the city & ??i? ???
Hypercities, currently in beta, is a collaborative effort to enable users to travel forward and backward in time within major cities of the world, watching changes take place over both the short (political protests in Tehran) and long (history of the city of Rome) term. Locative technologies are pushing the same ability into smartphones: Walking Through Time (Android, iPhone) allows the user to overlay their current location with a map of the past.

Related: Get London Reading, which maps books to their real-life locations in the city. Sadly, Walking Through Time is only for Edinburgh at the moment, and Get London Reading is restricted to iPhone, but more locations (and devices) are planned.

Do you love me, now that I can dance?
Scientists use science to scientifically determine what makes a good dancer. With bonus computer-generated dancing!

"Every single child is entitled to a life full of possibilities."
A New Career of Caring, Started in Death on 9/11. Brooke Jackman was a 23 year-old assistant bond trader who was one of 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees to die on the morning of 9/11/2001. In her memory, her family created a Foundation in her name, dedicated to promoting literacy, especially among elementary school children in New York City. Today, 'first responders' from New York's Police and Fire Departments "took some time off from their day jobs to read aloud to children at the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan, as part of the first ever Brooke Jackman Foundation read-a-thon."

Per the New York Times article: "Since its founding, the foundation has distributed nearly 100,000 books and backpacks — dubbed Brooke Packs — often to "children mired in domestic violence and other predations."

The foundation also provided funding to Brooklyn's Family Justice Center, which built a children's library this year and last month launched its first family literacy program, aimed at abuse victims.

On Facebook. On Twitter.

Guess that's why they broke and you're so paid
Famous Rappers and Their 20th-Century Literary Counterparts

OH MY GOD I AM SO EXCITED
Home Computing in the Future, according to Freescale Semiconductor (Vimeo)

(via)

Purrkour
Catz with mad parkour skillz.

Movie Trends
Five annoying trends that make every movie look the same.

Michael Lewis on the Crisis of Greece
"If there were any justice in the world the Greek bankers would be in the streets marching to protest the morals of the ordinary Greek citizen." Michael Lewis investigates Greece's economy. "In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks." In this terrific Vanity Fair piece, Michael Lewis visits Greece and examines a country where the general sense of civil society and trust has broken down, allowing mismanagement of the country's finances and economy on an unbelievably massive scale.

Tax evasion and fraudulent book-keeping is pervasive and generally accepted amongst both the governing elites and the ordinary population. Years ago, Greece joined the Euro while hiding a deficit roughly five times the amount they were allowed under Euro rules. Today, public sector workers are rioting against new austerity measures and a Greek default (or "restructuring") on emergency EU loans seems likely. Meanwhile, the Greek public debate is distracted by the scapegoat-ish real estate scandal of The Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi.

Also: Michael Lewis's online Q&A on this article ("What we are looking at is a morally indignant Germany, which is kind of a new thing. In my lifetime, I can't remember a time when the Germans were allowed to be self-righteous. And now they are justifiably self-righteous, because everybody screwed them. It is creating a climate where German politicians tell the Greeks they need to sell the Acropolis.")

Previously: Michael Lewis on Iceland's financial meltdown

A Taste of Home in Foil Packets and Powder
Troops from nearly 50 lands dine on combat meals in Afghanistan — each reminding them of where they'd rather be. More about military rations from around the world.

A couple more examples of rations: French day's rations l Australian

"...I never saw anything like this. The animal that came from never had any fur on it."
I didn't put much stock in the possibility that a Dominican spiritualist working out of a basement in Union City, New Jersey, would have much to say about a lampshade that might have been made from human skin in a Nazi concentration camp. But there I was.... (via)

"I wasn't even thinking about the tragedy that happened in Wyoming."
Montana Tea Party president Tim Ravndall was fired today due to public outcry over jokes about the murder of Matthew Shepard -- Ravndall's contribution to a discussion on Facebook about the recent ACLU lawsuit filed on behalf of seven gay MT couples who wish to get married. Last week, Montana GOP senate candidate Jason Priest ran into similar trouble on Facebook. (Priest supports the criminalization of homosexual acts.)

QUAAAAAACK! Now that's a war face!
Always wished you could listen to a scene from Full Metal Jacket [imdb] with the voices provided by Disney(tm)-sounding characters? Well, then you'd like Full Metal Disney. (SLYT - nsfw - swearing).

Laser Microscope
"After witnessing the image of a mosquito in a laser beam outside, I decided to investigate the phenomenon further. I started by locating scuzzy water. Ponds lacking, I decided to take water out of the bowl of my 6 year old spider plant. I then filled a syringe and hung it above a laser so that a drop of water, almost ready to fall, was in the beam path." [via]

The Maltese Double Cross
A documentary about Pan AM flight 103A. [MLYT]

There has been a bit of a furore over the release of Al Magrahi. This 1994 documentary shows an alternative to the case as outlined by the FBI/CIA/Scottish police. It was (eventually) shown on (UK) Channel 4: "When Channel 4 agreed to show the film, the Scottish Crown Office and the U.S. Embassy in London sent press packs to the media, labeling the film "blatant propaganda" and attacking some of the film's interviewees, including Juval Aviv the head of Interfor."

Starts Slowly, builds to part 9, where Dennis Phipps, former head of British Airways Security, says: "At Malta, the records of the handling of that flight, KM180, were made available for me to see. There was no evidence of unaccompanied bags, all of the bags that were carried as passenger baggage were checked in by a passenger that had travelled on the flight."

Found via William Blum's Killing Hope - lockerbie page website.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16

What's your position?
Sitting, lying or standing: what's the pole position for reading? Both the Guardian and Abebooks want to know? AbeBooks wonders if it's weird to read lying on your stomach?

Daley says he will not run for re-election as mayor of Chicago
Richard M. Daley announces he will not run for re-election as mayor of Chicago in 2011. In the past half-century, Chicago has had only 13 years when a Daley was not mayor. Is this fallout from RMD's botched, and, many say, ill advised, Olympic bid? Or just the fact that the city is more strapped for cash than ever? Should be interesting.

The Revolution Will Be Counter Clockwise
The revolution will be counter clockwise! Jam City Rollergirls for WiiWare is ready to drop later this year. It will be the first video game treating the 75-year old sport of roller derby. Like most things derby, from the recent Down and Derby book to the WFTDA, to DNN, where you can watch live bouts, to the movie Whip It!, Jam City Rollergirls is supported by and features real players of this growing girl-power sport.

It's just too bad none of the teams in the game are from the western region, which is dominating the national rankings. Just sayin'. West coast woot woot.

"host activist...advocates a radical conception of freedom of expression"
Swedish webhost PRQ, home of The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, has been raided by police.

The raid was part of an ongoing international crackdown on movie and TV piracy. According to authorities, the target of the raid was not Wikileaks but rather the host itself, "who advocates a radical conception of freedom of expression, including...hosting the download site The Pirate Bay or sites advocating pedophilia."

14 European countries are said to be involved in an operation two years in the making, targeting the "Warez Scene".

What condition, if any, does Caster Semenya have?
What's Caster Semenya's diagnosis? According to somebody who isn't a doctor, let alone Semenya's doctor, the reputed intersex track phenom (previously) "has what's called congenital adrenal hyperplasia." At least, such is the declaration of Kristen Worley, an MTF transsexual cyclist. (The IAAF cleared Semenya to compete in July 2010, but vowed to keep medical details private.)

Worley isn't done yet! How do we bungle a problem like Semenya? "[W]e throw her into stirrups and virtually rape her. We did that because of the way her face looks and her voice."

What's My Line? A Who's Who of US Entertainers from Past Decades
What's My Line? was a weekly televised game show that first ran in the US from 1950 to 1967, and featured a celebrity panel whose task it was to discern the profession or identity of the person who sat before them. The panel first guessed at the profession of two "regular folks," with a third "famous mystery guest," when the the panel were blindfolded and the guests often tried to disguise their voices. Let's start with a Halloween episode, split in 3 parts on YouTube, ending with the mystery guest (Andy Griffith). The lengthy list of Mystery Guests include the Harlem Globetrotters, Walt Disney, a young Ronald Reagan and Salvador Dalí (previously).

Some people we might consider to be well-know today needed no masked panel, such as Jacques Cousteau and Colonel Sanders, but most big names of the day were mysteries who replied by knocks, whistles, or let the host speak for them. The very last mystery guest of the first run was the host himself, John Daly. When the show had it's second run from 1968 to 1975, the format was the same but the characters had changed, as seen in these clips with a young George Carlin, Rodney Dangerfield, and Aretha Franklin.

There are a LOT of clips on YouTube, but a few users have uploaded the bulk of the clips. crepehanger47 and NorbertR33 have loads of mystery guest clips, as does joanfontainefan, though with audio limited to the right or left channel, but they they're still fun to watch. dentelTV1 has a few complete shows split into parts, and bluelobster has a mix of first and second-era clips.

36" = 41"
Think men were free of "vanity sizing" because their clothes are standardized by inches? Think again. (Previously, sort of.)

MapReduce Leap
Globe Genie is a Google Street View teleporter.

A useful subset of the entire internet
On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography. "The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs" is a twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War. The twelve volumes cover a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. The set is part of a project exploring history and historiography facilitated by the internet, and visualising information, opinion, narrative and discussion, by James Bridle.