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I recently came across this video of the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. The video at the forty second mark of cars turning around to escape from the oncoming wave of water and deadly debris is nightmarish.

My friend Patrick Ball turned me on to a wonderful piece of Serbian idiom: "Vukojebina," which literally means "where wolves fuck," but is used to denote any out-of-the-way place. Read the rest

How intuitive are modern keyboards? It can take a beginner ages to really get up to speed with a QWERTY keyboard, and without some form of formal training, most people wind up becoming one-finger typists.

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When you shop for a keyboard—especially a nice, high-end one —you probably see features on the box like "N-Key Rollover" or "Anti-Ghosting". But what do those mean, and do they matter? Linus from Techquickie breaks it down for us.

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“It's like handwriting, everyone has their signature.” Read the rest

Fifty years ago on Wednesday two Shinkansen bullet trains completed their first journeys, kickstarting a high-speed rail network that would transform Japan

Riding the Shinkansen: share your bullet train photos and memories

At 10am on 1 October 1964, with less than a week and a half to go before the start of the Tokyo Olympic Games, the two inaugural Hikari Super Express Shinkansen, or bullet trains, arrived at their destinations, Tokyo and Osaka. They were precisely on time. Hundreds of people had waited overnight in each terminal to witness this historic event, which, like the Olympics, heralded not just Japans recovery from the destruction of the second world war, but the beginning of what would be Japans stratospheric rise as an economic superpower. The journey between Japans two biggest cities by train had previously taken close to seven hours. The Shinkansen had made the trip in four.

The worlds first high-speed commercial train line, which celebrates its 50th anniversary on Wednesday, was built along the Tokaido, one of the five routes that connected the Japanese hinterland to Edo, the city that in the mid-1800s became Tokyo. Though train lines crisscrossed the country, they were inadequate to postwar Japans newborn ambitions. The term shinkansen literally means new trunk line: symbolically, it lay at the very centre of the huge reconstruction effort. All previous railways were designed to serve regions. The purpose of the Tokaido Shinkansen, true to its name, was to bring people to the capital.

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British life can be confusing for new arrivals, so here is my advice. Step one: buy a late-night snack

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Why the mental health of astronauts is one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to successful space missions

The sight of the entire Earth, visible to the naked eye, has had a profound effect on those who have seen it. Astronaut William McCool described it as beyond imagination, and many have written how space flight permanently altered how they saw their place in the universe. For mission control, the wonder of space must seem like something of a distraction as they focus on the psychological health of their astronauts working in a high-pressure, high-risk environment, 420km (260 miles) above the Earths surface. These day-to-day stresses can be equally as life-changing and Nasa consider behavioural and psychiatric conditions to be one of the most significant risks to the integrity of the mission not least as there is now significant evidence that space travel has mind-altering effects.

One of the most common experiences are frequent hallucinations that, despite sounding ominous, are probably the least concerning when it comes to in-orbit mental health. In the early Apollo missions, astronauts reported regular flashes or streaks of light that seemed to come out of nowhere. During a 2012 mission on the International Space Station, astronaut Don Pettit described these experiences as flashes in my eyes, like luminous dancing fairies that could be overlooked during work but would appear strongly in the dark confines of my sleep station, with the droopy eyelids of pending sleep. These flashes attracted significant scientific attention, and a series of experiments determined that they are caused by cosmic rays: free moving subatomic particles from distant destructing stars. On Earth, most particles are absorbed by the atmosphere, but in space they cause nerve cells in the visual system to produce the dancing fairy effect.

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Wellington: I told referee and he gave me a yellow card
Rapids coach says banana thrower may have slipped
Said & Done: footballs failing war on racism

The Concordia Chiajna striker Wellington has complained he was the victim of repeated racist abuse from a section of Rapid Bucharest supporters during their Romanian league match on Friday.

Wellington, who was seen in tears at the end of the match, accused Rapid fans of throwing a banana at him, while TV footage showed supporters making monkey gestures and racial slurs during the tense goalless draw.

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Above, a coffin for a snake. It's bronze, Egyptian, c. 664-30 BCE, and in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Read the rest

"Give a smile from your lips and say I'm free, yes I'm free, now I'm on my way."

Check out all the photos in this Atlantic article. Cozy!

"I can't quite place it," writes David Shiffman. Update: The original is at Jezebel: "This Science Museum Has Royally Pissed Off a Bunch of Girl Scouts"

This paperclip machine wastes no time admiring its handiwork before moving to the next one.

(Via Bits & Pieces)

Futility Closet reports on Silbo, a language whistled on La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. Read the rest

Nicholas writes, "Hacker School is a three-month, free-for-everyone programming retreat for experienced and new programmers alike, now offering need-based living expense grants to women, black people, Latino/as, and people from many other groups traditionally underrepresented in programming. Read the rest

In one of my favorite Woody Allen films, Sweet and Lowdown, Sean Penn plays Emmett Ray, a fictional jazz guitarist who embodies the titular qualities in equally great measure. “Already considered peerless among American jazz guitarists,” Ray admits of only one rival—Parisian gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, whom Emmett worships, obviously patterns himself after, and can’t stand to see in person without fainting dead away. Where Ray is a tremendously convincing creation of Allen and Penn, Reinhardt was very much a real musician, and was indeed the reigning king of jazz guitar from the 1930s to the 50s. Reinhardt’s incredible skill is all the more impressive considering he only had use of three fingers on his left hand due to injuries sustained in a caravan fire in 1928.

Reinhardt and jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934, and in the forties, Reinhardt began composing, and toured England, Switzerland, and the U.S. as a soloist with Duke Ellington’s band. He recorded his final album, Djangology in 1949, retired in 51, and died in 53, already a legend, “one of the few European musicians to exert a serious influence on the American art form of jazz,” writes an NPR “Weekend Edition” profile. Django’s playing, “at times joyous, fierce and lyrical,” draws heavily on his Roma roots while mastering the vocabulary of swing—a language, it seems, still new to many audiences in 1938, when the film at the top of the post, Jazz “Hot,” was made.

In a previous post, Mike Springer points out the “didactic tone” of the first couple minutes of the documentary, created by Reinhardt’s manager Lew Grade in order to familiarize the British public with jazz in advance of the quintet’s first UK tour. The film “really comes alive when Django arrives on the screen,” playing an arrangement of the popular French song “J’attendrai.” Prior to the UK tour, the Quintet du Hot Club traveled to the Netherlands and played The Hague. See them in the Dutch film clip above, beginning at 0:34. Grappelli solos while Django holds down the rhythm.

By 1944, Reinhardt was well known to jazz lovers and musicians alike, appearing at the upscale Paris cabaret Bal Tabarin in the footage above at 2:54, following a clip of Marlene Dietrich looking on from the audience.

In 1952, the year before his death, Reinhardt was famous enough to be cast alongside Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet in the French-Italian film La Route de Bonheur (titled Saluti e baci in Italy). In this clip, Reinhardt entertains a packed train car. The song dubbed over the footage is Nuits de St. Germain des Pres.

See much more film and photography of Django Reinhardt and his famous quintet in this biographical documentary, The Genius of Django Reinhardt. Described as an unstable and childlike man capable of the most unusual whims, the portrait of Reinhardt, practically the inventor of jazz guitar, traces his life from birth in a Roma encampment in Belgium to his final years in semi-retirement. And for even more Django, don’t miss this French documentary film, Trois doigts de genie.

Related Content:

Jazz ‘Hot’: The Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt

Django Reinhardt and the Inspiring Story Behind His Guitar Technique

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

Django Reinhardt Demonstrates His Guitar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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The freaks at B3ta are photoshopping extra eyes into kittehs and pugs (pug by Shlvng), and it's wonderful.

D'awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

People love to lampoon a credulous art world, but the reaction to the fake invisible work of Lana Newstrom shows just how repelled we are by its marketplace

A lot of people have fallen for a fake news report about invisible art. Collectors, claimed Canadas CBC, are paying through the nose for the art of 27-year-old Lana Newstrom even though you cannot see any of it.

Art is about imagination and that is what my work demands of the people interacting with it. You have to imagine a painting or sculpture is in front of you, the artist supposedly said.

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If I had to point one visible difference between American cities and Toronto, where I’ve stayed this past week, I’d point out the flyers posted around advertising a “Communism Discussion Group.” Maybe this has to do with Canada’s wider openness to the political spectrum; maybe, if you look at things another way, it has to with Canada’s deeper slant to the left. But here, much more so than in most of the United States, I could imagine people openly discussing the question of whether maybe — just maybe — humanity had it any better under communism. Sure, nobody on the “wrong” side of the Iron Curtain could have enjoyed the food lines, the crumbling housing, or the sheer boredom. But this hourlong documentary has a specific yet enormously relevant and often overlooked sub-question in this line of inquiry to ask: Do Communists Have Better Sex? Or: did East Germans have better sex than West Germans? The divided country offered something close to a controlled experiment for anyone looking to study the effects of communism versus those of capitalism, and here we see the sexual side of that dynamic explored through expert interviews, contemporary newsreels and educational films, and even animation.

The documentary proposes that, for all its deficiencies, the German Democratic Republic actually put forth a remarkably progressive set of policies related to such things as birth control, divorce, abortion, and sex education — a precedent to which some non-communist countries still haven’t caught up. However forward-thinking you might find all this, it did have trouble meshing with other communist policies: the state’s rule of only issuing housing to families, for instance, meant that women would get pregnant by about age twenty in any case. We must admit that, ultimately, citizens of the showcase East Germany had a better time of it than did the citizens of Soviet Socialist Republics farther east. And if the Ossies had a better Cold War between the sheets than did the Wessies, well, maybe they just did it to escape their country’s pervasive atmosphere of “unerotic dreariness.” Still, one likes to believe in the possibility of a better world. Back in Los Angeles, I recently attended Competing Utopias, a show of East German household artifacts at Richard Neutra’s idealistic VDL House — now I just wonder what must have gone on in the bedrooms.

You can find Do Communists Have Better Sex? (2006), shot by André Meier, in our collection of 200+ Free Documentaries Online.

via Network Awesome

Related Content:

Watch Family Planning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Production, Starring Donald Duck

The Story Of Menstruation: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

Your Body During Adolescence: A Nakedly Unashamed Sex Ed Film from 1955

The First Sex Manual Published in North America, 1766

The Karl Marx Credit Card – When You’re Short of Kapital

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Do Communists Have Better Sex?: A Documentary on the NSFW Ideological Question is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Do Communists Have Better Sex?: A Documentary on the NSFW Ideological Question appeared first on Open Culture.

Korean recording artist Hitchhiker's new music video is pretty crazy. #seapunk meets #ababa. This bizarre CGI creation is making the viral rounds, and for good reason. Below, here's an equally mysterious video on Hitchhiker's origins. Read the rest

A noodle seller in China's Shaanxi province was arrested for seasoning his soup with powdered opium poppy to "make it taste better and to improve his business," according to news reports. Read the rest

After his failure to appear in public for a "prolonged" period, 31-year-old Kim Jong-Un was described by the state press agency as suffering from "discomfort". [The Guardian]

When Senegalese Mozillan Ibrahima Sarr translated Firefox OS into Fulah, he had to coin an entire technological vocabulary, so "crash" became "hookii" (a cow falling over but not dying). Read the rest

In 1945 the US, China, and Great Britain asked Japan to either surrender or experience "prompt and utter destruction." A group of 1,000 Japanese military members were unwilling to accept either option. By Dan Lewis Read the rest

DUBXANNE: The Police in Dub is a recent collection of spaced-out dub remixes of classic songs by The Police. Those dubs have just been reworked by dubstep/breakbeat producer Rob Smith (aka RSD) and are available now from the Echo Beach label.

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UPDATE: IT'S A FAKE! TOO BAD.

Patsy Kerr of Omagh, Ireland reportedly spent 15 years digging a tunnel from under his bed to a nearby pub so he could visit the bar while his wife slept.

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-7/4 is also special. Dr Holly Krieger, a Postdoctoral Fellow from MIT explains dynamical sequences, prime divisors, and special exceptions. I also enjoyed her video about the Mandelbrot Set. (Via Pickover)

Developed by acoustic engineers and designers, the DUBS Acoustic Filters are advanced tech ear plugs that reduce volume without sacrificing the clarity of sound. They are ideal for people exposed to high volume levels such as in clubs, concerts, or even construction sites and airports. The snazzy earplugs employ a 17-piece Dynamic Attenuation filter, providing a 12 decibel Noise Reduction Rating to help protect your ears. Unlike traditional ear plugs that block all noise around you, the DUBS have been pre-tuned to target specific frequencies, this means the sound is still balanced and clear, just at a lower volume. Developed by acoustic engineers and designers, the DUBS Acoustic Filters