The origin of creative juices.

The first in a series of themed weekly amusements. Get your fix while you can at mlarson.muxtape.com; I forgot to post earlier this week and I've got a new edition coming in a few days.

Public sculpture can be hit or miss, but I think the Sibelius Monument is pretty sweet.

Schr??dinger's cat found its way into a comic with five randomly generated endings. [via waxy]

This fall, I'm thinking about running in the FATS Forty 40-Mile Ultra Trail Run or the Pine Mountain 40-Mile Ultra Trail Run. The most I've ever run in one stretch is about 17-18 miles, and that was a couple years ago. I have done day-hikes in the 30-35 mile range several times, though. I figure, why not give it a shot?

I don't remember how I came across these pictures of rare clouds, but they're really cool.

If you fight terror with terror, how do you tell which is which?

By choice, I stayed ignorant of the scandals at Abu Ghraib when the news first broke. Too disgusted. Too disheartened. I didn't want to see it or hear about it, though it seemed the photos were everywhere. I finally came around.

Philip Gourevitch wrote Standard Operating Procedure by drawing on the hundreds of hours of interviews that Errol Morris used to make his documentary film of the same name. There's some commentary on the mind-bogglingly poor management and bureaucratic indifference (e.g. "In the course of a month five different versions of the interrogation rules had been put into circulation at Abu Ghraib," or the topsy-turvy relationship of Military Intelligence and Military Police, or the secrecy of the International Committee of the Red Cross even after its investigation found conditions "tantamount to torture," or the willingness of people up and down the chain of command to look the other way when they saw the photos, or even saw it in person. This stuff is insane.).

But the photographs are the centerpiece. Most of the book details the incidents around the photos with lots of recollection from the military personnel involved, and talks more broadly about the nature of the photograph. It's the iconography, how they encourage us to interpret the scene even though we have only that slice of time to judge---I'm glad the photos don't appear in the book.

Were there a scale for jaded political cynicism, I'd probably rank in the 90th percentile, and I still find these stories really upsetting. But I'm glad I read it.

Really impressive linocuts + lithographs. See more of Edward Bawden's artwork at BiblioOdyssey.

And I quote, HARPERCOLLINS TO PUBLISH COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS!, end quote.

Dan Roam has shared the "Napkin Tools" from his book. (I wrote a wee review of The Back of the Napkin a while ago). New offerings in PDF format include the Visual Thinking Codex, the SQVID, and the Rule.

I stumbled on a couple music reading lists on Amazon. Daniel Levitin suggests 11 books to read on music. Songwriters on Songwriting could be good and I'm especially curious about The Art of Practicing. And Alex Ross wrote a top twenty guide for 20th-century music, both books and recordings. I'm curious about John Cage's Silence and Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.

The Singing, Ringing Tree is a sculpture in Lancashire, England that makes wooooing and oooooohhhhing sounds as the wind blows over the hilltop.

Tsar Bomba was the biggest man-made explosion we've ever had, back in 1961. The mushroom cloud in the video of the Tsar Bomba explosion went almost 40 miles up.

Dave Barry on college:

After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must *not* major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.

Anarchist Theory FAQ. This is really good.

A 10-minute film based on Flannery O'Connor's story "Good Country People", shot in the 1960s. [via maud newton]

The Luzzone dam in Switzerland has been made into a climbing wall. Here's a panoramic image at the base of the dam where you can look up and see the 700ft man-made route.

The LA Times has a nice profile of Billy Goat, a hiker who has finished off 32,000+ miles of hiking, including the Appalachian Trail, Continental Divide Trail, and where he's best known, the Pacific Crest Trail. I'm thinking about heading for the PCT next summer, so I found this bit pretty interesting: "Each year about 300 people attempt to hike the PCT in one season, generally April to September. Of those, about 60% make it -- fewer people than scale Mt. Everest in a year."

When I heard that milk jugs are being redesigned for better efficiency, I felt a sort of witless glee. Part of that is my usual response to efficiency. And also because most of my high school employment was in the local Kroger, stores #444 and #432 (I still remember that...?). I mostly did night stock, but also spent one summer in the Dairy section. Although throwing crates around in the heat of the shelving moment is really fun,1 dealing with crates is a chore, every single day. Some days I would have killed for a nice waist-level pallet of jugs, rather than a 7-foot tower of crates. There's also a good audio slideshow about the square milk jugs and some of the problems the customers are having. [via austin kleon] ---

1. Plenty of reasons I really liked stock work (lots of trade-offs, but still noteworthy): I got to work alone, but plenty of joking and yelling back and forth. I could yell or sing when I wanted. I got to walk around. There were very few irate customers at 3am, unlike a Saturday afternoon bagging groceries. There's also a good bit of healthy destruction involved (wielding a box cutter, breaking down cardboard, tossing damaged product out in the aisles, etc.). And on most nights, things looked perfect when I'd leave in the early morning. I love that severe contrast. Make an absolute mess when I'm working, and then polish it to something where no one can tell it was any different.

Selections from a few personal ads in the New York Review of Books.