What we hate most in others...

Markus Reuter and Mark Wingfield (recording under the name TEAR) have released two EPs on Bandcamp: Secret Music and City of Memories. And both EPs are freely available for download. What better way to give these two musicians a try?

You can also freely stream The Undivided Five, the new album from A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

Rolling Stone reports that beginning in 2020 Steve Hackett will perform Genesis' classic live album, Seconds Out, in its entirety. That show is scheduled to start late in 2020 in the UK. No US dates on the schedule. Yet.

Robert Mangold, Four Color Frame Painting No. 11, 1985. I had the pleasure of hearing the artist speak several years back and he explores a motif like this one for many paintings in a row until he loses it.

And the latest from Sonar and David Torn, Tranceportation Vol. 1,  is a keeper. Check out the teaser.

Colin Edwin has a new album coming out in January. Here's the trailer.

Here's a 2-fer from DJ Earworm.

• I always recommend his annual United State of Pop.
• And now we get his Decade of Pop.

We're getting close to award season for movies.

• Check out these Oscar-candidates for best animated shorts.

Lovers of the seven seas will adore Chris Bryan's film MOCEAN.

ONext spring will see a new exhibit installed in the Disney Family Museum: The Walt Disney Studios and World War II. Given my fascination with their wartime film Victory Through Airpower, I would like to see this.

Speaking of WWII, Godsend was the Soviet's code name for a spy within the Manhattan Project. We now know his name: Oscar Seborer.

Some thoughts on multi-cultural, multi-language communication.

The protophobic X boson may exert its force only across the width of an atom's nucleus but if it truly exists it will upset the entire standard model of particle physics.

Have you heard that the 2nd law of thermodynamics (i.e. entropy) controls the fact that time only moves forward and not backward? Not so fast.

Three Red Bull Air Racers fly by Mt. Fuji. From a photo gallery of the Red Bull Air Race. Still can't believe they ended it.

Houston's Rothko Chapel has suffered the same fate as those home renovation shows on HGTV. During its remodel they found a problem with the walls that must be addressed resulting in a 4-month, $1 million delay. Reopening now planned for late spring 2020. “It’s like resoling your shoes, while you’re standing up, without lifting them.”

This one particular black forest cake is the best dessert in Fort Worth. And it's not German, it's Swiss: Schwarzwaldtårta. (Why this article includes a 3D interactive rendering of a black forest cake is beyond me.)

The so-called "creative class" consists of techies, creatives, and knowledge workers. Fort Worth's creative class is growing the second fastest in the country.

Screen shot from a video showing the relative size, appearance, and rotation of the planets. MUST SEE.

Are you a fan of nature and landscape photography? Then checkout the work of Jeff McDonald (on Instagram and Etsy) and George Buxbaum.

2D animation is not dead as evidenced by Klaus. Click through if only to watch the video showing how a scene progresses from rough to final.

I'm not certain it qualifies as history, but here's a history of the poop emoji.

Your essential cured meats. Loves me some mortadella. Saucisson smells like feet.

Five reasons why smart doesn't mean successful. #3 Smart people attach a lot of their self esteem to being smart which can lead to avoidance.

In Ohio, the house of representatives passed a law allowing students to give wrong answers for religious reasons. Any politician who voted for this should be ashamed. Hopefully, the senate will kill this thing dead. Kill it with fire.

Vanadium dioxide, a metal, conducts electricity but not heat.

Have you ever been eating a pop-tart and wondered what whiskey would pair well with it?

I guessed that Oreos' mystery flavor was churros. I just didn't win the prize.

Ze Frank does it again with True Facts: Stinkhorns. And again with Mudskippers.

Sometimes the title says it all: You Can Finally Spend the Night in a Hotel Shaped Like an Anus.

I leave you with Emoji Storm, a real-time animation of every emoji being used on Twitter.

...we fear in ourselves.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge...

One Rothko Per Hour is pretty much what its name says.

Ze Frank has released more True Facts videos: the sand bubbler crab and leafhoppers.

After bookmarking the Bandcamp page for ILUITEQ's Soundtracks for Winter Departures about a year ago, I finally pulled the trigger and bought it based on recent praise for the album from Eraldo Bernocchi. And as I listen for the first time, I regret having waited so long.

Did you know the USS Fort Worth, the U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat Ship LCS-3, has a local support committee?

There's no better time for beautiful news. For example, a 100% biodegradable maxi-pad has been developed.
foo

Ed Clark, Untitled, 2005. The painter recently passed away at age 93.

Science has finally observed the magnetic bridge between galaxies.

You may need to spend time with this but I think it's a live, interactive map of trains in Tokyo.

The schedule for the next year's worth of runDisney events was posted to the Disney Parks blog.

The geographic fandom of baseball teams. Those poor Mets.

B-52 nuclear alert missions are not historical artifacts of the cold war. They still happen today as this video shows.

Here's a nice video epilogue to 2001.

Or how about a 360-degree, 4K video of an F-35 flight over San Francisco?

Even more aviation pr0n, this time in the form of the annual Strike Fighter Ball video

Let's bring together aviation and animation in this video survey of Miyazaki's portrayal of flying machines in his films.

A handy reference to all those things on your dashboard. (Never knew there was a gas-cap warning light.)

Sorry, no poop.

...faster than society gathers wisdom. -Isaac Asimov

The only easy day...

The best fast food in every state. Ohio = Gold Star Chili?

Science tells us what happened the day the dinosaurs died.

The Comet, a video about comet 67P.

Disney Docs is where a guy shares his collection documents related to Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and more. (It's nice to see a focused collection.)

It's still difficult to understand how the Red Bull Air Race can be over. But it is. So they share some memorable moments and some best moments.

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 22, 1969. From an article by Tony Berlant on Diebenkorn's influence. "A yin-yang balance between impulse and revision is felt in all his work."

Mark your calendars. The Modern will host the exhibition Mark Bradford: End Papers from 08 Mar 2020 to 09 Aug 2020.

Imagine an entire magazine dedicated to the periodic table of elements. You don't have to imagine it - just read the 28 Aug 2019 issue of Businessweek.

Money only motivates when tasks are simple and formulaic. Otherwise, money demotivates. So what do we want? Autonomy, mastery, purpose.

What's rarer than the collision of two black holes? The collision of three black holes.

Innerviews features Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks. Interesting to hear him be open about feeling a wee bit inferior to the solo careers of band mates Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford.

Robert Fripp said that music is the goblet that holds the wine of silence. Read more about the history of silence in music.

• Clocks Go Down in Wonderland, a 1-track, 20-minute EP by Markus Reuter & Stephan Thelen
• Event Horizon Live 2019 by Kollar/Chojnacki
• A mash-up of hits from 1979 by The Hood Internet.

Got a tech (programming) interview coming up soon? Don't forget to ask your own questions. What kind of meetings happen every week? How do you prepare for disaster recovery?

What's most interesting to me in this announcement from D23 of a 50th anniversary celebration by the Walt Disney Archives is that the exhibit will be traveling with an announcement of locations promised in 2020. DFW?

The fall foliage map for 28 Sep 2019. It looks like North Texas has nothing to get excited about until the end of October and beginning of November.

Excel mavens rejoice. XLOOKUP, the successor to VLOOKUP, is coming. The article claims that VLOOKUP is the 3rd most used function in Excel behind SUM and AVERAGE. (I guess I might as well learn what the hell VLOOKUP does.)

Fort Worth's Near Southside is primed to be an innovative economic force.

What are the most important leadership competencies? #2 is "self-organizing," provides goals and objectives with loose guidelines and directions.

The first ever photograph of light as a particle and a wave.

A golden toilet named America was stolen from a gallery where it was being exhibited. How?

You are looking at the world's oldest fossilized turd, the Lloyds Bank Coprolite. It's from a 9th century Viking.

Science proves that knives made from frozen poop don't work. (Who thought they did?)

...was yesterday. ~U.S. Navy Seals

Those who can make you believe absurdities...

OK, jazz lovers. Kind of Bloop is an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis' classic album Kind of Blue. Genius.

The long-ish article How Art Transcends Logic and Language ends with a short-ish insight: the unique nature of art can show us what's implicit in the gaps between our certitudes of rationality.

by Hans Kleinsman. source

True aviation pr0n - this year's video salute to the EA-18 Growler.

User Inyerface is a frustrating, game-based homage to bad user interface design.

As an antidote to that last link, here's a page full of (good) design principles. #1 for interaction design is "anticipation."

Ugly Gerry is a font comprised of gerrymandered congressional districts.

Excellent video with insight into the animation of Cinderella's dress. Seriously.

An introduction to particle physics. Go ahead: read it. It's OK.

See, I'm putting the music links in the middle.

• Rico Casazza - Vapor Pad (Eraldo Bernocchi Remix)
• Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm, Live in Milano from 2002
• Colin Edwin has a new album coming out with Jon Durant and Inna Kovtun.
• 4TH, the new studio album from DFA
• Become the Discovered, Not the Discoverer by Merzbow, Haino, and Pandi
• Slowburn by Security Project
• Innerviews' interview with Bill Bruford
• Lorenzo Feliciati's new website
• Tycho's set from Burning Man

How to kill cancer cells? Disguise chemo drugs as yummy fats.

Science has found a way to grow new tooth enamel. No more cavities?

Richard Serra, sculptor, makes the massive become ethereal.

Visiting an art museum makes you happy. I could've told you that.

Believe it nor, they did consider adding external munitions to the stealth fighter.

Quick: how many engines are on a B-17? Four? At least one had 5 with a T-34 mounted in the nose for testing.

Greg Bustin's 25 leadership lessons includes #20 Have Fun. Humor in the workplace is vital.

Disney's pressed penny machines now charge $1 instead of 50 cents. So I can no longer call pressed pennies "fifty ones." And the machines don't take coins. I bet soon the machines will all lose their hand cranks.

Can you limit all your email responses to 5 sentences?

Next year will be Syracuse University's 150th birthday.

Mortality rate by county and cause.

Unko, poop in Japanese. When in Japan visit the Poop Museum.

Buttsss, a collection of butt illustrations.

And the best thing on teh interwebs. A soundboard chock full of affirmations from Alex Trebeck.

...can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire

Work shapes the mind...

Some tunes for while you read.

• Tor & Vale by Mark Wingfield & Gary Husband
• Nick Mason's band, Saucerful of Secrets
• Trey Gunn and Markus Reuter performing at SeaProg 2019
• Trey Gunn performing Untune the Sky
• Jamie Saft and Joe Morris, CYRUS
• Eraldo Bernocchi's remix of RIco Casazza's Vapor Pad 
• Caravan to the Stars by Dark Matter Halo w Bill Laswell
• Smoke + Glass by Alex Haas and Bill Laswell

Eyvind Earle, A Sounding of Surf. Earle is one of my favorite Disney artists, maybe because his style is so distinctive. source

How exactly did art arrive at Jackson Pollock? Let's begin with Manet.

I love this aerial photo of Disneyland on opening day in 1955. See more here. 

Something's hidden on the moon. But unlike 2001's monolith, it's a lump of metal that's five times larger than the main island of Hawaii. Something like that isn't too hard to find. It's in an impact crater that's 2,000 km in diameter. That's right, its an asteroid impact.

Here's a 4-quadrant diagram of French fries rated on taste and texture scales. LOL - In-N-Out is dead last where they belong. (Their fries taste like someone sliced a raw potato and ran the bits under hot water for 30 seconds.) Guess who's #1?

MAD Magazine will be no more later this year. A huge part of my childhood.

Would an illustrated version of the Mueller Report make you want to read it?

2,400 previously unseen post-9/11 photos of the WTC were bought at an estate sale and are now on Flickr.

Think the solar system is dusty and dry except for the Earth? WRONG. There may be more superionic ice than any other form of H2O.

Oh, the solar system has a tail.

Photos of quantum entanglement? We got 'em.

Light has more properties than you'd think - or science can predict. They just discovered a new one: self-torque.

You can download from GitHub the original source code for the Apollo mission's guidance computer.

More science you ask? OK, how about the ability to teleport quantum data into a diamond?

The secret science-advisory group Jason is being disbanded by the Dept. of Defense.

Here's a 10-week introduction to meditation with freely available guided tracks to follow.

And here's 10 myths about work-life balance. #2 Life needs to be compartmentalized. The best alternative expression is work-life rhythm.

A visual representation of the warming of Texas over the period 1850-2018. Customize it for your region with Show Your Stripes.

Honestly, the National Military Strategy 2018 is a bit underwhelming. This unclassified version is only 6 pages. I wonder how many pages are in the full document?

The best book for every age from 1 to 100. I've read exactly 6 of them.

This is kinda interesting: the 101 things changing the way we work. Stuff I've never heard of: office farming (exactly what it sounds like), microdosing (want a little LSD with your work?), JOMO (the joy of missing out), and Globotics.

Take a tour of the Doomsday Plane.

Can you see the shock waves in this photo? I had to look really closely. source

Nuudii (a Kickstarter project) is said to be between a bra and bra-less.

Would you rather live in Fort Worth or "the LA of the south." LOL

What's the world record for sitting on the toilet? 116 hours.

Did you know they had robots in the 1700s? Did you know the greatest one was a pooping duck?

I started with music so I'll end with music. But you can control this music. Here's a Gregorian music generator.

...leisure colors it. ~James Dolbear

To live is to suffer...

Well, poop. I'm already past my work peak. (Duh. No one else is surprised.)

• Apollo Extended Edition, a remastering of the original Apollo album plus a second album of totally new material, will be released by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and Roger Eno on July 19th.
• AKKU Quintet's (founded by SONAR drummer Manuel Pasquinelli) latest album is Depart.
• Scenes from the Flood is Bryan Beller's (bassist with The Aristocrats) new double-album.
• The Aristocrats' 4th album, You Know What...? 
• John Bonham's Moby Dick drum solo

Drummers may have different brains than the rest of us says science.

Helen Frankenthaler, For E.M., 1981 (source).  Inspired by an article about a current exhibition of her paintings in Venice.

Speaking of Frankenthaler, she shared tips for being an artist. #4 Let mistakes lead to invention.

Greg Bustin's recommended summer reading on the topic of leadership includes Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning which I just finished reading. One of the book's essential philosophical or psychological points is that life is not about pursuit of pleasure or power but of meaning.

From Present & Correct comes a collection of TV test cards.

If "ablaut reduplication" is too technical for you just remember I-A-O and you'll never flop-flip your flip-flop.

Hey, smart people. You choke under pressure because your mental abilities cause performance anxiety. (Instead of trying to be right, just do your best.) Also, if you believe that intelligence is a fixed trait you're likely to fail at activities you're not instantly good at.

I have never seen this spiral version of the periodic table before. See it and more unusual periodic table designs here.

A bit more traditional is the periodic table in pictures.

Deservedly so, the Colossal Cave Adventure was inducted this year into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

This is from back in May but have you seen the surface of an asteroid close-up?

How about a font comprised entirely of colored dots?

Or some more traditional looking fonts by designer Clotilde Olyff?

Can you solve the secretary puzzle?

A longish and hard-to-read article on Disney animator Bill Tytla (think Chernabog).

Did you get some Ellsworth Kelly postage stamps yet?

How many mechanical movements are illustrated and animated for internet-friendly consumption? 507.

I enjoyed the Chernobyl series on HBO but what did actual Chernobyl survivors think of it?

How about the SR-71 flight manual?

Or maybe you'd prefer to fly the B-17.

A world map showing every city with more than 500 people.

The DFW Metroplex is the fastest growing metro area in the country and Fort Worth is now the 13th largest city.

At last we know: Libyan desert glass was created 29 million years ago by a meteorite impact.

Science has invented a drug that is successful against antibiotic-resistant bugs.

Thrilling to the live stream from Hungary this morning made me realize how sad it is that the Red Bull Air Race is ending this season after September's race in Japan. It "did not attract the level of outside interest as many other Red Bull events." I'm wondering if after some time off the event can be retooled and brought back.

Mark Rothko's Untitled (1961) recently sold at auction for $50.1 million.

POOP

Why does coffee make us poop? Science tells us it has nothing to do with caffeine.

If you ate rocks you'd poop sand too.

I'll take feline excretory systems, Alex. The answer is "Bacteria." The question is "what do cats farm in their butts?"

How long would it take for you to use up the forever roll of TP?

NOT POOP

And I leave you with hours of potential time wasting: this is sand.

...and to survive is to find some meaning in that suffering. ~Friedrich Nietzsche 

The Mueller Report

It took several months but I finally finished reading the Mueller Report, also known as the Report on The Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. I don't recall where I downloaded the PDF from but you can get the PDFs from justice.gov: Part 1 and Part 2.

It was a tough document to read because it was so dry and boring. I'll admit to not reading the appendices in Part 2 and I only skimmed the last section of Part 2. I am not an attorney nor do I claim to have any special expertise on legal matters. But that won't prevent me from sharing my conclusions.

The Russians engaged in a massive and systematic program to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Candidate Trump. Why President Trump seems so eager to let Putin off the hook is beyond me. I've heard of "keeping your friends close and your enemies closer" but Trump's statements on the topic are ignorant at best, irresponsible at worst. The Russians and others will likely continue activities like this.

The Trump campaign did not collude, coordinate, or conspire with (interestingly, only "conspire" has a legal meaning within the context of criminal law - the former two words do not) agents of the Russian government or directly with the Russian government to influence the election. This did not surprise me. However, members of the Trump campaign, either through naivete or craven greed or inflated self importance, allowed the Russians to lead them around by the nose like a bunch of chumps.

Probably because they had been led around by the nose, several members of the Trump campaign and/or administration did commit crimes, evidence of which was uncovered by the investigation.

And the big one: there is a considerable body of evidence that indicates President Trump engaged in several acts consistent with obstruction of justice. And the caveats: because the Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that criminal prosecution of a sitting president would be "bad" (my word), only an investigation was conducted without the potential for filing charges. (The section of Part 2 that I only skimmed was a refutation of the president's personal counsel's arguments that a sitting president could not be charged based on the obstruction of justice statute and Article II of the Constitution.) The significant paragraph from Part 2 is one we've all already heard:

"Fourth, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgement. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." 

This leaves me to wonder: When Mr. Trump is no longer president and the OLC's opinion is no longer applicable, will the evidence collected by the Commission be sufficient bring obstruction of justice charges at that future time?