Top 10 Most Extreme Substances

 25 Haunting Shipwrecks around the World

Metal! (and rubber)

[It was never meant to be]  Paleofuture

Temples of the Atom:  A view inside America's never-finished nuclear power stations.

A Laurel and Hardy Poster Collection

Scenes from Surrendered Homes

Designobserver Essay: How to Make Systems Thinking Sexy
The world needs a new kind of design based on an ethical framework in which life is the ultimate source of value.

A QR-Coded, "animated" tattoo

Looks like blogger is going to be rebranded.  Stay tuned.

 A huge set of photos from Six Flags New Orleans - 6 years after the flood.

Spongiforma squarepantsii

Confessions of a Nuclear Power Safety Expert
Nuclear engineer Cesare Silvi studied unlikely outside threats to nuclear plants in Italy, which soured him on the energy source and caused him to go solar.

Paul Chojnowski wets and burns wood to create fire drawings.

Dear NYC, ticket the people parking in the bike lanes, not the bikers (slyt)

Yesterday, a huge explosion occurred on the Sun.

Madison Avenue declares American 'Mass Affluence Over


The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.
“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence — particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”

the Crossover

Happy 70th Birthday, Mr. Bob Dylan.
Apparently his site is struggling under the weight of the thousands of well-wishers this morning.

Hiroshima: the lost photographs (designobserver)

Go to China, Young Scientist (Washington Post)
"As public funding for science and technology shrinks, it just isn’t possible for people who want to become scientists in America to actually become scientists. So when a friend of mine who recently received her PhD in molecular biology asked for some career advice, the answer was easy. Go to China, I told her."

"Bad Education" (n+1)
Excellent article from n+1 examines the student loan bubble, in which banks and colleges take advantage of students to an extent never before seen in higher education.

"high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it."

The One-Percenters (by Roger Ebert)
"Day after day I read stories that make me angry. Wanton consumption is glorified. Corruption is rewarded. Ordinary people see their real income dropping, their houses sold out from under them, their pensions plundered, their unions legislated against, their health care still under attack. Yes, people in Wisconsin and Ohio have risen up to protest these realities, but why has there not been more outrage?"

"Don't do it"
the Nation on grad school.
Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment.

The Dying Sea (designobserver)
For decades now the Aral Sea — technically a lake, bordered by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and once, at 26,000 square miles, the fourth largest on the planet — has been slowly dying; geologists estimate that it is now one-tenth its former size.  

 Star Wars Propaganda Posters

Humans kill more deer, antelope, raccoons, skunks, porcupines, bobcats and coyotes, among others, than any other cause, including predation, starvation, weather, disease and natural causes including age, accident or developmental defects.

What’s more, humans kill more large mammals in North America than all other causes put together.

The Possibilian (NewYorker)
Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction, he says. They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.
The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

Man Unveils Interactive Toothpick Sculpture of San Francisco That Took 35 Years to Create

Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay from Learning Studio on Vimeo.
(vimeo, via thoughtcatalog)

The Management Myth (the Atlantic)

I am the coin.  A strange puzzle.

The Real Housewives of Wall Street:  Rolling Stone investigates the $220M government bailout of two Morgan-Stanley exec's wives.

"There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do
you think the federal government spends too much money and they should
spend less, they say yeah, absolutely.  Then you name specific things,
like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that.  How 'bout
NIH, medical research funding?  Nah, you really shouldn't cut that.
And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against
is arithmetic."
       -- Bill Gates, March 10, 2011

The Ramones: 26 songs in 54 minutes
Hear a monumental concert from one of America's best bands in their prime. The Ramones live at New York City's Palladium, January 7, 1978. 26 songs in 54 minutes all set to a series of cheap sci-fi movie trailers. What could be better?

An excellent series of 'oral history of music' videos on empsfm.org
Here's Chris Squire of Yes talking about the time he first met a then-unknown Jimi Hendrix.

All the Buildings in New York
"An attempt to draw all the buildings in New York by James Gulliver Hancock"

Screw Portraits

Life Expectancy, Sunshine, and Happiness

Stop motion picture of a tangerine being painted, and peeled, etcetera.

Every once in a while, Wall Street's mask slips off, if only for a second.
Here, vile, subhuman Wall Street filth celebrate the fact that the "human toll is greater than the economic toll" of the Japan earthquake and subsequent tsunami. (youtube)

There's nothing like a public display of rotten-to-the-core, greed-devolved people revealing the depths of their depravity.

Linn Drum Machine creator Roger Linn demos his new Linnstrument prototype.

"They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers," he says. "They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me."

Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business: An illuminating NYTimes article on the farce that is the Standardized Test industry

Valparaiso Downhill:  Positively the most crazy bike race footage I have ever seen on the internets. (vimeo)

The laws of the Cayman Islands are not designed for the benefit of the 50,000-odd population of the Cayman Islands. They are designed for people who live in the United States, Europe, Africa, Asia, and so on. Hence the term ‘elsewhere’, or ‘offshore’, is fundamental to what a tax haven is. Essentially, then, tax havens are about wealthy individuals and corporations taking their money elsewhere to do things that they wouldn’t be allowed to do at home. 

The Men Who Stole the World:  The New Left Project on Tax Havens.

Hundreds of tourist pictures woven into single composites of famous sites.

Happy 60th, Fender Telecaster

Frank Buckles, the last living America WWI veteran, passed away yesterday at 110 years of age. (navytimes) NYTimes on same.

“I told him birth certificates were not made in Missouri when I was born, that the record was in a family Bible. I said, ‘You don’t want me to bring the family Bible down, do you?’ ” Buckles said with a laugh. “He said, ‘OK, we’ll take you.’ ”
He enlisted Aug. 14, 1917, serial number 15577.

Winners Take ALL.  Mother Jones has some revealing graphs on American income inequality.

Why isn't Wall Street in jail? (RollingStone)
"Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail."

TAL claims they have the secret Coca Cola recipe.  Ready, set, DIY.

A short opinion piece on the Stock Market's decreasing role as an actual Market.
Today, however, stock markets, once the bedrock of American capitalism, are slowly becoming a noisy sideshow that churns out increasingly meager returns. The show still gets lots of attention, but the real business of the global economy is inexorably leaving the stock market — and the vast majority of us — behind.

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search (nytimes on gaming google's pagerank)

Snowdecahedrons

Joe Lieberman: please please please just make this guy and his imbecilic ideas go away.

The Trashing of Owens Lake (designobserver)

Everything you know about fitness is a lie. (Mens Journal)

An excellent NYTimes piece on that newspaper's dealings with Julian Assange during the period when WikiLeaks disclosed battlefield dispatches and subsequently released diplomatic cables to the Times and the Guardian.
If you've been following this saga on either side of the privacy divide, this is a worthwhile read.

The Rise of the New Global Elite (the Atlantic)

Why Can't We Walk Straight? (vimeo)

Honda needs a tune-up
A guy does a really comprehensive mathematical analysis of what went wrong with a Honda commercial where they failed to properly calculate groove intervals in a 'rumble strip' song.  Don't mess with math geeks, Honda!  You'll get found out.

Q: Do luxury and privilege change people for the worse?
A: Yes.

According to Chua, their research found that "people who were made to think about luxury prior to a decision-making task have a higher tendency to endorse self-interested decisions that might potentially harm others." (Harvard)

3D-printed flute
The definition on these new-generation 3D printers is amazing.

2 Girls undermine the entire US-Mexico border strategy in 15 seconds.


Hey, as long as the well-connected government contractors got paid in full, that's all that counts, right?

Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness (Wired)
“We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics—and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.

Photo essay of the Paris Metro (sleepycity)

So our old pals at Goldman invest in Facebook and give it a private value of $50BN (nytimes).  This effectively lets them resell ownership creating an unregulated Facebook-only hedge fund, as described here. 

"...The capital injection that so duly empowers Facebook is basically an uncapitalized bonus pool for Goldman Sachs. You see, it is highly unlikely that Goldman is actually materially investing in Facebook, particularly at these valuations (is facebook really worth more than Time Warner and eBay, after the private market liquidity discount?). What Goldman is doing is employing its financial engineers to allow its HNW investors to sidestep and circumvent the laws of the land as feebly enforced by the SEC."

Remember back when a company would have to do an IPO before a market was made?  Why should Goldman have to deal with the swarthy, common 'P' in IPO, not to mention the already lax and over-permissive SEC and their trifling rules, when a mint can be made with a private, unregulated market?  We'll see what happens when and if the $50BN valuation turns up to be a bubble in disguise, and the repercussions hit so far and wide that Goldman's private dealings start to affect the overall market - AGAIN.  Just goes to show that Goldman can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, with no benefit to anyone else, as long as they're lining their own pockets.  When the house of cards falls, you and I will pay for their games out of our own 401Ks. 

Nothing changes on Wall Street.

Every episode (2006-2009) of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, available for download.

Salon's Best Scenes of 2010
Nicely annotated for explanation if you haven't seen the films from which they were pulled.

Merry Christmas!
(and happy 20th, www)

What happens when an alligator bites an electric eel.

Wikileaks' Julian Assange, in his own words.

Japanese Multiplication Trick (via gizmodo)

Rare, Unusual, and Prototype HotWheels

Woodcuts by Roman Klonek

Trailers from Hell!

In praise of Wikileaks (sfgate, op/ed)

So shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. ... the American people should be outraged that their government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
Odd, isn't it, that it takes a Pravda commentator to drive home the point that the Obama administration is on the wrong side of history. Most of our own media are demanding that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange be hunted down -- with some of the more bloodthirsty politicians calling for his murder. The corporate-and-government dominated media are apprehensive over the challenge that WikiLeaks presents. Perhaps deep down they know, as Dickens put it, "There is nothing so strong ... as the simple truth."

Meanwhile, Slate has interesting views on how Julian Assange's unrelated legal troubles, if perceived to be trumped-up or retaliatory, might help the movement's cause.

Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving (nytimes)
In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.
Do the neat perception experiment.

Doodling in math class

There's something both surreal and relaxing about this high-speed video shot from a moving train across a platform.

Deconstructing the Stones 'Gimme Shelter'

$6800 audio cables at amazon.. Don't miss the product reviews.

What Good is Wall Street? (NewYorker)

Other regulators have gone further. Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity”—a comment that suggests it could be eliminated without doing any damage to the economy. In a recent article titled “What Do Banks Do?,” which appeared in a collection of essays devoted to the future of finance, Turner pointed out that although certain financial activities were genuinely valuable, others generated revenues and profits without delivering anything of real worth—payments that economists refer to as rents. “It is possible for financial activity to extract rents from the real economy rather than to deliver economic value,” Turner wrote. “Financial innovation . . . may in some ways and under some circumstances foster economic value creation, but that needs to be illustrated at the level of specific effects: it cannot be asserted a priori.”
Turner’s viewpoint caused consternation in the City of London, the world’s largest financial market. A clear implication of his argument is that many people in the City and on Wall Street are the financial equivalent of slumlords or toll collectors in pin-striped suits. If they retired to their beach houses en masse, the rest of the economy would be fine, or perhaps even healthier.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.
Krugman, NYTimes, "There Will Be Blood"

Toilet paper roll art

"the" project

An interesting NYTimes interview with Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch (nytimes)
Most monopolists create a golden age that lasts a decade or more,  and then slowly they became more interested in being in power. AT&T became dangerous when they began to suppress technologies that might threaten their rule.

"Linotype: The Film" Teaser from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.
Linotype film teaser

Sons of Pong (boingboing)

Bill Moyers at the BU Howard Zinn Memorial lecture on how corruption has moved from a side-dish in policy to the main course.

from How Twitter Made Handwriting Cool. (telegraph uk)
A few years ago, a number of pencil bloggers announced that the discontinued Eberhard-Faber Blackwing 602 was, not to put too fine a point on it, the greatest pencil ever. A sleek black object with an oversized ferrule (eraser holder) and the charismatic epithet, ‘half the pressure, twice the speed’ embossed on its shaft, it was declared ‘the world’s best pencil’ by American author Joseph Finder. 

Pencil bloggers.  I'm beginning to think that this old blog isn't specific enough for these modern fetishist times.

Pontiac, as of yesterday, is no more.

Charlie Chaplin movie cell phone?
If only AT&T could deliver the coverage that this lady is getting in 1928.

Some impressive optical illusions

Sony is finally halting production of the cassette Walkman.
I was surprised to find they were still being made.

The xerox alto - first computer with a mouse a just went for 30k on ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320602942545&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT@

The MakerLegoBot is a lego bot that makes lego structures - in this case, a small house.

Project C-90 - the art of the audiocassette

Watch Jimmy McMillan, karate expert, beard enthusiast, and candidate for NY Governor representing The Rent is Too Damn High Party, debate.

One in five plants, one in five mammals, one in seven birds and one in three amphibians are now globally threatened with extinction.

This problem is a fact.  Another problem is that American Republican politicians, emboldened by anti-intelligence and anti-experience Tea Party ideals, are once again denying this fact.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy. 

Town in England turns off traffic lights.  Results surprise. (via metafilter)