[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]
#best news this week
A Gardener in South Central LA Wants You to Grow Your Own Food – “Q: Not anyone can just plant a garden like this. A: Anyone can. Anyone. We’re all gardeners. Truly, we are soil. Ashes to ashes. We decompose, and what’s left there? We share 50 percent of our DNA with bananas. Get some healthy soil. Get some seeds. Put some starter plants in there. Water it. Take care of it. And it grows. Plants are just like us.”
#watch and
Sam Hyde’s 2070 Paradigm Shift – “Comedian pranks TedX at Drexel University”
Carpark – A simple shopping trip goes horribly wrong.
Eye – Optical illusion – “This video has been carefully designed to create a strong natural hallucination.”
#learn
Activists score big victory as Jack Spade gives up on the Mission – “Score one for people power. Anti-gentrification activists in the Mission scored a major victory last night in their months-long battle to keep Jack Spade, an upscale men’s clothing chain, from opening a store on 16th Street”
All Is Fair in Love and Twitter – “One early Twitter employee used to say that the company succeeded in spite of itself, and in some ways, that’s true. While it was clear for years that Twitter was going to be huge, it wasn’t clear until very recently — as many Twitter employees privately confessed to me — that it wasn’t going to be the next Myspace or Friendster: great ideas that became great failures on account of bad management.”
Why Is Everyone Fucking Up Banksy’s NYC Work? America’s Top Vandals Explain – “Graffiti has never had one cohesive voice, so we decided to go right to the people who know the most about it and ask them why they think Banksy is such a target.”
An Interview With Banksy, Street Art Cult Hero, International Man of Mystery – “But it’s complicated, it feels like as soon as you profit from an image you’ve put on the street, it magically transforms that piece into advertising. When graffiti isn’t criminal, it loses most of its innocence.”
What Is the Higgs? – Interactive Graphic – “Two physicists, François Englert and Peter Higgs, won the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for their theory explaining how particles acquire mass.”
Jacob Appelbaum Doesn’t Have Much Hope for the Future of Privacy – “There’s no real separation between the real world and the internet. What we’ve started to see is the militarization of that space. That isn’t to say that it just started to happen, just that we’ve started to see it in an incontrovertible, “Oh, the crazy paranoid people weren’t crazy and paranoid enough,” sort of way.”
Tor and the Silk Road takedown – “So far, nothing about this case makes us think that there are new ways to compromise Tor (the software or the network). The FBI says that their suspect made mistakes in operational security, and was found through actual detective work.”
Rap Stats: Breaking Down The Words in Rap Lyrics Over Time – “Rap Stats, a tool to plot the frequency of words appearing in rap songs from 1988 through the present day.”
embodying ethics: endangered – “By designing a series of hunting jackets that turn into representations of the animal under threat, reminds us of our complicity in the problem.”
[delicious.com/pieceoplastic or subscribe to this RSS feed – with all the typos]