Sophianotloren

In 1863, chemist Angelo Mariani created Vin Mariani, a combination of Bordeaux wine and coca leaves (you know, where cocaine comes from). As you can imagine, it was an instant hit. Advertisements promised to “restore health and vitality,” cure malaria, and be “especially adapted to children.” Many believed in the medicinal properties of alcohol at the time, and incorporating the newly-discovered cocaine seemed almost too good to be true. The pope at the time was rumored to carry a flask.

Jaya Saxena looks at the disturbing history of energy drinks aka cocaine wine.

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If you thought you were going to have a productive day today, think again. The Associated Press and Movietone have together just dumped more than 550,000 archival news reels — about 1 million minutes of footage — on YouTube. It would take roughly two years to watch it all.

The “view-on-demand visual encyclopedia,” as AP describes it in a press release, extends as far back as 1895 and covers some of the biggest events in recent history. You no longer have to dig through a physical archive to view previously unreleased videos of smoke rising over Pearl Harbor and Apollo 11 launching into space. “At AP we are always astonished at the sheer breadth of footage that we have access to, and the upload to YouTube means that, for the first time, the public can enjoy some of the oldest and most remarkable moments in history,” said Alwyn Lindsey, AP’s director of international archive.

Perusing the new YouTube channels turns up some fascinating art historical moments. In one video shot in Paris during World War II, workers at the Louvre box up paintings and remove stained glass from the city’s churches to protect it from bombings. Another video filmed in Germany after the war shows artworks looted by Hermann Göring being unsealed from a cave where he hid them. They’re strange to watch today, as similar events are now playing out with ISIS destroying cultural heritage artifacts and museums refusing to repatriate Nazi-looted works.

The videos reflect the good and the bad. In several nostalgic clips from the 1960s, artists sell their paintings on the bustling sidewalks of Greenwich Village, visitors flock to catch the Mona Lisa‘s brief appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Salvador Dali baptizes his artworks in sparkling water at an art opening. In others, a misguided political artist eats a dog, and street artist Shephard Fairey getting sued by none other than the AP.

There’s also plenty of the stuff local TV stations love to run. Baffling art trends like body art? Check. Zoo animals that can paint abstractly? Right here. Ten-year-olds as talented as Picasso? Voilà.

Enjoy.

© Valerio Vincenzo


© Valerio Vincenzo


© Valerio Vincenzo


© Valerio Vincenzo




© Valerio Vincenzo


© Valerio Vincenzo


© Valerio Vincenzo

Borderlines, Valerio Vincenzo

Pneumatic Computing - Flop or Future?

Workshop exhibition organized by royrobotiks is a collection of projects exploring analogue computing using pneumatics:

Building a computer that works with air sounds probably a bit weird – but at the same time the idea is not really so far off. There exists many types of pneumatic valves with logic properties and it should not be too complicated to construct entirely pneumatic systems which can perform logic operations and calculations – without the need for electricity. However, making a pneumatic ‘computer’ out of such valves which runs an actual operating system like Windows 95 would be still quite a challenge, but that was also not the aim of the workshop. Instead, we wanted to explore how we could use air for building computer-like and computer-inspired components. We wanted to also see if we can connect some of the components in order to make a larger (or more complicated) pneumatic machine.

As workshop materials we used some industrial pneumatic components and lots of common, affordable objects which one can find in a regular mall: Balloons, camping and bicycle pumps, hair dryers, fans, flutes and whistles. On top of that I also brought some random stuff from our cellar  – we tend to accumulate and recycle all sorts of things, so the basement is quite a DIY paradise.

More Here

Shorter verbatim reasonable, moderate, thinking person’s conservative Jeb! Bush: ““I think a lot of people recognize that we need to make sure we fulfill the commitment to people that have already received the benefits, that are receiving the benefits. But that we need to figure out a way to phase out [Medicare] for others and move to a new system that allows them to have something.”

It’s instructive that Jeb!’s call to end Medicare comes just as cost projections for Medicare have come down substantially. Jeb! is, of course, lying about wanting to end Medicare because it’s fiscally unsustainable. He wants to end Medicare because Republicans are ideologically opposed to providing access to health care for the non-affluenct. (Cf. also Republican statehouses and the Medicaid expansion passim.)

Meanwhile, Politfact has already declared my claim that when Jeb! Bush says he wants to phase out Medicare he wants to phase out Medicare the lie of the millennium.

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Southern states didn’t respond to the civil rights movement only by placing Confederate flags on their statehouses or integrating the Stars and Bars into their state flag. They also named public buildings after Confederate leaders during these years. Take the elementary schools of Austin:

It was no coincidence that three other schools bearing the names of notable Confederates popped up in Austin during the civil rights movement, following the federal court-ordered desegregation of public schools.

Those local schools — Sidney Lanier High School, Albert Sidney Johnston High School and John H. Reagan High School — were built at a time when schools were being named after Confederate war heroes across Texas and the South. All three of the high schools are located in neighborhoods with large minority populations.

Some say the names were meant to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. Others saw the push to glorify the Confederacy as a deliberate slap in the face to minorities and the federal government after the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education.

That was the symbolic resistance of the Southern state to the imposition of the federal civil rights legislation. Standing on state’s rights and standing on the Lost Cause principle, they went about honoring the Confederacy,” said Frank de la Teja, a Texas State University professor who was appointed Texas state historian between 2007 and 2009 by former Gov. Rick Perry. “And by the way, Austin was an extremely racist town.”

There’s a lot of anti-civil rights Confederate symbolism that needs reversal in the South. The flags are only the first step.

I am glad that the Fight for $15 in fast food has forced the hand on Andrew Cuomo to raise the wages of those workers to $15 by 2021. That’s a win. But it’s totally ridiculous that it is industry-based as opposed to a general minimum wage. I fear the upshot of this will be to create divisions among workers, and perhaps at the same time, to start turning already fractured minimum wage law (national, state, city) into something even more fractured if it turns on industry lines. While one hopes this leads to demands from all workers for $15 an hour, we don’t want to have to do this industry by industry. This is a problem created by Cuomo, who just set a precedent for industry-wide minimum wage differentials. I don’t like that one bit.

Old Masters Buzzfeed

Tumblr blog by Matthew Britton takes classical art retitled in the style of Buzzfeed headlines.

You can find the Tumblr blog here

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July 22nd, 2015: Happy pi approximation day! Hey, this is unrelated to that, but did you see my NINE shirt designs available for two weeks only? HOPEFULLY YOU DID?? – Ryan

Hovertext: I really just made this for the first panel.

New comic!
Today's News:

New comic!

This pretty much exhausts everything I can recall about trig, I’m afraid.

“The originators and adherents of #GiveYourMoneyToWomen didn’t just suggest that women should get paid for existing, although yeah that too if you’re buying. Rather, women should get paid for all the work they typically do for free – all the affirmation, forbearance, consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, and weathering abuse that we spend energy on every single day. Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating, $100. Soothe your ego so you don’t get angry, $150. Smile hollowly while you make a worse version of their joke, $200. Explain 101-level feminism to you like you’re five years old, $300. Listen to your rant about “bitches,” $infinity.”

- On Unpaid Emotional Labor. This article resonated SO MUCH with me. 

there; fixed'it

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Last month, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court ruled that officials must remove a nearly six-foot-tall statue of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state’s capitol, thwarting the Satanic Temple‘s plans to install its own statue of Baphomet to challenge government endorsement of religious symbols. The group now plans to unveil the never-before-seen bronze sculpture, which represents Satan as a goat-headed figure, in Detroit on Saturday night at an event dubbed “The Unveiling.” Unsurprisingly, the Baphomet bash is causing a stir.

Today, a group of pastors shared a poster promoting a prayer rally and protest of the ticketed event, billed as “a hedonistic celebration” to launch the Satanic Temple’s “largest fight to date in the name of individual rights to free exercise against self-serving theocrats.” The poster, which oddly has the same aesthetic of the Satanic Temple’s website, features a photograph of the statue between the words “NOT ON OUR WATCH” and the names of dozens of pastors. The opposition effort is spearheaded by Pastor David Bullock of St. Matthew Baptist Church, who told Christian Today that the unveiling of the Baphomet sculpture amounts to “valorizing, elevating Satan.”

“The last thing we need — in a city where we’re fighting against violence and fighting against economic problems and unemployment and the water crisis — is a statue dedicated to Satan right downtown,” Bullock added. The Satanic Temple does not actually worship Satan, and the statue’s presence in Detroit is only temporary, but many others in the local Christian community are taking to social media to call for the statue’s destruction. The Satanic Temple originally planned the Unveiling at Bert’s Market Place in Detroit’s Eastern Market area, but its owner backed out after receiving threats about burning down the venue, as AP reported.

The group chose Detroit as the site of Baphomet’s unveiling because the city is also home to the Satanic Temple’s first national chapterhouse, as Jex Blackmore, part of the Satanic Temple’s executive ministry, explained to Metro Times. Blackmore said the Satanic Temple has a strong following in the area but that he is not surprised by calls to protest the event and destroy the sculpture, which the Unveiling’s event description says “stands as a testament to plurality and the power of collective action.”

“It’s an incredibly charged object — even the idea of it is just charged,” Blackmore told Metro Times. “It’s a really amazing thing to witness the kind of connotations important people place on it on both sides. We have purchased excellent insurance for the object. We will have an ample amount of security at the event. Of course we respect and even encourage people to express their opinions on either side because it’s healthy and it’s part of democracy.”

The event will occur at a secret location, to be revealed to ticket holders on Saturday. Baphomet may eventually follow through on its original cause and move to a spot near the Arkansas Statehouse, where lawmakers recently approved the installation of a Ten Commandments monument similar to the one in Oklahoma.

If you tell me that I’m a lazy good-for-nothing, I’ll hear you saying that I lack worth and value, and that you think I don’t work hard enough.  If what you mean is that you wish you could keep the same sleep schedule as I do, that’s a really ineffective way to get your point across.

If you express amazement that I managed to tell a funny joke, and furthermore that you’re not surprised that it took hard work to do it, I’ll hear you saying that I’m not very good at comedy, and that when I am it’s either accidental or the result of significant labor.  If what you mean is that my wit comes easily and often, and you appreciate my great sense of humor, that’s a really ineffective way to get your point across.

If you say to me, “SPAM?! No friend of mine would go near that filth! And you said you had good taste… As if…” I’ll get the message loud and clear that your friendship is a flimsy thing, predicated on sharing your opinions — and I’ll hear a hefty dose of judgmental attitude about my differing opinions.  If what you mean is that you don’t share my opinions but you don’t have any problem with mine, even when you don’t understand them, that’s a really ineffective way to get your point across.

And if I react to what you say — instead of what you mean (but didn’t say) — then telling me that I need to “chill out,” to “stop being so emotional about it,” that you were “just teasing,” and that I should have known… or for good measure, maybe even throw in a bit of wondering statement about whether I’m “looking for things to get upset about,” are really ineffective ways to address the issue of being ineffective at getting your point across.

I don’t read minds. If you want to tell me something, tell me. Please, don’t assume that I can look past your hurtful words and somehow glean a compliment or an expression of affection from them — I’m about as likely to pick up a pile of dog shit to try to figure out where the $100 bill in the middle is!

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