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An anonymous -- but inspired -- prankster has affixed some helpful addenda to the usual London Underground official signage on various tube-trains, as are documented in this Imgur photoset.

London Underground prank stickers

The PronunciationManual YouTube account consists of short clips of clearly enunciated borrowed words and proper nouns that are often uttered by English speakers, including some tricky single malt Scotch whiskey names. These pronunciations are sure to impress your friends with your nous (pronounced "nooo-see") and sophistication.

PronunciationManual's YouTube channel (via Kottke)

Say what? Random International has created a new installation entitled Rain Room, in collaboration with Arts Council England and Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art. Doing justice to its name, the installation generates raindrop sounds and moisture in the air with a 100 square meter gate hanging from the ceiling, releasing a continuous stream of water. As the viewers walk through the exhibit, motion detection sensors redirect the water stream away, keeping them dry. The installation is located at the Curve in the Barbican Centre in London. It’s free to the public and runs from October 4 until March 3, 2013. Go and play Moses. (Image: Mymodernmet.com)

The post Feel the Rain Without Getting Wet appeared first on ANIMAL.

This week's issue of Entertainment Weekly sports a live-tweeting interactive video display. The folks from Mashable did a teardown to see how this was accomplished, and discovered that there is a complete (albeit without a case or keypad) Foxconn Android phone glued between the pages, along with a T-Mobile SIM. By poking around, they were even able to make phonecalls with it.

They didn't show what happened if you put the SIM in another phone, which would be a neat trick, and I also wondered about the injunction to turn off mobile devices for takeoff and landing.

We Found a Free Smartphone Embedded Inside Entertainment Weekly (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

First time accepted submitter bmxeroh writes "Remember the tragic maple syrup heist? Police have seized more than 600 barrels of maple syrup they say are related to the missing syrup. It was transported back to Quebec via a 16 tractor trailer, heavily guarded (and presumably heavily armed) convoy Wednesday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While driving a couple weeks ago, I happened to catch a meteor shooting across the sky:

Saw one of the coolest things ever tonight: a meteor burning up in the lower atmosphere. Super bright, exploded at the end like a firework.

It turned out that "one of the coolest things ever" wasn't hyperbole. You see, earlier that day over the UK, a meteor streaked across the sky for about 50 seconds:

And then the one I saw happened about two-and-a-half hours later. Spurred by this unlikely coincidence, mathematician Esko Lyytinen of the colorfully named Finnish Fireball Working Group of the Ursa Astronomical Association did some calculations and determined that the two events were actually the same meteor.

He believes a large body grazed the upper atmosphere, dipping to an altitude of 33 miles (53 km) over Ireland before escaping back to space. Because it arrived moving at only about 8 miles (13 km) per second, barely above Earth's escape velocity, it lingered for more than a minute as it crossed the sky. (This explains why some witnesses mistook it for reentering spacecraft debris.)

Lyytinen says the brief atmospheric passage took its toll. As the meteoroid broke apart, its velocity dropped to just 5.7 miles (9.2 km) per second, too slow to make an escape back to space. Instead, it became a temporary satellite of Earth, looping completely around the globe before reentering the atmosphere -- this time for good. "It looks now that the fireball witnessed 155 minutes later in U.S. and Canada, may have been one fragment of the British fireball, most probably the biggest one," Lyytinen explains.

These earth-grazers are not common but they do happen from time to time. But a visible Earth grazing meteor that enters the atmosphere twice? Unprecedented. So cool! (thx, alex)

Tags: astronomy   Esko Lyytinen   science   space

Очень крутой иллюстратор.

Image: Richard Phillips, Black Water, 2012 via Gagosian Currently on view at Gagosian’s 24th Street location is a solo show of the work of Richard Phillips.  The imagery mostly revolves around three internationally-renowned female celebrities: Lindsay Lohan, Sasha Grey and Adriana Lima, with the inclusion of one painting of the ocean at night. Through three videos and [...]

wat u doing money

[pleatedjeans:via]

Peter Correa has been a regular attendee for quite some time now, so it was only fitting that he and his lovely daughter Michaela share a few minutes in the spotlight. Peter has been witness to – and an incredible part of – New York dance music history. Read on!

MSN: When did you first start coming on Sundays?
Peter: I first came here probably about four years ago, when it used to be called The Yard. Omar S was playing. But I saw Justin Carter for the first time at that party, and he was playing some of the old stuff from the Paradise Garage days.
MSN: Did you go to the Garage?
Peter. Yes.
MSN: You were a card-carrying member?
Peter: I was a card-carrying member at the Paradise Garage.
MSN: What are your experiences from that club?
Peter: It was one of the last vestiges of true underground dance music – and since they closed in ’87, I’ve kind of followed it around where it’s kind of ended up. And these guys have kind of brought it back to life in a really big way, in a beautiful way.
MSN: Are you talking about the Paradise Garage reunions that go on?
Peter: Um, you know what? Because Larry Levan, who was the DJ over there – because he’s no longer around, it’s kind of hard to call it a reunion. There’s a couple of guys who are still out there – Danny Krivit, Francois K, Joaquin Claussel – all these guys that I knew… Dave Mancuso, who’s out in Japan right now – those were the legends. But I’m really interested in the new guys who are actually bringing this stuff around in a different vibe, and it’s been really good.
MSN: What other clubs did you frequent back in the day?
Peter: The Loft. And then there were a lot of smaller clubs, like Better Days, The Shelter, and there was a place called Ones on 111 Hudson.
MSN: Do you remember who DJ’d there?
Peter: Tee Scott.
MSN: Oh yeah. Man, he passed away too early.
Peter: Way too early.
MSN: So you said that Justin and Eamon are helping carry the torch in some ways – are there any other parties that you frequent other than this one that you enjoy going to?
Peter: No, I think these guys are really my personal favorite. There are some that I see, like PS1, and I’ll go over there and see who’s playing. But the idea of a club scene being more intimate, kind of outside the Manhattan commercial vibe, is what people want to see, so the loft parties really caught my attention. The first one I went to was with the Junior Boys at 12-turn-13, which is a great place.
MSN: How did you get into dance music in general?
Peter: I was an engineer in a recording studio. I knew Larry [Levan] when I was a kid.
MSN: How?
Peter: One day, when I was going for a membership over there, I actually met him and we started talking about music. I showed him a few of my demo tapes and he listened to them, and said they were pretty good, and ever since then I just gave him a view, you know, my hints of “how are you doing,” because he always wanted feedback from the people that were going. So I said, “Your sound is amazing, and I think that you can always keep up with a lot of the older records – always be true to the ones that get people up and moving around.”
MSN: What was the process of getting a membership at the Garage?
Peter: It used to be you went during the daytime – they were on King Street, between Varick and Hudson, now it’s a Verizon building – and you’d go up to the second floor, because it was actually a garage, and there was a staircase that went upstairs, and there was a lounge where they would take photographs and interview the people who were going for the memberships. It was very private at that time. It was off-hours and if you didn’t know about it, you weren’t going.
MSN: What kind of music did you show Larry? What were you engineering at the time?
Peter: At the time I was just doing some re-edits of the old P&P music [an NYC-based record label run by Peter Brown and Patrick Adams in the 70s],  like “Atmosphere Strut” [by Cloud One], the kind of stuff that Kenny Dope was playing.

MSN: Did Larry play one of your cuts at the Garage?
Peter: He did! One of these old 45′s by Personal Touch that he re-edited. I thought it was a really good song, so I showed him the original vinyl and he said, “Let me take that, and remaster that, throw it out to the people and see how it plays.” That was the one time I got a little bit of a fore-run into something he was working on. I can’t remember the name of that song…[The track that Peter is referring to is "It Ain't No Big Thing," which is amongst the most classic tracks that were popularized by Larry Levan at the Garage]

MSN: And Michaela! What do you think of these parties?
Michaela: I really, really like them! He may have started coming here four years ago, but I only started coming here one year ago. This was my first interaction with any of this type of scene.
MSN: Does your dad play any dance music at home?
Michaela: Yes!
MSN: You have a nice hi-fi at home?
Peter: Yes.
MSN: Haha! OK. And you have record collection, Peter?
Peter: Um, here and there. It’s been pared-down over the years –
Michaela: It’s still very nice!
MSN: I’m sure it is! And so what are your interests, hobbies, etc?
Michaela: I write! And I use music for inspiration, so this is a great thing to come to.
MSN: What kind of writing do you like to do?
Michaela: Novels! Fantasy novels.
MSN: You’re working on something right now?
Michaela: Yes!
MSN: Give us a little synopsis?
Michaela: I guess the synopsis would be… It’s the story of a princess, who wants to go beyond her means as a princess, and through developing her own personality within the castle, she learns more about the world around her, only to get thrust into something that’s been going on for much longer than she’s even existed! And through meeting certain people she explores her own means, and solves a whole bunch of mysteries! And it was everything she dreamed, but at the same time, it’s so much more.
MSN: Well, if you can put it that succinctly, it sounds like it’s going to be great!
Michaela: I hope so!
MSN: Well, we don’t want to hold you too long – any parting words for the reading audience?
Peter: Keep this vibe and spirit alive forever. Don’t ever let it die, because this is something that’s carried through many decades, and to see so many young people getting involved in it… you just got to keep it going forever.
MSN: Will do, Peter. And Michaela, when will your book be available, and in what stores? Haha!
Michaela: I don’t know when the book will be available – but if anyone needs inspiration they should come here – and if they ever want to read something that’s gotten inspiration from coming here, they should buy the book “Innocent Sorrow” when it comes out!

Photo by Marshall McDonald

MrSeb writes "Reverse engineering company Chipworks has completed its initial microscopic analysis of Apple's new A6 SoC (found in the iPhone 5), and there are some rather interesting findings. First, there's a tri-core GPU — and then there's a custom, hand-made dual-core ARM CPU. Hand-made chips are very rare nowadays, with Chipworks reporting that it hasn't seen a non-Intel hand-made chip for 'years.' The advantage of hand-drawn chips is that they can be more efficient and capable of higher clock speeds — but they take a lot longer (and cost a lot more) to design. Perhaps this is finally the answer to what PA Semi's engineers have been doing at Apple since the company was acquired back in 2008..." Pretty picture of the chip after using an Ion Beam to remove the casing. The question I have is how it's less expensive (in the long run) to lay a chip out by hand once instead of improving your VLSI layout software forever. NP classification notwithstanding.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

i-like-pigeons:

“I’m glad you all could make it”

“Sexy” and “knitting” may have just appeared in the same sentence for the first time in, well, ever. Congratulations to United Colors of Benetton for creating some buzz by placing this tastefully vulgar sculpture by Erik Ravelo in the middle of their new pop-up location in Soho. The figurines reminiscent of yarn-bomber Olek are certainly getting some attention, mostly from angry parents who wish to shield their offspring from the evils of yarn-porn. Check out this Instagram shot where the fight is going down.

(Image: Tumblr)

The post Kinky Yarn Sculpture Riles Up SoHo appeared first on ANIMAL.

Wood grain

Mixing Mentos and Coke is a thing -- well-parameterized and understood. But what if you tape a condom over the bottle-mouth before you make the fateful introduction? Sheer hilarity!

Durex + Cola + Mentosy (via Reddit)

Etsy seller Miligurumis offers a knitting crocheting pattern for making your own Panzer tank slippers, a peaceful project to wile away the long nights on the Eastern front.

PATTERN for Tiger 1 Tank - Panzer Crocheted Slippers (via Neatorama)

Language English

In collaboration with Studio Ghibli, The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo presents a celebration of Japan's famed visual effects, TOKUSATSU.

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Landing Image:  Tuesday, July 10, 2012 to Monday, October 8, 2012 Tuesday, September 18, 2012 Featured Image:  Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - 17:23 USD Related Event:  TOKUSATSU – Special Effects Museum Editor's Pick:  0 Featured:  0 Classification:  group Permanent:  none none Credit:  Tokusatsu Special Effects Museum - Courtesy of Yoshikazu Takada via Flickr Travel:  WTGN Event Curate Page Title:  TOKUSATSU – Special Effects Museum, Tokyo Popular Cities:  Tokyo

A couple of years ago I was on The Colbert Report showing some fun projects from MAKE, and Stephen fell in love with a project called "The Most Useless Machine." (Watch the episode here.) The Most Useless Machine is a box that shuts itself off when you turn it on. (After the show Stephen hinted that he wanted to keep it, so I gave it to him and he was really happy.)

Make:Projects just posted complete instructions for making your own Most Useless Machine. It's the simplest version yet, and is sure to bring a smile to the face of anyone who tries it.

Last year I saw a video of the "Leave Me Alone Box" built by Michael Seedman. Flip its switch on, and an arm reaches out of a door to turn the switch back off. To paraphrase The Terminator, that's what it does, that's all it does, and it will not stop until its circuit is dead.

I had to have one of my own, so I made one. Seedman's design uses a microcontroller to run two servomotors: one to open the lid, and another to push the switch. This makes for an impressive performance, but seemed too complicated, and actually, his circuit remains powered even when the box is idle.

For existential purity, I wanted a super-simple machine that really turned itself off. So I came up with a single-motor design controlled by a 555 timer chip, with a curved arm that both lifts the lid and flips off the switch. I called it the "Most Useless Machine" and posted it on Instructables along with a YouTube video of the box in action. The project soon went viral, attracting millions of viewers, thousands of comments, and many builds and design variations. Whew!

Along the way, Instructables member Compukidmike came up with an even simpler version that dispenses with the 555 circuitry entirely by using a gearmotor and two switches. The resulting project, presented here, is the ultimate in technology for its own sake, a minimal assemblage of parts that, through its one meaningless act of defiance, speaks volumes.

How to Build the Most Useless Machine

You can buy a kit for $30

That doesn’t sound like fun

История снимка: "73-летний фотограф Чарли Саммерс говорит, что во время короткой борьбы один сурикат повалил другого на землю и присел на него. Нижний немного сопротивлялся, но потом смирился с судьбой и расслабился. Третий сурикат вообще шел мимо, увидел все это и уселся на поверженного за компанию. Все живы и здоровы. Чарли говорит, что едва мог сделать снимок, так как очень смеялся.

Tom Hunter

Here's a rather magnificent flyover of this year's Burning Man's Black Rock City. Look closely and you'll see our glorious Liminal Labs camp, just off 6 O'Clock and Rod's Road.

BURNING MAN FPV - Black Rock City Aerial Tour 2012 (Thanks, Nicola!)

“Regards”? “Best wishes”? “Very yours truly”? “Sincerely”? “All the best”? “Love”? ”Again, really sorry”? ”Well I guess I’ll take off now”? “It’s been a pleasure working with you”? “TTYL”? “Keep in touch”? Kweku Adoboli, UBS’s alleged rogue trader, who does sound genuinely sorry for the “shit storm” he brought on the bank, went with “thanks.”

Via the FT:

“Dear Will

It is with great stress that I write this mail. First of all the ETF [exchange traded funds] trades that you see on the ledger are not trades that I have done with a counterparty as I have previously described.

I used the bookings as a way to suppress the PnL losses that I accrued through off book trades that I made. Those trades were previously profit making, became loss making as the market sold off aggressively through the aggressive sell-off days of July and early August. Initially, I had been short futures through June and those lost money when the first Greek confidence vote went through in mid June.

In order to try and make the money back I flipped the trade long through the rally. Although I had a couple of opportunities to unwind the long trade for negligible loss, I did not move quickly enough for the market weakness on the back of the first back macro data and then an escalation eurozone crisis cost me the losses you will see when the ETF bookings are cancelled. The aim had been to try and make the money back before the September expiry date came through but I clearly failed.

These are still live trades on the book that will need to be unwound. Namely a short position in DAX futures [which had been rolled to December expiry] and a short position in S&P500 futures that are due to expire on Friday.

I have now left the office for the sake of discretion. I will need to come back in to discuss the positions and explain face to face, but for reasons that are obvious, I did not think it wise to stay on the desk this afternoon.

I will expect that questions will be asked as to why nobody was aware of these trades. The reality is that I have maintained that these were EFP [exchange for physical] trades to the member of my team, BUC [the accounts department], trade support and John Di Bacco.

I take responsibility for my actions and the shit storm that will now ensue. I am deeply sorry to have left this mess for everyone and to have put my bank and my colleagues at risk.
Thanks, Kweku.”

Transcript Of UBS Trader’s ‘Bombshell Email’ [FT]

Continue reading »

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Tags: Kweku Adoboli, reader polls, shit storms, thanks, UBS, valedictions

Baking Bread

In the introductory post for this series, published in mid-July, I mentioned that my reasons for visiting Boston to investigate its relationship to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest would “become apparent at a later date.” I am pleased to announce that this date has arrived. I am even more excited to tell you about this project, which has been almost exactly two years in the making. As the headline has already given away, I’m calling it The Infinite Atlas Project.

The underlying idea is simple to explain: my goal was to identify, place, and describe every cartographic point I could find in the novel—whether real, fictional, real but fictionalized, defunct or otherwise. This would not have worked with just any novel. As profound a work of imagination as Infinite Jest is, a significant majority (ballpark figures below) of the locations described in its 1,079 pages have some non-trivial basis in reality. And not just in Boston: this holds true across North America, and even the globe.

The manifestation of this research effort turned into something I could not have imagined at the outset: a multi-part collaborative research and art project, of which this website has only been the iceberg’s tip. Today I’m announcing the launch of a limited-edition print series and a free web resource drawn from this research. I am calling them, respectively, Infinite Map and Infinite Atlas.

❍

Infinite Map — A geographic infographic poster depicting the “territorially reconfigured North America” of the novel and identifying 250 of the most interesting locations with a color-coded dot and corresponding footnote. As you can see from the acromegalic thumbnail above, the 24”x36” print includes four telescoping map insets: O.N.A.N.’s North America, Northeast U.S. & Canada, Greater Boston and Metro Boston. The red shading represents my own painstaking, overdetermined conclusions about the most probable outline of the Great Concavity. In the upper right corner is the Great Seal of O.N.A.N., based on the description from page 153, and the map labels throughout include sometimes-obscure references to the novel’s the text. This image is the principal result of a long-term collaboration between myself and the Los Angeles-based creative design agency JESS3, whose technical ability and patience with yrstruly knows no bounds.

Yes, it is for available for purchase. Yes, today. You can buy it here. The Great Seal of O.N.A.N. is available as a separate print. Both are available in a limited edition of 1,079. (Because this whole endeavor has a long way to go before breaking even, other items are available here, too.)

❍

Infinite Atlas — Finally, the namesake of the project overall is nothing more or less than a Google Maps-enabled online atlas of Infinite Jest. Unshackled from the limitations of Tumblr, let alone a rectangular shape, here is the fullest expression of this project’s ambition. With the help of a small research team, I’ve organized and mapped to x-y coordinates approximately 475 locations that appear in some form in David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece. And those are just the ones I could place: the database actually includes more than 650 discrete locations, including the ones I couldn’t so locate. If you spend enough time exploring, I guarantee you will find them.

The locations of Infinite Atlas are searchable, browsable and sortable by characters and stories associated with them. As you can see from the screen shot above, clicking on a specific location brings up a new window, including: an overview of its place in the story, the page on which it first appears (fortunately, the pagination on all English editions of the novel to date are identical), additional commentary as necessary, a link to the most relevant Wikipedia article, plus a list of characters, stories and related locations.

The window is also designed to showcase photographs of specific locations. At launch, approximately 10% of locations include photos. You may be unsurprised to learn that all of these are currently in and around Boston. Readers are invited to upload their own photos, subject to approval. In case you are the sort of person who is inclined to notice these things, the website is published under a Creative Commons license. Programming and design was handled by the Washington, D.C.-based web developers at RedEdge, who made some real Arthur C. Clarke-type magic happen over the last month of hard-core development.

❍

In case you are wondering, Infinite Boston was in fact the last component of the project conceived, even though it was the first released. The idea for this blog grew out of the need to visit Boston and lock down some of the less obvious locations within Allston-Brighton, Cambridge, and their surrounds. Speaking of this website, just because the balance of this project is now live does not mean Infinite Boston is going away anytime soon. Several weeks of posts lie ahead, and tomorrow we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming, viz., my wanderings around and musings about the real-life counterparts of Infinite Jest’s Boston settings.

The Infinite Atlas Project itself may not quite be infinite, but it is open-ended: as much as I have discovered in the past two years, the deeper I get the more I find there is to know. The incredible feedback from readers on this website has been just one example and, if you are among those who have pointed out my embarrassing oversights, my gratitude is yours. Throughout the twenty-five months of this project to date, I’ve learned quite a bit about the Boston area. Today the scope has expanded considerably.

For further updates, please follow this project on Twitter, which I’ll be keeping at @infiniteboston and “like” us on Facebook. If you’d like to know more, please feel free to send me an email. If you’re remotely curious about who I am, it turns out that I’m this guy named William Beutler, and you can follow me on Twitter at @williambeutler.

Pi in the Sky, (The first one-thousand numbers of the infinite order of pi - 3.14159, etc.)