The Insides of these Abandoned Cooling Towers Look Straight Out of a Sci-Fi Film » http://twistedsifter.com/2017/01/inside-abandoned-cooling-towers-by-reginald-van-de-velde/
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Links, links, links…from a certain, uncertain mind.
Links: November 27, 2016
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The 2106 Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio, improved this year by “(i) including a larger number of words; (ii) involving a broader range of minority groups as participants; and (iii) considering potentially offensive gestures for the first time,” is fun and fascinating reading. See the full report (PDF) or the handy Quick Reference guide (PDF).
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National Novel Generation Month always yields some ingenious results, but Liz Daly’s Blackout may be the best yet. Using Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as its source, Daly’s program created the short book of blackout/erasure poems The Days Left Foreboding and Water. Previously in Katexic Clippings: Daly’s 2014 NaNoGenMo project.
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I have this Jabberwocky Diagrammed poster on my office wall. The oddly diminutive diagram of a sentence from Infinite Jest might make a nice companion piece.
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“For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans […] the sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes.” → The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz.
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Fascinating look at mining data from maps based on how they’ve changed over time. → He Collected 12,000 Road Maps—Now We’re Discovering Their Secrets.
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Time Magazine selects The Most Influential Images of All Time.
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Need a gift for your hard-to-please friend concerned about preserving our languages for our eventual alien overlords? The limited, numbered edition Wearable Rosetta Disk is just $1000. See also: a short video on the making of the wearable disk.
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“One researcher the book cites clocks inner speech at an average pace of 4,000 words per minute—10 times faster than verbal speech. And it’s often more condensed—we don’t have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know what we mean.” » Fascinating stuff in the Atlantic article “The Running Conversation in Your Head: What a close study of ‘inner speech’ reveals about why humans talk to themselves”.
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Today in 1942, James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix is born in Seattle, Washington, USA. Caught joyriding and forced, at 19, to choose between prison or the Army, Hendrix chose the latter, becoming a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) before being honorably discharged as “unsuitable” just over a year later. Though he would die of an accidental overdose just eight years later, in that short time Hendrix would become one of the most influential and celebrated rock guitarists of all time, using the wah-wah pedal, distortion, feedback and the “piano style” of holding a bass note with his thumb while playing the melody (aided by his use of right-handed guitars turned upside down and restrung for left-hand playing) in new ways that would influence every succeeding generation, not to mention establishing himself as a premier instrumentalist in a part of music that was still almost exclusively populated by white men. Some classic listening: ►”The Star Spangled Banner” and ►”Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” both at Woodstock, 1969; an ►acoustic version of “Hear My Train A Comin’; the ►album version of “Hey Joe”. Some tasty but less well-known cuts: ►Jimi with Curtis Knight and The Squires, “Gloomy Monday”; ►Lonnie Youngblood and Jimi, “Goodbye Bessie Mae”; ►Little Richard and Jimi, “Hound Dog” (just for fun).
Links: November 20, 2016
- RIP: Leon Russell. The tribute A Show For You: A Leon Russell Appreciation is not only worth a listen…it includes my friend Gardner!
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Also, RIP: Mose Allison. If you aren’t familiar with Allison (or even if you are), this ►Mose Allison YouTube playlist is worth a spin or three.
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Staying on the sound and music theme, behold Soundbreaking, an “eight-part series [that] explores the art of music recording, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of brand new sounds. Featuring more than 160 original interviews with some of the most celebrated recording artists of all time.” [Thanks, Reader F.]
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“The Internet Archive Manual Library is a collection of manuals, instructions, walkthroughs and datasheets for a massive spectrum of items.” → More than 77,000 of them for everything from military manuals like the PAM 21-41 Personal Conduct For The Soldier to manuals for computer games, synthesizers, vending machines and more. [Thanks, Reader A.]
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The pens of the world’s most famous authors. [Thanks, Reader N.!]
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The always interesting Atlas Obscura says, “this frozen tunnel in central Alaska is both an engineering feat and a valuable climate classroom.” And it’s only 15 miles from me. → Permafrost Tunnel [Thanks, Reader K.]
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Unfathomable is, as Reader B. says, “…awesome: good writing, wild invention, terrifying threats, inspirational success.”
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Today in 1923, South African writer, activist and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Nadine Gordimer is born outside Johannesburg. The daughter of a passive Russian refugee father and an activist mother, Gordimer would go on to write more than a dozen novels (at least three of which were banned in South Africa) and close to two dozen collections of short fiction, almost all of which probed the subtleties of race, love and politics in South Africa. Winner of practically every major literary award (and recipient of 15 honorary degrees), Gordimer joined the African National Congress when it was illegal to do so, advised Nelson Mandela during his trial and was active in the anti-apartheid movement and many post-apartheid causes. “The truth isn’t always beauty,” Gordimer would write in The London Magazine, “but the hunger for it is.”
Addendum: in Gordimer’s excellent Nobel Lecture, she makes an observation that remains critical today at near- and far-remove:
“… In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state’s indictment of treason, and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of blind commitment. As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean ‘balance’. The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on his side of the scale. Yet, to paraphrase coarsely Márquez’s dictum given by him both as a writer and a fighter for justice, the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats’s beast slouching to be born.”
Links: November 13, 2016
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RIP, Leonard Cohen. David Remnick’s recent New Yorker profile was so well done I had it on my list of links to share well before Cohen’s passing. The song ►”You Want it Darker” has been running non-stop in my head since I heard the news. And if you haven’t read it, Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers is bizarre, hilarious and seductive.
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From Merriam-Webster, Trending Words from Election 2016.
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“How many ways are there to read James Joyce’s great and bizarre novel Finnegans Wake? ¶ To answer this question, we gathered a host of musicians and writers, artists and scholars, weirdos and generally adventurous people. We decided to set the book to music, creating something that is simultaneously an audiobook as well as musical adaptation.” → Waywords and Meansigns: Recreating Finnegans Wake in its Whole Wholume. [Thanks, Reader A.!]
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“The Phantom Atlas is an atlas of the world not as it ever existed, but as we believed it to be.” → A short trailer for the book.
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Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, With Horrifying Book Curses. [Thanks, Reader S.!]
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“What makes swear words so offensive? It’s not their meaning or even their sound. Is language itself a red herring here?” → Naughty Words
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List: Fall DIY Projects That Help Numb the Pain of Existence
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►Two sonic branding experts explain the thinking behind some of the world’s most recognizable sounds
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Eggsactly, eggsciting, eggscetera. → eggsconcept
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Today is World Kindness Day. Please consider celebrating it. A bit of language history: the word kind comes from Middle English kinde, from Old English (ge)cynde, which speaks to “the feeling of relatives for each other.”
Choose Your Own Memoir
Buy the poster and/or buy Grant’s book
Links: October 30, 2016
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Before book v. ebook there was scroll v. codex. → The mysterious ancient origins of the book
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Pollin’ dirty! With elections nearly upon some of us, ProPublica‘s examination of bad ballot design (and simple fixes) is all the more interesting. → Disenfranchised by Bad Design
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You don’t have to be a chemist to enjoy the “Things I Won’t Work With” series by Derek Lowe. A great name, a scary compound and a Twain reference…how can you go wrong? → Things I Won’t Work With: Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane
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“The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses (BAHFest) is a celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory.” → Bahfest | THE ONE AND ONLY Festival of Bad ad Hoc Hypotheses
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In the continual font fascination department → More than 800 languages in a single typeface: creating Noto for Google
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I’m sure some will claim that it’s only gotten really bad in the last ten years… → “Students in first-year composition classes [in 2006] are, on average, writing longer essays, using more complex rhetorical techniques, and making no more errors than those committed by freshman in 1917.”
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Westworld is full of Shakespeare quotations, but it’s using them all wrong. [Thanks, Reader C.!]
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The ellipsis in medieval manuscripts: How subpuncting in the Middle Ages give the modern era its strangest punctuation mark. And, from within, Unfinished story … how the ellipsis arrived in English literature.
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For just $2850 USD, you too can line the pockets of both Karl Lagerfeld and Faber-Castell and own the KARLBOX. The description veers into J. Peterman territory.
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Today, the day before Halloween, is Mischief Night (also known as Devil’s Night or Beggar’s Night) in many parts of Canada and the United States, celebrating a night of trickery before a night of treats. Whatever happened to good old Halloween Eve?
Links: October 23, 2016
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“This is one day’s observations from Himawari-8, a Japanese weather satellite, animated in a loop. It shows the western Pacific, Australia, and parts of Asia, Antarctica, and Alaska as they looked on one day in mid-2015. It covers 24 hours in 12 seconds—a time lapse factor of 7,200×.” → Glittering Blue + A New and Stunning Way to See the Whole Earth
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Oh, Merdle! → What the Deuce: The Curse Words of Charles Dickens.
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Squick!, which leads me to the Wisdom of Repugnance, coined in 1977 in an article on cloning by Robert Klass, which is broken down clearly and logically by Don Berkich.
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A powerful, lavishly illustrated story → Photographer Documenting the Homeless Discovers Her Own Father Among Them
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On Not Reading shows that even a Dean at Yale like Amy Hungerford can be, as Shakespeare coined it, a lack-brain. Tom LeClair gives her proudly ignorant manifesto the thrashing it deserves.
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The Fascinating Story Behind Why So Many Nail Technicians Are Vietnamese (hint: it involves Tippi Hedren and it was no accident).
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Literary award offers $100,000 for books which have yet to be written
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The Guide to Digitized Natural History Collections should keep your browser busy for a while.
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A “radical burger joint” in Watts makes for an intriguing story of culture, food and conflict. → The People’s Cheeseburger
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Today from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. it is Mole Day, commemorating ► Avogadro’s Number (6.02 x 10^23 — get it?), a basic unit of measurement in chemistry. If your chemistry skills are rusty, it’s basically this: one mole of any substance contains Avogadro’s Number of molecules or atoms of that substance. I can’t tell you how many times this tidbit has come in handy in my life. Also, today is the birthday of myself and, more importantly (literally and figuratively), my Grandma Lori…happy birthday, us!
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