You look like you’re ready for a video collection of bugs from various soccer video games.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.
Author Archives: Mark Twain, probably
Northern Cities Vowel Shift: How Americans in the Great Lakes region are revolutionizing English.
Northern Cities Vowel Shift: How Americans in the Great Lakes region are revolutionizing English.
Rob Mifsud wrote a nice, readable explanation of the Northern Cities vowel shift that’s happening in the United States:
American dialects are actually diverging.
There are multiple examples of such divergence. But none is as dramatic, as baffling to linguists, and as mysteriously under the collective radar as what’s happening in the cities that ring the Great Lakes. From Syracuse, N.Y., in the east to Milwaukee in the west, 34 million Americans are revolutionizing the sound of English.
Language is weird and fascinating.
Andy Hertzfeld:
Snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used. Featuring Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, George Crow, Bill Atkinson and Mike Murray.
I was considering making some kind of timely remark about the “the balance of power is going to shift from companies running people to people running companies” line, but this old stuff puts me in way too good of a mood to do that.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Poll: 0 percent of blacks for Romney
Poll: 0 percent of blacks for Romney
Headline says it all. I’m cracking up here.
U.S. and U.K. Entangled in Legal Battle to Release Former IRA Militants’ Stories
U.S. and U.K. Entangled in Legal Battle to Release Former IRA Militants’ Stories
Kira Kay reporting for PBS Newshour:
In 2001, a group of academics set out to collect the oral history of Northern Ireland’s combatants, they say to record the truth, before it was too late.
…
Interviewees like William Smith were promised that their testimony would remain confidential until their deaths. And that’s how it went for years, the tapes hidden away under lock and key on Boston College’s campus.
But in 2010, that all changed, after infamous IRA commander Brendan Hughes died and his interviews were released.
…
And then, last summer, a bombshell: The U.S. Department of Justice, acting on behalf of United Kingdom law enforcement, subpoenaed the tapes of several interview subjects who were still alive.
This is a hard one. The piece points out that these legal acts can cause (and, in fact, are causing) future informants not to cooperate. But then, how do you balance the desire and need for justice?
Amelia Earhart’s Plane Debris Possibly Located in Western Pacific
Amelia Earhart’s Plane Debris Possibly Located in Western Pacific
The Maritime Executive:
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has been investigating the infamous Amelia Earhart plane crash for years, have recently discovered what is thought to be pieces of her plane in the waters off Nikumaroro island in Kiribati – a southwestern Pacific republic.
The underwater mission began on July 12th and used an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) to man the operation. Hours of high-definition data was produced. The famed Lockheed Electra aircraft was not immediately identified due to a harsh marine environment and technical difficulties.
Why the world has to ignore ReptileEvolution.com
Why the world has to ignore ReptileEvolution.com
Darren Naish of the University of Southampton wrote an unbelievably long and brutal takedown of a website on his Tetrapod Zoology blog for Scientific American.
That’s right. A website. Here’s his conclusion:
… for all the reasons discussed above, he has gone off at a tangent and his work as it stands at the moment will never be accepted, or indeed be of substantive interest, to anyone else who has a strong technical interest in the evolution of pterosaurs, squamates, synapsids or other tetrapods. The Digital Graphic Segregation technique, the finding of innumerable things that no-one thinks are real, the radically weird, discordant-with-all-other-data tetrapod phylogeny, the problems of using too few characters, of selective character choice and other methodological problems, and the insistence that only he has seen the light and that we are all too blinkered and too biased to realise the veracity of his results effectively ensure that he works on an ‘academic island’, separated and essentially ignored by the rest of the community.
Now imagine every point in this paragraph explained with more words and images than you’ve ever seen in your entire life, and you’ll have 1/100 of what Naish wrote. Wowza.
ODB’s Son Teams Up With RZA
ODB’s son, formerly Young Dirty Bastard and now apparently Boy Jones, teams up with RZA for this fun track. It’s got this ill horn sample that sounds Morricone as hell. Tarantino’s definitely been rubbing off on Bobby.
Poker Found a Game of Skill Not Covered by U.S. Gambling Act
Poker Found a Game of Skill Not Covered by U.S. Gambling Act
Mark Hamblett for the New York Law Journal:
Poker is a game of skill that is not covered under the federal Illegal Gambling Business Act, Eastern District Judge Jack Weinstein ruled yesterday. … Part of the judge’s reasoning was that poker games, in this case Texas Hold’em, are not purely games of chance.
“Bluffing, raising and folding require honed skills to maximize the value of the cards dealt by Lady Luck,” Weinstein said in United States v. Dicristina, 11-CR-414.
Judge Weinstein’s ruling hinges on his finding that poker is “predominated” by skill rather than chance, what with bluffing and all that.
Kunitaka Watanabe plays “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” on an Otamatone for your enjoyment.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)