Via the Big Picture. This is extremely weird, but even more impressive, I think:
Rubber Band Trumpet
Month: November 2011
Barack Obama Introduces Wilco (In 2005)
The introduction also happens to be followed by a great version of Airline to Heaven:
100 Greatest Guitarists
Rolling Stone has a new greatest guitarists list compiled by an impressive number of musicians. A few personal highlights: Keith Richards at #4. Enough said. Take that Scott Wilson. Jonny Greenwood at #48. ‘Radiohead are the consummate 21st-century rock band, and in Jonny Greenwood, they have one of the 21st century’s defining guitarists: an effects-loving wizard whose endlessly mutable style has powered the band’s restless travels – from the interstellar pomp of “The Tourist” to the misty shimmer of “Reckoner.” Like the Edge, only farther out in the art-rock stratosphere, Greenwood is a guitar hero with little apparent connection to the blues and little interest in soloing. He’s been known to attack the strings with a violin bow, and plays so
Katy Perry – Last Friday Night: Covered by Todd Gaynor
Watch my friend Todd get into it:
Why Does Evolution Allow Some People to Hear Colors?
National Geographic has a piece on the evolution of synesthesia, which is broadly defined as “a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” In the most extreme cases, this means that people can taste words or hear colors. This article caught my eye because I realized a number of years ago that I have a mild case of grapheme color synesthsia. I basically associate a color with every letter and number. The colors don’t change, and there doesn’t seem to be a logical reason as to why each letter or number has its color. For example, 7 is green. M is red. I don’t see colors
Creepy Video of the Day
“Meet Ant-Roach, an inflatable clackety six-legged robot with a protruding proboscis”: The name was chosen “because it reminds its creators of a cross between an anteater and a cockroach.” Some people take a ride: More here.
How to Feed 400,000 People In One Location
I recently came across a TechCrunch post discussing the logistics of feeding 400,000 workers at one of Foxconn’s factories in China (Foxconn is one of the main manufacturers of Apple products). The post is interesting throughout, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how many people work there, at a single factory (albeit many buildings). To put that number in perspective: 1 in 3,250 people in China work at this factory site 1 in 17,500 people in the world work there The workforce at this factory exceeds Iceland’s population of 318,000 What a huge number. Anyways, here are a few worthwhile excerpts from the post: Driving from the Foxconn Factory, down the road from the main gate, we spotted a truck
Ridiculous Indian “Talent Show”
Via Jeffrey Goldberg, this is quite odd, but very entertaining:
Expanding Manhattan & Boston’s Landfill History
There was an interesting piece in yesterday’s NYT outlining a proposed expansion of lower Manhattan: LoLo, which stands for Lower Lower Manhattan, is one of the first proposals from the Center for Urban Real Estate, a new research group at Columbia University. The neighborhood would be created by connecting Lower Manhattan and Governors Island with millions of cubic yards of landfill, similar to how Battery Park City was born in the 1970s. Over 20 to 30 years, the center estimates, LoLo would create 88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion in revenue for the city. Here’s what the proposed project would look like: On a somewhat related note, this reminded me that a while back I picked up
XKCD Money
This xkcd “cartoon” is just absurd: