historical perspective
If Obamacare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is going to be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the war between the states — the Great War of Yankee Aggression.
I remember hearing that phrase for the first time delivered by a 90-something archbishop in a sermon at a summer camp I worked at in Virginia — it was shockingly ridiculously gorgeously idiotically beautiful.
The Cutest Little Dictator Around
“We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other,” Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan tells Haaretz as she explains why she chose to dress up her baby daughter as the most evil historical figures of the 20th century.
Chat Roulette’s Piano Improv Man
One question: could our hooded hero actually be an incognito Ben Folds?
(via)
Musical Stairs
A creative way to promote exercise.
another novel
Or a subplot in the last one:
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was a straight-A nursing student when she abruptly left Colorado last fall with her 6-year-old son and turned up in Ireland, where her parents say she was arrested this week in an alleged plot to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist.
indivisible
Check out this comment thread.
Jihad Jane
There is a novel in the details of this as well.
Colleen LaRose spent long days caring for her boyfriend’s father in a second-floor apartment in Pennsburg, a small town north of Philadelphia.
But online, federal authorities say, the devoted caretaker developed a daring alter ego, refashioning herself as “Jihad Jane” while helping recruit and finance Muslim terrorists — and eventually moving overseas to try to kill an artist she perceived as an enemy to Islam.
it’s all over now, baby blue
This feels transformational: Imagine the Paul Bunyan story calibrated to human creativity. Now imagine a programmer has come up with an algorithm that creates beautiful, organic music, stuff that would have taken years to compose, effortlessly.
Cope thinks the old cliché of beauty in the eye of the beholder explains the situation well: “The dots and lines on paper are merely triggers that set things off in our mind, do all the wonderful things that give us excitement and love of the music, and we falsely believe that somewhere in that music is the thing we’re feeling,” he says. “I don’t know what the hell ’soul’ is. I don’t know that we have any of it. I’m looking to get off on life. And music gets me off a lot of the time. I really, really, really am moved by it. I don’t care who wrote it.”
Good luck on that novel.
(via kottke)
dear clusterflock
Is it only the internal compass that points true north?
Beard Law
In case you were curious about the steps one must take in order to grow a beard at Brigham Young University:
A student who wishes to obtain a beard exception must visit a BYU Student Health Center doctor by appointment. The doctor will fax his recommendation. The student then needs to come to the Honor Code Office to fill out some paperwork and receive the letter allowing the growth of the beard, if approved. If a yearly beard exception is granted, a new Student ID will be issued after the beard has been fully grown, and must be renewed every year by repeating the process.
I didn’t see anything about shape or length. I can only assume such deliberations are left to their shaven Mormon elders.
Subway Sing-A-Long
Musicians in a Times Square subway station convince waiting commuters to sing along with the end of Hey Jude.
from the comments
My little brother died five years ago and, believe me, there is no end to human insensitivity in times like this. I’ve begun to try to think longer about the people who show that rare ability to really listen, empathize, and hold space. Those people are awesome and are perpetually astonishing to me whenever I find them.
from the comments
Lucy:
I think those people wanted to go to bed together and have stilted, regretful sex with Greatest Wagner Arias playing in the background on a poor quality mini HiFi system, surrounded by pictures of their relatives in freemasonry costumes (they themselves would be wearing chicken outfits without quite understanding why). Perhaps they will, now that they are emailing privately.
the spiritual brain
Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say.
New research has found that spirituality has a greater effect on the sex lives of young adults — especially women — than religion, impulsivity, or alcohol.
this is us
Twenty years ago the Voyager 1 space craft beamed back a photograph of our tiny planet.
Carl Sagan on the pale blue dot:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
quote out of context
I have tried to show that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men discernible beneath the chaos of their actions.
from the comments
On the battlefield, we call out to loved ones who are far away.
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.”
moot speaking at TED
I think nonprofits should be the new start-ups:
In a brief question and answer exchange between moot and TED’s Chris Anderson, moot said that money wasn’t the goal of creating 4chan. “The commercial picture is that there really isn’t one,” he said. More laughs, mostly uneasy, and I was left with a sense that many people in the room did not understand. I did, because like 4chan, Ars was started not to make money, but to service a community. Whether or not 4chan has a real commercial future isn’t clear, moot said, but he was going back to school and hoped to apply all he has learned from 4chan to some future venture.
Most of moots discussion (hat tip to waxy), however, centered around 4chan and the power of privacy, particularly in an age when transparency and publicity through social networking is lauded. The whole talk reminds me of why I love the flock’s Christopher Walken.
suspended animation, metabolic flexibility in mammals
Mark Roth is a cellular biologist who has studied using hydrogen sulfide to induce suspended animation as a way to increase the likelihood of survival in both traumatic injury and surgery.
But then you have these freaks of nature. . . . There’s a retrospective study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine ten years ago that shows that 50 percent of people who have been without a heartbeat for three hours [in cold conditions], and are re-warmed appropriately, survive without neurological problems. The people in that study spent at least three hours below 28 degrees. The record is a 29-year-old skier in Norway who went for nine hours. Her core temperature fell to below 14 degrees C. Remember, people are large bags of water; they take a long time to cool off and a long time to re-warm. It took her nine hours to get to a point where they could re-start her heart, and she went on to be the head radiologist in the hospital that treated her.
How’s That?
I’ve got to wonder where they find these respondents.
(via)
nicknamed Inuk
Recent advances in sequencing technologies have allowed scientists to sequence the DNA of a Greenlander who died 4,000 years ago.
The DNA gives strong hints about the man, nicknamed Inuk. “Brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth,” Eske Willerslev, who oversaw the study, told a telephone briefing. Such teeth are characteristic of East Asian and Native American populations.
He had the genes for early hair loss, too. “Because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume he actually died quite young,” Willerslev said.
Dear Clusterflock
Today I quit on an online survey concerning a “buying experience”; the only reason I was doing it was because it kept popping up in my mail and taking it seemed the quickest way to make it go away. But I came to a question that pissed me off and made me delete the whole thing. It asked me to indicate my “position” in my household: was I the Head of household? The spouse of the Head of household? A dependent of the Head of household? and so on. Do you find yourself thinking as I do that the whole notion of there necessarily being A head of household is archaic? In my view, the whole thing smacks of that Southern Baptist insistence that women “submit” to the will of their husbands, which I find to be one of many reprehensible notions they espouse. Can’t we get past the whole Command Structure thing? Is this just me going off, or do you have feeling about this?
werewolf evolution
A short interview with Rick Baker, the makeup artist behind An American Werewolf in London and Thriller, about the transformation of his art in the digital era.
Wired: Have you worried that your work can’t keep up with evolving technology?
Baker: I had that concern. I wondered whether today’s kids, who grew up on CG, would accept a guy covered in yak hair. But I actually embrace digital stuff now — I do it for fun. I was heavily involved in the digital work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I like any trick that helps me achieve what I can’t with rubber. I try to make the right choice for the circumstances of the movie.
Patrick Stewart on the internet, iPhone, and games
Glad to see Patrick and I share the same feeling about letters and phone calls.
via waxy