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Call him Mr. Limpet, Mr. Furley, Wormie, Les Calhoun, or Barney Fife. Actor Don Knotts has passed away at 81.

Originally by Smart Dalek from MetaFilter on February 25, 2006, 4:46pm

Reasonable people are capable of thinking about complex issues without resorting to simplistic oversimplifications. These two scholarly types discuss what seems obvious but lacks traction amongst most people. What can be done to make these voices heard and more importantly, accepted?

Originally by mulligan from MetaFilter on February 24, 2006, 7:15pm

Gunkanjima or Battleship Island is 480 x 160 meters and was home to more than 5000 people. Abandoned for more than 40 years it is a microcosm of 20th century industrial development. A soundtrack to the photos. Or take the multimedia tour. Urban exploration.

Originally by arse_hat from MetaFilter on February 25, 2006, 2:22am

Xeni Jardin:
BoingBoing reader dwlfennell says,

Yes, Abe Vigoda is still alive (as of this posting). In fact, he’s celebrating his 85th birthday today - more than 20 years after people magazine mistakenly reported his death. Well, there’s no need to endlessly question his mortality any longer. Just download the “Abe Vigoda status” extension for Firefox to keep tabs on whether or not he’s still alive.

Link to the Abe Vigoda Status Firefox Extension. Reader comment: Mongo says,

Keeping in the spirit of the occassion: Link

Originally by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing on February 24, 2006, 4:43pm

Xeni Jardin:
Google today announced the addition of 103 historic films from the US National Archives in Google Video. Included:

* Footage of the Apollo 11 mission, and the first person to step on the moon: Link.
* From 1894, “Carmencita - Spanish Dance” — one of the oldest films at the archives: Link (screengrab at left).
* A representative selection of U.S. government newsreels, documenting World War II, 1941-45: Link. 
* NASA documentaries on spaceflight: Link. 
* Films from the 1930s, that document the history and establishment of a nationwide system of national and state parks. /
* Early footage of Native American life, the Boulder Dam, water and wind erosion in America, Civilian Conservation Corps workers, and the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
* From 1970, a motion picture documenting recreational programs for inner city youth: Link

ouncement.

Originally by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing on February 24, 2006, 5:41pm

Antonio Lazcano in Natural History Magazine:

Twenty-five years ago, Francis Crick, who co–discovered the structure of DNA, published a provocative book titled Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. Crick speculated that early in Earth’s history a civilization from a distant planet had sent a spaceship to Earth bearing the seeds of life. Whether or not Crick was serious about his proposal, it dramatized the difficulties then plaguing the theory that life originated from chemical reactions on Earth. Crick noted two major questions for the theory. The first one—seemingly unanswerable at the time—was how genetic polymers such as RNA came to direct protein synthesis, a process fundamental to life. After all, in contemporary life-forms, RNA translates genetic information encoded by DNA into instructions for making proteins.

The second question was, What was the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere? Many planetary scientists at the time viewed Earth’s earliest atmosphere as rich in carbon dioxide. More important, they were also skeptical about a key assumption made by many chemists who were investigating life’s origin—namely that Earth’s early atmosphere was highly “reducing,” or rich in methane, ammonia, and possibly even free hydrogen. In a widely publicized experiment done in 1953, the chemists Stanley L. Miller of the University of California, San Diego, and Harold C. Urey had demonstrated that in such an atmosphere, organic, or carbon-based, compounds could readily form and accumulate in a “prebiotic soup.” But if a highly reducing atmosphere was destined for the scientific dustbin, so was the origin-of-life scenario to which it gave rise.

In Crick’s mind, the most inventive way to solve both problems was to assume that life had not evolved on Earth, but had come here from some other location—a view that still begs the question of how life evolved elsewhere.

Crick was neither the first nor the last to try to explain life’s origin with creative speculation. Given so many difficult and unanswered questions about life’s earthly origin, one can easily understand why so many investigators become frustrated and give in to speculative fantasies. But even the most sober attempts to reconstruct how life evolved on Earth is a scientific exercise fraught with guesswork. The evidence required to understand our planet’s prebiotic environment, and the events that led to the first living systems, is scant and hard to decipher. Few geological traces of Earth’s conditions at the time of life’s origin remain today. Nor is there any fossil record of the evolutionary processes preceding the first cells. Yet, despite such seemingly insurmountable obstacles, heated debates persist over how life emerged. The inventory of current views on life’s origin reveals a broad assortment of opposing positions. They range from the suggestion that life originated on Mars and came to Earth aboard meteorites, to the idea that life emerged from “metabolic” molecular networks, fueled by hydrogen released during the formation of minerals in hot volcanic settings.

This flurry of popular ideas has often distracted attention from what is still the most scientifically plausible theory of life’s origin, the “heterotrophic” theory.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on February 24, 2006, 4:27pm

Happy new year, and apologies for the extended break. I was both busy and lazy during the holidays, and now I’m waist-deep in my first-ever New York apartment search. I’ve lived in New York since 1987, but this is the first time I’ve ever actually had to look for a place. After a decade in a rent-stabilized 400-square-foot studio on a great Upper West Side block a few yards from Riverside Park, I’m planning to move downtown in the next month or two, probably to the East Village. I spent most of the weekend racing around looking at apartments in a few downtown neighborhoods, and I actually found a couple of places that I’d be happy to live in. I’m hoping to score one of those places in the next few days.

I have a big backlog of cool links and other material that I’ve been meaning to post. I’m going to be swamped this week, too, but I’m planning to get back to a more regular posting schedule by next weekend.

I’ve got apartments on the brain, so for now I’ll leave you with a link to Architecture of Density, an amazing series of Hong Kong images by the photographer Michael Wolf. Here’s a brief description of the project from Wolf’s site:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings’ facades.

The photographs are on display through February 26 at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

Originally from panopticist on January 9, 2006, 12:48am

Earlier this month, Britain’s Channel 4 aired The Root of All Evil?, a two-part exploration of religious faith hosted and narrated by Richard Dawkins, the eminent Oxford ethologist and author who is one of the world’s most outspoken proponents of the theory of evolution. He’s also an aggressive critic of religion. The Root of All Evil? follows Dawkins as he travels to some of the world’s religious centers—among them Jerusalem, Lourdes, and Colorado Springs—to observe services and to interview leaders and followers of various faiths.

Tipped off by a thread on Echo, I bittorrented both episodes a few days ago. From the vantage point of the United States, the program is remarkable: You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country’s airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening. Dawkins’s narration drips with contempt; as he goes about his rounds, it’s as if he can hardly restrain himself from shouting, “I’m surrounded by IDIOTS!” The smoke coming out of his ears leaves a trail behind him wherever he goes.

In the seven-and-a-half minute clip linked through the image below, Dawkins visits Colorado Springs to attend a sermon by an influential but proudly ignorant pastor. In a conversation with Dawkins after the sermon, the pastor likens the event to a rock concert. Dawkins suggests that it was more akin to a Nuremberg rally—a comparison that the pastor appears to be too uneducated and ignorant to be offended by.

[I found the two torrent files on a members-only site. You can download the torrent for the second of the two parts here; the first episode is surely available on other torrent sites, too. For information about bittorrenting files, see this item I posted in July.]

Originally from panopticist on January 24, 2006, 8:53pm

I’m finally able to post something I’ve been trying to get my hands on for months: the cover of the May/June 1996 issue of Ms., which contained the most embarrassing copyediting error I’ve ever seen. A couple of weeks ago I finally ran into someone who owned a copy of the issue, and she was nice enough to let me borrow it to scan it. This is not online anywhere else, as far as I can tell, except here, but that image is so small that it’s only barely readable.

This is totally a real cover; it was available on newsstands for two months in 1996. I saw it right when it came out, and after laughing nervously for a minute or two, I felt my heart sink to my toes. The sheer horror of the huge misspelled word in the main coverline is compounded tenfold by the gruesome irony of the actual word that is misspelled.

It’s easy to laugh at this, but I’m actually surprised that cover mistakes don’t happen more often (though it’s hard to imagine a cover error more ghastly than this one). Magazines typically ship their covers to the printer right at the end of the close, a time when staff members, especially at small magazines like Ms., are often burned out from a week or two (or more) of long nights. Errors are sometimes more likely to happen in 48-point type than in 10-point type, because editors occasionally don’t read large type as carefully as they read small type. I don’t know how this mistake happened, but I’m guessing that only a small handful of people looked at the cover before it was sent to the printer—and no one happened to catch the mistake in proofs. I can only imagine the surprise and horror the editors felt when the first finished copies arrived from the printer…

(The issue is listed for sale on the Ms. website, but when you click through to buy a copy you’re informed that the issue is out of stock.)

Originally from panopticist on December 14, 2005, 12:22am

One of a series of ads created by Saatchi & Saatchi New York for an apparently fictitious printing company called Hudson Repro:

Graphic-design geeks will probably find this hilarious; most other people will simply be confused. If you fall into the latter category, read this for some insight. Go to Frederik Samuel’s blog for two more from the same series. A fourth ad from the series is here.

[via The Spunker.]

Originally from panopticist on November 21, 2005, 8:06pm