Friday, November 20, 2009

Friday Links!

Leading off this week, an absolutely brilliant piece of writing by Patrick Hruby about Cambodia, baseball, the heart of darkness, and everything in-between. It's Field of Schemes?

From David Gloier, a link to a story about the desire for perfect-sounding music (via editing) has made it much less interesting. The story is "The Death Of Mistakes", and it also features the best explanation (with accompanying audio example) of how dynamic range compression is ruining sound quality.

From Tim Street, a link to a Guardian feature on 100 years of great press photographs, and it's terrific.

Here's an intriguing story from Newsweek about the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and it's controlled nuclear fusion project.

From Phil Honeywell, a link to a short film about the Dock Ellis no-hitter (which he allegedly threw while on LSD). It's an audio interview with Ellis, but what makes it stand out is the accompanying animation. Ellis mentions that he was throwing the ball "all over the place" that day, and it's true--he had eight walks in that game (versus a career average of 2.9 per 9 innings pitched).

From Jesse Leimkuehler, a heartwarming story about a student who has Down Syndrome inducted into the National Honor Society.

From hippo, about something that is specifically NOT about the end of the world: man-made (but very tiny) black holes possible. Also, a link to a New York Times article about the always-elegant solar sail (in this case, the LightSail-1).

From Shane Courtrille, a link to an absolutely inspired mod--an "8-bit NES" version of Left 4 Dead. It's outstanding.

From Jonathan Arnold, a link to an exhaustive analysis and 3-D recreation of the infamous Flight 1549.

From The Edwin Garcia Links Machine, an amazing video about a National Geographic photographer's bizarre encounter with a leopard seal.

From Jeff Gardiner (and you really need to take a look at these images), it's fractals in three dimensions.

I guarantee you never expected one of these (thanks Michael Lange): an electronically modified didgerodoo.

From Paul, and this is required listening, it's the top 50 worst videogame voice acting samples of all-time. They're excellent choices, too, although I'm actually rather fond of #24. Also, and these are quite interesting, a series of nine drawings done by an artist under the influence of LSD as part of a government research program in the late 1950s.

From Rob Cigan, a link to a story about 'dark flow' and how it extends towards the edge of the universe.

From Sirius, and this is quite spectacular, it's a 16th century steel helmet.

From The Edwin Garcia Links Machine, a story about the remarkable discovery of a highly advanced WWII Japanese submarine).

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