Links for Later

1. Trends in self-publishing

2. Really great bread recipe

3. Guardian journalist caught in Egyptian police roundup of protestors

4. DOD press office incoherent on Bradley Manning detention conditions

5. Good places for angel funding

On the Street in Egypt

Montage of footage from the protests in Egypt.

(via the Daily Dish)

The Real State of the Union

Can Louis CK just give this talk as this year's State of the Union? Thanks.

Everything is amazing and nobody's happy.

Wikibloopers

Government's case against Assange, Manning, slowly unraveling as expected. Remember Captain Yee?

Links for Later

1. Juan Cole on Bradley Manning vs. Tunisian dissidents

2. Tim Ferriss interviewed by Dr. Oz

3. Which jeans are the slubbiest?

4. Goal of Quantico delays was to isolate, abuse Manning

The 50 Most Loathsome Americans 2010

From the Beast. Every year, the list gets a little better. Ready for your punishment?

(via kottke)

Lazy Teenage Superheroes

(via boingboing)

Gibson Wear

Cayce Pollard's "Skirt Thing" makes the jump from the pages of Pattern Recognition into the real world.

Why the Chinese Mom Story is Getting So Much Coverage

Because we immediately think, yes, that's what the little shits need: some discipline.

House Porn: The Selby's Favorite Images

The Selby's favorite images of 2010. I have envy for Karl Lagerfeld's library in particular, but there are many fine interiors to be seen.

The Selby's Favorite Images

The Selby's favorite images of 2010.

Skullboy for Mugler

One of our favorite body artists, Rick Genest, aka Skullboy aka Zombieboy, is featured in this new video by Mariano Vivanco for Mugler's new collection by Nicola Formichetti , with music by Lady Gaga. So that all over skeleton tattoo thing is working out pretty well, no?

Links for Later

1. Richard Dawkins on religious education in public schools

2. Pixies Canadian tour dates

3. To quote Bugs Bunny, "what a maroon"

4. Why so many fundamentalists at Oxford?

5. The three private graves in Manhattan

6. If Obama wants to be bold, he should be bold

Links for Later

1. Extra material from Tim Ferriss's 4 hour body including DNA testing and nootropics chapters

2. Zegna's Fall 2011 fashion show. Love the chapka, Senator.

3. Quirky's multitool

4. The Dakar rally

5. Looking under the street lamp

6. Octave, an open source substitute for MATLAB

Mr. Samberg & Mr. Herman Have a Wild Night

And Anderson Cooper gets a headline.

Asked and Answered

All you ever wanted to know about female anatomy, explained: "Do girls pee out of their butts?"

Quote of the Day

More bad news for people fretting about changes in the Zodiac: Scientists have also discovered all of astrology is horseshit!

-Anil Dash

Links for Later

1. Seven early data visualization papers (via @ycombinatornews)

2. From the same blog: 3 tools for data ninjas

3. Organizational websites

House Porn 17: the Carriage House

From Apartment Therapy, a house in St. Louis. Lots and lots of lots. Tim Tucker, the owner, says: "My male friends say they would love to live like this but their wives would not let them. And my female friends say, “it’s cold in here!“"

Links for Later

1. Defending Social Security from the deficit hawks

2. Banksy interviewed about Exit Through the Gift Shop (via boingboing)

3. Trundle Manor, a wunderkammer (via boingboing)

4. Incubate at the Metropolitan Exchange building in Brooklyn

Vienna Teng - Harbor

Jon Pareles Talks to Trent Reznor

Video of the Times Talks event with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels fame.

Links for Later

1. Mustique


2. How the Obama Administration's Online ID program would work: just like Facebook

3. The police can subpoena 6 month old emails? Online privacy needs a fix.

4. Rays of light: Muslims acting as "human shields" for Christians in Egypt

5. Why [this event] Means We Must Support My Politics With Urgency!

6. The right's politics of hate

Quote of the Day

Scientific literacy is necessary for a functioning society in the modern age. Scientific literacy is not science education. A person educated in science can understand science; a scientifically literate person can *do* science. Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to be active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water, and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them.

-from the Biopunk Manifesto
Meredith Patterson
(via grinding.be)

Autism - Vaccine Link Shown to be Fraudulent

Brian Deer, writing in the British Journal of Medicine today, describes how Andrew Wakefield falsified data to prove a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. As a result of this paper, a number of parents refused to have their children vaccinated, exposing the children to increased risk of three serious diseases. One of the most significant known cases of scientific fraud in the last thirty years.

My Japanese Shirt-Folding Technique is Unstoppable

The Sartorialist

Short film from Intel. Love the projected images at the end.

Get Pitted

Brought to you by Colorpulse, the musician behind Symphony of Science

Photos of the Week

Guo Pei's 1002nd Night collection

Kowloon Walled City Map

Flounder x-ray, false color

Amsterdam

17th Century map of Amsterdam from Frederik de Wit's Stedenboek. More at BibliOdyssey

Links for Later

1. Come the revolution, a hard rain's gonna fall...

2. Bach's Cello Suites

3. 20something gunrunner gets four years, plus maybe another decade added for gun possession while indicted for the first offense.

The Win Compilation

Wins in 2010


Good Luck in 2010

Arkansas Bird Rain

It's being reported that over 5000 birds (primarily blackbirds, grackles and starlings) rained down on part of Arkansas on New Year's Eve. Explanations include fireworks, disease, stress and "repeated blunt trauma". Meanwhile, in another part of the state, 1000s of fish died off in the streams. Apolcalypse now, or just another day in the Midwest?

More: A day later, 500+ birds die in Louisiana.

Links for Later

1. Andrew Gelman's five recommendations for statistics books (via Alex Tabarrok)

2. Bruce Sterling's annual State of the World conversation on the Well

3. Calcio Fiorentino, "the manliest game on earth". Basically a brawl with a ball, played while wearing 16th century pants.

4. Cross sectional map of Kowloon Walled City, with annotations in Japanese. (via @greatdismal)

5. Chinese haute couture from Guo Pei's 1002nd Arabian Nights collection. Amazing and almost certainly unwearable (via Bruce)

6. First fights over the separation of church and state: the Anti-Federalists lost big time.

Math Behind Everything

Tyler Cowen points us to this interview with Roger Penrose in Discover Magazine. Along with telling us why he is sure that quantum mechanics isn't the final theory of physics, he also talks about how he and his father influenced the art of MC Escher:

The artist M. C. Escher was influenced by your geometric inventions. What was the story there?
In my second year as a graduate student at Cambridge, I attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. I remember seeing one of the lecturers there I knew quite well, and he had this catalog. On the front of it was the Escher picture Day and Night, the one with birds going in opposite directions. The scenery is nighttime on one side and daytime on the other. I remember being intrigued by this, and I asked him where he got it. He said, “Oh, well, there’s an exhibition you might be interested in of some artist called Escher.” So I went and was very taken by these very weird and wonderful things that I’d never seen anything like. I decided to try and draw some impossible scenes myself and came up with this thing that’s referred to as a tri-bar. It’s a triangle that looks like a three-dimensional object, but actually it’s impossible for it to be three-dimensional. I showed it to my father and he worked out some impossible buildings and things. Then we published an article in the British Journal of Psychology on this stuff and acknowledged Escher.

Escher saw the article and was inspired by it?
He used two things from the article. One was the tri-bar, used in his lithograph called Waterfall. Another was the impossible staircase, which my father had worked on and designed. Escher used it in Ascending and Descending, with monks going round and round the stairs. I met Escher once, and I gave him some tiles that will make a repeating pattern, but not until you’ve got 12 of them fitted together. He did this, and then he wrote to me and asked me how it was done—what was it based on? So I showed him a kind of bird shape that did this, and he incorporated it into what I believe is the last picture he ever produced, called Ghosts.

Just a nice little footnote in the history of art. The rest of the interview is worth reading as well.