Yasutada.sudo

Kansas City Krakens by Kenneth “Wheels03″ Wheeler

Fantasy Football is a collection of 32 T-shirt designs by talented artists that feature legendary fantasy-themed creatures as sports mascots. They are available to purchase online until September 25th, 2014 at Shirt.Woot.

Arizona Jackalopes by Kevin “kdubbs29″ Werther

Seattle Sasquatches by Blair Sayer

Denver Unicorns by Stephen “Radscoolian” Dye

Buffalo Beholders by Adam “ApeLad” Koford

images via Shirt.Woot

via Adam Koford

What happens when the bell rings for break? James Mollison photographed school playgrounds around the world to find out

Paso Payita school
Aramasi, Chuquisaca, Bolivia, photographed 9 August 2011

Situated in a remote area on rough terrain 3,000m above sea level, the school has two teachers and 31 students aged from six to 12 years. Many students have to walk several miles to school. A road to the village was built only 15 years ago and there are no cars or buses. Most people are indigenous Quechua peasant farmers.

Clive Thompson looks into the business of robot handwriting, which is increasingly being used by junk mail companies to trick recipients into thinking someone cares about them.

How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

This Russian motorcyclist throws trash into the windows of litterbugs she comes across.

Ton Siedsma, a lawyer for the Dutch civil liberties group Bits of Freedom, volunteered to have a week's worth of his phone's metadata collected and analyzed by researchers from Ghent University and by Mike Moolenaar. Read the rest

Once, there was a golden age -- not a golden age of martial arts, certainly, but a golden age of easy copywriting employment for anyone with a penchant for florid prose and a casual relationship with consensus reality.

[Don't point that finger at me, it might be loaded]

A new twee tech track by NES-hacker-dreamer-popsters Anamanaguchi. (more…)

Dan Stevenson is neither a Buddhist, nor a follower of any organized religion.

Mr. Stevenson, a resident of Oakland's Eastlake neighborhood, purchased a 2-foot Buddha and installed it on a median strip in his neighborhood, near 11th Avenue and 19th Street.

Carl Hart is a neuroscientist and drug addiction expert at Columbia University. In a recent TEDMED talk, Hart spoke about drug addiction and the many misconceptions surrounding the topic — and how those misconceptions can mislead drug policy.

Hart went into neuroscience to cure the drug addiction he blamed for causing crime and poverty in his old Miami neighborhood. But when he began to work on the issue, he learned that his assumptions were wrong.

About 80 to 90 percent of the people who use illegal drugs don't turn out addicts, Hart explained. As an example, Hart pointed to the three previous presidents, all of whom used drugs when they were younger. "Their drug use did not result in an inevitable downward spiral leading to debauchery and addiction," Hart said. "And the experience of these men is the rule, not the exception."

the findings show the problems are much more complicated than some believe

As Hart explained, many of the current assumptions about drug addiction are based on old animal experiments from the 1960s and 1970s. In these tests, animals were put in a cage with a lever that they could pull for a shot of a drug. Researchers found the animals would pull the lever until they died from an overdose.

Hart said these animals were never presented with an alternative, though. In other experiments, animals were given another option: a mate or a sweet treat. At that point, the animals began choosing the non-drug alternative, and they didn't take the drug until they died.

Hart followed up on these experiments with human participants in 2000 and 2012. His lab recruited meth and crack cocaine addicts, and the addicts were given the option to choose between a small amount of money or their drug of choice. When the money option was $5, they chose the money about half the time. When the money option was $20, they chose the money about eight out of 10 times.

The results, of course, don't diminish the real problems of crime, poverty, and drug addiction in some of America's communities. But the findings show the problems are much more complicated than some, including a younger Hart, believe.

Ramen is extremely popular, both at home and in restaurants, but you might be eating it wrong. The best way to eat ramen is by slurping, much to the chagrin of traditional table manners.

Read more...

Stasi -- Secret Rooms is a 10-year project by Daniel and Geo Fuchs, who took beautiful, striking photos of the stark interiors of the spaces used by the Stasi, the terrifying secret police from the former East Germany. Read the rest

This secret bookstore is just one of the many examples why I love NYC so much. I have so much respect for Michael Seidenberg, force behind Brazenwood Books.

(via Njeri and Open Culture)

I wrote a comic about Japanese Honeybees and how they combat Japanese Giant Hornets.

It’s your sister’s wedding, and you and your quiet but nice cousin—he’s doing his Ph.D. in something, maybe history?—are doing your best to get drunk off the watered-down open-bar bourbon. You’re just making polite conversation, so you ask him: “Want to come visit us next Christmas?” Why on earth did his sallow face just cloud over at your kind and generous offer? Because he has no idea where he’ll be living two Christmases from now—he just applied to 30 jobs in 30 far-flung towns, so from a logistical standpoint “next Christmas” might as well be Pluto.

Not since the Battle of the Somme has such little space been the subject of such intense conflict.

I have this issue with how I hear words, Gareth, a 31-year-old graphic designer, tells me.

"So for example, while I was growing up, it was really hard to tell the difference between the words 'girl' and 'grill' because the 'ir' and the 'l' kind of overlapped in time unless you spoke really slowly. My teachers were always just flabbergasted that I couldn't tell."

Speed-reading a Man-Booker-shortlisted novel with help from an app called Spritz was a thrilling ride that left me in agony

Last week, I decided to perform an experiment. At midday precisely, I sat on my couch to see if I could knock off a Man-Booker-shortlisted novel by teatime.

Thats not as easy as it sounds. The book I picked was To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris at 110,000 words or so, its not particularly lengthy, but given that the average adult reader clocks in at between 250 and 300 words per minute (according to a 2012 study), it would still take around six hours to finish. And thats without considering the weighty subject matter: a Manhattan dentist dealing with a crisis of faith after a religious group steals his identity. Clearly, demolishing it by three or four oclock was somewhat ambitious.

I have a friend whose rent uses up so much of her salary that she can't justify going out at night any more, so she just stays in. She says she has to get her money's worth; she is trying to spend her flat instead.

It's quite a challenge, spending your flat. I had high hopes at first: my friend used to love a good rave, so I thought she might at least turn the kitchen into a controversially small nightclub, or start a pirate radio station in the lavatory. But it has been six months now, and all she's done with her enforced solitude is flood Facebook with pictures of her cat.

This collective noun provides a window on to British history. Before the 13th century the old feudal system of justice prevailed, under which anyone accused of a crime could be charged, tried and sentenced by the lord of the manor. When King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, he enshrined in law the right to a trial by jury. A "damning" verdict was one that found the plaintiff guilty of the crimes they were charged with. The word comes from the old French word dampner, from the Latin damnre, meaning to injure or condemn, and in the middle ages it implied that your crimes made you worthy of eternal damnation.

Botto Bistro in Richmond, California is unconcerned about its Yelp rating. In an effort to undermine the reliability of its Yelp page, Botto Bistro is working to be the worst-rated restaurant in the Bay Area and is encouraging its customers to leave one-star Yelp reviews and offering deals for anyone who writes a bad review: 25% off any pizza and a chance to win a cooking class. Read the rest

From 1903-1905, a Japanese-born, Dutch artist named Gustave Verbeek turned America’s Sunday funny papers on their collective head. Read the rest

Burger King has launched a black burger in Japan made from black peppered-beef, buns and cheese darkened with bamboo charcoal, and a topping of garlic sauce blackened with squid ink. Read the rest

Super Looper. You have to try it! Make sure to put headphones on, then, get in the zone.

(via coudal)

In “How To Insult Like the British“, host Siobhan Thompson of Anglophenia demonstrates how to best offend in the manner of the British, providing context for terms such as “pillock“, “mardy“, “tosser” and “skiver“. The Anglophenia blog has also compiled a list of additional British insults that seem to be just a tad more crass than those in the video.

Language. It’s as adaptable as Darwin’s finches.

It’d be interesting to know how the Internet changes the game. Seems like it would go a long way toward democratizing the process by which lingo gets mingled.

Alex Gendler’s TED-Ed lesson, winningly animated by Igor Coric, rolls back the clock to a time when communal groups would subdivide and strike out on their own, usually in order to beef up the food supply.

This sort of geographic and temporal separation was bound to take a toll, linguistically. Evolution is need-based. Vocabulary and pronunciation eventually betray the specifics of the speaker’s surroundings, their circumstances and needs.

It takes some forensics to figure out how, or, even if, various languages relate to each other. A cunning linguist (forgive me) will also have the power to fill in historical gaps, by identifying words that have been borrowed from neighboring cultures, as well as more transient acquaintances.

As a little experiment, look at the way you talk! Those of us without royal blood or a stick up our heinies tend to speak a mongrel patois custom tailored by our own experience. A little bit of regionalism, some professional jargon, a few colorful words gleaned from life’s characters, lines from long ago entertainments deployed as if the references were fresh.

I’ll bet a linguist would have a field day with you, Bub.

Even if you’re the most straightforward conversationalist on the planet, the people who can’t understand a word you say would greatly outnumber those who can.

Maybe we  should all “speak Mandarin,” as per the billboards I saw in Singapore on a post-collegiate trip. (As a Western backpacker in Birkenstocks and a wrap-around hippie skirt, I was exempt, leaving me plenty of time to worry about being caned for spitting gum on the sidewalk, a thing I’d never do, by the way.)

Back to the animated lesson, above. While I agree that political and national interests can be hugely influential with regard to language development, I’m not sure a pig is the wisest choice when depicting this linguistic phenomenon as an animal’s worth of re-zoned primal cuts, labelled a la the former Yugoslavia.

Pork is haraam, and treif, and  ‘pig,’ in and of itself, is hardly a flattering epithet, a situation that’s sort of insulting to a naturally intelligent and fastidious beast.

I digress.

As does language, which explains why there could be as many as 8000 of them in use. A more conservative estimate puts the number at 3000. Not to alarm you, but if the number of people who speak your language is what the foodie hipsters of Brooklyn would refer to as “small batch,” there are linguists who would downgrade your tongue to mere dialect.

In which case, this list of obscene gestures from around the world might well come in handy.

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Ayun Halliday’s highly idiosyncratic approach to language can be studied in seven books, a number of anthologies, and her long suffering zine, the East Village Inky. Follow her @AyunHalliday

How Languages Evolve: Explained in a Winning TED-Ed Animation 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 How Languages Evolve: Explained in a Winning TED-Ed Animation appeared first on Open Culture.

There is exactly one reason you would ever want to brew hot tea in a barely stable chocolate teapot: To prove that you could. And indeed, tea-loving Brits have enlisted a master chocolatier to do just that. Behold the power of (chocolate) science.

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