14 June 2011
One hundred cinema threats
I probably don't even need to advise you that this compilation is NSFW because about 2/3 of the clips contain profanity, highlighting the rather formulaic nature of such episodes.
Via JazJaz.
Finally, a postage stamp commemorating something important
Text from The Posthorn ("Official publication of the Scandinavian Collectors Club"). Photo via World Online Philatelic Agency.
13 June 2011
Disenchanted ?
A brief history of "The Twist"
Excerpts from an article at The Guardian celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the appearance of the dance:
The absence of body contact is significant. Rather than going through a set of predetermined steps, you are free to use dancing as a means of self-expression, of doing your own thing, though that phrase will not come into use until the 60s have become fully swinging. It is a narcissistic dance, but it also gives you the chance to watch your partner's moves, and read their intentions. And since you are not physically attached to your partner, there is nothing to stop you drifting away to dance with someone else who has caught your eye (of course, you can also have that humiliation visited upon you, and find yourself dancing alone). Finally, there is no leader: here is the first dance in which the genders are created equal...And re the embedded video:
No one knows how the Twist began. The word was used in connection with dancing in a number of songs during the first half of the 20th century, but the song itself seems to have been written, in its first form, in 1957 by Brother Joseph Wallace of the Sensational Nightingales, a prominent gospel group. Its profoundly secular nature prevented him performing it himself, but when the Nightingales found themselves sharing a Florida hotel with the popular (and very secular) Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Wallace offered them his song...
King Records' boss was Syd Nathan, an archetypal cigar-chomping philistine who liked the Twist so little that it first saw the light of day, in January 1959, as the B-side of a ballad called Teardrops On Your Letter, which edged its way into the Top 100... This was quickly spotted by Philadelphia-based disc jockey Dick Clark, who already had a national following for his own TV show, American Bandstand... it would be a good idea to record a cover version of this new song, to feature on his show. Lowe selected one of his contracted artists, a cheerful, good-looking, puppy-fattish 19-year-old called Ernest Evans whose professional name, Chubby Checker, paid homage to Fats Domino... Chubby Checker and the Twist were duly given their first national exposure in August 1960 to the broader audience offered by Clark's Saturday night show, broadcast from New York...
On West 45th Street in midtown Manhattan, a small nightclub called the Peppermint Lounge was setting aside its past as a sleazy leather bar... it had acquired as resident band a young New Jersey group called Joey Dee and the Starliters. They were joined on stage by three teenage girls from Spanish Harlem who had turned up at the club one night in high bouffant hairdos, lavish mascara and matching frocks, with Kleenex stuffed in their bras, and were given a job as the world's first go-go dancers. Later they would become known as the Ronettes...
Within weeks, Joey Dee and the Starliters were not only topping the charts with Peppermint Twist but entertaining Manhattan's social elite at a charity ball in the Plaza hotel and a party at the Museum of Modern Art. Jackie Kennedy, the epitome of the new carefree spirit of the post-Eisenhower era, did the Twist in a Capri nightspot... Arthur Murray, the dance teacher, added it to his curriculum, setting an example followed with some reluctance by Fred Astaire's nationwide chain of academies...
What the Twist had done, however, was create a powerful hunger among modernist youth for new dance crazes based on the template of dancing on the spot, with no contact. And so along came the Locomotion, the Fly, the Madison, the Hitch Hike, the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Frug, the Stroll, the Monkey, the Dog, the Mashed Potato and countless others...
Clips include the following actors and actresses dancing to The Twist: Route 66 (Julie Newmar), Pulp Fiction (Uma Thurman, John Travolta), Spiderman 3 (Kirsten Dunst, James Franco), Leave it to Beaver (Jerry Mathers), Mad Men and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Matthew Broderick).
"Blood farming" explained
Excerpts from The Red Market, a book by Scott Carney, subtitled "On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers."
For the last three years the man had been held captive in a brick-and-tin shed just a few minutes’ walk from where the farmers were drinking tea. The marks on his arms weren’t the tell-tale signs of heroin addiction; they came from where his captor, a ruthless modern-day vampire and also a local dairy farmer and respected landowner named Papu Yadhav, punctured his skin with a hollow syringe. He had kept the man captive so he could drain his blood and sell it to blood banks...Via Wired Science. I've requested the book from our library.
They sprung the lock and revealed a medical ward fit for a horror movie. IV drips hung from makeshift poles and patients moaned as if they were recovering from a delirium. Five emaciated men lying on small woven cots could barely lift their heads to acknowledge the visitors... One man stared at the ceiling with glassy eyes as his blood snaked through a tube and slowly drained into a plastic blood bag on the floor. He was too weak to protest.
A crumpled nylon bag next to him held five more pints. Inside were another nineteen empty bags ready for filling. Each had official-looking certification stickers from local blood banks as well as bar codes and a seal from the central regulatory authority...
A healthy adult has between 14 and 18 grams of hemoglobin for every 100 milliliters of blood. The men averaged only 4 grams. Leeched of their vital fluids to the brink of death, all of them were gray and wrinkled from dehydration...
It is tempting to view the horrors of Gorakhpur’s blood farm as an isolated incident: the sort of aberration that only happens on the margins of the civilized world and unrelated to the blood supply anywhere else. But the existence of the blood farm suggests a deeper problem with the circulation of human materials in the market. The blood farm could never have existed without eager buyers who were either incurious about the supply or just didn’t care about the source.
"Generally speaking, dead things don't move"
Biologist Matthew Harrington and his colleagues at Germany’s Max Planck Institute set out to explain the mysteries of the “ice plant,” Delosperma nakurense, a succulent that grows in arid and semi-arid regions of eastern Africa. The plant has adapted to dry conditions by producing special seed capsules that protect their cargo with a boxlike lid of five petal-like sections. When it rains, the capsules unfold. When the capsules dry up, they return to their original shape.Photo credit: M. J. Harrington.
The cycle can happen over and over, though by the time ice plant seed capsules perform their origami feats, they’ve long since been separated from the living plants that created them.
“Generally speaking, dead things don’t move,” said Harrington, whose examination of ice plant origami is published June 7 in Nature Communications. “So when they do, it’s of obvious interest.”..
Specialized cells in the capsules are filled with a cellulose layer that can absorb large amounts of water. As the cellulose swells, the cell’s unique honeycomb structure translates the increasing pressure into movement along a single axis — like blowing into a noise-maker party favor.
Addendum: 80-second video of the process here (found by Wayne Conrad).
Chicago skyline on a frozen Lake Michigan
04 June 2011
Hiatus
Several events have conspired to take me away from blogging, perhaps for a week or so - a combination of family and business affairs that will consume all of my time.
"Loom" - a remarkable animation
Loom tells the story of a successful catch.A list of the awards this animation has received is posted at the Polynoid website. If you're going to watch it, I highly recommend taking advantage of the fullscreen button.
A moth being caught in a spiders web. Struggling for an escape, the moths panic movements only result in less chance of survival. What follows is the type of causality everyones expecting. The spider appears, claims its prey and feeds on it. The way nature works. But it’s the point of view that creates an intense relationship between the hunter and its victim. There is much more to explore, much more to feel if one takes the time to really experience the content of a split second.
Loom is the newest brainchild in our short film family, and the most ambitious project we tackled so far. One year in the making, we took the time to push this 5 1/2 minute baby as much as possible in both storytelling and technique.
Via Neatorama.
03 June 2011
Queen Elizabeth must wonder sometimes what the fashion world is coming to
"I wasn't nervous to meet the Queen at all," Hamnett told us this morning. "I wanted to put the message across that sustainable clothing can be glamorous, so I wore an organic cotton dress by Katharine Hamnett and a fabulous Philip Treacy hat made from cockerel feathers - which is a bi-product of food waste."The rest of the story is at Vogue. Photo credit PA Photos.
*Commander of the British Empire is an order of chivalry enstated by King George V in 1917. The title of Commander is third in seniority, the two titles above it (Knight Grand Cross and Knight Commander) automatically make the individual a knight or dame.
Meet the "bitcoin"
The best performing currency of the past year isn't Brazil's real, up 15% versus the U.S. dollar, or Australia's dollar, up 27%. It's the Bitcoin. A year ago one was worth half a penny. Thursday morning it hit $10.50. That's a gain of more than 200,000%.It's not discussed in the article, but I suspect bitcoins offer a way for users and merchants to avoid a variety of taxes, both on income and on transactions. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
What's a Bitcoin? It's a peer-to-peer system of electronic money that allows payments to be sent directly between two parties without the need for a financial institution...
There are about six million Bitcoins today. The number will approach 21 million beginning in the 2030s but never exceed it. The finite supply of Bitcoins might help explain the frantic demand for them...
Users get Bitcoins in one of several ways. "Miners" set their computers to work solving problems in exchange for coins. The more miners there are, the more difficult the problems become, which keeps the rate of supply stable. At recent exchange rates, high-end machines can produce $30 worth of Bitcoins per day, but consume a vast amount of energy in doing so...
Any fiat currency -- dollars, euros, Bitcoins -- gets its value from trust. Dollars can't be cashed in for anything; rather, we accept them as payment with the belief that others will accept them, too. That's another reason the price of Bitcoins has rocketed over the past year. Two years ago, almost no one accepted them for payment. Over the past year, a handful of early adopters began trading services for them -- mostly programmers offering things like website design and hacking consultation. In recent months, a handful of pioneers have begun selling real goods for the start-up money...
More than a dozen sites now sell goods for Bitcoins, including T-shirts, coffee and natural pet food. At least one, The Arms Locker, says it offers firearms. Another, Silk Road, is a forum for people selling recreational drugs. How can that be? Bitcoin transactions leave a record of times and amounts, but not identities...
It's not clear what regulators think of Bitcoin. The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority over U.S. money. In March, a North Carolina resident was convicted of minting his own Liberty Dollars to reduce reliance on and compete with the greenback. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
Bitcoins aren't U.S. currency, however, and Norman says the Bitcoin Consultancy doesn't operate in the U.S. And as with file-sharing software, Bitcoin operates as a peer-to-peer network, raising the question of how regulators could stop it if they wanted to. The FBI didn't respond to requests for comment.
02 June 2011
Geophones and Golden Moles
I often wish I lived closer to a desert (especially the Namibian one).
Via SuperPunch and Neatorama.
Hidden product shrinkage
The photo above shows an example our family recently encountered while replacing a paper product. The cardboard roll from the previous item (same brand) fits easily inside the roll of the new product.
I hope they don't increase the size of the hole in Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I"m afraid I can't do that."
Excerpts from a post at AOL Autos:
Despite strides in voice-activated technology, carmakers acknowledge that women have a tougher time using speech-recognition technology than men... Women's voices can be tricky for the technology to decipher, especially when using navigation, causing many female drivers to give up trying. Drivers with foreign accents say it won't work for them. Even drivers with thick regional accents can have trouble...
OnStar spokesman Adam Denison says the General Motors' system has evolved over the past 10 years. Improvements were made first for males, then females, then Midwestern speakers. Finally it was adjusted for Southern speakers and people from New England...
Foreign accents still stump most systems. David Champion, who leads Consumer Reports' auto testing department, often stymies cars with his British accent. His voice isn't even picked up by British car brands, like Land Rover. When he asks it to do something, the car will respond in a British accent, saying, "Sorry?"
Covers for potted plants
Photo credit Erin O'Brien in The Erin O'Brien Owner's Manual for Human Beings.
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