The Guardian selects the 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube.
YouTube is best known for its offbeat videos that become viral sensations. But among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans. Ajesh Patalay selects 50 of the best – Joy Division’s TV debut, readings by Jack Kerouac, a Marlene Dietrich screen test, Madonna’s first performance… and much more.
via Kottke
I feel the political commentary is contrived and unnecessary, but this comparison of the McCain and Obama campaign websites is worth a look; if only to see how not to design a website.
The now-retired web designer inside me loved every minute of it.
via Link Banana
Following on from Wired’s revelation that less than 24 hours after the season première of Prison Break its torrent was downloaded almost one million times, Lifehacker asks its readers, is file sharing just more convenient?
Prison Break fans didn’t have to download the show illegally. The show is readily available to stream legitimately on both Hulu and Fox.com, where viewers have to sit through a few commercial breaks, but they can still watch the entire episode legally.
The fact that one million people downloaded the show within 24 hours — a little less than one-sixth of the 6.5 million people who watched Prison Break on TV on Monday night — proves, though, that P2P isn’t going away just because there are legal alternatives now.
Why is this? Wired writer Betsy Schiffman argues it’s because file-sharing is habitual and convenient.
The obvious comments ensue: ownership, on-demand access, unadulterated shows (no advertising), the list goes on… but people seem to miss another serious point.
Hulu, Fox, and countless other sites that allow users to legitimately watch shows online are only available to those within the United States. Of those one million people who downloaded the show in its first 24 hours, I’m willing to bet a very large proportion were from outside the US. And yes, I know there are countless ways to bypass these restrictions, but why should I have to take extra measures to do so? After all, Mininova and Pirate Bay are available to anyone, anywhere.
News from ScienceBlogs on magpies and self-recognition:
Self-recognition, previously thought to be found only in a small number of mammals, including humans, chimps, dolphins and elephants, has now been observed in birds as well. Psychologists at Goethe University in Germany watched five magpies remove colored stickers from their feathers after viewing their own reflections in a mirror. Their findings indicate that self-recognition, a prerequisite for consciousness, arose at least twice in evolutionary history.
The Magpie in the Mirror
Magpies Challenge Bird Brain Myth
Magpies Recognize Themselves
“If people don’t have an understanding of what science is and what scientists do, then they can tend to think that global warming, for example, is just a matter of opinion.”
Brian Cox
As I’m sure you are all aware—and don’t need reminding—CERN’s LHC is commencing its operations this morning with the first beam injection taking place at 0830 BST (the first collision is way off).
Now stop making jokes about the end of the world: it’s really not funny any more. For a good overview of the so-called ‘risks’ this article written by Dr. Michio Kaku (of Berkley and Harvard, expert in String Theory and Quantum Field Theory) is worth reading in its entirety, as is CERN’s own overview on the safety of the LHC.
Now take your mind off the frankly annoying media frenzy by looking at these old, yet truly beautiful, photos of the LHC from The Big Picture.
Have some questions? For your less demanding queries, the BBC has compiled a good guide to the LHC and its experiments while CERN has released it’s LHC introduction booklet (which includes “10 Fascinating Facts About the LHC”). For those more in-depth questions, all of the project documentation is available and CERN’s ‘First Beam’ site has a nice collection of videos.
Other interesting links: Katherine McAlpine’s Large Hadron Collider Rap, Seed Magazine‘s The Lords of the Ring short film, CERN’s own live webcast of today’s proceedings, a list of what the LHC might find (with probabilities), Brian Cox’s TED talk on the LHC, and Brian Cox presenting BBC Four’s The Big Bang Machine (UK only, 4 days left to watch online).
Can it be that swearing is a signal of a ‘civilised’ society? In Seed, Steven Pinker suggests that it may be so.
What does [the increasing incidence of swearing] have to do with violence? Contrary to the popular belief that we are living in horrifically violent times, rates of homicide in the West have plummeted ten- to a hundredfold over the centuries. The sociologist Norbert Elias noted that this pacification process, correlated with other changes in everyday manners.
New York Times science journalist, Natalie Angier, tackles the question of how various animals deal with death.
Among the social insects, the need for prompt corpse management is considered so pressing that there are dedicated undertakers, workers that within a few minutes of a death will pick up the body and hoist or fly it outside, to a safe distance from hive or nest, the better to protect against possible contagious disease. Honeybees are such compulsive housekeepers that if a mouse or other large creature, drawn by the warmth or promise of honey, happens to make its way into the hive and die inside, the bees, unable to bodily remove it, will embalm it in resin collected from trees. “You can find mummified mice inside beehives that are completely preserved right down to their whiskers,” said Gene E. Robinson, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
I mentioned the Personal MBA Book List last week, and today have come across this interview between Josh Kaufman and Ben Casnocha, author of My Start-Up Life.
Josh runs the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List — a list of the best business books one would need to read for a comprehensive business education. It’s a terrific resource that’s well worth reviewing. In our exchange, we talk about the list of books and whether recently published ones should be excluded, and then meander into the difference between books offering systems / models and practical advice, and conclude on how prominent a role books should play in the self-education process.
The University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute recently held a conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. There’s an upcoming book which might be worth a read but what I’m more excited about is that soon all of the conference’s lectures will be made available for free.
Global catastrophes have occurred many times in history, even if we only count disasters causing more than 10 million deaths. A very partial list of examples includes the An Shi Rebellion (756-763), the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), and the famine of the Great Leap Forward in China, the Black Death in Europe, the Spanish flu pandemic, the two World Wars, the Nazi genocides, the famines in British India, Stalinist totalitarianism, and the decimation of the native American population through smallpox and other diseases following the arrival of European colonizers. Many others could be added to this list.
Although the current and future risks are of various kinds, treating global catastrophic risk as a field for academic enquiry is a useful, coherent and important endeavour.
Given that Sir Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, recently estimated that the chances of humanity surviving the twenty-first century are fifty-fifty, I’m inclined to agree that topics like this are worthy of academic discussion. This argument reminds me of another article I read regarding the Large Hadron Collider where I quoted the following from The New York Times:
One problem is that society has never agreed on a standard of what is safe in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high. In such situations, probability estimates are often no more than “informed betting odds”.
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is arguably one of the most quoted, and one of the most famous, speeches in history. This two-minute, ten-sentence speech can teach us a lot about how to write a great speech.
These tips aren’t suitable for all talks but they’re all good tips, nonetheless.
