wskent

72 New emoji arrive later this month.

Pete Souza: photographing the real Barack Obama. Class, defined.

Pour your own FDLs today.

Geese have serrated tongues, and zero chill.

When you get goosebumps from listening to music, it's called a frisson (pronounced free-sawn), which means "aesthetic chills." About two-thirds of the population feels frisson. Music is the most common trigger, but so is "beautiful artwork, watching a particularly moving scene in a movie, or having physical contact with another person."

From Konstruktor:

[T]he results of our study show that it’s the cognitive components of 'Openness to Experience' – such as making mental predictions about how the music is going to unfold or engaging in musical imagery (a way of processing music that combines listening with daydreaming) – that are associated with frisson to a greater degree than the emotional components.

These findings, recently published in the journal Psychology of Music, indicate that those who intellectually immerse themselves in music (rather than just letting it flow over them) might experience frisson more often and more intensely than others.

And if you’re one of the lucky people who can feel frisson, the frisson Reddit group has identified Lady Gaga's rendition of the 'Star-Spangled Banner' at the 2016 Super Bowl, and a fan-made trailer for the original Star Wars trilogy, as especially chill-inducing.The Conversation

Vintage interview with Jonathan Wolff, composer of the iconic Seinfeld theme (and music for Caroline in the City, Full House, Saved by the Bell, and many other shows).

"I started with (Seinfeld's) voice... and took a meter from his delivery, and made that the tempo of the Seinfeld Theme," Wolff says.

360° from Mars. Curiosity at Furnace Flats Sol 647. Yowza.

The top of Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, is one of the windiest places on Earth. In 1934, a windspeed of 231 mph was recorded -- a record that stood until a typhoon-powered wind topped 254 mph in Australia -- and the wind chill value on a January day in 2004 was -102.59 °F. So, it's a cold, windy place.

Yesterday, the winds on Mount Washington only got up to 109 mph, but it still created the perfect conditions for people to fly themselves like kites and bad conditions for walking. Here's what living and working up there is like.

Wind on the summit is an experience that you can't just describe to understand. It makes you fully appreciate that air is in fact a fluid and not empty space. It is really impossible to safely face down hundred-mile-per-hour winds almost anywhere else; you'd either be risking your life trying to hike into them (I was exhausted after several minutes of playing in the wind) or risking your life in a hurricane, where flying debris and shrapnel poses a huge threat.

(via @EricHolthaus)

Update: It is also impossible to eat in high winds.

(via @kyleslattery)

Tags: video   weather

A look inside the Pantone color factory.

A touching look at a long-time marriage, trailer for the documentary My Love, Don't Cross That River

Thanks, but no thanks. Ingmar Bergman.

Created by Kurt Rauffer, who writes:

Growing up in the 90s where Star Wars was released on VHS, the franchise really sparked my imagination as a child. It not only let me exercise my imagination but also supplied me with some of the happiest memories as I watched it with my family. After re-watching "The Empire Strikes Back," I decided to use this as a chance to create a homage in the form of a title sequence. This would also serve as my senior "thesis" at SVA and took me the whole semester to complete.

The style and tone of the animation was inspired by the James Bond title sequences. The music was a rejected song from the newest Bond film, Spectre, sung by Radiohead. I really wanted to play on the concept of Luke trying to find himself and true purpose, so the music and inspiration felt fitting.

More about Uk, Demolition, Photobomb, Videobomb, and Fail

Jane Jacobs, journalist, activist, and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (one of my favorite books of all time), was born 100 years ago today. Curbed has a big collection of stories in celebration and Vox also has an appreciation of her career.

When Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, she was a lone voice with no credentials speaking up against the most powerful ideas in urban planning. Fifty-five years later, on Jacobs' 100th birthday (honored in today's Google Doodle), urban dwellers are all living in her vision of the great American city.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a reaction to urban planning movements that wanted to clear entire city blocks and rebuild them. Jacobs argued this ignored everything that made cities great: the mixture of shops, offices, and housing that brought people together to live their lives. And her vision triumphed.

Fun and sorta weird fact: neither The Death and Life of Great American Cities or Robert Caro's The Power Broker (about Jacobs' foe Robert Moses) is available in ebook format.

Update: From an interview with Jacobs included in Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations:

If I were running a school, I'd have one standing assignment that would begin in the first grade and go on all through school, every week: that each child should bring in something said by an authority -- it could be by the teacher, or something they see in print, but something that they don't agree with -- and refute it.

BTW, I started the audiobook version of The Power Broker today and it is already so good. (via brainpickings)

Tags: books   cities   Jane Jacobs   The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Brett Bobley writes, "'Hypertext: an Educational Experiment in English and Computer Science at Brown University' is an amazing documentary film from 1976 made by Brown University computer scientist Andries 'Andy' van Dam." (more…)

Bionic Woman Adventure Coloring Book: “A Thief in the Night”

Get Link Info protects you from being rickrolled, linked to malware or otherwise misled with a link: punch in a short URL from any of the big URL shortening services, see the real one before you go there. There's a browser plugin for Firefox and IE; for Chrome users, Redditor NickPapa suggests Nope, which doesn't quite do that, but does warn about links that redirect. [via]

This is a genius piece of media criticism: mapping the BBC's own slavishly patriotic broadcast of the British royals' 2015 "celebrations" onto its breathless voice-over for a North Korean patriotic demonstration in celebration of a Kim birthday. (via Kottke)

Welcome to Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.

0 female directors

Zero women are scheduled to direct films at 20th Century Fox and Paramount through 2018. TheWrap found that men are set to direct the next 22 scheduled films from Fox (TheWrap excluded the art-house studio Fox Searchlight) and 25 films from Paramount. [The Wrap]

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1 female CEO

In 2015, 359 new chief executives were named at the top 2,500 companies globally, according to a new study by Strategy&. Of those 359 new CEO’s, 10 were women. And of the 87 new chief executives appointed in the U.S. and Canada from that group, only one — Andrea Greenberg, CEO of MSG Networks — was a woman. [The Washington Post]

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16-0

Jake Arrieta of the Chicago Cubs threw a no-hitter Thursday, leading the Cubs to a 16-0 win over the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds were rather sanguine about the whole affair, all things considered. [ESPN]

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56 percent

According to a new poll from SurveyMonkey, that’s the percentage of Americans who believe replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill is the right call. [SurveyMonkey]

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120 days

Amount of time Douglas Hughes, the Florida mailman who last year landed a gyrocopter onto the West Lawn of the Capitol Building to protest campaign finance laws, will spend in prison as a result of his guilty plea to America’s worst parking job ever. [POLITICO]

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77.6 million

Number of Americans who live in ZIP codes where Amazon has begun to offer same day delivery. However, a Bloomberg analysis of census tracts and delivery zones found that black and other minority populations are underserved in some of the 27 metropolitan areas where Amazon offers the service. [Bloomberg]

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If you haven’t already, you really need to sign up for the Significant Digits newsletter — you can be the first to learn about the numbers behind the news! How great does that sound? You should totally do it.

And if you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.

Light is all around us, but how much do you really know about the photons speeding past you?

Talkin’ ‘Bout Parkour booklet by Dard Willis

More about Monsters, Photography, Instagram, Art, and Watercooler

David W. Niven collected jazz records from as early as 1921 and with the help of the Internet Archive, copies of those records have been made available online...that's 1000 hours of jazz.

My 20-year-old cousin introduced me to jazz when I was 10. It was a 10" 78 RPM OK recording of "My Heart" made in Chicago on November 12, 1925, by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five with Kid Ory, trombone; Johnny Dodds, clarinet; Lil Armstrong, piano; and Johnny St. Cyr, banjo. On the reverse was "Cornet Chop Suey."

(via @ftrain)

Tags: music

There are some ideas out there that are just so wacky they work. Take these churro tater tots, for example. You toss freshly fried tater tots into a cinnamon-sugar mixture and serve them with a dulce de leche dipping sauce. They're warm, salty, and sweet — betcha can't eat just one!

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I found a trove of unloved records. None of them are good.

ageofultron:

Oscar Isaac behind the scenes of Star Wars: The Force Awakens