Good Reads

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It slows your breathing and reduces brain activity to such an extent that Weightless, written by Manchester band Marconi Union, is said to be the 'most relaxing song ever'.

The eight-minute track is so effective at inducing sleep, motorists have now been warned they should not listen to it whilst driving.

The band worked with sound therapists to get advice on how to make the most effective use of harmonies, rhythms and bass lines. The result on listeners is a slowing of the heart rate, reduced blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.​
 
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According to recent figures from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) almost 70 per cent of the studios’ annual revenue from box office now comes from international markets.

Speak to anyone in the film industry in Los Angeles and they will tell you that the growth in global box office is bringing about fundamental change in Hollywood.
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US film critic Matt Singer has noted: “With China, Iron Man 3 had extra scenes and extra characters who were barely in – or not in at all – the American version. If you saw the film at a movie theatre in China you had this extra subplot that involved Chinese characters.”

In fact American film companies are so eager not to lose access to Chinese markets they will go to extraordinary lengths not to offend. When word filtered through that the Hollywood invasion thriller Red Dawn – released last year – was going to feature Chinese villains there was strong criticism in the Chinese media. In an unprecedented move the villains were then digitally removed in post-production and replaced by North Koreans.​
- read the full article How the global box office is changing Hollywood (from The BBC)
 
Sir John Soane's Museum

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http://www.soane.org/

Soane was born in 1753, the son of a bricklayer, and died after a long and distinguished career, in 1837.

Soane designed this house to live in, but also as a setting for his antiquities and his works of art. After the death of his wife (1815), he lived here alone, constantly adding to and rearranging his collections. Having been deeply disappointed by the conduct of his two sons, one of whom survived him, he determined to establish the house as a museum to which ‘amateurs and students’ should have access.


He insisted that it should always be free to visit.

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Braving sub-zero temperatures, she has thrown caution — and her clothes — to the wind to tame two beluga whales in a unique and controversial experiment.

Natalia Avseenko, 36, was persuaded to strip naked as marine experts believe belugas do not like to be touched by artificial materials such as diving suits.

The skilled Russian diver took the plunge as the water temperature hit minus 1.5 degrees Centigrade.​
 
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As you boarded your flight that day, perhaps you didn't realize you were in the market for a garden statue that looks like Bigfoot. But, as the plane doors close, you curse the FAA regulation that bans electronic devices from being used during takeoff and landing. How do you entertain yourself for these interminable 30 minutes? The inflight magazine? The emergency safety instructions card? How about the SkyMall magazine? Yes, the SkyMall magazine will do. And that's when you find yourself considering whether you need the The Garden Yeti.

On almost all US flights, you'll find SkyMall magazine in the seat-back pocket in front of you. This magazine is a catalogue filled with whimsical products that are available for sale. None of these products are things you strictly "need". They're not even products that a reasonable person could anticipate wanting until they've seen it -- a baseball bat shaped pepper grinder, a vacuum cleaner to catch flies, an alien butler drink tray, a helmet that promises to regrow your hair using lasers.

Having entertained ourselves by thumbing through the SkyMall catalogue hundreds of times in our lives, but never having purchased anything, we were curious. How does the business of SkyMall work?​
 
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It took the death of a small, rare member of the weasel family to focus the attention of Northern California’s marijuana growers on the impact that their huge and expanding activities were having on the environment.

The animal, a Pacific fisher, had been poisoned by an anticoagulant in rat poisons like d-Con. Since then, six other poisoned fishers have been found. Two endangered spotted owls tested positive. Mourad W. Gabriel, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that the contamination began when marijuana growers in deep forests spread d-Con to protect their plants from wood rats.

That news has helped growers acknowledge, reluctantly, what their antagonists in law enforcement have long maintained: like industrial logging before it, the booming business of marijuana is a threat to forests whose looming dark redwoods preside over vibrant ecosystems.​
- read the full article Marijuana Crops in California Threaten Forests and Wildlife (from The New York Times)
 
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Superman is so strong, he can do anything, right? Could he punch someone so hard that they ended up in space? Let’s do this.

How High Is Space?

When I say space, you might say “outer space.” But how high is that? The Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just stop at some height. No, instead the density of air gets lower and lower until you can’t even really detect it. But for this problem, we have to pick a height. I am going to pick 420 km above the surface of the Earth as “space.” Why? Why not. That is about the height of the International Space Station’s orbit, so I think it is a good choice.

How Fast Would the Person Have to Go?

I am talking about after the punch from Superman. Let’s just look at a person moving up at some initial speed v0. If this were a problem in an introductory physics course, I would hope you would think of the work-energy principle.

Let’s say that Superman is punching a clone of himself (called Superman-b) – just as an example. If I take Superman-b and the Earth as my system, then after the punch from Superman there is no external work done on the system. There will be two types of change in energy – kinetic and gravitational potential...​
- read the full article Could Superman Punch Someone Into Space? (from Wired)
 
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One Saturday evening last fall, some 180 Goldman Sachs employees assembled at a dock along the East River of Manhattan, divided into 20 teams. Standing on a platform overlooking the crowd was Mat Laibowitz, an impresario-mad-scientist-type dressed in a red t-shirt printed with the words Game Master. Laibowitz handed each team captain a white, semi-opaque plastic cube the size of a tissue box and a blue plastic bag containing the following items: a sealed pack of Wacky-Packages-brand bubble gum cards, a glossy foldout with the heading “Seating chart for Kevin Bacon’s wedding,” a slip of paper with a three-stanza poem, and a note that read:

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Thus began Midnight Madness, a geeky, over-the-top scavenger hunt played by a group of Goldman’s New York City financiers and some of their friends with expenses totaling roughly $270,000 for a single evening of play. It raised $1.4 million for charity. The game, which Laibowitz originally co-founded in 1996 with Columbia University buddy Dan Michaelson, requires teams to solve a series of mind-bending puzzles placed around New York City. Deciphering one puzzle points players to the location of the next puzzle, and so on.​
- read the full article Inside the epic, all-night, Goldman Sachs scavenger hunt (from Quartz)
 
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The great koi heist began with the thieves handing out a business card.

The two neatly dressed men in khakis and white shirts showed up at a business park in the Herndon area in early June, saying they were with an aquatic-care company and had come to remove sick fish from a pond, one person familiar with the incident said.
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The criminals’ ruse was so well orchestrated that no one realized 400 koi had been carefully packed in large coolers and stolen until after the men were gone and security mentioned the crew to the property-management company. An even greater shock: The fish might be worth tens of thousands of dollars.​
- read the full article Koi heist: 400 fish stolen from Virginia pond (from The Washington Post)
 
Nobody actually knows what dinosaurs sound like. But if you can imagine the roar of a T. Rex or the bellow of a brachiosaurus, it's probably thanks to the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park, which turns 20 this summer.

Sound designer Gary Rydstrom won two Academy Awards for his work on the movie. His resume is both long and impressive; Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Finding Nemo, and Lincoln are just a handful of titles on his list. But, as he told Weekends on All Things Considered guest host Jacki Lyden, Jurassic Park is the best job he's ever had.

"It scared me when I first saw [the offer] because there's so many different dinosaurs, and it was Steven Spielberg, and people would see it. It freaked me out," he says. "But there was no bigger candy store for sound design than Jurassic Park."

Rydstrom talks with Lyden about how he created some of sounds that star in the film.

Brachiosaurus

The brachiosaurus is the first dinosaur viewers see — and hear — on the scientists' first tour through the park. The longnecks' bellows are a mix of elephants, cows and donkeys, he says, though the singing-like clip above is made only from donkeys. "That was my favorite part of it, because a donkey [can make a noise that] almost sounds like an animal yodeling, so it has this multiple pitch. So you slow that way down, and it sounds like song."​
- read the full article Jurassic Bark: How Sound Design Changed Our Imaginations (from NPR)
 
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"Blood and sperm. The perfect mix," says a tattooed hippy, as he licks both off his hands, having just had sex with a woman in front of a small audience in a Berlin basement. "Life-giving fluids we are all so afraid of. We're so afraid of ourselves! It's all organic." It's not everyone's idea of popular entertainment, but this scene can be experienced at a safe distance in a new documentary, F*ck for Forest, detailing the activities of the group of the same name (without the asterisk). They enjoy confronting society with sex, nudity and bodily fluids, but what Fuck for Forest (FFF) really want to do is save the world. So this isn't just pervy performance art; it's also fundraising.

Few people would imagine any overlap exists between pornography and environmentalism, but FFF smash the two concepts together right there in their brutally blunt name. It's a concise signifier of what they do and how little they care about what you think of it. The live displays are a sideline; funds are primarily raised via their website, which has images and videos of its core staff members and whatever volunteers they pick up on the street in myriad sexual permutations, from naked people up trees to chaotic orgies. Subscribers pay about £10 a month, and the proceeds go towards rainforest conservation projects in South America.​
- read the full article The eco-sex activists who want to save the world (from The Guardian)
 
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The huge prison that dominates downtown Huntsville, Texas, is so intimately embedded into the life of the town that the rituals associated with it barely register. Every couple of hours a whistle blows marking the moment at which the prisoners are counted to make sure none have escaped. Roughly twice a month, when there are executions, vigils are held at the gates.

But there was one regular event townspeople always noticed and still recall fondly – the prison rodeo, which took place from 1931 to 1987. It was the biggest event in the town's calendar with spectators coming from miles to watch prisoners ride broncos and bulls, play bareback basketball and sing. "On those Sundays in October," says Joe Kirkland at Cafe Texan, a popular diner in the main square, "the ministers were expected to get finished their sermons just a little bit early so people could go home for lunch."

But there was one aspect of the rodeo in later years that stood out: the music. The prison had a band that could rival many professional outfits, and actually made records for commercial release to what prisoners called "the free world". "It was the highlight for me. They really were outstanding and we were quite amazed at that," recalls Linda Pease, another diner. "Sometimes they would come down to the square on a flat-bed trailer and play."​
- read the full article Prisoner soul: the Huntsville penitentiary band (from The Guardian)
 
By century's end, rising sea levels will turn the nation's urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin

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When the water receded after Hurricane Milo of 2030, there was a foot of sand covering the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontaine*bleau hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane's 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, the old art-deco* buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A 17-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than 800 people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; 13 people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread – falsely, it turned out – that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant 24 miles south of Miami, had been destroyed by the surge and sent a radioactive cloud over the city.​
- read the full article Goodbye, Miami (from Rolling Stone)
 
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A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost their memory, and, after weeks of play, the kids showed improvements not only in memory but in overall intellectual ability.
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Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF SMARTER?”
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The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world—and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.
- read the full article Brain Games are Bogus (from The New Yorker)
 
Risk is everywhere. From tabloid headlines insisting that coffee causes cancer (yesterday, of course, it cured it) to stern government warnings about alcohol and driving, the world is teeming with goblins. For each one there is a frighteningly precise measurement of just how likely it is to jump from the shadows and get you. “The Norm Chronicles”, a new book from Michael Blastland, a journalist in love with statistics, and David Spiegelhalter, a statistician, aims to help data-phobes find their way through this blizzard of risks.

To make risk comprehensible, the book uses a device called the MicroMort. One MicroMort is a one-in-a-million chance of death, which is roughly the risk of dying from an accident such as a car crash on an ordinary day in Britain.

That baseline allows for some illuminating comparisons. Giving birth in Britain, for instance, exposes the mother to about 120 MicroMorts, about the same risk as riding a motorbike from London to Edinburgh and back, or from 2½ days of active service during the most dangerous period of the war in Afghanistan. (A table at the back of the book makes for compulsive reading.) Life has plainly become much safer in recent decades. This is true even on the battlefield: soldiers in Afghanistan faced around 47 MicroMorts a day, but the aircrews that bombed Germany in the second world war endured about 25,000 MicroMorts per mission.​
- read the full article Review of 'The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger.' (from The Economist)
 
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It would probably be prudent to begin by letting you know this whale is not real. Rather, the whale is a highly-detailed site-specific installation and the “scientists are actors organized and created by a Belgian collective known as Captain Boomer. The installation was on the banks of the river Thames and in conjunction with Greenwich + Docklands International Festival – an outdoor festival. The installation (which pops up on various river banks throughout Europe) stir up and disrupt entire communities just as real beached whales do.​
- read the full article (with more pictures) Beached Whale Is Actually A Hyper-realistic Installation (from Beautiful Decay)
 
Time magazine, Danish filmmakers among the outlets apparently fooled by Kenyan actors pretending to be Somali pirates.

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“We pretend because we have the talent,” Adan told me. With ships being regularly seized and crews kidnapped, Somali pirates have been much in demand by the news media. “They [journalists] go to the boss and say, ‘We need pirates,’” Adan said. “The boss comes to us and says, ‘The white men need pirates.’ So he says, ‘Assume to be a pirate.’”

The scam is coordinated by a “fixer” who offers journalists the opportunity to interview “real live pirates”—for a fee. Touting his local knowledge, he promises to reach parts of the community a Western journalist never could. There then follows an elaborate scheme to convince journalists of the plan’s legitimacy. The “fixer” drives the Westerners around—sometimes for days—in search of the elusive pirates, telling them it is too dangerous yet to approach the men.
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“We act. And the film has to look real,” says Bashir. “Whether you accept it or not, there are no pirates here.

“Why would a pirate act in a film when they have money? Pirates have money. Why would they do this? They don’t have time to tell their stories to white guys for money.”​
- read the full article Fake Somali Pirates Scam Western Journalists (from The Daily Beast)
 
That's all the articles from the Blurt thread. More to come as I read 'em.
 
Trains do awful things to the people they hit, wreaking gruesome havoc that can haunt those who work L.A.’s rails. Preventing accidental deaths is challenging enough. The suicides? They seem unstoppable

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Ron Iseli decided to kill himself on December 14, 2010. He left his Mid City apartment that day wearing bright yellow Converse high-tops and jeans, a leather jacket covering his sleeveless T-shirt. Gray haired and blue eyed, the East Coast native seemed cheery as he spent the morning drinking bourbon and chatting with friends at the Spotlight bar in Hollywood. At around 2 p.m. he walked to the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where he bought a $1.50 one-way ticket from a machine and rode the escalator down into the Metro station.

Iseli was 55, single, and estranged from his family. He had been fired from his last job more than a year before and had drunk away his savings. For months Iseli had been ducking eviction notices from his landlord, certain he was about to become homeless. He was too proud to ask for help, and no one would understand anyway. But his suicide options were limited. He didn’t know anyone who would give him a gun. He was too broke to buy enough drugs for an overdose. Slitting his wrists or hanging himself in his apartment would unfairly burden his roommate or whoever would have to clean up the mess.

...

In his third year as an engineer, [engineer James] Salazar and his co-engineer were moving at 60 mph through an industrial swath of El Monte when they ran into a homeless woman (many trespasser strikes involve homeless people) walking on the tracks with her back to the train. A short time later Salazar was in almost the same place when he saw a man in his forties sitting on the tracks. He blew the horn and pushed the brake so hard, he almost broke his hand. “I knew I was going to hit him, and I knew he was going to die,” Salazar says. “You know it’s not your fault, but the guilt is terrible. ‘Could I have done something different? Could I have seen him earlier? Could I have blown the whistle earlier?’”​
- read the full article End of the Line (from Los Angeles Magazine)
 
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It should have been a cakewalk. On a Saturday afternoon in 1972 in a seedy hotel conference room in Midtown Manhattan, two men faced off across a chessboard. Well, one of them was a man—Walter Browne, a six-time United States champion regarded as perhaps the best American player not named Bobby Fischer. Facing him was a 14-year-old kid only a few years removed from his very first game. Dark, curly hair curtained his eyes. He was slight and a little over medium height, with a notable lack of physical coordination that belied a singular concentration. He was good, sometimes very good, and many observers considered him a future star. But he wasn’t Walter Browne.

Thirty-seven moves later, it had indeed been a cakewalk. But it was the kid, Peter Winston, who emerged the victor, “blowing up Browne’s position in a way that never happens to a player of his caliber,” as Chess Life magazine explained. Winston crushed the elder player so decisively that their contest would be discussed in chess circles for years, called simply “The Game.”

Winston, some thought, had the chops to be a grandmaster. Instead, a few years later, he would make a move more bewildering than anything he’d done in front of a chessboard.​
- read the full article The Mysterious Disappearance of Peter Winston (from Observer)
 
At six feet eight and four hundred and thirty pounds, Brian Shaw competes in events such as car lifts and the Manhood Stones.

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The giant of Fort Lupton was born, like a cowbird’s chick, to parents of ordinary size. His father, Jay Shaw, a lineman for a local power company, was six feet tall; his mother, Bonnie, was an inch or so shorter. At the age of three months, Brian weighed seventeen pounds. At two years, he could grab his Sit ’n Spin and toss it nearly across the room. In photographs of his grade-school classes, he always looked out of place, his grinning, elephant-eared face floating like a parade balloon above the other kids in line. They used to pile on his back during recess, his mother told me—not because they didn’t like him but because they wanted to see how many of them he could carry. “I just think Brian has been blessed,” she said. “He has been blessed with size.”​
- read the full article The Strongest Man in the World (from the New Yorker)
 
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On the evening of May 13, Mother's Day, a Canadian woman named Dana Dirr was hit head-on while driving to the Saskatchewan hospital where she worked as a trauma surgeon. She was 35 weeks pregnant, but determined to work until the moment she gave birth. The morning after the crash, her husband John ("J.S.") Dirr posted a note on Warrior Eli, a Facebook page the Dirrs had created to document their 5-year-old son Eli's battle with cancer: "Last night at 12:02am I lost the love of my life," J.S. wrote. "I lost my wife, the mother of my children, and my best friend." Miraculously, Dana had held on in the hospital just long enough to have her baby—a daughter, and the Dirr's eleventh child.

If any of it had been true, it would have made for a very sad story—the kind of story that would have taken over the news cycle on Mother's Day, even. But there was none of that, because the Dirrs are not real. They are, in some ways, just the latest example of the countless hoaxes perpetrated by bored, lonely people the world wide web over. But the Dirr hoax is singularly creepy in that the length of the con—11 years—meant J.S. evolved along with modern social networking. When he was born, in the time of Xangas and Tripod sites, J.S. Dirr was hardly more sketched out than a character in a novel. As the internet diversified and came to encompass every aspect of users' lives, so did J.S.​
 
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On the evening of May 13, Mother's Day, a Canadian woman named Dana Dirr was hit head-on while driving to the Saskatchewan hospital where she worked as a trauma surgeon. She was 35 weeks pregnant, but determined to work until the moment she gave birth. The morning after the crash, her husband John ("J.S.") Dirr posted a note on Warrior Eli, a Facebook page the Dirrs had created to document their 5-year-old son Eli's battle with cancer: "Last night at 12:02am I lost the love of my life," J.S. wrote. "I lost my wife, the mother of my children, and my best friend." Miraculously, Dana had held on in the hospital just long enough to have her baby—a daughter, and the Dirr's eleventh child.

If any of it had been true, it would have made for a very sad story—the kind of story that would have taken over the news cycle on Mother's Day, even. But there was none of that, because the Dirrs are not real. They are, in some ways, just the latest example of the countless hoaxes perpetrated by bored, lonely people the world wide web over. But the Dirr hoax is singularly creepy in that the length of the con—11 years—meant J.S. evolved along with modern social networking. When he was born, in the time of Xangas and Tripod sites, J.S. Dirr was hardly more sketched out than a character in a novel. As the internet diversified and came to encompass every aspect of users' lives, so did J.S.​
This is crazy.

I wonder how many stories similar to this one have been exposed on Lit.
 
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This is crazy.

I wonder how many stories similar to this one have been exposed on Lit.

for the life of me, i'll never understand shit like this.

or alts.

or catfishing.

to me, its so incredibly pathetic. :(
 
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