The Amish Project
A 24-year-old student went 90 days without using a cell phone, email or social media. Yahoo News interviewed him about the experience:
I definitely just lost complete contact with people that normally would have been part of my life. I mean it’s also an interesting metric for your life to see who some of your closest friends are, you know, and who’s willing to take the time.
I find it an interesting thought experiment to contrast this idea with Clusterflock, which is the clearest example in my life of the relationship-building power of the internet and social technology. The internet made it possible to seek out an entirely new tribe of people – people with which I have so much in common and so much to talk about, but that I hadn’t realized existed.
But then there are social networks like Facebook, which at their worst takes all of the people who are already part of your life – your co-workers, your school chums, your family – and hands them a level of intimacy about our lives that they haven’t really earned and don’t particularly deserve. I think that’s why it’s so interesting when these online relationships predicated on intimate knowledge but passive communication go bust when one party pulls out of Facebook – we’re just learning a hard lesson about the differences between that kind of intimate knowledge and true friendship, which for the longest time I thought were one and the same.
A couple relatives recently found me on Google Plus (I use it primarily for the sad remnants of what was once Google Reader). I hadn’t even acknowledged their existence before they were already commenting on every single piece of information attached to my name. This, I’m told, is keeping in touch.
headline of the day
Should a Life Coach Have a Life First?
The Six Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In
Look, we’re idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it’s probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC’ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be.
(via @tylercowen)
“It’s killing that is very distant but also very personal,” says anthropologist Neta Bar. “I would even say intimate.”
Chris Kyle is the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. He was deployed to Iraq in 2003, and killed 255 people in six years.
A crowd had come out to greet them. Through the scope he saw a woman, with a child close by, approaching his troops. She had a grenade ready to detonate in her hand.
“This was the first time I was going to have to kill someone. I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to do it, man, woman or whatever,” he says.
“You’re running everything through your mind. This is a woman, first of all. Second of all, am I clear to do this, is this right, is it justified? And after I do this, am I going to be fried back home? Are the lawyers going to come after me saying, ‘You killed a woman, you’re going to prison’?”
But he didn’t have much time to debate these questions.
“She made the decision for me, it was either my fellow Americans die or I take her out.”
He pulled the trigger.
(via the browser)
Photographers pose with their most famous photographs
Tim Mantoani took photographs of famous photographers holding their most iconic images:
The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like.
Tim Mantoani hopes to change that by taking portraits of famous photographers holding their most iconic or favorite photos in his new book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. Mantoani has shot over 150 of these portraits in the last five years, most of which are contained in the book.
The photograph above is Neil Leifer holding his photo of Ali and Liston taken on May 25, 1965.
And he also has a fuckable butt
The trailer for Matt Lenski’s Meaning of Robots:
The benevolent Mike Sullivan, age 65, has been shooting an epic stop-motion robot sex film in his apartment for the last 10 years. Obsessed with constructing the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands of them.
(thanks, Sarah)
Simon Biswas, The Light of Day
A short documentary of brief interviews with elderly New Yorkers:
I don’t have answers, even at this stage of the game. I have no answers.
Beautiful and heartbreaking.
(thanks, Chris)
Goodbye
by Kim Noble
(Did you spot the stormtrooper?)
posted by Pete
from the comments
People are always nicer someplace else. The rotten little shits.
“The world is becoming a zoo,” says Linden — speaking from the human point of view
Stray dogs figure out how to use Moscow’s subway system to get downtown to neighborhoods where the food is better.
For years, a house cat in England takes the public bus to get around town, unbeknownst to its owner.
A jungle leopard in India, needing to cross a swollen river with its cub, gets a man to ferry her and her cub across in his canoe.
Dolphins at a dolphin show in Hawaii instantly figure out a mistake their trainers have made and cover for them pretty well, preventing embarrassment all around.
The wild ocean cousins of those “tame” show dolphins have a long-standing partnership with fishermen along the coasts of both Brazil and Bengal that means more fish for all.
In Western Australia’s Shark Bay, wild dolphins being studied by scientists from Harvard, appear themselves to be studying the humans — including this reporter.
And other examples of animal intelligence.
(via marginal revolution)
You can’t just toss an old surplus turbojet engine into a homemade chassis anymore and go for it
Waldo Stakes wants to build a rocket car to beat the current land-speed-record of 763.035 by 1273 mph.
Moving his family to Southern California in 1984 to be closer to the aerospace industry, Stakes was soon scouring scrapyards for parts he could use to build a rocket car. His most impressive find is a set of XLR99 rocket engines designed for NASA’s legendary X-15, the stub-winged experimental plane that grabbed the flight speed record of 4520 mph in 1967 and has never let go. “Back in the ’80s this stuff was considered scrap metal, and everyone was melting it down to recover the silver and gold from the brazed tubing,” Stakes says. “But these engines weren’t built that way. They’re made from Inconel-X [an exotic alloy] and virtually indestructible. I think they cost $1500 each for four. I have two left. One for the car and a spare.”
The Lake, The Hood & The Golf Course
After we’d talked for a while, we got in my rental car and went for a drive around his ward. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not for us,” Knowles said, as we rode through Harbor Shores. “It’s not for poor people.” I had asked Knowles if he slept at City Hall, and he took me by his house, which he said he rents for about $250 a month. “I don’t sell dope,” he volunteered, explaining how he pays his rent. “I come out and hustle — electrical jobs, cutting grass, whatever.” […]
When I dropped him back at City Hall, Knowles got out of the car and said goodbye, then poked his head back in the passenger window. “Hey,” he said, “can you spare a couple of bucks so I can get myself a bag of chips and a pop?”
This is an excerpt from Jonathan Mahler’s Simon-esque piece on Benton Harbor, Michigan, for the NYT Magazine a few weeks back. The bit above is from a conversation Mahler has with an unemployed Benton Harbor resident who is also a city commissioner for one of the city’s poorest wards.
For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in the area and my family has lived there for a few generations. The article is a longer piece focusing on the city’s socio-economic problems and new divisions over a golf course and property development on Lake Michigan called Harbor Shores, which is hoped to improve the impoverished city’s attractiveness for future investment. The only problem is that most of the developers and proponents for Harbor Shores are affluent and white, while most of Benton Harbor is impoverished and black – oh, and the golf course was built on a chunk of the city’s one nice park at the lakefront.
It’s a feature worth reading and not just because it’s about the clashes between a city’s residents and a group of well-intentioned (if not woefully ignorant) outsiders that believe they can solve deeply-rooted problems of poverty and crime by introducing the game of golf. I like to think it’s also because Mahler turned my old stomping grounds into a moral fable for today’s social, cultural and economic divisions.
Eva Zeisel dies, age 105
Eva Zeisel, known for her playful and graceful ceramics, has died at the age of 105.
“She’s a conduit to pure things,” Mr. Klein said in 2007. He recalled that Ms. Zeisel, who had a strong appreciation of the history of decorative arts and a personal acquaintance with most of the modern design movements of the 20th century, told him never to try to create anything new. Asked how to make something beautiful, he said, she replied, “You just have to get out of the way.”
We have four or five of her pieces and they please me every time I see them.
Because, there you are
One of my favorite parts of Hillman Curtis’s book on Creating Short Films is that as soon as you turn the camera on, the person you are interviewing is there. You don’t have to do anything. They will show you who they are. I may not be remembering that part exactly right, but I’m not going to look it up, because it’s true.
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
awesome image out of context
via Rocketboom
New Christmas Catalog Price List
There are a bunch of good’uns.
Swimming Like a Dolphin
Franky Zapata uses a flyboard to zoom in and out of the water and leap through the air.
It’s like a jetpack for water.
(via ★jkottke)
Excerpt with minimal context
She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. “Did you get the graham crackers?”
“Yes,” he answered.
She moved toward him in her old slippers. He thought they looked like rabbits.
coming out of sleep
I like my sentences like my women: with colons.
your inner fish
These are fantastic.
(thanks, Rich)
What does it feel like to be alive?
Mich Kemeter on the Taft Point in Yosemite, CA is walking unprotected a 30m /99 feet long highline both ways.
(via ★slyoyster)
Life in a Day
Any of you watched Life in a Day? I watched it this afternoon as part of my Funemployment. I liked it, put together by many, “directed” by the Scott brothers (Ridley and Tony). I’d like to see other directors take the 4,500 hours of video submitted and do their own take. A sort of “Aristocrats” for directors.
I put a post up before it happened. I didn’t see anyone familiar in the film.
Test Your Morality
That autism quiz seemed to go over like gangbusters so here’s another quiz for a lazy pre-holiday afternoon.
This is a scientific test sponsored by the BBC to help scientists with their science. It’s all highly scientific and not at all a dumb personality test that you take to see how you stack up against friends.
(Takes about a half an hour. Sign up for a throwaway log-in [BBC iD] required.)
I scored pretty middle of the road except for my below average sense of wrongness & disgust and my above average sense of avoidance. AKA I don’t think what you did is wrong, but I don’t want to associate with you either.
The wording of the results is a bit odd…
[Your low sense of wrongness] suggests that you are not very sensitive to actions that break your moral code, and you are quite tolerant things you don’t agree with.
I agree with the latter but can’t I be sensitive to others’ actions while having a broader moral code? If I don’t consider those actions wrong then, almost by definition, they don’t break my moral code.
Different factors such as religious belief and personal wealth can influence our attitudes to the action and behaviour of others.
Yeesh. That’s a loaded statement.
So! Who’s the best Flocker? Scientifically speaking.
Take The AQ Test
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger’s report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.
I scored 26.
