Interactive 360º light field display. Yes, it’s done with mirrors. (h/t, The Thin Man) // Things found in the folds of fat people’s skin. Cutlery, marijuana, uneaten sandwiches. // The personal blimp. I’m sorely tempted. // A gallery of vintage airships. // Airship rides. $495. // Ejaculation “a potential treatment for nasal congestion.” Or perhaps not. // Being offended on someone else’s behalf. (h/t, AMac) // “What are the Joker’s powers again?” // Marvel superheroes versus giant robot. // Ninja Terminator. // Vintage detective badges. // Underwater panoramas. // Galapagos sea life. Wait for the whale shark. (h/t, Coudal) // Collective animal nouns. A siege of herons, a parcel of hogs. // A visual history of video recorders. // A time-lapse tutorial. // Baconnaise. // Brokers with hands on their faces. // Broccoli mystery deepens. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Kim Jong-il.  

With Halloween almost upon us, I feel it’s time to share François Macré’s multitracked a cappella rendition of Thriller. Be sure to wait for the Vincent Price monologue.

(h/t, Coudal)

Daito Manabe attaches electrodes to his face and triggers contortions in time with techno music. As you do. 

An earlier experiment.

Robert Bluey offers an experiment in wealth redistribution: 

In a local restaurant my server had on an Obama 08 tie; again I laughed as he had given away his political preference – just imagine the coincidence. When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need – the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I’ve decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.

At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more. I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.

One might, I think, quibble about the distinction between “deserved” and “needed,” but still, it’s worth some reflection. 

(h/t, The Thin Man)

The Guardian’s Theo Hobson tells us why he doesn’t approve of James Bond: 

It feels like breaking rank with modern heterosexual British malehood, to which I more or less belong, but here goes. I hate James Bond. The continuation of his cult disgusts me, embarrasses me, depresses me.

Poor lamb.

Call me Licensed to Killjoy, but it has to be said: this cult hero is a deeply malign cultural presence. He represents a nasty, cowardly part of us that ought to have been killed off long ago.

Er, killed off by whom, and how? A hail of bullets? Laser beams? Or just the weight of tutting and pretentious disapproval?

Of course there is a very serious case to be made against 007 on strictly feminist grounds. The women in the books and films are silly, naughty, flimsy things who need hard male mastery.

It seems Mr Hobson hasn’t seen recent Bond outings – say, any made in the last fifteen years – in which female characters are spies, assassins and fighter pilots and typically portrayed as tenacious, resourceful and absurdly competent, no less so than Bond himself. Hence, perhaps, the continuing popularity of this “malign cultural presence.”

I don’t know how offensive this is to women, but it’s offensive to me. Indeed I think the real victims of the Bond cult are men, who are impelled by a vile peer-pressure to worship at the shrine of this lethal lothario… The fact is that James Bond’s sexual career does real harm to the male psyche… I seriously believe that Bond is a big factor in the sexual malfunction of our times; the difficulty we have finding life-long partners, and the normalisation of pornography.

As so often, Guardian commentators are singularly immune to the “vile peer pressure” which presumably controls all other sentient beings. Still, at least we can count on them to direct us in our tastes, i.e. away from amusingly hyperbolical cinema and towards socio-political righteousness. I’m sure it will be good for us, if not exactly fun.

Large gentleman retains dignity in difficult circumstances. (h/t, Metrolander) // Bacon gumballs. // Fluorescent fish. // The shoe-fitting fluoroscope. (h/t, Coudal) // Curta calculators. // Garrett Lisi on particles and symmetries. // Atomic pen writes with individual atoms, slowly. // Photomicrographs. // A short film about the London Underground map. // Robert Hughes on skyscrapers, from American Visions. // Does your studio have a rubber exterior? // More concept cars. // Jet engine tests. // The Battlestar Galactica PC upgrade. Flashes, hums, doesn’t jump. // H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. // The innards of Godzilla. // A short summary of socialism. And another. // The Communist fever of William Ayers. (h/t, TDK) // SDA Late Nite Radio Archive. Crime thrillers, music, a feast of oddments. // Ghost towns. // More Watchmen footage. // “It’s the stickiest dry glue yet.” // The eyeballing game. // Cancer-fighting beer. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Louis Armstrong.

In a recent post on political bias in the classroom, I pointed out the insatiable nature of academic radicalism:

Several, rather vivid, examples were given, but if another illustration is needed, here’s Martin Kramer on Rashid Khalidi, a terribly oppressed radical now anointed as Edward Said Professor at Columbia University:

Yes, of course. That poor besieged minority of left-leaning educators who huddle in corners furtively and whisper their utopian dreams.

Should you feel an urge to take Germaine Greer seriously, about pretty much anything, watch this piece of magnificence from 1968. You may want to bite down on something.

Newsnight Review just won’t be the same.

Further to ongoing rumblings about classroom monoculture, political grooming and the disrepute of certain subjects, this may amuse. Software developer Chip Morningstar ponders academic insularity: 

Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me –  marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers – none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I’m constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I’m doing is worth having them pay for it.

Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don’t really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd… They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies…

What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos Islands – an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There’s no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they’ve been subjected. What’s more, it’s not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. […]

For instance, the cleverness that allows Duke’s Professor Miriam Cooke to argue, or rather assert, that the oppression and misogyny found in the Islamic world is the fault of globalisation and Western colonialism, despite the effects predating their alleged causes by several centuries. Professor Cooke also claims “polygamy can be liberating and empowering.” 

The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever hand waving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all… “Deconstruction” is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gödel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.

Indeed. And this is the process by which any number of phantom subtexts are detected, and by which the alleged “feminist philosopher of science” Sandra Harding comes to imagine that it’s “illuminating and honest” to refer to Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual”. 

Morningstar goes on to provide a helpful, and pretty accurate, guide to deconstruction. 

Related: Let’s Play Bamboozle!

James Burchfield releases his inner beatbox.

Related: French beatbox championship, October 2006. Part deux.