Yasutada.sudo

An amusing, but telling collection of generic logo concepts, trite design elements and hackneyed type. [gtgraphics.org; Archive.org cache; via]

It starts with "NO 'TELEPHONES'. TALK TO EACH OTHER. FACE TO FACE ONLY. WRITE A LETTER, SEND A TELEGRAM TO YOUR MOM, PRETEND IT'S 1860, LIVE." Read the rest

Touchless trash cans caught in an infinite loop. The laughter is infectious! (@rynbtmn) (more…)

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UPDATE: Duh! It was fake!

Police in Mount Laurel, New Jersey found a young woman's corpse under a motel bed and it reportedly had been there for at least five years.

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How did this British innovation go from a hobbyist curiosity to the war-torn middle east?

It will be another unsettled summer in the makeshift tent communities that line the valleys, mountains and border towns of Lebanon for the 300,000 children who have escaped Syrias civil war.

But these young refugees, baking in the blasting heat of the Levant and under constant threat of violence, polio and other illnesses, are the incongruous beneficiaries of a confluence of two UK technology initiatives. This summer, theyre going to learn to code.

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Phillybdizzle at Reddit made this map based on the 1881 Census of England and Wales showing the most common surname in each province:

Any American will be familiar with the two most popular choices — Smith and Jones — but what's remarkable is how nearly perfectly the Smith/Jones divide lines up with the political boundary between England and Wales. In the United States, both Smith and Jones play as super-generic Anglo names. But in reality they seem to show pretty distinctively what part of the British Isles your male line hails from.

The Russian space agency has lost control of a satellite containing geckos involved in sex orgy porn. Read the rest

There are lots of reasons to tackle a climbing wall at your local gym: it's great exercise, it can improve your hand-eye coordination, and it helps instill useful mountaineering skills should you ever find yourself trapped on a cliff. But researchers at Aalto University in Finland want to take them one step further through the use of Kinect sensors and projectors that turn climbing walls into interactive games.

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Open science advocate Michael Nielson writes about how scientists can infer causation in situations where it's not possible to do a randomized controlled trial.

It’s one of my ironclad rules of travel. When you’re in an airport, you pretty much always see Orthodox Jews. Occasionally in families, but generally in small groups of men, conspicuous by their dress and the Talmud volumes they often carry. At the New York airports and Miami, obviously. In European heavyweights: London, Zurich, Paris, and Berlin. But I’ve also noticed them in areas that aren’t hubs in the global diamond business or known for their high density of storefront shuls and rabbinic dynasties: in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Detroit; in Budapest and Prague; in Buenos Aires and Bogota.

This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.

Young scientists spend most of their work lives gathering and crunching data. So it seems especially unfair that when it comes to the job hunt, they’re forced to fly mostly blind. Ph.D. programs don’t usually track their graduates’ employment outcomes. They certainly don’t advertise placement figures the way that, say, business schools do. While the government collects troves of information from America’s doctorate holders every year, much of it is weirdly organized and tricky to access.

The Economist offers yet another overview of why Japanese electronics companies are having so many problems competing with foreign rivals. Read the rest

Piped water may be the greatest convenience ever known but our sewage systems and bathrooms are a disaster

• Bathrooms and toilets - a history in pictures
  

For centuries, the people of London and other big cities got their cooking and washing water from rivers or wells, limiting their consumption to pretty much what they could carry. They dumped their waste into brick-lined cesspits that would be emptied by the night soil men, who sold it as fertilizer or dumped it off Dung Pier into the Thames. Liquid waste might be dumped into gutters in the middle of the road.

And then in 1854, in the middle of a cholera epidemic in London, Dr John Snow mapped where victims died and found that the deaths seemed concentrated around one of those pumps, at 37 Broad Street. When he had the handle removed from the pump, the cholera epidemic stopped immediately. He had made the first verifiable connection between human waste and disease.

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I’m sure you’ve heard the adage “publish or perish.” In order to get tenure—or, as the abysmal job market begets hyper-professionalization, to be considered for a job at all—a scholar must have a certain amount of articles appear in “peer-reviewed” academic journals. These journals—Obscure Subfield Quarterly, One-Word Pretentious Greek Thing, etc.—usually have a circulation of about 300. Their subscriptions cost hundreds—if not thousands—of dollars per year. Thus, they remain all but inaccessible to someone without research-university affiliation. Thus those articles upon which careers depend are usually read by exactly three people.

Couple given conditional discharges and ordered to pay costs after taking children to Australia for three weeks

A couple who took their children on holiday to Australia during school term time have been given criminal records.

The pair, who cannot be named in order to protect the identity of their children, were handed conditional discharges at Nuneaton magistrates court and told to pay a total of £800 towards costs after being prosecuted by Coventry city council.

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The "kaffir" in "Kaffir lime" is actually a racial slur. At National Geographic, Maryn McKenna struggles with how to deal with foods that have offensive names.

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Wired offers a set of intriguing interactive charts revealing how the length of songs have changed over the years--and how closely (or not) it is driven by technological change.

A simple, straightforward website full of indie games. Bookmarked!

This cute article on Elite Daily references a few studies demonstrating that people who read more have a deeper understanding of a wider range of life experience.

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Cela peut sembler contradictoire, étant donné la polyvalence de nos laptops, tablettes ou smartphones –où l’on lit un article en écoutant de la musique en rédigeant un mail en payant ses factures en réservant un billet d’avion– mais pour être plus concentré, mieux vaudrait multiplier les écrans. De plus en plus de gens compartimentent en effet l’usage des nombreux outils qui nous accompagnent afin d’être plus efficaces, note Wired. Quand Karen Schulman Dupuis, qui travaille dans un incubateur de start-ups à Toronto, doit lire un long article, elle dégaine sa tablette, pour ne pas être tentée de répondre aux emails qui s’affichent sur son ordinateur portable. Un outil pour lire, un autre pour communiquer, note le magazine. «Au cœur de cette existence multi-écrans, il y a une réalisation paradoxale: la profusion de machines peut aider à concentrer son attention plutôt que la fracturer. Un tas d'onglets ouverts dans votre navigateur embrouille votre esprit; certaines tâches sont alors dissimulées et peut-être oubliées. Mais quand les écrans sont physiquement séparés, le problème disparaît.» Eparpiller pour mieux canaliser? En fait, la clé, c’est d’être capable, en un coup d’œil, de balayer l’ensemble des tâches. Pour Doug Belshaw, chez Mozilla, l’idéal serait que chaque machine possède une seule fonction. Lui a donc poussé le vice jusqu’à afficher sa liste de choses à faire sur une tablette posée à côté de ...

Scientists don’t usually lodge a protest against projects funded to the tune of 1.2 billion euros. They usually try to make nice with the organizers to get in on the action.

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Some things in academia never change. Even in an age when the feminists apparently control everything, it seems that the practice of older (usually male) scholars sleeping with much younger (usually female) graduate students is alive and … well, I wouldn’t say “well.” With two such relationships making recent news in the discipline of philosophy alone, for some of the older generation of male professors (again, mostly male), the grad students are still a dating pool—and vice versa. This is not just icky—it is highly damaging to the profession.

[Photo: Andrew Nash]

The recent sunshine and 26 degree heat has made us all outdoorsy types. We’ve been bathing in the local lido, supping in beer gardens and picnicking in parks, but a word of warning to those popping out for some ‘fresh air’: steer clear of Oxford Street.

Not that it’d be your first choice for a stroll in the sun anyway, but Oxford street has just been labeled the worst place in the world for nitrogen dioxide (NO2), an air pollutant that’s toxic when inhaled.

It’s pretty nasty stuff that can cause chest pain, coughing and eye, nose or throat irritation. There are some scary facts about it causing conditions such as respiratory disease and inflammation of the lungs.

NO2 levels on Oxford Street are more than three times the EU’s safety limit and reportedly come from the constant stream of traffic using the road. A group of emissions scientists collected the findings, which show that London’s levels are higher than other big cities like New York, Hong Kong and Rio.

In an attempt to reduce these levels, the number of buses on Oxford Street has been cut by a fifth and some of the buses have been fitted with hybrid engines (so powered by electricity and diesel). Boris knows more needs to be done so by 2020 there will be an Ultra Low Emission Zone in central London. But for now, those of us living or working near Oxford Street may want to invest in a face mask.

Wondering how polluted your road is? Plot your postcode in this London pollution map.

A recent study found that the urge to jump off tall things is pretty common, even among people who are not suicidal.

Fran Capo is the world's fastest-talking woman, according to Guinness. [Video Link]

It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of silent movies in Japan have been lost thanks to human carelessness, earthquakes and the grim efficiency of the United States Air Force. The first films of hugely important figures like Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Shimizu have simply vanished. So we should consider ourselves fortunate that Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Kuretta Ippei – a 1926 film known in the States as A Page of Madness – has somehow managed to survive the vagaries of fate. Kinugasa sought to make a European-style experimental movie in Japan and, in the process, he made one of the great landmarks of silent cinema. You can watch it above.

Born in 1896, Kinugasa started his adult life working as an onnagata, an actor who specializes in playing female roles. In 1926, after working for a few years behind the camera under pioneering director Shozo Makino, Kinugasa bought a film camera and set up a lab in his house in order to create his own independently financed movies. He then approached members of the Shinkankaku (new impressionists) literary group to help him come up with a story. Author Yasunari Kawabata wrote a treatment that would eventually become the basis for A Page of Madness.

Though the synopsis of the plot doesn’t really do justice to the movie — a retired sailor who works at an insane asylum to care after his wife who tried to kill their child — the visual audacity of Page is still startling today. The opening sequence rhythmically cuts between shots of a torrential downpour and gushing water before dissolving into a hallucinatorily odd scene of a young woman in a rhomboid headdress dancing in front of a massive spinning ball. The woman is, of course, an inmate at the asylum dressed in rags. As her dance becomes more and more frenzied, the film cuts faster and faster, using superimpositions, spinning cameras and just about every other trick in the book.

(We’ve added a version in slightly higher resolution than the one above.)

While Kinugasa was clearly influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which also visualizes the inner world of the insane, the movie is also reminiscent of the works of French avant-garde filmmakers like Abel Gance, Russian montage masters like Sergei Eisenstein and, in particular, the subjective camerawork of F. W. Murnau in Der Letzte Mann. Kinugasa incorporated all of these influences seamlessly, creating an exhilarating, disturbing and ultimately sad tour de force of filmmaking. The great Japanese film critic Akira Iwasaki called the movie “the first film-like film born in Japan.”

When A Page of Madness was released, it played at a theater in Tokyo that specialized in foreign movies. Page was indeed pretty foreign compared to most other Japanese films at the time. The movie was regarded, film scholar Aaron Gerow notes, as “one of the few Japanese works to be treated as the ‘equal’ of foreign motion pictures in a culture that still looked down on domestic productions.” Yet it didn’t change the course of Japanese cinema, and it was thought of as a curiosity at a time when most films in Japan were kabuki adaptations and samurai stories.

Page disappeared not long after its release and, for over 50 years, was thought lost until Kinugasa found it in his own storehouse in 1971. During that time Kinugasa received a Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his splashy samurai spectacle The Gate of Hell (1953) and Kawabata, who wrote the treatment, got a Nobel Prize in Literature for writing books like Snow Country about a lovelorn geisha.

You can find A Page of Madness on our list of Free Silent Films, which is part of our collection,  675 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

Related Content: 

Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Introduced Japanese Cinema to the West

Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931)

Akira Kurosawa & Francis Ford Coppola Star in Japanese Whisky Commercials (1980)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from the Early Days of Japanese Cinema (1926) 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 A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from the Early Days of Japanese Cinema (1926) appeared first on Open Culture.

A new Russian law requires companies to store Russians' data within Russia's borders, out of reach of the NSA, and in reach of Russia's own secret police. It's China all over again, writes Cory Doctorow. Read the rest