Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Allen Ginsberg: Ballad of the Skeletons
Ballad of the Skeletons. So good. Allen Ginsberg backed by Paul McCartney and Lenny Kaye on guitar and Philip Glass on keyboard, video by Gus Van Sant. This is the considerably shorter radio edit version of the full 7 minute recording that was one of my favorite CD’s when it was released back in 1996.
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Mon Oncle
Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables [geometrical lines do not produce likeable people].
Filmmaker Jacques Tati on Villa Arpel, the comically painful modern house depicted in his satire Mon Oncle. You can watch a nice video of the house being reconstructed piece by piece for the recent Tati exposition at the Cinémathèque Française.
(Quote found on Wikipedia)
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Shockwave
We’ve all been exposed to a glut of volcano videos lately, but this one has something I’ve never seen before. If you watch a few seconds in you can see the first of a series of visible shock waves rippling through the cloud of ash. Yikes.
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parchment
Parchment is a JavaScript-powered Z-machine interpreter. Translation: you can now play your Zork and your Leather Goddesses of Phobos (or more modern pieces of interactive fiction) without leaving the comfort of your web browser.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
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An ecological study of glee in small groups of preschool children
A phenomenon called group glee was studied in videotapes of 596 formal lessons in a preschool. This was characterized by joyful screaming, laughing, and intense physical acts which occurred in simultaneous bursts or which spread in a contagious fashion from one child to another.
Science!
See also:
- Radiolab’s 2008 episode on Laughter
- The 1962 Tanganyika ‘laughter epidemic’
- The Giggle Loop
(Via NCBI ROFL, which I guess is appropriately named in this case)
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CV Dazzle
Technologist Adam Harvey explores using dazzle camouflage makeup to thwart facial recognition libraries like OpenCV in his thesis project CV Dazzle (red squares in image denote the drawings that were successfully identified by the software as faces). Summary article over at PopSci.
(Via Discover)
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Solar Flare
False color extreme ultraviolet photo of the sun taken by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory. The zoomed-in video (40MB Quicktime .mov) of the solar flare you see on the left is incredible.
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Daydreaming
And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues. On daydreaming as a means to get past the terror of the blank canvas. From Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.
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Powerpoint Makes Us Stupid
PowerPoint makes us stupid. It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. […] Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable. Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, quoted in today’s New York Times article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.
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LG Pacman
WTFLG? Maybe my washing machine needs some power pellets.
(Originally from this Posterous post? It’s the earliest example I can find. Via Back of the Cereal Box)