PM - 79 comments Amy Schumer's tale of courage, sex and self-worth as told at the Ms. Foundation Gala. "I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will. I will speak and share and fuck and love and I will never apologize to the frightened millions who resent that they never had it in them to do it."
posted by rogerrogerwhatsyourrvectorvicto at 3:59 PM - 54 comments
This essay by music journalist
Taylor Parkes does an extraordinarily good job of explaining why
Britpop was so deeply and unremittingly
horrible.
[more inside]
posted by motty at 3:08 PM - 81 comments
The poet
Rosemary Tonks turned her back on the literary world in the mid-1970s, leaving behind her a handful of
strange and brilliant poems and a small band of
devoted admirers who longed to know what had happened to her. For forty years she disappeared completely, 'evaporated into air like the Cheshire Cat', as Brian Patten remarked in a 2009 BBC documentary,
The Poet Who Vanished. Now, with news of her death at the age of 85,
the story of her life is starting to emerge.
posted by verstegan at 2:39 PM - 14 comments Abandoned artificial satellites. Tanks jettisoned from shuttles. Refuse generated during space station construction. This junk, space debris, is traveling around the Earth at speeds approaching 8 km/s. This is a story of 2075, a time in which this space garbage has become a serious problem. This is
Planetes, a near-future hard sci-fi story that focuses on a small group of debris collectors who are part of a larger company. Both
the original manga and
the anime adaptation set small personal stories and dramas in the realistic context of near-future space exploration, complete with
radiation sickness,
impacts of growing up on the moon, and of course, the
dangers of space debris. The reality of the show is emphasized by a recent JAXA presentation was titled
PLANETES could be a true story?: Instability of the current debris population in LEO, and the English DVDs include interviews with NASA staff who work on
assessing orbital debris.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:06 PM - 41 comments
Valley of Dolls Eleven years ago, Ayano Tsukimi returned to her home in Nagoro. Confronted with constant departures, she has populated the village with dolls, each representing a former villager. Around 350 of the giant dolls now reside in and around Nagoro, replacing those that died or abandoned the village years ago.
In a recent documentary titled The Valley Of Dolls, Fritz Schumann explores Tsukimi's world, highlighting the time and artistry that goes into making the figures, and explaining her motivations. In it we're shown around a local school, once filled with children and teachers, that now houses dozens of dolls, sitting statically, waiting for class to begin.
posted by infini at 11:16 AM - 13 comments
“He did what he did out of fear,” Michael’s father says now. “He was mentally ill. Not criminally responsible means you’re not morally responsible.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” says Rebecca, who rested her hand on her brother’s shoulder as they walked out of court that day.
How does a family cope when
one of them kills his mother in the midst of a psychotic episode?
posted by MartinWisse at 9:21 AM - 23 comments « Older posts
