For my part, I *love* that one of the included minifigs is Mike Ehrmantraut, with a *fantastic* facial expression. Nice touch!
BREAKING BAD Meth Superlab LEGO Playset
FYI, Citizen Brick has some other excellent custom LEGO minifigs, including “Norwegian Black Metal Enthusiast” and ” ‘Botany’ Enthusiast”:
Author: dave-o
42 gauge pickup winding wire
New Supplier!
This is the wire you’ll use to make the pickup for the $10 Electric Guitar (Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred Project 13) as described in the book.
A 750-foot spool of 42-gauge pickup winding wire will make four or five diddley bow pickups. It’s a good price for the hobbyist (just $6!), and I’ve had solid service from the company, Antique Electronic Supply.
Holy Crap! “Beautiful LEGO” Is a Hella Apt Title for this Book!
No Starch Press (my publisher) is releasing Beautiful LEGO this fall, and it’s shaping up to be a very aptly titled book. Check this out!
No Starch’s other coffee-table-ish books (like LEGO Adventure and CUlt of LEGO have been consistent crowd-pleasures in my family (and that’s across age groups, from my folks down to my seven-year-old), so I’m pretty excited to see what’s in this latest offering.
OH GOOD GOD! THE SUN IS *REVERSING POLARITY!!!* which is gonna hella screw up my sun compass, right?
I tell you, if it isn’t one damn thing, it’s another. First the hummingbirds are fighting at the feeder, and now this.
The Sun’s Magnetic Field is about to Flip – NASA Science
Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun’s vast magnetic field is about to flip.
“It looks like we’re no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal,” says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. “This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system.”
“It looks like we’re no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal,” says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. “This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system.”
Wrath of the Pistol Shrimp: Sonoluminescence
I’ve geeked elsewhere in the past about the terrors of the tiny pistol shrimp–a lil crustacean that can clack its claws so hard it generates nuke-grade heat and noise (not an exaggeration! check that link!)
If you want a few details on how any of this could be remotely possible, check this out:
Chomsky and I Are Everyman! #RaceIsOver #FACT
It’s come to my attention that, according to Google, this selfie of Chomsky and me:
(from this article)
is “visually similar” to these selfies:
It’s as though Google Image Search is the true Mexican magical realism camera: In his heart of hearts Chomsky is saucy chicks and happy black kids (*Race is over!*), while I’m the stern bartender/goofy galpal/cranky trannie–which is all pretty accurate, actually.
Noam Chomsky and a “Journalist” Walk into a Bar . . .
I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. In a bit of a departure from my normal tedious exegeses of gun statistics and local bridge policy, this latest column is based on a conversation I had with Noam Chomsky in early July. It begins something like this:
I’m interviewing Noam Chomsky in the bar of the Campus Inn a block from the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The bar is dim and entirely abandoned at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning. Because I’m highly distractible, I can’t help but periodically marvel at the symmetry of this: I only ended up interviewing Noam Chomsky at all because I’d Tweeted a link to a joke about Heisenberg, Gödel, and Chomsky walking into a bar [1], and Dave Askins (editor of this fine publication) had responded by noting that Chomsky would be speaking at the University of Michigan a week or so later, and essentially dared me to interview him.
I’d agreed, on the assumption that it would be impossible to land an interview with the man almost universally regarded as America’s foremost public intellectual. I was wrong [ . . . ]
. . . and goes downhill from there. Enjoy!
(For those more interested in Chomsky and less in my chatter, you can read the unedited transcript of the interview or listen to all 48 minutes of the audio.)
Linguistics Krazy Korner: “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”
“The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” is a 92-character modern poem written in Classical Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao, in which every syllable has the sound shi (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. [Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
In other words, the following series of sushes is this poem:
In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.
Man, now I’m mad-crazy craving stone-lion sushi . . .
Continue reading “Linguistics Krazy Korner: “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den””
“Being Art Isn’t a Property of a Thing, but a Property of How We Perceive that Thing” — Vi Hart
Twelve Tones – YouTube
This video is ostensibly about twelve-tone composition techniques–but do not let a disinterest in “experimental” music cause you to miss out.
First off, the music Vi tosses off to illustrate her points is so hauntingly beautiful it’s just about crippling. This arrangement of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (explored at length around the 21min mark) is so beautiful it makes me ache. I love it, without irony or snark. I just *love* it, love how the sound of the 12-tone recombination has guided the dark and tortuous new text.
But, although that’s the focus of the video, this talk (recitation? recital? lecture? demo? “vlog”?) is really about creativity and the rudimentary mechanics of artistic craft (both for the nominal creator and nominal audience), as well as the concreteness of artistic “abstraction” and the fucktardity of current US copyright law[*].
This video is incredible and wonderful; it’s worth your 30-minutes, especially if you aspire to *any* creative endeavor.
*thx for the tip @logista!*
The US-Canada Border: Signifiers and Signified, Precision and Accuracy, Errors All the Way Down
OK, this video makes no direct mention of the things it makes me think about—nonetheless, it’s neat unto itself and worth your time.
But what it gets me thinking about is the difference between being “accurate” (i.e., mating the objectively observable world) and “precise” (i.e., being broken into suitably small gradations for the work at hand)—because this is a story about both human failures in accuracy and precision. And, to the degree this is about politics (which is usually how the US-Canada No Touching Zone is presented; this is the third or fourth time this has come up for me [DISCLOSURE: I’m from and reside in Michigan]), it’s about how quickly humans begin to fully and deeply conflate the signifier (the word, the map, the photo) with the signified (the notions these hashes and squiggles imply, the *actual* land you’re standing on, your *actual* living-breathing child). It also makes you think about all the kinds of *errors* there are out there, beyond simple fat-fingering and typos. I mean true, legit errors in how we compartmentalize things in our damn little monkey brains.
Canada & The United States: Bizarre Borders Part 2 – YouTube