November 30, 2012
Fantastic Four, Episode 3 - The Coming of the Submariner (1975)
The Fantastic Four Marvel Radio Series is available at Archive.org.
"... a very short-lived radio show in 1975 that adapted early Lee/Kirby stories, and is notable for casting a pre-Saturday Night Live Bill Murray as the Human Torch. Also in the cast were Bob Maxwell as Reed Richards, Cynthia Adler as Sue Storm, Jim Pappas as Ben Grimm and Jerry Terheyden as Doctor Doom. Other Marvel characters featured in the series included Ant-Man, Prince Namor, Nick Fury, and the Hulk. Stan Lee narrated the series, and the scripts were taken almost verbatim from the comic books."
The play's the thing
Rick McGinnis reviews toy stores of Toronto.
They've got an Ark in the back there somewhere, presumably
Inside Amazon.
November 29, 2012
Can you speak Venusian?
From Patrick Moore's One Pair of Eyes (1969).
Copiale Cipher
"It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic 'sight-restoring' ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history."
Map of Refractoria
"Artist Jeffrey Beebe's website dedicated to his autobiographical/imaginary world called Refractoria; the website features dozens hand-drawn geopolitical maps, city maps, celestial charts, genealogical charts, etc. profoundly influenced by OD&D/AD&D 1st Edition and various fantasy maps."
With trembling pseudopods
Rork Glanf tore away the Earth-Girl's space-suit.
November 28, 2012
Paging Blake to the Satanic mill phone
"As W.H. Auden, one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, once said, 'One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.' These days you’re more likely to find the cavernous concrete foundries of a bygone industrial era chock full of Eames chairs and ironic art."
And a confused troll
"Like a dreamy setting straight out of a fairytale, Marseille-based artist Olivier Grossetête's delicate bridge floats over a pond, suspended by a trio of surreally inspired giant white balloons."
Elon of Mars
"Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who co-founded Tesla Motors and Paypal, has been doing some serious planning for his next big venture: his future dominion on Mars."
November 27, 2012
Sanskrit Village - Jhiri, Madhya Pradesh
"Jhiri comes under Rajgarh district of Madhya Pradesh. Total population of the village is 976 and all the people including small children, women, elder people, school-going children, literate and illiterate speak fluently in Sanskrit. Samskrit Bharati had started conducting Samskrit Sambhashan camps in the village in 2002 through an activist Vimla Tewari. She had come here only for one year. But in that one year she developed so much interest of the villagers to the divine language that everybody in the village turned to learn Sanskrit."
Hat tip to Alexei.
The Sanskritisation of life
"Prem Narayan Chauhan pats his oxen, pushing them to go a little faster. Ziighrataram, ziighrataram chalanti, he urges them. The animals respond to their master’s call, picking up pace on the muddy path that leads to his 10-acre cornfield. Chauhan, 35, dropped out of school early, after Class II. He does not consider it remarkable that he speaks what is considered a dying language (or that his oxen respond to it).
"For him, Sanskrit is not a devabhasha, the language of the gods, but one rooted in the commonplace, in the ebb and flow of everyday life in Jhiri, the remote hamlet in Madhya Pradesh, where he lives. Mutterings under banyan trees, chit-chat in verandahs, pleasantries on village paths, disputes in the panchayat — in Jhiri, it’s all in Sanskrit."
Vayam Atra
Mukhda: It is indeed a good fortune (punyam) to have been born to this land - a land so holy, its sentiment so pure.
Antara 1: To be born to this land is not easily attainable by everyone. Those born here can attain godliness. Without any expectation of returns, those born to this land work righteously and dutifully.
Antara 2: There are no differences amongst us in our being or in our sentiment. We unify all religions and, we walk and speak together as one.
November 26, 2012
Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012
Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012
Given that the man did not attend university, and didn't need to, he has excellent advice of general application; perhaps most especially for a room full of enthusiastic young people seeking a career in the arts and managing a small mountain student debt.
Bryce Bayer, RIP
"Bayer's work with Kodak left an indelible mark on almost every digital image you see today, both figuratively, and literally. His eponymous color filter, developed in 1976, used a mosaic layout of red green and blue filters that enables light sensors to create full color images. The design imitates the way the human eye perceives color, with twice as much green as red or blue, and the resulting output is then interpreted with "demosaicing" algorithms to produce an accurate, RGB image."
Penitentiary industrial complex
"The US has five times the population of the United Kingdom but 40 times the number in prison. This fact alone ought to invalidate the monstrously inequable extradition treaty between Britain and the States. It is quite obvious that a person we extradite to America cannot expect the level of justice we take for granted here."
Derbys vs Oxfords
"As the modern office gets less formal when it comes to men’s clothing, does it really matter if you struggle to tell the difference between the two styles of men’s shoes, The Derby and Oxford? To the modern gentleman, it matters a great deal."
November 25, 2012
Fnord
Radio Eris is an algorithmically generated audio stream that will broadcast for 15 days from 23rd November 2012, and then shut down for good.
November 24, 2012
Even front-row seats near the blackboard or a post as class monitor are up for sale
This does not represent my experience. On Monday, I am going to start auctioning off front row seats.
November 23, 2012
Sandy Island
Australian scientists have undiscovered an island in the Pacific. Fortunately, it's French.
The Twinkie Curtain descends
"From the deplorably parochial coverage in the U.S. media, you’d almost get the impression that those iconic American delicacies of Twinkies and Wonder Bread have ceased production. That’s not true. They’ve just ceased production for Americans."
November 22, 2012
The dictatorship of fashion
The existence of youth subcultures in the Soviet Union demonstrates two things: On one level, finding punks and metalheads in the Soviet Union - or jazz fans, fedoras and A-line dresses in an earlier era - shows that whatever the political differences of the day, it is culture that matters.
And on another rather more obvious level, it shows that the erstaz rebellion of punk and metal was a matter of perfect indifference to the authorities. For all the posing, youth style tribes are about fashion, looking cool and getting laid, and not about changing anything.
A new hope
Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg have agreed to write installments of the new Star Wars trilogy, writing either Episode 8 or Episode 9.
November 21, 2012
Carl Sagan - The Frontier is Everywhere
Terraqueous related: Because this is the only other instance of the word that comes to mind.
- H.P. Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
Olfactory white
The nasal equivalent of white noise,
This experiment revealed that the more components in a mixture, the worse participants were at telling them apart. A four-component mixture smells less similar to other four-component mixtures than a 43-component mixture smells to other 43-component mixtures.
Walt Disney + Salvador Dali = Destino
"Destino dates from a late 1940s collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali that was abandoned then resurrected 56 years later. About seven minutes in length and set to a Spanish ballad by Armando Dominguez, Destino is about love lost and rediscovered, full of surreal transformations. Animated by Dominique Monfery at Disney's Paris studio, the short features five original Dali paintings as backgrounds. unlike the other video available on youtube, this one contains the original soundtrack to he movie."
November 20, 2012
BBC Newsnight - Possession, Jinn and Britain's Backstreet Exorcists
"UK health and social workers and those in the criminal justice system are increasingly having to understand belief in spiritual possession among ethnic minorities, with new research highlighting a particular issue with some sections of the British Asian community blaming mental health problems on the supernatural."
The English Leonardo
"Not only did Sir George Cayley draw an aeroplane design almost a century before the first one was built - but he also imagined the bicycle wheel, the tank and a prosthetic hand."
November 19, 2012
Fritz Lang - The Nibelungen Saga (1924)
"Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge by Fritz Lang finally presented as one complete epic. Revolutionary film-making in its time and regarded as one of the most important silent films to this day.
"The films are presented in their most complete and uncut form (142 & 148 min. respectively), and were restored by the Munich Film Archive featuring the original 1924 orchestral score newly recorded. Part II starts at 2:22:22"
Both films were co-written by Lang's then-wife Thea von Harbou, based upon the epic poem Nibelungenlied written around 1200 AD. Siegfried was released in the U.S. on 23 August 1925, premiering at the Century Theatre in New York City in the short-lived Phonofilm sound-on-film process. Kriemhild's Revenge was released in the U.S. in 1928.
Resilience Maps
"Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps is a Creative Commons licenced mapping and analysis tool for evaluating personal and social resilience. It is intended to be used for planning, and is simple enough to learn during a crisis to facilitate cooperation and effective response."
Via Warren Ellis.
November 17, 2012
Berndnaut Smilde makes clouds
"Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde makes real clouds form inside of empty rooms! He uses a fog machine and carefully adjusts the temperature and humidity to produce clouds just long enough to photograph."
Apple now owns the "page turn" effect
Also, glass staircases.
This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application.
Yes, that’s right. Apple now owns the page turn. You know, as when you turn a page with your hand. An “interface” that has been around for hundreds of years in physical form. I swear I’ve seen similar animation in Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons.
I've got a... good... feeling about this?
According to the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, Disney plans to put out two to three Star Wars-related movies every year.
Dynamic D*Haus
"Inspired by geometry, mathematic formulas, and more than likely a childhood adoration of tangrams, UK designers David Ben Grünberg and Daniel Woolfsonat of the firm D*Haus have dreamed up some crazy renderings of a home that folds up, and not in the way tiny New York apartments do, either."
November 16, 2012
“And maybe if I had a camel-portable solar array, I could...”
"THAT guy is part of the .01%. A crazy. An outlier. A brother. A dreamer of dreams."
"So here we are in our books..."
Try a fly next
"Physicists have teleported quantum information from one ensemble of atoms to another 150 metres away, a demonstration that paves the way towards quantum routers and a quantum Internet."
November 15, 2012
Sunrise, sunset
"Throughout the few weeks I spent in Yunan, I really wanted to see this fantastic landscape."
November 13, 2012
Grimes - Oblivion
Grimes 'Oblivion' from Somesuch & Co. on Vimeo.
Hat tip to Mr. Percifield.
November 12, 2012
A zoom with a view
The Landscape Photographer of The Year 2012 (LPOTY) competition has announced its winner. There was a bit of a to do about photo manipulation in excess of what the rules allow.
I've got a bad feeling about this
Lucasfilm has confirmed that Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Arndt would be writing the script for Star Wars Episode VII.
November 10, 2012
Ruggero Raimondi - Tosca "Tre Sbirri, Una Carrozza/Te Deum"
Benoit Jacquot's Tosca (2001)
Ruggero Raimondi - Tosca "Tre Sbirri, Una Carrozza/Te Deum"
Arena di Verona (2006)
Puccini - Tosca (2011)
Giacomo Puccini: Tosca [Royal Opera House, 2011] - Gheorghiu, Kaufmann, Terfel
"Tosca (Italian pronunciation: [ˈtɔska]) is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work, based on Victorien Sardou's 1887 French-language dramatic play, La Tosca, is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples's control of Rome threatened by Napoleon's invasion of Italy. It contains depictions of torture, murder and suicide, yet also includes some of Puccini's best-known lyrical arias, and has inspired memorable performances from many of opera's leading singers."
November 09, 2012
Just once, a mullet
Jesus was most likely not a long hair.
Adventures in synaesthesia
Richard Feynman, Vladimir Nabokov, David Hockney. What do these famous figures have in common? They are all synaesthetes.
November 08, 2012
Meanwhile, in 1986
At Topgun today, there's a $5 fine for anyone on staff who references or quotes the movie.
November 07, 2012
A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (1750)
Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity, which do not result in the exportation of bullion, increase among their subjects. They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people. Alexander, wishing to keep the Ichthyophages in a state of dependence, compelled them to give up fishing, and subsist on the customary food of civilised nations. The American savages, who go naked, and live entirely on the products of the chase, have been always impossible to subdue. What yoke, indeed, can be imposed on men who stand in need of nothing?
- Jean Jacques Rousseau. A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences - The First Part, Note 1
2012 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year
"The coveted first place title went to Canadian Paul Nicklen for his photo of emperor penguins swimming near a frozen area of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. To capture the image, Paul had to lower himself into the water through the only exit hole, remaining motionless as he breathed through a snorkel careful not to scare away any penguins that arrived."
Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers
“Why don’t you do a continuity of Mickey trying to commit suicide," Walt Disney told Floyd Gottfredson. “I think it will be funny.”
November 06, 2012
Still scruffy looking
Harrison Ford would like to reprise his role as Han Solo. So, no matter how everything else turns out today, good news.
But let's not go overboard with this.
Sorites paradox
How many grains of sand can you remove from a heap of sand before it stops being a heap?
November 05, 2012
Unfinished business
You say the British have invaded nine out of ten countries. I say we have twenty-two to go.
November 03, 2012
Shert Nebti
The tomb of a an Egyptian princess has been discovered near Cairo after resting undisturbed for 4500 years. Just in time for it and its contents to be hammered into oblivion by Puritan crazies. Congratulations, archaeology!
Avedis Zildjian
"The Avedis Zildjian Company is a cymbal manufacturer founded in Istanbul by Armenian Avedis Zildjian in the 17th century during the Ottoman Empire. At nearly 400 years old, Zildjian is one of the oldest companies in the world."
November 02, 2012
The letter reaches its destination
The remains of a heroic World War II carrier pigeon, have been discovered in a chimney in Surrey. Work has begun at Bletchley Park and GCHQ to decode its message; hopefully, not time critical.
Pigeons at war: The Air Ministry Pigeon Section, memorialized at Bletchley Park..
For gallantry: Thirty two pigeons were decorated during the War with the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross.
Khaleesi
For your edification: 80 Daenyris Targaryen costumes from Halloween, 2012 culled from Instagram, Twitter and Reddit.
November 01, 2012
Godzilla, King of the Monsters
I can't be the only one who was a little disappointed civilization didn't collapse a couple nights ago.
The good old days
The foundations of a huge Anglo-Saxon feasting hall have been discovered under a village green in Kent.
A new hope
Understanding George Lucas.