tech@vedella

In 1920, Harry Houdini, famed illusionist, met Arthur Conan Doyle, famed creator of Sherlock Holmes. The two became friends even as their complex views on spiritualism and the paranormal often put them on opposite sides of the Skeptic/Fortean coin. Christopher Sandford, biographer of Keith Richards, Kurt Cobain, and Roman Polanski, is the author of a [...]

A gentleman in a nice suit who's disgustedly watching an Occupy LA protest proudly identifies himself as "part of the one percent" and asks, "Have you ever heard of anybody great that's come out of the 99 percent?" Proud One Percenter: "Have You Ever Heard of Anybody Great That's Come Out of the 99 Percent?" [...]

Elvis Costello addresses his fans in an editorial called "Steal This Record," in which he notes the absurdity of the price set by his label on "The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook," a live CD and DVD combination priced at $262.46 ("either a misprint or a satire"). He laments that his label has refused [...]

Fantasy literature doyenne Terri Windling is in the midst of a serious financial and health crisis and her friends are pitching in to run a fundraising auction for her benefit. My contribution: naming rights for a character in the sequel to Little Brother, to be published by Tor Teen in late 2012/early 2013.

Houston's Burzynski Clinic is a cancer-treatment facility specializing in "antineoplaston therapy," a treatment involving urine developed 34 years ago by the clinic's founder, Stanislaw Burzynski. Mr Burzynski characterizes his treatments as "clinical trials." After 34 years' worth of these trials, I can find no record of randomized double-blind studies demonstrating this treatment's efficacy being published. [...]

Here's a "street skiing" video that crosses street-skating with parkour, driving a long-suffering pair of skis over a series of urban obstacles from stone stairs to snowy hills. Just watching this daredevil makes my heart pound in sympathy. JP Auclair street.avi (via Kottke)

Using the attractiveness of waist-to-hip ratio as an example, psychologist and blogger Sabrina Golonka explains why you have to be skeptical when someone declares a psychological finding to be a universal human truth. It's not universal if it doesn't cross cultures. But we don't have great cross-cultural psychology data, and, where the data does exist, [...]

As a person whose state is currently embroiled in a debate over whether (and, more likely, how) the public should pay for a private company to build its new facilities, I found this quote from a 2000 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives to be particularly interesting: Few fields of empirical economic research offer [...]

Photographer Carli Davidson catches high-speed frames of dogs shaking their jowls. Insane landscapes of weird and cute. Shake (via Making Light) (Image: downsized thumbnail from Shake6.jpg, by Carli Davidson)

Palantir is security software that helps CIA analysts take innocuous events (man comes to U.S. on temporary visa, man takes flight training classes, man buys one-way ticket from Boston to California) and put them into a context where potential threats can become more apparent (the one man is actually several, and they're all on the [...]

Last week, Kansas teenager Emma Sullivan posted a snarky tweet about the state's governor Sam Brownback, which, naturally, led to Brownback's staffers pressuring her principal to make her apologize on threat of punishment. Apparently, at some point during the holiday weekend, the school district noticed this would violate Sullivan's free speech rights. They've announced that [...]

From Vintage Ads participant write_light, a triptych of 1940s illustrated rail ads of surpassing loveliness. Sunday Surplus: The Luxury of Rail Travel in the Forties

The NYT has a long investigative piece explaining the procedures deployed by the Estee Lauder heirs to "shelter" their income from tax, such as donating millions of dollars' worth of art to their own charitable trusts, then taking a gigantic tax write-off. Estée Lauder Companies went public in 1995, and Ronald Lauder and his mother [...]

The Aitkin, Minnesota, Fish House Parade is a post-Thanksgiving tradition. People dress up their snowmobiles, Sno-Cats, and fish houses—portable cabins used for ice fishing—in silly costumes and roll them down Aitkin's Main Street to cheering throngs. It's meant to mark the kick-off of the ice fishing season on Mille Lacs, a particularly large lake in [...]

Vintage Ads poster Write_light rounds up a collection of WWII "gremlins" safety posters, beauties every one. Sunday Surplus: Back Up Our Battleskies!

Twitter has bought a company called Whisper Systems, who make a secure version of the Android operating system as well as suites of privacy tools that are intended to protect demonstrators, especially participants in the Arab Spring. Many speculate that the acquisition was driven by the desire to hire CTO Moxie Marlinspike, a somewhat legendary [...]

In this episode of Gweek, David and I speak with Jon Ronson, a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and the author of the bestselling books, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and The Men Who Stare at Goats. Jon’s  latest work is a very short book, or long article, available as an ebook, called [...]

Read the article. Then download one of the 800 live shows in the newly restored audio archives, starting next Thursday. Then, go buy the book. (Thanks, Glen E. Friedman!)

Via writer Ned Sublette, who profiled him in this 2008 Bomb article, comes the sad news that New Orleans hoodoo bluesman Coco Robicheaux has died. He is said to have suffered a massive heart attack while sitting at the bar. He was 64 years old. Nola.com has an obituary, and more on the circumstances of [...]

For your post-Thansksgiving long read list, "Pre-Occupied: The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street," in the New Yorker today by Mattathias Schwartz. "It's very tl;dr," said the friend who forwarded it, but we both agree it's an essential read. Not everything fits in 140 characters, after all.