Via “Tracking Michael Jackson’s White Glove in 10,060 Frames”, Information Aesthetics:

On May 4th, 2007, Internet users were asked to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. This huge dataset was then used to create a collection of video effects-like visualizations.

Via “Penguin’s Magnum Collection”, Creative Review:

Steve Hare alerts us to the recently published Penguin editions of six classic non-fiction texts, each using a rare image from the Magnum archives as a wraparound cover. The design sees the barcode and title/author information placed on the spine – a removable sticker ensuring that the cover image remains as powerful as possible…

“Our starting point was trying to dress six classic works of American reportage in cutting-edge design that properly reflected their style and substance, to bring them to the attention of a whole new readership,” writes Michael Joseph Non-Fiction Publishing Director, Rowland White, on Penguin’s website.

“When that became a collaboration with Magnum, it suddenly was impossible to imagine doing it any other way. The Penguin Magnum Collection was a partnership that immediately felt right.” All six editions are out now (see, here, for the listing on the Penguin website).

Via missmodular:

Oh snap! In correlation with the 20th anniversary of 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul curated the upcoming issue of Frank151 with tons of exclusive material. There goes my magazine allowance. More info and images at Frolab’s blog…

Iran’s power structure, a brief overview.

(via hackiran)

Saab 37 Viggen

When I was growing up in the more Military Industrial Complex supported version of Southern California—it still is, but not as much—a lot of the fighter pilots from the many near-by bases had these corny bumper stickers that said, “My other car is an F-14,” or whatever it is they flew. (Seriously, nobody is more full of themselves and overcompensating than a twenty-something fighter jock.) I don’t know how this directly connects, but Saab once made cars and jets, and in spite of the high-quality of their cars, their jets were even better. I think that goes without saying. I grew up wishing that I could buy a Saab car with a Viggen (jet) engine. I don’t know why, but I thought that in the future it would be possible. The “future” so far, sucks.

Clipse, “Hello New World”, Hell Hath No Fury

I tend to not post “trife-life” raps, but I love this song. Crack rap is so ’80s.

Used as the sole criterion, however, this field day measure would clearly be imperfect. A firefighter could play a great game of basketball, for example, but have poor organizational skills or a tendency to procrastinate in writing up reports. This method is also vulnerable to a legitimate fairness argument: Black players make up 75 percent of the NBA and 65 percent of players in the NFL but less than 13 percent of the U.S. population. That means they’re excelling over whites at about a 5:1 ratio in these sports. My test would make it likely that 65 to 75 percent of all promotions in fire departments go to African-Americans. In a diverse city like New Haven, where the percentage of African-Americans in the fire department is roughly three times the percentage of blacks in the general U.S. population, there is a high likelihood that no white people would be chosen if there were 15 openings for a promotion.

Fifteen turns out to be an important number, because in 2003, the city of New Haven had 15 openings for promotion in its fire department. They made the cut based solely on the results of a multiple-choice exam and an oral exam, giving more weight to the multiple-choice part of the exam despite the fact that other fire departments recorded substantial disparities between blacks and whites on the multiple-choice exam but not on the oral exam. (The few fire departments that still use a combination of oral and written exams tend to place about twice as much emphasis on the oral rather than the written exam, because they have not witnessed racial disparities in leadership among qualified firefighters, suggesting that the oral exam is less biased.)

Full Article.

Simon and Garfunkel, “Mrs. Robinson”,The Graduate Soundtrack

This Fourth of July, those who identify themselves as non-believers, or humanists, or atheists — or a whole host of other names which signify a nontheistic worldview — have much cause for celebration. After eight years in the Bush wilderness — and an even longer period of ostracism by the Washington political establishment — a rising demographic of like-minded Americans and a new president are guiding us back to our roots as a secular nation.

“We have generally been a pariah group in America,” says Woody Kaplan, Advisory Board Chair of the Secular Coalition for America. “Pretty much unrecognized by the political establishment. Yet there’s almost no religious group in America as large as us…. We were that third rail that politicians failed to touch.”

Indeed when the Obama Administration invited the Coalition to the White House for a meeting in May it marked a stark departure from recent history.

“Joe Lieberman famously talked about the constitution providing for freedom of religion but not freedom from religion — and questioned the possibility of non-believers to be ethical human beings,” Kaplan says. “Suffice it to say we were never invited as an identity group into the Bush White House. But interestingly enough… we were only invited into the Clinton White House under the rubric of core civil rights or civil liberties interests, and not as an identity group of nontheists.”

Full Article.

Via “Four for the Fourth”, NPR:

Wasn’t Born to Follow

Artist: Original Soundtrack

Album: Easy Rider [Expanded]

Many events in 1969 changed how Americans viewed their country: Woodstock, the continuing Vietnam War, the Moon landing and the Chicago Seven trial, to name a few. And for the first time, mainstream America was viewing its counterculture on the big screen in films such as Easy Rider. In the midst of motorcycles, mutton chops and a lengthy acid trip, audiences saw a wild America, the one between Los Angeles and New Orleans. Suddenly, the American highway was the kind of place where you could get lost in the wonder and Easy Rider had its soundtrack. Penned by songwriting team Carole King and Gerry Goffin, the oh-so appropriately-titled “Wasn’t Born to Follow” by The Byrds is an easy-going psychedelic-country song about aimless wandering and the choice to do so. —Lars Gotrich

Watch “Wasn’t Born to Follow” on YouTube.

Via “Global Warming: Causes and Effects”, Sociological Images:

The two maps below are part of a series of maps that warp the size and shape of countries according to various international disproportions (see lots more here).

These two warp countries according to how much they are contributing to global warming and how much they are likely to suffer from global warming respectively.

Ezra Klein interprets:

The first shows the world in terms of carbon emissions. America, for instance, is huge. So is China. And Europe. Africa is hardly visible. The second map shows the world in terms of increased mortality — that is to say, deaths — from climate change. Suddenly, America virtually disappears. So does Europe. Africa, however, is grotesquely distended. South Asia inflates.

Kevin Drum summarizes:

Long story short, we spit out the carbon, but it’s people in Africa and South Asia who are mostly going to die because of it.

Via “Illegalize LA: American Apparel’s Immigrant Dilemma”, Good/Blogs:

American Apparel, the sexified Los Angeles-based clothing manufacturer that prides itself on the ethical treatment of its staff, was apparently employing a huge concentration of illegal immigrants. According to Reuters, “[a] U.S. federal probe has found that about a third of American Apparel’s factory workers in the Los Angeles area had supplied suspect or invalid records and were not authorized to work in the United States.”

The Reuters piece, which was adorned with the inappropriately fittingly suggestive headline, “Probe Fingers 1,800 American Apparel Workers,” reported that those 1,800 employees (out of 4,500) possessed “suspect and not valid” documentation of work-eligibility. American Apparel, which assembles 230,000 pieces of clothing a day in its Los Angeles factory, will terminate those employees, but expects that the loss will not affect its output.

As Gawker points out, and as is widely known, the company had been making all sorts of noise about the need for immigration reform in Los Angeles and the rest of the country. That—along with soft core porn—is the touchstone of the company’s mission statement. Hence Reuters thinks the finding will be a significant setback for the company. I’d say, if anything, it reinforces the point that we desperately need sweeping reform in the country.