Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Every Urban Population Believes in Having It Owns
Every urban population believes in having it owns collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go through all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions. Boris Groys, quoted in “6 Questions for Boris Groys”, Art Lies no. 58, p. 19
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Four QTLs that Influence Worker Sterility in the Honey Bee (Apis Mellifera)
I like the headline that ran in Nature better: “The Genetics of Anarchy”. Research into the fecundity of worker bees in ‘queenright’ colonies. Way out of my element, but interesting!
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First look: Mozilla Weave 0.2 puts Firefox in the cloud
As the title says, this new Firefox extension aims to help users synchronize their browser settings, including bookmarks, history, cookies, etc, between computers or on mobile devices. Sounds…
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Bleep Labs
New site, new Thingamakit (a DIY version of the Thingamagoop noise toy), and new t-shirts!
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Inspired by a Bunny Wabbit – WSJ.com
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Another Year, Another Cooking Mama
In the words of Mama: “Do not nine!” Hopefully it’ll have some online play.
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Official Google Webmaster Central: Improved Flash indexing
Googlebot will begin crawling Flash swf movies it finds looking for meaningful text data that it can add to its index. Biggest question for now: can it find files that have been embedded with…
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The International House of Mojo – The Secret of Monkey Island
Oh boy! Mix n Mojo’s posted their “secret history” article on Monkey Island. Immediately worth a link.
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Language Log: Parts of speech
For a moment I thought I had come across the most literate, intellectual post ever on Comics Curmudgeon. This Family Circus take is no where near insightful as Calvin’s “verbing weirds language”!
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Can past nuclear explosions help detect forgeries?
According to one source, at least, linseed oil produced after 1945 has a subtle difference that can help suss out phony or misdated paintings: the presence of cesium-137 and strontium-90 leftover…