Hip hop heads can be nerds too.
Greatest commercial ever? Yup! Hearing RZA scream “and the BORDERS” is a surprising effective advertising technique.
from on .
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Okay, not really. But Shortz and a fan got into a little spat over the definition of the word “illin’” and it’s inclusion as a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. For those of you who don’t know him, Shortz is the NYT , and seems to be a pretty nice guy.
A clue in Saturday’s New York Times crossword has caused an Internet uproar over the correct meaning of the word “illin’.”
The divisive clue, 28-down, read, “Wack, in hip-hop,” and the correct answer provided was ILLIN.
UPDATE: Colbert had a field day with this, and invited Mike D from the Beastie Boys . According to Mike D, Shortz is wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, Chris Brown is an awful human being, but a ton people have been giving the cover treatment to his track Look at Me Now. I can’t even say that I like the original that much, but I get a big kick out of the covers. It might just be the idea that these random people (granted, Karmin is getting a bit famous now) are surprisingly talented. But regardless, I present to you two of my favourites so far.
Serious
Extra Serious
Check out this pretty serious mashup. They had me when they mashed the Theme from Shaft and the Imperial March from Star Wars.
from on .
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Proving once again the irresistible allure of Barack Obama, Twitter has announced they will scrap the 140-character tweet limit for the President’s upcoming .
Now let’s see if he can use that mojo to raise a more important limit: the .
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I kind of like this idea. For those of you who don’t know what the Internet Archive does, they’re stated mission is to offer access to a “non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.” An ambitious goal, no doubt.
As part of this mission, they have been scanning as many books as they can get their hands on. They state that:
The goal is to preserve one copy of every published work. The universe of unique titles has been estimated at close to one hundred million items. Many of these are rare or unique, so we do not expect most of these to come to the Internet Archive; they will instead remain in their current libraries. But the opportunity to preserve over ten million items is possible, so we have designed a system that will expand to this level. Ten million books is approximately the size of a world-class university library or public library, so we see this as a worthwhile goal. If we are successful, then this set of cultural materials will last for centuries and could be beneficial in ways that we cannot predict.
Thus, as they scan these books, they also want to archive a hardcopy of the same volume for the future. In an age where traditional publishers are hurting, and ebook sales are starting to surpass traditional book sales, I think this is a noble goal. I love the tactile feeling of a physical book, even though I tend to favour my ebook reader these days.
The system, as described by the Internet Archive, is as follows:
In January of 2009, we started developing the physical preservation systems. Fortunately there is a wealth of literature on book preservation documenting studies on the fibers of paper as well as results from multi-year storage experiments. Based on this technical literature and specifications from depositories around the world, Tom McCarty, the engineer who designed the Internet Archive’s Scribe book-scanning system, began to design, build, and test a modular storage system in Oakland California. This system uses the infrastructure developed around the most used storage design of the 20th century, the shipping container. Rows of stacked shipping containers are used like 40′ deep shelving units. In this configuration, a single shipping container can hold around 40,000 books, about the same as a standard branch library, and a small building can hold millions of books.
Tyler Cowen, an economist and , recently published an eBook entitled ““, which charts the gradual decline in innovation in the United States and its effect on the global economy. Here he is discussing the book and its hypothesis at a TED event:
His argument is certainly a persuasive one. One has to believe, though, that the stagnation he’s identified will only be temporary. The Internet, plus forthcoming changes in energy generation and use (new , hydrogen fuel, etc.) seem to portend a new wave of innovation that will society.
Arnold’s in a lot of hot water these days. Plus he took an acting break to run California, so it’s easy to forget that he made some classic films back in the day. Like Twins, which likely has the highest number of unintentionally hilarious lines in Schwarzenegger’s oeuvre. Exhibit A:
Also great about Twins is its soundtrack, featuring the Spinners and, strangely, 2 Live Crew:
Here’s hoping the about Twins 2 are true.
for helping publicize this idea, and to user over at AudioKarma for the original post. It”s fascinating to thin that someone along the line figured out that it was a good idea to put something so foreign and crazy on something you normally want to take very careful care of. But the basic principle is that:
In short wood glue and the material LP albums are so chemically similar that the wood glue can’t bind to the record. It can however bind to everything else on the record which includes oil, dust, dirt, fungus, the crayon your nephew rubbed on it, and so on. You’re essentially giving your record a spa wax and ripping all the impurities off of it with the glue.
The original forum post is , with more details.
A couple of years ago Fu-Quon posted a video that made me laugh for days. The 1992 classic Don’t Copy that Floppy. It was a pretty hilarious anti-piracy clip featuring DP, the digital rapper from cyberspace. What you don’t know is that they made an official sequel.
Check it out below.
