“Violence Transformed is an annual series of visual and performing arts events that celebrate the power of art, artists and art-making to confront, challenge and mediate violence.

Based primarily in the center and surrounding neighborhoods of Greater Boston and drawing upon the creative energies of artists throughout New England, Violence Transformed documents the ways in which our diverse communities harness art’s potential to effect social change and materially transform our environments.

Violence Transformed also represents a unique collaboration among artists, activists, museum professionals, academics, and community service providers from diverse segments of the greater Boston area. We share the conviction that art and art-making are essential to the well-being and vibrancy of our communities.”

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“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972).

“I wrote a program that takes any text and tries to find any accidental limericks that might be hiding within (based on syllable counts and rhyme, ignoring punctuation and intent).

Limericks have a fairly loose form. The rhyme scheme is always AABBA, but the syllable count can be anything along the lines of 7-or-8-or-9/7-or-8-or-9/5-or-6/5-or-6/7-or-8-or-9. And as if that weren’t loosey-goosey enough, they can have either anapaestic meter (duh-duh-DUM, duh-duh-DUM) or amphibrachic meter (duh-DUM-duh, duh-DUM-duh)!

…(So) Nantucket is set to look for limericks that are AABBA (rhyme scheme) and 8/8/5/5/9 (syllable count per line). It currently ignores meter, but I may add that requirement in later. It also only looks at words through an American English accent.” (Danielle Sucher, via Neal Stephenson)

“James McCartney Looking to Form Band with Sean Lennon, Dhani Harrison and Zak Starkey…” (via Cool Album of the Day). Do those names mean anything to you? Do you expect that the music would be very good?

 

Think Again : “Everybody knows that there’s just one moon orbiting the Earth. But a new study by an international team of astronomers concludes that everybody is dead wrong about that.” (via NPR).

21 of them, in the Telegraph.UK’s opinion. On the other hand, I don’t know much about architecture but about half of these inspire admiration and wonder, not revulsion or derision, in me.

‘

At Cult of Mac, John Brownlee writes about Girls Around Me, a creepy app that exploited geolocation APIs to make it easy to stalk women.

These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.

See also Charlie Sorrel’s guide to kill the Facebook and FourSquare features that enable apps like this.’ (via Boing Boing, with thanks to kerry).

Tell your daughters, wives, significant others, friends about this.

 

 

Exiles mourn latest in string of self-immolation suicide protests: “Dozens of Tibetans have self-immolated in the past year to protest Chinese oppression. In addition to dousing themselves with fuel, some drink kerosene, so that the flames will explode from within.” (via Boing Boing). Why is this phenomenon being largely ignored by the world press?

Related:

• Wave of Tibet Immolations Among History’s Biggest (abcnews.go.com)
• Opinon: Why Tibetans burn themselves (cnn.com)
• Tibet Protester Who Set Himself Alight Dies (news.sky.com)
• Thousands mourn at Jamphel Yeshi’s funeral (photoblog.msnbc.msn.com)
• Wave of Tibet immolations among history’s biggest (thehimalayantimes.com)
• Horrific‚ anti-China protests become Tibet’s norm (thehimalayantimes.com)
• Tibetan Monk, 20, Latest to Self-Immolate in China (abcnews.go.com)

“MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory.As you can imagine, the trick here is activating individual neurons, which are incredibly small and not really the kind of thing you can attach electrodes to. To do this, the researchers used optogenetics, a bleeding edge sphere of science that involves the genetic manipulation of cells so that they’re sensitive to light. These modified cells are then triggered using lasers; you drill a hole through the subject’s skull and point the laser at a small cluster of neurons.” (via ExtremeTech).

‘Think of Jennifer, or as we like to call her, “Jen.” Jen of the dazzling smile, Jen of the gorgeous chin, Jen with her hair down, Jen tousled, Jen as Rachel, Jen with Brad; Jen without Brad, Jen with Vince, Jen at the Oscars, and, of course, Jen as a neuron in the medial part of the temporal lobe.

Maybe you missed that last Jen.’ (via Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).