Privilege Denying Dude – whenever an item about, say, sexism in tech or harassment in conferences comes up on Hacker News, this guy totally ownz the comments. Let’s see. [found via Vered on Facebook]
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Saw this on a bus station as I was entering the train station and took a photo figuring it might not be there tomorrow. A geek Rabin memorial poster.
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Cosmic Nerdcore
I know of Eugene Ahn thanks to his podcast War Rocket Ajax, which he hosts alongside Chris Sims. Two weeks ago I bought his debut album, The War For infinity. Although all the tracks are available streaming online, the thing is a concept album, and it requires the uninterrupted listening I get when walking with an mp3 player, not when sitting in front of the distraction box that is a computer.
Concept album? Well, essentially this is a 21st century hip-hop retelling of the Infinity Gauntlet, the 1990s Marvel comics mini-series where, as far as I can tell, Jim Starlin retold once more the story of a big battle for the fate of the universe between his doomed messiah figure, Adam Warlock, and his Darkseid-ripoff evil god figure, Thanos the lover (literally!) of Death personified. And the awesome thing about Ege’s album is how the modern nerdcore hip-hop delivery manages to convey Jim Starlin’s 70s-era Cosmic themes, which always held a distinct dark seam beneath the space opera superhero bombast (Starlin wrote The Death of Captain Marvel, a graphic novel where one of the characters most closely associated with him dies from cancer).
The deluxe version of The War For infinity includes a whole extra album of material by Euge mixed by DJ Empirical, and while it’s also quite enjoyable (I really like the mix of Smash Gordon, available in a different version on Euge’s blog), it mostly served to highlight the importance of Euge’s two collaborators, producer Ruckus Roboticus and guest MC Tribe One in the role of Demonus (the album’s version of Thanos; sounds dumb but grows on you) to the success of the debut.
But as a listener to War Rocket Ajax, I already know that Euge can pick ’em.
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All the art videos you can eat
A slideshow on Google Docs with a ton of arty interactive project videos, animations, ads, visualizations and so on.
In Israel we make a fuss because the Haredim pushed to end Daylight Saving Time before the holidays, so they can have an easier time on Kippur (or before Kippur, or whenever. We don’t need to know the fine details to know it’s a stupid thing, because, Haredim+politics = bad).
But maybe they didn’t go far enough: The Egyptians (like the rest of the Arab and Muslim world – including Israel’s own sizable Palestinian population) observe Ramadan, where for a whole month they have to fast from dawn to dusk – so early sunset is even more helpful. But the Egyptians don’t stop there – once the thing is over, they set the clock back to DST, so they can benefit from it some more:
Daylight saving time (DST) will end in Egypt on Wednesday August 11, 2010. Egypt’s Cabinet recently decided that the country’s DST schedule for 2010 will end before the start of Ramadan. However, DST will resume in Egypt after the month of Ramadan on Friday, September 10, 2010. Egypt will be back from DST on Friday, October 1.