stray bullets

Mayfair, and the Deaths of Harry Nilsson, Mama Cass and Keith Moon
How to Embalm a Body (via)
Middle Eastern Contemporary Artists Booming
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Systems (via)
The Felt Toothbrush
Recommended piano books
Iain Banks talks to Writing Magazine

viddy:
This American Life - Judgement to the Wife (funny)
Zumba Cinco - Moça do Biquini Azul
São Paulo in 1943
Aldous Huxley's Deathbed (as related by his wife) (via)

stray bullets

World's largest machine--the electric grid--is old and outdated The U.S. electric grid is so old and outdated it can't handle the influx of wind power and other intermittent renewable resources.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

stray bullets

Instant-Messagers Really Are About Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon Big Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory.

New Bargains on Old Furniture Some antique furniture is going for a quarter of what it fetched a year ago as people gravitate toward contemporary styles. On top of that, struggling consumers have been liquidating their collections of vintage pieces, flooding the market. Even high-end auctioneers such as Sotheby's have seen some disappointing sales of all but the rarest pieces. Time to buy low. The pendulum will swing. (via)

also:
The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years!
Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time (good taste) (via)
Philip Toledano - Days with My Father (touching photo essay) (via)
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books The digital archive of basic references on Silk Road, including 92 rare books (29 authors : 19,242 pages) by the digitization of whole books from cover to cover. (beautiful) (via)
Interactive Map of Early Modern London (via)
Ten Great Examples of Science Fiction World Building (via)
August is World Building Month
We Are What We Do a new movement inspiring people to use their everyday actions to change the world. (via) (via)

viddy:
Ray Bradbury on Literature and Love (via)
Today I Googled "Biggest Regret" (thx)
They don't nag and they don't eat much (bizarre sex life)
Play With Your Food (vegetable symphony)

stray bullets

Arctic has 90bn barrels of crude The Arctic holds as much as 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil and has as much undiscovered gas as all the reserves known to exist in Russia, US government scientists have said in the first governmental assessment of the region’s resources.

The Top Ten Myths in FBI History Well, according to the FBI, anyway. (via)

In Africa, No Coke Can Mean No Stability (audio) Coke is a big business all around the world. But in Africa, the soda is so pervasive that it acts like a key indicator of political stability. In other words, if you can't get a Coke somewhere, you might want to get out of the country — fast. Alex Cohen talks with Jonathan Ledgard from The Economist about this unusual political indicator.

CalTech: Intelligent space robots will explore universe by 2020 Before the year 2020, scientists are expected to launch intelligent space robots that will venture out to explore the universe for us.

Counterfeit Chic A periodic collection of news about counterfeits, fakes, knockoffs, replicas, imitations, and the culture of copying in general around the globe. (via)

also:
Reclaim Your Time: 20 Great Ways to Find More Free Time (via)
It takes us two days, nine hours and 25 minutes to fully relax on holiday
The &%£§$‡@?!!-ing grawlix (via)
Fantasy Cartography is a blog that posts maps from science fiction and fantasy books. (via)
Mike Patton interview
Anecdotage Anecdotes from Gates to Yeats. We'll start you off with a good one about Steve Martin (via)
Japanese sitting etiquette at a Japanese home

viddy:
Tiny Blue Dot Mind-blowing cosmic perspectives. You think our sun is big?
The Shining (With Robots)
If I want a female to go away, I play this track. It works every time.

Word Spy: DWT abbr. Driving while texting; driving a car while reading or sending text messages. —DWTer n.

Jonathan Harris on Storytelling Platforms

Intrepid storyteller and We Feel Fine co-creator, Jonathan Harris takes us on a ride from his beautiful sketchbooks to the freezing floes of an arctic whale-hunt to the multitudinous tales and expressions of emotion in cyberspace. All of these storytelling platforms draw us in and continually feed our incurable need for yarns, legends, gossip, reports and narrative.

As one fortunate enough to make a modest living as a storyteller, I'm always keenly aware of my customers' needs to be told a good story, to be informed and entertained. I try not to needlessly tinker with what comes natural, but I'm always interested in what others have to say about their processes and experiences.

Pop!Casts

Killing for a good story

The first five or six years of the 1990's, I was working on a lot of music production, doing lots of sampling. I spent endless hours going through records, cassettes and VHS tapes looking for killer loops, hits and breaks. After you do it for a while, you realize that you have to be selective, discriminating. After a further while, you get downright ruthless, mercilessly cutting out the crap.

It's the same with writing, film and video production, design, photography as well as looking for interesting and amazing things and blogging them.

I guess it also applies to producing a 60 minute national radio show 30 or so weeks out of the year. This American Life's Ira Glass explains:



via Signal vs. Noise