NME is collecting the wit and vitriol of Mark E Smith.
Do I know you?
What would you like to know?
March 15, 2013
March 6, 2013
"Many magazines have been funded by wealthy people who were willing to take moderate losses. (Thank you to all of you.) Or Conde Nast could suck money out of its newspapers to feed into its glorious magazine operations. Nevermind that back at the newspapers they kept people working for nothing at podunk papers that also happened to make crazy bank with their classified ads. Any time I imagine the glamorous world of writing for The Atlantic or The New Yorker or Harper’s in 1968 or 1978, I remember that most journalists were going to homecoming football games and writing about the king and queen. Most journalists were humping around the local garden show and talking about trends in petunia horticulture. Most journalists were doing things that no one really wanted to do, but they did it anyway for money and for a shot at the show which almost never came. I respect the hell out of those journalists working at those local papers. They were doing the stuff that, at least within certain empires, that let the magazine editors have lunch at Balthazar’s (or insert actual appropriate New York lunch spot)."
— A perspective from Alexis Madrigal’s response to the “y’all ain’t payin’ yer freelancers nothin’” kerfluffle.
March 5, 2013
"At least twice in history, a form of money has existed where there was no incentive to accumulate it as a store of value because it didn’t earn positive interest in bank accounts. Instead, it had the equivalent of a negative interest rate (known as demurrage)—the longer you held on to it, the more you would have to pay—similar to a parking fee on money. This gave people who were paid in this currency a strong incentive to spend it or to invest it—preferably in things that would continue to be valuable over the long term. The velocity of this type of money, in other words, was quite high. Since people didn’t hoard it, it also was not scarce—there is strong evidence that its existence fostered long periods of prosperity in Dynastic Egypt and during the Central Middle Ages (10th-13th centuries) in Europe."
— Utne Reader on local currencies.
February 26, 2013
“The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” by Johnny Cash
Happy birthday, Mr. Cash.
February 14, 2013
Warms my heart more than any Valentine ever could. This might make me wrong, but I don’t care; I’m having a moment.
Melba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Ms. Roy led a group of NASA mathmeticians known as “computers” who tracked the Echo satellites. The first time I shared Ms. Roy on VBG, my friend Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a former postdoc in astrophysics at NASA, helpfully explained what Ms. Roy did in the comment section. I am sharing Chanda’s comment again here: “By the way, since I am a physicist, I might as well explain a little bit about what she did: when we launch satellites into orbit, there are a lot of things to keep track of. We have to ensure that gravitational pull from other bodies, such as other satellites, the moon, etc. don’t perturb and destabilize the orbit. These are extremely hard calculations to do even today, even with a machine-computer. So, what she did was extremely intense, difficult work. The goal of the work, in addition to ensuring satellites remained in a stable orbit, was to know where everything was at all times. So they had to be able to calculate with a high level of accuracy. Anyway, that’s the story behind orbital element timetables”. Photo: NASA/Corbis.
(via laboratoryequipment)
February 11, 2013
Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things
I won’t even attempt to describe how satisfying this Tumblr is to me.
[via]
In The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd gave definitions to place names, creating words that should exist but don’t.
There was a word that was an adjective describing something that fit perfectly - like the last book on a bookshelf sliding into the last available space as if it was made for it. That word is kentucky. A kentucky fit.
February 11, 2013
RIP, Nagra inventor Stefan Kudelski.
He made sound go with the moving pictures.
January 30, 2013
The deadliest school killing took place in 1927 in Michigan.
“After the bombings, investigators found a wooden sign wired to the farm’s fence with Kehoe’s last message, ‘Criminals are made, not born,’ written on it.”
January 3, 2013
![Bu as in bushido as in “war” and geisha as in… geisha?
A rare vintage photograph of an onna-bugeisha, one of the female warriors of the upper social classes in feudal Japan.
Often mistakenly referred to as “female samurai”, female warriors have a long history in Japan, beginning long before samurai emerged as a warrior class.
[via ziarci]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_meimjkfMAp1r500f1o1_1280.jpg)
Bu as in bushido as in “war” and geisha as in… geisha?
A rare vintage photograph of an onna-bugeisha, one of the female warriors of the upper social classes in feudal Japan.
Often mistakenly referred to as “female samurai”, female warriors have a long history in Japan, beginning long before samurai emerged as a warrior class.
[via ziarci]
(via quantumblog)
December 21, 2012
"The annual cycle carries little charge in a place where the winter has no killing frost and the summer sun withers as well as it nourishes. And so although Classical Maya science measured the solstices with extreme precision, they formed only one among several significant cycles: the religious calendar, for example, was based on the length of a pregnancy."
—
- Charlie Lloyd, “Perhaps it is broken, the cover of your diadem […], darkness collar […]?”, a reflection on Mayans, poetry, cycles, loss, translation and comic books.
But mostly about how things mean things.
RSS feed: http://grantimatter.tumblr.com/rss
1 of 8
Next page
-
For anytime, a tale:
From the ancient stories of the Yoruba. This short, fully illustrated children’s picture book is the first in the Yoruba...
-
a cd inspired by the wicker man and it’s soundtrack. mostly traditional english folk songs with a little neofolk, fairport era stuff, and of some of...
-
Happy Mother’s Day from Old Florida!
Seminole Indian mother and child at the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation
State Archives of Florida
-
“Katniss is very skinny… How much do you weigh?
I am so fucking happy that female celebrities are starting to call...
-
“One of my set texts was to all intents and purposes a dramatisation of a government pamphlet about serial killing. Bizarrely, I met the author in a...”
-
Redditor SquishyMcPhee recently made an awesome discovery while visiting his car dealership in Norman, Oklahoma for an oil change. He found a...
-
-
Gibson nails it. Again.
