broadcast includes Delia Derbyshire, Clara Rockmore, Else Marie Pade, Laurie Spiegel, et al.
Avant-garde and outsider arts site UbuWeb has shared a 40+ year audio retrospective of women in electronic music. Women In Electronic Music 1938-1982, originally broadcast on April 1, 2010, features the work of Clara Rockmore, Bebe & Louis Barron, Daphne Oram, … Continue reading →
Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life - anybody’s life; my life. All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? — Blade Runner (1982)
(RNS) We asked readers how they would say, pray or meditate what we called the Liesborn Prayer Wheel, after the abbey for which the larger book was created. Dozens of readers responded.
In the movie “Ex Machina” (which is really great BTW) this code can briefly be seen:
#BlueBook code decryption
import sys def sieve(n): x = [1] * n x[1] = 0 for i in range(2,n/2): j = 2 * i while j < n: x[j]=0 j = j+i return x def prime(n,x): i = 1 j = 1 while j <= n: if x[i] == 1: j = j + 1 i = i + 1 return i - 1 x=sieve(10000) code = [1206,301,384,5] key =[1,1,2,2,] sys.stdout.write(“”.join(chr(i) for i in [73,83,66,78,32,61,32])) for i in range (0,4): sys.stdout.write(str(prime(code[i],x)-key[i]))
print
Which when you run with python2.7 you get the following:
“Nones,” who according to the study now account for nearly 23 percent of all Americans, are made up of people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.” Within these denominations of the unaffiliated, there are in fact deep theological divisions.
a friend shared this on facebook, and I'm trying to figure out why it bugs me: is it because "consent" (in the legal sense) and "the motivations/process behind your decision to consent" are being treated as the same thing here? or because being second-guessed feels like infantilization to me (but maybe not to somebody else)?
And it just… it feel dismissive of the experience of the person being asked for consent, to say it’s as simple as wanting tea or not wanting tea, like it’s an off-switch/on-switch.
Taylor will not only live and die by your advice, but follow through on it in real time. If they say that hiking to a certain destination will take about an hour, guess what: it really will. "I'll let you know when I get there," Taylor writes. An away message pops up on the screen that reads Taylor is busy. And then I wait. An hour later in real time, my phone pings again. Taylor has arrived.
Early in the game, Taylor asks you a question: Is it better to spend the night huddled up next to a heat source emitting potentially lethal radiation, or risk the sub-zero temperatures on the moon's surface? I wasn't sure, but I went with my gut: "Camp out by the reactor."
"I gotta be honest with you: I'm really nervous about this," Taylor messaged back. "I guess I won't know till I wake up in the morning."
And then there was nothing to do but wait. But as the hours ticked by, I started to get worried. Did the long delay mean something had gone wrong? When would I hear back? Eventually, I went to sleep as well. The next morning when I woke up, I heard the ping of an unread message and lunged for my phone. "Hey! Check it out! I'm not dead!" it said.
via firehose ("was ready to hate-share the fuck out of this but I think I'm actually sold")
In 1753 the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, considered by many to be the father of biological taxonomy, officially identified a tree as the food of the gods: theobroma cacao. The tree’s fruit, which grows in the shade of tropical rainforests, is known simply as cacao: a football-shaped pod that changes from green to yellow to red as it ripens. Inside a cacao is a good deal of white goop, and inside that goop are the fatty, almond-sized seeds (commonly called beans) that chocolate is made from.
A golden pod of magic beans.(AFP/Getty Images/Frederic J. Brown)
“Xocoatl,” the word we get chocolate from, comes from a bitter Aztec cacao drink—probably similar to the drinking chocolate that (legend says) King Montezuma shared with the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes in the 16th century. By the 1700s, a sweetened version of the drink swept Spain—and the rest of the world soon after, with the help of companies such as Cadbury, Nestle, and Hershey’s. There’s a new way to drink chocolate, one that provides its mood-boosting, sensual, buzzy benefits, with none of the sugar: cold-brewing.
Which brings us to the chocolate drinks we know today: usually sweet, milky beverages laden with sugar and lactose—and lacking in the complex flavors that chocolate fanatics crave. (At the other end of the spectrum are the heavy, hot, melted chocolate drinks served at establishments such as New York’s City Bakery.)
But there’s a new way to drink chocolate, one that provides all its mood-boosting, sensual, craving-satisfying, buzzy benefits, with none of the sugar: cold-brewing.
Chocolate, clarified
If you’re an avid summertime coffee-drinker (or have ever made sun-tea) you’re probably already familiar with cold-brewing, which involves letting grounds steep in water at room temperature overnight to make iced coffee. It’s a method that substitutes time for temperature—a literally chilled-out process, which is reflected in its smooth, low-acid results.
Try cold-brewing cacao beans and you’ll get nothing short of magic. Like a cold-brewed coffee, it’s sunny, bright, and fruit-forward—but breathe in and it boasts an aroma that dances between browned butter, toasted nuts, and chocolate-coated espresso beans. This elixir has all the magic of chocolate, clarified for summer.
Cacao has far less caffeine than coffee, but contains a different stimulant: theobromine. Like caffeine, theobromine stimulates the heart rate, but unlike caffeine—and actually, like Viagra—it dilates nerves, allowing more blood flow. Studies show that theobromine does not affect one’s mood or focus the way caffeine does, but I’ve consistently experienced a steady, crash-free buzz from consuming cold-brew cacao. (Similarly, science says chocolate isn’t the aphrodisiac it’s cracked up to be, but centuries of chocolate-lovers would strongly disagree.)
Or, you can make yourself a cold-brew cacao at home right now.
Do try this at home
After a delicious, cacao-buzzed weekend of experimenting, followed by several days of refining and testing on myself, friends, and co-workers, I devised recipes for pure cold-brew cacao, a coffee-and-cacao combination, the most sophisticated chocolate milk I’ve ever sipped, and a silky, citrusy cacao Manhattan that blew them all away.
Come cocktail time, stir this stuff into a complex, buttery Manhattan. As Maverick Watson, who developed Dandelion’s recipe for “Ecuadorian iced coffee,” a cold-brewed combo of Dandelion’s own Ecuadorian cacao beans and Four Barrel espresso coffee, advises—and I can attest—you ought to have some fun trying this at home.
“Just messing around will probably lead to something tasty,” he says.
Samples of cold-brew cacao pulled after (left to right) nine, 10, 11, and 12 hours. By 16 hours, it was murky and delicious.(Quartz/Jenni Avins)
In terms of equipment, this method requires only a pitcher and a fabric nut-milk bag, but you could certainly do it with a Chemex filter coffee pot, a Toddy system, or a $250 Kyoto-style dripper, as Cory Doctorow did for his cold-brewing cacao experiments.
The essential ingredient in this recipe is cacao nibs, the inner parts of roasted cacao beans, broken into little pieces. It’s tempting to get whole beans from a delicious roaster like Dandelion, but often, beans come with their thin husks still on. Hand-shelling even six ounces of cacao beans can take a while—and it’d be hard not to eat them all in the process—so for ease, I’d stick to nibs. (I also tried this recipe with a bag of sun-dried, unroasted, shelled whole cacao beans I bought at Whole Foods, and the results were bitter and funky—not in a good way.)
6 ounces (28 grams, or about 1 1/2 cups) of roasted cacao nibs
½ gallon of cold water
Grind your nibs using a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle to a texture that’s fine but not powdery. (Don’t put cacao beans in your expensive burr coffee grinder; the fat will gum it up.)
Line the pitcher with a nut-milk bag and dump the cacao grounds inside.
Fill the bag-lined pitcher with water, and stir to make sure to get all the grounds wet.
Cinch the bag, cover the pitcher, and leave it at room temperature for about 16 hours. If your home is very hot, put it in the refrigerator, but add a few hours to your brew time. (It will grow increasingly cloudy and robust in flavor as it brews.)
Remove the nut-milk bag and squeeze all the liquid into your pitcher. (Use the grounds for mulch if you have a garden!)
Stir before serving, as cacao particles will settle toward the bottom.
Enjoy over ice, straight or with your favorite kind of milk.
Follow the instructions for the cold-brew cacao, treating the coffee beans the same as you do the cacao. The above proportions were my favorite, but of course you should adjust to your taste.
I spent the last week gliding around San Francisco in the now infamous “Suitsy,” an adult-sized pajama onesie disguised as a full business suit. At bars and in meetings, no one seemed to notice anything amiss. But, perhaps, I thought, this was because San Francisco is the home of weird attire and my colleagues were just unfazed.
So I found the only place in the Bay Area were most people were guaranteed to be wearing suits: a Republican convention.
Feinstein Wire
Last weekend, the liberty-loving tech organization, Lincoln Labs, held a rally for presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul. There were suits oozing out the front door waiting to get a selfie with the libertarian icon. I blended right in.
Indeed, one dressed-down hip conservative asked me why I chose to join the other square stiffs wearing formal attire, “This is Silicon Valley — what are you doing?” he chuckled.
It was at this point that I unzipped my onesie suit and revealed the comfy glory of what I was actually wearing. Gasps of disbelief echoed around me as if Criss Angel had just made a statue of Ronald Reagan appear out of thin air. “Whaaa?! No way!”
The consensus was clear: Everyone thought I was wearing a traditional suit.
Last Fall, a crowdfunding campaign to create the Suitsy became an instant meme; the Suitsy was a totem for everything that people loved and loathed about Silicon Valley. "Good Morning America" praised its quirky bohemian ingenuity while GQ hailed it as an omen for the end times.
For six months after the press went nuts, its creator, Jesse Herzog and Silicon Valley-based retailer Betabrand, have been heads down turning the concept piece into a reality. I managed to get my hands on the first production run and tested it out in the real world.
Below is the first hands-on review of the Suitsy and, below that, is a data-driven analysis of how our economy got to a point where it’s acceptable for grown men to wear pajamas at work.
To be sure, without the twin Silicon Valley powers of internet crowdfunding and casual tech-office attire, Herzog never would have never been more than faint blip on the fashion radar.
The question I had in reviewing the Suitsy was whether it’s just a gimmick or a legit substitute for men’s office attire. As with all things at The Ferenstein Wire, we tested this quantitatively.
A suit comfortable enough to sleep in
The Suitsy, inside out.
For four days I barely took the Suitsy off — and never wanted to. I worked out, went grocery shopping, held business meetings, and went out drinking at a bar in it. As a blogger who spends most of my workday in pajamas anyways, it was like wearing my normal attire all day long.
Were it not for occasional glances in retail-shop windows, I would have thought I was at home in sweatpants.
Indeed, it’s just as comfortable to sleep in. Compared to the night before sleeping in sweatpants, my deep sleep actually improved about 3% while in the Suitsy (as measured by the Basis band health tracker).
This isn’t to say that the Suitsy improved my sleep; but it certainly didn’t keep me from a restful slumber.
Does it look like a regular suit?
For style, the Suitsy is no match for an expensive tailored ensemble, especially for folks who like to don the latest seasonal colors. But, that’s like comparing the top speed of a Ford Mustang to a Prius, when all you really want is a car to pick up milk at the grocery store. The Suitsy is meant to satisfy the bare minimum requirements, not make a statement.
So long as it can pass undetected as just another neck-strangling suit, the Suitsy has achieved it’s goal. As an avid data geek who worries about an entirely subjective evaluation, I decided to test the Suitsy’s style prowess as scientifically as I could.
I compared professional photos of me in my normal suit to the Suitsy, and conducted a small poll online (using Survey Monkey and and sample of U.S.-based Amazon Turks). Respondents were asked, “Which suit do you like better” — no other details were provided.
My normal suit won the poll, of course, but the Suitsy managed an admirable showing, with 20% of respondents preferring the disguised adult onesie (full details here).
At the end of my trial, the Suitsy definitely proved it’s worth in both style and comfort. It won’t make you look like the sharpest trendsetter at the negotiating table. But, if you’re like me, and only wear a business suit once or twice a year, the Suitsy is more than a sufficient substitute.
If enough consumers commit to preordering a pair of pants or a onesie business suit, a batch gets sent to the factory for mass production. “When we develop products, we try to connect them to Web communities and let them do the talking,” explains Betabrand co-founder, Chris Lindland.
Betabrand’s avid early consumers were mostly bi-coastal professionals who wanted pants that could withstand a bicycle commute to the office. When Betabrand offered up the “Bike To Work Pant” for crowdfunding, the blogosphere exploded. “Something like a thousand unique sites point at our pants and we sold batch after batch”.
Mark Zuckerberg’s famous hoodie-wearing habit become the inspiration for Betabrand’s next viral sensation: a hoodie with business suit-like stripes.
Indeed, Lindland’s early vision for Betabrand was “fashion for the Creative Class,” referring to the growing legion of geeks turned highly skilled professionals first identified by University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida. The Creative Class are “educated, early adopters who’re professionally-connected to the Web and tend to have larger-than-average social reach,” explains Lindland.
So while Facebook’s engineers can lallygag into work in a pizza-stained hoodie, most creative class workers aren’t lucky enough to have a billionaire CEO that wears T-shirts to press events; many are the lone data scientist or designer sandwiched in between Burberry-clad sales reps.
Crowdfunding is the collective action glue that helps creative class workers around the country band together and fund clothing that feels like pajamas, but are indistinguishable from regular work attire.
For now, Betabrand is a relatively small tech startup that gets substantial media play through stunts that get its overly connected audience excited. The Suitsy officially debuted at the company’s self-titled “Silicon Valley Fashion Week,” which made headlines this week for drones that flew shiny pants down the catwalk.
It’s no surprise then that Betabrand’s penchant for silly trolling stunts needling the traditional fashion establishment make it an easy target for critics. But behind the silliness Herzog says that the fashion industry itself won’t recognize the next generation of fashion, especially from folks who don’t share their values.
“I love a good fashion magazine on a flight. But they’re kind of like the Bible. If you read it literally, you’re not doing it right. They are a great way to learn about what is generally acceptable, and traditions in attire, but something like a Suitsy from a nobody in fashion, that is counterculture to everything they’ve espoused,” he argues.
Herzog is aware of his critics, but eyes a sea change in the culture that will propel the idea of pajama-like clothes into the mainstream of work attire. “When J. Crew says sweat pants are now a fashion item,” he concludes, “that apparently is not the end of fashion.”
The Ferenstein Wire is a syndicated news service. For inquiries, email the editor at greg at greg ferenstein dot com.
We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure, and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the university’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large.
“If you were a real feminist, you would support housewives and see them as the heroes and women who work wasting their time,” McInnes shot back.
When Holder questioned McInnes’ claim that women don’t “go the extra mile” for work, she got a response that left her with a shocked expression on her face.
“You’re making a mistake!” he said. “You would be much happier at home with a husband and children.”
All host Sean Hannity could say was, “Oh, boy.”
Darkman —the tale of a sweet scientist who becomes a vigilante, hiding his scarred face behind bandages and masks — came out in 1990, showcasing the talents of up-and-comers Sam Raimi and Liam Neeson. It was the perfect blend of superhero tale and monster movie. And it’s only gotten better with age.
This paper discusses the various ways in which the practices of libraries and librarians influence the diversity (or lack thereof) of scholarship and information access. We examine some of the cultural biases inherent in both library classification systems and newer forms of information access like Google search algorithms, and propose ways of recognizing bias and applying feminist principles in the design of information services for scholars, particularly as libraries re-invent themselves to grapple with digital collections.
Long-time Cambridge rock club T.T. The Bear's Place celebrated its 40th anniversary in the fall of 2013. Less than two years later, its finale is rumored to be planned for this summer. Our sources tell…
Amazon, headquartered in the city’s historically industrial South Lake Union neighborhood, has a workforce spread around more than a dozen buildings and plans for more. And when you need to hire thousands of high-salaried workers in Seattle who probably have their minds set on Mountain View or Cupertino, you make a promotional video.
Amazon did just that in 2013, putting together a collection of testimonials assuring the next wave of Amazonians that Seattle is right for them:
The selling points fit what’d you’d expect a young tech worker with a lot of money to appreciate: Ambitious fitness routines (“everyone does Crossfit”). Weirdness in a safe, controlled environment (“there’s actually two places in Seattle where you can take circus classes”). And owning property in a market they’re unwittingly making too expensive (“we bought a house recently here”).
The video started making the rounds among Seattleites after being posted on The Strangerlast month. Since then, not one but two razor-sharp parodies have popped up, shared yesterday by the Seattle Times’ Tricia Romano.
One comes from the local rapper Spekulation, filled with voiceovers that get right to Seattle’s growing tech-dread:
And another by one of Seattle’s most famous record labels, Sub Pop:
Of course, these are funny manifestations of a very real issue. As Anthony Flint noted last month, “it won’t be long” before Seattle’s real estate market catches up with Vancouver’s, where the median home price is $1.2 million.
The dynamic is especially noticeable in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Separated from South Lake Union by I-5, the gay and punk cultures that have thrived there since the 1990s now feel at risk. Rents are rising dramatically and resentment is growing alongside it.
Capitol Hill Housing, an organization that provides income-restricted housing in the neighborhood, has 25 buildings with 747 units, according to the Seattle Times. The paper reported just one vacancy as of last March. A poster recently spotted in the neighborhood reads: “Tech Money Kills Queer Culture Dead.” A writer for The Guardian noticed multiple “We Welcome Our New Condo Overlords” bumper stickers while reporting on Amazon’s growth last year.
It may not be as bad as San Francisco yet, but the more Seattle changes in ways that isolate those who aren’t rich or absorbed in tech culture, the icier the satire will surely become.
In a remote stretch of the Pacific Ocean southeast of New Zealand, the broken remains of space stations and robotic freighters litter the ocean floor, four kilometers below the waves. The world’s space agencies call this region the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area. But it’s also called the Spacecraft Cemetery.
Do you have a fancy college degree or a job in a STEM field? Do you have fewer than two tattoos? Do you avoid Tinder dates and songs with explicit lyrics? Do you spend more than two hours a day exercising? Then you may be qualified to live at the Startup Castle, a self-proclaimed “community of excellence” located in a 17,000-square foot mansion in Woodside, California, just minutes from Stanford’s campus.
The Suitsy, inside out.
Business pants built for rock climbing.
OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy
Feinstein Wire
BetabrandBetabrand's dress sweatpants.
