Shiny Archive

Florence And The Machine Both Kind Of Think You’re An Addict. Also, Vimeo.

I think I might be late coming to this party, but has anyone else noticed the dramatic degree to which music videos look better on Vimeo than on YouTube? Is it that their monetization scheme is more direct so they can afford better quality in the short term? Is it that everything Google does takes [...]
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White Ghost Shivers Provide Uplifting, End Of Semester Bitterness

We’re locked up with with grading and prospectus work. In the meantime, here’s a little Austin hot jazz. Great song, although we think we would’ve preferred the “nice bitter one” that she says was next in the set… … since we suspect that it may have been this awesomeness: Sometimes we wonder how so many LA hipsters [...]
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We Get Visitors – IP Of The Day

Jumping directly to this post: The hit came at 7:33am – say what you will about city employees, they’re not clocking in late. References: * Scientist Who Doesn’t Understand How Judgment Works Tries To Persuade People To Drink Their Own Excrement – Produces Rhetorical And Psychoanalytic Train Wreck, Comedy Gold [IIS] Previously: * The History Of Hip Hop, Viral YouTube [...]
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Best Library Facade Ever

Awesome: The books for the facade of the Kansas City Library were nominated by local residents. This is perhaps a cause for hope. Or given your opinion about some of the choices, not. Still: awesome. References: * Kansas City Public Library [Neatorama] Previously: * French Band Requests That You Dance, Fight [Video] * Giant Scorpion Provides Scientific Data, Nightmares * The Things [...]
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The History Of Hip Hop, Viral YouTube Edition [Videos]

It turns out that, contra Tricia Rose, hip hop actually originated in an obscure Mongolian farming village in the 1960s. MC Farmer on the mic: The genre then mutated (metastasized?) into nerdcore, giving rise to MC Frontalot’s utterly brilliant “It Is Pitch Dark”: “The voices in your head said the dwarf shot first… but doctors with needles [...]
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Wednesday Link Dump – Screaming Chimps, Powerpoint Poisons Everything, Rhetorical Advertising, Etc

This is a preview of Wednesday Link Dump – Screaming Chimps, Powerpoint Poisons Everything, Rhetorical Advertising, Etc. Read the full post (285 words, 1 image, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)
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Earthrise And Earthset From The Moon

The Japanese took some time off from creating the freakiest robots known to humanity to create this gorgeous video, a scaled down version of the hi-def version that they’re promising to release soon: The real downer? It was done in a Burbank studio. References: * Earthrise video [Pink Tentacle] * Earthrise, Earthset [pinktentacle3 / YouTube] Previously: * Second Life Brain-Computer Interfaces [...]
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Electovamp Girls Look Like They Know Their Way Around A Club, Are Fun [Video]

These are the times that we wish we had an mp3 blog, because as near as we can tell the British hotties from Electrovamp are still nowhere to be found on Hype Machine. We would post them and then the Internets would belong to us. Alas we run an academic blog frequented by a half [...]
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3D Images Of The Brain’s Architecture

Scientists are so adorable when they produce something stupefying and then reveal their over-enthusiastic muffin-like geekiness by giving it a really corny name: Researchers at Harvard University have taken an important step to mapping the detailed architecture of the brain – the fantastically complex 3D atlas of connections between individual cells in the brains of mice. [...]
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Humanity Now Actually Begging To Be Destroyed By Robots [Video]

We’re beginning to suspect that there may be humans among us not strictly interested in the continued dominance of our species: At least there’s no chance of these robots becoming hyper-intelligent or partaking of a functionally teleological metaphysics of self-replication. Because that would be awkward. References: * RHex – ROBORAMA.info [roborama / YouTube] * Engineer Builds Self-Aware Robots That [...]
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French Band Requests That You Dance, Fight [Video]

This being the popular song with the lyrics “1234″ that isn’t currently being used for an iPod commercial, we weren’t sure if posting it would bring down the wrath of the hipsters. But this irony-endowed Jimmy Kimmel appearance probably makes it safe: Here’s the original video, which – if not for that Ronson guy – [...]
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Engineer Builds Self-Aware Robots That Learn And Self-Replicate. Umm… What? [Video]

You know, we’ve seen more than a few movies that begin this way. And they always end badly. Always. Here’s uber-genius Hod Lipson giving an engaging presentation that was – for reasons inscrutable to us – not subtitled “how I spent my summer vacation ushering in the Age of the Machines:” At least he’s enthusiastic about [...]
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Underwater Photographer Having A Lot More Fun Than Us, Also Producing Gorgeous Photos

We haven’t done a photo gallery in a while. This set is shamelessly lifted from Kawika Chetron of Cold Water Images. Blue rockfish (Sebastes mystinus) swimming below a canopy of giant kelp (Macrocystis sp.): Invisible high five from a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas): Sneaky harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) doing a little pose: They’ve got more than 100 gorgeous [...]
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Mark Ronson And Amy Winehouse Are Very Good For Each Other [Video]

Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse are having a difficult time doing wrong. The talented and circumspect Ms. Winehouse does not make a physical appearance in this video – a cover of the Zutons’s “Valerie” – but the female vocals are all her: Another music video, as we continue to flirt with becoming a poorly written shadow [...]
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Science Photography Awards Announced

The 2007 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge awards were announced last week in Science. That little beauty above is Chondrus crispus, a red algae more commonly known as Irish moss, that was snapped by Andrea Ottesen of the University of Maryland. National Geographic has a roundup of some more winning photographs. There are a few [...]
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