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Good Reads

girlsmiley said:
Do you just spend all day reading?

I'm only just up to the blimmin' German story. For fuck sakes, Laurel.

Some of us have 9 to 5 numbers. I can't keep up.
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You should do what most do at their day jobs - fuck off and read random stuff on the Internet. :D

No rush on reading. This thread ain't going anywhere unless the jerk admin decides to ban it. :D

SaintPeter said:
I LOVE parks!
Click to expand...

Me too! Chan-wook Park is my favorite Park. :rose:
 
From 2006, but a good one.

Late one afternoon in June, 2001, John W. Worley sat in a burgundy leather desk chair reading his e-mail. He was fifty-seven and burly, with glasses, a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, and a bushy gray beard. A decorated Vietnam veteran and an ordained minister, he had a busy practice as a Christian psychotherapist, and, with his wife, Barbara, was the caretaker of a mansion on a historic estate in Groton, Massachusetts. He lived in a comfortable three-bedroom suite in the mansion, and saw patients in a ground-floor office with walls adorned with images of Jesus and framed military medals. Barbara had been his high-school sweetheart—he was the president of his class, and she was the homecoming queen—and they had four daughters and seven grandchildren, whose photos surrounded Worley at his desk.

Worley scrolled through his in-box and opened an e-mail, addressed to “CEO/Owner.” The writer said that his name was Captain Joshua Mbote, and he offered an awkwardly phrased proposition: “With regards to your trustworthiness and reliability, I decided to seek your assistance in transferring some money out of South Africa into your country, for onward dispatch and investment.” Mbote explained that he had been chief of security for the Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who had secretly sent him to South Africa to buy weapons for a force of élite bodyguards. But Kabila had been assassinated before Mbote could complete the mission. “I quickly decided to stop all negotiations and divert the funds to my personal use, as it was a golden opportunity, and I could not return to my country due to my loyalty to the government of Laurent Kabila,” Mbote wrote. Now Mbote had fifty-five million American dollars, in cash, and he needed a discreet partner with an overseas bank account. That partner, of course, would be richly rewarded.​
 
emphasis mine

http://ridgewood.tipsfromtown.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/turntable1.png

One of the often overlooked facts about LP reproduction is that some people prefer it because it introduces distortion. The "warmth" that many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate. Reproducing bass on vinyl is a serious engineering challenge, but the upshot is that there's a lot of filtering and signal processing happening to make the bass on vinyl work. You take some of this signal processing, add additional vibrations and distortions generated by a poorly manufactured turntable, and you end up with bass that sounds "warmer" than a CD, maybe-- but also very different than what the artists were hearing in the control room.

There is a strong suspicion in the audiophile community that LP reissues are commonly mastered from a CD source. What this means is that, instead of traveling to a record label's tape vault, finding the original master tapes and a machine that can play them, and going through the painstaking and expensive process of transferring that tape to a mastering disc in order to press LPs, the starting point is actually a CD. And the LP pressing is essentially an inferior copy of that CD. In these cases, the "warmth" you associate with the vinyl record is completely up to the distortions added by the playback process.​
- read the full article Does Vinyl Really Sound Better? (from Pitchfork)​
 
Why is it always Florida?

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/69024000/jpg/_69024860_mv_624.jpg

Miracle Village lies deep in a sea of green. This is sugar cane country, south Florida. At the edge of the everglades, and over two miles from the nearest town, around 200 people live in the small, neat bungalows.

More than 100 of them are registered sex offenders - people who were found guilty, and have usually served a prison sentence, for a sex crime. There is one woman, the rest are men. Some of them viewed child pornography, or molested their own children.

Others abused minors when they were in positions of power - there is a teacher here, a pastor, a sports coach. There are those who have been to prison for exposing themselves. A number of residents were convicted because they had sex with underage girlfriends.

Under Florida's state law none of them can live within 1,000 feet of a school, day care centre, park or playground. Cities and counties have extended those restrictions up to 2,500 feet - about half a mile. And in some places swimming pools, bus stops and libraries are out of bounds too. The effect has been to push sex offenders out of densely populated areas.​
- read the full article The village where half the population are sex offenders (from The BBC)​
 
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/08/04/magazine/04king1/mag-04King-t_CA1-articleLarge.jpg
From left: Joe Hill, Tabitha King, Kelly Braffet, Owen King, Stephen King, Naomi King and Joe's dog, McMurtry. The family now boasts five novelists, four of whom have books out this year.

Life in Maine, where Stephen King has spent most of his adult years, requires long drives down country roads, time that King, whose mind is restless, likes to fill by listening to books on tape. In the '80s, however, he sometimes could not find the books he wanted on tape — or maybe he just did not bother. He had three children: Naomi, Joe and Owen. They could read, couldn't they? All King had to do was press record. Which is how his school-age children came to furnish their father, over the years, with a small library's worth of books on tape.

On a drizzly morning in July, King, his wife and their children gathered in Maine for a reunion the week of the Fourth and compared notes on what constituted chores in the King household. As they talked, they were crowded around a rather small kitchen table in a lakeside guesthouse, where King's 41-year-old son, Joe Hill, was staying, a short drive from the family's summer home.

"I read you that stupid book, that Dean Koontz book," said Owen King, who is 36 and the youngest of the three children.

"Watch it!" interrupted his father, but Owen, seated across the table from his father, kept going: "The one where the dog is a genius, and he talks to him by pointing at Scrabble pieces with his nose."

"Hey, I liked that book," Joe said.

"I loved that book," their father said.

"I remember reading 'The Carpetbaggers,' " Joe said. "I remember feeling that was a very long novel."

Tabitha King, their mother, suddenly sat upright. "That's a filthy book — I didn't know he would have asked you to read that. How old were you?"

"I don't know," Joe said, dodging for his dad. "I was innocent when I started, and I was filthy afterward."​
- read the full article Stephen King's Family Business (from The New York Times)​
 
http://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/language-340x340.jpg

In terms of living people, a candidate for the record holder is Ziad Fazah, who reportedly claims to speak around 60 languages, the exact number isn’t clear. However, in one television appearance, Ziad was stumped by basic questions in several languages he’d previously claimed to be fluent in. That’s not to detract from the fact that Ziad has proven he’s able to speak a pretty ridiculous number of languages and he may have studied and once been fluent in the languages he was stumped in, and simply forgotten them; but it throws into question his claim of being able to currently speak 60 or more.

A more verifiable living polyglot is one Alexander Arguelles, who has a working understanding of around 50. Again, the number isn’t clear, even in interviews, Alexander very rarely puts a hard figure on the number of languages he can speak and understand, stating only that “Now, I can read about three dozen languages and speak most of them fluently, and I’ve studied many more“.

In Alexander’s case, he puts his amazing gift for language down to thousands of hours of study and work. A sentiment that is echoed by other living hyper-polyglots, for example, Richard Donner, who speaks and understands 20 different languages. In Richard’s case, though, he’s still a teenager, so he has the potential to speak and understand as many, if not more languages than Alexander some day. It should be noted that Richard also refuses to bother learning “easy” languages like Spanish, in lieu of learning more difficult ones like Urdu and Russian.​
- read the full article The Contested Title of the Person who Speaks the Most Languages (from Today I Found Out)​
 
http://s.ngm.com/2011/09/personal-flight/img/personal-flight-615.jpg

Perched on the edge of a cold, windswept dune in North Carolina, I was about to fulfill a dream I shared with Leonardo da Vinci: To fly. The Renaissance genius spent years deciphering the flight of birds and devising personal flying machines. On his deathbed in 1519, Leonardo said one of his regrets was that he had never flown. Five hundred years of innovation since then had produced the hang glider I held above my head, simple and safe enough to be offered as a tourist entertainment. But despite those centuries of adventure and experimentation, personal flight—the ability to bound from Earth like a skylark, swoop like a falcon, and dart as blithely as a hummingbird—remains elusive.

That's not for lack of trying. Many lives have been lost and fortunes squandered pursuing the dream of flight, and even today scientists, inventors, and adventurers persist in the quest.​
- read the full article If We Only Had Wings: The daring dream of personal flight (from National Geographic)​
 
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/10/21/duncan-0c9a549b45aa45b7106d35adc18aed43286ddae9-s3.jpg
Barry Duncan is quite possibly the world’s first master palindromist, and he refuses to cede control to the alphabet

In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet. He was totally absorbed in the completion of a commissioned piece. “It’s draining me of every bit of energy I have,” he explained at the time. He was also just getting over a cold, his first since January 2002, and certain that it was the project that had made him sick. He’d been working on it for as many as twelve hours a day. Then, on April 6, after an estimated two hundred hours of toil, Barry Duncan unleashed on this world the greatest palindrome of his life. “Far and away the best reversible work I’ve ever, ever done,” he calls it.

You know palindromes—words or phrases that read the same forward or backward. “Party booby trap.” “Lisa Bonet ate no basil.” And, famously, “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” When you think about palindromes, you probably just think they’re fun.

For Duncan, though, they’re much more than that. He writes them constantly. He sees them everywhere. Have you ever killed twenty dull minutes scanning the grid of a word-search puzzle, and then afterward found yourself with a bit of a word-search hangover, your eyes involuntarily searching for words everywhere? Imagine doing the word search for three decades. That’s Barry Duncan with palindromes.

RE: NO GAS IN AGE? BEWARE.

Warren, old as sin, am red. Lost—or reviled—a female. (No, a hag!) Elder, it passes old lot. Fossil. Lip sags, eh? Flesh sags. Poor devil! At one, nips.A store, cafe, zoo. “Pops.” No, is elder, has gas till it’s late. Menace. No bristle, few warts on nose. Hoots. Peels, eh? Park, late: talk, rap. He sleeps, too. (He’s on no straw.We felt, sir: Bone. Cane. Metal.) Still, it sags. Ah! Red lesions pop, ooze. Face rots. A spine, not alive, droops. Gash self? He’s (gasp) ill, is soft, old, loses sap, tired. Leg? Aha, one lame! Fade. Liver rots. Older man is sad loner, raw. Era we began is a goner.​
- read the full article Doubling in the Middle (from The Believer)​
 
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/files/2013/07/minor-threat2-200x300.png

"Dischord doesn't make T-shirts," MacKaye clarifies in a phone call. But Minor Threat is another story. Because so many bootlegged Minor Threat shirts are constantly floating around the universe, MacKaye decided the band had to do something about it. The solution: Get another company to oversee their official shirts, and when a bootleg crops up, let them deal with it. "It's fucking absurd the amount of bootlegs are out there," MacKaye says, and "my time is better spent doing other things."

"It's not a political thing for me," MacKaye says. "I just don't give a fuck about T-shirts."​
- read the full article Ian MacKaye Says Urban Outfitters’ Minor Threat T-Shirts Are Legitimate (from Washington City Paper)​
 
This bit from the comments section made me smile. I mean, kids today care about Minor Threat? Wow. That's like if I wore Cat Stevens and Commander Cody tees as a teen. *shudders*

Keith Morris said:
who gives a fuck what grumpy old Uncle Ian says or does? Start your own band and make your own shirt. Quit ridding [sic] on the coattails of your mom and dad's hardcore.
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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/07/28/us/orange-compare/orange-compare-custom2.jpg

The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state’s storied groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice for Tropicana and Florida’s Natural, sat in silence for several long moments.
...
“In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.

In all of citrus, but perhaps not in all of nature. With a precipitous decline in Florida’s harvest predicted within the decade, the only chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection. They would have to alter the orange’s DNA — with a gene from a different species.​
- read the full article A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA (from The New York Times)​
 
http://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Grey-gradient-cake.jpg

Miss Cakehead, a publicist specialising in edible stunts (why didn’t that job exist when I was in school?) has organised a network of pop-up Depressed Cake Shops, which will take over bakeries around England in August with an array of all-grey cakes.

Volunteer bakers will be donating misfortune cookies, black dog macarons, monochrome gradient cakes, and a psycho Swiss roll, among other depressive delights, and each shop will donate the entirety of their proceeds to a mental health charity of their choice. However, the project’s real goal, according to Miss Cakehead, is to raise awareness of mental illness, and the fact that one in four people worldwide will suffer from some form of it at some point in their lives.​
- read the full article Depressed Cakes (from Edible Geography)​
 
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/files/2012/09/fruit-bunch.jpg

The tiny, rock-hard fruits of Pollia condensata, a wild plant that grows in the forests of Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania and other African countries, can’t be eaten raw, cooked or turned into a beverage. In Western Uganda and elsewhere, though, the plant’s small metallic fruits have long been used for decorative purposes because of an unusual property: They stay a vibrant blue color for years or even decades after they’ve been picked. A specimen at the Kew Botanical Gardens in London that was gathered in Ghana in 1974 still retains its iridescent hue.

Intrigued, a team of researchers from Kew, the University of Cambridge and the Smithsonian Natural History Museum decided to look into how this plant produces such a dazzling and persistent color. When they attempted to extract a pigment to study, though, they were surprised to discover the fruit had none.

When they examined P. condensata on a cellular level, they realized that the fruit produces its characteristic color through structural coloration, a radically different phenomenon that is well-documented in the animal kingdom but virtually unknown in plants.​
- read the full article This African Fruit Produces the World’s Most Intense Natural Color (from Smithsonian Magazine)​
 
http://img.weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/walmart-library-1.jpg

http://img.weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/walmart-library-5.jpg

http://img.weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/walmart-library-3.jpg

There are thousands of abandoned big box stores sitting empty all over America, including hundreds of former Walmart stores. With each store taking up enough space for 2.5 football fields, Walmart’s use of more than 698 million square feet of land in the U.S. is one of its biggest environmental impacts. But at least one of those buildings has been transformed into something arguably much more useful: the nation’s largest library.

Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States.​
- read the full article Abandoned Walmart is Now America’s Largest Library (from Web Urbanist)​
 
http://s.ngm.com/2011/09/girl-power/img/cabdriver-watching-novela-615.jpg

That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide.

And it's not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There's a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn't true. At the demographic center Carvalho helped found, located four hours away in the city of Belo Horizonte, researchers have tracked the decline across every class and region of Brazil. Over some weeks of talking to Brazilian women recently, I met schoolteachers, trash sorters, architects, newspaper reporters, shop clerks, cleaning ladies, professional athletes, high school girls, and women who had spent their adolescence homeless; almost every one of them said a modern Brazilian family should include two children, ideally a casal, or couple, one boy and one girl. Three was barely plausible. One might well be enough. In a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, an unmarried 18-year-old affectionately watched her toddler son one evening as he roared his toy truck toward us; she loved him very much, the young woman said, but she was finished with childbearing. The expression she used was one I'd heard from Brazilian women before: "A fábrica está fechada." The factory is closed.​
 
Laurel said:
http://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Grey-gradient-cake.jpg

Miss Cakehead, a publicist specialising in edible stunts (why didn’t that job exist when I was in school?) has organised a network of pop-up Depressed Cake Shops, which will take over bakeries around England in August with an array of all-grey cakes.​
Click to expand...


ok, i'm tired. i read that as 'specialising in edible students' (my brain had clocked the word 'school') and i thought 'whoa! what?' like this -> :eek:​
 
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