Dastardly plots
The perils of losing one’s grip on reality:
Belief in conspiracy theories can be comforting. If everything that goes wrong is the fault of a secret cabal, that relieves you of the tedious necessity of trying to understand how a complex world really works. And you can feel smug that you are smart enough to “see through” the official version of events. [...]
In his book “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History”, David Aaronovitch argues that conspiratorial fantasy can have dangerous real-world consequences. Hitler read and believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bogus account of a global Jewish conspiracy. So did the founders of Hamas.
There was a brief period of time in college when I, too, found comfort in blaming the Bush cabinet for the events of 9/11. It was around that time when a certain video circulated, asking questions about the Pentagon’s destruction. Of course, I soon recognized my own reasons for distrust and the theories dried up.
Do you believe — or have you ever believed — in a conspiracy theory?
quote out of context
The title of Rawlings’ book is a reference to Jones’ estate, which was formerly the home of the late author A.A. Milne, author of “Winnie the Pooh,” which features the character Christopher Robin.
Well, are you?
New York City’s public health officials have unveiled a graphic new ad campaign:
The ad does raise the interesting issue of what, exactly, fat looks like.
“We had to make sure it looked like real human fat,” said Ms. Nonas, of the health department. “We did want those little blood vessels and things like that.”
Naked Man
I ask you this: can you imagine a man naked in public that isn’t angry?
An angry, naked man commandeered a school bus full of teenage students Thursday in Atlanta, police said.
Ecological apple
Experimental short,
2009.
Hat tip, Eyeteeth.
How to write a song.
Andrew Bird discusses his time spent recording at the Wilco Loft:
In the studio, a number of things can conspire to turn the natural act of making music into an awkward dance. First there is no audience, no one to impress. Second is the temptation to be too careful, to isolate every sound and not let it migle with other sounds. The third deals with the voice, the most personal and vulnerable instrument. Recording vocals can be fraught with aural illusions akin to the weirdness of hearing your own voice on your answering machine. ”That’s not me, is it?” You sing into a device that converts your voice into an electric current, which travels through wires and gadgets to a tape machine. You scrutinize that voice, make adjustments to your proximity to the microphone, switching between “head voice” and “chest voice.” When you belt it out it almost always sounds thin and small but when you sing quiet, close and intimate it sounds thick, warm and huge — but then it can lose gusto. Recording is full of counterintuitive stuff like this, so you can see how quickly the original sentiment of a song can get derailed.
survival mode
Three men adrift for eight days in the Gulf of Mexico have been rescued.
“About the fourth or fifth day we started hallucinating about people dropping off food and water,” Phillips said. “And we were talking to them, but they weren’t there,” Phillips said.
You don’t ever just see a fish practically just chilling like that
3.16 Billion Cycles
An attempt to visualize change over 100 years:
A 60 rpm (revolutions per minute) motor drives the entire mechanism. It rotates once every second. The following pulley rotates once every 5 seconds (1:5 ratio). The next rotates once every 60 seconds or 1 minute. Then 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, and 1 decade. The decade wheel carries the load of the large arc. The large arc rotates once every century. The final ratio between the 60 rpm motor and the large arc is approximately 1:31.6 billion.
Each wheel is marked with a black nut to highlight a position that could be tracked over time. Along the arc, 100 lines mark the divisions of each passing year. When the clock finally reaches the end of a 100 year cycle, the arc falls off its track onto the floor.
The most commented-on recipe on Epicurious
Pretweeting
It makes twitter a game by assigning words monetary value. Trending words are more valuable, so the goal is to predict what will trend and scoop it up before the value gets too high. Think day trading game with twitter words. (via)
the placebo effect is getting stronger
It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.
But first, a little history.
The roots of the placebo problem can be traced to a lie told by an Army nurse during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of southern Italy. The nurse was assisting an anesthetist named Henry Beecher, who was tending to US troops under heavy German bombardment. When the morphine supply ran low, the nurse assured a wounded soldier that he was getting a shot of potent painkiller, though her syringe contained only salt water. Amazingly, the bogus injection relieved the soldier’s agony and prevented the onset of shock.
A little context.
By attempting to dominate the central nervous system, Big Pharma gambled its future on treating ailments that have turned out to be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect.
Holy fuck:
Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary. By the late ’90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail. Conversely, Prozac performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa. It was an unsettling prospect: FDA approval could hinge on where the company chose to conduct a trial.
And much much more.
Swiss Spaghetti Harvest 1957
An old one but a good one.
Federer’s Footwork
Geoff Macdonald analyzes how the Federer’s footwork affects his fore and backhand. (via Schenkenberg)
L’homme sans tête
(Via @pipsan)
Am I alone in hearing
an echo of Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” in the verses of “We Are the Champions”?
Social justice
via Cosmic Variance
The Corvette Club down here
has a showing in the Hooters parking lot. Here’s Smitty’s newest acquisition–a ‘65 convertible Stingray.
(If you look hard you can see his yellow 2008 reflected in the side panel.)
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
Sending this message was important to us.
(via @johndiesattheen)
An Unfortunate Twitter Juxtaposition
(via unfocused)
Borneo. Bor-Ne-O.
Hazards Of Loving Creatures
A beautiful musical contribution by fellow flocker Barry Stone, AKA In Mountains In Stars. The mish-mash of stolen film is by me and uploaded at Barry’s request as he has a wonky Internet at present. Barry sent me the song and I went and stole clips from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror and the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter.
Just my interpretation of how the song made me feel, but it really is all about the lovely song. If you prefer viewing it on Youtube I have uploaded it there also.
Thank you, Barry for asking me to do it. It was an honour.
More stalking and shooting from the hip
For Cindy
Once, when Nadeau was still living in south St. Louis, a neighbor found out he did taxidermy. “She’d had a Persian cat in her freezer for twenty years,” he remembers. “She wanted me to mount it like a beanbag so she could put it in different poses. The cat was all crystallized; it had crystals all over its face. I told her that once it’s mounted, you can’t put it in different poses. It kind of freaked me out a bit.”
—Mount My Squirrel! Local taxidermist Rick Nadeau has a lot of fun with his “little buddies,” Aimee Levitt, Riverfront Times, August 10, 2009
I brought a copy of this newspaper home from St. Louis (this was the week’s cover story; consider that for a moment) so that I could mail it to you, but then I realized that the article was probably online. Now everybody gets to share it.
Man with a Van
Man In Van from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.
(When I figure out how I found this, I’ll let you know.)