Christopher.kantos

Among any and all creatures in this world that could be considered living, including people, there is an universal truth: We die. But not all of us go through the gradual (and eventually rapid) process of self-destruction that we think of aging. Some animals and plants, like species of jellyfish, tortoises, and trees,…

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Hakkasan restaurant in Midtown Manhattan offers missives from the author Jay McInerney through the month of February.

Kids nowadays! All they care about is Nando’s and Jeremy Corbyn and none of them even want to hear just how dope it can be to roll a fake block of cheese down the street. That’s why the annual Stilton, England cheese rolling competition has been canceled this year.

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A new report has included downgrading drug possession to a non-criminal offence in its recommendations

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Hill Billies Ice Hole is a seasonal bar that sits on Minnesota’s frozen Lake Lida. It's a favorite among ice fisherfolk, especially because you can fish from inside the bar. The favorite drink is the minnow shot, which is a shot of hooch with -- you guessed it -- a live, wriggling minnow in it.

By using an artificially intelligent algorithm to predict patient mortality, a research team from Stanford University is hoping to improve the timing of end-of-life care for critically ill patients. In tests, the system proved eerily accurate, correctly predicting mortality outcomes in 90 percent of cases. But while…

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There's a fascinating linguistic fight brewing in Kazakhstan, due to the president's decision to adopt a new alphabet for writing their language, Kazakh.

The problem? It's got too many apostrophes!

For decades, Kazakhs have used the Cyrillic alphabet, which was imposed on them by the USSR back in the 30s. Now that Kazakhstan has started moving away from Russia -- including making Kazakh more central in education and public life -- the president decided he wanted to adopt a new alphabet, too. He wanted it based on the Latin one.

But! Kazakh has many unique sounds that can't be easily denoted using a Latin-style alphabet.

Kazakhstan's neighbors solved that problem by following the example of Turkey, where they use umlauts and phonetic symbols. But Kazkhstan's president didn't want that -- and instead has pushed for the use of tons of apostrophes instead.

Kazakhstan's linguists intellectuals think this is nuts, as the New York Times reports:

The Republic of Kazakhstan, for example, will be written in Kazakh as Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy. Others complained the use of apostrophes will make it impossible to do Google searches for many Kazakh words or to create hashtags on Twitter. “Nobody knows where he got this terrible idea from,” said Timur Kocaoglu, a professor of international relations and Turkish studies at Michigan State, who visited Kazakhstan last year. “Kazakh intellectuals are all laughing and asking: How can you read anything written like this?” The proposed script, he said, “makes your eyes hurt.” [snip] Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e, and pronounced she-ee-ye. “When scholars first learned about this, we were all in shock,” Mr. Kazhybek said.

What's particularly interesting are the technological and geopolitical reasons behind the president's embrace of apostrophes. He claims it's about making the language easy to type on computers; no need to have a keyboard equipped with umlauts and other special characters. But critics say it's about something else -- the president's desire to not alienate Russia, which doesn't like the idea of the various former Soviet satellites adopting Turkic styles ...

The only reason publicly cited by Mr. Nazarbayev to explain why he did not want Turkish-style phonetic markers is that “there should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer,” he said in September. He also complained that using digraphs to transcribe special Kazakh sounds would cause confusion when people try to read English, when the same combination of letters designates entirely different sounds. But others saw another possible motivation: Mr. Nazarbayev may be eager to avoid any suggestion that Kazakhstan is turning its back on Russia and embracing pan-Turkic unity, a bugbear for Russian officials in both czarist and Soviet times.

Oh, and a director shot a video parodying the apostrophe-ridden words the president's new language would produce. The image above is from it.

It's a great story, with fascinating nuance into Kazakhstan's politics; go read it in full! A very good reminder of how deeply political language is, was, and probably always will be.

(There's a cool video embedded where you can learn Kazakh phrases, too.)

Watch your language!

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Erin Gloria Ryan reviews the evidence for a powerful cinematic hypothesis: in the movie "Home Alone," the abandoned youngster played by Macaulay Culkin is in fact dead.

One of the most telling moments in the film comes when Kevin’s mother hitches a ride with a polka band, led by Gus Polinski (John Candy). In the back of a Budget rental truck, Kate asks Gus if he’d ever left his kid home alone. Gus replies that he’d actually left his kid at a funeral parlor once, all day long. Kate says, “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this.” Gus points out that she had brought it up. “I’m sorry I did,” says Kate, mad with grief.

The best fan theory since "the kids in the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon died when the rollercoaster collapsed and they are in Hell."

Last night, St. Louis Lambert International Airport's Terminal 2 was fully evacuated due to fire concern. It was quickly determined that the smoke alarms were triggered by a burning bagel at one of the airport restaurants.

(KMOV)

anfractuous
adj. winding, sinuous, involved

quomodo
n. the manner, way, or means

flagitate
v. to entreat earnestly

planiloquent
adj. plain-speaking

In a 1993 New York Times article lamenting the obscurity of scholarly writing, University of Colorado history professor Patricia Nelson Limerick cited this passage from Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind as an example of indecipherable prose:

If openness means to ‘go with the flow,’ it is necessarily an accommodation to the present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware of what is doubtful in it.

She wrote, “Is there a reader so full of blind courage as to claim to know what this sentence means?”

Tide's laundry detergent pods look good enough to eat. In fact, since the brightly-colored product's introduction (a bestseller for its creator, Proctor & Gamble) six years ago, children have frequently gotten sent to the ER for consuming them.

Despite the dangers, the "eating Tide Pods meme" remains strong.

In March 2017, this CollegeHumor "Don't eat the laundry pods" video emerged: https://youtu.be/pM6wanZOLtk

Now, in 2018, we finally have "Tide Pods" you can actually eat, in the form of vegan sushi. While recipes for Tide Pods candy and a gelatin-based dessert have been floating around, Hilary, a friend of Redditor dweron, has attempted to crack the "edible pods code." Her sushi retains the squishiness of the swirling "purple" and "orange" sections using truly edible foods like carrot, cabbage, and rice paper.

I say "attempted" because, in my opinion, Tide Pods would taste like candy or frosting not vegan sushi. Solid try, though! (Mashable)

O’Naturel is a nudist restaurant in Paris. The New Yorker's Henry Alford had a bite and an eyeful:

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Sacha Lauri makes clothing and jewelry out of kombucha, more specifically the SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast) floating on the surface of the fermented tea. Her company is called Kombucha Couture. From an interview with Lauri in MAKE:

Sasha, what’s the process of making an actual dress out of SCOBY?

It is very simple!

First of all, boil 1 gallon of water and add 6 black teabags (for phytonutrient/nitrogen source) and 1 cup of sugar (as carbohydrates fuel the fermentation and production of cellulose. When tea is cool, pour into a tub (approx 1/2″ deep), add a small 1″ “nugget” of kombucha SCOBY, and cover. Let sit for 1 week at room temperature. After 1 week, harvest the mat of cellulose that the original kombucha SCOBY has produced over the surface of the tub. At this point, lay the cellulose mat out on parchment paper and allow to dry in 75F with indirect sunlight. This takes 1-5 days depending on size. When cellulose is dry, I colour it with acid reactive dharma dye or food colouring and cut and sew it like a leather textile.

The process is very simple as I allow nature to do all of the production. The bacteria in the SCOBY is a strain of acetobacter which naturally spins cellulose to both protect itself and keep it floating so it has access to oxygen. It is related to the vinegar producing bacteria which also create cellulose SCOBYS. It is a very natural process and just requires nutrients (tea), sugar, and an ambient temperature for the SCOBY to begin spinning cellulose. Once I have harvested a mat, I discard half of the acidic tea and refill with fresh tea. There is enough bacteria in the liquid that a kombucha “nugget” isn’t really even necessary, although it speeds up production.

"Edible Innovations: These Dresses are Made from Kombucha" (MAKE:)

In honor of what would have been the late singer’s 71st birthday

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 SpaceX’s latest rocket may have launched successfully – but the mission didn’t end as a win. The Zuma payload it was carrying, a mysterious classified piece of cargo for the U.S. government believed to be a spy satellite, was lost after it failed to separate from the second stage of the rocket after the first stage of the Falcon 9 separated as planned and returned to Earth.… Read More

You can now watch all 13 episodes of Carl Sagan's mind-expanding, life-changing 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage for free on Twitch! Written by Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, Cosmos is a profoundly important scientific head-trip that sparks the imagination and instills that sense of wonder and hope that we all desperately need right now.

Watch live video from COSMOS on www.twitch.tv

Costume parties are a mess, but so totally worth it for the hookups.

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Humankind is mortal. We are born, we flop around and make noise for a while, and then, inevitably, we die. That is perhaps the lesson that the diabolical makers of slippery stairs were trying to teach to their audience. I realize that asking someone to watch a nine-minute video is demanding a lot, but I hope you will…

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A team of scientists in Italy fed some spiders a solution of graphene and carbon nanotubes, which the spiders duly incorporated into their webs. The result is webbing that’s five times stronger than regular webbing, on par with the strength of bulletproof Kevlar. And why stop with spiders:

If you think that creating super-spiders might be going to far, this research is only the beginning. Pugno and her team are preparing to see what other animals and plants might be enhanced if they are fed graphene. Might it get incorporated into animals’ skin, exoskeletons, or bones?

“This process of the natural integration of reinforcements in biological structural materials could also be applied to other animals and plants, leading to a new class of ‘bionicomposites’ for innovative applications,” Pugno added.

The future is gonna be weird, y’all!

Tags: science

Alarming news from the north.

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– The Snowball of debt as percentage of GDP

– Stunning ballpoint pen drawings.

– Simple iPhone trick frees up storage space you didn’t know you had (via)

– This all-in-one living cube is pretty cool.

– Google is sharing its management tools with the world

– How to Make Friends—Literally

– This made me smile: Players find out their coach used to tour with MC Hammer and make him do the Hammer Time dance. He nails it.

– This is a lovely, minimal cube necklace.

– The 3 types of bullshit feedback — and what to do about them

– I want to visit The Hill of Buddha one day.

– Bedtime stories about race and social justice

– Adult-Sized Little Tikes-Inspired Car Spotted in UK

– Learn Tai Chi Online. I love the internet so much.

– A Simple, Inexpensive Trick to Find Out Exactly What Your Voice Sounds Like to Other People

– This Friday Link Pack was dispatched while on vacation in the Swiss Alps. Prost!

As eclipse mania grips the nation, Vox has created a nifty interactive eclipse map of what to expect in every American ZIP Code. (more…)

Location platform Here Technologies calculated how far one hour of driving can take drivers out of major American cities starting on Friday at 4, 7, and 10 pm. (more…)

Maybe this dude shouldn’t have been urged to “fire it in there,” because boy did he ever fire it (the baseball) in there (this dude’s dick and balls).

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Siberian Husky, and Alaskan Malamute rescues are overflowing with dogs named Nymeria and Ghost. Thanks, Games of Thrones!

Siberian huskies, the strong, wolf-like dogs originally bred for sled-pulling in the Arctic, have along with some of other wolf-esque breeds like the Alaskan malamute been gaining huge popularity in the US and the UK the last several years, due in large part to the influence of Game of Thrones — and before that, the Twilight movie franchise. The Daily Mail reported on the problem of large numbers of abandoned huskies showing up in British shelters three years ago, and here in the Bay Area, the phenomenon continues — and as the Chronicle reports, the dogs often show up in shelters with weird GOT-inspired names like Ghost, Nymeria, and Grey Wind.

The dogs are likened to the Stark clan's direwolves, and it seems that far too many people are buying or adopting huskies hoping to add some Stark-like swagger to their homes, only to find out these dogs are a heavy-shedding handful.

Angelique Miller, president of Northern California Sled Dog Rescue, tells the Chronicle that her numbers of monthly intakes of abandoned dogs has more than doubled, and she's seeing about 45 new dogs per month. "These people, they watch these shows and think how cool these dogs are. People can't even tell the difference between a husky and a wolf because they're always asking us at adoption fairs if these dogs are wolves — and it's clearly a husky. They're just following the trend of what they think is cute."

She says in the past there have been upticks of abandoned dogs connected to movie releases like Snow Dogs and Eight Below, but clearly the biggest influence is now GOT — with many owners who sought out huskies as pets after the show premiered in 2011 now recognizing that they can't take care of the dogs anymore because they require too much exercise and grooming.

San Francisco Animal Care & Control also reports seeing a lot of huskies come through, as has Bay Area Siberian Husky Club (BASH).

Via SFist

(GIF via Giphy)

Nominative determinism: "the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names."

Exhibit A.

Police are confident that 59-year-old John Burns has a connection to at least 19 arsons on Sharon’s west side. All of those fires have happened since the beginning of this year.

At this point, he is only charged with one count of attempted arson and one count of causing or risking catastrophe. ... Over the past two years, the total number of fires in Sharon is estimated to be near 30.

Exhibit B.

This is deeply weird but also makes perfect sense. Wow. (more…)

Gmail is the de facto standard for personal email accounts, with more than more than 1.2 billion people using the free service. One criticism, however, is that Google scans your email for keywords so it can better target ads directly to you. Not anym...