stray bullets

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)

stray bullets

How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry Most researchers agree that the value of the U.S. marijuana crop has increased sharply since the mid-nineties, as California and twelve other states have passed medical-marijuana laws. A drug-policy analyst named Jon Gettman recently estimated that in 2006 Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants. He reckoned that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing corn. A 2005 State Department report put the country’s marijuana crop at twenty-two million pounds. The street value of California’s crop alone may be as high as fourteen billion dollars. (via)

For Some Products, Prices Have Been Falling A fair bit in the last ten years, too. (via)

Unidentified Flying Threats A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States. (via)

Extradition appeal for British hacker dismissed A British hacker who admitted breaking into U.S. military computers hoping to uncover evidence of UFOs looks set to be extradited to the U.S. after the highest British court dismissed his appeal against the extradition on Wednesday. This guy is facing 60 years in prison for "hacking" wide open, non-password-protected military computers using a 56k modem. It was found afterward that entire suites of computers were unprotected by the most basic login passwords. They should give this guy a medal and throw their sysadmins in prison. Our government is an embarrassment. (more)

Hacking Without Exploits Black Hat researchers will demonstrate how the bad guys are quietly raking in big bucks without ninja hacking skills, tools, or exploit code (via)

Man deposits millions, one tattered bill at a time For years, authorities say, he and his family have popped in and out of U.S. banks, looking to change about $20 million in decaying $100 bills for clean cash, offering ever-changing stories... (via)

Building 'The Matrix' Now physicists have created a rudimentary prototype of a machine that simulates quantum phenomena using quantum physics, rather than using data kept in a classical computer. While the new device can't make people fly like the Matrix does, it demonstrates a technique that could enable physicists to create, in the virtual world, materials that don't yet exist in nature and perhaps figure out how to build, in the real world, superconductors that work at room temperature, for example. (via)

One teabag, one spoonful of neurotoxins The PBOI says of aspartame: “The chemical caused an unacceptable level of brain tumors in animal testing. Based on this fact, the PBOI ruled that aspartame should not be added to the food supply.” Add to that all the microwaves pumped into your brain by cellphones and you have quite a toxic brew. (via)

also:
Widespread Flaws in Online Banking Systems
Bush Administration Scandal Map (via)
Six Vacation Photos That Can Kill You (via)
Fly 1950s style From the end of July until the end of the year, Finnair’s retro plane, Silver Bird, will fly to several destinations. The cabin crew will wear 1950s-style uniforms and the beat of music from the 50s will spur the takeoff. (via)
10 Most Bizarre Restaurants
The Bureau of Atomic Tourism (via)
Billy Bob Thornton on his music and movies Big Zappa and Beefheart fan. (via)
Laurie Anderson Interview (via)
Glitter And Doom: Tom Waits In Concert Hear A Stunning Performance, Recorded At Atlanta's Fox Theater (via)
Steve Reich Interview (podcast) (via)
Voodoo Funk Record Digging in West Africa (via)

viddy:
Julie Driscoll - Season Of The Witch (groovy)
More Traffic in Tehran (even better)
I Love Sarah Jane Excellent zombie short. NSFW
Tank Man A documentary about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

stray bullets

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)

stray bullets

Marines in Afghanistan Weigh In on a Life at War They live in crude mud-wall compounds. There are no sewage system, no telephones, no electricity — these young men have been sleeping in the dirt for weeks. But the Marines have come up with a trick to beat the Afghan heat. Lance Cpl. Brian Archer sticks water bottles in a wet cotton sock. "Piece of cloth, wrap up a hot drink in it, well water over it, let the wind hit it. Be like an hour or two. And it feels like you just pulled it out of the fridge. It's great," he explains.

Online service lets blind surf the Internet from any computer, anywhere New software, called WebAnywhere lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool developed at the University of Washington turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or a headphone connection.

Stoners, Like, Totally Solve Nation's Air Travel Problems Air travel is a total hassle, man, and marijuana advocates in Denver say everyone would find the normally excruciating process a lot more pleasant if they could enjoy a few bong hits before boarding. It might even help solve a few of the problems that airlines have been experiencing lately. The way they see it, if people can knock a few back before a flight, they should be able to spark one up. They're calling on airports nationwide to install marijuana lounges. Not sure where they're going with this by the end, but if it helps alleviate the humiliation of gate-rape, I'm, like, all for it. Seems like they should focus their energy on the legal issues first, man.

How Can I Free My Home of Pests without Harming My Family? I'm fully behind all-natural pesticides. Those chemicals make me feel sick. If I even walk by a house that had been recently sprayed it gives me a headache.

I never knew Google was THIS massive! If you only read one of these, read this one. It will blow your mind. (via)

stray bullets

The U.K. bans product placement on TV, hopefully a trend (via); Wired Science asks, Would You Smoke Genetically Modified Marijuana?; just don't smoke any before you read The Art of Simplexity (via); though if you insist, you can zone out on some European Film Treasures (via); but if you really want to go deep, check out Jahsonic's mind-blowing Art and Popular Culture Wiki, good for you.

If you're gonna go, you might as well go high

I guess it's all a matter of perspective, but I don't think it's such a bad idea. The Afghanis seem pretty well adjusted. A lot more than that British guy.

Still, it probably doesn't speak well for their effectiveness as a fighting force.

And don't try to tell me that those British soldiers aren't havin' a go, now and again.

via Danger Room