Massless

I am loving these...

1.) Technopop: The Secret History of Technology and Pop Music
A six-part NPR series on how technology has changed popular music. The first three parts are archived on the internet, part four starts this Friday. Here's the description for part three...

Until the late 1940s -- even during the era of electrical recording -- making a record was an all-or-nothing proposition. If the trombonist flubbed a note in the second verse, you either scrapped the recording by literally breaking the record, or you just lived with the mistake. But an unlikely team made up of Nazi-era engineers, an American GI and Bing Crosby helped change all that. They introduced a new technology called "magnetic tape recording."

...so it's really a story about a string of killer apps for music. My kind of feature. Perfect.

2.) Russian Prison Tattoos
Disturbing and fascinating. The site design is simple and remarkable...

The Russian prison population is one of the largest in the world. From the mid-1960's to the 1980's, thirty-five million people were incarcerated, and of those, twenty to thirty million were tattooed. The tattoos display inmates' contempt for official justice and retribution--phrases and images directly mock the political system and the absence of any possibility for "reform" within the jails. "For a convict, prison is a crime college," reads one typical statement. Convicted female gang members sometimes prefer the simple declaration, "People are wild animals."

...click through the first picture and then click the body.