Try not to become a person of success...

Post-truth. It's the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year. Which is really all you need to know.

I don't even recall how I found it, but I'm now streaming Crone's ambient album Endless Midnight to decide whether to order the CD.

Markus Reuter is sharing his Live in Pomona 2016 album with us all for free.

Maybe my favorite music discovery this week was Arvo Part's Fur Alina.

And certainly you've heard that Brian Eno's next ambient album, Reflection, is due out on 01 January.

Google Maps Streetview Player does pretty much what it sounds like it'll do - given two addresses it will use street view images to show you what you'd see as you travelled the route between the two places.

More Google fun you ask? Play Quick, Draw! to see if Google can guess what you're sketching.

Srsly. Google PhotoScan. Use your smart phone to "scan" old photos in a high quality way so they can be archived and backed up. And enjoyed online. I just installed the app and scanned my first photo and it really really works.

A huge concrete shield is now being moved into place over the remnants of the reactor at Chernobyl.

You can paint with a brush or a knife or by dripping, pouring, or splashing. So why can't a robot paint with an artist? source

The Aberdeen Bestiary, now online in colorful glory.

Public art - what are you getting for your tax dollars? Sometimes alot, sometimes a little.

Do you need a new snowboard? I know a guy. Check out Totem Snowboards.

Fort Worth friends, take a moment to mourn the passing of Charley Bell of Charley's Hamburgers on Old Granbury Road, my favorite burger in DFW.

The 10 "semi-finalists" for the Oscar for animated short subject include two that are notable. Pixar's Piper has a soundtrack by guitarist Adrian Belew. And you know how much I love a good black and white line drawn animation so here's Once Upon a Line. I see a bit of The Dot and The Line in there.

Time's 100 most influential photos of all time includes many you'll agree with, some you'll question, and a little bit of fluid science: this milk drop coronet photo of 1957.

Now keep in mind this is from Good Housekeeping. There are five types of butts in the world. Can you name them? The first two are Square and V-Shape.

Remember the hilarious video advertising the Squatty Potty? They're back with a new product, a spray to take care of odors. Equally hilarious: Unicorn Gold.

I'm not the only one interested in poop. Here's the (legitimate) Space Poop Challenge - a design competition for a space suit component that will collect poops for up to 144 hours and dispose of them without people having to use their hands. You'll literally have to engineer the shit out of this.

Cow farts account for about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions so when a farmer reduced his herd's output to nearly zero by changing what they eat, that's a big deal.

Generate your own Metallica logo here.

Marconi Union's song Weightless has been called "the most relaxing music ever" so here's a 10-hour loop of it. Unfortunately, it's not one of the tracks on the Marconi Union album I have.

Want something even more minimal? How about 10 hours of black screen in 4k?

...but rather try to become a person of value. ~Albert Einstein

Music is the arithmetic of sounds...

Time to release a dangerous backlog of links. (That no one will read.) Don't worry; I'm not posting them all. Some I'm just reading and archiving. Others are getting the "why did I bookmark this?" treatment. This is pretty much presented in the order I encountered them in my bookmark list.

Have you heard of MasterClass? You can take online classes from masters for what seems to be a decent price. For example, James Patterson teaches writing in 22 video lessons and Dustin Hoffman teaches acting in 5 hours of video. Each is $90.

The story of Victor Belenko's defection to the West with a MiG-25 in 1976.

Stanford's 100 year study on artificial intelligence. Sounded interesting, but apparently not interesting enough for me to read.

MusicBrainz is an "open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public."

King Crimon's latest live album, Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of the Monkey Mind, is everything I want from a live KC album - breadth of material, superb performances, and quality recording. This excellent review from All About Jazz goes into a wee bit more detail and is definitely worth reading.

I'm a fan of Red Bull Air Races so I loved this video showing pilot Kirby Chambliss up against Indy driver Alex Rossi at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I think Kirby's just showing off by flying inverted.

Dragonfly 44 is the same mass as the Milky Way but may be 99% dark matter, something never seen before. Considering that I recently read that some scientists think that dark matter may not actually exist...

The Air Force has begun a competition, Ground Based Strategic Deterrence (GBSD), to replace the Minuteman III missiles by 2029 at an estimate total cost of $62 billion (yes, billion) through 2044.

Published before the election, Aviation Week's list of the next president's tech agenda includes some very cool stuff. #7 directed energy weapons.

You too can get your own facehugger GIF (pronounced jiff) to celebrate ALIENS' 30th anniversary at www.aliensfacehugger.com.

The (untrue) story of how Pollock's (gorgeous) Mural was painted for Peggy Guggenheim under commission.

Syracuse is ranked #60 in U.S. News and World Report's 2017 best college rankings. Where's your alma mater?

Just a tad late on the fall foliage map - everywhere's past peak.

Smelly poo - is there any other kind? - forced a British Airways flight to Dubai to return to Heathrow after only 30 minutes in the air.

One of those crossovers I enjoy: musician extraordinaire Tony Levin visited CERN and photoblogged his tour of the facility.

Neil Blomkamp's Alien 5 is still underway according to Sigourney Weaver. If I remember correctly, it's going to be inserted into the franchise after Aliens.

In another crossover (kind of) the Presentation Zen blog shares tips from legendary film director Akira Kurosawa that while overtly about film, can be applied to any creative endeavor (delivering a presentation, writing software). Most importantly, "have the forbearance to face the dull task of writing one word at a time."

I absolutely adore the ambient album Winter Garden but I'm not certain what to think about this version played 800% slower.

America's next bomber - the B-21 Raider from Northrop Grumman. 

MoMA has put their exhibition catalogs from 1929 to the present online. I couldn't help but be drawn to Jackson Pollock from 1956. See image below. Be careful - you can spend hours exploring this archive.

Jackson Pollock, Shimmering Substance, 1946

Map of the most lewd sounding town names in the U.S. I think Ohio wins with Pee Pee Township.

I encourage my friends in the UK to go see Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy. Not all reviews, however, have been as positive as this one from The Telegraph. But I liked what I saw when I skimmed the exhibit catalog when it arrived earlier this week.

The Modern in Fort Worth has a large number of Sean Scully's paintings in their permanent collection and I had the chance to hear him speak at the museum recently. I love his work, the iconic motif of his stripe paintings, and his painting Light in August that's a direct reference to Faulkner's novel. In fact, there's a quote (I think in that novel) that says "the supreme rectangle of the open door," and he admits that doors and windows are part of his motif. In this recent interview with Studio International he talks about a lot and says this: "Abstraction is free. It is always concerned with thinking, and it is concerned with acting free of context. Also, it is always reaching outwards.

Are you interested in the future of sex? Honestly, I'm more interested in sex in the present. Yet this article and accompanying infographic blazes forward. For example, by the year 2045, 10% of young adults will have had sex with a humanoid robot. (Ewww. Hopefully not the same one.)

Rare Noise is one of my favorite record labels and consistently releases music that I very much enjoy. Learn more about them in this interview.

North Korea has a tiny internet. Tee hee.

What do I like? Black and white animation. See Halved feat chip king (the body). Feel free to mute the video.

For $42.5 million I'd probably change my name too. Buffalo's Albright-Knox art museum (a must-see if you're in the area) will now be called the Buffalo Albright-Knox-Gundlach Museum.

I have a hard time taking a men's underwear brand called Saxx seriously.

Just silly - Rammstein's Du Hast done in a bossa nova style. Very well done live performance with the music overdubbed.

Why did Willie Sutton rob banks? Cuz that's where the money was. Why does Uncle Sam tax the shit out of corporations? Cuz that's where...

Rolling Stone says Mystery Science Theater is the 93rd greatest TV show of all time. Where's your favorite ranked?

Disney geeks, decorate your electronic device with these Disney wallpapers, especially those celebrating the 45th anniversary of Walt Disney World. I put "it's a small world" on my Chromebook.

Speaking of Disney, Ethan Allen introduced a line of Disney furniture.

Who better to advocate for a STEAM education than David Byrne and Neil deGrasse Tyson?

A transcript of conversations between jailed German nuclear physicists in 1945-1946.

Video of Lorenzo Feliciati and his Koi band getting their studio groove on.

Touring Walt Disney's office: part 1 and part 2.

Explore the tree of life, an interactive exploration of evolutionary relationships between living things on this planet.

The periodic table of CNC machining.

Not to be a downer but the longest you can expect to live is 122 years.

Artisinal toilet paper. I applaud Northern for having a (good) sense of humor about their own product.

source

Doughnut kitten.

For travelers, wireless passwords from airports.

An animation showing the normal growth of human teeth.

NASA pr0n.

Cool interactive timeline world map of earthquakes and eruptions.

Does your logo look like genitalia?

Interviews with Eno and Budd about The Pearl, a fantastic ambient album.

Have your wedding at Disney's Magic Kingdom with prices starting at $120,000.

The mystery only makes me love the X-37B all that much more. What exactly has it been doing up there in outer space for over 500 days?

I'm listening to Burnt Belief's new album Emergent right now so here's a link to a music video from that album, Ghosts Aquatic.

Harold Budd's website.

Project 4K77 is converting the original Star Wars movie to 4K. Be sure to watch the teaser.

I'm not paying $400 for Richard Diebenkorn's catalog raissone so I'll have to content myself with this excerpt in which we read that he explored "planarity (flatness) versus illusionistic space; chromatic dissonance versus harmony (always subtly played out); bold, wall-commanding size versus more intimate scale."

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled #15, 1970. See link above.

Also currently listening to Live 1 and Live 2 from The Security Project as they perform the music of Peter Gabriel.

Matisse/Diebenkorn at the Baltimore Museum of Art. You have until 29 January to see this. Don't delay.

Lockheed Martin is proposing the TR-X as a replacement for the U-2.

A rare recording of Harold Budd's Children on the Hill.

Jelly is back.

Craft pr0n: Japanese Hakone Marquetry.

There's a 1-handed keyboard hidden in iOS.

In movie news, JJ Abrams supposedly is working on a 3rd movie in his Cloverfield series called God Particle. However, given what 10 Cloverfield Lane looked like, calling this a series is a stretch.

Rocky and Bullwinkle fans rejoice: a new book, The Art of Jay Ward Productions, is now available.

Patient's fart during surgery causes fire.

The Clyfford Still Museum has published The Works on Paper; it's online and free.

Putin's got himself a new ICBM, the RS-28, that can carry warheads sufficent to wipeout a landmass the size of Texas.

If I said a video of paints being mixed was sensual, you'd say...

Scientists say they've found a way to break the second law of thermodynamics (i.e. entropy decreases with time). Trump won so I guess anything's possible. Read more: H-Theorem in Quantum Physics.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), 1962. From Dark Palette at the Pace Gallery.

The KC-Z next generation tanker. 

A diver may have found a lost Mark IV nuke from 1950 when a B-36 crashed. (My nuclear expert says not so fast.)

Feces may be the fuel of the future, or so says science. (Bullshit powers Washington so why the hell not?)

Get your annual dose of F-18 pr0n in the 2016 Rhino Ball video.

If this isn't a hoax, this video of a vegetarian eating meat for the first time in 22 years is the best thing I've seen in a long time. Not that I have anything against vegetarians but her reactions to meat are making me ravenous.

Video for Stick Men's new album Prog Noir.

Get facts about your name at NameDat. There are 5 of me in the U.S, most of whom live in New York. The average lifespan of John Chawners is 77.3 years. (Shit, where do I get my 122?)

Just another periodic table of the elements with pictures.

Aviation pr0n: B-17s.

...as optics is the geometry of light. ~Claude Debussy