Just found out that the Guardian has a small collection of Yakuza pictures. Worth a look if you have the time.

In Japan, organized crime and criminals come under the general heading of Yakuza. According to tradition, the name is derived from the worst possible score in a Japanese card game. It comes from Japan’s counterpart to Black Jack, Oicho- Kabu. The general difference between the cardgames is that in Oicho- Kabu is that a winning total of the cards is 19 instead of 21. As you see, the sum of 8, 9 and 3, is 20, which is over in Oicho-Kabu. In a hand resulting in a score of 20, the worst possible score, a player’s final score would be zero.

Among the losing combinations, the phonetic sound of an 8-9-3 sequence is ya - ku - sa. It’s from there the name, yakuza is derived… without worth to society. This doesn’t mean that they have no use for the society, it means that the members are people that somehow do not fit in the society, in other words societies misfits.

The Yakuza were itinerant gamblers, peddlers, renegade warriors and roving bandits. They served shoguns and municipalities and their legend includes a distinct Robin Hood quality that recently emerged during the recent Kobe Earthquake. The Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza clan quickly mobilized providing on the scene assistance to Kobe’s earthquake victims long before the national government resolved to act. (Source)

Now this is just one of the most incredible comic strips I have ever seen. Awe-inspiring, zen-ish, surreal and just flat out cool. Be sure to read the whole thing because you’ll become an enlightened Buddha after that.

Check it out here.

Found this bunch of interesting warning signs. Kinda 90s style futurism but I dig it. Looking at them makes me feel like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing.

Chaos control is likely to be very useful in many future applications. But chaos is sensitive, so interfering with such a system might be unadvisable.

Exactly what kinds of hazards could occur with mature cognotechnologies is hard to imagine. This sign represents a general hazard, perhaps the induction of inconsistent beliefs, infinite loops or mistaken perception.

A warning sign for black holes, event horizons, naked singularities and other spacetime engineering hazards. Of course, purists will point out that orbits around black holes are just as stable as around any other mass – they don’t suck things in without some friction mechanism – and that many other nasty metrics are not even symmetric. But some physical realism ought to be sacrificed for visual saliency. A black spiral signals an obvious, dynamical danger.

My symbol is intended to both remind of a Penning trap (for early applications where we just have a few antiprotons) and a starlike explosion (for bigger amounts). It is also in reverse, to hint at the anti-aspect of antimatter.

A system that evolves freely is potentially very adaptable and creative. It could also become nearly anything, with consequences ranging from the annoying to the disastrous. It is likely unlimited self-evolution will need to be contained carefully even as we mine it for truly new inventions. The arrows nicely hint at a chaos-star as well as replication.

As we learn to affect our brains better there is an increased risk for addictions, to gain pleasure from something harmful or that we edit ourselves to like our current state no matter what. The poppy represents such motivation traps.

Initial information and photographic results from thisSaturday afternoon attempt to make George Seurat’s famous painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte come to life with real people (Friends of Riverfront) on the banks of the Rock River in Beloit.

The weather cooperated beautifully with one glaring exception… the wind was ferocious… which kept things cool but shredded at least two umbrellas.

This must have taken a long time to set up. See the full set here.

Wired has a great set of pictures by Ed Burtynsky, a Toronto based photographer (Link).

Toronto photographer Ed Burtynsky has photographed industrial landscapes for more than 25 years. From 2003 to 2005, he traveled to China several times to capture images of the country’s industrial growth.

A film crew followed Burtynsky on his fifth trip in 2005 to shoot the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which opened this month in New York. A TED prize winner, Burtynsky manages to convey the scope of China’s growth through images where raw statistics have failed.

Iris Murdoch tells the truth here.

This is really cute. The famous scene from Stephen King’s The Shining, re-imagined and done Mario Bros style.

Here’s a wicked collection of pictures from BoredStop. Imagine what would happen if Fire was Made of Water. Very sexy.

Popular Mechanics has an article which celebrates the quarter century birthday of Blade Runner, the seminal sci-fi cyper-punk futuristic science fiction classic by directory Ridley Scott.

Twenty-five years ago, the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner became an instant science fiction classic. Set in a sodden, squalid Los Angeles of 2019, the neo-noir masterpiece influenced a generation of filmmakers and video-game designers. Long before I teamed up with Jamie Hyneman to form the MythBusters, I was a special-effects modelmaker, and Scott’s cyberpunk gem almost instantly became the most important film in the canon of movies I love.

I am a pretty big Blade Runner fan and have seen it over 10 times, with many viewing sessions purposely set at an hour pass midnight. I’ll slurp cup noodles and put on some killer headphones while lying all horizontal on the couch. Even better when its raining because everything gets totally surreal and you actually feel that you’re way ahead in the future, with now being just a dream of some sort.

Christophe Suarez, a French storm chaser recently took some rather remarkable pictures of lighting raining down upon Geneva and published them on Storm Track, a forum about storms and hardcore weather.

On the 20th of june, a very nice supercell occured in the northern Alps. I intercepted the storm from the “Salève”, a 1300m moutain close to Geneva. The base of the cumulonimbus was so low that I could take the strikes over Geneva from above. It’s really a wonderful experience.

Here are the pictures he took:

Apparently, he’s part of a thunderstorm chasing group which goes around chasing storms and snapping pictures of them. Here’s the link to the storm chasing group website.

Took a look around the site’s storm photo gallery, which features pictures of lightning storms by other photographers. Check them out: