This is why they call him "The Boss".

Sui Generis

Yo-Yo Ma & Lil' Buck

L’appel du Vide

I want what I write to be like a buoy that marks a rock; I don't want anyone else wrecked on it. ~ Derek Raymond

Girls who rock. Sublime.

"Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a robot hand that has a 100% winning rate playing rock-paper-scissors. Using a high-speed camera, the robot recognises within one millisecond which shape the human hand is making, then produces the corresponding winning shape."

In the future human beings are going to have to learn to how to control/suppress their physical ticks and tells because we will be constantly surveilled by high speed/resolution cameras controlled by high performance computers. Orwellian!

How the biggest landfill in the world got turned into a public park earning $12 million a year.

"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life" ~ Oscar Wilde

"The object of Art is to give life a shape." ~ William Shakespeare

Colophon

This website is newly created using the Python programming language on Google's App Engine infrastructure with the addition of Django for the template language and URL mapping functionality.

History of the Euro

"And when crises arise, economically disarmed nations have little to do but wipe away government regulations wholesale, privatize state industries en masse, slash taxes and send the European welfare state down the drain."

Part of a great series of short videos from Big Think.

"Then there was the centrepiece of the weekend spinning – the abolition of housing benefit for the under-25s. With the cosy middle-class assumption that mum and dad can always welcome back jobless twentysomethings, this sounded like a suggestion from a gin-soaked colonel in his clubhouse."

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819

"Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll toward a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap." ~ Derek Raymond

"Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings." ~ Søren Kierkegaard

There's a new Sun Kil Moon album which you can listen to on Spotify but it's Mark Kozelek's early output with RHP that still draws me in.

In my opinion this is the most plaintive song about the fading of youth ever written and it was the very first song on RHP's début album. What a way to introduce yourself and your band to the world!

Red House Painters, 24

Lonesome George has died. The Darwinian in me knows that millions of species have come and gone over the billennia but losing something so unique still pulls on my heart strings. At least he finally escaped the melancholy that must have afflicted him as the last of his kind.

Cocteau Twins, Cherry Coloured Funk

"The archbishop of Canterbury has denounced David Cameron's "big society", saying that it comes across as aspirational waffle that was "designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable".