Blog – page 12 of 16

Synchronized sky diving inside a Prague wind funnel. Just think of the Ok Go video where they’re all on the treadmills, but instead of treadmills they’re flying.

Praha Opening (by RaphCoudray)

Newspeak (via reddit)

Ninja via Dilbert.com

Below is a quote from John Gray’s review of David Brooks’ book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. He’s talking about how the recent economic crisis was supposed to be impossible because of the psychic ability of quantitative models to predict the future of the economy.

[M]any economists refused to accept that such a crisis was possible—captivated as they were by the belief that quantitative models could predict the future, sheltering the field from messy reality. Economists were thus incapable of perceiving the dangers that were mounting around them. The attempt to domesticate the uncertainties of the future by turning them into calculable risks was discredited by the crash. A mode of thinking that was supposed to be supremely rational has proved in practice to be little more than an exercise in harebrained cleverness.

How to deactivate a cat. aka, putting a cat in admin mode.

A veterinarian put standby a cat with a plier. (by fckjulien1000)

Grains of sand magnified to 250 times real size via Lost At E Minor: For creative people

Angry Birds Coffee Art, via Foodbeast

“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.“

— John Adams

You Can’t Cross a Chasm in Two Small Steps

(via Lifehacker)

Previously, on 24 (by le nompourflickr)

Tim Black write in the Sp!ked Review of Books about how universities are deviating from their primary purpose: the pursuit of knowledge. However, universities now have the expectation to be economic engines, churning out smarter workers and economic producers.

An increase in the quantity of graduates will neither create a dynamic, wealth-producing economy nor will it create the conditions for the emergence of lots of dynamic, wealth-producing individuals. Universities are not what they are currently being cracked up to be. But that leads to another problem. So deeply entrenched is the belief that, to use the words of the 1998 Dearing report, ‘Higher education has become central to the economic wellbeing of nations and individuals’, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recall what the purpose of institutions of higher education might be. Their autonomy as academic bodies, in which one ought to be free to pursue an interest in a subject area to a higher level, has been effaced by their thoroughgoing instrumentalisation as drivers of economic growth and social mobility.

Can applying the principles of computer hacking to the human body make for a better life?

Much as an engineer will analyse data and tweak specifications in order to optimise a software program, people are ­collecting and correlating data on the “inputs and outputs” of their bodies to optimize physical and mental performance. “We like to hack hardware and software, why not hack our bodies?” says Tim Chang, a self-quantifier and Silicon Valley investor who is backing the development of several self-tracking gadgets. Indeed, why not give yourself an “upgrade”, says Dave Asprey, a “bio-hacker” who takes self-quantification to the extreme of self-experimentation. He claims to have shaved 20 years off his biochemistry and increased his IQ by as much as 40 points through “smart pills”, diet andbiology-enhancing gadgets. “I’ve rewired my brain,” he says.

Will the internet ever replace books? Only if they’re able to replace a key and unique factor that up until now only books have successfuly been able to supply – linear concentration. Johann Hari has an article about the function of the book and how it will continue to persist in an age of distraction:

And here’s the function that the book – the paper book that doesn’t beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.”

This passage from the David Means’ story “Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” has a fun explanation of the difference between a hunch and a gut feeling.

A gut feeling finally becomes a hunch when it is transmuted into the form of clear, precise, verbal statements uttered aloud to a receptive listener—internal or external—who responds in kind. A hunch twists inside the sinews and bones, integrating itself into the physicality of the moment, whereas a gut feeling can only struggle to become a hunch, and, once it does, is recognized in retrospect as a gut feeling.

zoomar:

This makes me very happy. Especially the wigs.

This is what happens when Youtube announces a 10 hour video limit.

(via YouTube ups the video limit to 10 hours. The Internet responds)

River Shiver - Pomplamoose (by PomplamooseMusic)

The Very, Very Many Varieties of Beer, via Pop Chart Lab

“If You Don’t Have Time to Do It Right, When Will You Have Time to Do It Over?” (via Lifehacker)

Butterfly Man - The Dark Net (by evangelistjfox)

I saw this video at the Ave Maria youth conference this weekend, and am amazed it hasn’t gotten more attention. It is a very well done parody of Batman, re-imagined as if he were attacked as a child by butterflies instead of bats.

Penguins are bad at logic

(via Funny Penguin - Fanpop)

Similarities between the Godfather and Arrested Development

The World Map of Useless Stereotypes - via NYTimes.com

Harry Potter Comic.

This is the whole harry pottery series in comic form. Click through the see it close up. (via Lucy Knisley - OMGRYFFINDOR.)

Wired Magazine’s article on Feedback loops explore what they are and how we can harness them to modify and improve our behavior.

[T]he simplicity of feedback loops is deceptive. They are in fact powerful tools that can help people change bad behavior patterns, even those that seem intractable. Just as important, they can be used to encourage good habits, turning progress itself into a reward. In other words, feedback loops change human behavior. And thanks to an explosion of new technology, the opportunity to put them into action in nearly every part of our lives is quickly becoming a reality.

Woody Allen as Toy Story’s Woddy

ilovedoodle:

tumblr

“Leonardo’s rediscovered Salvator Mundi , before restoration.”

Possible long lost work by Leonardo da Vinci (via ARTnews)

The Rocketeer 20th anniversary (by John Banana)

Imagine if Pixar made an animated version of the Rocketeer…I have fond memories of the Rocketeer from my childhood but am afraid I would find it very cheesy if I watched it again now. So this will have to do.

Splitscreen: A Love Story by JW Griffiths, shot on a Nokia N8 Phone.

Twitter Whom to follow - Chrome Web Store

Org charts at major tech companies:

arainert:

You don’t work on an assembly line any more. You work in project world, and more projects mean more chances to screw up, to learn, to make a reputation and to have more impact. When it’s you against the boss, the goal is to do less work. When it’s you against the project, the goal is to do more work.

— Seth’s Blog: When is it due?

This is a video of the Office re-imagined as a 1980-1990’s sitcom.

(by benny2700)

Why to join Google+ (via xkcd: Google)

CASSINI MISSION: pro-tip, watch in full screen with headphones and prepare to be blown away by the beauty of this video made from footage of NASA’s Cassini Mission to Saturn. (by Chris Abbas)

Claiming clairvoyance. (via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

The World’s Best Commercials, 2010-11 - Adweek

Here are a few of my reading highlights from the Foreign Policy article Meltdown, by Gennady Burbulis and Michele A. Berdy, an exciting account of the August coup in Russia, and the fall of the former Soviet Union in 1991.

We began to work together on a new union treaty that would transform the Soviet Union into a confederation of sovereign states with a limited central government. Yeltsin planned to sign the controversial pact on Aug. 20. As we miled about Yeltsin’s living room on the morning of Aug. 19, it was instantly clear to us that the coup was an eleventh-hour attempt to prevent the treaty from being signed the next day. But that was the only thing that was clear. Americans watching the events unfold live on CNN knew more about what was going on in Russia than we Russians did; the news anchors in Moscow simply read a formal statement issued by the coup plotters’ hastily appointed “Emergency Committee.” Information arrived at the dacha in bits and pieces, by phone from friends and colleagues in Moscow and around Russia.

Hidden cameo in Indiana Jones: C-3PO & R2-D2??!?

cepankus:

Broccoli House

brockdavis:

The first weapon made from code.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus (by Patrick Clair)

An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code. This was produced for Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1

William Zinsser on what it takes for travel writing to move from a personal narrative into the realm of literature.

The worlds that those restless hermits wrote about were often interior worlds, tinged with mysticism, and it could hardly be otherwise; they achieved their destiny by following trails that weren’t on any map. But what raises travel writing to literature is not what the writer brings to a place, but what the place draws out of the writer.

Hang on Woody! (by nplus1)

Some people don’t mind starting a company without any customers. I’m too conservative for this. I’m happy to even give up equity to get that first customer. 50% of a profitable company is better than 100% of a company that will probably quickly go out of business.

— The Easiest Way to Succeed as an Entrepreneur Altucher Confidential

Map of the World

This map is drawn using data of the connections of 10 million Facebook users. (via Map of the World Drawn Entirely Using Facebook Connections: Geekosystem)

National Geographic has an interesting article about some recent findings in the search for the real Cleopatra.

[M]aybe finding her tomb would diminish what Shakespeare called “her infinite variety.” Disembodied, at large in the realm of myth, more context than text, Cleopatra is free to be of different character to different times, which may be the very wellspring of her vitality. No other figure from antiquity seems so versatile in her ambiguities, so modern in her contradictions.

Judy Bachrach, writing for Obit Magazine has a piece, Death Be Not Chic, on how Hollywood deals with death, in comparison to people’s real experience of it. Some notable quotes:

Death marks us permanently — and not simply because we are all, in another sense, marked men. Death defines who we are now and, inevitably, how we and our accomplishments will be considered at some later date most of us would generally prefer not to think about. At all.

Dear Photograph is a website with a simple premise: take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.

The results are beautiful:

It’s awesome when an entrepreneur is obsessed with his idea. Every great product that I’m aware of came from an obsession of an idea and every great company followed. But for every entrepreneur that shifted the obsession with the idea into an obsession with the execution of the idea, I know many more entrepreneurs who got stuck on the idea, but never focused on building something from it.

— Note to entrepreneurs: Your idea is not special - Entrepreneurial

101 Awesome Marketing Quotes

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

The following quotes are from Joseph Epstein’s book review in the New Criterion on Stanley Fish’s book “How to Write a Sentence. Epstein, throughout his review, demonstrates that he does not believe Fish to be in a position to teach this art, and provides examples from the book demonstrating his lack of command of the language. However, Epstein provides some helpful nuggets on the craft of writing from what he believes to be the best book on the subject, Style(1955), by F. L. Lucas’s .

[Lucas said, O]ne does best always to attempt to use strong words to begin and end sentences. Straightaway this means eliminating the words “It” and “There” to begin sentences and dropping also the pompous “Indeed.” This advice also reinstates and gives new life to the old schoolmarmish rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, for a prepositon is almost never a strong word.

Luckiest tennis shot ever.

Kim Clijsters LUCKY SHOT French Open (by AccepthisNEWS)

Learn to steal like an artist (via How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) - Austin Kleon)

Microsoft’s Kinect is letting hardware and software hackers (the good kind) discover new possibilities in robotics.

Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

Geek Alphabet (via ABC by *yllya)

(via Work Smarter and More Easily by “Sharpening Your Axe”)

bestrooftalkever:

The zeppelin Hindenburg floats past the Empire State Building over Manhattan on Aug. 8, 1936. The German airship was en route to Lakehurst, New Jersey, from Germany. The Hindenburg would later explode in a spectacular fireball above Lakehurst on May 6, 1937. (AP Photo)

Diagram of geek culture: it’s a big world out there.

(via HBO Programming Venn Diagram - /Film)

Arty Bollocks Generator

Comic Sans Criminal - There’s help available for people like you!

Flavorwire has a collection of 30 of the harshest author to author insults. My favorites are the ones where I’m familiar with both the insult-or and the insulted. This one on Don Quixote is my favorite:

17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, discuses the use of the word relationship to describe the everyday interactions with the people in our lives:

My problem with “relationship” is that it means whatever anyone needs it to mean. It doesn’t denote a specific act–like, say, “falling in love” or “getting married.” Those bold leaps of faith have long been sung by poets and troubadours. But nowhere in bardic lore is there any word of Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra, or Tristan’s relationship with Isolde, or Romeo’s relationship with the girl on the balcony. Cole Porter didn’t write “Let’s do it, let’s have a relationship.” He wrote “Let’s fall in love.” That’s what people used to do.

This is a simple game that won the grand prize in the 10k Apart contents, that challenged developers to come up with a web-app that took less than 10 kilobytes.

Sinuous is game built using canvas and JavaScript - no external libraries. The game requires only mouse movement or swiping (iPad/iPhone/Android) as input. Total size: 6.9KB. The goal is to avoid colliding with red dots while looking for green ones. The longer you can stay alive, the higher you will score!

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” Winston Churchill

(by theroyaltyclub)

Sad Vador

“An actor dressed as Darth Vader waits for tourists who want to be photographed with him, in front of the Brandenburg Gate during a thunderstorm in Berlin, Germany, on June 14.”

Coffee vs. Tea Infographic

This up to 1000 years old snow has metamorphosed into highly pressurized glacier ice that contains almost no air bubbles. Thus it absorbs the visible light despite the scattered shortest blue fraction, giving it its distinct deep blue waved appearance. This cavity in the glacier ice formed as a result of a glacial mill, or moulin.

Rain and meltwater on the glacier surface is channelled into streams that enter the glacier at crevices. The waterfall melts a hole into the glacier while the ponded water drains towards lower elevations by forming long ice caves with an outlet at the terminus of the glacier. The fine grained sediments in the water along with wind blown sediments cause the frozen meltwater stream to appear in a muddy colour while the top of the cave exhibits the deep blue colour.

A group of pranksters in Bulgaria painted a statue of soviet soldiers to look like a group of All American Superheros.

Twenty years ago you would have been shot for stepping too close to this monument in Sofia in Bulgaria.

But after the smashing of the Berlin Wall, statues celebrating communist rule appear to be fair game to the graffiti artists of the former Soviet block in Eastern Europe.

denverpost:

New Dietary Guidelines

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

— Mark Twain

Either you negotiate to make the whole bigger, to have both sides benefit–or you negotiate to have the other side lose. Winning by punishing the other side isn’t a particularly long lasting or satisfying strategy.

— Seth’s Blog: The last minute (a case against brinksmanship)

Today’s Daily *ism is another artistic (revolutionary) movement that came out of the modernist period:

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers[who?] regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

How do you get this business card? (via Hello - The Indigo Bunting: Pretty fantastic business card)

They’ve made it 100 years, so must be doing something right. Here’s the flash notes, click through for the details:

(via 5 lessons from IBM’s 100th anniversary - Fortune Tech)

DVDLater - Save Theater Movies to your Netflix Queue

Here’s the most recent edition of my reading highlights, passages of posts and books that I’ve highlighted on my Kindle.

Kevin Kelly – Chapter 8: No Harmony All Flux (kk.org)

Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed. The first level—changes in the game—produces the kind of changes now visible: new winners and losers. New businesses. New heroes. We see the rise of Wal-Marts, and of Nucor steelmaking. The second level—changes in the rules of the game—produces new kinds of business, new sectors of the economy, new kinds of games. From this type of change comes the Microsofts and Amazon.coms. The third level of change, which we are now entering, whips up changes in how change happens. Change changes itself. While the new economy provokes change in the first two levels—all those new business and business sectors—its deepest consequence is the way it alters change. Change accelerates itself. It morphs into creative destruction. It induces flux. It disperses into a field effect, so you can’t pinpoint causes. It overturns the old ways of change.

We are not running out of space. (via If the world’s population lived in one city… « Per Square Mile)

Super Cut: Other actors being Woody Allen. NOTE: This is only funny if you love Woody Allen.

A Retrospective of Woody Allen Surrogates (by FilmDrunkDotCom)

(via Quasi-Fictional Stand-Ins for Woody Allen: A Retrospective)

Here’s a political system that’s bringing down many parts of Europe. It’s also one that has to go by many other names, since its popularity is sagging, and its accomplishments leave such carnage in its wake.

Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are publicly or commonly owned and controlled co-operatively, or a political philosophy advocating such a system.[1][2] As a form of social organization, socialism is based on co-operative social relations and self-management; relatively equal power-relations and the reduction or elimination of hierarchy in the management of economic and political affairs.[3][4]

Today, I’m going to bring up a school of philosophy.

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. The term can mean several things, for example:

The last interpretation may be attributed to Secular Humanism as a specific humanistic life stance.[1] Modern meanings of the word have therefore come to be associated with a rejection of appeals to the supernatural or to some higher authority.[2][3] This interpretation may be directly contrasted with other prominent uses of the term in traditional religious circles.[4] Humanism of this strand arose from a trajectory extending from the deism andanti-clericalism of the Enlightenment, the various secular movements of the 19th century (such as positivism), and the overarching expansion of the scientific project.

Scenes From Underground

thetenthamendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”’

Woody and Buzz Lightyear as reimagined by designer Luis Eduardo Vargas Montoya. (via Toy Story Unleashed - Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation)

Here I’m taking us back to an outdated political system. I’m not aware of any active political movements trying to bring it back.

Manorialism, an essential element of feudal society,[1] was the organizing principle of rural economy that originated in the villa system of the Late Roman Empire,[2] was widely practiced in medieval western and parts of central Europe, and was slowly replaced by the advent of a money-based market economy and new forms of agrarian contract.

pulmonaire:

still time (by Amy Rice)

I’m a bit out of order on these. I suppose this post should have preceded the one on modernism, but at least I’m keeping on track with exploring relatively recent literary periods.

Romanticism (or the Romantic Era or the “‘Romantic Period”’) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[3] education[4] and natural history.[5]

zeroing:

Banksy

60moons:

Big Browser

How to attract women: according to Disney.

The Cato Institute has a report on federal higher education spending and policy showing how the favorable treatment of non-profit over for profit education hurts both students and taxpayers alike:

Undergraduate education is a highly profitable business for nonprofit colleges and universities. They do not show profits on their books, but instead take their profits in the form of spending on some combination of research, graduate education, low-demand majors, low faculty teaching loads, excess compensation, and featherbedding. The industry’s high profits come at the expense of students and taxpayer.

Here’s the second installment in my Daily *ism series. Although, very destructive in many ways to Western culture and tradition, it still was a the movement that paved the way (or was the creation of) many great works of literature that I admire. I find that modernism, as an artistic movement, did produce art that was in far better alignment with the society it inhabited than the romantic period that preceded it.

Modernism , in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement , its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is the first post in a new series I’m starting on this blog. I call it the daily *ism. It’s going to be mostly information copied from Wikipedia, but each entry is going to feature another *ism.

Now *ism’s have a variety of meanings, but at their root, they indicate a belief or principle. Now, I suppose there can be as many systems of though and belief as there are thinkers and believers. However, the credibility of some *ism’s are stronger than others, and unless you are a subscriber to relativism you will agree that some are more valid than others.

Lady or not: very true.

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