The Flight of The URLs

Ben Kingsley and Petey, via Liartown USA

1. I've been playing a lot of PinOut!, a neon-lit infinite pinball game for iOS. Expect to buy the paid upgrade (which allows you to continue from checkpoints) after about five minutes.

2. Sunday Books is a new Dublin-based magazine and book store that leans towards design-related titles. Small, but perfectly formed.

3. Have a listen to the old-timey Westworld covers of The Cure, Radiohead, Soundgarden and The Rolling Stones:

4. An abandoned US satellite has started transmitting again.

5. Watch John Berger and Susan Sontag chew the fat for an hour:

The Flight of The URLs

Inokashira Park blossoms © Danilo Dungo

Human ethics update May 2016: "Having a person stuck to the hood might prevent a human driver from fleeing the scene". Google has patented a sticky car bonnet that ‘traps pedestrians like flies‘, in theory protecting them from secondary impact injuries AND hit-and-runs.

Listen to Moderat's 2016 Essential Mix, featuring tracks from Alec Empire, Slayer, Basic Soul Unit, Vangelis and dozens more:

“All you need to do is take two subcritical masses of uranium and smash them into each other to form a critical mass. Neutrons strike the heavy uranium nucleus, which splits, releasing a tremendous jolt of energy along with two or more neutrons, which split more nuclei, setting off a chain reaction that grows and grows and finally manifests itself as a huge fireball over a populated area, blinding, asphyxiating, incinerating, or crushing every living being within a five-mile radius.”

— Atomic John: a truck driver's 'nuclear archaeology'

What happens when we get into the habit of following GPS directions uncritically? An annoying detour here; a harrowing death there.

Cillian Murphy has put together the lineup for IMMA's Summer Party and, in addition to having very piercing eyes, he's made a great job of it.

Jonny Greenwood's presence looms large on Radiohead's new album A Moon Shaped Pool. Watch him perform with the London Contemporary Orchestra, in one of Boiler Room's more against-type broadcasts: 

The photograph at the top of this post is by Danilo Dungo, who took a drone above Tokyo's Inokashira Park to get a new perspective on the city's iconic blossom fall. See more of his work at National Geographic.

The Flight of The URLs

Photo via Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Researchers at Wake Forest University have created a 3D printer capable of extruding bone, muscle and ear tissue. 

“What happens if you have a lot of money, versus what happens if you have no money—none? In The Jinx it’s not whether he did it or not; it’s, you know, how come he’s never been prosecuted successfully for any of the things that he’s done? And I think the answer is a pretty simple one—money.”

— Errol Morris on Making a Murderer

“Completely bullshit.” The NSA's terribly-named SKYNET program, which rates the ‘terroristiness’ of people by way of a machine learning algorithm, may be killing thousands of innocent people. 

Listen to William Carrà's 48-minute Donal Dineen-ish The Heart Has Its Reasons Which Reason Knows Nothing Of mix:

Wyclef Jean's Reddit AMA goes really badly.  

All Your Base Are Belong To Us is 15 years old:

The Flight of The URLs

National Archives

Retronaut has a bunch of great National Archive photos of Wonderland, a pre-digital arcade in Kansas City. 

“In 1948, the week before Election Day, [George Gallup] said, ‘We have never claimed infallibility, but next Tuesday the whole world will be able to see down to the last percentage point how good we are.’ He predicted that Dewey would beat Truman. He was quite entirely wrong.

Gallup liked to say that pollsters take the ‘pulse of democracy.’ ‘Although you can take a nation’s pulse,’ E. B. White wrote after the election, ‘you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.’”

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker on opinion polls as “a form of disenfranchisement”.

Listen to .wav goodbye, a new collection of home recordings fresh from Richie Egan's hard drive.

Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever, 1963 vs 1991 editions. Father has taken up his rightful place at the stove. 

Watch Aran Quinn and Damien Bastelica's title sequence for Offset London, which is taking place today and tomorrow in Shoreditch Town Hall:

The Flight of The URLs

Jazzmine Beaulieu

Jazzmine Beaulieu shoots the Holi Festival-inspired A Colourful Life.

“The headquarters of FIFA takes up about 11 acres on a wooded hill above Zurich ... In a Strangelovian lair on the third subterranean level, Blatter holds executive committee meetings in a conference room with a floor of lapis lazuli. The room is lit by a round, crystal chandelier meant to evoke a soccer stadium.”

Bloomberg Businessweek on the inner workings of FIFA. (Thanks to Joe O'Donnell for pointing me to this piece.)

Vanity Fair used a computer without internet to keep its Caitlyn Jenner cover secret. 

British Airways senior first officer Mark Vanhoenacker writes about the experience of flying from London to Tokyo in In Flight, a beautifully executed piece for the New York Times.

Listen to the title track from the upcoming Beirut album, No No No:

The Flight of The URLs

Amezaiku is the Japanese art of candy sculpture, dating from the late 700s. See more like the goldfish lollypop above at Ameshin. 

Paul Morton interviews Daniel Clowes over at The Millions.

Seymour Hersh claims that the official narrative around the killing of Osama Bin Laden is 90% horseshit. 

Every outfit that Alicia Florrick wears in every episode of The Good Wife. 

The illusion of control and the buttons that do nothing.