blacksundae

8mm footage shot by my grandparents. I think it’s pretty neat to see how the San Francisco skyline has changed since then. The music was added by the company that digitized the footage.

McClatchy:

On Wednesday, Fagan’s 7-foot statue of the nation’s 40th president will be unveiled at the U.S. Capitol, replacing the likeness of a lesser-known California hero, Thomas Starr King. Nancy Reagan is expected to attend, along with Fagan.

It’s the end of an era for Starr King, a 19th-century San Francisco Unitarian Universalist preacher who’s received star billing at the Capitol for 78 years.

It also caps a five-year effort by California Republican Rep. Ken Calvert, who launched the campaign to remove Starr King shortly after Reagan’s death on June 5, 2004.

“I thought, well, you know, he was a great person, but he’s been here for a while. Maybe we can replace him with Ronald Reagan,” Calvert said. “And one thing led to another. … We were able to get it done.”

Because Reagan is underrepresented in the public sphere? Also, nice logic. “Washington was a great guy, and all… but the city’s been named after him for a while. Why not change it to Mister T, DC?” Link

Michael Bérubé:

[I]n 1974, I was a freshman at Regis High School in New York, where I heard one of my more conservative classmates say, in the course of a discussion about affirmative action, that he had been the victim of reverse discrimination for too long. Exasperated to the point of flummoxation, I noted in reply that (a) affirmative action showed up only yesterday, (b) you’re thirteen years old, d00d, and (c) you’re attending an elite, tuition-free Jesuit high school that does not admit women. And the reason I remember that moment 35 years later is that it has never gone away: guys like Stuart Taylor and Fred Barnes are still thirteen years old, still the victims of reverse discrimination, and still questioning the credentials of smart women while campaigning for the protection of conservative white men under the Endangered Species Act. Taylor graduated from Princeton in 1970; Barnes from the University of Virginia in 1965. Neither of them had to compete with women for admission; Princeton started opening its doors to that half of the population in 1969, Virginia a year later. That’s why guys like these worry so much about the decline of standards in college admissions since 1970, you understand. Because things were tougher and people were smarter when white guys only had to compete with 44 percent of the population for admission to elite colleges, positions of power and influence, and so forth.

Read on. Via Pharyngula

The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) directed by Prof. Dario Floreano focuses on the development of robotic systems and artificial intelligence methods inspired by biological principles of self-organization. Currently, we address three interconnected research areas: flying robots, artificial evolution and social systems.

Link! Be sure to check out their projects page (which I would link to directly, but they’re using frames…. Tsk! Tsk!). Via this post on Current.

Coal torpedo

The coal torpedo was a hollow iron casting filled with explosives and covered in coal dust, deployed by the Confederate Secret Service during the American Civil War, and intended for doing harm to Union steam transportation. When shoveled into the firebox amongst the coal, the resulting explosion would at the very least damage the boiler and render the engines inoperable, and at most cause a catastrophic boiler explosion that would kill crewmen and likely start a fire that would sink the vessel.

Read on.

This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams - Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. People share a lot of information in their tweets - some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.

Link. Via http://waxy.org/links/

Geoffrey West, courtesy of Cosmic Variance:

[T]o what extent are cities or corporations an extension of biology? Are they “just” very large organisms? Analogous scaling laws reflecting underlying social network structure point to general principles of organization common to all cities, but, counter to biological systems, the pace of social life systematically increases with size. This has dramatic implications for growth, development and particularly for sustainability: innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, if left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds for their inevitable collapse.

Read on.

A little while back, my girlfriend’s 9-year-old made a really neat lego Dalek. Since then, he’s created a second, alternate one plus the TARDIS and the Doctor himself. Take a look after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

A wonderful homage to my favorite movie, John Carpenter’s The Thing. Via MeFi

Spiegel Online:

According to the recipe, the meat was to be cut into small pieces or slices, sprinkled with “myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe” and then soaked in spirits of wine for a few days.

Johann Schröder, a German pharmacologist, wrote these words in the 17th century. But the meat to which he was referring was not cured ham or beef tenderloin. The instructions specifically called for the “cadaver of a reddish man … of around 24 years old,” who had been “dead of a violent death but not an illness” and then laid out “exposed to the moon rays for one day and one night” with, he noted, “a clear sky.”

Read on.