UPDATED: with details from the German Currywurst Museum.
This Might Be Great. Presidentially great (also an MRE or escargot substitute).
Eugene comments on the similarity to Fleischbutter — and he is spot on. The meatwater movement has had some of its greatest popularity in Berlin, at the Currywurst Museum: (there’s more after the break)
Liquid Currywurst on display at the Deutsches Currywurst Museum
So I watched the full moon as it passed overhead, and the day and then full noon the next, from my bed.
I drank nothing and ate less, drifting in a certain breeze, considering the pressures of similarity and conservation of novelty in large societies. When I stirred from the warmth I could name the new field that the study of these sorts of patterns would yield, and sounded its depth and its length. And found the first challenges, boundless and bright, shared by the world and as clear as night, waiting to be coalesced into sight, that required the finesse of its strength.
I sometimes wonder whether Keyhole has been able to fulfill their dreams from years past when they were just starting up. Cetainly they have accomplished amazing things.
Here’s an interesting slideshow of places found through Google Earth. But where is the annotatable version — the wikimapia mod for Google Earth? Why are these links to the screenshots of random people, rather than deeplinks into the images themselves?
1) 23andMe has Genetic kits for genealogy and health analysis. I’m told they are like the OLPC version of genetic kits — green, cheerful, roughly lunchbox sized…
2) My mother made a lot of calls from her cell phone to my brother in Chile in the aftermath of its recent geologic activity. This week she received a letter from AT&T in the mail letting her know that all calls to Chile during that week were being refunded. Three cheers for transcontinental neighborliness!
3) Birthday Milongas and Holy Lolas.
Take a peek, you’ll enjoy the view. The presentation of the Book of Odes is particularly delightful. It is said that the great classics should be read a thousand times over before they are truly internalized… and that presumes a familiarity with the language to begin with.
One of my brother’s latest projects, Chile 8.8, is a reflection on the act and goals of architectural reconstruction of cities, for this year’s Architecture Biennale. If you are near Venice while the 2010 Biennale is on, stop by the Chilean Pavillion and take a look.
17 soluciones arquitectónicas fueron seleccionadas para participar del encuentro titulado “La gente se encuentra en la arquitectura”… Los proyectos, que ya fueron construidos o lo serán en el corto plazo y se expondrán en un gran biombo de 130 metros, siguen tres pilares de reconstrucción: patrimonio, prefabricación y organización social.
17 architectural solutions (to destruction) were chosen to participate in the Biennale, where this year’s subject is “People Meet Architecture”. The projects, which have been or will shortly be built, and displayed on a 130 meter screen, focus on one of three pillars of reconstruction: heritage, prefabrication, and social structure.
Read this transcript of a great public speech about how to do great science, by R. W. Hamming. This sort of good advice is timeless… as are many of his works.
A beautiful soul and person; and source of strength in our family. Advocate for peace in life, may she rest in peace.
This is elemental art. (epilogue)
I sconded with a few amusing poems the other day in A Matter of Antics, to ensure that stellation of wordplay is preserved and highlighted for the long now — something along the lines of my older post on the perils of English pronunciation, Concordant Chaos. If you have a few moments, both are worth a read. See also the Language Log for ling.
I can’t get over this amazing geographic feature of Quebec. The central km-high peak is now way up on my list of mountains to climb.
Gizmodo features a mind-molding video of Microsoft’s dual-touchscreen Courier tablet laptop.
“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments
The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard. And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?
For the record : I’ve found online a full set of photos of my favorite angelic work from the ^//. century – a masterfully illustrated treeware ‘pedia from a parallel dimension. Now that I own a copy I should take proper photos, however…
Disambiguate has been a somewhat obscure term for ‘specify’ for ages. And the noun form, disambiguation, has been used even more sparingly. At some point in the last century, perhaps in the 1950s, it became a popular term in computational linguistics. And before that it was basically only used by one person, writing about logic and semantics in the early 19th century. All of this sprang to my mind because of the tremendous popularity of the word in and through Wikipedia. In the encyclopedia, it is the canonical way to describe the clarification of an ambiguous term, the indication of type used to specify the context of an article title.
Google n-grams and other public domain searches suggest disambiguation was not popular at all before the 50s. It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham. But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics? And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?
The word’s recent history touches on Rush, Nirvana, Invictus, Larry, and Magnus… and started with a policy page on Naming conventions/Disambiguating.
Simply brilliant. The world needs more media like this. And more of those fat sign-anything markers.
No, not rollcats, but Яolcats — the glorious and gorgeous (and occasionally quite uncatty) lolcats of Russia.
Faves: March is a state of mind …
