Month: December 2014

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Mollifying a future father-in-law

In his letter dated March 12, 1914, poet Ezra Pound wrote to the Consul General of the United States in London seeking information that would help him ease the reservations of his future father-in-law that Pound’s marriage to his daughter would be invalid if he returned to the United States. Pound is a well-known and influential poet, but at the time of this letter, he was a struggling artist.

National Archives, Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State

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The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 7:28 p.m. EST on Dec. 19, 2014. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an X1.8-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.

Image Credit: NASA/SDO via NASA http://www.nasa.gov/content/holiday-lights-on-the-sun-imagery-of-a-solar-flare

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We all know the multimedia artistic brilliance of pioneering New Wave band Devo. And many of us know that Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh is an artist who works in other media. But even other moderately devoted fans such as myself may be surprised to realize just how multiple Mothersbaugh’s artistic talents are, how persistent, or how significant when surveyed as a whole. This is all remedied in an impressive new volume, Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia, assembled by Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver Director Adam Lerner. Read the rest

from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2014/12/17/the-first-career-spanning-book.html
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Nice and talented people sometimes send stuff to me in the mail. This little kitchen set sawed from a single block of pine is one my favorites. The Mayor of Mt Holly, MN (pop. 4) made it using a pattern from one of the Foxfire books, "updating it with a few things."
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The cult favorite documentary was produced to promote Tron’s release, featuring a trippy plot and the strangest computer graphics this side of SIGGRAPH — and it quickly became a staple of the LA club scene as visual accompaniment for whatever was floating your boat that night.
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from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2014/12/17/the-strange-history-of-disney.html
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Dissent implements the Dining Cryptographers and Verifiable Shuffling algorithms to produce a group-conversation system that is resistant to traffic analysis. Feels like we’re entering the second golden age of cypherpunk.
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from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2014/12/17/sock-puppet-and-traffic-analy.html
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