Snakes’ Feat May Inspire Heart Drugs
Pythons are known for their enormous appetites. In a single meal they can devour animals at least as big as they are — deer, alligators, pigs, household pets.
I’m meeting Sarah in Chicago for dinner Wednesday evening.
a little car porn
What does a twin turbo V-8 sound like?
trusting the machine
Isn’t it really a perennial problem? It’s just the authority is an algorithm instead of a human being:
High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?
Hey, Amanda
headline of the day
How to make your own feral raccoon suit
Font for Sarah
We haven’t given anything away in a while, and yesterday Sarah mentioned being in love with this font. I set up a PayPal donation button you can contribute to below. The font family is $199. What we contribute more than that we can use to buy someone else something. (If you want something, let us know in comments, and we’ll see what we can do.) Happy Monday.
Update: $159 $84 $65 $55 $40 $20 $15 to go.
Black Mirror — Thought Controlled Siri
Some hobbyist hackers have rigged up an iPhone 4S to collect brain wave patterns from some simple ECG pads, translate them into synthesized speech, which is in turn pumped through the 3.5 mm headphone jack, and recognized by Siri as a usable command. Besides pressing the home key to initiate Siri, all you have to do is think your command, and your iPhone 4S will hop to it. The engineers expect that they’ll even be able to eliminate the need to press the home key, making it fully automatic. So far, the guys at Project Black Mirror have been able to link 25 brain wave patterns to specific Siri commands. Of course, right now the project is a bulky Arduino test board hooked up to a Macbook, which also occupies the headphone jack, and makes the user look like he belongs in Clockwork Orange, but these guys are putting up a Kickstarter page shortly to get funding and turn this thing into a real product.
I guess I should say this would be pretty easy to fake, but when Siri was announced I told my sister-in-law in ten years Siri would be in our heads. Maybe I was too pessimistic. Here’s the Black Mirror blog, so you can follow along.
Update: Mind-controlled Siri likely a hoax
(thanks, Joel)
quotes out of context
Her aggressiveness was not of this world. She broke them all down.
Insiders get them, outsiders do not but do not realize they do not, and everyone is happy.
There’s even a seminal (no pun intended) paper on squirrel masturbation.
There, it’s all better now. You’re welcome.
Remembrance Sunday
From Derek Jarman’s film of Britten’s “War Requiem”.
Maybe it’s because my maternal grandmother died in the autumn of 1918. Or maybe it’s the set of cast-metal doughboys (my Uncle Mont’s toys?) I played with as a child. But the Great War has always felt closer to me than that other world war that ended a decade before I was born.
I posted this, inspired by the “War Requiem,” my first year as a flocker.
And I began to post remembrances each year thereafter.
More Destruction Party
The posters are done, my hair is washed, 128 people have RSVP’d for the premiere tonight. We’re going to figure out a Google Hangout soon for all Flockers to watch the movie if they want to, but let me get through today first.
Here’s an embarrassing video where people say nice things about me and you can see everyone scurrying around on-set.
This has been a crazy year. Almost the punchline to a joke I can’t quite remember.
“Oh man, 2011.”
“Yeah, that’s a good one.”
from the moderated comments
she’s dyslexic that’s why she have this problem…and I understand every word she says…she’s a good woman…and if this crazy did this fkn comment about Cher is cause don’t have a life…if people wouldn’t understand what she says she wouldn’t have so many followers…and she have around all the people that love her so I guess….that comment…is nothing for her…
things to see in Rome when you think you’ve seen it all
Being that I’m on a moratorium against photographs on my own blog, I’ll break my sight-silence (sitence?) to show you some things you might otherwise not know about:
headline of the day
High blood pressure makes some socially awkward
Photo out of context
The Vespa Quarantasei
It’s a concept vehicle, so it’s hard to tell how much of the design will make it to production, but the Vespa Quarantasei is lovely in its potential.
quote out of context
I suppose you’re right, but from my experience, writing a novel is like having sex with a gorilla. You ain’t done till the gorilla’s done. You might think, Well, when I’m done, I’ll be done. But you’re not done.The gorilla’s still going.
from the moderated comments
Come on ppl! twitter limits ones tweets…not always easy to express ones thoughts in 140 characters! Like you’ve nvr hit the wrong key…like you’ve nvr mispelled a word…like you’ve nvr had your lock cap on and not realize it. If you follow @cher and are awake when she does tweet you’d understand what she’s talking about…she’s actually answering ppls questions unlike most celebs on twitter. She talks to her fans and even the “haters”. If you don’t like her tweets don’t follow…and leave your comments to yourself! Quite honestly it’s an honor to be talking to such a mega star!!!! Don’t fk with @cher!!!!
Legendary Cities
I absolutely love these. Atelier Olschinsky’s Legendary Cities.
from the moderated comments
WTF? If u don’t freakin like her tweets, don’t freakin read them. She’s awesome. Don’t u have anything better to do then this with ur time?
Dead Pheasants
Creative-type Julian Harriman-Dickenson has been creating a body of work by scanning the bodies of dead birds and manipulating the resulting images:
Butcher’s counters aren’t renowned for their aesthetic allure and even the best taxidermy is frequently unnerving (something about those cold dead eyes). But Julian Harriman-Dickinson of Harriman Steel has created a body of work that defies this contention, taking a brace of dead pheasants and creating some truly striking visual imagery.
The feathery mix of colors and patterns are undeniably beautiful and the subject matter has me pondering exactly where I find beauty and why I find particular subjects moving. It’s a strange feeling — I’m told this is called art.
the most disturbing thing I’ve read today
When things blew up, we didn’t say to ourselves, “maybe it’s not possible to engineer a low-risk 6% annual return on assets” or “maybe it’s not possible for everyone a demographically mature population to expect to spend as much time out of the workforce as in it.” Instead, we search for the fault in the system: were pension fund managers too incompetent? Bankers too greedy and clever about searching for loopholes? Regulators too lax? Did we write the rules governing bank risk capital wrong?
Discovering that we can’t all achieve higher risk-free returns by piling into mortage securities, we do not question the premise that there is some way to achieve attractive risk free returns on a mass scale; instead, we direct the banks to pile into OECD sovereign debt. Having created a bubble in OECD sovereign debt that is about to end disastrously, bankers and regulators are undoubtedly even now searching for a “truly” risk free security that they can use to backstop their deposits.
Let us instead consider the possibility that this thing may not exist. There may be no way for us all to enjoy steady, low-risk capital appreciation, or to exit the workforce whenever work becomes difficult. There may be no way to engineer these possibilities into being.
And that’s counting Cher’s twitter feed.
Cher is on Twitter
Ok, I imagine this may not be breaking news to some, but did you know Cher is on Twitter and is incomprehensible?
I discovered this via The Oatmeal:
tweet of the day
No Mums and Pansies Here
“We begin, often enough, by hoping to knock the neighbors’ eyes out with the largest mass of color since the lions ate the Christians.” Garden writer Henry Mitchell.
I have my own variation of Henry’s ways. When it gets cold, I like to bust out South American tropicals to keep the pumpkins company. I. Will. Not. Submit.
