5IT, 12/4
1. Some artists set up a way for people to send messages to the NSA.
"Berlin-based artists Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud have installed WLAN / WiFi mesh network with can antennas on the roofs of the Academy of Arts and the Swiss Embassy, both located in the heart of 'NSA's Secret Spy Hub' in the city. The network is at the disposal of passersby who would like to communicate anonymously and even send messages to operatives of the NSA and GCHQ intelligence who might lurk inside the nearby British Embassy and Embassy of the United States."
"As odd as it is to see an exquisite 17th-century Japanese bowl in a contemporary design exhibition, it seems odder still to discover that it is there not because of the finesse with which it was originally made, but the skill with which it was repaired during the late 1800s. Tsukuroi, or the art of repair, is so revered in Japan that it is believed to create a new form of beauty, as the bowl demonstrates."
"In a novel use of drone technology to further conservation efforts, researchers from The Nature Conservancy have brought their $2,000 DJI Phantom quadcopter into the heart of Staten Island, a working farm west of Lodi acquired by the group in 2001 as both a living laboratory and a refuge for migratory birds. Their mission: to use the drone-generated aerial photos and videos to get a more accurate head-count of the threatened greater sandhill crane, the island's largest and most majestic winter visitor."
4. Reevaluating the origins of our species.
"I had come to Ethiopia in search of my own deep vision of humankind’s history and fate. A flood of new discoveries coming out of the country have suggested that human traits occurred in ancient members of our tribe, the hominids, long before Homo sapiens entered the scene 200,000 years ago. I wanted to meet the native and foreign scientists responsible for shifting our origins backward in time. Soon after I arrived, Merkeb Mekuria, an anthropologist and curator at the Ethnological Museum in Addis Ababa, greeted me. 'Welcome home,' he said."
5. The best animated films of all time, as selected by Terry Gilliam.
"The magic of Tex Avery’s animation is the sheer extremity of it all. The classic Avery image is of someone’s mouth falling open down to their feet, wham, their eyes whooping out and their tongue unrolling for about half a mile: that is the most wonderfully liberating spectacle…. There is also a childlike sense of immortality and indestructibility in his work; people get squashed, mashed, bashed, bent out of shape, whatever, and they bounce back. In essence, it is like the myth of eternal life."
Two other notes: 1) It's worth mentioning my Fusion colleague Kevin Roose's stellar work on the Sony Pictures hack, what the hack told us about the gender pay gap, and the fallout inside the company. 2) I've got another pile of invites to the social network This. I'll be sending them out today. No need to write in again: I've got everyone who emailed on a big list.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
corpus. Body; fig. the whole body of literature on any subject; a complete collection of writings; the main body, material substance; principal as opposed to interest on income. Corpus delicti: the basic facts necessary to the commission of a crime (not, as is sometimes supposed, the body of the victim).
The Credits: 1. we-make-money-not-art.com 2. nytimes.com 3. siliconvalley.com / @byjulialove 4.nautil.us 5. openculture.com
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