cycles of history?

Elizabeth Olds - A Sacred Profession Is Open to College Graduates, 1936

via Ordinary finds, a far from ordinary weblog

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Getting A Story Made at National Geographic After talking with several National Geographic photographers about shooting for the magazine I became intrigued with the process of getting a story made. The collaboration between the photo editors and photographers and then the photographers involvement in all the steps along the way is unique and important to how they make stories. More magazines should spend this kind of time with their contributors. The few times I’ve had photographer come into the office and present their images to us have been incredibly rewarding and certainly I think made the story that much better. I asked David Griffin, National Geographic’s Director of Photography about the process of getting stories made and the rumored years it takes for a story to go from idea to printed page... (via)

Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface? How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?

From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre A cache of letters hidden in the basement brings to life a house, a family and the tragedy that would change everything (via)

Love story: The librarian, the postal worker and their art Art takes up all the air in Herb and Dorothy Vogel's cramped one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. Minimalist and conceptual works cover every inch of wall and dangle from the ceiling. Because there is no other place for it, a Richard Tuttle painting clings to the inside of a louvered door that leads to the tiny kitchen. Other pieces crowd shelves and table tops. And the Vogels, who are giving the Miami Art Museum and 49 other institutions around the country gifts of 50 artworks each and are subjects of a documentary that will screen in December during Art Basel Miami Beach, say there is plenty more under the bed and jammed into the closets of this modest, rent-stabilized space they have called home since 1963.

Library Ghosts: Northeastern U.S. Last year about this time (just in time for Halloween), I posted on this blog a list of libraries that are said to be haunted. Now the library ghosts are back, by popular demand...

also:
Stanislav Petrov, the man who could have started a nuclear war, but didn’t (via)
Know Your Intelligence Agencies: National Reconnaissance Office
Biology in Science Fiction: Erasing Memory
The History of Some of Today's Most Common Phrases (via)
Recent additions to the Chambers Slang Dictionary
Punctuation Game
1000 artworks to see before you die (via)
Podcasts from the University of Oxford (via)
Haruki Murakami interview (via)
Wayne Coyne interview
Aerial Phenomena Research: Selected Papers - Jacques F. Vallee (via)
Casting the Runes by M.R. James
Oboe Bong

Futility Closet: Over the Moon Jules Verne earned his title as the father of science fiction. His 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon contains eerie similarities to the Apollo program that unfolded a century later. (read more)

viddy:
The Anti-Fascist trailer
Parallel Universes, Parallel Lives 1/6 (Eels frontman Mark Everett in search of his father's brain. Dr Hugh Everett III proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.) (via)
Hog Hunting (A plague of feral hogs has descended on the American South. They've been spotted here in Savannah.) (via)
The Real Secret Of The Matrix: The Haunting Sound Of The Waterphone (You'll know it as soon as you hear it.)
Daily (kinda sorta) Weather with David Lynch (via)
Angkor Wat, Cambodia (1930s newsreel)

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Pentagon plans ‘spaceplane’ to reach hotspots fast The American military is planning a “spaceplane” designed to fly a crack squad of heavily armed marines to trouble spots anywhere in the world within four hours.

The History of the India-China Border There is no territorial dispute which has been, and still is, more susceptible to a solution than India’s boundary dispute with China. Each side has its non-negotiable vital interest securely under its control. India has the McMahon Line; China has Aksai Chin. Only a political approach, climaxed by a decision at the highest level, can settle the matter. In a couple of months it will be half a century since the issues were joined. (via)

Debt Collection, Outsourced to India With her flowing, hot-pink Indian suit, jangly silver bangles and perky voice, Bhumika Chaturvedi, 24, doesn't fit the stereotype of a thuggish, heard-it-all-before debt collector. But lately, she has had no problem making American debtors cry. (via)

Biology in Science Fiction: Big Giant Heads Before transhumanism became all the fashion, science fictional depictions of far future often gave our human descendants fantastic mental powers along with giant brains. But there is a serious problem with that idea: human brain size at birth is limited by the size of the opening in the pelvis, and those far future women never seem to have extra-wide hips to go along with their giant heads. (excellent post)

also:
Stone Age man took drugs, say scientists
NASA sends probe to study edge of solar system
Books: Umberto Eco - Turning Back the Clock
Britain to get first glance at author Burroughs' paintings
Showcasing 'Hidden Treasures' from Afghanistan
Eight Reasons Why You Can't Pay Attention (via)
How to Stay Awake at Work (via)
In the computer age, handwriting is a lost art
20 Places Where Bookworms Go to Read and Socialize Online (via)
Idea Generation (visual arts) (via)
Complete Spy Cam Smaller Than an Eyeball
Open Yale Courses: Introduction to Ancient Greek History with Professor Donald Kagan (via)
Photo Gallery: Hackers delight - A history of MIT pranks (via)
List of common misconceptions (via)

viddy:
17 months and 14'000 km away from technology Swiss adventurer Sarah Marquis, who travels by foot around Europe, Australia and America, explains what happen when you reconnect with nature and try to be autonomous, finding water, getting some electrical energy, collecting food were some of the topics discussed during her presentation.
Ivo Niehe Meets Frank Zappa (’91) (narration in Dutch, interview in English)
Presenting the instrument of the moment (beautiful music on the kora)
Brainwave Synthesis With Percussa AudioCubes
D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln
Insane Train Stunt (completely nuts)
Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" (montage)
Order of the Knights of Malta
Boring Books
The Ruts - Babylon's Burning
Run DMC on Reading Rainbow (via)
Do the Hustle

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Bringing a Trove of Medieval Manuscripts Online for the Ages One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the magnificent baroque halls of the library in this town’s abbey, is going online... (roughly 7,000 handwritten manuscripts, many over a thousand years old)

Martin Scorsese and me - mentored by a master Celina Murga has experienced what all young film-makers must dream of – being mentored by Martin Scorsese. The master craftsman of American cinema explains why fostering talent is important to him, while Murga reveals what it’s like to be on set with a legend.

Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams I'm not from that generation, but I watched a lot of B&W growing up. I have no recollection of any monochrome dreams. The white in B&W television always looked blue to me. I have an aunt that can tell what color something is in black and white. The family always razzed her for it, but I think maybe she could.

Obscure History: Let The Military Help In A Heist On October 17th, 1906, Wilhelm Voigt, a 57-year-old German shoemaker, impersonates an army officer and leads an entire squad of soldiers to help him steal 4,000 marks.

also:
Home Movie Day!!
The Invisible Library (list of fictional books from fiction) (via)
Giant Plush Microbes (all the favorites) (via)
FACT mix: Murcof
Black Swan Glossary (Taleb) (via)
Penguin Cover Notebooks (via)
Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter...

viddy:
The Power of Art: Caravaggio (via)
Jim Henson - Ripples (via)
Diego Stocco: DIY Musical Machines

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Mafiaboy grows up; a hacker seeks redemption The Internet attack took Yahoo Inc. engineers by surprise. It came so fast and with such intensity that Yahoo, then the Web's second most-popular destination, was knocked offline for about three hours. That was on the morning of Feb. 7, 2000. A few months later, 15-year-old Michael Calce was watching Goodfellas at a friend's house in the suburbs of Montreal when he got a 3 a.m. call on his cell phone. His father was on the line. "They're here," he said. A hacker seeks a career. This seems to be the standard arc: make news, get busted, do time, write a book, become a security consultant.

Follow up: Almost human: Interview with a chatbot No machine has yet passed. But the winner of the Loebner Prize at the weekend – Elbot, brainchild of Fred Roberts at Artificial Solutions in Germany – came close, according to the contest's rather generous rules.

Ocean Containers To Bury According to most survivalist sites, ocean containers can be buried, hidden away under the ground outfitted with electricals, rudementary plumbing, and all the food and water you can store for several months of keeping a low profile. While we at American Steel have seen it done, I'd like to give a word of caution.... Anyone planning to use a container for anything should take note. (via)

Downloads soar despite crackdown Music downloads among US adults have risen sharply during the past several months, despite a crackdown by the music industry to curb such behaviour. Few I know could afford their music collection. (via)

also:
Recurring science misconceptions in K-6 textbooks (via)
First look at Downey Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson
$56,000 Turntable Only An Audiophile Could Love
Surrealist techniques (via)

viddy:
Buffalo Dance featuring Hair Coat, Last Horse, and Parts His Hair
Trio: Da Da Da
Alien Contact: What will happen on October 14 (thx, dave)

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Aussie exposes online poker rip-off Detective work by an Australian online poker player has uncovered a $US10 million cheating scandal at two major poker websites and triggered a $US75 million legal claim. In two separate cases, Michael Josem, from Chatswood, analysed detailed hand history data from Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and uncovered that certain player accounts won money at a rate too fast to be legitimate. His findings led to an internal investigation by the parent company that owns both sites. It found rogue employees had defrauded players over three years via a security hole that allowed the cheats to see other player's secret (or hole) cards. I've never trusted online poker for this very possibility. (via)

NASA's dirty secret: Moon dust Fine as flour and rough as sandpaper, Moon dust caused 'lunar hay fever,' problems with space suits, and dust storms in the crew cabin upon returning to space.

Afghanistan's Very Careful Tour Guides The lines between the Afghanistan at war and the Afghanistan at peace alter daily. Cities accessible by road today may only be reached by plane — or not at all — tomorrow. And so follow the boundaries of the nation's tiny tourism industry. The few foreign tourists who come to Afghanistan, estimated to number under a thousand yearly, need plenty of help to pull off their holidays safely. In cities like Kabul, Herat, Faizabad and Mazar-i-Sharif, a small legion of Afghans who spent the last seven years as translators and security aides are spinning their expertise at navigating this shifting landscape into a new business. Now, they are also tour guides.

also:
Frank Deford - Paul Newman: A Sportsman And A Hero (audio)
5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind (via)
Traffic Waves - Sometimes one driver can vastly improve traffic

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Death of the bookworm Children are being taught to read at school – but not to love books' complexity and depth.

Looking at beautiful art can act as a painkiller Beauty is truth, the English romantic poet John Keats once wrote, but according to the latest scientific research it is also a painkiller. Looking at a beautiful piece of art has long been said to have the power to heal emotional wounds but the new research also claims it offers a distraction from physical pain.

Stealing History Over the last couple of months articles about the theft of items of historical significance have made there way into my reading queue. I didn’t seek these interesting pieces out on purpose, but the string of serendipity is too much to ignore so I though I would share them with you all.

Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200. “This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.” (via)

Print on demand with 'ATM for books' Imagine walking into a book store and knowing that even the most obscure or out of print books will always be in stock. Angus & Robertson today became the first Australian book chain to install the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), capable of printing, trimming and binding a paperback book on demand within minutes. I brought this idea up to some friends back in 2001. I thought it would be a good idea-- not unto itself but as a part of bookstore or coffeeshop or somesuch. People laughed at or just ignored me. I shouldn't listen to friends that don't read. (via)

also:
Take a look at what Hurricane Gustav did to Grand Isle, LA. (stunning) (via)
The Digested Read podcast: The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon A podcast version of John Crace's wickedly satirical Guardian column, lampooning the literary style of leading authors by summarising their books in five minutes
IMDB Video Watch Full-Length Movies, TV Shows, and More — Free! (via)

viddy:
2005 PBS NOW interview with Kurt Vonnegut (via)
Renoir painting (verb) (and puffin' somethin')
Why Schools Make You Tuck In Your Shirt! (wow)

Futility Closet - Elementary: Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, Scottish surgeon Joseph Bell, whom Arthur Conan Doyle had served as a clerk in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. (read more)

Word Spy: secondhand drinking n. A negative effect that a drinker has on a non-drinker.

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Baseball's UK heritage confirmed A diary that documents a game being played in Guildford in 1755 has been verified by Surrey History Centre. William Bray, a Surrey diarist and historian from Shere, wrote about the game when he was still a teenager. Major League Baseball, the governing body of the game in the US, has been informed of the discovery. (via)

Baang You're Dead Lee had recently quit his job in order to spend more time playing games, presumably so that he could eventually "go pro" and compete in South Korea's popular gaming competitions. It was a life choice that would ultimately prove fatal. Armed with cheap and fast connections and the latest gear, some South Koreans are gaming themselves to death. (thx Nick)

The last shot of the American Civil War was fired.... in the Arctic, off the coast of Alaska!

also:
100 Free Online Ivy League Courses You Should Take Just for Fun (via)
SnowCrystals.com Your online guide to snowflakes, snow crystals, and other ice phenomena (exhaustive)
Man Killed By Exploding Lava Lamp (via)

viddy:
Meatarians train plants to eat burgers
Rupert Sheldrake - The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence (via)
Brewster Kahle on the need for a digital library 'free for the world'
How to survive a nuclear attack (don't miss it)
Howard Rheingold on collaboration (I don't link frequently to Smart Mobs, but I keep and eye on it. Stick with this one, it's good.) (via)

Unnecessary Knowledge: Every year approximately 2,500 left-handed people are killed by using object or machinery designed for right-handed people. If you're left-handed and work with tools or machinery, you become aware of this possibility. In many cases, you become right-handed. (via)

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Gustav holdouts' tales give evacuees pause After curfew on Wednesday night, two National Guard soldiers traded their rifles for a guitar and some drumsticks....The night after Gustav came ashore, small squads of storm holdouts and National Guardsmen played an elaborate game of curfew cat-and-mouse. But they finally gave up as everyone ended up at the Maple Leaf lounge for a late-night gab session. (via)

The secret code of diaries A sampling of the more daunting diary codes, some taking many years to crack. (via) also: A high school teacher in Salinas, Donald G. Harden, and his wife cracked a code of a man threatening mass murder, a code which the Navy and FBI experts have failed to break in a week of effort. (read more and see the cracked message)

Elderly are more open-minded than young people People become confused more easily as they age because they succumb to distractions and not due to their brains slowing down, a new study shows.

Finding L.A.'s hidden homeless To most people, it's just trash: A scrap of dirty blanket visible under some stairs. A glimpse of blue tarp peeking out of a bush. A bag of recyclables parked discreetly behind a concrete column. But Courtney Kanagi, an outreach worker, has learned how to decode bits of urban detritus that most people ignore. She knows what these signs mean: the crawl space beneath the stairs was someone's home. When you're out there, you're acutely aware of many things that others miss completely, never noticing. (via)

Let's hear it for the autodidact Sean Connery's memoir is surprising, not least because the actor emerges from its thoughtful pages as self-taught.

also:
MIT-led Team Zooms in on Massive Black Hole at Center of Milky Way
Bare-breasted virgins compete for Swaziland king (photos!)
How to Create the Perfect Fake Identity
Archaeological Excavation Techniques
ClichéWatch: i.love.the.smell.of.*.in.the.morning (funny) (via)

viddy:
USCG Fly Over of New Orleans Post Gustav
Terry Gilliam on the Work of Roland Emmerich
Marshall McLuhan on the Today show (don't miss it)

Steve Vai On His Audition for Frank Zappa

Great story.

This video is from Berkleemusic.com, which is the online extension school of Berklee College of Music. You can get a good feel for what they're about on their YouTube page.

via Kill Ugly Radio

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World's largest machine--the electric grid--is old and outdated The U.S. electric grid is so old and outdated it can't handle the influx of wind power and other intermittent renewable resources.

Space Station Dodges Orbital Junk The International Space Station fired its rocket engines to dodge space junk for the first time in five years on Wednesday.

Is It Possible To Teach Experience? Business veterans claim you cannot teach ‘experience’, but European researchers say you can. (via)

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian. People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.

also:
Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes
10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You
Now Hear This: Don't Remove Earwax (I always suspected that those Chinese candles weren't so good for you.)
6 Funny Things About Asimov's Foundation Series
The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive (via)

viddy:
Cockfighting and dominoes: Haiti's poor at play (via)
Hackers prepare supermarket sweep
Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett Show

Making Books

Old school, indeed.

via

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Slow news day today, but we have a few items to mull.

More Miss Marple than 007: the true face of British espionage Like 007, they were licensed to kill, but they would never have dreamt of carrying a gun. “Obviously if your back was to the wall you would have done what was necessary,” Lady Ramsay says. “But we weren't like Rosa Klebb, we didn't have special shoes with poisoned daggers.” Her own firearms training was not a success. “The instructor told me, ‘You're not supposed to close your eyes every time you pull the trigger'.” Lady Park kept her gun in the safe. “In the Congo, I frightened an unwanted visitor away by pretending I was a witch. I shouted out of the window, ‘If you do not go away, your feet will fall off'. That was far more effective than a gun.” Much cooler than the mythology.

also:
Mark Twain's travels in India (via)
New Milky Way Map Reveals A Complicated Outer Galaxy
Canada seeks historic shipwrecks
The Fauxmaxion Map an interactive interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion World Map. (read more) (via)
How To Hot Wire Your Car

viddy:
Phillip Glass composition for Sesame Street
Sesame Street - How Crayons Are Made
The Daredevils Who Chase One of the Sky's Greatest Mysteries
Romanian Gypsies (photomontage)

Bill Evans was born on this day in 1929. Bela Lugosi died on this day in 1956.

Sending and Receiving

The first radio lecture being delivered by radio from Tufts University, 1922.

tout-fait (The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal):

Everything that we call electronic mass media today begins with the sending and receiving of signals without any material connection, with the miracle of "wireless" that started shortly before 1900. From 1920 on, this transmission technique of then primarily strategic military use develops into radio broadcasting. As a result, material things disappear from mass distribution and the media turn into something "immaterial". The uniformity of all products for all people caused by industrialization - as is expressed by the lexical term "ready made" - is only a preliminary stage towards a globally synchronized perception of a "radio-made" experience world.

This is one of the best articles I've read all year. If you're a fan or student of radio, media, communication, the Internet, hacking, the occult, Duchamp, Cage, Baudelaire or Baudrillard, do not miss it. Although it dates back to 2000, it is no less relevant to the present day.

via :::wood s lot:::

Some Facts About Owls

Tony Dusko:

This is a film I made for science class to get my fifth graders interested in owls. It worked! They love this film (even though a cute little bunny does get eaten).

There is hope for the education system in this country.

More educational fun on Notebook Babies

via Drawn!

see also: Gunnar fångar en uggla (Gunnar catches an owl)

Feist on Sesame Street

Pretty good.

Feist
Sesame Street
via Digital Collage

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The Twisted Journey Of 'Napoleon's Privates' "Whenever someone implies that history is boring, I bring up Napoleon's penis..." (via)

10 Badasses From the Pages of History A few surprises in there. A few that I never heard of.

Studs Terkel interviews Frank Zappa In August of 1968, Chicago's WFMT-FM broadcast of Studs Terkel's Wax Museum featuring composer, guitarist and full-time anarchist Frank Zappa. (via)

How Hunter S. Thompson beat back his writer’s block Writers sometimes suffer bouts of major paralysis. They want to write, are desperate to get down something great, but it’s just not coming easily, in fact not at all. (via)

Richard K. Morgan blogging on Amazon US (via)

Baseball diamonds: the lefthander's best friend "Ninety percent of the human population is right-handed, but in baseball 25 percent of the players, both pitchers, and hitters, are left-handed..." There are a number of purely physical reasons why the game favors lefties. Mechanical engineer David A. Peters breaks it down for us.

Pothead Ph.D. I never would have made it this far in graduate school without the aid of marijuana. Not a cautionary tale. Forget all the cliches and misinformation, this guy pretty much nails it. (via)

Japanese etiquette on entering a home or room, take off your shoes A quick primer, with video, for us gaijin barbarians.

also: World Conflicts Today (via); Richard Tomlinson v. MI6 The whereabouts of Richard Tomlinson is unknown, and whether he is alive or dead. (via); The Memory Hole is back!

lagniappe: Down for everyone or just me? (via)

Sesame Street designer, Kermit Love dies at 91

NYTimes:

Kermit Love, the costume designer for some of ballet’s most renowned choreographers whose greatest fame came as a creator, with Jim Henson, of the beloved “Sesame Street” characters Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, died on Saturday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 91 and lived in Stanfordville, N.Y.

I saw the very first Sesame Street in 1969. That show has done more for kids and non-English speaking athletes and immigrants than will ever be truly known.

The Snuffleupagus was one of my earliest mind-bending experiences.

Edward de Bono on creative thinking

Having more of a background in the arts, I have been conditioned to distrust advice on creativity from business gurus, academics and motivational speakers. However, if I employ lateral thinking and look outside to box, I can find value in the words and ideas of Edward de Bono.

Thanks to Zenpundit



Here's a simple example of Lateral Thinking via Wikipedia:

A man and his son are in a car crash. The father is killed and the son is taken to hospital gravely injured. When he gets there, the surgeon says "I can't operate on this boy- he is my son!" How is this possible?

This is an example of an instant perception blocking the mind's ability to explore alternatives. In this case the instant perception is that most people imagine a surgeon as a male; this leads to the conclusion that either the surgeon or the "father" in the car crash was not the boy's real father.

If you switch your perception to allow for a female surgeon then the answer is suddenly obvious,the surgeon is the boy's mother.

Most people imagine a surgeon as a male, but in this case it is the opposite! Lateral thinking is the method of switching perceptions to allow the alternate view point...

Interesting de Bono nugget:

Edward de Bono is a prolific originator of ideas, only a few of which are listed here.

In 2000 he advised a U.K Foreign Office committee that the Arab-Israeli conflict might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread, a known side-effect of which is aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate...

Not sure how that worked out., but it seems like as good an idea as any.

As far as the video goes, sometimes I struggle with the semantics involved with the term "creativity." It seems that the creativity that has value in the worlds of business, technology or strategic thinking is not necessarily the same as that of the aesthetic. This does not make them exclusive of each other, but sometimes the novel, unique or different can have worth outside the realms of utility and cognitive resonance. Therefore, a triangular door might serve no useful purpose, but within certain contexts could conceivably be charged with significant value and meaning.

Sorry, just thinking outside of outside of the box.

More de Bono videos