You Might Like … a Brief Acquaintance With Air Flanders, Fitting Starts, Tiiiik Toooock, Sushi Chefs, Private Networks and More

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

Laughing Squid – Seat Assignment: Airplane Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style – Nina Katchadourian – A really effective series of photographs taken in an airplane lavatory using only paper available there. This woman knows her Flanders folk.

The Chronicle of Higher Education – Forewords, Prefaces, and Introductions: Where to Begin? – Carol Saller – A moving foreward is what you want, if you’re a book writer. But my, there are a lot of throat-clearing noises that precede das Ding an sich. Notice, though, that there’s no mention of a prolegomenon. How comenon?

www.10000yearclock.net – 10,000 Year Clock – Danny Hillis /Jeff Bezos – You think it takes a long time for some books to get started? Try timing it with this baby, which “ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium” — or will, when it’s complete. Fittingly, this will take a while, given that it’s being constructed in the heart of a mountain in Texas. All about long-term thinking, something in short supply lately.

YouTube – Minute Physics – MinutePhysics – If you’ve only got a minute — one of the short ones, that is — and a need to understand how come e=MC², this is the site for you. There are a bunch of remarkably effective explanations of physical phenomena that can educate you while you pretend they’re for your kids’ benefit. Take, for example, the “hairy ball theorem“…

London Review of Books – Marx at 193 – John Lanchester – Physics isn’t the only thing that’s difficult to grasp. Marx would be another. But John Lanchester, novelist, journalist and, well, polymath, is the help you need. He does a lovely analysis here of what Marx got right and wrong, from the perspective of today. Read it, or listen to it. Your choice.

YouTube – A Day in the Life of a Kiva Robot – ForaTv – Kiva is a business that manages the delivery of goods ordered online from companies such as Saks, The Gap, or Staples. Their super efficient handling techniques are partly the result of using (cute) little robots that scurry (scuttle?) throughout the warehouse fetching and stacking the goods.

The European Magazine – Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive – George Dyson – No, not the vacuum cleaner guy. This Dyson is a historian of science, and here he is interviewed about such things as computational intelligence and progress.

The Guardian – How to Make Sushi – Lindsay Poulton, Ekaterina Ochagavia and Rie Yoshitake – This is a five minute video in which a real Japanese expert demonstrates how to make sushi (in Japanese, with English subtitles). Do not watch this if you are hungry.

Lifehacker – Build Your Own VPN – Alan Henry – If you’ve got more than one computer and if you deal with confidential material on them, you might want to consider hooking them up to your own virtual private network. It’s easier than it sounds and might save some heartache down the line.

HiLobrow – The Key of C – Matthew Battles – Speaking of computers, “via novelist, futurist, and ultimate hackhunter Bruce Sterling, a short demo video of music generated for 8-bit output from single lines of code.” Never destined for the Top 1000, some of these are, well, kind of interesting in a science fiction sort of way. I kind of like “Guard Against Divide-by-zero” — which is pretty good advice, anyway.