The Lebanese Army isn’t on your side any more!: “So there was George Bush, telling the BBC today that he is willing to send US aid to the Lebanese Army… Doesn’t he realize that… the Lebanese Army isn’t on his side any more?? Is it any wonder that the administration led by this man is losing so badly in the Middle East these days?” (Just World News)
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Fanboy Supercuts
Obsessive Video Montages: “… [a] genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.” An extensive list from films and TV series, including every whacking from The Sopranos and every “dude” from The Big Lebowski. (waxy.org)
A New Approach to Treating Alzheimer’s
‘We’ve shown that the function of memory circuits can be modulated.’ A neurosurgeon testing deep brain electrical stimulation with implanted electrodes for other purposes was surprised to find normalization of memory function in a man with Alzheimer’s dementia. (Technology Review)
Shipwrecks & Sea Disasters
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The World’s Spookiest Weapons
“Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they’re spooky as hell.
Can turning animals into cyborgs ever end well? Should lasers really be strapped to planes? Is dispersing humans with the worst smell ever created a better alternative to doing it by burning their skin? You be the judge.” (Popular Science)
The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep
(Literally): “‘We went to the doctor after he was born, and I kept telling him something was wrong. He didn’t sleep. They thought I was being kind of an anxious mom, and we went back and forth,’ Rhett’s mother, Shannon Lamb, said. ‘Finally, they [were] starting to realize now that he really doesn’t sleep at all. But we’ve had a lot of different diagnoses and nobody really knows.’” (ABC News)
‘Mad Pride’ Fights a Stigma
““Until now, the acceptance of mental illness has pretty much stopped at depression,” said Charles Barber, a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. “But a newer generation, fueled by the Internet and other sophisticated delivery systems, is saying, ‘We deserve to be heard, too.’ ”” (New York Times)
Where can I get one of those?
Safety in numbers for speeding drivers: “Speeding drivers in south China are getting clear away thanks to machines which switch the numbers on their licence plates in seconds, state media said on Tuesday.” (Reuters)
Where can I get one of those?
Safety in numbers for speeding drivers: “Speeding drivers in south China are getting clear away thanks to machines which switch the numbers on their licence plates in seconds, state media said on Tuesday.” (Reuters)
Higher Suicide Risk for Smart MDs
“There’s a grim, rarely talked-about twist to all that medical know-how doctors learn to save lives: It makes them especially good at ending their own. An estimated 300 to 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves each year — a suicide rate thought to be higher than in the general population, although exact figures are hard to come by.
Some doctors believe the stigma of mental illness is magnified in a profession that prides itself on stoicism and bravado. Many fear admitting psychiatric problems could be fatal to their careers, so they suffer in silence.” (Time)
Rafe Coburn: ‘Why I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton’
“…A victory for Hillary Clinton would be a victory for shameless pandering and for all that is small within us. We can do better.” (rc3)
Hauntology
“The shades of the past become more vivid than anything turned up by the present. The spirit of the times is itself spectral. Faced with the apparent triumph of global Capital and the collapse of cultural innovation, artists and critics impatient with postmodern culture’s ‘nostalgia mode’ are forced back to a time before the End of History. They engage in mourning and melancholia for what has disappeared and what never came to be. Everyday life becomes ghostly… a saturated culture is unable to forget that things were not always like this.” (Strange Attractor)
Happy Birthday, Gary Snyder (b. 05/08/30)
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this poem is for deer
I dance on all the mountains
On five mountains, I have a dancing place
When they shoot at me I run
To my five mountains”
Missed a last shot
At the Buck, in twilight
So we came back sliding
On dry needles through cold pines.
Scared out a cottontail
Whipped up the winchester
Shot off its head.
The white body rolls and twitches
In the dark ravine
As we run down the hill to the car.
deer foot down scree
Picasso’s fawn, Issa’s fawn,
Deer on the autumn mountain
Howling like a wise man
Stiff springy jumps down the snowfields
Head held back, forefeet out,
Balls tight in a tough hair sack
Keeping the human soul from care
on the autumn mountain
Standing in late sun, ear-flick
Tail-flick, gold mist of flies
Whirling from nostril to eyes.
Home by night
drunken eye
Still picks out Taurus
Low, and growing high:
four-point buck
Dancing in the headlights
on the lonely road
A mile past the mill-pond,
With the car stopped, shot
That wild silly blinded creature down.
Pull out the hot guts
with hard bare hands
While night-frost chills the tongue
and eye
The cold horn-bones.
The hunter’s belt
just below the sky
Warm blood in the car trunk.
Deer-smell,
the limp tongue.
Deer don’t want to die for me.
I’ll drink sea-water
Sleep on beach pebbles in the rain
Until the deer come down to die
in pity for my pain.
Gary Snyder
this poem is for bear
“As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.”
A bear down under the cliff.
She is eating huckleberries.
They are ripe now
Soon it will snow, and she
Or maybe he, will crawl into a hole
And sleep. You can see
Huckleberries in bearshit if you
Look, this time of year
If I sneak up on the bear
It will grunt and run
The others had all gone down
From the blackberry brambles, but one girl
Spilled her basket, and was picking up her
Berries in the dark.
A tall man stood in the shadow, took her arm,
Led her to his home. He was a bear.
In a house under the mountain
She gave birth to slick dark children
With sharp teeth, and lived in the hollow
Mountain many years.
snare a bear: call him out:
honey-eater
forest apple
light-foot
Old man in the fur coat, Bear! come out!
Die of your own choice!
Grandfather black-food!
this girl married a bear
Who rules in the mountains, Bear!
you have eaten many berries
you have caught many fish
you have frightened many people
Twelve species north of Mexico
Sucking their paws in the long winter
Tearing the high-strung caches down
Whining, crying, jacking off
(Odysseus was a bear)
Bear-cubs gnawing the soft tits
Teeth gritted, eyes screwed tight
but she let them.
Til her brothers found the place
Chased her husband up the gorge
Cornered him in the rocks.
Song of the snared bear:
“Give me my belt.
“I am near death.
“I came from the mountain caves
“At the headwaters,
“The small streams there
“Are all dried up.
– I think I’ll go hunt bears.
“hunt bears?
Why shit Snyder.
You couldn’t hit a bear in the ass
with a handful of rice!”
Gary Snyder
Census Atlas of the United States
“More often than not, trolling websites that end with “.gov” is about as much fun as renewing your driver’s license. But if you check out the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, you can fully access a truly awesome book: the Census Atlas of the United States.
True to the federal government’s prominent place on the trailing edge of information technology, the 302-page report, containing 800 maps populated by data compiled through 2000, is available in 18 PDF files (very Web 1.0). Sure, it’s a bit of a slog — the largest PDF weighs in at 21 MB — but it’s fun to wander such diverse sections as college dormitory population, prevalent language spoken at home, and percentage of commuters who carpool.” (Very Short List)
turtlewheels
“Little Bit, a young Eastern Box Turtle was hit by a car in September of 2000. Her shell was crushed and she was left partially paralyzed… After some weeks Little Bit seemed to have made a full recovery except for the use of her hind legs. So some wheels seemed to be the way to go. Some lightweight model airplane wheels on a wire frame did the trick… She was eating, drinking, and exploring all the rooms of my house. Eventually she was able to move around outside as well.” (via kottke)
Is the personal Web site a thing of the past?
“It’s interesting that having your own domain and Web site once set you apart from the crowd because it meant you were an early adopter, perhaps soon it will mark you as unusually old fashioned.” — Rafe Coburn (rc3)
The best and worst of medicine
“spiked and Wellcome Collection have launched a website to debate and discuss the top-dog medical breakthroughs that transformed humanity’s fortunes, and the worst-ever harebrained medical schemes that should be stuffed in the sin bin of history.” (sp!ked)
How does an Etch-a-Sketch work?
I know you have all been dying to know for all these years. (Howstuffworks)
The best and worst of medicine
“spiked and Wellcome Collection have launched a website to debate and discuss the top-dog medical breakthroughs that transformed humanity’s fortunes, and the worst-ever harebrained medical schemes that should be stuffed in the sin bin of history.” (sp!ked)
Why We Sleep
The Temporal Organization of Recovery — Emmanuel Mignot, Stanford University (‘Unsolved Mysteries’ discuss a topic of biological importance that is poorly understood and in need of research attention). (PLoS Biology)
I See Dead People['s Books]
at LibraryThing: “A group for those interested and involved in entering the library catalogs of famous readers.”
visualcomplexity.com
A visual exploration on mapping complex networks: “VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.
Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.” (thanks, abby)
R.I.P. Jimmy Giuffre
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Adventurous clarinetist, composer and arranger dead at 86. His “50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem “Four Brothers” through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works…Among the half-dozen instruments he played, from bass flute to soprano saxophone, it was the clarinet that gave him a signature sound; it was a dark, velvety tone, centering in the lower register, pure but rarely forceful. But among the iconoclastic heroes of the late ’50s in jazz, he was a serene oddity, changing his ideas as fast as he could record them.” (New York Times)
