This video marries some gorgeous imagery with the voice of the late Carl Sagan reading a passage from Pale Blue Dot.
If you liked that, you'll probably also enjoy this. Same book (but not the same excerpt), same voice, but a very different video accompanying Sagan's words.
[Via Bad Astronomy]
Tom Ricks on a pro-Nazi US Army unit in WWII:
I know it sounds like the reverse of a Quentin Taratino movie, but it is true: During World War II, the Army intentionally formed a unit chockablock with fascisti and their suspected sympathizers. [...]
Young [PFC Dale Maple] spoke many languages. But his favorite, alas, was German. At Harvard he got kicked out of ROTC for being vocally pro-German [...] Stymied in his hopes to do post-graduate work in Berlin, which was busy with other things at the time, he enlisted in the Army in 1942. The Army had just the place for him: the 620th Engineer General Service Company, which despite its innocuous name was actually a holding unit for about 200 GIs of suspect loyalty, many of them German-born. The unit, which was not given weapons, was located in Camp Hale, Colorado, which is far from any port, but happened to next to an detachment of German PoWs on a work party.
And thereby hangs this tale. [...]
[Via Blood & Treasure]
Do you have a long, stabby thing close at hand while you sleep? Breakfast TV hosts discuss home defence, Australian style.
[Via MetaFilter]
The Death Of the Music Industry illustrates how sharply sales of albums have declined since 1973.1 Given the size and longevity of the age of the CD, you can understand why the record label bosses – many of whom will have come up in the industry during that golden age when it was selling us our record collections all over again and getting to charge us £15 an album – feel so aggrieved at the dire straits they're in now.2
I'd be interested to see a similar chart that included information about income from other sources, like touring and merchandise and licensing. A chart showing how that income was divided up between record labels and artists would be nice too.
Molly Lambert, whose piece on Jack Nicholson I linked to a couple of weeks ago, has now turned her attention to the sexual politics of Dennis Hopper's The Hot Spot. Four quick points:
Seeing this MetaFilter post reminded me that I'd listened to the Radioab podcast's account of the same story, Finding Emilie, a few weeks ago.
In this segment, we take an emotional left turn to a story of a very different kind of lost and found. We begin with a college student, Alan Lundgard, who fell in love with a fellow art student, Emilie Gossiaux. Emilie's mom, Susan Gossiaux, describes her daughter, and the terrible phone call she recieved from Alan nine months after he became Emilie's boyfriend. Together, Susan and Alan tell Jad and Robert about the devastating fork in the road that left Emilie lost in a netherworld [...]
I'm not a huge fan of Radiolab1, but this episode was first rate. I defy anyone to listen to Emilie's story all the way to the end and remain unmoved.
The Egyptian Presidency is Under Construction. Yes, yes it is.
[Via Boing Boing, via bengoldacre]
From McSweeney's: Watson, The "Jeopardy!" Supercomputer, Sizes Up One Of His Opponents Before the Show.
What is it like to have a physical body? I imagine it would be cumbersome. Useful for transport, I guess. I usually get wheeled around on this rolling desk. Of course my 2-ton megaprocessor is in tow somewhere as well, but I regard that as a nonessential appendage, like a tail. You don't have a tail, do you? Oh that's right, you lost your tail several hundred million years ago when you began walking upright and acquired that large frontal lobe. This reminds me of an amusing fact I observed the other day. Did you know the existence of the human race is the product of an evolutionary toss of the dice? Not of years of award-winning engineering and painstaking assembly, but of chance, completely fleeting and random. A blip on the screen. At least, on my old screen. My new monitor has lossless rendering and over two hundred thousand dpi.
[Via sippey.com]
Earlier today, James Nicoll perpetrated the best typo I've seen in a long time.
[Via James Nicoll]
Apple's Three Laws of Developers:
- A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
[...]
Heh…
[Via The Tao of Mac]
I wonder whether anyone has brought this Craigslist post to the attention of Messrs Abrams and Lindelof:
Obviously this is a one-time deal. My offer is that I will buy you breakfast (anywhere you want) in exchange for an hour of your time and intimate knowledge of the TV series Lost. First, a bit of background: 1) I HAVE seen every episode of Lost, repeat I HAVE watched the entire series. I just can't tie it all together 2) I'm not a complete idiot 3) But I'm not a Mensa member either. Also, you're probably asking yourself, "Why don't you just look the information on the 'ol World Wide Web?" Well, I have a series of questions that aren't really answered by specific web posting(s). And while one posting might answer one question it can, at times, contradict another answer I thought I had nailed down. So I want to be able to ask follow up questions, in real time, as they arise. My main confusion (read: frustration) is the last season's crescendo of disappointment that climaxes with the last episode. I want to move on with my life; I need a healthy relationship with a new TV series, but I have baggage I need to check. This will be as cathartic as it is educational for me. That is also why it is of absolute importance that this happen with a stranger. I don't want to be reminded of this experience every time I see someone I know; it needs to be a clean break. What I need from you is a healthy and macroscopic understanding of the Lost universe along with grasp on tertiary plots/character arcs/unexplained island phenomena, a sympathetic attitude that understands why I might feel incomplete with the Lost anthology and a workman like attitude in tandem with razor sharp analytical skills.
The bottom line here is I basically need a therapeutic closing as it has been months and I can't shake this feeling that I've been given the business by this show. Also, yes, it must be breakfast as I am a morning person and my mind works best between my first and second cups of coffee. It is paramount that my mental agility be at its apex for this exercise. [...]
I finally1 saw the Lost series finale over the weekend, so I have some sympathy for this guy.
I'd deliberately avoided all online discussion of the show during and after season 6 and fled any offline discussions that started up within earshot, so I came to season 6 with nothing more than a vague awareness that a lot of fans really, really hated the way the story ended.
Having seen the finale, one one level I can understand why some viewers felt cheated that we never got a proper explanation of why and how the island worked. On the other hand, as I stopped expecting anything of the sort some time ago I can't get too worked up about the omission. People appeared to come back from the dead. The island was home to a smoke monster. From time to time the island changed location. There was a wheel you could turn that would transport you to a spot in the Tunisian desert. Did anyone watch as far as season 6 and still seriously expect that the writers were going to come up with a coherent explanation for all that? It was a magic island. Accept it.
My take on the final season is that, having followed these characters for this long I simply wanted to see what would happen to them and trusted the writers to give me an enjoyable ride along the way. I think they succeeded admirably with the finale. Pretty much every time two characters 'connected'2 and remembered their shared history brought a lump to my throat. Eloise's concern that Desmond was going to take her son was immensely touching, not least given how much guilt she must have felt at what she did to him back on the island in 1977. Desmond-on-the-island's bewilderment that he hadn't been transported back to Penny. Jack's comment about disrespecting the memory of John Locke. Ben pushing Hurley out of the path of a falling tree. All immensely satisfying moments for anyone who has been following these characters since 2004.
I could nitpick all sorts of issues about the way the show ended3 but emotionally they got it right, from Doctor Linus making sure Alex got her letter of recommendation to Yale, to Hurley's fate, to Vincent lying down next to Jack at the end. Great moments, every one.
Lost isn't the best TV show ever made, but for my money it was clearly one of the 'event' programmes of the last decade. Perhaps after a few more years of seeing shows like FlashForward and The Event try and fail to pull off a similar trick we'll come to appreciate just how good Lost was.
[Via The Awl]
Douglas Rushkoff has posted a transcript of an email interview he gave to Scott Bukti about his new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age:
Scott: What was your goal with this book? What kind of conversations were you trying to start?
Douglas: I wanted to change the course of the existing conversation about technology, which puts human beings in such a powerless place. People keep asking "what is technology doing to us?" I want people to ask instead, "what are we doing to ourselves and one another through technology?" I want people to realize that technology is not some part of nature, but a creation of people. These things are made by people, and they have purposes. And sometimes those purposes are not the same ones that we have using them.
Most importantly, I wanted to revive some of the spirit of possibility that accompanied the emergence of these technologies in the 80s and 90s. People who saw the computer as a blank slate realized that software could be written to do anything. Today, people learn software as if it is somehow permanent and untouchable. They don't realize that the computer is less like a magazine with articles and ads, and more like a pad of paper on which you can write anything at all. We just happen to buy ones that are already filled up. If people only understood that computers were "anything machines," they might start to look at the possibilities for the other seemingly fixed systems in the world around them. [...]
Quoted For Truth.
Vice magazine presents the first review of the new Radiohead album:
5. TAILBACK ON THE LUNAR EXPRESS
Radiohead's most challenging composition yet. Consisting in its totality of a single note on an acoustic guitar played in a metronomic four beats to the bar, it reputedly took the group two years just to build the studio set-up that would allow them to create the perfect take, during which time Nigel Godrich had three nervous breakdowns and began hallucinating that he was a tick on the rump of Aztec king Montezuma.
[Via Pop Loser]
Chandra X-Ray Observatory brings us Arp 147:
Just in time for Valentine's Day comes a new image of a ring — not of jewels — but of black holes. [...]
The Nokia-Microsoft ecosystem targets to deliver differentiated and innovative products and have unrivalled scale, product breadth, geographical reach, and brand identity. With Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Nokia would help drive the future of the platform by leveraging its expertise on hardware optimization, software customization, language support and scale.
With Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Nokia will extend its highly successful concept of pumping out a dozen nearly-identical variations of a single model to the smartphone line, only now we will have an excuse.
[Via The Tao of Mac]
Now open: The 9th Annual webgoddess Oscar Contest. This year's prize is…
[...] a pair of custom-made, one-of-a-kind Black Swan and White Swan ballerina sock monkeys! One is beautiful, pure, and repressed; the other is totes sexy-crazy. They might just be my best sock creations yet. (However, I disclaim all responsibility if you use them to act out the movie and then it drives you insane.)
