tweet of the day, II
(Why don’t we have a “Kids these days” category?)
tweet of the day
If My Apartment Were Within Your Sight Line (I)
Fart Machine No. 2
The Great Rupert (1950) | For Cindy
In which a multi-talented squirrel aids an impoverished family of vaudevillians (headed by Jimmy Durante) by stealing cash their landlord has stashed in a wall.
quote out of context
He hands out three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like “THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.” His starting rate is three hundred and sixty dollars an hour.
‘If protocells like these can be reliably paired with a fully-functional mirror biochemistry, the first truly alien life form may not come from a distant planet, but from a petri dish in a research lab’
Small steps toward understanding, and replicating, the origins of life:
Two simultaneous but distinct approaches have defined the work on the origins and biochemical diversity of life. One approach is from within, following paths that begin with existing Terran biochemistry and move away from its set of molecules and networks in search for alternatives. The other approach is from outside, following paths from plausible prebiotic initial conditions. Both approaches have scored recent breakthroughs. John Sutherland’s lab (University of Manchester), in a brilliant example of systems chemistry, has performed a synthesis of nucleotides—building blocks of genetic molecules like DNA and RNA—in which two of a nucleotide’s crucial parts, the base and the sugar, emerge as a single unit under natural conditions. Moving in the opposite direction, George Church’s lab at Harvard has achieved the successful synthesis of functioning ribosomes—the molecular machines that read genetic code and make the proteins for cells.
things I hadn’t posted
Detroit’s RoboCop Statue Is Funded
Child’s Remains Reveal Ice Age Burial Practices
Cosmic census finds crowd of planets in our galaxy
Match Each Wrestling Move to Its Awesome Name
Engineered Viruses Boost Memory Recall in Mice
Iran objects to London 2012 Olympics logo
Left-Handedness Loses Its Stigma but Retains Its Mystery
Nerd-Fi, Spooky Art Flicks, Eccentric Docs: SXSW Film Fest’s Great Unknowns
Nevada Politicians Debate an Older Profession
New View of How Humans Moved Away From Apes
The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?
The Epic Battle Behind the Apollo Spacesuit
Thinking Your Way Through Traffic in a Brain-Control Car
photo out of context
from the comments
This man would love to sneeze.
from the comments
Mr. B. has a friend whose mother would not let him have a computer or use hers. She is a physician and felt he could use his time in a more fruitful way. He was 12 or 13. He went online at school or a friend’s and described his problem on some computer forum. People started sending him parts, some of them broken, some from halfway around the globe. The kid built himself a computer.
Bonus:
The mother said uncle, Shelia.
stay classy Rush
The Japanese have done so much to save the planet. He’s right. They’ve given us the Prius. Even now, refugees are still recycling their garbage, and yet Gaia levels them [laughs], just wipes them out. Wipes out their nuclear plants, all kinds of radiation. What kind of payback is this? That is an excellent question. They invented the Prius. In fact, where Gaia blew up is right where they make all these electric cars. That’s where the tsunami hit. All those brand new electric cars sitting there on the lot. I like the way this guy was thinking. It’s like — it’s like Gaia hit the Prius in [inaudible]. It’s like they were in the crosshairs, if we can use that word, it does. What is Gaia trying to tell us here? What is the mother of environmentalism trying to say with this hit?
late night
Do you ever hear two people got together and think, I’m sorry for both of them?
Dear Clusterflock – Plaid candy eggs?
A conversation I had this evening, to frame the question:
LC: How does Cadbury stay in business when they only do these candy eggs once a year?
CW: They sell other candy, you just don’t know about it. That’s like saying, “How does Burberry stay in business just selling plaid scarves?”
LC: They sell other plaid things too.
Now the question: Is it appropriate to eat egg-shaped candy this long before Easter?
(LC is the lady companion. CW is humbly yours, this Christopher Walken.)
the iSwindle™
Matilda re-imagined for the digital age. You’ll want to read the whole thing.
(via)
tweet of the day
Flannery got me a new shirt
This is only a [fucking] test
Repeat: This is only a [fucking] test, designed to see whether this time Twitter picks up on a clusterpost with ‘fucking’ in the title.
This is only a [fucking] test.
Apparent ‘fucking’
I suspect that what Joel noted in his comment on Ngram’s revelation of apparent early uses of the term meme might reflect the limitations of current OCR technology.
Related: this letter written by Henry Phillips and published in the LRB of March 3, 2011:
Jenny Diski is mistaken in implying in her piece on Google’s Ngram Viewer that there was a golden age of swearing (LRB, 20 January). The apparent prevalence of the word fuck in the period before 1820, and its complete disappearance for more than a century thereafter, can be explained by the end of the use in printing of the ‘long s’, which modern optical character recognition sees as an ‘f’. All the apparent ‘fucking’ before then is actually just ‘sucking’. Diski is also mistaken is saying that there is no way of telling how the words were used. All the scanned, digitised books are fully searchable by date range: a single click on the ‘fuck’ search page would have taken her to several examples that would have made her realise her initial error. Needless to say, there are hours of adolescent fun to be had with this.
I do think that perhaps not all of the apparent ‘fucking’ was in fact ‘sucking’, but the point is nonetheless sound.
Greplin
Greplin aggregates all your social media so you can easily search it. It was made by a nineteen year old.
Visualizing the earthquake
Jaw dropping visuals that put some intelligible measure on the destructive scope of the Japanese Earthquake.
Chain World
The Minecraft mod you (or I) will probably never play:
Chain World is the brainchild of Sleep is Death/Inside A Star-Filled Sky creator Jason Rohrer, it’s a Minecraft world that lives on USB drive. Only one person may have access to that drive at any one time. Should they die in-game, a special script wipes the save game from their PC but clones it, with a fresh character, onto the USB stick, which must then be passed onto the next player. No replays. No do-evers. Once the world ends, it ends for you – but it carries on for just one other person.
That next player receives, and must play in, a world created and shaped by their predecessor, and by those who preceded him or her. Every player must obey these commandments:
1. Run Chain World via one of the included “run_ChainWorld” launchers.
2. Start a single-player game and pick “Chain World”.
3. Play until you die exactly once.
3a. Erecting wooden signs with text is forbidden
3b. Suicide is permissible.
4. Immediately after dying and respawning, quit to the menu.
5. Allow the world to save.
6. Exit the game and wait for your launcher to automatically copy Chain World back to the USB stick.
7. Pass the USB stick to someone else who expresses interest.
8. Never discuss what you saw or did in Chain World with anyone.
9. Never play again.
I have never wanted to play a game more.
Land of Disaster
A photo essay about Japan’s cultural view towards disaster. Worth a look/read.
quote out of context
Not all experts are comfortable with the idea that a strange force is mysteriously tugging the universe apart.
“You’ve been described as a more hard-line atheist than Richard Dawkins. Do you think that is a fair comment?”
From an interview with British Chemist, Peter Atkins:
As a scientist, how do you think philosophy can help society? Do you think it does have a place?
Moral philosophy is useful; political philosophy is useful. They help solve those conundrums relating to deportment of individuals in societies. In terms of science, I think it has nothing to contribute. I think science goes out and looks at what the world is like. Philosophers sit around, either reflecting on what the world should be like or telling scientists that they can’t believe their own observations!
