Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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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)
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Tom Waits on Fernwood 2 Night
Things I did not know: Tom Waits appeared on an episode of Fernwood 2 Night, playing The Piano Has Been Drinking before begging a couple of bucks off Martin Mull (he was trapped in the fictional town after his tour bus broke down). Crazy.
(Via Coudal)
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Ebooks
At no point has it even occurred to me, until right now, that I’m in fact typing e-words or e-sentences. I’ve not thought about adding an e-carriage return to separate this e-paragraph from the next e-paragraph. From Brett McLaughlin’s post on O’Reilly Radar asking why publishers and vendors are still using the term e-books when it’s simply literary content that’s appearing on a different platform. You could also argue that the term book itself is beginning to get slippery. In any case, “ebooks” has been sounding dated for a while now, so I’ll give him that.
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Pinball
It might feel like simple nostalgia at first, but pinball is more than that. Pinball is hyper-personal. A pinball machine invites you to shove quarters into it so that you can challenge this physical piece of hardware in a game that’s based on the best physics engine ever, physics itself. Simon Carless of GameSetWatch discovers the wonderment of pinball at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, one of my favorite places ever.