- “They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan / When they discovered a slave cemetary there” 19th-c. African-American village unearthed in what is now NYC’s Central Park
- Drug Dealers May Have Wiped Out “Uncontacted” Amazon Tribe [via]
- Where’s WALL-E? [via]
- If the Kindle is $0 next August, I’m totally buying one. Otherwise, not so much.
- And finally, A tear jerking story about Animal Crossing [via]
robots
Monday various
- Strange Horizons is looking for female reviewers.
- Where was the robotics merit badge when I was a Boy Scout?
- On the decline of The Daily. I lost interest almost immediately in the app. [via]
- Reinventing the Muppets.
- And finally, Sandworm Size Chart:
Thursday various
- “Julie Powell managed to cook/blog her way through all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook in a year, learning valuable life lessons along the way. I hope to learn as much, if not more, by watching the film Julie & Julia every day for a year.”
You know, as a joke, it’s pretty funny. I haven’t seen the film or read the original book myself, but my understanding is that only the “Julia” parts are actually worth watching. (In fact, someone out there must have created a cut of the film that excises Julie Powell altogether, right?) But to actually do this? Watch the same movie every day for 365 days in a row? That way lies madness. [via]
- Nathan Rabin on Bill Murray in Larger Than Life:
Like pop music and playing center field, slapstick is a young man’s game. Nobody wants to be a fiftysomething Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working, yet Larger Than Life persists in having Murray flail his way through dispiriting pratfalls and physical comedy. In his early comedies, Murray’s deadpan under-reactions felt like an inveterate anarchist’s passive-aggressive rebellion against corrupt authority. Here, they merely broadcast Murray’s understandable lack of engagement with his material. Murray wears a simultaneously bored and humiliated look throughout the film that says, “I’m getting too old for this shit.â€
- The Case of the Vanishing Blonde [via]:
After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.
- You know, I’m not particularly looking forward to the new Thor movie, but here’s one good thing to come out of it: its casting has outraged hate groups. For that reason alone, I applaud casting Idris Elba as a Norse god.
- And finally, I for one welcome our new Jeopardy-solving robot overlords.
Monday various
- Robots with synthetic skin? [via]
- They don’t build safes like they used to.
- Underground chefs? I had no idea, but apparently, there are more than a few. [via]
- If you’re going to hack an electronic voting machine, this is the way to do it. [via]
- And finally, the YouTube Time Machine. [via]
Monday various
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Robot Needs. [via]
You know, I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of Maslow’s hierarchy before just a couple of weeks ago, and since then I’ve seen multiple parodies of it. Weird how that works. [via]
- Good news for Quantum Leap fans: there will be a new movie. The bad news: it probably won’t be about Dr. Sam Beckett.
- Man, Spock’s back must have been killing him at the end of the day!
- Google says there are 129,864,880 books in the world. If I’m lucky, I read about 50 a year. You do the math. Luckily, I intend to live to be several millions years old. [via]
Of course, Google may just have made that number up, so who knows how much I’ll have to Methuselah-it-up before I get through just what’s already been published. (At least I know I can skip that Justin Bieber book, so that’s a load off my mind.) [via]
- And finally, Guy Walks Across America [via]: