Good Reads

Let’s talk about reading or building things. When you did those things [as a child], nobody was giving you an assignment, nobody was telling you what to do—there wasn’t any stress around it. You did these things for your own pleasure and joy. As you played, you developed a capacity for attention and for a type of curiosity and experimentation that can happen when you play. You were in the moment, and the moment was unfolding in a natural way.

You were in a state of relaxed presence as you explored your world. At one point, I interviewed a handful of Nobel laureates about their childhood play patterns. They talked about how they expressed their curiosity through experimentation. They enthusiastically described things they built, and how one play experience naturally led into another. In most cases, by the end of the interview, the scientist would say, “This is exactly what I do in my lab today! I’m still playing!”​
 
I like the Whitman thing because I agree that even if a person is abhorrent it doesn't mean we should ignore what they have done or said. Sometimes terrible people do great things. I don't like Tom Cruise but I watch his movies because they're fun. I don't like Busybody but I...never mind. Bad example.


I also like the K9 piece because when I was an EMT many many years ago there was a K9 officer who was poisoned by someone looking for payback. The funeral was exactly the same as it would have been for any cop and with just as much emotion. The police department was devastated just as if a man had been killed in the line of duty.
 
Yeah, the Whitman piece really made me happy because it beautifully said what I'd wanted to express to people so many times. Like when I got into an argument with a person who believed all of Roman Polanski's films were garbage because of that awful incident in his personal life. You can't expect people who achieve great things to be saints.

The dog one made me cry a little.
 
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Linneah sat at a desk at the Center for Sexual Medicine at Sheppard Pratt in the suburbs of Baltimore and filled out a questionnaire. She read briskly, making swift checks beside her selected answers, and when she was finished, she handed the pages across the desk to Martina Miller, who gave her a round of pills.

The pills were either a placebo or a new drug called Lybrido, created to stoke sexual desire in women. Checking her computer, Miller pointed out gently that Linneah hadn’t been doing her duty as a study participant. Over the past eight weeks, she took the tablets before she planned to have sex, and for every time she put a pill on her tongue, she was supposed to make an entry in her online diary about her level of lust.​
- read the full article Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That (from The New York Times)
 
Yeah, I'm not sure how relevant that lady is to the piece. But she's in the article, and she looks nice! :)
 
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To people in the world of British gardening, the announcement was as startling as if the authorities at Wimbledon had suddenly decreed that players could compete in cutoffs and sequined tank tops.

So it was not surprising that the staid Royal Horticultural Society‘s decision to allow garden gnomes — creatures commonly associated with the landscapes of the unrich, the unfamous and the untasteful — at the Chelsea Flower Show this year elicited a variety of responses.

Such as people all but fleeing in horror when the word was mentioned. “Gnomes?” said one exhibitor on Monday, when the show opened in preview. “I can’t comment on gnomes.”​
- read the full article Common Gnomes Pop Up at Rarefied Flower Show, to Horror of Many (from The New York Times)
 
I like garden gnomes. I think they're cute. I don't own any because I have, you know taste and stuff but they're still cute.
 
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The sex toy business has never been more profitable or female-driven, thanks in no small part to Fifty Shades of Grey. But while most of the industry’s manufacturing takes place in China, Doc Johnson is doing its patriotic duty, one giant rubber penis at a time.​
- read the full article Deep Inside The Biggest Little Dildo Factory In America (from Buzzfeed)
That was really interesting. My two take aways: I now have the urge to host a toy party, and I'm slightly disappointed in myself that I've never even considered getting a famous dildo.
 
Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker.

In the early 80s, the then-20-something programmer had a job at a company called General Instruments Corporation, where he worked alongside a gruff Air Force pilot-turned-businessman named John "Wild Bill" Stealey. Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down.

One year, as Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari’s Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you’d steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade’s leaderboard. Not bad.

Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points.

“I was really torqued,” Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. “Sid, how did you do that?”

“Well,” Meier said. “While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.”​
- read the full article The Father of Civilization (from Kotaku)
 
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I’ve heard songs from Murmur in various forms (live boots, alternate versions, demos, covers, etc.), but what Michael Stipe is or isn’t singing remains the album’s great mystery. The words are left open for the listener to discern, but perhaps I’ve been overanalyzing them this entire time. I knew what I had to do: bring in fellow writers, Dan Caffrey and Dan Pfleegor.

These two gentlemen are novices when it comes to R.E.M., having heard very little, if any, of Murmur over the years. After e-mailing each writer the same specific moments from certain Murmur songs, I requested that they listen to each section no more than twice before attempting to write down what they just heard, followed by a brief explanation of what it could all mean.

What follows is a genuine, fresh perspective on a universally, acclaimed classic. So kick back and prepare to celebrate 30 years of Murmur with Gumby, Kindergarten Cop, Busch Gardens, and Jaws: The Revenge references. Don’t ask. Just read.​
- read the full article What’s Michael Stipe Singing on R.E.M.’s Murmur? (from Consequence of Sound)
 
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For just about any fantasy between consenting adults that might be thought of as beyond conventional sexual practices or decency as dictated by society, you can bet that there's a non-human species for whom that particular behaviour is commonplace. Sure, there are plenty of examples of creative role-playing, food in the bedroom, or unusual places to do the deed, but even when you push the boundaries much further the chances are you’ll find it happening in the animal world.

Take giraffes, for instance. Males, called bulls, make casual visits to various groups over time in search of a cow who might mate with him. In order to select the mating partner the bull literally finds the one that best suits his taste – by sampling their urine. Females co-operate in this "urine-testing" ritual, according to researchers David M. Pratt and Virginia H. Anderson. “When the bull nuzzles her rump, she must produce a stream of urine if he is to catch some in his mouth and savour it," they write. If a cow is particularly attracted to a visiting bull, she may simply decide to urinate as he walks past her, no prodding required. Urolagnia, or "golden showers" as it is more commonly known, is not a human invention, it seems.​
- read the full article The wilder side of sex (from the BBC)
 
Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker.

In the early 80s, the then-20-something programmer had a job at a company called General Instruments Corporation, where he worked alongside a gruff Air Force pilot-turned-businessman named John "Wild Bill" Stealey. Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down.

One year, as Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari’s Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you’d steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade’s leaderboard. Not bad.

Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points.

“I was really torqued,” Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. “Sid, how did you do that?”

“Well,” Meier said. “While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.”​
- read the full article The Father of Civilization (from Kotaku)

Civilization and its sequels are the greatest computer games of all time.
 
Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications. Perhaps he thought that the N.S.A. operated only outside the United States; in that case, he hadn’t been paying very close attention. In any event, Snowden decided that he does not “want to live in a society” that intercepts private communications. His latter-day conversion is dubious.
...
Snowden fled to Hong Kong when he knew publication of his leaks was imminent. In his interview, he said he went there because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.” This may be true, in some limited way, but the overriding fact is that Hong Kong is part of China, which is, as Snowden knows, a stalwart adversary of the United States in intelligence matters. (Evan Osnos has more on that.) Snowden is now at the mercy of the Chinese leaders who run Hong Kong. As a result, all of Snowden’s secrets may wind up in the hands of the Chinese government—which has no commitment at all to free speech or the right to political dissent. And that makes Snowden a hero?​
- read the full article Jeffrey Toobin: Edward Snowden Is No Hero (from The New Yorker)
 
Spectator Magazine has made their entire archive - form 1828 to 2008 - available online. Every page has been scanned and digitised, each article tagged and extracted, so that you can search the whole archive by content, keyword, topic, location, and date.​
- read The Spectator Archive (from The Spectator)
 
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Lobsters were so abundant in the early days—residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found they washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles—that people thought of them as trash food. It was fit only for the poor and served to servants or prisoners. In 1622, the governor of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, was embarrassed to admit to newly arrived colonists that the only food they “could presente their friends with was a lobster … without bread or anyhting else but a cupp of fair water” (original spelling preserved). Later, rumor has it, some in Massachusetts revolted and the colony was forced to sign contracts promising that indentured servants wouldn’t be fed lobster more than three times a week.​
- read the full article How Lobster Got Fancy (from Pacific Standard Magazine)
 
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Lobsters were so abundant in the early days—residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found they washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles—that people thought of them as trash food. It was fit only for the poor and served to servants or prisoners. In 1622, the governor of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, was embarrassed to admit to newly arrived colonists that the only food they “could presente their friends with was a lobster … without bread or anyhting else but a cupp of fair water” (original spelling preserved). Later, rumor has it, some in Massachusetts revolted and the colony was forced to sign contracts promising that indentured servants wouldn’t be fed lobster more than three times a week.​
- read the full article How Lobster Got Fancy (from Pacific Standard Magazine)


Laurel,

Build me a time-machine. I want to go then.

Come with. Bring butter.
 
Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide earned a spot in the Selfie Hall of Fame with this striking, other-worldly, photo as reflected in his helmet outside the International Space Station last year.

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The raunchy, goofy, poignant, or sexy self-portrait has been a common sight since phone camera met social media. Now, nearly a decade since the arm-extended or in-the-mirror photos became a mainstay of MySpace — duck face or otherwise — selfies are a pastime across generations and cultures.

...The director of the nonprofit Media Psychology Research Center, which explores how humans interact with technology, sees the selfie as democratizing the once-snooty practice of self-portraiture, a tradition that long predates Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

She sees some key differences between selfies and self-portraits of yore. Unlike painted portraiture, selfies are easily deletable. And "bad or funny is good in a way that wasn't the case when people had to pay for film to be developed," or for a professional painter, she said.

"Albrecht Durer's self-portraiture is these incredible self-reflections and explorations of technique, and then when Rihanna snaps her picture it's just self-aggrandizement, or it's promotion, so you have a fairly interesting double standard based upon who's taking the self-portrait," said Rutledge, in Boston.
...
The word selfie in itself carries multiple connotations, Rutledge observes. "The 'ie' at the end makes selfie a diminutive, implying some affection and familiarity." From a semantic's perspective, the selfie is a "little' self" — a small, friendly bit of the self, she said.​
- read the full article Selfies: A democratized version of the 'snooty' self-portraiture of yore? (from The Christian Science Monitor)
 
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It is a "light, refreshing, fun rom-com" about "girl power", according to its British co-director, a tale of a working-class lass drawn to the stage amid the bright lights of the metropolis. Comrade Kim Goes Flying – in which a beautiful coalminer inveigles her way into becoming a circus trapeze artist – may have as familiar a story arc as Billy Elliot, but this 81-minute film was shot in North Korea, a land known for being a starving Stalinist state on the edge of the world, not for producing fluffy chick flicks.​
 
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The next time you’re getting ready to eat, think carefully about what utensil you choose to dig into that tasty morsel. Researchers, publishing in the journal Flavour, showed that how we perceive food and even how we taste it, can be affected by the type of cutlery we use.

One of the food stuffs that researchers from the University of Oxford took as a subject was yogurt. And they came up with some bizarre results. For example: yogurt was perceived to be denser and more expensive when eaten from a light plastic spoon, as opposed to a weighted plastic spoon.​
- read the full article Your Choice of Spoon Changes the Taste of Your Food (from Smithosonian Magazine)
 
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