THING:A Comedy Writer Confronts ‘Mind-Shredding Evil’ in Uganda from RD Magazine. Jane Bussman, a former South Park writer, somehow went from interviewing Ashton Kutcher for blahblahblah to doing real, dangerous (in every sense) journalism. This is this week’s must-click.
Last year, high school science teacher Ron Dantowitz of Brookline, Mass., played a clever trick on three of his best students. He asked them to plan a hypothetical mission to fly onboard a NASADC-8 aircraft and observe a spacecraft disintegrate as it came screaming into Earth’s atmosphere. How would they record the event? What could they learn?
For 6 months, they worked hard on their assignment, never suspecting the surprise Dantowitz had in store.
On March 12th, he stunned them with the news: “The mission is real, and you’re going along for the ride.”
THING:The Making of OutKast’s Aquemini from Creative Loafing. If you’re me, then you barely made it through that headline before clicking on it. However, please report back on how long it took you to click if you are, in fact, not me. Big Boi’s debut solo album drops this week, and at least one-fourth of our staff is very excited about that.
Bonus Patriotic Bonus
Via SBN, the best fake documentary trailer you’ll wish was a trailer for a real movie all season:
THING:Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure from Wired. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who’s made a life of using the power of algorithms to “organize all the world’s information,” is using that same kind of power in an attempt to cure Parkinson’s Disease. Since discovering he carries a gene mutation that puts him at risk of contracting the disease, Brin has sought “to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science. He wants to collect data first, then hypothesize, and then find the patterns that lead to answers. And he has the money and the algorithms to do it.”
THING:Travel itineraries from Flickr photo trails from Geeking With Greg. Greg Linden links to a paper by American and Israeli researchers on “cleverly [using] the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels.” It makes sense that the most interesting points along a path would also be the most photographed, so this could be a great way to note can’t-miss spots, common travel routes, and typical trip durations. An inspiring quote from the paper:
By aggregating such timed paths of many users, one can construct itineraries that reflect the “wisdom” of touring crowds. Each such itinerary is composed of a sequence of POIs, with recommended visit times and approximate transit times between them.
THING:How Rap Tears Up the Boring Art Vs. Commerce Argument from The Awl. Selling out has a different connotation in hip-hop than it does in other spheres. Though punk and hip-hop grew up at the same time and place and in the same socioeconomic conditions, the two have had very different ideas on mass appeal. (Yes, this is lumping thousands of musicians and millions of fans into two groups. I’m sorry.)
We can all agree the Black Eyed Peas sold out — they completely changed everything about their sound and image, conscious of their brand and marketability the whole time, and wedding receptions will never be the same. I’m sure they weep into their pallets of Franklins every night, thinking about all the underground respect they lost in the process. But many rappers have been able to market themselves without significantly changing their sound. None of this is new information, but the Awl article certainly presents a worth-reading take on the issue.
A Video of Americans Pretending to Care About the World Cup
Even though the U.S. lost its knockout round match against its nemesis Ghana, this World Cup still produced one of the best moments in American soccer history, and certainly the most widely experienced — Landon Donovan’s last-minute, life-or-death goal against Algeria did the kind of Twitter damage unseen since Michael Jackson’s death. An amazing montage of Americans from Arkansas to France celebrating the score:
You’ve heard of the uncanny valley. How about the completely useless valley? Realism in UI Design takes us there. More like Useless Interface, am I right?
A lesson in late-night TV walk-on music, music publishing, and markets by Questlove of The Roots, known by many as the greatest-ever hip-hop band and by others as Jimmy Fallon’s house musicians. If you know them by the latter, then… well, then you and I are probably not friends already, but we can get past this! (The big question: How much would it cost to use “Walk On” as walk-on music?)
When it comes to Lost, I’m like a doorbuster sale… I have ZEROZEROZEROZEROINTEREST!!! But this seems like a thing that took work to make and that you’d like.
Watching football is a big waste of time. The average NFL game features only about 11 or 12 minutes of live gameplay content. The rest is replays, crowd shots, loitering, promos, and so on. But is this really a problem? When watching a game by myself, I can play with my daughter, read blogs, work (as I’m doing right now — Hi mom! — there’s 6:16 to go in Cowboys-Vikings!), etc. without really missing much, and lots of people Tivo games anyway. When watching games with friends, there’s plenty of breaks in the football we can use to discuss football. Who really loses in this arrangement? ELSEWHEREINSPORTS:Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, and Other Pitching Stats based on one man’s Peanuts extrapolatin’. No, not this Charlie Brown.
Regarding the strange and unreadable Esquire thing about Jay-Z… Oh man. Plenty of writers had problems with its content, while others focused on its baffling syntax. (FULLDISCLOSURE: I liked that “campefire flickers” line.) I’m not sure which part of this messy, messy article qualifies as a “Best” anything. It’s the most forced writing I’ve ever read — it reads like it was written by a suburban 15-year-old boy who always looks for chances to remind his teachers that Mos Def is poetry. Maybe it’s the article’s amazing music-writer-unifying properties, as the spectacle of rap writers rallying to shoot it down was inspiring.
Jimmy Kimmel lays into Jay Leno on Leno’s own show. Around 1:40, Kimmel dings Leno and Leno refuses to play along. You can see Kimmel’s eyes light up, as he realizes he gets to tee off on Leno for the next four minutes. Jay loses his audience, and all he can do is wait it out. I don’t watch any of these shows, so I don’t really have a dog well-trained competitor in this fight, but Leno is impossible to like at this point.
“Why would anybody ever wanna leave Baltimore? That’s what I’m askin’.”
The new trailer for Treme, the upcoming series by The Wire’s creators:
Anil Dash shows how Twitter’s much-worked-up-about Suggested Users List is actually nothing of consequence: Life on the List makes it clear that even though Anil gains “100 new followers every hour” thanks to the List, almost all of these are first-and-only-time users, robots, or zombies. Nobody Has a Million Twitter Followers extends the survey beyond Anil’s site, demonstrating why the Suggested Users List should work at a zoo and stop bothering people*, as it plainly offers no value to any woman, man, child, or organization that could ever exist.
You didn’t see this coming, but we’re about to kind of talk about Miley Cyrus. Now. Specifically, how “Party in the USA” is more of a Jay-Z song than a Michael song, no matter what Miss Cyrus’ editor would have us believe. “We are post-racial to the extent that an incredibly elaborate set of determinations has got us to the place where a song can be at once entirely dipped in the language of hip-hop and come out of the river shining of country grammar.” Miley Cyrrrrrrrrrus.
You thought the Amazon was being deforested due to overexpansion and quests for riches. Of course not! We were just trying to find El Dorado all this time, which it seems, has happened. El Dorado, of course, was the legendary city whose kings took turns dumping a lot of money in a hole. Told you we found El Dorado.
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