Archive for December, 2007
Sylvain Chomet – writer-director of the funny, enchanting Triplets of Belleville – is working on a feature-length cartoon called The Illusionist, which is based on an unused script Jacques Tati wrote in the 1950’s.
This article has a screenshot from it, featuring a cartoon Tati. David Bellos’s excellent biography of Tati has a rundown of [...]
Transport’s debut album, The Inner Chimp – as gushed about on this blog – is now available for purchase and download from their Usync page*.
It’s eleven tracks of rocking, eclectic magnificence, destined to be a cult classic … and you won’t hear it on the radio. (Triple J are too busy showcasing [...]
One of my favourite old stories from The Onion: “Haggar Physicists Develop ‘Quantum Slacks’” (link).
Excerpt:
“For decades, we conducted level-one physics experiments in which we collided individual subatomic particles in a highly controlled laboratory setting,” Chang said. “But an array of technical hurdles kept us from taking the next logical step: colliding pants.”
Preliminary tests conducted last [...]
In Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead game, the narrators (a group of scholars centuries in the future) describe what is remembered of the Age of the Feuilleton (pronounced fee – er – ton).
The Age of the Feuilleton was the era when people “came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could [...]
John Allen Paulos (author of the very entertaining Innumeracy, Beyond Numeracy, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper) has an article on American ABC listing five puzzles to test the abstract reasoning of potential presidents. Okay, the premise is extremely flimsy, but the puzzles are fun: just hard enough to be interesting but by [...]
Thanks Lach for the link.
Ps. The performer, Jonathan Arons, has a politics-oriented blog, featuring an interesting theory about why white guys don’t dance.
