Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
This is from one of Peter Cook’s 1965 EL Wisty monologues, in which EL is describing the electoral campaign of his political party, the World Domination League:
I’ve got some extremely subtle advertising slogans that should gett the public behind us. Things like ‘vote for EL Wisty and lovely nude ladies will come and dance with [...]
The Onion can still come out with stories that really speak to me: Link.
… but Johann Hari’s experiences with the ’smart drug’ Provigil make it sound a little bit enticing. But also creepy. Link. Excerpt:
A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. [...]
Many of you would probably be familiar with the idea of online games like Second Life being fodder for economics research. Well, this article is the definitive thing I’ve read on the issue, full of fascinating real (virtual) world examples: link (pdf).
The Boston Globe has an interesting article about research into what it means for something to be ‘on the tip of your tongue’. It’s one of those areas where athe subject seems almost banal until you start to ponder it a bit more. Some of the experimental stuff is strange and cool:
A similar fragmentation is [...]
Rotifers are a group of microscopic animals that are very common and often very pretty. It’s been recently discovered that they have prolifically incorporated genetic material from other organisms into their own DNA. The Not Exactly Rocket Science blog has a good article about it: link. Excerpt:
But among the DNA of the bdelloid Adineta vaga, [...]
In 1988, the KLF (who had a hit in the late 80’s with their insipid remix of the Dr Who theme) self-published a semi-ironic guide to topping the UK charts. The text of The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is available online. It is an entertaining read, and full of [...]
The New York Times reports a wave of Albino killings in Tanzania, because of superstitions about the luckiness of their body parts. Madness.
Police officials said the albino killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in their nets because [...]
William Nordhaus, from his book A Question of Balance, quoted in the New York Review of Books:
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global [...]
Patrick House won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, and wrote an article for Slate about how you can do it too! It helped me understand why I’ve never gotten anywhere when I’ve entered it before. Link. Excerpt:
Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously [...]
I want to read Now The Hell Will Start, a new book about the true story of Herman Perry, a black American soldier who “shot and killed a white commanding officer, then disappeared into the jungles of Burma, where he joined a tribe of headhunters and eluded capture for months”. Slate has a slideshow with [...]
The Boston Globe has an article about property law and outer space that I found both fascinating and exciting. Link. Excerpt:
And while the question of property on the moon remains, for the time being, an abstract one, for space property proponents it’s far from frivolous. Whether it’s 16th-century English privateer-explorers or the Dutch East India [...]
George Packer writes in the New Yorker about the dire state of the Republican party in the USA. There are parallels with the current situation of the Liberals here; they’re excellent at winning elections by dividing their critics, but not by actually getting people behind their vision of where the country should go. In [...]
The New Republic has an article about the growing backlash against al-Qaeda (and al-Qaeda-style indiscriminate killing) in the Muslim world. Link. Excerpt 1:
According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by [...]
For his installation, Displacements, artist Michael Naimark 1) put a video camera on a turntable in the middle of a room, 2) set it recording as it span, 3) painted everything in the room white, and 4) put a projector on the same turntable, and set it spinning. Clever. Link.
