Michael K. Williams is going to play Ol’ Dirty Bastard
Great casting choice. Dirty comin’, yo!
A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.
Letters of Note: The Empire State Building (Helen Keller)
Letters of Note: The Empire State Building (Helen Keller)
Letters of Note here with a description by Helen Keller of her experience at the top of the Empire State Building.
What did I “see and hear” from the Empire Tower? As I stood there ‘twixt earth and sky, I saw a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary. I saw it stand erect and serene in the midst of storm and the tumult of elemental commotion. I heard the hammer of Thor ring when the shaft began to rise upward. I saw the unconquerable steel, the flash of testing flames, the sword-like rivets. I heard the steam drills in pandemonium. I saw countless skilled workers welding together that mighty symmetry. I looked upon the marvel of frail, yet indomitable hands that lifted the tower to its dominating height.
Let cynics and supersensitive souls say what they will about American materialism and machine civilization. Beneath the surface are poetry, mysticism and inspiration that the Empire Building somehow symbolizes. In that giant shaft I see a groping toward beauty and spiritual vision. I am one of those who see and yet believe.
It is long and evocative and oh geez this lady
The GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan performing “Liquid Swords” with the band Wavves. Totallly amazing for any number of reasons — GZA rockin’ a button down and rapping without a hype man, for starters.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Swiss ‘Satellite Janitor’ Aims To Clean Up Space Junk
Swiss ‘Satellite Janitor’ Aims To Clean Up Space Junk
Carl Franzen, writing for TPM’s IdeaLab:
The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a “janitor satellite” that will begin to clean up Earth’s orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth’s atmosphere on a suicide mission, causing both the janitor satellite and the piece of junk to burn up.
Franzen also describes just how real the problem of space junk is. (Spoiler: very serious.)
Super neat photo by Arnd Wiegmann for Reuters on MSNBC’s Photoblog the other day. Caption:
An aerial view shows cross-country skiers climbing a hill during the Engadin Ski Marathon near the Swiss mountain resort of St. Moritz March 11.
F.A.A. to Review Policy on Gadgets
F.A.A. to Review Policy on Gadgets
About time.
The Daily Caller: “‘Vigorous’ Santorum crackdown may catch Internet porn viewers with pants down”
Good evening, ladies and gents. You’re all doing fantastic, I hope. How’s the wine? I’ll cut to the chase, since I know you can tell I’m just buttering you up, being as well-read and attractive as you are.
I’ve started a side Tumblr called Things I Didn’t Click, which is in a way kind of an opposite of what we do here at Nullary Sources. Instead of interesting things like music, news, crazy science, and the like, TIDC is filled with stories so awful that you can tell solely from the title (and perhaps summary) that there’s no reason you’d ever want to read them. Things like the above headline, which was clearly written in attempt to be as creepy and disgusting as possible.
Check out TIDC if you’ll enjoy mockery of obvious linkbait, odd fixations on celebrity genitalia, terrible technology coverage, and so on.
“That’s one of the things about freeways: They tend to fail when you need them the most”
“That’s one of the things about freeways: They tend to fail when you need them the most”
Fantastic interview with John Norquist in Next American City about how freeways hurt cities and what can be done to improve the situation. I’ve been saying this same stuff for years. Probably my favorite bit, naturally about San Francisco:
A robust street grid, with lots of connections, will distribute traffic much better than a few large freeways. […] For example, when the Embarcadero Freeway, a double-deck freeway, was torn down, a majority of the trips—according to a study by the city of San Francisco—got shorter and faster because of the increased connectivity. With the freeway, there were a lot of trips where you overshot your destination and had to come back. It also attracted trips that didn’t add any value to the neighborhood: People going from Oakland to Marin County were cutting through San Francisco. When the freeway was torn down and replaced by a boulevard, it suddenly didn’t look so attractive to go that way, and [drivers] found a different way to get to Marin Country or, in some cases, didn’t make the trip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En7EGSxUbTM
For your toe-tappination on this fine Tuesday is “Limehouse Blues” by Le Quintette du Hot Club de France, featuring Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stéphane Grappelli on violin.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Crystals may be possible in time as well as space
Crystals may be possible in time as well as space
Alexandra Witze, writing in ScienceNews:
In two new papers, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek lays out the mathematics of how an object moving in its lowest energy state could experience a sort of structure in time. Such a “time crystal” would be the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space.
MOTHERFUCKING TIME CRYSTALS WHAT. Even Witze admits the name sounds “like the title of a bad fantasy movie”.