quote out of context
“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here,” he told us in Leviathan, “because life itself is but a motion and can never be without desire, or without fear, no more than without sense; there can be no contentment but in proceeding.”
Chicks Who Scorn Chick Flicks
So I think it’s really cool that I am connecting with other chicks who scorn chick flicks. Chicks into “explosions and naked people.” And chicks into Robert Aldrich and Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine and Keith Carradine. And hobo flicks.
Western Motel. U.S. Route 380, Plains, TX 79355
Photo out of context
Jousting on Segways
The Washington Lottery put together a clever advertisement playing on the fantasy of what you might do if suddenly you were rich. Slow-motion fully armored jousting on Segways anyone?
(via autoblog)
headline of the day, II
Idaho Rejects Rape Exception In Abortion Bill Because ‘The Hand Of The Almighty’ Was At Work
The first digital camera
Nikon Rumors points out the first commercially available digital SLR and links to one on ebay. From the Wikipedia article:
The Kodak Professional Digital Camera System or DCS, (unofficially named the DCS 100,) was the first commercially available DSLR camera. It was mounted on a Nikon F3 body and released by Kodak in May 1991. Aimed at the photo journalism market in order to speed up the transmitting of pictures back to the studio or newsroom, the DCS had a resolution of 1.3 megapixels. The DCS 100 was publicly presented for the first time in Arles (France), at the Journées de l’Image Pro by Mr Ray H. DeMoulin, the worldwide President of the Eastman Kodak Company.453 international journalists did attend this presentation that took place in the Palais des Congres of Arles.
I have an F3 as well, minus the digital back.
Longreads and The Browser
Twitter has been helpful finding good articles to post, but in the flood sometimes I forget where I found something or who pointed it out. In that spirit, I was reminded this morning of how good Longreads and The Browser are at aggregating articles that keep my interest. You can follow them on the web, through Twitter, or RSS.
from the comments
Let me tell y’all, you don’t want to be sitting at a funeral and have Dick Thucker occur to you.
from the comments
It was 1987, in Paris, my last night out before leaving. I had been to dinner at a favorite news media hangout (dive of course) that featured belly dancers. I consumed the strange green house drink plus a shellfish paella (I know I know) that I had been avoiding on previous visits. I was quite ill the next day. No details, they make me sick to dwell on. I was stuck in the hotel room except for one quick trip. I sat outside in the sun, trying to get down tea and toast at a little cafe where the waiters had been trying to guess my nationality, slipping checks on the bistro table with an occasional bored query. Irlandaise? Angleterre? La Grece? That last day I said goodbye with the words “Etats-Unis” as I walked away, very very carefully. The taxi to the airport was a nightmare, the wait for the plane, but I made it. I boarded. Suddenly I was okay. I did not want to go home. But I had been off balance for weeks and needed my own country back. I realized then it was my anchor. I asked for tea and a Coke. I made it back.
Christopher Walken’s Doppelganger
That’s pretty much where the similarity ends.
(thanks, @abrayeh)
headline of the day
Georgian woman cuts off web access to whole of Armenia
I have a question
Which is funnier?
a. Dick Thicker
b. Dick Thucker
dear clusterflock
Last time you had food poisoning?
headline of the day?
Gerontophilia
Speaking of birthdays, an article on the little understood predilection for sex with much older partners.
There certainly are individuals for whom the elderly are equated, quite strongly, with the erotic, and it’s these fascinating, little-known souls—referred to in the clinical scientific literature as gerontophiles—to whom we shall now turn. Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his classic 1886 book on sexual deviancy, Psycopathia Sexualis, first described this particular “erotic age orientation.” His definition was brief and nonspecific, describing gerontophilia simply as “the love of persons of advanced age.” Krafft-Ebing offers the case study of a 29-year-old man who reportedly found sex with “old women” pleasurable after being seduced by one when he was a teenager.
(via the browser)
photo out of context
tweet of the day
But ‘as recent research shows, the more human a robot looks, the more likely the Homo sapiens at its controls may be tempted to make the droids go Rambo on their foes’
According to a 2004 Darpa survey, US military officers believe that humanoid robots will begin filling out infantry units as early as 2025. Those android grunts will likely be descendants of Petman, a bipedal Boston Dynamics robot funded by Darpa that walks more gracefully than C-3PO.
And they may take aesthetic cues from Vecna Robotics’ BEAR, a military prototype that features a rounded head studded with soulful Bette Davis eyes.
from the comments
It’s things like this that only reconfirm that humans can no longer be analyzed by the principles of natural selection.
The Assize of Nuisance
Alice Wade, who lived in 14th Century London, could not countenance the smell of her own poo.
headline of the day, II
Horse dreams dashed, German teen turns to cow Luna
Update:
Ghost Crushes
So a new friend, a friend of a friend, revealed her crush on Lee Marvin. And I said, “You know he was one of Bruce Lee’s students, right?”
She thought I was shitting her, but I said no. She says that now she has a total ghost crush and wants me to envision tiny hearts above her head — with Lee Marvin’s bad-ass face in them.
Got any ghost crushes, y’all?
ex-state senator talks about his time in jail
Jeff Smith, a former Missouri politician, is surprisingly open (via):
When I arrived at my unit, I was the only white person, which immediately made me a source of curiosity.
“White-collar?” one guy asked.
“Yup.”
“What you done did?”
“Lied to the feds.”
“Damn, how they know?” asked another.
“One of my best friends was wired.”
A chorus of “Punk-ass motherfucker!”s rained down.
Then somebody said, “Dude need to get chalked.” That was slang, I realized, describing a body at a crime scene.
The chorus went “Hmm-hmmmmm!”
How Facebook scaled
Fascinating read by an anonymous ex-Facebook employee:
In the grand scheme of things, Facebook has scaled incredibly well – obviously on the technical side, where its growth is arguably unprecedented, but also on the organizational side that you ask about. Few companies have absorbed as many new employees as quickly as Facebook has, and with essentially no major problems in the process.
So while I identify a few items below, it should be noted that, overall, these issues are relatively minor to the scaling successes that Facebook has achieved in its relatively short history. I do not mean to cast aspersions on any person or group with any of this, and obviously this all is my personal opinion.
