[funny] A Cartoon Guide To Shark Anatomy …

[language] The Rad New Words Added to the Dictionary in the ’90s: Where Are They Now?… Alexis Madrigal investigates what new words added to dictionaries during the 90’s made it into common usage today … ‘Cypherpunk: In the early days of both computing and the Internet, cryptography to keep people from spying on you was all the rage. For obvious reasons, both the term and idea of cypherpunk are coming back, I think.’

[comics] The 50 Greatest Graphic Novels Of All Time … according to the Scotish Herald … ‘#3 Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth, Chris Ware (2000) – Eight years in the making, Ware’s graphic novel may on the page look like the most formally precise title in this list, yet that perfection can be misleading. It moves so easily between the past and the present, reality and imagination that you can get lost in its labyrinth. “Sophisticated like free jazz,” suggests Metraphrog cartoonist John Chalmers. “It changed the way I looked at the world, at comics, the way I drew,” adds Stephen Collins.’

[movies] Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs: out of time?… Twenty years after the release of Jurassic Park how realistic were the dinosaurs … ‘New finds show that the forelimbs of tyrannosaurs were rather closer together than previously assumed – on screen those famous little arms are set far up the side of the animal, but in fact should be much closer together and almost underneath the head. These are minor details in appearance compared to the probability that Tyrannosaurus had feathers, or the fact that there’s no good evidence that Velociraptor was a pack hunter or especially smart (or as fast as a cheetah while we’re on the subject), and the giant frill and venom-spitting in Dilophosaurus is basically fiction.’

Facebook is just fine … How to hide your way to a better Facebook … ‘My newsfeed is almost all signal. This is, in part, because I am ruthless. If you are overtly negative (which is different than having opinions differing from my own), you get hidden. If I don’t find value in your postings, you get hidden. If you’re a high school friend I friended just to be nice, I hide. I hide unhesitatingly. I hide remorselessly. Hiding is your super power. Hiding is one of those few pure joys of the Internet through which — amidst the near-endless entropy of online content — you can take a stand, push back in a way that meaningfully affects the data you see.’

[web] The Pinterest Skeptics Board … pushing back at fake, misleading or wrong quotes on Pinterest.

[mail] In the Sorting Office … depressing long-read on what the happens after the Royal Mail is privatised … ‘Every week Dutch households and businesses are visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies. There are the ‘orange’ postmen of the privatised Dutch mail company, trading as TNT Post but about to change their name to PostNL; the ‘blue’ postmen of Sandd, a private Dutch firm; the ‘yellow’ postmen of Selekt, owned by Deutsche Post/DHL; and the ‘half-orange’ postmen of Netwerk VSP, set up by TNT to compete cannibalistically against itself by using casual labour that is cheaper than its own (unionised) workforce. TNT delivers six days a week, Sandd and Selekt two, and VSP one. From the point of view of an ardent free-marketeer, this sounds like healthy competition. Curiously, however, none of the competitors is prospering.’

[funny] Instasham … ‘Make a funny face or something you little shit.’

[comics] Twitter / MattBors: ‘The quintessential comics fan—reading books he can’t stand for 45 years.’

[comics] Howard Chaykin on his lewd, depraved, banned graphic novels … a short interview with Chaykin but has plenty of pages and panels from his long career … Chaykin on digital illustration: ‘I work with and use Photoshop in my comics work. I also believe that web comics are the future of comics, a future with little or no room for me, since I produce a page-designed product, and web comics are aspect-ratio based. An iPad is either portrait or landscape, with zoom and click: a factor that obviates my primary skillset.’

[history] Early recollections of Adolf Hitler: “Eccentric but quite a pleasant fellow” … a profile of Adolf Hitler published in the New Statesman in 1933 …

In those days in Munich I lived in the Thiersh Strasse, and I frequently noticed in the street a man who vaguely reminded me of a militant edition of Charles Chaplin, owing to his characteristic moustache and his bouncing way of walking. He always carried a riding whip in his hand with which he used incessantly to chop off imaginary heads as he walked. He was so funny that I inquired from neighbours who he might be: most of them, owing to his Slav type, took him to be one of these Russian émigrés who abounded in Germany at that time, and they freely talked of his being probably a trifle mentally deranged. But my grocer told me it was a Herr Adolf Hitler from Braunau in Austria, and that he was leader of a tiny political group which called itself the “German National Socialist Workers Party”. He lived as a boarder in the apartment of a small artisan, wrote articles for an obscure paper called the Völkischer Beobachter, and orated in hole-and-corner meetings before audiences of a dozen or two. Out of curiosity I bought the paper once or twice, and found it a scatter-brained collection of wild anti-Jewish stories and articles interlarded with panegyrics on the Germanic race. My obliging grocer closed his information on Hitler by remarking that he frequently purchased things in his shop and was, despite his eccentric appearance, quite a pleasant fellow, though inclined to talk sixteen to the dozen about anything and everything.

[twitter] First World Problems on Twitter … ‘It’s generally a fact that there is no kale available in Crouch End because of the Gwyneth Paltrow cookbook. #unbearable’

[comics] The DC New 52 Timeline of Departures, Firings, and Bridge-Burnings … a look at recent internal strife at DC Comics … ‘8/9/2013 – Justice League 3000 was to be a “dream team” book reuniting writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis with artist Kevin Maguire. Somewhere along the way, DC got cold feet with the lighter direction of the book (before the first issue had hit the stands, of course, because why wait for the fans’ reactions) and fired Maguire, replacing him with Howard Porter. “I’m still a bit perplexed as to how it got to this point,” said Maguire, reflecting the feelings of many fans who wondered why DC would even hire the beloved Justice League International veterans in the first place if they didn’t want a book that was anything like Justice League International.’

[books] Stephen King: on alcoholism and returning to the Shining … King is interviewed by Emma Brockes.

…without labouring the point, [Doctor Sleep] has good allegorical bones: the sick buzz one gets from consuming the grisliest news stories. It also captures the reality of a recovering alcoholic, a state with which King is intimately familiar. “The hungover eye,” he writes, “had a weird ability to find the ugliest things in any given landscape.” Danny turns his life around and starts going to AA meetings, where, King writes, he discovers that memories are the “real ghosts”. It is a book as extravagantly inventive as any in King’s pantheon, and a careful study of self-haunting: “You take yourself with you, wherever you go.”

[movies] Errol Morris on How Donald Rumsfeld Sees His Own Legacy … interesting preview of Errol Morris’ new film on Donald Rumfield. Here’s the trailer.

The most distinctive thing about Rumsfeld is his use of language. Is it Orwellian? In 1984, language is used as a means of control—but it is conscious control. With Rumsfeld, I felt I was witnessing something more complex: a man using language to obscure the world from himself as well as from others. In his Pentagon press conferences he would frequently quibble over the meaning of words: “pre-emption,” “insurgency,” “quagmire.” It was almost a way of keeping a safe distance from reality.

Most people remember that Rumsfeld’s famous comment about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns” happened at a press conference, but few remember that it was in response to a question about what evidence we had that Saddam Hussein was linked to terrorist organizations—which was the justification for the war in the first place. The more I studied this performance, the more I realized that what Rumsfeld said wasn’t really an answer. It was an attempt to change the subject, to turn reporters’ questions about intelligence into a lofty question about the nature of knowledge: “Sometimes we have evidence for things and sometimes we don’t; sometimes we know what we’re looking for and sometimes we don’t.”

[mac] World’s smallest working Mac is a tiny work of art … forget about your new iPhone – take a look at this is incredible mini retro-computer … ‘Make no mistake — this is a full working Mac running System 6. In fact, if anything, it’s a bit more impressive than the original Mac as it has an Ethernet port, two USB ports and HDMI output. Inside, there are also WiFi and Bluetooth dongles attached to an internal USB hub to provide wireless connectivity. Mini Mac is made at one-third scale, with the exterior pieces lovingly cut from Sintra PVC plastic with an X-Acto knife, filed and sanded to match the bevels and curves around the screen, and then glued together.’

[apollo] The Family that Went to the Moon … How a picture of a family ended up on the moon …‘The portrait shows Charlie, his wife Dorothy, and their two sons Charles and Thomas. It looks like they are sitting on a bench in the summertime.The family photo, gingerly wrapped in clear plastic and slightly crumpled from being stashed in the pocket of a space suit, was left on the Moon. It presumably still sits there today…’

[books] Hotel That Inspired The Shining Plans to Dig Up Its Pet Cemetery … File under: THIS ENDS BADLY … ‘The most common complaint from neighbors concerns the noise likely to be generated by the excavation. Meanwhile, one local psychic with a head on her shoulders, was practically the only one to point out that maybe it’s not the best idea to disturb a bunch of pet graves on the property of the hotel that was not only the inspiration for one of the most terrifying horror novels of all time, but also the set of the book’s miniseries adaptation.’