strange animals traveling in twos and threes

Fast Art

Ben — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:46:03 +0000

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

Ways of consuming music

Ben — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:22:01 +0000

Of course you know that artists don’t get money when you find their music through less-than-aboveboard avenues; but do you know the difference between buying in-store and, say, through iTunes? Or what the cut is when you stream something over Rhapsody, or download from cdBaby? Dig into this delicious infographic and find out (and read through the comments to stumble through some of the conceptual differences that are harder to portray graphically). (via Information Is Beautiful)

Underground

Ben — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:25:23 +0000

Men died on that boardwalk all wooden and wobbly, knobbed and wind-smacked, wormy and walked-upon, hit with rain, sand, scum. I won’t tell you about those men because I don’t know that story. Mal tells me there’s a story, there. Maybe it’s just the kind of place, seems like it oughta have a story, dark and gloomy and underhanded.

Bank robbers came and went, but didn’t rob the banks here. They came here on vacation like the rest of us, civilized folks. Only stole a little, maybe. Paid for food and fare and accoutrement. Dolled it up, resplendent.

You’re following, cause you want to see what I see. Well, you don’t want to see what I’ve seen. Rot and slime and ruin. Up here it’s all neat and ordered, shiny. Things what break can be fixed. Splinters cut your skin and you bandage them; scum dirties your boot and you wash it, the shoe. Boardwalk over a lumpy, smelly place, smells bolted down under four thousand tons of concrete, buried.

The songs we sing, you like what you don’t understand. You think you understand, but you don’t. Our faces are shadowed while our voices — robust and smooth, fantastical, wild — tickle your ears. It sounds like childish bunkum and nonsense to you. Our tongues are wet and tired. Imagine these tables in a smokier time. Foghorn listing in through the murky air when the door swings open, admitting or depositing new blood. Our feet shuffled more, then. We were tireder. We were animals, then.

You don’t come here with anyplace left to go. It’s not the worst life, now, but it’s not easy nights, dreaming the things you sing. And, where else would you go? Working, in a job. Walking on that boardwalk like it’s a thing of pleasure and ease.

Return of the Rundown

Ben — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:59:15 +0000

Timewaster: Typewar. Think you know fonts? Try this game, which you’ll either find completely boring or riveting.
Best aggregated reference word site: Wordnik. My favorite reference site right now. All about words.
Maps of Disaster: Informative, curious, unnerving. View map (or maps) of the world, with icons of disaster superimposed. For added effect, project image onto your office wall. You’ve got things under control. (This is: a service of the Hungarian Emergency and Disaster Information Service)
Best specialty science-writing blog: Tetrapod Zoology. Fascinating, curious, informative, and detailed without alienating those not totally familiar with the science at hand. Aside: I want this book.
Best easily digestible good news story: “Feeling grumpy is ‘good for you’” (via BoingBoing). Bonus: “File photo” used for BBC article appears to have been taken from One Foot in the Grave.

Now returning with more frequent posting, longer entries, better images, AND THIS

Ben — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:04:05 +0000

You’re welcome.

More tk.

(via 2modern)

An understandable mistake

Ben — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:08:04 +0000

A reply to a question in Notes & Queries yesterday recommended purchasing lion and tiger urine from Chester Zoo to stop neighbourhood cats from urinating in a vegetable patch (G2, page 17). Chester Zoo would like to forestall requests for its big cats’ urine: it asks us to make clear that it does not in fact sell either tiger or lion urine. Many years ago the zoo sold elephant dung, but it no longer does.

(via Regret the Error)

Hippos

Ben — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:07:29 +0000

Of course there’s always debate about invasive species, but usually… Well, usually you don’t think hippopotamus, not in the same mental grouping as zebra mussel and starling. But apparently we live on a place where that can happen; where Colombian drug lords decide to create a haven (of sorts) for hippos; and where, even today, the problem lingers. (NYT, via MeFi)
But who’d hijack a hippo? Probably no one. But maybe you want precautions in place, just in case:

The crate was hoisted onto the flatbed with a 120-ton construction crane. For security reasons, there were no signs on the truck indicating that the cargo was a hippopotamus, the zoo said.

(WaPo, via Schneier)
But it’s not all fun and games. (Actually, part of #1 is already treading into the not-fun-and-games category, if you read into it.) Sometimes hippos fight sharks. At least in Italian natural history books from the 60s, maybe. (via Tetrapod Zoology)

Cleaning House (Rundown)

Ben — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:58:46 +0000

It turns out computers can figure out what language you’re speaking without actually hearing you. In at least some controlled circumstances, anyway. (NewScientist, via Monochrom)
“Astonishingly”, (1) people forget their passwords all the time, but (2) the ever-helpful “secret” “questions” are not really either — at least, not as far as security is concerned.
If I had a car I needed to get into on a regular basis (as in, for driving), this would be wicked awesome. It’s not everyone who can open a car with his shoes.
And this video montage is just kinda sweet.
This post is a good example of why I’m recently drawn to reading Tetrapod Zoology on a regular basis. The lead-in sentence (I think) sells itself:

I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that ‘dinosaurs’ had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.

Read on.
I am still waiting for these business cards made out of meat to get real. (No, not like that.)
Without having perused it much, Ficly at minimum stands out as an interesting concept — a place for collaborative story-telling (in a time & place where social networks are, weirdly, moving us away from that kind of collaboration). (via SimpleSpark)

Aliens, astronomers, or super-intelligent aardvarks?

Ben — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:22:00 +0000

You decide. Whatever the case, it’s kind of amazing.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

Respectfully

Ben — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:07:59 +0000

(via bbg)

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