Michel Vuijlsteke's weblog

Vital Signs: The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down | Health & Medicine | DISCOVER Magazine
Real-life House: A doctor is baffled: Why did a giant man walk into the ER holding a tiny woman by her feet?

Everything you never wanted to know about the mites that eat, crawl, and have sex on your face | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine
New Scientist published a story yesterday stating that rosacea – a common skin disease characterised by red blotches on one’s face – may be “caused” (more on this later) by “tiny bugs closely related to spiders living in the pores of your face.” Tiny bugs that “crawl about your face in the dark”, lay eggs in your pores, and release a burst of faeces when they die.

Edge of the abyss
Michael Schofield thought his young daughter, Janni, was a genius, until he realised her bright mind masked an inner darkness.

Spotify Classical Playlists: Frank Zappa: Chronological Discography (available soon on Spotify)
I put all Zappa albums into one playlist, sorted by release date. From Freak Out!, debut of the Mothers of Invention, to the posthumous release Mystery Disc. You can subscribe to it now and (hopefully) the tracks will be available as soon as the last license issues are sorted out. If you are a premium user, you can set the playlist, or some tracks, as available offline, so you will know when the playlist/tracks become available (to download) without checking everyday.

Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes – Marco.org
I sure as hell wouldn’t build a business on Twitter, and I don’t think I’ll even build any nontrivial features on it anymore. And if I were in the Twitter-client business, I’d start working on another product.

Kijk nu:  

Aan de pro-kant: ‘t is helemaal legaal en gemakkelijk. Aan de contra-kant: er moet Spotify op de computer staan. 

En zou dat werken op mobiel en alles? (Update: ‘t werkt alvast op een iPhone, als de Spotify-app geïnstalleerd staat, tenminste. Magisch!)

I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found. | Blog – Hooktheory
In this article, we’ll look at the statistics gathered from 1300 choruses, verses, etc. of popular songs to discover the answer to a few basic questions. First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. For example, if a chord is found in a song, what can we say about the probability for what the next chord will be that comes after it?

The Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk, Part V: A Brief Review of Charles Carreon’s Complaint | Popehat
Yes, it's totally true, as anyone who has read about this story or met Charles Carreon could attest: interacting with him is clearly a memorable joy, akin to being farted upon by a unicorn, and his actions normally inspire only adulation and the occasional rapturous fainting incident.

Can We Please Move Past Apple’s Silly, Faux-Real UIs? | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
In many ways, the iPad book app feels like it was designed with the intention to look simply like a book, whereas it appears the Kindle was intended to feel like a book for those who love to read and want to.

Applied Sciences Group: High Performance Touch – YouTube
Modern touch devices allow one to interact with virtual objects. However, there is a substantial delay between when a finger moves and the display responds. Microsoft researchers, Albert Ng and Paul Dietz, have built a laboratory test system that allows us to experience the impact of different latencies on the user experience. The results help us to understand how far we still have to go in improving touch performance.

Why You Shouldn’t Be A Writer – Forbes
I’m going to be a writer, you decide one day, sitting on the crapper, considering your life on the way to work, walking out of the office where you signed the divorce papers. Really, though, you shouldn’t be a writer. Here’s why. TIP #1: You’re not good at it.

Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains | Infectious Diseases | DISCOVER Magazine
Parasitic worms leave millions of victims paralyzed, epileptic, or worse. So why isn’t anyone mobilizing to eradicate them?

I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result. : gaming
I've been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I'm not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows.

Fantastic Sources for Free Soundtrack Music — Life Scoop
Back in the pre-digital days of video creation, directors without the cash to commission original soundtracks to their films had to rely on library music. The folks who put together these massive libraries owned all the rights to the music outright, so it was easy to license recordings for creators to use in their films, TV, and radio pieces. A TV director would flip through his network's sound library records, pick the track, and then pay for the license. (In recent years, some outré 1960s and 1970s library music has become very collectible amongst a certain breed of vintage vinyl addicts.) Physical sound libraries, and their associated licensing fees, are still around, albeit in entirely digital form.

IE 10′s ‘Do-Not-Track’ default dies quick death | Ars Technica
IE 10 with DNT turned on lived for six days before getting its death sentence.

The Devil and John Holmes (by Mike Sager, Los Angeles Times, May 1989)
John Holmes was a porn star. Eddie Nash was a drug lord. Their association ended in one of the most brutal mass murders in the history of Los Angeles.

swissmiss | Two kids in a car
These two kids saw the GOTYE music video SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW and fell in love with it. They started requesting the song every time they’d be riding in the car, singing along, of course. One day, their parents set up a go camera behind their seat and taped them over a few car rides. Awesome.

don kenn gallery
BORN IN DENMARK 1978. I WRITE AND DIRECT TELEVISION SHOWS FOR KIDS. I HAVE A SET OF TWINS AND NOT MUCH TIME FOR ANYTHING. BUT WHEN I HAVE TIME I DRAW MONSTERDRAWINGS ON POST-IT NOTES… IT IS A LITTLE WINDOW INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD, MADE ON OFFICE SUPPLIES.

More Dutch men served in feldgrau than in khaki | MetaFilter
Needless to say, this part of WWII history doesn't quite fit with the image that us Dutch would like to have as ourselves as innocent victims of the Nazi occupation, where after the war everybody had been in the resistance.

I’m Sick Of Pretending: I Don’t "Get" Art | VICE
You know what? I'm sick of pretending. I went to art school, wrote a dissertation called "The Elevation of Art Through Commerce: An Analysis of Charles Saatchi's Approach to the Machinery of Art Production Using Pierre Bourdieu's Theories of Distinction", have attended art openings at least once a month for the last five years, even fucking purchased pieces of it, but the other night, after attending the opening of the new Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, I'm finally ready to come out and say it: I just don't think I "get" art.

Spectrum Made Me • Articles • Retro • Eurogamer.net
Those other computers were good and they were popular, but – on a national, social and for me, personal level – the Spectrum was a phenomenon. It was a mercurial presence, a flashpoint, and it changed everything. It changed me.

IBNIZ
IBNIZ is a virtual machine designed for extremely compact low-level audiovisual programs. The leading design goal is usefulness as a platform for demoscene productions, glitch art and similar projects. Mainsteam software engineering aspects are considered totally irrelevant. IBNIZ stands for Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo. The name also refers to Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th-century polymath who, among all, invented binary arithmetic, built the first four-operation calculating machine, and believed that the world was designed with the principle that a minimal set of rules should yield a maximal diversity.

Fringe. Division. | MetaFilter
There are three episodes left for season four (teaser for 4×20, "Worlds Apart") and if Fox doesn't give Fringe a possible thirteen-episode fifth-season renewal, they have shot two different endings for season four.

Games Criticism is OK » Medium Difficulty
It seems that games and the people who play them are growing up at the same time. While there is still a seedy, immature underbelly of niche gaming (one that reveals itself in incidents like the inflammatory hailstorm of verbal abuse against Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler), there is also every indication that there is a generation of “gamers” who are able to examine, and understand, the medium that they love. There is no doubt IGN will still throw cringe-inducing taglines into their RSS, and that mainstream videogame news coverage (FOX News, etc) will demonize video games in order to drive ratings. These monolithic structures are, at this point, as inevitable as they are unfortunate. However, something exciting has happened in their shadow; out of the dankness of that ground a generation of darn good writers has taken root and started to grow.

Games Don’t Need Citizen Kane, They Need Roger Ebert » Medium Difficulty
There’s been a lot of talk as to when video games are going to have “the Citizen Kane of videogames,” some sort of overwhelming magnum opus that makes non-gamers respect the medium. I have a more pressing and reasonable goal – when will we get our “Roger Ebert” of video game criticism? As Dave Thier recently put it, the people who write game reviews seem to be less “game critics” than they are “game enthusiasts.” They love games, and they want games to be great. They’re exceptionally optimistic about the future of video games. They’re eagerly anticipating the day that video games are the predominant form of media, eclipsing television and movies.

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer – NYTimes.com
Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.

Child of Rage The FULL Documentary – YouTube
Shocking, Horrifying, Fascinating The full documentary.

The Best Textbooks on Every Subject – Less Wrong
What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful. Let's do it.

Omni-Suzanne Ciani – YouTube
Suzanne Ciani working on the music and sounds for the Xenon pinball game from the Omni televsion show. hypnotic in places

Pop! … Pop! | MetaFilter
Boston Dynamics is getting close to mastering quadrupedal motion with Big Dog and Cheetah (previously). And are working on bipedal motion with Petman (previously), but how about a robot that is able to leap (up to the top of) tall buildings in a single bound? Sand Flea!

‘A Test You Need to Fail’: A Teacher’s Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students | Common Dreams
Here we spent the year reading books and emulating great writers, constructing leads that would make everyone want to read our work, developing a voice that would engage our readers, using our imaginations to make our work unique and important, and, most of all, being honest. And none of that matters. All that matters, it turns out, is that you cite two facts from the reading material in every answer.

Excerpt of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir — TheBloggess.com
Yup. I am SO buying this book.

Joint New Year Editorial for Juche 101 (2012)
That we parted too suddenly and unexpectedly with the great leader Kim Jong Il last year was the greatest loss our nation had suffered in its 5 000-year-long history and the bitterest grief our Party and people had experienced.

Redheads feel a different kind of pain | ScienceNordic
Catherin Tate vindicated! Redheads have a reputation for being feistier than others, and there may be some truth in this. Scientists are gradually piecing together a picture which seems to indicate that redheads are constituted differently to other people.

Santiago CARUSO – Illustrator
Santiago Caruso is an Illustrator from Buenos Aires who sometimes refers to himself as a graphic journalist. He has illustrated books and both album and book covers.

Spiders spin wet blanket over Wagga Wagga | News.com.au
THE danger may have passed for the residents of Wagga Wagga, but spare a thought for these little guys and gals.

Coilhouse » Blog Archive » “SOLIPSIST” by Andrew Huang
Many of us remember Andrew Huang‘s DIY sci-fi short, “Doll Face“, which went viral on YouTube in 2007, boosting the USC graduate’s professional career. Huang’s most recent work, this short film called “SOLIPSIST“, is nothing short of a vibrant, sensual revelation. It earned the multi-disciplinary artist and his team the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at Slamdance 2012.

Aggravure III: A Mural Using 450,000 Staples | Colossal
Aggravure is an ongoing series of large wall installations by Baptiste Debombourg. His latest, Aggravure III, was inspired by drawings from 16th century engravers Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Harmensz, Cherubino Alberti and utilizes nearly a half million metal staples tacked to a wall, taking 340 hours to complete.

24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed
There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.

There is something really wrong with modern programmers. Very wrong indeed.
Increasingly, projects are websites.  You don’t have to be a power programmer; you can cut-n-paste Javascript and run node.js and then you go get mongoDB or Redis as a backend and you’re thinking you’re scalable!  Get with the movement!

2012_SDTVx264r.nfo
The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012 (2012-02-22)

Dangerous Minds | Just how beautiful was Karen Carpenter’s voice? Listen to her isolated vocal tracks and find out
Karen Carpenter’s voice takes me to that happy safe place when I was young and everything seemed possible.

"…now I am the Jew here, I am the boss." | MetaFilter
Afghan Jewry may date back 2700 years. Today, there is but one: Zablon Simintov. Zablon, of Turkmen-Afghan descent, is a carpet trader and the caretaker of the only synagogue in Kabul. Zablon had a feud with Ishaq Levin, the second-to-last Jew of Afghanistan.

Least Helpful
Daily Dispatches from the Internet's Worst Reviewers

Hot buttered sloths in pajamas | Grist
What do you do when orphaned baby sloths are afflicted with mange? Shave them, rub them with lard, and wrap them in sloth pajamas.

Pro-Ana and Pro-Mia – Pro Mia Tips
Use more than one finger, and wiggle them a little to “tickle” the gag reflex. i personally use three…makes me feel like i am choking and everything comes up.

Coilhouse » Blog Archive » Cat Butts Being Semi-Rhythmically Smacked to the Sound of Joy Division.
Nothing more need be said. Gawk in silence

Start Developing iOS Apps Today: Introduction
Creating iOS apps is fun and rewarding, and if you're a new developer you might be wondering where to begin. This road map provides the perfect starting point for iOS app development. On your Mac computer, you can create iOS apps that run on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. Follow this road map to learn where to get the tools you need, understand the major concepts and best practices, and see where to find more information.

Eurozine – Europe invents the Gypsies – Klaus-Michael Bogdal The dark side of modernity
Social segregation, cultural appropriation: the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, as recorded in literature and art, represents the underside of the European subject's self-invention as agent of civilising progress in the world, writes Klaus-Michael Bogdal.

A Show with Ze Frank by Ze Frank — Kickstarter
In 2006, I launched a show called "The Show With Ze Frank." It was one of the most strange, exciting, difficult, and amazing things I have done so far. I think it is time to do something similar, what with the economy in the crapper and the election coming up. If Newt can do it, so can I. So can we.

Mountain Lion Review: What Happened to Apple’s Innovation?
That's the most surprising thing about Mountain Lion. Not what Apple did, but that it makes clear a startling reality: Microsoft is the new Apple, thinking of ways to make a better, more productive experience for users. Sure, MS might fail, but at least Redmond is breaking new ground and trying to push computing forward.

Think about that for a second: Mountain Lion is conservative and boring—even gaudy at times. Meanwhile Microsoft is pushing the envelope and being innovative and elegant in its approach to user interface.

Hell. It froze.

Sinéad O’Connor: A Mea Culpa < PopMatters
It’s time to apologize to Sinéad O’Connor.

850k Android Daily Activations, 300m Total Devices, Says Andy Rubin | TechCrunch
In many ways the mobile platform war feels like the desktop race of the early ’90s. Apple had a huge lead, refused to license and is now about to be overtaken by hordes of nondescript clones. But in this race the main competitor is Google rather than Microsoft and the devices are smartphones instead of beige desktops. It’s just a matter of time until Android overtakes iOS now.

Microsoft offers touch guidance to Windows 8 Metro-app developers – istartedsomething
Since Metro-style applications for Windows 8 should all have a touch-first experience, Microsoft has recently released a brief but useful “Windows 8 Touch Guidance” documentation on how developers should think about touch in their applications. The four-page PDF touches (pun) on some interesting touch characteristics of Windows 8 – including but not limited to drag-down/up for select/deselect, semantic zoom and panning and swipe from edge.

A case study of the tactics of climate change denial, in which I am the target | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
This reminds me of one of my favorite skeptic jokes. Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?
Answer: Four. It doesn’t matter what you call a tail, it’s not a leg.

Top five regrets of the dying | Life and style | guardian.co.uk
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Orthodox Homosexuals And The Pursuit Of Self-Indulgence,Elliot Resnick
Seeing him speak shamelessly as a homosexual on YouTube pained me. "Why?" I asked Dovid's image on my computer screen, as if he could somehow hear me. "Why must you publicize your orientation for the whole world to know?"

The Two Things
For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.

Dolly Parton’s Other Voice « wakingupnow.com
FACT: Dolly Parton is two amazing singers. If you slow her songs down (as if you were playing an old 45 at 33rpm) she sounds completely different and really terrific.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages via reddit.com
1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action | TorrentFreak
While the shutdown last week of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder and management team was certainly dramatic, a situation of perhaps even greater gravity is beginning to emerge.

Loper OS » Why Skin-Deep Correctness — Isn’t, and Foundations Matter.
All you will ever get from Apple is a “Worse Is Better“, taxidermic imitation of orthogonal persistence.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer
The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede.

Radiofy – Converteer playlists van op de radio naar Spotify-playlists
Radiofy laat u toe om doorheen de playlists van de VRT-radiozenders te bladeren en de muziek ook meteen te beluisteren via Spotify en/of YouTube.

The 5 Most Horrible Things Nobody Tells You About Babies | Cracked.com
Hollywood comedies about parenthood depend entirely on making raising a kid look a ridiculous, hectic mess. Then, eventually the leading man finds out that in the end, the rewards make it all worth it. That's mostly because for whatever reason, baby murder is still taboo in modern Hollywood comedies.
When you have a real kid, you realize there's plenty of stuff those movies don't show you. If they did, their zany comedy about a single father finding a baby on his doorstep would quickly become a nightmare inducing horror that would shut down the genitals of any aspiring parent.

Newt Gingrich Profile – Esquire Story on Newt Gingrich – Esquire
She was married to Newt Gingrich for eighteen years, all through his spectacular rise and fall, and here she is in a pair of blue jeans and a paisley shirt, with warm eyes and a big laugh and the kind of chain-smoking habit where the cigarettes burn right down to the filter — but she's quitting, she swears, any day now.

Nikon 1 System Review: 19. Conclusion: Digital Photography Review
Many photographers within Nikon's sizeable user base had been eagerly anticipating the camera giant's move into mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, and a lot of them reacted with disappointment when the curtain parted on the 1 System in late 2011. Despite containing some very interesting technology, the 1 J1/V1 are clearly intended to appeal to upgraders from lower-level compact cameras. Nikon firmly believes that there is a market here, largely untapped, and made up of people who don't like to be bothered by the intricacies of 'serious' photography but just want to be like Ashton Kutcher in the commercials and have fun, and take photographs, and have fun. And did we mention having fun?

The end result of this laudable design philosophy is a pair of rather curious cameras which have a lot to offer (we're hugely impressed by their phase-detection AF performance, and how many other cameras can you think of that allow 60 fps RAW+JPEG capture?) but which in our opinion, fail to wholly address the needs of any class of camera buyer.

Famous Photogs Pose With Their Most Iconic Images | Raw File | Wired.com
The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like.

Tim Mantoani hopes to change that by taking portraits of famous photographers holding their most iconic or favorite photos in his new book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. Mantoani has shot over 150 of these portraits in the last five years, most of which are contained in the book.

Fadades | Musique gratuite, dates de tournées, photos, vidéos
J'ai également le projet de mettre au point un ( propulseur gravitationnel ) "sorte d'engin en forme de sphère de ma propre conception capable de se déplacer sans roues ni hélice ni moteur a réaction ou fusée…"j'ai une certaine expérience sur la conception et construction de moteurs fusée a propergol solide".Le procéder tente a contrer la loi de Newton sur la force gravitationnelle . Ce type d'appareil pourrait se déplacer en théorie sur le sol ,dans l'eau ,dans l'air et dans l'espace sans roues ni ailes et sans aucune émanation de gaz . Celui-ci pourrait être totalement silencieux s'il était mis sous vide et ne générerait aucunes pollution…

Double-Blind Violin Test: Can You Pick The Strad? : Deceptive Cadence : NPR
In fact, the only statistically obvious trend in the choices was that one of the Stradivarius violins was the least favorite, and one of the modern instruments was slightly favored.

The Quest of Behemoth
Tired of the graphical complexity of Nethack? Yearn for a game smaller than a favicon?

The fight goes on. — TheBloggess.com
When depression sufferers fight, recover and go into remission we seldom even know, simply because so many suffer in the dark…ashamed to admit something they see as a personal weakness…afraid that people will worry, and more afraid that they won’t.  We find ourselves unable to do anything but cling to the couch and force ourselves to breathe.

Longform’s Best of 2011
Selected from articles featured on Longform.org

Tintin au Congo à Poil
What it says on the tin.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Clear Lines
When the Captain gives up drinking in Hergé’s comic to join the Society of Sober Sailors, it’s funny, because we know he doesn’t mean it. Here it’s just trite, a way to protect a young audience from the idea that drunkenness can be funny at all. When Spielberg deprives the Captain of his pipe, it’s not a joke, but judgment.