Chicken
Image removed at photographer’s request.
The photographer: JR.
(hat tip to Mike)
A very nifty twitter aggregator
STL Tweets is only for Saint Louis, but it was created with locative extensibility in mind. Using a secret sauce, it aggregates local tweets into categories and subcategories and finds the most linked articles and pictures. It’s more compelling to look at than explain; needless to say, this is precisely the sort of thing that should have existed for awhile, but hasn’t (at least, not well implemented). Kudos to the folks at Infuz for pulling it off.
One thing I did notice was that an occasional non-STL tweet would make it into the fray or it would flat out miss some users in the STL area. There is nothing that can be done about that, apparently, unless twitter fixes its hidden fail whales in the geocode search API.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
quote out of context
“I don’t see,” Gruber concludes, “how Apple can get from where they are to where they need to be when they are negotiating with people that stupid.”
Y’all
Happy John Frum Day!
the biology of design
The biological effects of what you drive:
Theory
Scientists have spent over a hundred years formulating theories to explain the existence of Aston Martins. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen published his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he postulated that we buy expensive things not so much for their inherent qualities, but for the attention we receive as we experience said object. He predicted the rise of modern image-driven marketing, which accords value to things exactly because they are expensive and seemingly exclusive — the reason why people pay a premium for a Lexus RX over its mechanical twin the Toyota Highlander. In Veblen’s worldview, Aston Martins exist because of how they make other people feel, ejector seats or no.
Practice
Saad and Vongas had 39 male college students drive two different cars for an hour each, first in crowded city (lek) and then in open highway (non-lek) environments. The cars? One was a clapped-out 1990 Camry wagon with almost 200,000 miles on the clock. The other was a 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet. During their drives in each car, drivers had saliva samples taken to evaluate changes in testosterone levels while in the lek (city driving with lots of witnesses) and out of the lek (on the highway, with nobody there to witness their driving). To eliminate testosterone level variations due to individuals slaking their need for speed, each student promised not to burst posted speed limits.
I’ve posted on this before, but it’s always interesting.
the newly discovered Sundaland clouded leopard
“Despite our powerful spot lights and the roar of our vehicle’s engine, it walked around our vehicle calmly,” he told AFP.
MURDER! and Descartes
Was Descartes murdered by a Catholic Priest? There’s reason to believe so:
According to Theodor Ebert, an academic at the University of Erlangen, Descartes died not through natural causes but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest.
Ebert believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the poison because he feared Descartes’s radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to Catholicism by the monarch of protestant Sweden. “Viogué knew of Queen Christina’s Catholic tendencies. It is very likely that he saw in Descartes an obstacle to the Queen’s conversion to the Catholic faith,” Ebert told Le Nouvel Observateur newspaper.
[...] Descartes, who had been summoned in 1649 to tutor Queen Christina, was regarded with suspicion by many of his theological coreligionists. His theories were viewed as incompatible with the belief of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine served during the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Christ. “Viogué was convinced that … his metaphysics were more in line with Calvinist ‘heresy’,” said Ebert.
Poison-laced communion wafers? Sounds like the punch-line to a really bad PZ Myers joke.
(tip)
Largely why I was hated in high school
Phil once asked somthing like “is there a photo of yourself you wouldn’t show someone?” This would be it, if I were showing it. The dude on the left was my neighbor to the north of our house in the background. We shared a driveway.
There’s an Explanation for That
Vice Magazine, like everyone else, is checking the Creation Museum off of their to-do list. The above snapshot is from the museum’s explanation regarding the inevitable incest that would befall the family of a literal Adam & Eve.
It seems like science you could hang your hat on.
dear clusterflock
Where do you live?
Flames, a heroic person, a low angle so it sort of thins out my face
alien
via boingboing
Thrashing around somewhere in a swamp of its own legislation
Mark Thomas takes on the Digital Economy Bill.
via @glinner
dear clusterflock
Do you pull your socks all the way up?
Magnum archives sold to Dell, curated by the Ransom Center
The famed Magnum photojournalism archive (the rights to the photos are still owned by the photographers) has been sold to Michael Dell and will be curated, for the next five years, at the Henry Harry Ransom Center in Austin.
The boxes are marked with three-initial codes. I haven’t quite broken the codes that correspond to all the photographers. Robert Capa is CAR but then also BOB which is funny. Bob.
early Shelby Cobra racer up for auction
Thank you, Cindy.
Not only is Cindy Scroggins a performance artist, but she is an information specialist. If ever you are looking for lodging in the Dallas area, you just call up Cindy. She will not steer you wrong.
At The La Quinta Uptown, some of the rooms have heat. Mine even had hot running water for two or three minutes. If you want to wash but your timing is off, you can fill the sink with cold water, then add water you’ve boiled in the coffeemaker and give yourself a whore’s bath.
Read more
Living Architectures
There’s an interesting exhibit, “Living Architectures,” going on now for those in NYC at the Storefront for Art & Architecture (conveniently across the street from La Esquina where you can get a taco after).
“Living Architectures” is a series of films that seeks to develop a way of looking at architecture which turns away from the current trend of idealizing the representation of our architectural heritage. The cult of perfect, disembodied forms entirely devoid of people, inevitably leads to a break-up between architecture and living space.”
For example, in Koolhaas, the P.O.V. follows the maid and window cleaners as they go about cleaning this sterile & automated home. Here’s the trailer from this one:
Bowl of cereal.
Today I got up 4:48pm, had a bowl of cereal and then spent the rest of the day on my computer. I worked on some music, surfed 4chan, then remembered moot was supposed to be talking at TED2010 and after a series of links made it to here. I’d say today has been a pretty good day.
Hey, Deron
Maserati Quattroporte Hearse
Old Nintendo sells for $13,105
Last week, North Carolina eBay user lace_thongs35 thought she was putting up an everyday, 80s-era Nintendo Entertainment System (together with five games) up on the popular auction site. But less than an hour after the first bid, the price was over $6,000 — and on Wednesday, when the auction closed, the final selling price topped $13,000.
It wasn’t the console that was worth so much.
hypothetically,
say a guy were thinking about moving down to Austin, TX: what should he expect to find and what would the job market look like, what kind of industries are big there?
Sky
Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
Read more about the project HERE.
