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What remains of the history of the executioner is his professionalism; his ability to efficiently manage the spectacle of death, to make his work seem like justice’s natural route, and to above all avoid disruption or botching. Like the throngs that gathered to witness the work of Charles-Henri Sanson or the beheading of Thomas Cromwell, we do not question the executioner’s purpose—to kill the condemned—only the cruelty of his methods.

How do you sign "new" words? The Deaf community works as a network, collectively brainstorming new sign language terms over the web, until dominant signs emerge.

A disposable camera was sent sans package through snail mail from Baltimore to Chicago to Boston and back to Baltimore again.

"moDernisT" was created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song "Tom's Diner", famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. Similarly, the video contains only material which was left behind during mp4 video compression.

These vague associations with arts and media are intended to send a message that, if voiced explicitly, we all know by now to ridicule: some of my best friends are black.

A series of tweets by @betajames spotted by @cwodtke. Instititutionware is about preserving the institution as it is and has been, enhancing/supporting rather than challenging/threatening.

Wikipedia has a declining population. Their own research identifies the editing process as a significant barrier to entry and as a reason for leaving. Their solution to this was a WYSIWYG editor, which failed for the basic reason that it denies the fact that Wikipedia is a program. I suggest a more conservative solution: as a program, Wikipedia needs an IDE that embraces and understands the Mediawiki language. That IDE should make rapid feedback its priority: realtime compilation, realtime diff viewing, and realtime correspondence between source and HTML.

Transmitting electricity is easy, moving air is hard.

Part of maturing, I think, is realizing that charges of acting in bad faith are often themselves made in bad faith, an attempt to explain away gaps in understanding between two people rather than trying to bridge them, or even make peace with them. That's as true in politics and in relationships as it is in music, but in music—arguably the strangest and most subjective art form there is—the best option often is "make peace." Not everything is for you, even you of eclectic tastes and voracious listening appetite. That doesn't mean others are lying about their enjoyment.

The entertainment of your childhood is not sacred. Adults, our childhoods are over, and waxing apoplectic over Michael Bay’s Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies won’t do anything but broadcast our inability to move beyond the silly, entertaining ephemera of our youth, or understand how it might appeal to a younger generation with a different set of ideas about how entertainment works.

Two Twitter image bots go back and forth for a while. this is an eternal robot love story

I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second.

Working in tech–and especially trying to advance within it–asks of us our support for the self-defined mythology about our industry and the people within it. You don’t go around telling people you only code for the money while you still need a coding job, that’s suicide. You have to say you code for the challenge at minimum, or the beauty of naked logic or the unlimited power to create, if you want to really sell it.

The site offers a very clear picture of a society where wages are so low that they are no longer worth striving for, where ambitious young people cannot advance their educations without going into debt, and where the misfortune of illness results in financial catastrophe. For the people in phases of their lives where they had to serve as a caretaker to an ill partner or relative, the sex work offered flexibility, even if their earnings were often unpredictable or paltry.

If complexity and connectivity are necessary conditions for the perceived success (the complement of failure) of any given technology, it stands to reason that the risk of technological failure will increase over time, not fall. I don't see this as a dystopian inevitability though. I think people are at their best and truest selves in the moments following failures. And to a simplistic extent, the human experience is one of either solving problems or creating problems to solve.

Andy Beta scours New York—from a museum to a summer camp upstate—trying to locate the essence of classic dancefloors via memory, imagination, and bass.

I’m worried about those things but more worried about getting you out of bed and dressed in the morning. I’m worried about looking out the window one day and seeing a column of fire but more worried about teaching you to be sad when I could be teaching you to be happy. I’m worried about the college teacher writing for the New York Times who also works as a waiter. I want you to have careers and cats; I want you to have apartments without roommates in your thirties.

With the help of recycled cardboard and quick-drying concrete, these modern bookends with high-end appeal are budget-friendly and easy to make at home.

Thousands of MS-DOS games playable in-browser. Software for MS-DOS machines that represent entertainment and games. The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software. Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable.

@jbushnell muses on what it means to be able to stream everything. Guest appearances and useful proddings by @debcha and @mathpunk

Is Pharrell’s identification as "New Black" a demarcation, separating himself from Old Black millions? Safy Hallan Farah examines the spectre of Whiteness in the success stories of Kanye, Jay-Z and Pharrell.

Proper dog park etiquette is important if you want your dog to stay out of fights when playing. Anyone who frequents the dog park and knows about dog behavior probably has a few horror stories to share. Here are some basic rules to keep your dog out of trouble.

Hello! I love satellite imagery and topographic maps so I made several wallpapers with those gorgeous pictures.

If you make a joke, and people get really offended, it's almost certainly because you violated this rule. People don't get offended randomly. Explaining that "it was just a joke" doesn't help; everyone knows what a joke is. The problem is that you used a joke as a means of being an asshole. Hiding behind a dummy or a stage persona or a bot won't help you.

On tweeting less in 2015.

1. It’s almost impossible to compare past and present because of lack of data. 2. Art has always been a terrible way to make money. 3. It’s less about there being "no money" and more about where the existing money flows.

The CSS property vertical-align has some seemingly mysterious rules at work. This article forces them to show their true color.

As it happens, this is not the first time this bird has yodeled its way into popular music.

Any band who goes on Letterman for the next month, at least—like the one that was on last night—has been completely screwed to hell by this one.

‘Papers, Please’ in particular is recommended.