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Earlier this summer, Theo Jansen released an improved iteration of his strandbeests, wind-powered machines that walk along the beach. The newest version doesn’t have any joints, so it doesn’t need lubrication or protection from the sand to keep it from moving. As a result, it zips along at a pretty good clip down the beach. I first ran across Jansen’s work at a conference more than a decade ago.

It’s hard to know where to begin in talking about what’s so cool about Jansen’s beach animals. They’re evolved for one thing; he worked out the optimal 11-piece leg using evolutionary algorithms on a computer but now prefers to race his animals on the beach and “breed” the most successful ones together, taking the best bits from each to make their offspring better. His animals have legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubing), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (collections of on/off values that work pretty much like logic gates).

The kids have one of these built-your-own mini-strandbeests and it’s really neat to see how it all works up close.

Tags: Theo Jansen   video

The Beach Boys vs the Fat Boys in an epic grudge match.

Irene Taylor Brodsky directed this short film in which about a dozen deaf people talk simply about their hearing loss and the technology (like cochlear implants) that is transforming how they interact with others. This was wonderful…I learned a lot from listening to these stories.

I was also struck by how difficult it actually is to lump “people who X” into a single category, despite the human desire to tidy people and things into groups. Even among the relatively few people featured in this short film, there were many different approaches and attitudes about deafness. Watching it, you think, jeez, what do all these people really have in common? Probably less than you might have assumed initially. (via @JossFong)

Tags: deafness   Irene Taylor Brodsky   video

A grim reminder that in the upper echelons of journalism, white supremacists are at worst wayward tribesmates and at best very interesting men: Steve Bannon is to headline The New Yorker's October festival. From The New York Times:

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, who will be interviewed by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, a frequent critic of the administration. “I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Mr. Remnick said in a phone interview.

More than anything else, America's elites consider themselves gracious hosts. But some of us have outstayed our welcome. Tickets go on sale Thursday. UPDATED: They disinvited him after a deluge of complaints, not least from other celebrity invitees publicly disinviting themselves from the event.

"Vermeer was eerie / Vermeer was strange / He had a more modern color range" Muses: Jonathan Richman on Vermeer, Monet, and Custom Chords for Matisse.

"Today is kind of a sucky day," Village Voice owner Peter Barbey told newspaper staff in a phone call Friday. "Due to, basically, business realities, we're going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.” (more…)

On Twitter, @InstantSunrise wrote an entertaining thread “in which I drag every single US president in order”. She starts off with The Founding Fathers:

Thomas Jefferson: Motherfucker owned slaves, and was a rapist, committed forced removal against Native Americans. Started an actual war in North Africa and a trade war with Britain that would eventually escalate into an actual war.

Andrew Jackson is deservedly dragged more than most:

Ohhhhhh my god. This absolute motherfucker garbage president. Literally committed genocide. Owned slaves, gave govt. jobs to people who gave him money. Decided that a central bank was a bad idea and closed it in 1837, breaking the entire economy.

Teddy Roosevelt gets a B/B-:

Did some good busting trusts and monopolies with his big dick energy. Discovered that if you bait the media with “access” they’ll eat up whatever shit you say. Had a lot of policies that were racist as shit, like banning all Japanese ppl from entering the US.

Woodrow Wilson gets a Jackson-esque OMG:

Ohhhhhh my god. Dude was like super fucking racist. So racist that his election emboldened racists enough where they literally revived the KKK. His AG, Palmer, loved to deport leftists for no reason. There’s so much shit about Wilson I can’t fit it into 280 chars.

I think she could have gone in on Nixon a bit harder (for creating the war on drugs for example):

Created the southern strategy and stoked racial tensions. Sabotaged the peace negotiations for Vietnam in order to get elected, then prolonged the war. Bombed the shit out of Laos and Cambodia for no real reason. Also watergate.

Only Lincoln and John Quincy Adams get off relatively unscathed.

Tags: lists   politics   USA

I finally picked up Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal the other day. This is how it begins (emphasis mine):

The imaginary horizontal lines that circle the earth make sense. Our equator is 0°, the North and South Poles are 90°. Latitude’s order is airtight with clear and elegant motives. The earth has a top and a bottom. Longitude is another story. There isn’t a left and right to earth. Any line could have been called 0°. But Greenwich got first dibs on the prime meridian and as a result the world set clocks and ships by a British resort town that lies outside London.

It was an arbitrary choice that became the basis for precision. My father knew a family named Wolfawitz who wanted to go on vacation but didn’t know where.

It hit them. Take a two-week road trip driving to as many towns, parks, and counties as they could that contained their last name: Wolfpoint, Wolfville, Wolf Lake, etc.

They read up and found things to do on the way to these other Wolf spots: a hotel in a railroad car, an Alpine slide, a pretzel factory, etc.

The Wolfawitzes ended up seeing more than they planned. Lots of unexpected things popped up along the route.

When they came back from vacation, they felt really good. It was easily the best vacation of their lives, and they wondered why.

My father says it was because the Wolfawitzes stopped trying to accomplish anything. They just put a carrot in front of them and decided the carrot wasn’t that important but chasing it was.

The story of the Wolfawitzes’ vacation was told hundreds of times to hundreds of customers in the small restaurant that my mom and dad ran in Greenwich Village. Each time it was told, my dad would conclude that the vacation changed the Wolfawitzes’ whole life, and this was how they were going to live from now on — chasing a very, very small carrot.

The restaurant was Shopsin’s, no longer in Greenwich Village, and after a start like that, I read the next 80 pages without stopping. Really wish I’d heeded much advice to pick this up sooner.

See also “I’ve never had a goal”.

Tags: Arbitrary Stupid Goal   books   food   NYC   restaurants   Shopsins   Tamara Shopsin

Insta Repeat collects photos of people (particularly so-called “influencers”) taking similar photos on Instagram — peeking out of an open tent flap, perched on top of an offroad vehicle, on the end of a dock — and displays them together.

See also this supercut of cliched Instagram travel photos.

Taking a photo of a friend holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa or jumping in the middle of the road in Utah are really good ideas — that’s why lots of people do it — but each successive photo of the same thing doesn’t tell us anything new about those places, experiences, or people.

For influencers, a cliched photo is easy money, a tried and true way of capturing what others already know is the essence of a place or an experience. For most of the rest of us, we aren’t looking to say anything new about someone or somewhere. We just want to capture our experience to show our friends and well-wishers on Instagram. If I saw my tent flap hanging open to a beautiful mountain vista, of course I would take the hell out of that photo.

Tags: Instagram   photography

In this video, MoMA film curator La Frances Hui gives us a very quick and informative overview of what to look for when watching kung fu and martial arts films. Aside from Jackie Chan & more recent stuff like Crouching Tiger & Hero, I’ve never been super into martial arts movies, but after watching this, I’m excited to watch some of Lau Kar-leung’s films, particularly The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime). Lau also directed and did the fight choreography for Drunken Master II, a favorite of mine that I haven’t seen in awhile.

Tags: La Frances Hui   Lau Kar-leung   movies   video

https://youtu.be/Hbp3JxwH704?list=PL8a8cutYP7fruG3kwwADY5HZ_FN4A4jdk Aretha Franklin, the queen of soul, died in Detroit today at the age of 76. She scored at least 112 singles on the Billboard charts, with 20 number ones. Sir Elton John: "she was one of my favourite pianists."

Photo: Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)

In 2009, after a successful public records lawsuit, the Invisible Institute received data on complaints against Chicago Police Department officers since 1988 -- the complaints often list multiple officers, and by tracing the social graph of dirty cops over time, The Intercept's Rob Arthur was able to show how corruption spread like a contagion, from senior officers to junior ones, teaching bad practices ranging from brutality to falsifying evidence to torture to racism to plotting to murder whistleblowing cops. (more…)

"There is a sense of brazenness to unintentionally bad art-it embodies desire gone awry. And being able to enjoy ugly art isn't simply about making fun of it. It's also about being able to sit in discomfort and recognize mistakes. Ugly art demands a sense of looseness; it asks you to dip into a slippery state of mind where you can hold multiple beliefs simultaneously. The piece can be both ugly and unappealing, and it can also delight and appeal for those very reasons.

For a while, it looked like Twitter fiction was going to be a thing. As early as 2009, a writer named Matt Stewart self-published The French Revolution, a novel originally shared in 140-character installments. Five years later, David Mitchell, the great British novelist who wrote Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, spent a week serializing "The Right … More »

The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education's director, who forges alliance with colleges and their faculty. (more…)

A quirk of British rail history left 4,555 railway arches in public ownership through National Rail, and these commercial spaces are that most rare of British commodities: publicly owned, reasonably priced commercial spaces that welcome quirky industries and small businesses that are the nation's only respite from endlessly homogenised high-streets sporting the same fast food chains, betting shops and chain grocers. (more…)

Since moving in, Ted had done nothing to help with the housework. The household tasks assigned to him on the whiteboard in the kitchen have always gone undone. Despite demands that he pick up after himself, Ted leaves food scraps everywhere and never pays the rent on time. On Friday, after finding the leftovers she'd left in the fridge eaten, Sally decided to put an to Ted's bullshit. The quiet of her and Dave's wee flat had been disrupted for long enough.

Chinatown NYC, as photographed by Ludwig Favre.

The Straight Dope — which some readers might know only as an online message board with impressive Google Juice — is closing up the weekly print column that got the whole mess started.

Why the change, and why now? With the planned sale of the Chicago Reader, the folks at Sun-Times Media, which will continue to own the Straight Dope, are re-thinking the once-a-week deep dive (sorta) on a single topic (usually) in question-and-answer format. It’s possible a successor to the Straight Dope will emerge, possibly with daily online content. But no decision has been made, and my role, if any, has not been determined. In the meantime, I’m thinking about publishing another Straight Dope book - it’s been nigh on 20 years since the last one.

However that works out, the Straight Dope legacy will remain intact. The Straight Dope archive - some 3,400 columns, most written by me, the balance by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board, my online auxiliary - will remain accessible at www.straightdope.com. The Straight Dope homepage will continue to be updated with recycled classics. The Straight Dope Message Board (SDMB), the online community that has grown up around the column, will remain open for business.

The Straight Dope was and remains really important to me. It was an alt-weekly question-and-answer column about anything and everything. Pre-internet, I gobbled up the collected columns in paperback. My grandmother gave me my first copy, which I don’t know if she would have done if she’d known the semi-lewd contents inside. She just knew that like her, I liked to read and liked to know things. In college, I used to say that half the things I knew were things I’d read in The Straight Dope. After college, I moved to Chicago, and read it in the Reader regularly, where it now seemed tweedy and straight-laced. When I was talking to Jason about developing Ask Dr. Time, TSD was my first reference. I’m going to miss it.

"Recent incidents of Trump officials being confronted in public for their role in the administration’s separation and imprisonment of immigrant families have driven renewed concern about the lack of civility in U.S. politics. The Onion presents tips for staying civil in a debate about child prisons."

• Avoid unkind generalizations like equating the jailing of ethnic minorities with some malevolent form of fascism.
• Recall that violently rejecting a tyrannical government goes against everything our forefathers believed in.
• Make sure any protests are peaceful, silent, and completely out of sight of anyone who could actually affect government policy.
• Give your political opponents the benefit of the doubt by letting this play out for 20 years and seeing if it gets any better on its own.
• Realize that every pressing social issue is solved through civil discourse if you ignore virtually all of human history.
• Avoid painting with a broad brush. Not everyone in favor of zero-tolerance immigration wants to see children in cages—it’s more likely that they just don’t care.

Image: Shutterstock/chatgunner

When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy quit yesterday, it was a nightmare for liberals: now Trump was going to get to appoint a second judge, and he'll be replacing a judge who cast deciding votes for marriage equality and habeas corpus rights for Gitmo prisoners. (more…)

This is A Map of Chicago’s Gangland from Authentic Sources published in 1931 by Bruce-Roberts, Inc.

Map of Chicago gang locations showing Little Italy, Little Sicily, Cicero, Capone Territory, Westside O’Donnell Territory, Stickney, Saltis Territory, Southside O’Donnell Territory, and Little Africa. “Designed to inculcate the most important principles of piety and virtue in young persons, and graphically portray the evils and sin of large cities.” Numbers in red circles give the sequence of important events in Chicago’s gangland war. Insets include: Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, lawyer running to spring his client, an armored car, bootleggers stealing wheels from prohibition cars, machine gunners arriving from Detroit, World’s Fair grounds of 1933, police tipping over a speakeasy, and “gangland dictionary”.

Al Capone looms large over the map; he was arrested for tax evasion that year and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. There’s also a zoomable reproduction you can explore at the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Tags: Al Capone   Chicago   crime   maps

Maxwell King, the former director of the Fred Rogers Center and author of the forthcoming book The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, shared an excerpt of the book with The Atlantic about how much attention Rogers paid to how children would hear the language on the show. For instance, he changed the lyrics on Friday’s installment of the “Tomorrow” song he sang at the end of each show to reflect that the show didn’t air on Saturdays.

Rogers was so meticulous in his process for translating ideas so they could be easily understood by children that a pair of writers on the show came up with a nine-step process that he used to translate from normal English into “Freddish”, the special language he used when speaking to children.

1. “State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: It is dangerous to play in the street.

2. “Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.

3. “Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.” As in, Ask your parents where it is safe to play.

4. “Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” In the example, that’d mean getting rid of “ask”: Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.

5. “Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” That’d be “will”: Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.

6. “Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.” Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.

7. “Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.” Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.

8. “Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.” “Good” represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.

9. “Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand.” Maybe: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.

These are boss-level communication skills. Steps 6 & 8 are particularly thoughtful. Using language like “your favorite grown-ups” instead of “your parents” is often decried these days as politically correct nonsense but Rogers knew the power of caring language to include as many people as possible in the conversation.¹

You can also see Rogers’ care in how he went back and fixed problematic language in old shows.

But as the years would go on, he would find things that had happened in old episodes that didn’t feel current, where maybe he used a pronoun “he” instead of “they” — or he met a woman and presumed that she was a housewife. So he would put on the same clothes and go back and shoot inserts and fix old episodes so that they felt as current as possible, so that he could stand by them 100 percent.

Fred Rogers understood more than anyone that paying attention and sweating the details is a form of love. It was never enough for him to let you know that he loved you. He made sure to tell you that he loved you “just the way you are” and that made all the difference.

1. As opposed to those who, for instance, refuse to use people’s preferred pronouns or can’t bring themselves to use “they/their” instead of “he/his” in writing. Those refusals are also an exercise of power, against individuals or marginalized groups, based on fear, uncertainty, and hate.↩

Tags: books   Fred Rogers   language   lists   Maxwell King   The Good Neighbor   TV

The New York Times doesn't like to call Donald Trump (who is a compulsive liar) a liar; they deploy the squeamish euphemism "falsely claimed" in place of "lied" -- with Gabriel Gironda's NYT Speak Chrome extension (source code here), you can remedy this situation. (Thanks, Gabriel Gironda!)

George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist and linguist that studies propaganda, says the way the media reports on Trump's lies actually helps Trump. “Trump needs the media, and the media help him by repeating what he says,” he told The Washington Post. He says stories can actually be constructed in a way to make Trump's lies work against him, not for him:

Unlike those who insist that what the president says is news and therefore must be reported, Lakoff proposes a radical reimagining of how the news media reports on Trump.

Instead of treating the president’s every tweet and utterance — true or false — as newsworthy (and then perhaps fact-checking it later), Lakoff urges the use of what he calls a “truth sandwich.”

First, he says, get as close to the overall, big-picture truth as possible right away. (Thus the gist of the Trump-in-Singapore story: Little of substance was accomplished in the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, despite the pageantry.) Then report what Trump is claiming about it: achievement of world peace. And then, in the same story or broadcast, fact-check his claims.

That’s the truth sandwich — reality, spin, reality — all in one tasty, democracy-nourishing meal.

Photo of wax museum dummy of Trump by Max Pixel, CC0 Public Domain

Felix Colgrave animated this wonderful video for Nitai Hershkovits' Flyin' Bamboo. (more…)

For The Atlantic, Sarah Rich writes about how stifling masculinity can be for some children and their parents.

As much as feminism has worked to rebalance the power and privilege between the sexes, the dominant approach to launching young women into positions that garner greater respect, higher status, and better pay still mostly maintains the association between those gains and masculine qualities. Girls’ empowerment programs teach assertiveness, strength, and courage — and they must to equip young women for a world that still overwhelmingly favors men.

Last year, when the Boys Scouts of America announced that they would begin admitting girls into their dens, young women saw a wall come down around a territory that was now theirs to occupy. Parents across the country had argued that girls should have equal access to the activities and pursuits of boys’ scouting, saying that Girl Scouts is not a good fit for girls who are “more rough and tumble.” But the converse proposition was essentially non-existent: Not a single article that I could find mentioned the idea that boys might not find Boy Scouts to be a good fit — or, even more unspeakable, that they would want to join the Girl Scouts.

If it’s difficult to imagine a boy aspiring to the Girl Scouts’ merit badges (oriented far more than the boys’ toward friendship, caretaking, and community), what does that say about how American culture regards these traditionally feminine arenas? And what does it say to boys who think joining the Girl Scouts sounds fun? Even preschool-age boys know they’d be teased or shamed for disclosing such a dream.

While society is chipping away at giving girls broader access to life’s possibilities, it isn’t presenting boys with a full continuum of how they can be in the world. To carve out a masculine identity requires whittling away everything that falls outside the norms of boyhood. At the earliest ages, it’s about external signifiers like favorite colors, TV shows, and clothes. But later, the paring knife cuts away intimate friendships, emotional range, and open communication.

Rich talks about her young son’s current penchant for wearing dresses and wishes there was room in society for activity like that.

What I want for him, and for all boys, is for the process of becoming men to be expansive, not reductive.

Reading this, I thought about the amazing one-step process for getting a bikini body I read recently: “Put a bikini on your body.” It’s not perfect and this is a lot to ask of society, but perhaps an analogous definition for masculinity is that when a man or boy does something, that’s masculine.¹ Chugging a beer is masculine. Wearing a dress is masculine. Being brave is masculine. Crying is masculine. Playing sports is masculine. Not playing sports is masculine. Comforting a friend whose team lost before celebrating with his team is masculine. Anything and everything is masculine. You might argue that broadening the definition of the word to this degree diminishes its power to denote anything meaningful. And you’d be right, that’s the point.

1. Correspondingly, when a woman or a girl does something, that’s feminine. And when someone who identifies as, for instance, genderqueer does something, that’s genderqueer. Playing sports is feminine, wearing a dress is genderqueer, etc.↩

Tags: gender   language   Sarah Rich