You Might Like … a Moment Alone With Clouds, Emma, Quartz, Yourselves, Testudines, LEGO 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.


chromeexperiments.com – Cloud Globe – Chrome Experiments – Something of a demo of what Javascript can do in your browser, this takes satellite photos of clouds over time and runs them as a movie, showing major weather events around the globe over the past couple of years. Canada, as is so often the case, gets cut off arbitrarily, this time in the north.

Network Awsome – Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman – PBS / Mel Bucklin – From clouds to the fog of war and class struggle. This 85 minute film documents the political life of the radical, pacifist and feminist, Emma Goldman, who was imprisoned in the US and then deported. She died in Toronto in 1940.

Wired – Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future – Bryan Gardiner – “Lighter than aluminum, harder than high-carbon steel, and many times stronger than regular soda-lime glass, Pyroceram” isn’t able to leap tall buildings at a single bound — but it did begin Corning’s work on specially hardened glass that eventually produced Gorilla Glass, which graces the front of your Apple iPhones. No fog, no cloud, please. Clear?

Quartz – Welcome to Quartz – Kevin J. Delaney – There’s glass — and then there’s Quartz. It’s a new site for business news, aimed principally at tablet and smartphone users. The stories are not simply curated from elsewhere but written for the publication — which might take itself and, indeed, business a trifle too seriously, purporting, as it does, to ask “tectonic questions”.

Information is Beautiful – Being Defensive: How psychotherapy sees you – David McCandless – If you can’t see that you take yourself too seriously, you may find yourself somewhere on this chart, which actually does a decent job of arraying Western neuroses in an attractive design.

Brain Science Podcast – “The Self Illusion” with Bruce Hood – Virginia Campbell – One cure for taking yourself too seriously would be the elimination of the illusion of the self. Here Dr. Hood “is challenging is the notion that we are the integrated coherent individuals that we usually experience as self.” (If you’d prefer to read rather than listen, there’s also a transcript of the podcast.)


NPR – ACME in Concert: Steve Reich’s Complete String Quartets – American Contemporary Music Ensemble – One of the things about neuroses is that you persevere in unfruitful behaviour. American composer Steve Reich’s music perseveres (and repeats, and insists), but does so fruitfully. (There’s also an audio only track, for those who don’t want to see the music being made.)

Slate Magazine – Tasting like chicken: its evolutionary origins – Jackson Landers – Speaking of things being made, here’s a piece that explains why fish doesn’t taste like chicken but diapsids and testudines do. Will there be fries with that?

The Economist – The human microbiome: Me, myself, us – anon. – Indeed, will there be microbes with that? is the question. And the answer is a resounding yes. Millions upon millions of them, and not just those in your gut that will help you deal with those fries. Like Chicken Man [ed. note: worth the side trip], they’re everywhere!, they’re everywhere!

YouTube – LEGO Great Ball Contraption – akiyuky – LEGO’s everywhere, too. But you’ve never seen it put to use like this. Glorious in its inutility, this device would make Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson proud. Nay, envious.
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