Good Reads

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The index claims to list those books which have been most frequently discarded by guests of the budget hotel chain.

While last year it was Fifty Shades of Grey topping the study, this year it is the third volume in the best-selling series, Fifty Shades Freed, that takes the number one spot.

The first two instalments come in at number six and number 10, respectively, while other authors of erotic novels also feature prominently, as does J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults.

Sylvia Day’s Bared to You, which focuses on the romance between 24-year-old Eva Tramell and young billionaire Gideon Cross, was the second most frequently discarded book, while Travelodge staff also discovered many copies of her other works, including Reflected In You and Entwined With You.​
- read the full article & see the full list Fifty Shades Freed is ‘most discarded book’ (from The Telegraph)
 
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The first English recipes for iced chocolate desserts have been uncovered by academics.

Dr Kate Loveman, from University of Leicester, found the recipes cited in the manuscripts of the Earl of Sandwich in 1668 - one hundred years before his great-great-grandson allegedly invented the sandwich.

The earl's recipe for an iced chocolate treat reads: "Prepare the chocolatti (to make a drink) ... and Then Putt the vessell that hath the Chocolatti in it, into a Jaraffa [carafe] of snow stirred together with some salt, & shaike the snow together sometyme & it will putt the Chocolatti into tender Curdled Ice & soe eate it with spoons."

Dr Loveman, from the university's school of English, said: "It's not chocolate ice-cream but more like a very solid and very dark version of the iced chocolate drinks you get in coffee shops today. Freezing food required cutting-edge technology in 17th-century England, so these ices were seen as great luxuries."​
- read the full article Chocolate recipes from 1600s found (from Independent.ie)
 
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If you're going to be a vegetarian, you really do have to like lentils. Otherwise you're fucked.

All walls are great if the roof doesn't fall.

My dad taught me to always expect someone coming around the bend on the wrong side of the road, right at me. I was always to assume that would be the case. He tried to teach me to be very suspicious of people — not to trust. I think he took it a bit too far when I was a kid. I had to unlearn that one.

It's much better to attempt to trust people until they prove you wrong.

I only started singing because I couldn't find anybody else to sing. Everybody I asked was a bloody idiot.

Twenty thousand people can all look like one big mush, but actually it's really interesting how you can walk onstage and within ten minutes feel what their vibe is.

When we first started supporting R.E.M., there were some gigs we played where people were ordering chicken dinners, and that kind of fucked with my head.

I was in hospital a lot when I was a kid 'cause I was born with my left eye shut, and they had to take muscle from my ass and graft it to make a muscle that would open the eyelid. So I had four or five operations, starting when I was very young. I must've started complaining by the time I was five. "Look, you've got to do it," my parents said. "If you go, we'll buy you whatever you want, okay? What do you want?" I said, "I want a red tracksuit." And they got me a red tracksuit, tops and bottoms, and I was happy to go back to the hospital even knowing that I was going to go under the general anesthetic, wake up, and throw up everywhere. I loved that red tracksuit. I wore that red tracksuit until it looked so small that it was ridiculous on me.

Respect is if you're having a political argument with someone, just before you get to the point where you call them a fascist, you sort of step back and wonder how on earth they've ended up at this point of complete ignorance and stupidity.​
- read the full article Thom Yorke: What I've Learned (from Esquire)
 
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Even in the best of times, amusement parks are chaotic, occasionally ugly, and full of danger. But when they are abandoned, they become tragic too. Here are some of the most incredible and sad portraits of fun zones that have gone to seed.​


 
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Stop me if you've heard this one. A Cornell graduate physics student takes his girlfriend to her first heavy metal concert. Instead of diving straight into the mosh pit, as he typically would, he hangs back "to keep an eye on her."

Being a physicist first and a mosher second ("fieldwork was independently funded"), the student, Jesse Silverberg, can't help but notice curious patterns in what had always felt like the epitome of chaos. "Being on the outside for the first time, I was absolutely amazed at what I saw -- there were all sorts of collective behaviors emerging that I never would have noticed from the inside." So for an even better perspective, he turns to YouTube, to figure out what happens to people under the "extreme conditions" borne of a combination of "loud, fast music (130 dB, 350 beats per minute) ... bright, flashing lights, and frequent intoxication."

What he found, of course, was the "collective phenomenon consisting of 10^1 to 10^2 participants commonly referred to as a mosh pit." And he was able to prove his initial observation: While the individual movements of moshers may be random, their collective behavior follows a few simple rules.​
- read the full article Mosh Pits Teach Us About the Physics of Collective Behavior (from The Atlantic)
 
Collaborating with a 4-year old

One day, while my daughter was happily distracted in her own marker drawings, I decided to risk pulling out a new sketchbook I had special ordered. It had dark paper, and was perfect for adding highlights to. I had only drawn a little in it, and was anxious to try it again, but knowing our daughter’s love of art supplies, it meant that if I wasn’t sly enough, I might have to share. (Note: I’m all about kid’s crafts, but when it comes to my own art projects, I don’t like to share.) Since she was engrossed in her own project, I thought I might be able to pull it off.

Ahhh, I should’ve known better. No longer had I drawn my first face (I love drawing from old black & white movie stills) had she swooped over to me with an intense look. “OOOH! Is that a NEW sketchbook? Can I draw in that too, mama?” I have to admit, the girl knows good art supplies when she sees them. I muttered something about how it was my special book, how she had her own supplies and blah blah blah, but the appeal of new art supplies was too much for her to resist. In a very serious tone, she looked at me and said, “If you can’t share, we might have to take it away if you can’t share.”

Oh no she didn’t! Girlfriend was using my own mommy-words at me! Impressed, I agreed to comply. “I was going to draw a body on this lady’s face,” I said. “Well, I will do it,” she said very focused, and grabbed the pen. I had resigned myself to let that one go. To let her have the page, and then let it go. I would just draw on my own later, I decided. I love my daughter’s artwork, truly I do! But this was MY sketchbook, my inner kid complained.

http://busymockingbird.com/2013/08/27/collaborating-with-a-4-year-old/

http://busymockingbird.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/img_5151.jpg?w=852&h=1024
 
Collaborating with a 4-year old

One day, while my daughter was happily distracted in her own marker drawings, I decided to risk pulling out a new sketchbook I had special ordered. It had dark paper, and was perfect for adding highlights to. I had only drawn a little in it, and was anxious to try it again, but knowing our daughter’s love of art supplies, it meant that if I wasn’t sly enough, I might have to share. (Note: I’m all about kid’s crafts, but when it comes to my own art projects, I don’t like to share.) Since she was engrossed in her own project, I thought I might be able to pull it off.

Ahhh, I should’ve known better. No longer had I drawn my first face (I love drawing from old black & white movie stills) had she swooped over to me with an intense look. “OOOH! Is that a NEW sketchbook? Can I draw in that too, mama?” I have to admit, the girl knows good art supplies when she sees them. I muttered something about how it was my special book, how she had her own supplies and blah blah blah, but the appeal of new art supplies was too much for her to resist. In a very serious tone, she looked at me and said, “If you can’t share, we might have to take it away if you can’t share.”

Oh no she didn’t! Girlfriend was using my own mommy-words at me! Impressed, I agreed to comply. “I was going to draw a body on this lady’s face,” I said. “Well, I will do it,” she said very focused, and grabbed the pen. I had resigned myself to let that one go. To let her have the page, and then let it go. I would just draw on my own later, I decided. I love my daughter’s artwork, truly I do! But this was MY sketchbook, my inner kid complained.

http://busymockingbird.com/2013/08/27/collaborating-with-a-4-year-old/

http://busymockingbird.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/img_5151.jpg?w=852&h=1024

Very cool!!
 
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Another of my peers did a wonderful piece that involved coffee due to the consumption on campus: the art touched on the coffee trade, the history of the New World, sustainable and ethical farming and more. It was a rich and full-bodied piece of art (I wish I had it here to share), the very opposite of Shake’n'Bake stuff. I was struck by it, and a number of pieces in the class having been affected by the internet. Quick access to knowledge at artists’ fingertips begat livelier paintings with more mystery and depth. I think I produced some of the best art of my life (so far) after that realization. I had to, to keep up.

Does this mean a return to the days of Van Eyck? I think not. Science-inspired fine art will be hopefully about more than symbols of sex and power and violence. I hope. But I think the concept of a rich visual vocabulary is making a return.

And this is the wonder that Wikipedia and its contributors and donors gives us: a richness of topic and visual cues to lead us down a myriad of paths instead of one-note shocker headline images. The fine art coming out in the next 20 years will be richer and hopefully more insightful than the instant sight-cues of recent decades.

Because of Wikipedia I now know the official name of what we referred to as Shake’n'Bake art is typically called Art Interventionism. Thanks wiki-editors.​
- read the full article The Wikipediafication of Fine Art (from Scientific American)
 
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One of the least understood symptoms in psychosis are hallucinations called cenesthesias. These are ‘inner body’ feelings that often don’t correspond to any known or even possible bodily experiences.

A team from Japan has just published a study of patients who experience cenesthesias in the mouth. Here are a selection of the hallucinations:

“Feels like gas is blowing up in his mouth”, “feels like something is struggling, as if there is an animal in his mouth”

“Feels the presence of wires in the mandibular incisors [front teeth in the jaw] when removing dentures”

“Feels something sticky coming up rapidly in her mouth”, “feels like a membrane is covering and squeezing her incisors”

“Feels like trash is coming up behind her dentures”, “feels sliminess in her mouth”

“Feels slimy saliva”, “feels like her teeth are made of iron and is sore from chewing”​
- read the full article Hallucinations of the inner body (from Mindhacks)
 
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Chicken soup was ready as a remedy for Gerry's flu, and it seemed to do Sylvia good too. We followed it with steaks from a great French butcher in Soho, and mashed potato and salad. Sylvia ate heartily, and said how good it all was.

I don't remember what we chatted about, only that it was not about her own predicament. Not then.

But later she asked me to come and sit beside her, showed me bottles of pills and told me which of them helped her to sleep and which got her going in the morning.

She swallowed sleeping pills at about 10 o'clock, but prattled on for an hour or more about people I didn't know as if they were mutual friends.

She seemed to be rambling, and I thought it was because she was growing sleepy.

Then her tone changed, and she talked emotionally and energetically about Ted and Assia Wevill, the woman he had left her for.

She was bitter, she was jealous, she was angry.​
- read the full article Sylvia Plath: Jillian Becker on the poet's last days (from the BBC)
 
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/65762000/jpg/_65762768_plathwithnick.jpg

Chicken soup was ready as a remedy for Gerry's flu, and it seemed to do Sylvia good too. We followed it with steaks from a great French butcher in Soho, and mashed potato and salad. Sylvia ate heartily, and said how good it all was.

I don't remember what we chatted about, only that it was not about her own predicament. Not then.

But later she asked me to come and sit beside her, showed me bottles of pills and told me which of them helped her to sleep and which got her going in the morning.

She swallowed sleeping pills at about 10 o'clock, but prattled on for an hour or more about people I didn't know as if they were mutual friends.

She seemed to be rambling, and I thought it was because she was growing sleepy.

Then her tone changed, and she talked emotionally and energetically about Ted and Assia Wevill, the woman he had left her for.

She was bitter, she was jealous, she was angry.​
- read the full article Sylvia Plath: Jillian Becker on the poet's last days (from the BBC)

i don't want to be bitter, angry or jealous when i go.
 
From earlier this year, but interesting...

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Her departure has hurt them already—she knew it would—yet there was no way she could stay. “My doubts started with a conversation I had with David Abitbol,” she says. Megan met David, an Israeli web developer who’s part of the team behind the blog Jewlicious, on Twitter. “I would ask him questions about Judaism, and he would ask me questions about church doctrine. One day, he asked a specific question about one of our signs—‘Death Penalty for Fags’—and I was arguing for the church’s position, that it was a Levitical punishment and as completely appropriate now as it was then. He said, ‘But Jesus said’—and I thought it was funny he was quoting Jesus—‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ And then he connected it to another member of the church who had done something that, according to the Old Testament, was also punishable by death. I realized that if the death penalty was instituted for any sin, you completely cut off the opportunity to repent. And that’s what Jesus was talking about.”

To some, this story might seem simple—even overly so. But we all have moments of epiphany, when things that are plate-glass clear to others but opaque to us suddenly become apparent. This was, for Megan, one of those moments, and this window led to another and another and another. Over the subsequent weeks and months, “I tried to put it aside. I decided I wasn’t going to hold that sign, ‘Death Penalty for Fags.’” (She had, for the most part, preferred the gentler, much less offensive “Mourn for Your Sins” or “God Hates Your Idols” anyway.)​
- read the full article Damsel, Arise: A Westboro Scion Leaves Her Church (from Medium)
 
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The first time many people encountered the concept of the uncanny valley was in 2001 with the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Today, it is known as one of the first photorealistic computer animated films, but at the time not everyone was impressed. The groundbreaking graphics made many movie-goers uncomfortable, and the film flopped, losing Columbia Pictures $52 million. The faces were too human, too close to real life. "At first it's fun to watch the characters," film critic Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone. "But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements."

A link between what is almost human and what is creepy was proposed long before Final Fantasy, however. The phrase “uncanny valley” is widely accepted to have originated in 1970, with the publication of an academic paper by roboticist Masahiro Mori in an obscure journal called Energy. Mori's original paper was in Japanese. Contrary to popular belief, his original title “Bukimi No Tani” only roughly translates into the phrase it has made famous. A more accurate translation is “valley of eeriness”.

This matters because it demonstrates the problem with the uncanny valley: it is an inherently woolly idea. When researchers try to study the phenomenon, they often have a hard time pinning down what an uncanny response actually looks like. The main graph in Mori’s paper has been mistranslated many times, leaving many people unsure what he really meant. Mori used the Japanese word “shinwakan” on the y-axis, a word that has no direct translation into English. The most common interpretation is “likeability”, but not all translators agree about that. Other suggestions include “familiarity”, “affinity”, and “comfort level”.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the concept’s history, though, isn't the translation troubles, nor the debate over what is being represented on his graph, but how long it took for that debate to arise. Mori's paper didn't include any measurements. It was more an essay than a study. Yet, despite broad dissemination, the uncanny valley avoided scientific scrutiny until the early 2000's, when graphics and animatronics like Final Fantasy started giving people the creeps. As scientists started to explore Mori’s graph, they began to ask whether real data would reveal the same pattern.​
- read the full article Robots: Is the uncanny valley real? (from the BBC)
 
http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/something-terrible-has-happened-here-the-crazy-story-of-how


When I was 11 or 12, I stumbled upon a mystery that has stayed with me my entire life. It was the early 1990s. I was idly channel-flipping while hanging with friends on a lazy summer evening. At some point, I came across a movie set inside an old-fashioned New England mansion packed with adults in fancy party clothes racing around and screaming at each other. One was dressed in a tuxedo and speaking with a rapid singsong British accent so instantly amusing, I put the remote down just to see what the heck was going on.
After maybe five minutes of madcap banter and murderous revelations, someone in the room said, “Wait, I think this is based on Clue? Like, the board game?”

We were all entranced. The very idea that someone could make a movie based on a board game was just so tremendously silly that even though we barely understood what was going on, we could not tear our eyes away from it. What was this movie? And how was it possible we never had heard of it?

When we got to the movie’s three different endings — each resolving the whodunit murder in different, increasingly loopy ways — we all knew we had just seen something unlike anything we’d seen before, and we had to watch the whole thing, immediately. One emergency trip to Blockbuster later, and a lifelong love affair with Clue was born.
 
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A couple of years ago, when the Pixies were almost 300 concerts into their second life as reunited heroes of alternative rock, they played a casino in Canada. The symbolism stopped them for a moment: had the Pixies succumbed to stereotype and become an oldies act?

“It was like, Ha ha, here we are at the casino,” Charles Thompson, a k a Black Francis, the lead singer, said in an interview recently. “Is this the shape of things to come?”

Now, taking a step they had put off since returning in 2004, the Pixies are finally releasing the equivalent of a new album, their first in 22 years. After teasing fans in June with a new song, “Bagboy,” the band issued the four-song “EP-1” early on Tuesday, the first in a series of mini-releases it plans to put out sporadically over the next 15 months.
- read the full article Pixies Motor On, With New Bassist (from the NYT)
 
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/09/04/arts/04pixies-1/04pixies-1-articleLarge.jpg

A couple of years ago, when the Pixies were almost 300 concerts into their second life as reunited heroes of alternative rock, they played a casino in Canada. The symbolism stopped them for a moment: had the Pixies succumbed to stereotype and become an oldies act?

“It was like, Ha ha, here we are at the casino,” Charles Thompson, a k a Black Francis, the lead singer, said in an interview recently. “Is this the shape of things to come?”

Now, taking a step they had put off since returning in 2004, the Pixies are finally releasing the equivalent of a new album, their first in 22 years. After teasing fans in June with a new song, “Bagboy,” the band issued the four-song “EP-1” early on Tuesday, the first in a series of mini-releases it plans to put out sporadically over the next 15 months.
- read the full article Pixies Motor On, With New Bassist (from the NYT)

Woah, I dunno what I think about that...
 
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