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The Austerity Kitchen (previously) on the Dutch abundance of the 17th Century
posted by The Whelk at 9:51 PM PST - 7 comments

Years before the X-Files appeared on TV, there was Project U.F.O., produced by Jack Webb, famous for creating Dragnet and many other popular television series. The show features two U.S. Air Force investigators with the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson AFB, charged with investigating UFO sightings. The first season starred William Jordan as Maj. Jake Gatlin alongside Caskey Swaim as Staff Sgt. Harry Fitz. Jordan was a rather nondescript leading man, while Swaim, who had never had any significant acting experience before landing the role, added diversity as a Southerner with a pronounced accent. In season two, Jordan was replaced by Edward Winter as Capt. Ben Ryan. Many of the episodes were loosely based on case files from the Air Force's Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952-1970. Project U.F.O. only ran for two seasons, from 1978-1979, and was never re-aired in the USA, nor was it released on video. [more inside]
posted by smoothvirus at 8:49 PM PST - 62 comments

Bill and Coo Plot: The feathered residents of Chirpendale are terrorized by an evil black crow by the name of "The Black Menace". But to the citizen's rescue comes a brave young taxi puller named Bill! [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:14 PM PST - 7 comments

Bowe Bergdahl, American Soldier, Freed by Taliban in Prisoner Trade (NYT) [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:17 PM PST - 121 comments

"DISCLAIMER: Rap Shirts for White People can be worn by people of all colors, but in some cases, it may not be appropriate to wear them at all. Use your best judgment." [NSFTwerk]
posted by Rykey at 4:05 PM PST - 98 comments

A charmingly illustrated guide on how to engage in oral sex with a woman.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:47 PM PST - 59 comments

Are Reform Conservatives Serious?
A crop of young thinkers trying to steer the right toward the future needs to both vanquish the Tea Party and show it has more than just a marketing campaign.
posted by davidstandaford at 11:55 AM PST - 40 comments

Yesterday, during the pre-World Cup friendly between England and Peru being played at Wembley Stadium, there were three goals scored, but the moment that captured the most attention has been this unbelievable, incredible paper airplane toss.
posted by BeerFilter at 11:30 AM PST - 24 comments

"I have seen the killer's face every day since that happened - multiple times - but I have not seen any of the victims..."

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has four suggestions for removing the social incentives for copycat killers, in the wake of the recent murders in California. She wrote about this in The Atlantic a couple of years ago, and she talks about her ideas in a more recent interview on CBC's Day 6.
posted by sneebler at 10:38 AM PST - 21 comments

Someone posted an ad on Craigslist seeking women who for one reason or another had never seen their own vagina and then set them up with a mirror in the Vagina Booth to film their reaction.
posted by gman at 10:14 AM PST - 26 comments

I am not especially bothered by men who desire thin women. They are just as susceptible to messages that these are the women that they should find most attractive as women are to messages that they should look like them. The more troubling kind of man has a caveat about a woman’s thinness. She must not be “obsessed” or “overly concerned” with it. Or at least not visibly so. She mustn’t always order salads or freak out when she doesn’t make it to the gym. Watching her eat a cheeseburger—or better yet, a steak—even oddly enthralls him.

Reflections on thinness, staying thin and making it look natural by Alana Massey.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:42 AM PST - 199 comments

After the controversial decision last month (previously) to leave actress and activist Laverne Cox out of their "Time 100" issue, Cox has become the first transgender person to grace the cover of Time magazine.
posted by The Gooch at 9:07 AM PST - 37 comments

"It’s most logical to conceive of Billy Jack as a dream-movie accidentally created by a spiritually confused, LSD-addled 19-year-old who fell asleep in the early 1970s while watching a weird, humorless movie about a half-Native American/half-Caucasian warrior who does not want to fight, because he’s too good—both in the sense of being a singularly skilled one-man killing machine, and in subscribing to a higher moral and ideological cause than his bloodthirsty brothers-in-arms And yet he’s pushed by circumstances into dramatically kicking ass, over and over." Nathan Rabin takes a long look at the bizarre pair of blockbusters Billy Jack and The Trial of Billy Jack. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:48 AM PST - 66 comments

Maybe it's time to put down that camera/smart phone. A short NPR article (including a link to the audio, an interview with Maryanne Garry, a psychology professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand) discussing why it's important to be thoughtful about the amount of time you spend experiencing life through a viewfinder and how the digital age has impacted on our parental role as archivist of our own and our children's lives.
posted by HuronBob at 4:20 AM PST - 46 comments

How well can you spell? is a spelling challenge from the Washington Post. Just click on the misspelled words. [more inside]
posted by zardoz at 9:49 PM PST - 109 comments

Norman Greenbaum discusses the creation and ongoing popularity of 'Spirit in the Sky'
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:47 PM PST - 49 comments

The old Country store on dirt road, on 75 Wheelers Church Rd Hurdle Mills, NC 27541.
Here is what it looked like on Sunday afternoon in July 1939, (A 4x5 nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration.)
Current and recent visits.
Models from the American Adventure attraction in Epcot at Disney World (scroll ½ way down).
And colorized.
(Shorpy, previously.)
posted by growabrain at 9:08 PM PST - 20 comments

"The Demo" [SLYT] is the original pilot episode of the animated tv show, Bob's Burger's (previously).The theme remains the same, although the art style is a bit rough. The plot is exactly the same as the first episode, "Human Flesh", with minor differences in animation and timing. Oh, and Tina was originally a Daniel! [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 9:07 PM PST - 21 comments

Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW]. "Installing magnets, microchips and sensors in their own bodies — this is how cyberpunk biohackers went from fiction to reality." [Previously, Via]
posted by homunculus at 8:42 PM PST - 49 comments

Twenty-Eight Feet: Life On A Little Wooden Boat [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:55 PM PST - 16 comments

What is it about "Happy" by Pharrell Williams that makes you want to move? Why can't we sit still when we hear Ray Charles perform "I've Got a Woman"? Michael Jackson had it, and so did Stevie Wonder. "It," in this case, is syncopation, the gaps in the rhythm that your brain wants to fill in, as reported in the article Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music (full article online).
posted by filthy light thief at 4:58 PM PST - 67 comments

Vortexx, the last non-E/I children's Saturday morning programming block on broadcast television, is ending this fall.
posted by Small Dollar at 3:47 PM PST - 67 comments

Comedian and voice actor H. Jon Benjamin redubs the voice of HAL 9000 during a guest appearance on the Late Night Basement live show in Brooklyn.
posted by figurant at 3:37 PM PST - 31 comments

A completely unscientific survey on tipping in the US service industry.
posted by chainsofreedom at 2:30 PM PST - 173 comments

"No, I took her voice for two simple reasons—she was a twit and she was in love. I took one look at her and knew that she’d spill everything she knew in the pretty human boy’s ear, and then where would we be?" - The Sea Witch Sets The Record Straight by Ursula Vernon.
posted by The Whelk at 2:16 PM PST - 25 comments

You could call summers like this a colossal waste of time. But that’s what feels immortal about them—wasting time, colossally, as the gods must do. Taisia Kitaiskaia writes an ode to summer on the Hairpin. The author, a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, also channels Baba Yaga in a regular advice column for the same website. [more inside]
posted by pretentious illiterate at 1:28 PM PST - 16 comments

Schrödinger’s water for the perfect cup of coffee
posted by pjern at 12:48 PM PST - 26 comments

Mo Asumang, daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother, talks to BBC News about her experiences making her new documentary, The Aryans, in which she confronts racists, both in Germany and among the Ku Klux Klan in America. (4:31) [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 11:52 AM PST - 12 comments

This morning, the Veterans Affairs Chief Eric Shinseki tendered his resignation, following the release of an independent review detailing corruption in the reporting of wait times and scheduling practices, along with alleged patient deaths in the Phoenix Health Care system. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:02 AM PST - 112 comments

Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide drafts to be published Writing that Douglas Adams cut from his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels is to be published for the first time after being found in his archive.
posted by dfm500 at 10:13 AM PST - 57 comments

Researchers at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have developed a technique for quantum data teleportation that uses deterministic methods to offer one hundred percent accuracy. Previous methods only worked reliably one in every 100 million attempts. [more inside]
posted by saulgoodman at 9:26 AM PST - 84 comments

Genius in a tiny mother bird, who learned to give her babies a password so they wouldn't die. A musical password. The Superb Fairy Wren sings to her eggs. The unborn baby birds, still in the egg, learn that musical password and sing it on being hatched.
posted by nickyskye at 9:03 AM PST - 34 comments

What song do you play when you have a crow sitting on your guitar? Blackbird, of course. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by tommasz at 8:35 AM PST - 35 comments

Getting relevant data first is a gambling advantage. Thus the controversial practice of courtsiding.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:36 AM PST - 28 comments

The Los Angeles Clippers will be sold to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. The sale -- forced by the NBA's kicking out current owner (and racist slumlord) Donald Sterling -- will be formally conducted by the Sterling Family Trust, which technically owns the team. The Trust is currently controlled solely by Sterling's wife Shelly, who had her husband declared mentally incompetent after a month of him declaring that he would never sell and that Magic Johnson is a bad role model. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:28 AM PST - 177 comments

In 2013, NZ researchers looking at conserving evidence from the Shackleton Expedition (1914-17) found 22 unprocessed negatives stored in a box at a hut where a group of stranded explorers had sheltered. "Though slightly damaged, the incredible images give us a rare glimpse of adventurers from the past."
posted by sneebler at 5:57 AM PST - 39 comments

A bunch of otters jam on a Casio. An orangutan plays a xylophone with a banana. A sloth bear toots some harmonica. These are all a part of the National Zoo's environmental enrichment efforts, not unlike getting your cat some food balls and cat shelves. [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 5:31 AM PST - 31 comments

An outsiders guide to the City of London.
Also of interest from the Guardian is the Joris Luyendijk banking blog which includes a ten best quotes from financial insiders and a helpful guide for novices.
posted by adamvasco at 4:50 AM PST - 5 comments

“Are you a boy or a girl?”: Our trans-bisexual love story
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 3:40 AM PST - 13 comments

Remember when Captain America had a gay best friend?
posted by MartinWisse at 3:16 AM PST - 74 comments

Team Service Announcements is a series of short skits demonstrating basic principles of Team Fortress 2 tactics and strategy.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:44 AM PST - 19 comments

Mass Bolero. "This short film, Mass Bolero, is a mass participation project made in the spring of 2014 by the people of Nottingham in tribute to Torvill and Dean." [via]
posted by feelinglistless at 1:26 AM PST - 15 comments

Back in February (mefi), things looked grim for the ISEE-3/ICE probe. A lot can change in 3 1/2 months. [more inside]
posted by dendrochronologizer at 11:08 PM PST - 20 comments

Julia Collins of Kenilworth, Ill, is now the winningest woman in Jeopardy! history, the third winningest non-tournament player, and she isn't done. She'll be playing her 20th game tomorrow night, wherein followers hope she'll break the $400,000 mark on her steady climb. You can catch up on her run at YouTube.

One of the champions whose records she has now surpassed is Arthur Chu, who has also made big waves this week, speaking out on misogyny in geek culture, in response to the murders in Isla Vista. Writes Chu: The overall problem is one of a culture where instead of seeing women as, you know, people, protagonists of their own stories just like we are of ours, men are taught that women are things to 'earn,' to 'win.'

The show's history and the iconic host's banter seem to reveal that in terms of gender, Jeopardy! is not, as etymology would have it, "an evenly divided game," but could this be the year things change?
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:32 PM PST - 59 comments

If our criminal-justice system had to pay a fair wage for labor that inmates provide, it would collapse
posted by MoonOrb at 10:06 PM PST - 42 comments

Fredbird, Louie and Rampage are missing. St. Louis' only hope is #OfficerJalisha [more inside]
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 9:57 PM PST - 3 comments

At silent-reading parties, guests bring books, stay as long as they want, and aren't allowed to speak to one another.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:10 PM PST - 45 comments

Morgan Freeman finally opens the b-o-o-o-o-ox. [Warning: Contains spoiler for the movie Se7en]
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:35 PM PST - 19 comments

The psychology of Soylent and the prison of first-world food choices

People are born with neither the ability to cook nor compile; both are taught, and chastising even an adult for not knowing how to cook a healthy meal makes about as much sense as chastising an adult for not knowing how to code or how to compile an application from source. Each of those two different ridicules demonstrates an identical lack of empathy and an accompanying equally stunning sense of privilege that you should probably check immediately.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:45 PM PST - 388 comments

University Study on Sexism In BBC’s Doctor Who (Infographic). It examines and compares episodes from the first seven seasons of the revival through the departure of the Ponds. The major metrics are the Bechdel Test and companion speaking time. [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 5:29 PM PST - 89 comments

Tonight at 7pm PDT, after years in development, SpaceX will reveal a new manned version of the Dragon spacecraft. Elon Musk said that Dragon 2 will look like "a real alien spaceship", leading to speculation what it will looks like, including this artists interpretation at ExtremeTech. According to Musk, Dragon 2 will have larger windows for astronauts to see outside, and "landing legs that pop out of the bottom" and "side-mounted thruster pods" to allow for propulsive landings on land.
posted by stbalbach at 5:07 PM PST - 124 comments

Hidden Paintings Revealed at Ancient Temple of Angkor Wat. "New, digitally enhanced images reveal detailed murals at Angkor Wat showing elephants, deities, boats, orchestral ensembles and people riding horses — all invisible to the naked eye." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 4:16 PM PST - 7 comments

MagiCATastrophe , in which a birthday party magician discovers his secret power.
posted by desjardins at 3:46 PM PST - 25 comments

Friedrich Nietzsche, famously a full professor at the tender age of 24, was in a good position to develop an acute sensitivity to the university as machine: "The student listens to lectures . . . Very often the student writes at the same time he listens to lectures. These are the moments when he dangles from the umbilical cord of the university. The teacher . . . is cut off by a monumental divide from the consciousness of his students . . . A speaking mouth and many, many ears, with half as many writing hands: that is the external apparatus of the academy; set in motion, that is the educational machinery of the university." [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 3:36 PM PST - 12 comments

Recently, News Corp announced they are acquiring Harlequin, the foremost publisher of steamy romance novels. Here's a taste of the new and improved product, courtesy of Bill Maher.
posted by Daddy-O at 12:27 PM PST - 44 comments

A couple of weeks ago, Uruguay unveiled marijuana regulation details... but it's easier written than done. The most famous cannabis activist in Latin America, Alicia Castilla, critizises the registries and points out several unknowns like supply. "I don't know how they'll come up with 22 tonnes of marijuana for November”.
posted by LetsKa at 12:15 PM PST - 6 comments

There are few professions more confusing, or misrepresented, than high school teaching. Education is a ubiquitous experience — public or private, we are all taught by someone, somewhere — and yet it remains misunderstood. I have now begun to write about teaching because I profoundly respect this vocation. I refuse to allow politicians to corner the rhetorical market on this subject. There are stories that need to be told.

I hesitate to call what follows "advice," though it might seem as such. There are so many varied experiences during a single teaching day that I am much more comfortable thinking in epigrammatic terms. I have a lot more to say about teaching, and certain reflections will need to wait. But, for now, here are 55 thoughts about teaching English. Nick Ripatrazone, at The Millions (previously).
posted by davidjmcgee at 12:11 PM PST - 27 comments

Wanted: Explainer explainer. Our venture-funded vertical-driven content prosumer phablet platisher is rapidly growing and we need to add some Ninja Rockstar Content Associates A.S.A.P. See below for a list of open positions!
posted by Diablevert at 10:59 AM PST - 50 comments

The strange, tragic story of the Brothers Muse. The sideshow called them Eko and Iko, cannibal savages from Borneo, sheep-headed men, ambassadors from Mars, highlighting their signature white dreadlocks in every poster. In reality, they were George and Willie Muse, taken from their parents in 1899 in rural Roanoke, Virginia by bounty hunters working for sideshow producers fascinated by their albinism. [more inside]
posted by Gucky at 10:40 AM PST - 7 comments

Springpad to shut down. The venerable productivity app that served as a digital filing cabinet and personal organizer, has announced on its blog it will close its doors effective June 25. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 9:02 AM PST - 121 comments

Simply put, it is a fact that people eat Pokémon.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 8:51 AM PST - 30 comments

Two years after a mentally ill Florida prisoner, Darren Rainey, was found dead, locked in a scalding-hot shower, the autopsy remains incomplete and no charges have been filed. He had been scheduled to be released the following month from his sentence for cocaine possession. The unit is under increased scrutiny because of the recent death of another prisoner, Damion Foster, during a cell extraction.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:09 AM PST - 46 comments

Golem are a klezmer-punk band from NYC, whose third album Tanz is has just come out. Their current label, Discos Corasón, has a number of live songs and their first music video: "Freydele". And here's a great rendition of their song "This Is Yiddish!" You can also catch an interview with a couple of band members and read an interview with the multilingual vocalist, accordionist and band founder Annette Ezekiel Kogan.
posted by griphus at 7:17 AM PST - 8 comments

Randy Olson is conducting an analysis of chess since 1850. What's the advantage of playing white? Are games getting longer? What openings have fallen in and out of vogue? Are chess players becoming less focused on capturing pieces?
posted by Chrysostom at 6:25 AM PST - 26 comments

Stickman's Tips for Having a Table at a Comic Book Convention is actually a pretty good primer for having a booth or table at any convention, ever. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 6:14 AM PST - 23 comments

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is currently presenting the first part of a near-complete retrospective of the films of the great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, featuring 17(!) films he made between 1969 and 1974. (Part 2, featuring the films made between 1975 and his death in 1982, will take place in November 2014.) Collected below are some recent writings on RWF and these early films, posted by the Film Society and elsewhere online. [more inside]
posted by Awkward Philip at 5:29 AM PST - 7 comments

Yamada Gouki (山田剛毅), aka goking, has been illustrating creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos and similar horrors in an ukiyo-e style: Cyaegha, Igolnaku, The Thing That Plays with Fate, Cthonian, Byakhee, and would like to wish you a very Merry Fishmas from Innsmouth. You can find more illustrations on his Twitter or his blog, 2D6. [more inside]
posted by 23 at 4:56 AM PST - 11 comments

It's hard to imagine a cover of Michael Jackson's hit song Billie Jean that could any be more satisfying than this one by the Bottle Boys, who do it on, guess what? Bottles.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:36 AM PST - 24 comments

HELLO TO ALL YOU SATURNIANS, THIS CHANNEL IS DEDICATED TO JAZZ, TO SUN RA AND HIS JAZZ SPACE MUSIC. SPREAD THE WORD, PLEASE, BECAUSE THE SATURNIAN CULTURE ALWAYS HAS TO REMAINS ALIVE INSIDE US, SHARE MY VIDEOS, VOTE AND COMMENT. I HOPE YOU'LL ENJOY IT ALL.

It's Ascension Day in the Netherlands and what better way to celebrate a four day weekend than by watching a great slab of Afrofuturist jazz extravaganza, courtesy of Youtube channel Sun Ra Soul: the complete 1974 Sun Ra movie Space is the Place?
posted by MartinWisse at 2:52 AM PST - 11 comments

Since his death from cancer at age 32, comedian Bill Hicks's (very previously) legend and stature have only grown; American: The Bill Hicks Story (previously) fills in the details of a life cut tragically short, blending live footage and animation, and is narrated by the 10 people who knew Bill best. A comic's comic and unflagging critic of hypocrisy and cultural emptiness, American: The Bill Hicks Story is now streaming for free on Snag Films.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:55 PM PST - 75 comments

Danziggy - unfunny comics about the foibles of a diminutive Glen Danzig.
posted by carsonb at 10:43 PM PST - 12 comments

Martha M. Lauzen is executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film and on the film and television faculty at San Diego State University. The center conducts an extensive agenda of original research on women working on screen and behind the scenes in film and television. Lauzen is the author of annual studies of women working in film (The Celluloid Ceiling) [2013 PDF] and television (Boxed In) [2012-13 PDF], as well as numerous articles examining women’s employment patterns and representation. See also: Films 4 2 interview with Lauzen (2003), and Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test (2008, Jennifer Kesler for The Hathor Legacy)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:51 PM PST - 23 comments

Doodal is a freehand fractal doodling program that runs in your browser.
posted by narain at 8:32 PM PST - 12 comments

The Drive Thru is quite ubiquitous in our everyday lives, whether it be burgers, banking or big-ass cups of coffee. Yet there is one Drive Thru concept that only survives now in isolated pockets throughout the country, and that is the Drive Thru dairy. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:33 PM PST - 42 comments

Yang Yongliang's From The New World. It loses a little detail on the screen, since it is 4m by 8m. Try some detail here, here or here. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:32 PM PST - 6 comments

What is it that the global pseudo-left in particular objects to about Lincoln and so values in Django Unchained?

This well-heeled social layer, conditioned by decades of academic anti-Marxism, identity politics and self-absorption, rejects the notion of progress, the appeal of reason, the ability to learn anything from history, the impact of ideas on the population, mass mobilizations and centralized force. It responds strongly to irrationality, mythologizing, the “carnivalesque,” petty bourgeois individualism, racialism, gender politics, vulgarity and social backwardness.

To such people, Lincoln is boring, staid and hagiographic, because it treats ideas and historical actors seriously and even admiringly. A film can hardly be degraded or “dark” enough today for these so-called radical commentators. The latter feel disdain for any expression of confidence in the best instincts and democratic sensibility of the American people, whom they view as always on the verge of forming a lynch mob.

The intellectually bankrupt defenders of Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty by David Walsh, longtime film critic for the World Socialist Web Site. [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:35 PM PST - 95 comments

Discouraged by limited access, exclusivity in subject matter and author demographics, lack of transparency and long wait times, Ergo is a new take on the philosophy journal that recently released their first volume.
posted by Lutoslawski at 4:21 PM PST - 13 comments

"Can you imagine that within six years of getting his MBA he was CFO of Disney?" Please appreciate the thorough reporting on a seedy topic.
posted by breadbox at 4:21 PM PST - 46 comments

They didn’t have a permit to rent to a foreigner, but they didn’t have a permit to rent to a Cuban, either. A German wintered in the flat upstairs, and a Chilean political-​science student lived below without a problem. I was a yanqui, so the consequences of staying there could be more grave. But Elaine was willing to risk it if I was. Especially if I was staying for more than a few months. Renting was their family’s only source of income, and they needed to save if they ever wanted to move out of Cuba. (SLVQR)
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:33 PM PST - 4 comments

Cat Playing Jenga. "Now it lives on the floor. Why you put back? Ok NOW it lives on the floor." It's a cat playing Jenga.
posted by sweetkid at 2:43 PM PST - 37 comments

A tumblr detailing how many businesses in NYC are now ...Fro-Yo places.
posted by The Whelk at 1:44 PM PST - 139 comments

Chris Gethard: Overcome Your Programming And Be A Better Man
posted by zarq at 1:34 PM PST - 104 comments

Point: HOW TO SURVIVE BEING THE ONLY GIRL IN A BAND /Counterpoint: NOT ALL WOMEN: A REFLECTION ON BEING A MUSICIAN AND FEMALE
posted by josher71 at 1:32 PM PST - 22 comments

I have lived many of the questions that have become central to our national discourse since 1998. How far should we allow the government into our bedrooms? How do we reconcile the right to privacy with the need to expose sexual indiscretion? How do we guard against an overzealous government demanding our private data and information? And, most important to me personally, how do we cope with the shame game as it’s played in the Internet Age? - Monica Lewinsky for Vanity Fair
posted by porn in the woods at 1:15 PM PST - 40 comments

Brazil has spared no expense for the upcoming World Cup. The month-long competition will feature 64 matches in 12 cities across the country. Refurbishing old stadiums and building new ones has cost Brazil $3.6bn. Several of the new stadiums will seldom be used after the World Cup, and Brasilia's World Cup stadium is estimated to have cost taxpayers $900m. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 12:04 PM PST - 52 comments

Finding the Next Lost: What Is an “Operational Theme” and Why Don’t I Have One? by Javier Grillo–Marxuach (Previously)
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:44 AM PST - 35 comments

The President has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to render text in a variety of sweet-as-hell video game typefaces using Arcade Font Writer? [more inside]
posted by cortex at 10:18 AM PST - 18 comments

GooBing Detroit: chronological photosets of houses and streets in Detroit from 2009 to 2013, made with the aid of Google Street View and Bing StreetSide. [more inside]
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 10:02 AM PST - 29 comments

At the end of 2013 Eben Moglen (Metafilter Previously) gave a lecture in four parts ``Snowden and the Future´´ presented here in Audio, Video and Text:
Part I: Westward the Course of Empire.
Part II: Oh, Freedom.
Part III: The Union, May it Be Preserved.
Part IV: Freedom's Future.
From Al-Jazeera - A Timeline of the leaks.
From The Tow Centre - Journalism after Snowden. (scroll down for further links ).
From Foreign Affairs - How to Spy after Snowden.
posted by adamvasco at 9:51 AM PST - 37 comments

"I consistently felt myself to be not male or female,” she said, “but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist." [. . .] The title of the piece can only be rendered in these pages as “The Semen Queens of Hyatt Place.” The New York Times Magazine profiles Metafilter's own Tricia Lockwood. (Previously, previously)
posted by grobstein at 9:03 AM PST - 32 comments

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ― Maya Angelou 1928 - 2014
posted by saucysault at 7:39 AM PST - 156 comments

The enigma of Mona Lisa's smile? Who cares? The mystery of Dido Belle is much more intriguing. The double portrait Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray, once attributed to Johann Zoffany and now hanging in Scone Palace in Perth, depicts two elegant 18th-century women in silks and pearls at Kenwood House in London. Beyond them, you can just glimpse St Paul's and the rest of the Georgian cityscape. Nothing unusual about any of that, but for one detail – Dido is mixed race. Belle is about slavery and follows on the heels of Steve McQueen's Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. An impossible act to follow, you might suppose. Yet the two films could hardly be more different. "I wouldn't want audiences to come to Belle and think they were about to see '12 Years a Slave Mark 2'," Asante says. Based in Britain and rooted in fact, Belle is an extraordinary story, she tells me: Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) was the daughter of John Lindsay, a British admiral, and an African slave. She grew up in Kenwood House, Hampstead, under the guardianship of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. One delicately speculative Guardian article about a painting and its context leads to a fascinating portait of a Ghanaian/British filmmaker and the circumstances that formed her. Asante has always had an "extra eye" and sees herself as an insider and outsider (all directors, she believes, need to be emotionally ambidextrous).
posted by glasseyes at 4:51 AM PST - 12 comments

Scottish bike trials scamp Danny MacAskill has been at it again. His latest video shows his talents in the ruins of Argentinian tourist resort Epecuén. [more inside]
posted by tim_in_oz at 3:55 AM PST - 23 comments

Antique Shanghai Pop Music 1930-1949 Downloadable mp3 episodes chock full of wonderful music with delightful commentary from Ling. [more inside]
posted by unliteral at 11:40 PM PST - 12 comments

Frank Rich takes a look at conservative comedians and the late-night comedy landscape.
posted by Room 641-A at 9:33 PM PST - 186 comments

A century ago, mankind fought a war "To End all Wars". The scars and reliquaries from that time still endure today.
posted by pjern at 9:31 PM PST - 33 comments

In Theory is a column in Ceasefire Magazine that introduces and reflects on major figures in cultural/political/literary theory (Agamben 1 2; Althusser 1 2; Amin 1 2; Appadurai 1; Aristotle 1 2; Badiou 1 2; Bakhtin 1 2; Bakunin 1 2 3; Barthes 1 2 3 4 5 6; Baudrillard 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14; Benjamin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8; Deleuze 1; and Marcuse 1) in addition to discussing general topics such as anarchism, asymmetrical war, autonomism, commodity fetishism, global cities, local knowledge, peacekeeping, and precarity.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 8:19 PM PST - 12 comments

Today Google unveiled their purpose-built self-driving car prototype, complete with no steering wheel, brake, or gas pedals. You just jump in, and go. The demo video is pretty impressive, and even the funnier Kara Swisher video of her first ride makes it look kind of fun. [more inside]
posted by mathowie at 7:49 PM PST - 406 comments

"'average person eats 3 spiders a year' factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted". Spiders Georg provides statistical explanation for one of the most commonly mis-represented scientific 'facts' promulgated for years. Although the math may be a little off and Georg may in fact be consuming many more spiders. You can read more from the man himself if you want to know more about the spider eating life.
posted by codacorolla at 6:53 PM PST - 48 comments

Baseball’s Best Lobbyist [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:27 PM PST - 5 comments

Stormé DeLarverie, drag king, activist and veteran of the Stonewall rebellion, has died at the age of 93. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:02 PM PST - 47 comments

Fordite, also known as Motor Agate or Detroit Agate, is a relic from the old technique for painting cars: spray enamel paint and bake it on, layer after layer, car after car. The resulting overspray on the tracks and skids that carried the cars and parts would build up over time, and eventually need to be removed to allow everything to move smoothly. That enamel waste product is now valued to make colorful jewelry, seen here, here and here. This spray enamel process is outdated, with electro coating (or more formally, electrophoretic deposition) prevailing as a much more efficient process. Sure, it looks modern, but where's the fun in it?
posted by filthy light thief at 4:51 PM PST - 40 comments

Before there was Weezer, there was Zoom (nee-Avant Garde), Rivers Cuomo's poodle haired progressive metal band.

Before there was Mr. Bungle performing at the 1986 Eureka High School Talent Show [previously], there was Mike Patton and Trevor Dunn in the glammy Gemini performing at the 1984 Eureka High School Talent Night.

And perhaps most legendarily, before there was Pantera. There was Pantera.
posted by mediocre at 3:22 PM PST - 67 comments

How to do visual comedy like Edgar Wright.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 2:21 PM PST - 44 comments

Poorcraft is on the Web. The acclaimed comic book guide to "living well on less", written by C. Spike "Templar, Arizona" Trotman* and drawn by Diana "Intrepid Girlbot" Nook, after two years in print, is getting a second life as a free webcomic**, publishing a page a day for the next five months. So don't declare insolvency until you've gotten all the moneysaving tips! Recommended by notable MeFites. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:29 PM PST - 28 comments

Dimetrodon is not a dinosaur! Sorry to ruin your childhood yet again, but it's not even a reptile. It's a synapsid, which makes it one of our cousins. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 1:22 PM PST - 64 comments

Before bootleg DVDs, western movies were adapted into Lianhuanhua: linked picture books that could be bought or rented. While many stories were told, and many movies were "pirated" in this way, one of particular interest is Star Wars. [more inside]
posted by nubs at 1:21 PM PST - 25 comments

Peanut Butter , home made. Alton Brown shows you how to make peanut butter. All you need is a wok and a food processor (and, of course some peanuts, and some peanut oil, and a little salt). You KNOW you're going to try this.
posted by HuronBob at 1:19 PM PST - 42 comments

Design giant Massimo Vignelli has passed away at the age of 83. [more inside]
posted by Thorzdad at 12:25 PM PST - 32 comments

To enforce his orders—and to make Arlington uninhabitable for the Lees—Meigs evicted officers from the mansion, installed a military chaplain and a loyal lieutenant to oversee cemetery operations, and proceeded with new burials, encircling Mrs. Lee's garden with the tombstones of prominent Union officers. The first of these was Capt. Albert H. Packard of the 31st Maine Infantry. Shot in the head during the Battle of the Second Wilderness, Packard had miraculously survived his journey from the Virginia front to Washington's Columbian College Hospital, only to die there. On May 17, 1864, he was laid to rest where Mary Lee had enjoyed reading in warm weather, surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine. By the end of 1864, some 40 officers' graves had joined his.

So what's more fitting after Memorial Weekend to read about than how the US government took over Robert E. Lee's very own mansion and turned it into the nation's foremost military cemetery to honour the Union's war death?
posted by MartinWisse at 12:10 PM PST - 163 comments

Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist is a live-action web series in 13 episodes about the origins of Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Gōken. Official site. [more inside]
posted by ersatz at 11:49 AM PST - 10 comments

Herb Jeffries, 'The Bronze Buckaroo' and cowboy crooner, has died. So it totally depends on the source, but he was somewhere between 100-111 years old; he was born in Detroit, or maybe Chicago. He was African-American, Sicilian-American, Irish-Sicilian, 'part Ethiopian' or something else. He grew up with both parents and a younger brother, or his father died before he was born and he was raised in the boardinghouse his mother owned --- or was it a bordello? He was married either four or five times, including once to exotic dancer Tempest Storm. He is survived by at least three daughters and two sons. Herb Jeffries was a jazz singer with both Duke Ellington's and Earl "Fatha" Hines' bands, the first black 'cowboy crooner' on so-called 'Negro Circuit' films (including starring with Mantan Moreland in Harlem on the Prairie), a 'luscious' tenor and/or a 'smooth, warm' baritone, and the owner of jazz nightclubs in Paris and the south of France.
posted by easily confused at 11:08 AM PST - 5 comments

For the past two weeks, the back of my mind has been occupied by thoughts of how to start writing about my experience as a white man in India. The list of potential anecdotes is interminable. Perhaps a theoretical grounding would prove a more incisive framework. Or maybe I need to talk about everything that I am. I am more than a skin colour. I am a gender. I am a nationality. I am a language. I am a class. I am a sexual orientation. The overlapping privileges encompassed in a straight, white, English-speaking, relatively affluent American man can be more difficult to disentangle than one might imagine.

posted by infini at 10:59 AM PST - 37 comments

"John Holt and Paul Tough are a half-century apart. Both were interested in children and how they learned. One wrote a book called How Children Learn, the other a book called How Children Succeed. Their juxtaposition has a lot to tell us about how we think about and treat our young people."
posted by overeducated_alligator at 10:52 AM PST - 11 comments

Some Musings on Diversity in SF by Vandana Singh: "The best speculative fiction, like travel, does that to you – it takes you to strange places, from which vantage point you can no longer take your home for granted. It renders the familiar strange, and the strange becomes, for the duration of the story, the norm. The reversal of the gaze, the journey in the shoes of the Other, is one of the great promises of speculative fiction. " (Previously)
posted by dhruva at 9:03 AM PST - 9 comments

Portrait of a Young Man with Down Syndrome. A father reflects on his son's search for employment.
posted by zarq at 8:15 AM PST - 51 comments

The Amiga Cracktro Marathon. Part 2. Part 3. (What are cracktros?)
posted by kmz at 7:38 AM PST - 8 comments

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become increasingly crowded with branded accounts seeking their attention. Every few seconds, your favorite brands are tweeting at you. But what most people don't know is how much time and effort goes into curating these accounts, writing tweets, and filling your news feed with content people actually want to see. For instance, it can take a team of 13 social media and advertising specialists up to 45 days to plan, create, approve, and publish a corporate social media post. The story of Huge Inc. and President Cheese.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:05 AM PST - 160 comments

Jardine told me to stand at short cover-point and just stare at Bradman Charming interview with Harold Larwood, a name synonymous with life-threatening fast bowling, from 1993. Ey oop!
posted by Wolof at 7:04 AM PST - 7 comments

Judge William “Banana Bill” Sheffield has never shied away from his ambitions. After graduating from Cal State–Long Beach with a degree in philosophy, he worked with former classmate Steven Spielberg on a yearlong film project, but just didn’t see promise in Hollywood. As a law student at UC–Berkeley, Sheffield successfully sued Pope Paul VI over a St. Bernard puppy that was never delivered to him from a monastery in Switzerland. At one point he even served as legal counsel for embattled Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. But none of this would compare to an invention he created in hopes of truly changing the world: the banana slicer.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:52 AM PST - 23 comments

The BBC assesses the World Cup Groups: Group A/ Group B/Group C/Group D/Group E/Group F/Group G/Group H. [more inside]
posted by marienbad at 6:34 AM PST - 76 comments

Designer Adam Chang rode New York's trains for 20 hours, using 9 swipes to visit 118 stations, to bring you the NY Train Project.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:19 AM PST - 11 comments

When you first hear the opening seconds of the song “Sanctified,” by Rick Ross, your instinct might be to give credit to Kanye West, who co-produced it, for finding one of the most breathtaking vocal samples in hip-hop history. Even if you’ve never really listened to old gospel music, the melody seems like a recovered treasure, recorded by a woman with a voice weathered by air that no longer circulates on this earth. None of that is true, though: “Sanctified,” the best track on Ross’s new album, “Mastermind,” and probably the best rap song of the year so far, is not built around a rediscovered sample. Instead, the song owes its existence to a last-minute favor called in to the soul singer Betty Wright, late one night in February, just as Wright was drifting off to sleep in her chair after a long day of vocal coaching. - This piece takes a look at Betty Wright, legendary singer, and coach/mentor to many of today's rappers [more inside]
posted by beisny at 5:56 AM PST - 29 comments

From Ianyan Magazine and elsewhere comes: The Legend of Ali Baba: The Incredible True Story of Armenian Genocide Survivor and World Wrestling Champ Harry Ekizian [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:27 AM PST - 2 comments

The more the Internet of Things knows about you, the more that insurance companies are able to slurp that data and incentivize you to walk the straight and narrow. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 3:20 AM PST - 48 comments

"These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. It's easy to generate, easy to store in the short term, incredibly toxic, and almost impossible to dispose of. Just when you think you've buried it forever, it comes leaching out somewhere unexpected." A talk by Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard, about why we have Big Data and why it's frightening. [more inside]
posted by 23 at 2:57 AM PST - 48 comments

Former Journey vocalist Steve Perry hasn't performed publicly since 1995. Until yesterday. [more inside]
posted by litlnemo at 12:53 AM PST - 29 comments

The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win

The challenge is daunting. In 1994, machines took the checkers crown, when a program called Chinook beat the top human. Then, three years later, they topped the chess world, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer besting world champion Garry Kasparov. Now, computers match or surpass top humans in a wide variety of games: Othello, Scrabble, backgammon, poker, even Jeopardy. But not Go. It’s the one classic game where wetware still dominates hardware.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:31 PM PST - 72 comments

For more than half a century, pallet futurists have announced the next big thing, only to see the basic wooden variety remain the workhorse of global logistics. Pallets, previously.
posted by shoesfullofdust at 4:56 PM PST - 34 comments

"Once illuminated, the line transforms: It mimics and abstracts, glows and flickers, and implores and distracts." An online museum of Hong Kong's neon signs.
posted by spitefulcrow at 3:18 PM PST - 7 comments

Psycho-Pass is a fantastic anime written by Gen Urobuchi, the man who brought us 2011's brilliant Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Even if you are not an anime fan (I'm iffy on it myself), Psycho-Pass is worth checking out. Set in a "utopian" society where psychological profiles can be analyzed remotely, police carry guns that can only fire at would-be criminals, and aptitude tests determine how to provide "the greatest number of people with the greatest amount of happiness", Psycho-Pass asks intriguing, provocative questions about the relationships between humans and computers, criminals and society, and the responsibilities we owe society, versus the responsibilities said societies owe us in turn. There is also a good deal of people shooting each other, if you're into that sort of thing.

Psycho-Pass can be watched for free, either subbed or dubbed, at Hulu (as can Madoka if "lighthearted" "fantasy" is more your cup of tea).
posted by Rory Marinich at 2:17 PM PST - 39 comments

The Complex City Guide has a bit of information on 15 possible headquarters for the Illuminati, but it's a slideshow with limited information, and there's a lot of information out there, so let's get into it. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:52 PM PST - 73 comments

The Pissing Tanker is on a Mission to Stop Public Urination in India
posted by KokuRyu at 12:11 PM PST - 47 comments

The Black Fantastic: Highlights of Pre-World War II African and African-American Speculative Fiction: pulp historian Jess Nevins attempts to shine a light on a long neglected part of science fiction and fantasy. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 11:23 AM PST - 16 comments

How Naspers CEO Koos Bekker beat the New York Times at its own game by Michael Moritz [more inside]
posted by infini at 10:50 AM PST - 12 comments

Tomorrow morning 281spellers will begin to compete for the title of 2014 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion, and starting Wednesday, you can play along. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:24 AM PST - 29 comments

Kyle Kallgren finishes "Shakespeare Month" on his art house movie review series "Brows Held High" (previously) with a smashing take down of Roland Emmerich's 2011 Shakespeare-was-a-fraud conspiracy thriller "Anonymous". [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 9:36 AM PST - 25 comments

A Dictionary of Navy Slang Compiled From Various Sources 67 pages of history and hilarity.
posted by timsteil at 8:24 AM PST - 33 comments

how one gay athlete's coming out (autoplaying video) led to an activists' war
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 5:35 AM PST - 33 comments

We’re all familiar with the stories of Russian oligarchs buying up mansions in London, but this is a much broader phenomenon. A torrent of capital from wealthy people in emerging markets—from China, above all, but also from Latin America, Russia, and the Middle East—has flowed into the real-estate markets of big cities in other countries, driving up prices and causing a luxury-construction boom. ... The globalization of real estate upends some of our basic assumptions about housing prices. We expect them to reflect local fundamentals—above all, how much people earn. In a truly global market, that may not be the case.

James Surowiecki writing in the New Yorker on the rise of a truly global market in real estate.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 11:18 PM PST - 86 comments

The results are in for the 2014 elections. While the EPP and S&D retain the lion's share of the seats, the shocking results have been in Britain, where the UKIP have scooped up a plurailty with 27.5% of the vote and in France, where the similarly veined far-right National Front came in first. The two combined would present a 48 seat anti-EU block within the European Parliament and when figured with the EFD's other gains (of which National Front are not currently a part of) a total of 61 eurosceptics will be seated in total.
posted by Talez at 9:46 PM PST - 104 comments

Wojciech Jarzelski, Poland's last Communist leader, has died from complications following a stroke. [more inside]
posted by orrnyereg at 8:52 PM PST - 8 comments

Five reasons not to share that Common Core worksheet on Facebook [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 8:00 PM PST - 200 comments

This is your brain while videogaming stoned.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:45 PM PST - 23 comments

George Harrison passed away on the 29th of November, 2001. Though a simple private ceremony was held shortly after where his ashes were scattered over the Ganges river, a more public memorial occurred at Royal Albert Hall exactly one year after his death. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:14 PM PST - 26 comments

Stop Writing JavaScript Frameworks! And stop using them too!
posted by blue_beetle at 6:08 PM PST - 44 comments

Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere (Man) [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 3:50 PM PST - 46 comments

Knowlton Nash, former long-time host of CBC's flagship news program The National, died yesterday, aged 86. [more inside]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:20 PM PST - 24 comments

Last year, Saturday Night Live aired a Wes Anderson parody [previously]. This is the amount of work it took.
posted by mediocre at 2:00 PM PST - 17 comments

Where does one novel end and another one begin? One day not too long ago, I was thinking about this as I considered what sort of message to send next to my little email list. I decided to do a little research. Gather just a bit of data.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:03 PM PST - 20 comments

Fourth in a series on screen writing in the Paris Review, an interview with Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men.
posted by ShooBoo at 12:05 PM PST - 3 comments

before Robbie Roberston got his filthy paws on it and overdubbed the hell out of it? Now you can hear it, untouched, in order, as it was played. [more inside]
posted by old_growler at 12:04 PM PST - 36 comments

Ever wonder if you could take down a famous rapper in a fight? Grantland offers a thoughtful analysis. "You’d likely win this fight if it managed to come off, but I’d sidestep it because let’s say you trip over Puff’s teeny-tiny teeth and fall and hit your head on the concrete and knock yourself out or whatever, he is absolutely going to celebrate by doing that Diddy Bop dance he’s done for the last 60 years. You can’t risk that. There’s no recovering from that. There’s no recovering from being the guy in the WSHH knockout Puff Daddy Diddy Bop dance video."
posted by scaryblackdeath at 10:51 AM PST - 26 comments

Sure, you like your mp3s well enough; you just wish they would steadily collapse into a wall of distortion and white noise. Good news: The Disintegrator is here to help. [via mefi projects]
posted by cortex at 9:05 AM PST - 29 comments

US Men's National Soccer Team coach Jürgen Klinsmann on Thursday announced the final 23 man roster for the upcoming World Cup. The roster did not include Landon Donovan (NYT)). Donovan, the USMNT's all-time scoring and assists leader and widely regarded as the best ever men's American footballer, has responded: "I think if I’m being judged based solely on what happened in camp then I absolutely deserve to be going to Brazil." Klinsmann says "I just see some other players slightly ahead of him." [more inside]
posted by davidjmcgee at 9:04 AM PST - 74 comments

Indie gaming started out as games written with passion for people who embraced and loved them. Now too much of it is about churning out giant mounds of decent but undifferentiated product to be bought for pennies by people who don't give a crap either way.

It's not sustainable.

Veteran indie game developer Jeff Vogel says the indie game bubble is popping.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:38 AM PST - 85 comments

In these turbulent times, we all need to take a deep breath and think about grace and beauty. In that vein, here are the winners of the British Tarantula Society's awards from its recent Exhibition.
posted by Etrigan at 4:05 PM PST - 46 comments

Grime is an electronic music style that is largely regional, associated most strongly with the Bow/E3 district of London (prime example: Wiley - "Bow E3"), but in recent years, grime has grown in style and station, moving out from London and expanding to Canada, Australia, Japan and beyond. (NOTE: audio is likely to be NSFW to some degree) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 3:30 PM PST - 17 comments

Why Men Love War. "What people can't understand is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I can't tell anybody."
posted by four panels at 3:18 PM PST - 95 comments

From the VIBE hip hop dance competition (University of Southern California, Irvine / Segerstrom Hall - January 18, 2014): 2nd place, The Company [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 1:43 PM PST - 31 comments

California drive-by shooting: 'Son of Hunger Games assistant director' Elliot Rodger suspected of killing six in attack. Rodger embarked on his shooting spree hours after posting an online video detailing his plans for "retribution" for rejection by women. [more inside]
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:11 PM PST - 1759 comments

The president of Saint Paul's College, Millard (Pete) Stith, has the unusual mandate of selling his institution. He took over management after the historically black college was unable to pay its debts, lost its accreditation, and closed in 2013. Along with a staff of 22, he maintains the campus in hopes that another college will purchase it during a sealed-bid auction, on June 25.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 1:05 PM PST - 16 comments

The Art of Antarctic Cooking

What comprises “Antarctic culinary history,” Anthony writes, is “a mere century of stories of isolated, insulated people eating either prepackaged expedition food or butchered sea life.” It helped if some of these isolated, insulated people knew their way around the kitchen. “The cook, however good or bad, is an artist whose simple vocation is to make others lives happier,” observed chef Raymond Oliver. More magician than artist, a cook with an Antarctic expedition ranked as one of its most important members. His kitchen little more than a Primus stove, his ingredients either canned or scrounged, he conjured nourishing dishes as if from the gelid air.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:28 PM PST - 10 comments

Godflesh is back.
posted by Existential Dread at 11:47 AM PST - 7 comments

The VR Chicken Matrix: "a virtual chicken world in which caged animals think they're wandering happily around in the open... got me thinking again about Facebook's recent purchase of Oculus VR."
posted by kliuless at 11:11 AM PST - 23 comments

I was surprised to learn that few people knew that almost all maths was written rhetorically before the 16th century, often in metered poetry. Even our wonderful symbol for equality – you know, those two parallel lines – was not used in print before 1575.
posted by sammyo at 8:00 AM PST - 38 comments

From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male. This white straight male default was of course not biased in any way by its white straight maleness—no way! Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.

In the New Yorker Junot Diaz talks about MFA vs POC. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 7:08 AM PST - 112 comments

To kick off (in the U.S.) the long Memorial Day weekend (traditionally the unofficial start of summer!) the Boston Globe presents an interactive chart of iconic songs of summer from each of the last 100 years! No word yet on the 2014 earworm to be.
posted by Curious Artificer at 6:37 AM PST - 58 comments

Over the past three decades, a Canadian archaeologist found compelling evidence of a Norse settlement in the Canadian Arctic. Then she was fired. [more inside]
posted by Brodiggitty at 4:42 AM PST - 48 comments

Jerry Seinfeld talks celebrity stand-up, his full head of hair, the new season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and why our dads wouldn't have considered turning down a job.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 1:06 AM PST - 50 comments

Like cheesy 3D animation and PornHub comments? Here you go!
posted by porn in the woods at 7:53 PM PST - 49 comments

Eudora Welty at 23
March 15, 1933
Gentlemen,
I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.
posted by Stewriffic at 4:05 PM PST - 22 comments

In 1994, The Shawshank Redemption made just $18 million at the box office. It got seven Academy Award nominations, but won zero. And yet, it has become one of the most consistently profitable movies there is, including providing some of its actors with what Bob Gunton (the evil Warden Norton) calls "a very substantial income" in residuals. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 4:00 PM PST - 175 comments

This month, the US Public Health Service released (PDF) the first comprehensive clinical practice guidelines for PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) which outlines the criteria for determining a person’s HIV risk and indications for PrEP use. (PrEP FAQ) The CDC states, "When taken consistently, PrEP has been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection in people who are at high risk by up to 92%. PrEP is much less effective if it is not taken consistently." The FDA's approved drug — Truvada — that was previously approved for H.I.V. treatment in 2004, is now approved it for prevention of HIV transmission. (Truvada previously) [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:14 PM PST - 30 comments

Politically Incorrect was an American late-night, half-hour political talk show hosted by Bill Maher that ran from 1993 to 2002, first on Comedy Central and then on ABC. Four guests (usually including at least one comedian) would debate topics across the political spectrum in what Maher once described as “The McLaughlin Group on acid.” Of the 1300+ episodes produced, 190 can be viewed on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 1:52 PM PST - 65 comments

Purportedly anti-terrorism Fusion Centers allowed police, military and "private sector partners" to share material about surveilling the nationwide Occupy protests [more inside]
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 1:48 PM PST - 34 comments

Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga discuss writing the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale. [more inside]
posted by audi alteram partem at 1:45 PM PST - 43 comments

A meteor shower that has never been seen before is expected to hit tonight and into the morning, and it could be spectacular. Camelopardalids may be your 1st and last chance to see shooting stars from Comet 209P/Linear. NASA predicts it will peak from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. ET Saturday morning, but says "outbursts" could happen any time all night.
[more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 1:00 PM PST - 55 comments

Piketty findings undercut by errors -- The Financial Times analyzes the data and calculations that Thomas Piketty used to support his result in his book "Capital in the 21st Century", and discovers that some of the data was "adjusted" and some of the formulas contain fudge-factors. When those things are removed, the calculations show that there hasn't been any significant change in wealth inequality in Europe since 1970. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:33 PM PST - 126 comments

"This began my quest to find as many of the first 100 Citibikes as possible." [more inside]
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 12:08 PM PST - 6 comments

From the BBC. Ed Houben from the Netherlands helps couples of all kinds have the children they desire. The catch? No catch! No contracts! He helps them the good old fashioned way, and relies on good faith to protect himself against future claims for financial assistance. [more inside]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:51 AM PST - 33 comments

Doing verbal battle at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:21 AM PST - 54 comments

Minecraft in Space: NASA embraces the space simulator Kerbal Space Program with the Asteroid Redirect Mission patch.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:17 AM PST - 39 comments

Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication is a free book (PDF) from NASA. The premise is that communication with alien lifeforms will have some (cautious) analogues to interpreting past cultures, and to the work that anthropologists and linguists do cross-culturally. Among the 16 chapters are: Beyond Linear B - The Metasemiotic Challenge of Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence; Learning To Read - Interstellar Message Decipherment from Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives; and, Mirrors of Our Assumptions: Lessons from an Arthritic Neanderthal.
posted by Rumple at 11:05 AM PST - 24 comments

The Glasgow School of Art, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and recently voted Britain's favorite building of the past 175 years, has been devastated by fire. While the stone exterior of Mackintosh's greatest architectural masterpiece may survive, Mackintosh's interiors are presumed lost.
posted by scody at 10:53 AM PST - 70 comments

The two-day Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) graduate showcase at NYU was a madhouse, with some 100 projects on view, ranging from groundbreaking innovations to timely trinkets. But the most talked about project by far was Peiqi Su's "Penis Wall" - an array of 81 robotic phalli that rise and fall in response to the stock market. Official Vimeo account for the project - Thesis presentation - in depth How-it-was-made production blog. (Slightly NSFW if your work doesn't like white, plastic, abstract dicks.)
posted by The Whelk at 8:45 AM PST - 14 comments

Why owning your own power plant might not be crazy (from rmi.org)
posted by flabdablet at 8:41 AM PST - 37 comments

26 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico and 2,150 feet underground, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) brings new meaning to the phrase "built to last". The world's third deep geological nuclear waste repository, WIPP was designed to house radioactive material for 10,000 years. The primary challenge (keeping hazardous waste IN) was tackled by engineers. But for the secondary challenge - keeping living creatures OUT - the goverment recruited a team of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers. The job description included the words "the knowledge necessary to develop a marker system that will remain in operation during the performance period of the site - 10,000 years". Stymied by inevitable linguistic and orthographic drift, the group has discussed a wide array of ideas, some more fabulously demented than others (artificial moons, a nuclear containment-centric priesthood, a landscape of massive granite thorns). They intend to submit their final plan by 2028. [more inside]
posted by julthumbscrew at 7:58 AM PST - 85 comments

I can’t help wondering how many other, noncosmetic, nonashiness-related parts of your lives are so completely different that they’d make you ask each other, “For what!?” ...What I think is most fascinating about your question is the reminder that sometimes we simply have no idea what’s going on with other people from different backgrounds. Forget stereotypes and biases related to stuff we talk about all the time—we have actual, huge blind spots where it never occurred to us that our experience might not be the only one.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:38 AM PST - 199 comments

Amazon is deprecating books published by the French publisher Hachette after Hachette refused to drop wholesale prices to Amazon in recent negotiations. Per the NY Times, Amazon is reporting delays on Hachette books, increasing their prices, and suggesting alternatives. Hachette has maintained silence on the issue to their authors but royalty statements and examining their listings on Amazon reveals the truth. Affected authors and their professional associations are speaking out to pressure Amazon. Meanwhile, Amazon is raising the stakes by refusing to accept pre-orders for some books on Hachette imprints, including those by popular authors like Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling).
posted by immlass at 7:34 AM PST - 83 comments

O Human Star, an ongoing webcomic by Blue Delliquanti, is a near-future science fiction family drama about robots, relationships, identity and finding a place for oneself in the world. [more inside]
posted by Narrative Priorities at 6:52 AM PST - 11 comments

When looking at a face, Perrett concludes, “I think because we are busy processing one side at one time, we don’t notice the left-right differences.”
posted by sammyo at 6:51 AM PST - 22 comments

Prison of Oz: Staying Human in an Ohio Prison Dorothy, something of a diva, let the laughter subside. Then she started to sing with a voice of resounding beauty about a land she once heard of in a lullaby, about chimney tops and lemon drops and wanting to fly away. "Why oh, why, can't I?" [more inside]
posted by EvaDestruction at 6:11 AM PST - 6 comments

The Center for Otherworld Science , a comic about three women in hazmat suits, interpersonal workplace dynamics, and a cryptozoology institute with questionable ethics. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by metaBugs at 5:39 AM PST - 8 comments

If you remember Oolong, this is the internet test for you! [via b3ta.com] (Also, worth clicking on background!)
posted by marienbad at 3:56 AM PST - 77 comments

What zombie trees tell us about the world's worst nuclear disaster: in the abandoned forests around Chernobyl the trees that died in the accident are still standing because all the bacteria and fungi died off and hasn't come back, according to research done by Timothy A. Mousseau.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:43 AM PST - 47 comments

Watch These 15 Incredible Basketball Shots
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:12 AM PST - 10 comments

A number of different languages utilize compounded words, but German has a number of fun examples in the animal kingdom: how to name animals in German (Compounding German words, previously)
posted by filthy light thief at 9:08 PM PST - 76 comments

The No Safe Word Show is a weekly podcast about all things kinky. Part news round up, part comedy hour but fundamentally a show that builds community and educates. Hosts Sparky and Daddy Tony have been delighting filthy perverts for over one year and 85 episodes. You can bet it is NSFW under the fold. [more inside]
posted by munchingzombie at 8:36 PM PST - 9 comments

Signs from the Near Future: What the Near Future Is Actually Going to Look Like.
posted by homunculus at 8:00 PM PST - 62 comments

Thailand 2014 Coup: Expect for the Worst [more inside]
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 7:48 PM PST - 49 comments

(Slightly more than) 100 fantastic pieces of journalism – by the same staff writer at The Atlantic, a follow-up to this popular post from 2011. (Looks like it takes him about five months to assemble them all on one page.)
posted by LeLiLo at 7:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Spray on some friendly bacteria and skip the soap? (NYT) Plenty of people have tried the 'no-poo' method to switch from shampoos, but what about skipping everything, and adding some bacteria instead? We bathed without soap for a long time and antibacterial soap is really bad for us. AOBiome wants you to think Bacteria is the New Black.
posted by viggorlijah at 7:03 PM PST - 111 comments

Longtime veteran courtroom sketch artist Gary Myrick gives us a look inside his profession.
posted by gman at 6:18 PM PST - 5 comments

Ducklings vs. Stairs. Link text pretty much sums it up.
posted by KathrynT at 3:36 PM PST - 61 comments

Until recently, Rosemead, CA was home to one of the last great tiki restaurants, Bahooka. Bahooka's star resident was Rufus, a 37-year old Pacu, who graced the entrance area. Rufus loved carrots. He appeared in several movies, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Bahooka closed in early 2013. Sadly, despite fan efforts to save and relocate Rufus, his whereabouts are now a mystery, and as the site's new owners are not communicating, fears have grown that Rufus was simply thrown away.
posted by anazgnos at 3:18 PM PST - 23 comments

Go to the window for what? Just ask GiGi if you need to know the weather. She'll tell you. It's no trouble, what else does she have to do with her days anymore?
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 3:00 PM PST - 14 comments

Metafilter is laying off 3 of its staff, including long time moderator and frequent moral compass Jessamyn who is moving on to Internet Archive’s Open Library. November 2012, Metafilter experienced a sharp drop in traffic. Slate asks "Why has Google forsaken Metafilter?" But the problem is endemic of a larger issue. Google is breaking the internet. [more inside]
posted by [insert clever name here] at 1:59 PM PST - 717 comments

Opera Is Dead! Long Live Opera. [more inside]
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 1:04 PM PST - 18 comments

The Washington Ballet's hardest dance moves - PostTV goes behind the scenes at the Washington Ballet to get six professional dancers to show off the most difficult moves in their repertoire. [via]
posted by Think_Long at 11:39 AM PST - 11 comments

Joseph Stromberg writes about science for Vox. He has recently written three articles about bike safety. First, he argues that "cyclists should be able to roll through stop signs and ride through red lights". Second, he argues that it should not be illegal to cycle without a helmet. "Let's start thinking of biking as a normal, safe activity, like walking — and helmets as an optional accessory for people who are really into it." Third, he looks at some data on the frequencies of different sorts of bicycling accidents in the US.
posted by HoraceH at 11:35 AM PST - 247 comments

Billy Childish is known as a poet, painter, and musician who is routinely reduced to doing the same thing over and over again. A recent interview in The Guardian demonstrates how much he continues to stay the course, going so far to call him a "monomaniac". [more inside]
posted by kendrak at 10:52 AM PST - 12 comments

Are you lovin it? Gone is the infamous jumpsuit. Hello leisure suits and boyfriend jeans! [more inside]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:52 AM PST - 73 comments

Dangerous Minds digs up Andy Kaufman's My Dinner With Andre (prev.) parody, My Breakfast With Blassie. (57m video) [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 10:30 AM PST - 16 comments

When the band announced they’d be getting back together in 2000 after a three-year hiatus, people were understandably excited. Here was a band with a cannon of music that included everything from “Say It Ain’t So” to “El Scorcho” getting ready to unleash a new set of works on the world, the way we all wished J.D. Salinger would. Then “The Green Album” came out and although it featured Mikey Welsh instead of Matt Sharp, everything from the artwork to the use of producer Ric Ocasek seemed to indicate a return to form for the celebrated geek rock act. Except it wasn’t. I’d like to think that even the most strident Weezer supporters would admit that a song like “Hash Pipe” would never have fit on the first two albums, not because Cuomo had vastly evolved as a songwriter, but because it completely lacked the spark and character that typified the band’s earlier works. In fact, Weezer reportedly wrote 75 songs for this album yet this was the best collection they could come up with.
posted by josher71 at 10:26 AM PST - 73 comments

We finally got to the woods, and to the creek. Mary said a few words in Episcopalian, and I unwrapped the ham for the last time.

SF author Ellen Klages has a story about a ham.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:05 AM PST - 16 comments

"... trolling wasn’t the work of just a few bad apples. Instead, there were many, many people who sent us mean messages saying that they simply thought the blog shouldn’t exist." Amanda Levitt of FatBodyPolitics.com writes about the role that trolling, up to and including threats of violence and doxxing, plays in maintaining privilege and furthering oppression.
posted by emjaybee at 9:19 AM PST - 94 comments

Richard Edes Harrison was a trained architect, artist and mapmaker whose maps in the years leading up to and through WWII gave Americans a new perspective on the world.
World War II Led to a Revolution in Cartography. These Amazing Maps Are Its Legacy [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:59 AM PST - 3 comments

Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues? [PDF] New research on judicial empathy finds that when judges, specifically Republican judges, have daughters, they are more likely to rule in favor of women's issues. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:43 AM PST - 54 comments

We are all very anxious - how constant observation and mass precarity undermine our ability to change and resist. [more inside]
posted by Happy Dave at 6:36 AM PST - 28 comments

8-Bit Philosophy: What is Real? (Plato) 8-Bit Philosophy: Does SCIENCE = TRUTH? (Nietzsche) 8-Bit Philosophy: Do Humans Operate Like Computers? (Kant)
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:49 AM PST - 11 comments

The Back to the Future theme, played by disk drives.
posted by nthdegx at 4:52 AM PST - 16 comments

Inside the Science of an Amazing New Surgery Called Deep Brain Stimulation
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:04 AM PST - 40 comments

Starting up fan localization projects feels much like amassing the cast of your typical role-playing game: a group of random strangers rally around a common cause before embarking on their journey together. In was in this way that Mandelin and Erbrecht found each other — stumbling to create something beautiful and meaningful, and realizing they could make that beautiful and meaningful thing better by working together. — For Polygon, Alexa Ray Corriea dives into the underground world of fan-translated games.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:58 PM PST - 7 comments

Arcade Story - the co-founder of innovative OS X and iOS software outfit Panic reminisces about learning how to beat Dragon's Lair in the pre-Internet age, but that's not the fun part...
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:40 PM PST - 17 comments

Anonymous Redditor ’Your Post As A Movie“ takes photo comments that members post, and Photoshops them into spot-on fake movie posters. Here's his/her prolific output from the last 6 months. (the first link is the original photo, the second one, is the poster, which is often created right after the post goes up) [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 10:15 PM PST - 19 comments

War robots are now so real that "87 countries sat down at a United Nations-convened conference from May 13th to the 15th to discuss banning the things." A country on the forefront of development is Russia. They have announced that armed roaming robots would be standing guard over 5 ballistic missile bases, and there are plans for a new military robot laboratory. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said "We have to conduct battles without any contact so that our boys do not die, and for that it is necessary to use war robots." Defense experts say within 10 years nearly every country will have robotic weapons, mass produced and exported by countries like the US, China and Russia.
posted by stbalbach at 10:02 PM PST - 68 comments

Meet Frostie the Snow Goat, who suffers from joint/navel ill and has to borrow a quadruped wheelchair from Leon Trotsky the piglet. Both critters are residents of Edgar's Mission Farm Sanctuary, a “a not for profit sanctuary for rescued farmed animals”.
posted by Maecenas at 9:10 PM PST - 12 comments

Francisco Tapia, aka "Papas Fritas" (French Fries), is an artist and activist whose recent work has drawn international attention. It might not look like much, but it is US$500 million of ashes, the burnt remains of "debt papers" for student of the now defunct Universidad Del Mar, a private institution in Chile that was stripped of its legal standing in 2012. While this might sound like a singular bold move to make people pay attention to the cost of education in Chile, it's just one of many acts in support of efforts to reclaim a very expensive private education options in Chile, with student protests going back to 2006. Chile's president Michelle Bachelet proposed a reform bill on Monday, May 19th, but it doesn't go as far as some protesters would like.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:04 PM PST - 8 comments

Almost four years after Mark Zuckerberg made a very well publicized 100 million dollar donation to Newark, NJ schools, and two years after the Newark Teachers Union agreed to a new merit-pay based contract, the current superintendent of schools, Cami Anderson is attempting a new education reform initiative called One Newark. Ironically, the plan has deeply divided the city, and last night members of the the Newark Students Union staged a sit-in at the Board of Education meeting, demanding Anderson resign. [more inside]
posted by lownote at 7:51 PM PST - 11 comments

"To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte." Slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation both de jure and de facto--Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Case for Reparations.
posted by ilicet at 7:27 PM PST - 152 comments

Andrew Collins started a blog in July 2013 - Circles of Life: The 143 - he's about half way through now. [more inside]
posted by unliteral at 7:23 PM PST - 32 comments

Cloudkicker is Ben Sharp and he releases his instrumental rock/prog-metal project at ‘name your own price’ through the website Bandcamp. [more inside]
posted by bwilms at 6:56 PM PST - 9 comments

It's not exactly news that Somaly Mam, head of the anti-trafficking non-profit The Somaly Mam Foundation, has been accused of fabricating her own story of sexual slavery and abuse. But today, the story made it all the way to Newsweek. Respected former call girl Maggie McNeill blogged about the issue in 2013 and 2011, and in 2012 wrote about the psychological self-deception that might be at play. Dr. Laura Agustin wrote this piece attacking Somaly Mam's idea of sex worker empowerment over a decade ago, and in this 2011 blog post criticizes a live-tweeted brothel raid carried out by Mam and Nicholas Kristof. Previously. Previously. Previously.
posted by Sarah Aeget at 6:54 PM PST - 7 comments

Green Velvet (aka Curtis Jones) has been on the Chicago House scene for almost two decades I purchased a pretty green vinyl disc many years back, not knowing what was on it. Prior, had not heard any Chicago House. I received a pleasant sonic surprise when I placed the turntable stylus on Curtis Alan Jones' (aka Green Velvet, etc. etc.) Preacher Man (give it about two minutes to let the beat marinate). (may be NSFW, depending on work environment) [more inside]
posted by Vibrissae at 5:19 PM PST - 16 comments

"The thing that really gets to me about the reviews is that all of them, almost grudgingly, admit that she sang the extraordinarily difficult role beautifully. And yet the bulk of their criticism is reserved for her body type." Irish Tara Erraught, soprano star of this year's Glyndebourne festival, garnered almost universal contempt from London's male critics. Guardian roundup, including a mention of Alice Coote's open letter to critics.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:13 PM PST - 111 comments

"The Parties Do Not Need a Judge; They Need a Rather Stern Kindergarten Teacher"
posted by flabdablet at 1:40 PM PST - 46 comments

Decades of scientific research suggests that beneath dogs' seemingly frivolous fun lies a hidden language of honesty and deceit, empathy and perhaps even a humanlike morality.
posted by gman at 1:10 PM PST - 56 comments

So some lunatic put together an interactive chart of the vocal ranges of the most popular musicians of the last couple of generations (based on their studio albums), and it turns out that Mariah Carey only came in second... to Axl Rose. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:34 PM PST - 138 comments

Read this and have some sushi with friends.
posted by sidra at 11:53 AM PST - 55 comments

Most mainstream comics have a serious problem dealing with women. See Women In Refrigerators (previously). But DC seems to be doing particularly bad lately. Witness this conversation by David S Goyer in which he compares She-Hulk to a porn star.(more She-Hulk info here and here) [more inside]
posted by lumpenprole at 11:10 AM PST - 140 comments

Disney Studios censors Miyazaki collection, pulls Studio Ghibli compilation. "On Your Mark" a video directed by Hiyao Miyazaki, and produced between early January and late May, 1995 by a team of over fifty animators at Studio Ghibli, in cooperation with other studios, is being censored from the upcoming 13-disc "Collected Works of Director Hayao Miyazaki" collection. Disney is also stopping shipments of a 2005 Ghibli Shorts collection, which features the video, along 22 other shorts that Studio Ghibli produced over the course of decades. The rationale?! Nineteen years after the video's release, one of the members of the band that did the music for the video has been arrested, along with a female acquaintance, after police found MDMA at his home. The musician was arrested Saturday, but has not been charged or convicted, as yet. Both he and the woman he was arrested with claim to be innocent.
posted by markkraft at 10:42 AM PST - 73 comments

Visualize a comic book, in your language, and imagine what would be written in the text balloon coming from the mouth of an animal. Now translate it. Derek Abbott of The University of Adelaide (previously) has compiled "the world’s biggest multilingual list" of animal sounds, commands, and pet names.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:29 AM PST - 20 comments

Everything is broken Next time you think your grandma is uncool, give her credit for her time helping dangerous Russian criminals extort money from offshore casinos with DDoS attacks.
Quinn Norton [previously] breaks down the reasons why computers are so hackable by exploring the realities of how software is made and used.
posted by dobie at 9:52 AM PST - 63 comments

Second Breath. On Saturday night, the first breath of the BBC's new Arts initiative was a live stream on the evening of Museums at Night which included this short dance piece by Russell Maliphant and English National Ballet at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. All the BBC Arts clips also have their own page which includes other reports from Saturday including a visit with Spencer Tunick in Folkstone and artist Bill Fontana discussing his superb Vertical Echoes sound installation. [more inside]
posted by feelinglistless at 9:18 AM PST - 1 comment

Why I'm sending back Google Glass
posted by figurant at 8:45 AM PST - 129 comments

What happens when Toronto street signs taken over by Indy bands. Interesting to see the placement of signs, and the types you remember as being iconic in Toronto, and also how many signs I can actually remember, or identify considering the names have been changed.
posted by Pr0t35t3r at 8:01 AM PST - 9 comments

Why your friends with children no longer socialise and other horrifying new parent facts Christine Skoutelas explains the myriad reasons why parents with young children don't seem to want to socialise (TLDR: They are permanently exhausted). [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 7:59 AM PST - 122 comments

Thanks to some insider information, you now know how much it costs to hire your favorite band or performer. Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, James Taylor, Justin Timberlake, Madonna, Taylor Swift and the aforementioned Bieber are in the rare one million dollar club. Others can be had for much, much less. [more inside]
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 7:51 AM PST - 146 comments

Endlessly growing flower.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:05 AM PST - 20 comments

Everyone's favorite South African provocateur rap-ravers Die Antwoord are back with a new album in June and a new video right now: "Pitbull Terrier" (probably NSFW)
posted by griphus at 4:29 AM PST - 44 comments

Orbán combined Germany’s much-criticized rules for drawing electoral districts with Britain’s highly disproportionate first-past-the-post rules for constituency elections, and topped it off with the widely used d’Hondt system for deriving proportional representation from party-list votes, a system that marginalizes small parties and bulks up plurality ones. The 2014 Hungarian system also allowed for blatant gerrymandering, an unusual new system of vote aggregation, and double and even triple standards in the way that different categories of citizens were treated (see my “Hungary, An Election in Question” and “Legal but Not Fair” for details). Those who supported the government found it easy to register and vote from abroad, while those who opposed it had to contend with red tape and misleading instructions circulated by new Fidesz-installed election officials. Unless the allied opposition had garnered at least 6 percent more votes than Fidesz, it could not have won even a bare majority of the parliamentary seats. All told, the election system had been altered to turn a bare plurality into a bare supermajority—hence Orbán’s apparent landslide..

Kim Lane Scheppele explains in The Nation how Hungary has been made over into a one party state and how powerless the European Union is to do anything about it. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 11:58 PM PST - 39 comments

A Suicide Bomber’s Guide to Online Privacy is the title of a keynote talk that Peter Watts (previously) gave to the International Association Of Privacy Professionals' Canada Symposium.

My immediate reaction was that this had to be some kind of cruel hoax. But they hooked me anyway, with what basically came down to a double-dare: “You’ve got a chance to talk to the regulators who enforce privacy law and the executives as big companies who make decisions about what to do with your data – what do you want to say to them?” Well. Since you ask.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:22 PM PST - 30 comments

Davy and Kristin McGuire do some amazing things with cut paper, light and animation that turn these beautifully cut paper dioramas into haunting installations - including an homage to Hitchcock. Via Colossal.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:50 PM PST - 7 comments

Seventeen People. A modest tribute to—and deconstruction of—my favorite hour of television.
posted by Cash4Lead at 5:46 PM PST - 34 comments

Why are humans so fascinated with other animals? Looking to psychology and evolution to find out.
posted by rcraniac at 5:43 PM PST - 12 comments

When I reached out [to Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti] yesterday, asking whether he saw Buzzfeed as embodying the trends described in the paper or as subverting them, he simply replied, "lol."
posted by latkes at 4:57 PM PST - 21 comments

The Asahi Shimbun has learned (from recently released interviews with now-deceased Fukushima plant manager Masao Yoshida) that 90% all workers, including managers required to deal with accidents, defied orders and fled the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant at a critical juncture when the disaster was unfolding in March 2011. The New York Times reports on the story as well.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:54 PM PST - 37 comments

"Live comedy thrives off an audience, but what if the comics have no idea how the crowd is responding? At 7 Minutes in Purgatory, half a dozen local [Chicago] comics were tasked with doing a set alone in a soundproof room while the crowd watched via live stream elsewhere in the venue." [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 4:28 PM PST - 24 comments

Thug: A Life of Caravaggio in Sixty-Nine Paragraphs
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 2:17 PM PST - 14 comments

If David Lynch directed "Return of the Jedi", it may have looked like this.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:31 PM PST - 43 comments

Pennsylvania's ban on gay marriage was overturned by a federal judge Tuesday. [more inside]
posted by Chrysostom at 11:56 AM PST - 184 comments

Eight former National Football League players have filed a class-action suit against the NFL for illegally pumping them full of painkillers and other drugs to keep them playing. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 11:16 AM PST - 49 comments

Every year, the Neural Correlates Association announces the world's three best optical illusions. Out of a number of finalists, the 2014 winners have been announced: 1) The Dynamic Ebbinghaus, 2) Flexible Colors, and 3) a Turn in the Road [animated gif version]. There are also a list of best illusions from all years, as well as winners from 2013, 2012, and previous posts. Of course, if there was a lifetime achievement award, it would need to go to Akiyoshi Kitaoka, inventor of some of the most amazing recent illusions: rotating snakes (seriously, this is amazing), possibly the best color illusion ever (with instructions on making them), and also Lady Gaga covers. Also, for no good reason, here are 20 more good ones.
posted by blahblahblah at 10:26 AM PST - 38 comments

Educationally bizarre: Current events, medicine, animals, forensics, oddities, teeth, eyes, deformities, funerals, cemeteries, blood, albinism and such ........ It's The Soul is Bone. Not necessarily disturbing, but not necessarily not disturbing. Not necessarily NSFW, but not necessarily not NSFW.
posted by Think_Long at 10:25 AM PST - 25 comments

The world's tallest water slide is about to open in Kansas City, MO at the Schlitterbahn Kansas City Waterpark. To ride Verrückt, riders climb 264 steps to the top before being strapped into a raft ("NO Wedgies!") and plumetting seventeen stories. Statue of Liberty for scale. The current (tentative) opening date is June 5, 2014. Cheesy promotional video.
posted by rouftop at 10:24 AM PST - 98 comments

WWE CEO is no longer a billionaire, Forbes reports. His attempts to generate new revenue by reshaping the way fans consume his product have "imploded", according to Business Insider. Meanwhile, Paul Levesque, aka Triple H, strives to rebuild WWE from within.
posted by jwhite1979 at 9:50 AM PST - 54 comments

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Open Access for Scholarly Content now provides free access to almost 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain artworks from their collection (FAQ). From a database searchable by artist name/culture, date/era, location, etc., works by El Greco, Picasso, Rembrandt, Titian, and many, many more are available to view and download.
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:58 AM PST - 13 comments

"Looking back on it, one of the things that's crazy is I don't think I even realized that first of all, Joe Flaherty is supposed to be a vampire but he's howling like a werewolf. [laughs] I just took that for granted, and it must've been years until I saw it and was like "Wait a minute, that's a joke!" Furthermore, Count Floyd's always wearing a turtleneck which is the least vampire thing ever." "Splitsider kicks off its new column, Sketch Anatomy, with television writer Bill Oakley breaking down SCTV’s "Dr. Tongue’s Evil House of Pancakes" (previously). Oww owww oowoooooo!!!
posted by Room 641-A at 8:04 AM PST - 73 comments

Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return set a record for the all-time worst opening weekend for an animated film. Executive Producer Greg Centineo attributed the failure to a "conspiracy" of Hollywood's powers-that-be against independent production company Alpine Pictures. In light of Oz's glacially-delayed release schedule and shabby production values, it would appear that the heads of Alpine are completely incompetent…or are they? [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:42 AM PST - 115 comments

"With over 200 breweries, Oregon is often considered the craft beer capital of America. Beer geeks and casual drinkers across the country can also thank the state’s farmers for their brews: hops, the essential ingredient that gives beer its bitter flavor, is a rare crop throughout the U.S. but not in Oregon. Last year, Oregon State University established the Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives (OHBA), the first archive in the U.S., dedicated to preserving and telling the intertwined story of hop and beer production and the craft brewing movement. They're posting materials from their collection to Tumblr, Flickr and Zotero.
posted by zarq at 7:18 AM PST - 31 comments

Ladar Levison
My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company's network.. (Previous)
posted by adamvasco at 5:40 AM PST - 105 comments

“The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence. Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it… If you should write a book (you had better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be called ‘brilliant’ and forfeit all respect.” - The Microcosmographia Academica (pdf), FM Cornford’s cynical 1908 guide to the academic life, including detailed instructions on obstructing progress. (via the excellent Alex Reinhart, previously)
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:59 AM PST - 6 comments

The current critique of experimental social science is coming mainly from the inside. Strohminger, Simmons, and a handful of other mostly young researchers are at the heart of a kind of reform movement in their field. Together with a loose confederation of crusading journal editors and whistle-blowing bloggers, they have begun policing the world of experimental research, assiduously rooting out fraud and error, as if to rescue the scientific method from embarrassment—and from its own success. The Reformation: Can Social Scientists Save Themselves?
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:53 PM PST - 49 comments

The new "Guardians of the Galaxy" trailer conclusively proves that the Star Wars films really would've benefited from a '70s superhits soundtrack. And details are beginning to trickle in concerning the Agent Carter series, including the fact that the show will include Howard Stark, Gabe Jones, and Dum Dum Duggan.
posted by Ipsifendus at 8:27 PM PST - 167 comments

Use a trampoline. “The cancellation of the space shuttle may be the biggest blunder ever made by the United States,” Kraft said. “It’s fairly obvious that no one in the government thought through what they were about to bring about when they made that decision.”
posted by bitmage at 8:06 PM PST - 85 comments

The Age of Uncertainty, A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith was a 12 (or 15) part documentary mini-series about the fickle art of economics, co-produced by the BBC, CBC, KCET & OECA, and broadcast on television in 1977. Galbraith’s dry Scottish Canadian wit, and the 70’s-style art-direction, are worth viewing for those who like this sort of thing. The parody corporate videos for the Conglomerate UGE anticipated some of the ideas explored later in the 2003 documentary The Corporation. Some parts will seem dated, considering that this series was produced in the thick of The Cold War, before the rise of Reaganomics, Thatcherism, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the EU, yuan, electronic transfers, etc. The basic insights about the instability of financial markets are still real, as always. [more inside]
posted by ovvl at 6:26 PM PST - 5 comments

"The exhibition starts with one shining, unfathomably terrible morning and winds up as all of our lives, as banal and constant as laundry, bottomless. . . . I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else’s past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn’t feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark." [more inside]
posted by Anonymous at 5:31 PM PST - 96 comments

The Spielberg Oner: "One overlooked aspect of Spielberg is that he's actually a stealth master of the long take. From Duel to Tintin, for forty years, he has sneakily filmed many scenes in a single continuous shot." [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 4:44 PM PST - 58 comments

Line Segments Space by Kimchi and Chips
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:15 PM PST - 2 comments

The NSA is recording the audio of every phone call in the Bahamas and in another country which the article does not name "in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence." Previously
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 1:44 PM PST - 85 comments

Huge collection of (and commentary on) matte art from classic films that has been rescanned for HD releases. Much more on the process of creating and filming this type of setup at last month's post. (previously)
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:53 PM PST - 13 comments

Camille Lepage, a 26 year old photojournalist who dedicated her burgeoning career to reporting what the media seemed to ignore, was killed Tuesday while on assignment documenting the conflict in Central African Republic. As well as some amazing photography from her most recent work in CAR, Lepage worked in South Sudan on stories about young men drawn into the war, birth in a refugee camp, and less formal photography on instagram.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:33 PM PST - 21 comments

A federal judge in Oregon has overturned that state's ban on same sex marriage, opening the door for couples to begin getting married immediately. (PDF) [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:21 PM PST - 107 comments

Slings & Arrows (trailer) was an award-winning Canadian dramedy that enjoyed great critical reception on both sides of the border. It ran for three seasons from 2003 to 2006, produced by Rhombus Media with Niv Fichman as Executive Producer, and aired on Showcase, The Movie Network, and Movie Central. Co-written by Mark McKinney (of Kids in the Hall fame), Susan Coyne (a Canadian playwright, actor, novelist, Stratford veteran, and co-founder of Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre), and Bob Martin (a comedian, creator of The Drowsy Chaperone, which won five Tony awards), the show starred Paul Gross (possibly most famous for his role on Due South, also a Stratfordian actor), Martha Burns (a major Canadian actor and another founding member of Soulpepper, another Stratfordian), and Stephen Ouimette (another major Canadian actor who, unsurprisingly, has also spent time onstage at Stratford), as well as Coyne and McKinney. The show takes place in the fictional town of New Burbage, which is a stand-in for a thinly-veiled Stratford Festival, which most of the actors and creative team have acted and/or directed in. The writers take great pains to note that they aren't mocking Stratford in the series, but there are obvious parallels. The entire run of the series was directed by Peter Wellington. (There are many spoilers inside, and in the critical reception links, for those who haven't yet watched the show). Much [more inside]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:59 AM PST - 55 comments

Terrorcore, for when you are listening to "I Wanna Be A Gabber Baby" and thinking "Man, I wish my 90's techno nostalgia could get just a bit 90's-ier"
posted by mediocre at 11:42 AM PST - 18 comments

Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study Finds (SLNYT) 'At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012...The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.' Report here.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:53 AM PST - 24 comments

Three bartenders in a backyard teach you how to make three classic summer drinks on a budget: the daiquiri, the gin & tonic, and the mint julep. Not simple enough? How about the only summer cocktail recipe you will ever need?
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:21 AM PST - 105 comments

Transcription: WAHH Traffic | Aired May 19, 2043 — 20:25:00 ET [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:17 AM PST - 12 comments

To commemorate the 300th Anniversary of the original Longitude Prize (won by John Harrison with the invention of a clock that could keep time at sea), UK charity Nesta has launched a new £10million prize to encourage inventors and scientists to find a solution to one of six problems facing the world. [more inside]
posted by Jakey at 8:43 AM PST - 21 comments

Today's Google Doodle, in honour of the 40th anniversary of the Rubik's Cube. — a fully functional, animated Rubik's Cube. [Click here for the interactive version.] [Related]
posted by Fizz at 8:21 AM PST - 26 comments

What do the words "safety," ''chaotic" and "problem" have in common? They're all on General Motors' list of banned words for employees who were documenting potential safety issues. The revelation of the 68-word list is one of the odder twists in GM's ongoing recall of 2.6 million older-model small cars for defective ignition switches. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver weighs in.
posted by Room 641-A at 7:41 AM PST - 78 comments

This stop-motion video for British rock band James's song "Moving On" tells a tale of life, death, joy, and grief, using only yellow yarn. The video was created by BAFTA-nominated animator, writer, and director Ainslie Henderson. (SLYT)
posted by orange swan at 6:58 AM PST - 21 comments

Jean and Scott is a web comic by Max Wittert, depicting domestic life between the X-Men Cyclops and Jean Grey. [episode 1] [episode 2] [episode 3] [episode 4] [episode 5] [episode 6] [episode 7] [more inside]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:41 AM PST - 22 comments

"In 1992, George Soros brought the Bank of England to its knees. In the process, he pocketed over a billion dollars. Making a billion dollars is by all accounts pretty cool. But demolishing the monetary system of Great Britain in a single day with an elegantly constructed bet against its currency? That’s the stuff of legends."
posted by MartinWisse at 4:58 AM PST - 65 comments

Alistair Macleod, one of Canada's greatest writers, has passed away. With just one novel, and two collections of short stories to his name, Macleod left an indelible mark on Canadian, and modern, literature. Other writers share their memories at the National Post (skip the first, Joyce Carol Oates' completely bland and characterless effort). At the Globe and Mail, Steven Galloway shares his own stories with Alistair. [more inside]
posted by smoke at 12:51 AM PST - 9 comments

Starship size comparison chart
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:20 AM PST - 79 comments

Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym of a feral child who was the victim of extraordinarily severe abuse, neglect and social isolation. Her circumstances are recorded prominently in the annals of abnormal child psychology. Born in Arcadia, California, United States, Genie's father kept her locked alone in a room from the age of 20 months to 13 years, 7 months, almost always strapped to a child's toilet or bound in a crib with her arms and legs completely immobilized.

"Secret of the Wild Child" - A 1997 NOVA episode.
posted by azarbayejani at 9:10 PM PST - 45 comments

Mother Jones reports on the annual California Dietetic Association conference, where highlights included a panel titled "Sweeteners in Schools" sponsored by the Corn Refiner's Association, and a lunch catered by McDonald's.
posted by a fair but frozen maid at 4:07 PM PST - 78 comments

SNL asks: "When Will the Bass Drop?"
posted by empath at 3:30 PM PST - 81 comments

Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews unveils an astonishing American subculture, and the homespun inventors and users who propel it. Meet a laid-off tech industry exec who transforms a thrift store pasta maker into a high-powered sexual appliance and a new career; an apocalyptic visionary who builds a sex machine prototype for female survivors of a future without men; and an Idaho cowboy who intends to use his device as a form of Christian-based marriage counseling.
posted by munchingzombie at 3:11 PM PST - 50 comments

Why Did AIDS Ravage the U.S. More Than Any Other Developed Country?
Solving an epidemiological mystery
posted by davidstandaford at 1:59 PM PST - 77 comments

If you read to the end of Neatorama's list of 10 magical facts about unicorns, you'll see that Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan has issued "unicorn questing permits" since 1971. This is true, and you can download a PDF of the license form, but take note of the regulations. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:26 PM PST - 7 comments

It appears that the one thing Star Trek: The Next Generation was missing was sausages.
posted by spiderskull at 11:27 AM PST - 44 comments

Because Peter Dinklage.
posted by chainsofreedom at 9:43 AM PST - 50 comments

Four cute kids dance The "Bean Bag Dance", The "Hokey Pokey", and a few other kids' favorites
posted by growabrain at 8:54 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

The SmartMime whale tracker lets you know where Hawaii's diverse population of whales are right now (not actually in real time, but based on migration data).
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:25 AM PST - 7 comments

Little remembered Suzy Solidor was frequently an artists model.
Some of the images are NSFW
Starting in the early 1920´s she was painted by Foujita possibly after their shared holiday in Deauville and then in 1927 by the fauvist Kees von Dongen.
In 1930 she opened her nightclub La Vie Parisienne the same year modelling in a BSDM take for Man Ray among others.
In 1933 her lover Tamara Lempicka ( previously ) painted her.
Like her friend Jean Cocteau (pictured 1938) she collaboratored during the occupation by keeping her club open and in 1940 Picabia painted her and she became known as the Madonna of the Sailors.
Here is a recording of her version of Lily Marlene and some more
She moved to Cagnes sur Mer after the war and modelled up to her death in 1983 (Marie-Pascale Deleun)
She left her portraits to the Chateau Grimaldi museum.
posted by adamvasco at 6:47 AM PST - 14 comments

Feel as if you've watched everything on Netflix? You might find something new at Summary Bug, where a text-display glitch generates whimsical cinematic possibilities.
posted by oulipian at 5:27 AM PST - 16 comments

Winter on Georgian Bay : “Highlights of a four-month time-lapse taken from a cottage overlooking Lake Huron, during an absolutely epic winter.” [via mefi projects]
posted by scruss at 4:55 AM PST - 24 comments

My husband and I didn’t have a honeymoon. The closest we got was a trip to the southwest, ten months after our wedding, to a rented condo and a private hospital where he would have his second round of female-to-male surgery: hysterectomy, oophorectomy, vaginectomy, metoidioplasty, and primary urethral lengthening. The upshot is that at the end of this he would be rid of reproductive organs and naturally-produced hormones, and, we hoped, be able to pee standing up.

Kate Good talks about her husband's surgery for The Toast's series about trans* matters (Trans 101.)
posted by MartinWisse at 4:32 AM PST - 29 comments

"Britain's richest people are wealthier than ever before, with a combined fortune of almost £520bn, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. The total wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals, couples or families jumped 15% in a year, the survey said. Wealth expert Philip Beresford, who compiled the list, said he had never before seen such a "phenomenal" rise in personal fortune... Mr Beresford said: "The richest people in Britain have had an astonishing year. While some may criticise them, many of these people are at the heart of the economy and their success brings more jobs and more wealth for the country." - The total figure for the Rich List is equivalent to a third of the UK's gross domestic product."
posted by marienbad at 4:00 AM PST - 43 comments

Railroad track today is laid by such monsters as the Plasser & Theurer SVM1000 Infranord, and specialized work trains renew old track (out with the old, in with the new in one pass) [more inside]
posted by pjern at 12:08 AM PST - 27 comments

A Compilation Video of Celebrities Impersonating Other Celebrities
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:45 PM PST - 12 comments

JAY Z & Beyoncé "RUN"
posted by nadawi at 9:50 PM PST - 15 comments

Volvo Blå: A Swede named PonyHans wants you to Buy His Volvo. [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A at 8:29 PM PST - 10 comments

This Quiznos-produced short is the likely the best Mad Men / X-Men crossover you'll see today.
posted by The Whelk at 8:06 PM PST - 40 comments

A day in the life of New York City's public libraries: Traveling from borough to borough, this short documentary by Julie Dressner and Jesse Hicks reveals just how important the modern library is for millions of people. Why Libraries Matter.
posted by cashman at 7:41 PM PST - 6 comments

As discussed previously on the blue, Danny Chen died in Afghanistan not from fighting the Taliban or al Qaeda, but from suicide after prolonged abuse by his comrades. A street in Manhattan now bears his name.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 5:20 PM PST - 12 comments

I call on historians to dedicate their precious few hours of spare time to improving Wikipedia; as an incentive, I call on ­administrators to integrate Wikipedia contributions into the publication requirements for tenure.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:36 PM PST - 71 comments

Rain falls on the now vacant Pontiac Silverdome, once home to the Detroit Lions and the Detroit Pistons. [slyt] [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 3:03 PM PST - 45 comments

Adobe's controversial Creative Cloud service stumbles and fails, leaving many who have paid for the service unable to use it for 24 hours. Adobe says the cause was an unexpected failure during database maintenance. Compensation may be possible.
posted by juiceCake at 2:32 PM PST - 97 comments

The closest his memories usually come to the surface is when he insists those memories no longer hold any power over him. "All of this stuff," he says, "helped me realize that you have to be happy in life. I had my childhood. It was fun. I would never change my childhood." Twenty years after fleeing with his family from the Bosnian War, Vedad Ibasevic has led his national team to an appearance in the World Cup. But nothing can stay buried. [more inside]
posted by Snarl Furillo at 2:22 PM PST - 3 comments

A visit to Galloping Ghost, the largest video game arcade in the USA. "'The largest video arcade in the USA,' boasted the website. 'We’ve got to make it over there,' I told Deputy Editor Nate Anderson over IM one morning. Galloping Ghost, an arcade located in the western suburbs of Chicago, was said to house well over 400 vintage games. The combination of proximity and the desire to while away an afternoon in a warm, nostalgic gaming haze eventually overpowered our excuses not to go, so we made the trip."
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:41 PM PST - 33 comments

Amparo "Amparin" Serrano turned the much-revered Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, into its Hello Kitty. In the early 2000s, Amparin drew a cute cartoon version of the Virgin and asked for protection, an inexpensive cell phone, and removal of her cellulite (Google auto-translate; original Spanish article), and it went from there (auto-translation; original page). Now, Serrano and her Distroller company have teamed up with Walmart and other large chain stores, and the brand has also expanded into the US.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:45 AM PST - 29 comments

SCOPE assists you in dealing with your awkward.
posted by latkes at 10:43 AM PST - 48 comments

K. Mike Merrill at BigThink has some ideas on how to modernize Monopoly while helping players better understand the nature of our financial system.
posted by reenum at 9:35 AM PST - 39 comments

CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding , and the manual uses “crew” as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library’s “crewing” its collection. It means weeding but doesn’t sound so harsh. [more inside]
posted by sammyo at 6:12 AM PST - 65 comments

The AV Club argues that Say Yes to the Dress is quietly bringing feminist TV mainstream. Are the wedding consultants 'accidental feminists' as they stand up for the brides' desires against family and friends? Others disagree strongly. The Onion sums it all up with Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show. [more inside]
posted by viggorlijah at 2:40 AM PST - 92 comments

Poolside Radio is a bizarre slice of the 1980s in a browser. Strange old clips of 80s movies combined with 80s synth music and a lovely pastel palette make for a good time.
posted by mathowie at 10:02 PM PST - 28 comments

The DeLorean DMC-12 is a really cool car. But if you have a hard time finding one for sale, try looking for a DeLorean snowcat. Alas, the DeLorean sedan, bus, and all-terrain vehicle were never mass-produced, and it's unclear if his monorail patent was ever monetized. [more inside]
posted by compartment at 9:12 PM PST - 18 comments

An NPR interview with the creator of a 75 foot long Mammy-Sphinx sculpture made entirely of sugar. Award-winning artist Kara Walker's latest work challenges viewers to confront the relationships between American history, racism, slavery, and industrialization. Her exhibition is held in the soon-to-be-demolished, historic Domino Sugar Factory. (New Yorker article) [more inside]
posted by warm_planet at 8:18 PM PST - 33 comments

“That was the type of feeling you had - you were *in danger* at one of their shows.” The legendary X-rated Butthole Surfers show at Danceteria. (Video is NSFW due to strobelighted, confusing Butthole Surfers fornication.) For a glimpse of the band at their peak — markedly clothed, but no less extreme and noizy — see this full 1986 CBGB's set. If all this is too much, kick back with the comedy stylings of their 1988 Bar-B-Que Movie.
posted by naju at 7:31 PM PST - 24 comments

NOTEBOOK WITH DECORATIVE COVER GUARDSMAN KISSING CLOSED EYES [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust at 6:21 PM PST - 53 comments

A checklist for those making graphs from Stephanie Evergreen and Ann Emery. This is a useful tool for teaching scientists and others some of the rules of data presentation in graph form.
posted by sciencegeek at 4:48 PM PST - 23 comments

No one loves his bucket more than Charlie This is my bucket. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My bucket is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My bucket, without me, is useless. Without my bucket, I am useless. I must run with my bucket . I must with my bucket, be better than my enemy who has another bucket. My bucket is a dog, even as I am a dog, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its roundness and its red color. I will keep my bucket clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will...Before God, I swear this creed. My bucket and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our yard and the yard with the cat next door. We are the saviors of my life . So be it, until victory is ours and there is no enemy, but peace! [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 3:52 PM PST - 36 comments

The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.

How companies like Coursera use volunteer labor to expand their profit margins.
posted by Charity Garfein at 1:09 PM PST - 85 comments

It's easy to explain why you love a conventionally excellent player, but way, way more fun to try and explain the appeal of a top-flight athlete whose every step and twitch appeared to be bringing him dangerously close to death itself. You had this guy, St. Louis, and he was awesome and everything, but every time he hit a triple he'd pop up and have the saddest look on his face like everything he loved had died, and left him with the soul of an ancient, sad, and immortal Golem. It was like watching Buster Keaton play centerfield, and he was like that every time he played.

SB Nation Reviews: Willie McGee
posted by davidjmcgee at 11:06 AM PST - 43 comments

During the late 1970's and 1980's, Glen A. Larson's lighthearted television dramas were incredibly popular: Knight Rider. B.J. and the Bear. The original Battlestar Galactica. Quincy M.E. The Fall Guy. Magnum, P.I. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Larson had hit after hit and it seemed he could do no wrong. But he did produce three flops in the 80's, (and another in the 90's that managed to last two seasons): Automan, The Highwayman, Manimal and Night Man. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:03 AM PST - 136 comments

On a bitter Icelandic night in 1974, teenager Erla Bolladottir was having a nightmare. Voices, whispering outside her room. Who were they? What were they saying? It seemed so real. Terrified, she wet the bed. The dream would continue to haunt her for years to come.
posted by Jelly at 10:12 AM PST - 21 comments

Not everyone agrees on the best methods for raising kids. That becomes apparent when you examine the results from the 2010-2014 World Values Survey — 82,000 adults across 54 countries were surveyed to gain a better understanding of what they consider most important when raising a child, whether or not they were parents themselves. PBS NewsHour has an interactive quiz you can take to show which country has values closest to yours as well as a widget to compare the values of any two countries. You can see all the data in this google docs spreadsheet.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:05 AM PST - 90 comments

The Fire Rises is a music video from Masketta Man's UUUU, a name-your-price banecore devotional EP based largely on the somewhat befuddling opening to the 2012 blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. Other tracks concern hotheads (and how to get them out of places), states of relative bigness w/r/t inter-guy relationships, and pastiches in the vein of Bentley Rhythm Ace. To be fair, however, other banecore songs have been equally sonorous, other banecore videos may be even more romantic, and Bane himself has some skills as a rapper, although maybe not as much as Tom (and Louis) Hardy. (last link contains NSFW language)
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:45 AM PST - 6 comments

We have released 7 hoax videos which appear to demonstrate paranormal phenomena. In fact they're all based upon real scientific principles. Over the past few months this hoax footage has been posted all over the internet in an attempt to find out if people would either accept it as genuine or question it in an attempt to discover the real truth. Can you find the hoaxes before we reveal the secret science behind these scams?

Ghost on film (4:28)
Psychic Readings (13:07)
Telekinesis (2:45)
Chi energy (4:00)
Ouija board (5:17)
Brickbreaking (5:31)
Psi Wheel (3:29)
posted by Blasdelb at 8:36 AM PST - 109 comments

Current Spiderman Andrew Garfield is a different type of hero in the video for Arcade Fire's "We Exist", which examines transphobia and acceptance.
posted by hippybear at 8:30 AM PST - 49 comments

21 [Entirely Totally Completely Seriously True] Simple Hacks That Will Significantly Improve Your Life [slBuzzfeed]
posted by cthuljew at 8:07 AM PST - 47 comments

Charles McNamara reviews Orbis Sensualium Pictus, the world's first picture book for children, in the Public Domain Review. If you care to instruct your own little ones on the subject of Stones, Potherbs, Flying Vermin, Bowels, and the Tormenting of Malefactors, the full book is available.
posted by theodolite at 7:40 AM PST - 15 comments

Tomorrow, is the 60th Anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision (pdf) in Brown v. Board of Education [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:28 AM PST - 12 comments

For everyone out there who is calmed by organization and minimalist things, I present to you: Tiny PMS Match.
posted by phunniemee at 7:24 AM PST - 15 comments

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights around the world Being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender is illegal in almost 80 countries, and in at least five of them is still punishable by death. Ahead of the International day against homophobia and transphobia on 17 May, explore the legal situation for LGBT people around sex, marriage or civil partnerships, adoption, workplace discrimination and hate crime by region, country and overall population. Trans 101.
posted by michswiss at 7:02 AM PST - 6 comments

Over the past two weeks, Iranian women have been publishing pictures of themselves without hijab, as a protest to the 35-year long encroachment on their right to choose how to dress. [Guardian] [HuffPo] [Vocativ] [more inside]
posted by turnips at 6:16 AM PST - 12 comments

Step 1: Video bats. Step 2: Turn it upside down. Step 3: Add a soundtrack. Step 4: Achieve Internet notoriety until the next funny video craze comes along. SLYT
posted by Athanassiel at 6:08 AM PST - 18 comments

These days, there’s a broad consensus that the Comics Code — which has been endlessly discussed and condemned by comics historians — was disastrous, and that it damaged comics. But nearly all of the critiques of the Code focus primarily on its dire consequences for white men’s artistic freedom, or the disservice done to readers in coddlingly denying them explicit sex and violence. What’s less discussed is the fact that independent women, and people of color, and all sorts of stories that didn’t fit with the compulsory patriotism and cop-worship of the 1950s, essentially vanished from comics for decades. This is a loss that comics are still wrangling with.

Saladin Ahmed explains how censors killed the weird, experimental, progressive golden age Of comics [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:56 AM PST - 28 comments

In a black-and-white world, artists fight to defend their color from THE GOLD SPARROW. [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 12:23 AM PST - 18 comments

Who Gets to Graduate? "If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores."
posted by epimorph at 11:20 PM PST - 48 comments

Japanese Pocari Sweat sports drink is striving to go where no ad has gone before: the moon. Lunar Dream is their campaign to get kids to submit their dreams to include in a "dream capsule," on SpaceX's Falcon 9, as part of the company's first moon landing in October 2015. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:46 PM PST - 45 comments

Strava, the bike and run tracking system, is using their database to create Strava Metro, to sell to urban planners for commute data. But unless you're the Oregon DoT, London, or Alpine Shire, you might find the Strava bike and run heatmaps more useful. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:44 PM PST - 34 comments

An election spread over 42 days with 550 Mn people (66% of eligible voters), 930,000 polling booths, more than a 1000 parties, 545 seats and approximately $6 Bn spent. These elections come at time when India is going through huge changes. The economy has slowed down from its heady days of 9% growth to around 5% growth. The current coalition government headed by congress was mired in scandals and policy paralysis. The demographic dividend has resulted in a large number of youth participating in elections. [more inside]
posted by TheLittlePrince at 7:31 PM PST - 26 comments

Valve's annual Dota 2 championship was record breaking last year. It took 3 months to raise the prize pool by a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding from 1.6 million USD to 2.8 million USD. This year it took a little more than 1 week to raise the prize pool from the same 1.6 million USD to 5 million USD. And the tournament will only start in mid July. At this rate, even if the winners had never won cash before (and assuming they will the take half of the total money), they will become the highest earner in esports of all time.
(previously)
posted by bdz at 4:51 PM PST - 24 comments

Finally, after 25 years, the conclusion to one TV's enduring mysteries is finally at hand... Finally, after 25 years, the conclusion to one TV's enduring mysteries is finally at hand with the Announcement of Twin Peaks - The Complete Mystery. [more inside]
posted by Mintyblonde at 4:34 PM PST - 84 comments

The Emily Dickinson Archive is a collection of high resolution digital images of Emily Dickinson's handwritten manuscripts. Here are, for instance, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Tell the Truth but Tell It Slant, I Dwell in Possibility, They Shut Me Up in Prose and I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died. The whole collection is fully searchable and the images include the text of the poems as they were written down by Dickinson. The archive is a project of Harvard's Houghton Library but many other institutions provided manuscripts. Perhaps the best place to start is to simply browse the poems by title.
posted by Kattullus at 3:50 PM PST - 10 comments

Michael Jackson has a new album out: Xscape [more inside]
posted by jammy at 2:59 PM PST - 28 comments

"Because of differences in craniofacial morphology and dentition between the earliest American skeletons and modern Native Americans, separate origins have been postulated for them, despite genetic evidence to the contrary." The 12,000-year-old skeleton of a girl with these features, however, confirmed a Beringian origin. "Thus, the differences between Paleoamericans and Native Americans probably resulted from in situ evolution rather than separate ancestry." [more inside]
posted by ChuckRamone at 1:50 PM PST - 21 comments

Two Weeks Ago, I Almost Died in the Deadliest Plane Crash Ever How two jetliners nearly collided over the Pacific, why no one knows about it, and what it means for safety oversight aboard airplanes
posted by gottabefunky at 1:49 PM PST - 63 comments

Gawk at the unholy burger combinations of PornBurger. (disclaimer: not at all porn, but NSIH --Not Safe If Hungry)
posted by Kitteh at 1:33 PM PST - 76 comments

Southern Belles, Latchkey Kids, and Thrift-Store Crossdressers. Worth a click if only for the photos of a teenage RuPaul. [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 1:19 PM PST - 12 comments

Russia wants to nix plans to use the ISS after 2020, prohibit the United States from visiting the space station after that date along with preventing the US from using Russia made rocket engines for military launches. NASA says it hasn't received any official word, as US Congress critters begin asking questions
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:46 PM PST - 96 comments

Was the pilfered painting worth it? Detroit's 555 Gallery saved a stencil from scrappers, but now wants to sell it.
posted by klangklangston at 12:05 PM PST - 22 comments

In the mid-1940s, surrealist artist Salvador Dali began collaborating with Walt Disney on a short film. The idea was fully storyboarded and an 18 second test animation was completed by Disney animator John Hench. Soon after, the idea was shelved due to a changing of focus with Disney Feature Animation. Almost 60 years later, Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney (with consultation from the now 95-year old Hench) spearheaded an effort to finish the film. In 2003, the finished product, "Destino", premiered. [more inside]
posted by inturnaround at 11:56 AM PST - 11 comments

FIFA: "The votes have been counted and the winners declared! Congratulations to our 32 winners... The winning slogans will be placed on the respective teams' buses at the 2014 FIFA World Cup! Scroll down to read all the winning entries." - CNN: FIFA's bus slogans cause misery and mirth on social media - and The Guardian asks: "Can you think of better World Cup slogans for the 32 teams? "The England team are not 'the heartbeat of millions', real men do not 'wear orange' and since when did 'heroes play like Greeks'? The World Cup slogans need a rewrite. Can your wit help?"
posted by marienbad at 11:48 AM PST - 49 comments

In a story first broken by the AP (heads up: link does not conform to guidelines about how to refer to trans people), Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has given approval for the Army to transfer Pvt. Chelsea Manning to a federal prison in order to allow her to access treatment for her gender dysphoria. [more inside]
posted by Corinth at 11:08 AM PST - 10 comments

A Short History of Game Panics: [Boing Boing] "Do you know where you child is? Watch out: they might be in an arcade! Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine on video gaming's juciest moral panics." [Previously] [Previously] [Previously]
posted by Fizz at 10:52 AM PST - 34 comments

Baby Mentalist is a show about a baby mentalist
posted by jcruelty at 10:38 AM PST - 11 comments

The British Library today unveiled a major addition to its website: Discovering Literature, a portal to digitized collections and supporting material. The first installment, Romantics and Victorians, includes work from Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, and Blake, and forthcoming modules will expand coverage of the site to encompass everything from Beowulf to the present day.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:20 AM PST - 6 comments

Cultivating Thought: Cups and bags at Chipotle (previously) will now feature stories and essays by famous authors, including Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Steven Pinker, Sarah Silverman, and Jonathan Safran Foer, who came up with the idea for the series and will be curating it as well.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:09 AM PST - 73 comments

Q&A: Ginger Baker on Why 'the Rolling Stones Are Not Good Musicians'
posted by josher71 at 8:53 AM PST - 168 comments

Yesterday, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson - the first woman to hold that position for the paper - was unexpectedly fired, reportedly because she attempted to bring on a new co-managing editor without consulting the managing editor already at the paper or the publisher, though there is also a persistent rumor that it was because she addressed a pay gap between herself and her predecessor. Today, the first woman managing editor for French paper Le Monde resigned, claiming that she was being undermined, drawing more attention to journalism and media's woman problem. [more inside]
posted by troika at 8:49 AM PST - 133 comments

This indignant map exposes the seamy underbelly of 1890s Washington, D.C., naming and locating “saloons” and “bawdy-houses” in the so-called Murder Bay neighborhood, located east of the White House. The Library of Congress, which holds the map, tells us that it’s a newspaper clipping from the 1890s, without a known author or publisher. (Slate.com)
posted by The Whelk at 8:41 AM PST - 14 comments

Amos Barshad of Grantland talks to Darcy Frey and the basketball players featured in the classic book The Last Shot 20 years after the book's release.
posted by reenum at 8:35 AM PST - 1 comment

A preview of computer graphics technology innovations to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2014. (Previously)
posted by griphus at 7:53 AM PST - 30 comments

myNoise.net uses audio synthesis cleverness and the HTML 5 Web Audio API to give you a vast array of ambient soundscapes and background noises right in your (recent) browser. Each generator is highly customisable and users can share customisations with each other.
posted by vanar sena at 7:10 AM PST - 21 comments

50 years ago Anthony Hopkins wrote a piece of music titled 'And the waltz goes on'. Watch him hear it played for the first time. [SLYT].
posted by pjern at 6:38 AM PST - 24 comments

Military infographics are completely insane -- An analysis of some of the baffling infographics that the US military have made public on the web for some reason.
posted by schmod at 5:37 AM PST - 59 comments

Switching away from iPhone can make text messages to you disappear.
posted by exogenous at 4:54 AM PST - 93 comments

Tim Shafer plays Day of the Tentacle for the first time in fifteen years.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:48 AM PST - 9 comments

Four things about men and women I’ve learnt from being neither by CN Lester.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:17 AM PST - 110 comments

“Putting magic at the center of a play about a magician doesn’t seem like that radical a choice,” explained Teller’s  co-director and co-adapter Aaron Posner. "But in the history, at least the modern history of producing 'The Tempest', it is a radical choice."

posted by divabat at 12:22 AM PST - 24 comments

Meat Atlas: facts and figures about the animals we eat
posted by Gyan at 11:17 PM PST - 28 comments

“If someone goes out on a limb and tries something different, and the book doesn’t sell, you know who to blame: the guy who didn’t put the acacia tree on the cover.” [more inside]
posted by Herr Zebrurka at 9:29 PM PST - 67 comments

This Little Girl Is Watching Her Own Birth For The Very First Time [totally SFW] A young girl watches a video of herself being born. Her face is amazingly expressive!
posted by QuakerMel at 7:37 PM PST - 34 comments

Cat saves boy from dog.
posted by Bistle at 7:25 PM PST - 138 comments

Dave Eggers takes a Long Ride To Riyadh.

In any case, it’s a result of a gradual evolution. When I first travelled, I was naive, sloppy, wide-eyed, and nothing happened to me. That’s probably where the dumb luck came in. Then I began to read the guidebooks, the State Department warnings, the endless elucidation of national norms, cultural cues and insults and regional dangers, and I became wary, careful, savvy. I kept my money taped inside my shoe, or strapped to my stomach. I took any kind of precaution, believing that the people of this area did this, and the people of that province did that. But then, finally, I realised no one of any region did anything I have ever expected them to do, much less anything the guidebooks said they would. Instead, they behaved as everyone behaves, which is to say they behave as individuals of damnably infinite possibility. Anyone could do anything, in theory, but most of the time everyone everywhere acts with plain bedrock decency, helping where help is needed, guiding where guidance is necessary. It’s almost weird.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:01 PM PST - 26 comments

A 101 year old woman requested that Anastasia Pottinger photograph her in the nude, but also ensure that she couldn't be identified. [more inside]
posted by gman at 7:00 PM PST - 12 comments

"Small electrical pulses during sleep make some people feel as though they can manipulate their dreams, a team from Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Goettingen reported Sunday," reports NPR. But writer Ursula LeGuin was there first: YouTube Theater presents "The Lathe of Heaven" (1980), a public television adaptation of LeGuin's 1971 novel of the same name. Lucid dreaming was never such a nightmare... (Previously and previously.)
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:08 PM PST - 26 comments

My love of typography originated in the 80′s with the golden years of 8-bit home computing and their 8×8 pixel monospaced fonts on low-resolution displays.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 4:04 PM PST - 41 comments

A 50 minute documentary about Maxwell Street Market and musicians in Chicago (I interpret the title with an implicit accusatory question mark.) Mike Shea—previously a photographer for Life, Look and Time—directed this exquisitely composed, Frederick Wiseman-esque documentary that lurches between the wiles and complaints of street vendors to some astoundingly well-recorded street side blues performances—recorded by Gordon Quinn. Most notably numerous songs by Robert Nighthawk and one electrifying performance by Carrie Robinson. There's also one seriously awesome-looking house party. [more inside]
posted by zbsachs at 1:24 PM PST - 10 comments

My Child Ate... (poop, grandma's medicine, something around the house, nature, honorable mentions)
The Case of... (the tube switcheroo, the secret ingredient, the wrong container) [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 12:48 PM PST - 98 comments

What language does your state speak?
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 12:38 PM PST - 118 comments

Every Wednesday, rocker Andrew WK (previously) answers reader questions in his Village Voice advice column. He can be deep ("Ideally, life shouldn't be an ongoing struggle to see the glass half-full, but rather an appreciation that there's a glass at all") and inspirational and practical. Today, a reader asks him whether he should start using heroin.
posted by jbickers at 12:00 PM PST - 40 comments

As fears about global warming become ever more culturally ingrained, “climate fiction” has gone from a once-fringe genre to a standard literary device. Cli-Fi, as it’s abbreviated, is set in a near or long-term future where the fallout from global warming, be it flooding or mass extinctions, is not only apparent, but an aspect of everyday life. Spanning genres from literary fiction to thrillers, Cli-Fi acts as a barometer of our own ecological anxieties. This project offers a compelling portrait of climate change fears beyond what scientists and pundits can provide. via

PDF of the full visualization of the novels
posted by infini at 11:20 AM PST - 30 comments

A federal judge in Idaho has issued a ruling (PDF) declaring Idaho's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional, and today denied Gov. Butch Otter's motion for a stay on her decision overturning Idaho's ban on same-sex marriages. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:18 AM PST - 95 comments

Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity May Not Exist
posted by Brent Parker at 10:55 AM PST - 266 comments

'West Wing' Uncensored: Aaron Sorkin, Rob Lowe, More Look Back on Early Fears, Long Hours, Contract Battles and the Real Reason for Those Departures
posted by dirtdirt at 10:43 AM PST - 39 comments

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal sure loves his Tesla Model S. He also thinks that, for using Tesla's name for his company, the least Elon Musk could do was help fund a Tesla museum. Musk agreed.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:26 AM PST - 108 comments

What that Louie episode got right and wrong about fat women. After Sunday night's airing of Louie, some thoughtful, angry, interesting articles about how the show dealt with the issue of female body-shaming have popped up. But should the issue of fat-shaming women really be brought up by men?
posted by Kitteh at 10:13 AM PST - 122 comments

There are indications of a coming stock market crash. The timing is, of course, unknown, but the historical data might point to this October.
posted by wendyfairy at 10:13 AM PST - 65 comments

Peter sees the painting. "I could paint that", says Peter. "But you didn't", says Mummy. (mildly NSFW). In We go to the gallery, by British artist Miriam Elia, the titular characters of the Peter and Jane Keyword Readers of the 1960s visit a museum of contemporary art. Penguin, the publisher of the original books, is not amused, but the feathered creature may be actually dead in the water.
posted by elgilito at 10:08 AM PST - 9 comments

Obby Breeden, husband of The Devil's Panties and Geebas on Parade's Jennie Breeden, on what happens when the web advertising industry decides that an occasionally foulmouthed webcomic is equally "Adult" as a porn streaming site, as well as how to find your own site's score.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:54 AM PST - 20 comments

In the survey to be released Tuesday, which covered 101 countries plus the Palestinian territories, 26% of respondents agreed with at least six of 11 negative statements—what its sponsor called stereotypes—about Jews. The questions included "Jews are more loyal to Israel than [their home] country," and "Jews have too much power in the business world."

[Anti-Defamation League] Poll Says Anti-Semitism Is Global Matter
posted by griphus at 7:46 AM PST - 132 comments

This website refers you to licensed doctor who can provide you with a medical abortion. After you complete the following online consultation and if there are no contraindications, the medical abortion (with the pills mifepristone and misoprostol) will be delivered to you. At this moment it can take 2-3 weeks before the packages arrives. A medical abortion can be done safely at home as long as you have good information and have access to emergency medical care in the rare case that there are complications.The doctor can only help you if:

you live in a country where access to safe abortion is restricted

you are less than 9 weeks pregnant

you have no severe illnesses

Before starting the consultation, do a pregnancy test and an ultrasound, if possible. The consultation consists of around 25 questions. At the end of the consultation you will be asked to give permission to disclose all your information to the doctor. All information will remain confidential.

[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 7:45 AM PST - 22 comments

Oldest known sperm discovered, and it's gigantic.
posted by Xurando at 7:29 AM PST - 12 comments

The song "Turkey In The Straw" is one known to millions of Americans as well as many, many others around the world. Here's a National Public Radio article that shines some light on the virulently racist lyrics that attended that familiar old melody in its earlier incarnation. WARNING: Do not go to the link if you wish to avoid racist imagery and slurs.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:59 AM PST - 117 comments

Australia's 2014-2015 budget was just released. Amongst the casualties: television, young people (and the organisations that help them) and old people, tech startups, postgraduate students, people with disabilities and anyone seeking medical care, foreign aid, Indigenous people, the arts, renewable energy, and the environment. However, if you are in defence, mining, or Indonesian immigration, you should be fine.
posted by divabat at 11:40 PM PST - 116 comments

"Buy our car, but be aware that it might drive over a cliff rather than hit a car with two people." The Mathematics of Murder: Should a Robot Sacrifice Your Life to Save Two?
posted by juv3nal at 6:10 PM PST - 159 comments

Millie is an athlete, she trains hard, and diet is an important part of any athlete’s complete routine.
posted by Dashy at 5:57 PM PST - 40 comments

Molecular gastronomy at its most basic: Chef Heston Blumenthal makes chocolate mousse in five minutes using nothing but chocolate and water. (Heston Blumenthal (previously, pre-previously) [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A at 5:56 PM PST - 29 comments

James Mickens (previously) gives a talk at Monitorama 2014 about distributed computing and security.
posted by A dead Quaker at 5:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Why yes, a video about cucumber tendrils can be fascinating!
posted by mudpuppie at 5:45 PM PST - 8 comments

Journalist and author Robert Young Pelton describes his experiences in South Sudan in the most recent issue of Vice Magazine. It's the first time a single issue of the magazine has been devoted to a single topic and written by a single person. It follows Pelton, the photographer and filmmaker Tim Freccia, and a former South Sudanese refugee named Machot as they travel to Machot's homeland, one of the most war-ravaged countries on Earth. For Machot, the trip was an attempt to help South Sudan out of the seemingly never-ending cycle of war, corruption, and power-hungry strongmen that has ruled the country for generations. For Pelton and Freccia, it was the chance to explore and document the conflict that is rapidly turning the three-year-old country into the world's newest failed state—and to find out what, if anything, could stop South Sudan's slide into hell.
posted by Man Bites Dog at 5:22 PM PST - 17 comments

Film is Forever is a 16 minute short film made by students in the Lights, Camera, Action! class at West Ridge Middle School in Austin, Texas in partnership with Creative Action -- a team of teaching artists who run interactive performances, community-based programs and arts residencies in schools. More student-created work can be viewed on their web gallery.
posted by nathancaswell at 4:04 PM PST - 2 comments

How to Honor the Dead We Cannot Name: The problems with the Sept. 11 memorial museum.
posted by davidstandaford at 3:20 PM PST - 46 comments

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on "The Oprah Winfrey Show". A slight bit of context can be found on Tumblr.
posted by kmz at 12:52 PM PST - 43 comments

On October 13, 1972, the Technology Assessment Act was put into law as a bipartisan effort to promote scientific understanding for Congress members. The act created the nonpartisan Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which released over 750 studies in its 24 years of operation. The OTA was defunded in 1995, part of Newt Gingrich's efforts to "dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it." (Bruce Bartlett, NYT Economix blog). It was seen by some as "Reagan's Revenge" (Google books preview) for OTA's critical reports (Gbp) in 1985 (PDF) and 1988 (PDF) of the potential for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka "Star Wars"). Chris Mooney looked back on OTA in Requiem for an office (PDF), and both the Federation of American Scientists and Princeton University have OTA report archives online. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:31 PM PST - 26 comments

Equaldex: the collaborative LGBT knowledgebase! A crowd-sourced, verified, beautifully presented representation of equal rights (and how they are specifically denied) for LGBT folks. [via reddit]
posted by batmonkey at 12:06 PM PST - 7 comments

For more than 30 years, New York based photographer Mariette Pathy Allen has been documenting transgender culture worldwide; in 2004 she won the Lambda Literary Award for her monograph The Gender Frontier. In her new publication (amazon), TransCuba, Allen focuses on the transgender community of Cuba, especially its growing visibility and acceptance in a country whose government is transitioning into a more relaxed model of communism under Raúl Castro's presidency. (trans 101)
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 12:02 PM PST - 8 comments

Sarah Jarrett won the 2012 / 2013 Mobile photographer of the year award.
She lives in Norfolk, England and her landscapes and seascapes are well worth a look.
Here she discusses the technique behind some of her works.
Otherwise just go straight to her frequently updated blog.
posted by adamvasco at 11:10 AM PST - 17 comments

Schoolyard bullies may worry that their victims are free to be sniveling, cowardly worms with almost zero repercussions. But, fortunately, they'll get their comeuppance when they grow up and die of heart disease or cancer. "Bullying Is Good For Your Health." (Being bullied is bad for it.)
posted by grobstein at 10:20 AM PST - 89 comments

"More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti."
posted by brundlefly at 9:50 AM PST - 61 comments

The Energizer Bunny debuted in 1989 and quickly became one of the most successful advertising campaigns in media. Five years later, Duracell decided to do an eye-catching campaign of their own. The result was one of the most bizarre series of commercials of the 1990's. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:01 AM PST - 46 comments

Studies show that abused or neglected children placed in foster care face lifelong challenges greater than children who remain with their families.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:21 AM PST - 52 comments

Stayin in Black. What the hell just happened here?
posted by timsteil at 7:59 AM PST - 42 comments

The world's oldest recorded orca was spotted swimming with her pod off the Seattle coast this weekend. J2, nicknamed Granny, is believed to have been born in 1911, making her 103. [more inside]
posted by theweasel at 7:48 AM PST - 28 comments

A small but significant number of theologians, psychologists, and other conservative Christians are beginning to develop moral arguments that it’s possible to affirm same-sex relationships not in spite of orthodox theology, but within it. In books, academic journals, magazines, blog posts, speeches, conferences, and campus clubs, they are steadily building a case that there is a place in the traditional evangelical church for sexually active gay people in committed, monogamous relationships. They argue that the Bible, read properly, doesn't condemn such relationships at all—and neither should committed Christians.

Can the evangelical church embrace gay couples? Here Matthew Vines speaks to each of the 'clobber' passages used to attack homosexuality in engaging detail and describes his vision for the role of gay Christians in the church. (1:07:18) [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 6:43 AM PST - 151 comments

Swans have a new album out. Called To Be Kind. Financing for the album was supplied by sales of the live album/collection of demos entitled Not Here/Not Now, which, for a price, Michael Gira himself would write and original song and send you a video of him singing it, just for you. Oh and, reviews are in for the new album, and they are very favorable. Links inside. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:20 AM PST - 25 comments

Before there was Firefly, after there was Star Trek, in between there was… Blake's 7 (previously). The BBC's dystopian space opera ran for four series, ended with arguably the bleakest finale in sci-fi TV, yet never achieved popularity in proportion to its influence. To accompany its DVD release, documentary filmmaker Kevin Jon Davies prepared making-of videos for the first three series, which he has now posted YouTube: Series 1, Series 2, Series 3. Learn the origins of Blake's dysfunctional band of freedom-fighters, the secrets of the show's horrible SFX, watch the cast read aloud their worst reviews, and much more!
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:50 AM PST - 32 comments

On Sept. 13, 1848, at around 4:30 p.m., the time of day when the mind might start wandering, a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage filled a drill hole with gunpowder and turned his head to check on his men. It was the last normal moment of his life. Other victims in the annals of medicine are almost always referred to by initials or pseudonyms. Not Gage: His is the most famous name in neuroscience. How ironic, then, that we know so little else about the man—and that much of what we think we know, especially about his life unraveling after his accident, is probably bunk.

—Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient by Sam Kean.
posted by Kattullus at 1:03 AM PST - 36 comments

Swiss media report that HR Giger, famous for his dark and iconic Alien design, has died. He leaves behind a large body of work, much of it displayed in his own museum.
posted by Zarkonnen at 12:52 AM PST - 144 comments

What not to say to a parent of an autistic child.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:39 AM PST - 31 comments

In a new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice) in Vienna, the part of Euridice is shared between the soprano Christiane Karg, who sings from the stage, and Karin Anna Giselbrecht, a young woman in a persistent vegetative state, who lies in a nearby hospital. "The music is played to her and video cameras relay her image to the stage." [From the opera blog Intermezzo.] [more inside]
posted by Orinda at 12:02 AM PST - 9 comments

Warm water is eating away at the bases of West Antarctic glaciers in an irreversible runaway process: West Antarctic Glacier Loss Appears Unstoppable [the damn paper (paywalled)] [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:44 PM PST - 101 comments

What would US House electoral districts look like without any gerrymandering?
posted by Chrysostom at 10:50 PM PST - 41 comments

"Young Minds in Critical Condition" (SLNYT) "Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege” … We should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers—or, to use a currently fashionable word on campus, people who like to “trouble” ideas," opines Michael Roth, on the status quo of liberal education. Also "The case for a liberal education", 2014/05/09, The Boston Globe; and, "There's Nothing Liberal About Specializing in Philosophy" The Atlantic, 2014/05/09. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, recently authored “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters”, and teaches "The Modern and The Postmodern", offered on Coursera.
posted by polymodus at 8:11 PM PST - 22 comments

Way back in 1970, there were some air racing organizers who felt that the answer to the too-short Unlimited air races at Reno might be to have a longer race, so long that it would require pit stops. In Unlimited-class piston airplanes. Thus was born the California 1000. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 7:16 PM PST - 15 comments

How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company
posted by fings at 6:38 PM PST - 35 comments

20 Day Stranger For me, the socially awkward type, this is so exciting and frightening all at the same time!
posted by Yellow at 5:14 PM PST - 28 comments

Memories of a Bette Midler Message Board Childhood: Reminiscences from the early days of talking to strangers online.
posted by mudpuppie at 5:03 PM PST - 30 comments

The Gold Standard in Executions.
For two years now, Texas has used a single drug, the barbiturate pentobarbital, instead of the three-drug regimen used in neighboring Oklahoma. Prison administrators from other states often travel to Texas to learn how it performs lethal injections and to observe executions. Texas officials have provided guidance and, on at least a few occasions, carried out executions for other states.
posted by four panels at 2:46 PM PST - 96 comments

He somehow straddled the line between Prog and New Wave. He remained hidden since 1979. He helped pioneer the use of drum machines. He founded the innovative trio, FM. As a solo artist, he recorded some memorable covers and original material. He announced his retirement in 2012. Influential Canadian musician Jeff Plewman AKA Nash the Slash, has died at the age of 66.
posted by davebush at 2:43 PM PST - 29 comments

Squeee now or forever hold your peace. A bunny enjoys some raspberries, it looks like she's wearing lipstick.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 1:16 PM PST - 56 comments

A belated gift to all of you MeFi moms and moms-to-be. Not an uncommon occurrence in the Spring in North America. No less heart-warming to watch, though.
posted by Danf at 12:27 PM PST - 24 comments

Already being hailed by some as maybe one of the best music videos of the year, Sia's Chandelier, featuring 11-year old Maddie Ziegler, is by turns haunting, beautiful, strange and frisson inducing. [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:18 AM PST - 92 comments

Tranform any text into a patent application
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:29 AM PST - 11 comments

Even if you don't have a Gmail account, many of your contacts do. So Google has a lot of your email, even if you have been trying hard to avoid that.
posted by COD at 9:15 AM PST - 104 comments

The Oracle vs. Google decision has been reversed. [more inside]
posted by juiceCake at 7:45 AM PST - 151 comments

The baffling tweets of Jaden Smith make a surprising amount of sense when repurposed into Garfield comics.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:03 AM PST - 72 comments

"On 25 November 1953 , an international football match was played between Hungary - then the world's number one ranked team, the Olympic champions and on a run of 24 unbeaten games, and England... The British press referred to it as the "Match of the Century" - the originators of the game, against the finest team in the world at that time." [more inside]
posted by marienbad at 4:12 AM PST - 21 comments

So, in writing about Elsa, from Frozen, as having an iconic value in an emerging canon of a new trans creative mythology, of course I’m not saying that’s what Disney intended. What interests me is not the official image, but how the image gets ported into a kind of dynamic sensation of sympathy within a collective group. The number of trans women who told me — “I never liked princesses, but I get Elsa.” What are we all detecting in her at such a shared resonance?

Imaging Frozen's Elsa as a trans symbol. (trans 101)
posted by MartinWisse at 12:36 AM PST - 69 comments

Richard Linklater's Boyhood casts the same group of actors to shoot a movie over a 12-year period (2002-2014) portraying the coming-of-age of Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, who speaks about the experience here.
posted by divabat at 7:49 PM PST - 50 comments

Hello, [insert tv market name]!! A collection of the ‘Hello News’ package produced by Gari Communications, sold to various TV networks, nationwide (and Australia.) Hello Bonus 1: Florence Warner sings “Hello Nashville” live, accompanied by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Hello Bonus 2: The Osmonds record a “Hello Utah” promo.
posted by Room 641-A at 7:03 PM PST - 15 comments

Each year for the past seven years, Billboard Magazine's Rich Appel has surveyed a group of classic pop aficianados to create his IRS chart--It Really Should have been a Top 10 hit. This list of more than a thousand records largely from the 60s and 70s runs the gamut from classics that somehow never cracked the Top 10 during their heyday to the unjustly overlooked and obscure. Via the best radio show in America, Crap From the Past.
1. NOTHING BUT A HEARTACHE The Flirtations
2. CAN'T FIND THE TIME (to Tell You) Orpheus
3. WILL YOU BE STAYING AFTER SUNDAY The Peppermint Rainbow
4. SHAME, SHAME The Magic Lanterns
5. MORNING GIRL The Neon Philharmonic
6. MR. DIEINGLY SAD The Critters
7. GOD ONLY KNOWS The Beach Boys
8. THINGS I'D LIKE TO SAY The New Colony Six
9. PRETTY LADY Lighthouse
10. YELLOW RIVER Christie
And so much more!
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:56 PM PST - 69 comments

Kayte Spector-Bagdady gives a lecture at the Rock Ethics Institute summarizing a report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues on the 1946-1948 U.S.-Guatemala STD Experiments. [Previously] [Previouslier]
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 3:33 PM PST - 9 comments

A comprehensive review of mugs.
posted by codacorolla at 3:28 PM PST - 83 comments

The 100 Best (?) “B Movies” of All Time , a mix of Cheap Knock-Offs, the Almost-Good, the Too Weird for This World and Classic Corn, compiled by Paste Magazine's Jim Vorel, who has published more beer reviews than anything else, possibly because his "10 Most Unwatchable Films Featured on MST3K" drove him to hopeless alcoholism. He also previously listed "10 Essential Bad Movies for Your Collection", all of which are highly ranked here (if you want to save time). So pull up a chair and make plenty of popcorn, because the only thing more fun than watching cheezy movies is arguing about them. ("Hercules in New York" is ONLY #99? "Sharknado" only #90?!? Blasphemy!!)
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:40 PM PST - 74 comments

This Is What Happens When An All-Female Band Tries To Sing While Orgasming (NSFW) [more inside]
posted by jammy at 2:11 PM PST - 73 comments

Every Human in Star Wars is Really a Humanoid Bee by Max Gladstone. [via]
posted by quin at 2:00 PM PST - 29 comments

Huayhuash: Mountain Biking in the Andes - This spectacular range is remote and forbidding. In early 2014, three friends set out on a mountain bike adventure during the rainy season, encountering jaw-dropping vistas and challenges galore. In addition to the video, the trip is chronicled in a beautiful (but potentially browser-busting) multi-media feature in Bike Magazine; also, via a photo gallery in Outside.
posted by madamjujujive at 1:26 PM PST - 9 comments

NBC releases the first trailer for the Constantine tv show. (not available for viewing in countries outside the US)
posted by Kitteh at 11:43 AM PST - 104 comments

In 1981, the South Bank Show followed Elvis Costello to Nashville for the making of his latest album. The result: "The Making Of Almost Blue" [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:23 AM PST - 10 comments

The Colonel's Home Page! It's a home page that spans the Colonel's many interests, including homebrewed card games, jingle compositions, ASCII maps of NES games, how to deal with abusive parents, and puzzles. [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 10:54 AM PST - 23 comments

Moments of the Human Condition, a photo-essay by renown photo-journalist Peter Turnley.
Some powerful highlights:
Ft. Wayne, IN, 1974
Rwanda, 1994 (NSFL)
Kosovo, 1999
Basra, 2003
Seville, 2010
Havana, 2012 [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 10:20 AM PST - 9 comments

Meet Warren Kirk, the “Westographer” of Melbourne’s fading suburbs. [more inside]
posted by Lorin at 10:14 AM PST - 22 comments

Lifting weights in an American prison means joining a culture unlike any seen in a free-world gym, full of crudely welded pig iron and rust. Men forsake masturbation to improve their bench-press stats and consume cans of Jack Mack, the cheapest tinned fish in the world, along with the filthy broth it's packed in for every one of the 72.5 grams of protein promised on the label. It's a manly, aggressive universe with rules and customs of its own. I lived it for 10 years. An Ex-Con's Guide to Prison Weightlifting.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 9:11 AM PST - 52 comments

On losing your mother.
posted by carrienation at 7:18 AM PST - 67 comments

"Of all the men known to have boarded the Hunley, indeed, only about half a dozen escaped death in her iron belly–yet McClintock himself survived the war, and one of the keys to understanding the events of 1879 is to establish why he did so."

Scam artists, war profiteers, double agents, possibly faked deaths, and the precursors to the IRA are all tied together by the designers and builders of the first combat submarine to sink a warship, in the American Civil War.
posted by jenkinsEar at 5:59 AM PST - 6 comments

Long Player is a fortnightly show presented by [British music journalist] Pete Paphides. Conducted in a relaxed setting, these interviews see some of Petes favourite artists revisiting the highs and lows of their careers. Interviewees include Allen Toussaint, Linda Thompson, Neil Finn and Jimmy Webb. [more inside]
posted by jack_mo at 2:21 AM PST - 7 comments

Me The Machine, from Imogen Heap's forthcoming album Sparks, is the first song written for and performed with the Mi.Mu musical gloves, designed by Heap and a team of programmers, engineers, designers and musicians over the last four years with the aim of making creating and performing digital music "more like the experiences we have with traditional instruments: using the dexterity and mobility of the human body". [more inside]
posted by emmtee at 11:49 PM PST - 30 comments

How to tell if you're reading a gothic novel, in pictures. A guide to terrible weather, castles, scary eyes, and swooning virgins from The Guardian.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:17 PM PST - 26 comments

Two seniors at the Columbus College of Art and Design have been sneaking into classrooms one night per week and creating incredible chalkboard art featuring famous quotations. Going by the moniker Dangerdust, they can be found on Twitter, Instagram, tumblr, and behance.
posted by gnidan at 9:58 PM PST - 14 comments

Photographer gets hugs from baby seals. (SLYT)
posted by griphus at 6:17 PM PST - 41 comments

Welcome to West Roanoke, a tumblr with pictures by Kaleb Horton (whose Twitter is here and whose writing about pop culture is here) and captions by Chris Barrus (whose Twitter as @quartzcity is here and whose blog Quartz City is here). Updates come every Saturday.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 5:11 PM PST - 12 comments

Michael Sam (previously), being the 249th draft pick, becomes a St. Louis Ram and the first openly gay man (and already endorsed) in the NFL.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:04 PM PST - 64 comments

In Many Cities, Rent Is Rising Out of Reach of Middle Class . Here's What $800 in Rent Gets You in 11 Major Cities [more inside]
posted by desjardins at 2:05 PM PST - 286 comments

In seven minutes, you can see the evolution of London, as seen in its road network, from the Roman port city of Londonium through the Anglo-Saxon, Tudor, Stuart, Early Georgian and Late Georgian, Early Victorian and Late Victorian, Early 20th Century and Postwar London, set to the scale of the 600 square miles of modern London, though the original city core is a very dense square mile. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:02 PM PST - 15 comments

Never Alone is an upcoming puzzle adventure game featuring a young Iñupiaq protagonist and her arctic fox companion, whose breathtaking trailer has been causing some buzz. It is the debut production of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council's Upper One Games, the first Native American owned games company. The game draws on Alaskan folklore and was developed in collaboration with elders, storytellers, and E-Line Media, a Seattle-based publisher of educational games.
posted by Erasmouse at 12:32 PM PST - 16 comments

Rock bouncers can climb incredibly steep terrain, but on this day, none of the 30 entrants made it to the top (with 20 of them rolling over). Here's a documentary style video showing some runs and interviews at Cable hill.
posted by 445supermag at 12:31 PM PST - 37 comments

Last November, after five years of remarkable negotiations that unfolded far from the Delta, representatives from the U.S. and Mexico agreed to a complex, multi-part water deal that will give them desperately needed flexibility for weathering the drought. More surprisingly, the two nations will join the team of environmental organizations to release a flood of more than 105,000 acre-feet of water – 3.8 million big-rig tankers' worth – into the Delta's ancient floodplain, and chase it with a smaller, permanent annual flow to sustain the ecosystem.

It is the unlikeliest of times to pull off a deal like this. Rather than hoarding all the water for themselves in this drought –– the river supplies some 35 million people –– the West's largest water agencies have pledged to send some all the way to the sea. That move is, to some extent, a long-overdue acknowledgment that the U.S. bears responsibility for the impacts its dams have caused beyond its borders. And after years of fruitless court fights in the U.S. by environmental groups, the Mexican government finally insisted that water for the Delta be a cornerstone of the broader deal.

For High Country News, Matt Jenkins describes the most ambitious water sharing plan ever created between Mexico and the United States (single page print version). For much more about this project and the water issues surrounding it, there's Eli Rabett's roundup of John Fleck's blogposts about this. (Or read the tl;dr version by Alex Harrowell.)
posted by MartinWisse at 11:27 AM PST - 9 comments

In the WSJ today, the authors of Freakanomics have an essay reprinted from their new book, entitled "How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves" which discusses several everyday applications of theory practices including the idea that medieval Trial By Ordeal actually worked (previously), why Nigerian scammers reveal they are from Nigeria, and the policy that Zappos came up with in which they offer a cash reward for new hires to quit working there, which other companies have now picked up as well.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:22 AM PST - 59 comments

The A.V. Club asks readers What’s your cultural dealbreaker? which they define as "cultural products that someone can profess to enjoy only while losing all of your respect."
posted by arcolz at 9:52 AM PST - 207 comments

Captain Ahab's Motorcycle Club is a project overseen by the perversely multitalented Cory McAbee (previously, previously) It's a band/fan club/film production group, which has been working for the last two years on music written by McAbee and orchestrated/performed by anybody interested in uploading a mix. Its ultimate project will be a feature film chronicling the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln.
posted by contraption at 9:21 AM PST - 1 comment

Arkansas Judge strikes down gay marriage ban. And in a surprising move, didn't put the order on hold so people could appeal. [more inside]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:38 AM PST - 137 comments

So this new music video called 'Tip Tip', by KIDS N CATS, looks like it was shamelessly engineered to go viral on the Internet. I WILL HELP THEM.
posted by dgaicun at 6:51 AM PST - 35 comments

Akira Project - Live Action Trailer [more inside]
posted by quin at 10:43 PM PST - 46 comments

The Old 97's are a country rock band formed in 1993. A part of the country-punk genre designated as No Depression in the early 90s (named after Uncle Tupelo's first album), they later added a more brit pop feel to their songs. In twenty good years of about twenty-five they've made their mark on the American landscape. Their newest album, Most Messed Up, is a return to their country-punk roots, where raw feelings overpower courtesy. Their lead singer, Rhett Miller, did an AMA on reddit to talk about it. The new album can be streamed here. It debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at #30, the highest debut in their history.
posted by Quonab at 10:35 PM PST - 59 comments

The internet is flooded with hilarious animated gifs of jumping cats, running babies and hilarious fails. But there’s a whole different class of gifs out there – gifs that can educate and fascinate. These 20 awesome gifs will do exactly that – show you how the world works.
posted by JujuB at 8:57 PM PST - 61 comments

Spurious Correlations lets you dig through various data sources to find things that totally aren't causally related... or are they? [Related, previously] [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 7:32 PM PST - 26 comments

Introducing a perfect Metafilter storm: Ponyroguelike 0.9.4.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:31 PM PST - 24 comments

Blues, April Fools, white noise, Robocop, Noah's ark, the Pope, even pizza isn't sacred on South Africa's first satirical puppet news show, Puppet Nation. Brought to you by the ZA News Network. MYLP.
posted by saysthis at 6:22 PM PST - 5 comments

Still Paying for the Civil War Each month, Irene Triplett collects $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a pension payment for her father's military service—in the Civil War. Additionally, the article is rich in detail about what life was like for a young enlisted man during the Civil War and the years after.
posted by mlis at 6:18 PM PST - 30 comments

"The last commuter train in the US with a built-in bar has just departed, one last time before it's being taken out of service, possibly forever.". [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:00 PM PST - 25 comments

Buffy the Vampire Slayer as LucasArts adventure game.
posted by curious nu at 5:34 PM PST - 8 comments

Sarah’s abuser gained access to every password she had. He monitored her bank accounts and used her phone to track her location and read her conversations. She endured four years of regular physical and emotional trauma enabled by meticulous digital surveillance and the existing support services, from shelters to police, were almost powerless to help her. “We wish we could just stop the clock because we need to catch up,” said Risa Mednick, director of the Cambridge domestic violence prevention organization Transition House. To fight back, Transition House and others turn to the same methods used by intelligence agencies in order to keep their clients safe.

posted by ChuraChura at 3:02 PM PST - 26 comments

What is Nina Totenberg wearing? The Wall Street Journal profiles some unusual style icons: the hosts and staff of National Public Radio.
posted by Diablevert at 2:51 PM PST - 59 comments

Revisit the glory days of coin-op goodness with the Flickr pool Growing Up In Arcades: 1979-1989. (A nice companion to Horace Rumpole's previous post from last year.)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:36 PM PST - 31 comments

It's under 24 hours until the Grand Final of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, airing at 2100 CEST (2000 UTC, 3 pm EDT). Are you ready for the most wonderful musical event of the year? [more inside]
posted by asperity at 1:04 PM PST - 142 comments

At the Market, Very Late Last night in a supermarket about 3 AM, I saw a woman have a serious breakdown. [...] "I thought I had more money left," she muttered before bursting into tears. They were not tears of embarrassment. They were tears of desperation and panic and "I don't know what to do anymore." [more inside]
posted by Flexagon at 12:39 PM PST - 159 comments

Élisabeth Daynès and John Gurche (not connected in any way, AFAIK) are among a few paleoartists who specialize in sculpting models of ancient hominin species, such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Daynes), Australopithecus boisei (Gurche), Australopithecus africanus (Daynes), Homo floresiensis (Gurche), and charismatic favorite Homo neanderthalensis (Daynes, Gurche). [more inside]
posted by ChuckRamone at 12:30 PM PST - 11 comments

NBC has cancelled Community after five seasons (Recently previously. Also, here and here)
posted by dry white toast at 12:24 PM PST - 183 comments

Maybe you saw the 2011 movie. And if you're a fan of long form journalism, you shouldn't miss the Skip Hollandsworth piece it was based on. You probably didn't see this twist coming: Bernie was just granted early release on the condition that he move into director Richard Linklater's garage. [more inside]
posted by blue suede stockings at 12:16 PM PST - 3 comments

WhatsApplebee's: Connect. Share. Communicate. But Only At Applebee's. [more inside]
posted by davidstandaford at 12:15 PM PST - 38 comments

Actual Network notes given to actual shows BONUS: What network notes say vs. what they mean.
posted by The Whelk at 11:13 AM PST - 43 comments

101 Things To Love About NYC, 1976
via and glossed by Scouting NY
posted by griphus at 10:21 AM PST - 52 comments

In 1945, a small Canadian airline was hired to fly 50 beavers to Argentina in an attempt to create a local fur industry. Almost 70 years later, there is no fur trade, but instead a series of failed attempts to remove 1-to-200,000 pests that have now damaged almost 16 million hectares, 50 percent of Tierra del Fuego's riparian forests. It seems no one warned the Argentinians about a previous attempt to start a fur trade in Louisiana, when Argentinian nutria were introduced to the US south on a fur ranch in 1930, but some escaped and the population exploded to around 20 million nutria in the 1950s, though the numbers have been reduced since then. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:45 AM PST - 31 comments

So when someone like John C. Wright holds up Heinlein as the best SF writer ever, I have to wonder what world they’re living in. An important writer in the genre, absolutely. The best ever? Really? Way to declare the race over before everyone’s even gotten to the starting line, buddy.

Because that’s what he’s doing, right? He’s trying to draw a line around SF. In Wright’s world, there’s no room in SF for people who aren’t like him and, furthermore, no one’s work can ever come close to that of a man who died in 1988. That’s just. No. I don’t want to read that kind of SF anymore. I did my time there and it’s well past time to move on.

Natalie Luhrs is unhappy about John Wright's invocation of Robert Heinlein to bolster claims of witch hunts against rightwing science fiction writers. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 9:44 AM PST - 129 comments

Jonathon Keats is asking people to hide cameras around Berlin. Each of his specially designed "photographic time capsules" will slowly record an image over the next hundred years. If all goes according to plan, "future viewers of the images will be able to see urban development and decay over the span of a century captured in single frames." The exhibition is scheduled for May 16th, 2114.
posted by The Girl Who Ate Boston at 9:01 AM PST - 19 comments

Friday video fun: A new subreddit Commercial Cuts is devoted to television commercials that have had small edits made to them that, um, really change the message and tone. Highlights include Lunchables, J.G. Wentworth, Bagel Bites, Febreze, and Swiffer.
posted by jbickers at 8:46 AM PST - 24 comments

If you were sitting around in the early years of the Great Depression with $247 burning a hole in your pocket (about $3,800 in today's dollars) and were too lazy to get up and change your records when they finished playing, you might have been tempted by RCA's new Radiola Automatic Electrola RAE-26. [more inside]
posted by Longtime Listener at 8:44 AM PST - 7 comments

Zizek, Slavoj. "Who can control the post-superpower capitalist world order?" The Guardian.
posted by ultraversetransit at 8:42 AM PST - 16 comments

Collectors Weekly, a resource for vintage and antique collectors, examines the gender politics of the Easy-Bake Oven, the toy industry’s gender divide, and why ordinary things go pink. (Don't miss the Dumbest Products Made 'For Her' slideshow at the bottom of the "pink" article.)
posted by Room 641-A at 8:14 AM PST - 37 comments

To those who have read Randy Shilts' "And the Band Played On", or seen the 1993 movie, French-Canadian airline steward Gaetan Dugas is known as Patient Zero. It has been only in the past few years that the full truth about how the "Patient Zero" narrative was crafted has come out.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:09 AM PST - 13 comments

Tim Cook beats a new path. Apple management are reported to be finalising a deal with Beats Electronics to purchase the entire company for $3bn+ [more inside]
posted by asok at 6:44 AM PST - 141 comments

It may not get us to the stars - or Jupiter - just yet, but human interest in animal hibernation has never been higher. NASA's investigations, themselves in deep freeze for two decades, have woken up. Most work, though, focuses on the obvious use, that of slowing down the process of dying in trauma victims to give doctors more time to work. But more, much more, now seems possible. [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 6:27 AM PST - 5 comments

Fuck Yeah, Thoreau is a Tumblr dispensing Thoreau quotes and Thoreau-themed art - "Everything Henry David Thoreau". A good place to begin is Ralph Waldo Emerson's powerhouse biographical essay, the conclusion of which perhaps still rings true more than 150 years after Thoreau's death: "The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:52 AM PST - 30 comments

In the future, making a delivery will require dedication, intelligence and observation. Or not. A sunny sweetly-drawn Jetsonesque animated short Johnny Express about interplanetary delivery that evokes Independence Day and War of the World. Written, directed and animated by Kyungmin Woo. Found on Gizmodo. Safe for work, but if you laugh at this you may be a very bad person (I did).
posted by viggorlijah at 11:31 PM PST - 13 comments

A refreshing, well researched, measured take on gun control The police officer smiled and handed me a bucket with a revolver and thirty loose rounds of ammunition. Outside, it was dusk and the snow was falling sideways.
posted by bartonlong at 8:50 PM PST - 202 comments

Photobooth Innards: the inner workings of a vintage black and white photobooth in real time. Via photobooth.net, the most comprehensive photobooth resource on the internet (previously)
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:39 PM PST - 6 comments

Maybe you've tried a pan full of water. Maybe you've tried to find some way to hack up one of those Steam Shark things. Maybe you just open the door and spray. Those days are over, because the best way to get your oven good and steamy to keep your bread crusts thin and crisp has been discovered, it doesn't require anything you won't almost certainly already have around, and it's dead simple.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:47 PM PST - 53 comments

"I decide I should really read this Updike biography from cover to cover right now if I want this essay to be worth reading." Heather Havrilesky (of the fantastic Ask Polly) on How to Write.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:01 PM PST - 20 comments

Spherical Voronoi diagram of world airports [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 3:25 PM PST - 42 comments

Birdly: An Attempt to Fly . "‘Birdly’ is an installation which explores the experience of a bird in flight. It tries to capture the mediated flying experience, with several methods. [...] Visualized through HMD (Oculus Rift) the participant is embedded in a virtual landscape where his body is the body of a Red Kite. The whole scenery is perceived in the first person perspective of a bird. To intensify the embodiment we include additional sonic, olfactoric and wind feedback. Soundwise you perceive only the roaring of the wind and the flaps of the wings." [more inside]
posted by Drexen at 2:47 PM PST - 19 comments

bell hooks calls Beyonce a "terrorist" and a "slave" At a panel discussion at the New School yesterday, bell hooks raised eyebrows in a conversation about the controversial Time magazine cover seen here, saying that Beyonce "colluded in the construction of herself as a slave," going on to say “I see a part of Beyoncé that is in fact anti-feminist — that is, a terrorist, especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” [more inside]
posted by zeusianfog at 2:36 PM PST - 164 comments

Soon you will be able to print your own makeup from home using any colour you find online.
posted by divabat at 2:34 PM PST - 17 comments

"Hey, how am I gonna keep this octopus I have somehow obtained?" you ask.
"This handy jar will suffice," your friend tells you.
Your friend is way wrong. via kottke
posted by Etrigan at 1:23 PM PST - 84 comments

Live video of yourself as an ASCII cartoon. (Requires webcam) [more inside]
posted by the latin mouse at 1:04 PM PST - 43 comments

P.Rajagopal is a fast food magnate who may be South India's answer to Ray Kroc. He's also a twice-convicted murderer. And possibly something like a god. (SLNYTimes Magazine).
posted by Diablevert at 1:03 PM PST - 20 comments

Lead-Free Solder - friend or foe? In 2005, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a report (pdf), in which it assessed the environmental impact of tin-lead vs lead-free solder. In July 2006, RoHS legislation banned the use of lead in electronic products destined for sale throughout Europe with a few exceptions.
But not everyone thinks this was a good idea:

• Lead-free assembly is not better for the environment, it is worse. The additional tin mining required to produce high-purity tin alloys, plus the mining of other precious metals required to alloy with tin in substitution for lead is a poor trade for the use of existing lead, much of which comes from recycled products.
  
• Lead-free assembly is less reliable than lead-based assembly. The E.U. environmental commission admits this point. That's why they grant exceptions for military and high-reliability applications that still use SnPb solder.

While lead may pose a greater public health problem than SAC solder (Tin–silver–copper), the latter uses noticeably more energy to produce than lead–tin solder. Tin Whiskers have also been identified as the cause of many military, health, industrial and satellite failures.
posted by Lanark at 12:25 PM PST - 44 comments

It's Thomas Pynchon's birthday today, and as usual they've done tasty work over at Biblioklept.
posted by mr. digits at 12:19 PM PST - 8 comments

How the typewriter is/isn't better/worse for your writing. A little bit about ye olde handwriting in there as well.
posted by JanetLand at 11:24 AM PST - 33 comments

How the “Sassiest Boy in America” became the most interesting man in rock-and-roll.
posted by josher71 at 10:39 AM PST - 35 comments

What if complex life didn't evolve in the oceans?
posted by brundlefly at 10:19 AM PST - 14 comments

Staten Island, long a blue-collar bastion of police officers and other New York City workers, is confronting a heroin epidemic. Thirty-six people died from heroin overdoses in 2012, the highest number in at least a decade, according to the most recent available city health department records; the death rate was higher than the city’s other four boroughs had seen in 10 years.

Heroin’s New Hometown
posted by griphus at 9:44 AM PST - 63 comments

Goosebumps Plots Illustrated from Memory. [more inside]
posted by asperity at 9:39 AM PST - 7 comments

Slightly unheralded prince of television themes, Steve Barri. Plus, a look at his early songwriting career with P.F. Sloan. [more inside]
posted by saintjoe at 9:35 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

There is a place in Russia called the Kola Penninsula that is just a jump away from both Norway and Finland. At this remote locale, people can visit a crumbling cinder block building in the middle of nowhere that is surround by debris. Amongst this debris is a nondescript metal cap secured with a dozen rusting bolts. Beneath this cap is the deepest hole in the world. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:30 AM PST - 48 comments

Valentina Lisitsa is a classical pianist who credits her current fame to YouTube, where she has uploaded more than 200 videos of her performances. Were it not for the popularity of these videos (Beethoven "Moonlight" Sonata op 27 # 2 Mov 3 - 7 million views; Beethoven "Für Elise" - 4 million; Liszt "La Campanella" - 3 million), she would be, in her own words, "totally dead" in "the age of child prodigies". Her newest work is not a thousand notes a minute as featured in some of her popular videos, but more minimal, as heard in "The Heart Asks Pleasure First," the first track from her album (Soundcloud snippet preview of all tracks) of music by minimalist composer Michael Nyman. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:57 AM PST - 12 comments

Can Atlanta Go All In on the BeltLine?
That magical TOD experience came courtesy of the BeltLine: Atlanta's multibillion-dollar, 25-year project to transform 22 miles of railroad and industrial sites into a sustainable network connecting 45 inner-city communities. The project envisions wide walking and biking paths, access to nearby neighborhoods and businesses, parks and green space, and new homes, shops, and apartments.
posted by davidstandaford at 8:48 AM PST - 25 comments

The uncommonly well-moderated and researched Ask Historians subreddit answers the question: What common medieval fantasy tropes have little-to-no basis in real medieval European history?
posted by The Whelk at 8:44 AM PST - 54 comments

JapaneseEmoticons.net solves all of your Japanese emoticon needs
posted by Going To Maine at 8:38 AM PST - 29 comments

In March 1910, Chicago’s city council ran with that idea, debating an ordinance that would ban hatpins longer than nine inches; any woman caught in violation would be arrested and fined $50. The proceedings were packed with curious spectators, men and women, and acrimonious from the start. “If women care to wear carrots and roosters on their heads, that is a matter for their own concern, but when it comes to wearing swords they must be stopped,” a supporter said. Cries of “Bravo!” from the men; hisses from the women. Nan Davis, there to represent several women’s clubs, asked for permission to address the committee. “If the men of Chicago want to take the hatpins away from us, let them make the streets safe,” she said. “No man has a right to tell me how I shall dress and what I shall wear.” [more inside]
posted by JujuB at 8:02 AM PST - 49 comments

Passive Aggressive Missed Connections
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:35 AM PST - 97 comments

The Ever Increasing Size of Godzilla: Implications for Sexual Selection and Urine Production
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:07 AM PST - 16 comments

Crystal Shard games presents Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok. Modeled on the old Sierra Quest for Glory games, Heroine's Quest is available for free here and on Steam. [more inside]
posted by dortmunder at 7:03 AM PST - 21 comments

The Navy has developed its own stripped down eReader for use on ships and submarines called NeRD (Navy eReader Device). It will have no ports, no removable storage and no wireless connectivity to assist with security concerns. While it will only hold a static collection of 300 books, it will take up much less space than the current minimalist library on board submarines today. [more inside]
posted by Twain Device at 6:59 AM PST - 69 comments

Hack-a-Shaq, inconsistent officiating, poisoned room service, and the road to the last NBA three-peat: Grantland's oral history of the 2002 Western Conference finals. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:56 AM PST - 11 comments

Because you are the one who is absurd and illogical, and these cats are frankly surprised that you would deign to judge them. (SLBuzzfeed)
posted by ladybird at 3:46 AM PST - 48 comments

"NFL teams stepped easily into the creepy patriarch role. Today, they enforce expectations for the way their cheerleaders look (according to the suit, the Jills’ guidebook mandates everything from the cheerleaders’ nail polish color to how they clean their vaginas) while rewarding them, not with money, but with the supposed prestige of appearing as one of their city’s most desirable women."
[...]
"The old stereotype of cheerleaders as bimbos has also worked in the NFL’s favor. NFL cheerleading is such an obviously raw deal, some might assume that women must be stupid to agree to it. (Tell that to Dr. Monica Williams, who cheered for the Tennessee Titans while fulfilling a research fellowship at Vanderbilt.) That’s not a stigma that, say, coal miners fighting against unfair working conditions have to overcome to get what they’re owed."

Amanda Hess for Slate writes about the cheerleader revolt against low pay and humiliating working conditions. (previously) [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 2:29 AM PST - 113 comments

Velma "Velveteen" Martinez is a toy-animating super hero created by Seanan McGuire, a.k.a. Mira Grant. Over the past six years, McGuire's "Velveteen vs." story cycle has been released gradually on LiveJournal, achieving a dedicated following thanks to the story's overall emotional complexity. As fantasy author Tanya Huff has written, "Velveteen is about a young woman who fights crime in a pair of rabbit ears in much the same way Buffy was about a girl who killed vampires. That being, not so much." [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 2:04 AM PST - 10 comments

Humans have co-evolved with the resident microbes that call us "home", known as the microbiota, consisting of trillions of cells that colonize our bodies. The microbiota carry out many beneficial functions, such as producing vitamins, aiding in digestion, and protecting against invading microbes, but disruption from antibiotics or delivery by Caesarian section may have consequences for human health. Recently, antibiotic use has been linked with obesity and asthma. Using both human studies and experimentally observed mice, we are beginning to understand how antibiotics may lead to the disappearance of microbes and to identify key microbes that impact our health.

Save the Microbes

[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 1:28 AM PST - 23 comments

Todd VanDerWerff at the A.V. Club is in the process of reviewing the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Episodes reviewed so far: Currahee --- Day of Days --- Carentan --- Replacements --- Crossroads --- Bastogne.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:50 AM PST - 27 comments

John Luther Adams won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his symphonic composition Become Ocean. Premiered in 2013 by the Seattle Symphony, who commissioned the piece, it was debuted in New York City last night in Carnegie Hall by the Seattle Symphony as part of a program which took audience from the ocean (Adams' Become Ocean) to the desert (Varèse's Déserts) and back again (Debussy's La mer). The entire concert is available to stream online via WQXR. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:53 PM PST - 16 comments

Author, environmentalist, and activist Farley Mowat, OC, died Tuesday at his home in Port Hope, Ontario, six days short of his 93rd birthday. [more inside]
posted by gingerest at 6:32 PM PST - 81 comments

Anticipating the start of convention season, Dr. Nerdlove writes, "today I’m going to take a whack at one of the greatest sacred cows on the Internet: the Socially Awkward Exception."
posted by prefpara at 5:32 PM PST - 151 comments

Inside the Strange New World of DIY Brain Stimulation. "Inspired by scientific studies, ordinary people are buying and building devices to send electrical current into their brains. Some say it has improved their memory and focus. Others have found relief from depression and chronic pain. But are they getting ahead of the science?" [Via]
posted by homunculus at 5:20 PM PST - 41 comments

"In over 700 pages of handwritten Dutch, the author, who identifies himself as A. Boogert, describes how to make watercolour paints. He explains how to mix the colours and how to change their tone by adding “one, two or three portions of water”. To illustrate his point he fills each facing page with various shades of the colour in question. To top it he made an index of all the colours he described, which in itself is a feast to look at. In the 17th century, an age known as the Golden Age of Dutch Painting, this manual would have hit the right spot. It makes sense, then, that the author explains in the introduction that he wrote the book for educational purposes. Remarkably, because the manual is written by hand and therefore literally one of a kind, it did not get the “reach” among painters - or attention among modern art historians - it deserves." Erik Kwakkel, a medieval book historian in the Netherlands, spotted scans of the book in a French scholarly database and posted it to his blog a few days ago. [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 3:33 PM PST - 10 comments

Ofelia Cleaning. Ramiro Gomez (Facebook page) (Gallery page) is an artist whose paintings at the blog Happy Hills "document[] the predominantly Hispanic workforce who work tirelessly behind the scenes to maintain the beautiful imagery of these affluent areas." He also places painted cut-outs of workers on the lawns in pricey neighborhoods. [more inside]
posted by crush-onastick at 1:49 PM PST - 6 comments

From AVClub's TV Club 10, Advanced Introduction To Community (in 10 [representative] episodes) [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:25 PM PST - 43 comments

N KAPITALIST AMERICA YOU RUN FROM BEAR...SOVIET BEAR RUN FOR YOU Tired of Soviet Bear making front page? Crimea River.
posted by Cookiebastard at 12:04 PM PST - 66 comments

An illustrated guide. "Enjoy life with your bride or groom. Be aware, however, that you're never guaranteed a storybook ending. Someone who is likely to walk from a wedding may be afraid of commitment, and insecure in relationships. This could pose problems for your relationship."
posted by 912 Greens at 11:35 AM PST - 88 comments

Philip Welsh’s simple life hampers search for his killer. " By 1 p.m., Philip would leave the small yellow house in Silver Spring where he lived alone. He walked a half-block, waited for the No. 5 bus, took it to his job as a taxi dispatcher, returned home, cooked a late dinner, watched Charlie Rose and went to sleep. He never locked his front door and often left it wide open. Part was defiance. This is how I live. Part was warmth. Anyone is welcome. One February night, someone came inside — someone Philip may have known — and beat him to death. The case remains Montgomery’s only unsolved killing this year."
posted by sweetkid at 10:06 AM PST - 30 comments

If I Live I'll See You Tuesday... Founded in 1766, the auction house Christie's is hip, I mean cool, no? Maybe not; Christie’s Makes Gritty, Underbelly-Esque Skateboarding Video to Preview Forthcoming Gritty, Underbelly-Esque Auction
posted by R. Mutt at 9:25 AM PST - 16 comments

Parisian tattoo artist Gue T Deep made a slow motion video of his hand at work.
posted by gman at 8:52 AM PST - 12 comments

DESPITE ANY GOOD INTENTIONS, SOMETHING IS GOING HORRIFICALLY WRONG HERE. AND AS A RESULT, WE'RE DEALING WITH A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING. A BRAND OF VILLAINY MASQUERADING AS HEROISM. The Film Crit Hulk on the problems with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and its approach to storytelling and character.
posted by dng at 8:37 AM PST - 151 comments

Vintage Paris Paris tragics will enjoy this one. Others may enjoy it anyway!
posted by Wolof at 6:48 AM PST - 25 comments

Homophobia and competitive tickling. Journalist David Farrier explores the "quite weird" world of Competitive Reality Endurance Tickling.
posted by Catch at 3:31 AM PST - 72 comments

The Three Languages of Arts and Cultural Funding : It is a truth universally acknowledged that the public funding of arts and culture will cause political strife. Reasonable people just do not agree on this, and can be surprisingly quick to accuse others of ideological warmongering. An Australian application of The Three Languages of Politics [interview: podcast and transcript] by Arnold Kling. Via The Conversation.
posted by michswiss at 3:23 AM PST - 6 comments

Excerpts from "How to be Perfect" by Ron Padgett.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:20 AM PST - 87 comments

The world's most complex borders. Bonus: a closer look at Baarle, the Belgian Dutch Belgian enclave in the south of the Netherlands.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:39 PM PST - 29 comments

Jack White unveils The Ultra LP.
posted by roll truck roll at 10:18 PM PST - 58 comments

Why Tina of Bob's Burgers Can't Be Ignored
"The eldest Belcher child is a unique character in the world of modern television. And this is a very good thing."
posted by davidstandaford at 10:16 PM PST - 70 comments

The Day I Started Lying to Ruth - "I realized that I now had a secret we couldn’t discuss. I could see her future. Where she would end up. What she might look like. How she might suffer with me standing helplessly by her side. She couldn’t."
posted by Memo at 9:27 PM PST - 37 comments

Christian Zander may have a commercial design background, he has a significant amount of work in a more abstract, generative style, as seen in his House and Bike blog posts, and strewn among his work portfolio. He has also worked with animations, both live (Kiss Kiss Kiss - "Ponte 25") and recorded (Kenton Slash Demon - "Ore" / I Got You On Tape - "Run From The Rain").
posted by filthy light thief at 8:30 PM PST - 2 comments

Creating a portable survival kit is a popular project for which you can find many examples online. There have been a great many different items in military survival kits over the years. The Paratroopers on D-Day were apparently well equipped, and pilots in the Pacific Theater had their own special manual. Many soldiers in WWII famously received chocolate bars for their kits, though they were apparently not all that welcome. Finally, if you really want an authoritative source for what to pack, ask Major Kong.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:57 PM PST - 30 comments

Not only is Wax Trax! Records being reborn as a label, but the famed Chicago record store will return next month, too — for one day only.
posted by quin at 4:16 PM PST - 47 comments

After being delivered to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX resupply mission, the High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) platform was activated on April 30th, providing a live HD stream of Earth for anyone to view. [more inside]
posted by Static Vagabond at 3:07 PM PST - 94 comments

This morning the U.S. government released the newest National Climate Assessment, which "concludes that the evidence of human-induced climate change continues to strengthen and that impacts are increasing across the country." You can explore the assessment here. Previously.
posted by brundlefly at 3:03 PM PST - 47 comments

how one woman destroyed the biggest pro-life myth by filming her own abortion
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 1:49 PM PST - 493 comments

The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature.
posted by kmz at 1:31 PM PST - 38 comments

At long last the College Of Arms has released offical guidelines on the effects of same-sex marriage on heraldry.
posted by The Whelk at 12:21 PM PST - 104 comments

Not sure who to vote for in this month's European Parliament elections? Find the party that best represents you at MyVote2014.eu. While you're there, play the game and find out how much you really know about EU politics.
posted by rollick at 12:13 PM PST - 19 comments

Forty maps that explain the Middle East. Includes sections on Middle East history, the region today, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and oil, Iraq and Libya, and "points of light." [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:07 PM PST - 8 comments

Kids Interview Bands is a video interview series hosted by 7th graders Olivia and Connie. [more inside]
posted by Rangeboy at 12:01 PM PST - 5 comments

A Maryland gun store owner recently spent the night in his store to guard against retribution for his store's (now-reversed) decision to sell the Armatix iP1 Smart Pistol, the first smart gun to be marketed in the United States. Andy Raymond, co-owner of Engage Armament in Rockville, Maryland, initially supported the iP1 as a way to reach "fence-sitters", but backed down after receiving death threats. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 9:32 AM PST - 387 comments

The World Cup is on the way, and for many kids (and nostalgic adults) that means only one thing: stickers. [more inside]
posted by mippy at 8:49 AM PST - 22 comments

First look at the trailer for the FOX series, Gotham.
posted by Kitteh at 8:13 AM PST - 146 comments

Michael Tesler is a political scientist who studies the "Spillover of Racialization" during the Obama presidency into other areas, both political and non-political. He argues that racial attitudes drive public opinion of miderm vote preference, healthcare, and the Obama's Portuguese Water Dog, Bo. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:09 AM PST - 157 comments

The Roader’s Digest is ‘the most complete archive of information on the British and Irish road networks on the web.’ from the A1 to the R999; from the B3306 to the B855, they probably have a description of it. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 2:26 AM PST - 19 comments

"Look at this beautiful woman that's athletically very strong beside me, I knew there were some intangibles that I could work with to turn this team around in a short space of time." The woman Rongen refers to is Jaiyah Saelua, born Johnny, but one of the island's Fa'afafine - an integral part of traditional Samoan culture, born biologically male but embodying both masculine and feminine gender traits. It makes her the world's first transgender national football player. While, through the force of her own personality, Jaiyah becomes an integral part of the documentary - there is no explicit battle for acceptance from her teammates, the issue of sexual identity is just not an issue for the islanders. "Its natural in American Samoa because its part of the culture. Fa'afafine's have been around since before the missionaries came. It's so deeply embedded in the foundations of our culture to show respect and that includes respect for transgender people," says Jaiyah.

posted by marienbad at 1:38 AM PST - 30 comments

The Story of Gordafarid (dir. Hadi Afarideh, 2008, 34 mins.) is a brief, poignant documentary about Fatemeh Habibizad, a.k.a. Gordafarid, a woman in Iran performing as a solo narrator of Persian classics. Gordafarid is also an inspirational character from Ferdowsi's 10th Century epic, the Shahnameh. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:26 AM PST - 3 comments

In pain and forced to use a wheelchair, a young woman opts to amputate her clubfeet. "New prosthetics have made active life possible for many with injuries and congenital defects​." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 10:20 PM PST - 35 comments

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is both a television show featuring stand-up comedian Stewart Lee (previously), and the whimsical clown car in the opening credits of the show’s first season. Lee’s patronizing, repetitive, and defeatist style may appear thoughtful or ironic, but taking him at face value reveals a darker, more interesting picture (NSFW language): [more inside]
posted by Hume at 9:51 PM PST - 53 comments

As the hype builds for Michael Bay's latest assault on the eyes and eardrums: Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, let's take a walk down memory lane to happier times: Beyond good. Beyond evil. Beyond your wildest imagination. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:34 PM PST - 57 comments

Happy dogs on the beach! Includes a cat on a surfboard, who also seems happy. Ubiquitous soundtrack. much wag. so splashing.
posted by not_on_display at 8:35 PM PST - 29 comments

Decontextualized product labels: "DirectionsforMe provides the information that’s on consumer packages or labels in a simple online format for anyone who has trouble reading the small print including people who are blind or visually impaired." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 8:27 PM PST - 8 comments

The Maytag Man has changed with the times (NYT). Gone is the lonely repair man, and now he is the running refrigerator. The message might well be taken from this 2005 SF Gate article, Disposing with the fix-it guys. In 2011, Consumer Reports posed the question: Repair or replace it? And recently, BBC gave a broad overview of why washing machines are no longer built to last.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:01 PM PST - 104 comments

Global Breakfast Radio aggregates radio stations from across the world, constantly streaming broadcasts from wherever it’s breakfast-time right now. (via)
posted by davidjmcgee at 7:00 PM PST - 10 comments

"Card Tricks by James Hannaham recommended by Jennifer Egan"
"By invoking the existence of artworks involving the gallery space, the people inside it, and the larger world (quite literally), Hannaham performs an ingenious reversal: the subject illuminated by the plaques ends up being us, the reader-viewers. And our experience of reading and viewing them—in what order we choose, in what state we’re in that day or night, in what company, in what mood, in what weather, is the narrative."
posted by davidstandaford at 5:53 PM PST - 3 comments

Rabbi Myer Kripke, of Omaha, dies at 100. The New York Times obituary tells the story of the Kripkes and a couple they played bridge with and became friends with, Susan and Warren Buffett. In 1966, they approached Buffett to manage their savings, and they wound up making $25 million, all of which they gave away. The Times piece also devotes a half a sentence to Rabbi Kripke's son, "Saul Kripke, a Princeton scholar who has been called the world’s greatest living philosopher" (cynics should note that Saul Kripke shot to prominence before his parents were rich).
posted by grobstein at 5:02 PM PST - 18 comments

Sony just announced that cassette technology might be the future! With a device that can hold 185 terabytes on one tape. (that's three bluray discs worth of data per square inch.)
posted by quin at 4:05 PM PST - 73 comments

57-minutes of a live-stream concert from French composer/musician Yann Tiersen playing from a secret location today. [more inside]
posted by foxhat10 at 2:18 PM PST - 15 comments

"Arabic programming languages with the honest goal of bringing coding to a non-Latin culture have been attempted in the past, but have failed without exception. What makes my piece قلب different is that its primary purpose was to illustrate how impossible coding in anything but English has become."
posted by invitapriore at 1:44 PM PST - 43 comments

The New Yorker Jigsaw Puzzle. Unjumble the covers.
posted by feelinglistless at 1:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Dogs.... Dogs playing "Dueling Banjos"
posted by HuronBob at 12:37 PM PST - 19 comments

How fast do you read? (previously.) The average adult allegedly reads 300 words a minute, but if that's too slow, there are ways to improve it.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:16 AM PST - 74 comments

Today is the 150th birthday of Elizabeth Jane Seaman, née Cochran -- best known by her pen name Nellie Bly. She is perhaps most famous for her re-creation of Jules Verne's epic Around the World in 80 Days, but this real-life Phileas Fogg did it in a record-breaking 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, and wrote a book about her adventure. She was a pioneering investigative journalist, brave enough to get herself committed to an insane asylum to expose its practices, which resulted in the book Ten Days in a Mad-House. As she wrote, "I was too impatient to work at the usual duties assigned women on newspapers." [more inside]
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:21 AM PST - 26 comments

Exactly ten years after one of the most traumatic events in Tulip Time history, festival-goers (and children) are finally afforded a chance to turn a negative into a positive. Plus, the original headlines and the awards-filled aftermath.
posted by saintjoe at 10:19 AM PST - 8 comments

The Supreme Court ruled (PDF) this morning that the town of Greece, New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:55 AM PST - 162 comments

Jack Bauer has a distinctive approach. He repeats it (SYTL).
posted by entropone at 9:19 AM PST - 45 comments

All of Bach: Every week, you will find a new recording here of one Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1080 works, performed by The Netherlands Bach Society and many guest musicians.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:47 AM PST - 12 comments

First World Anarchists
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 8:27 AM PST - 73 comments

Another day, another Wes Anderson film parody trailer -- this one's for a tasteful, adults-only offering called The Grand Sausage Pizza. (The NSFW tag is for dialogue and premise, rather than nudity.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 8:07 AM PST - 15 comments

A decade after "Rathergate," 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan was badly duped by a security contractor who claimed to have been an eyewitness to and to have fought in the Benghazi battle that eventually killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and was subsequently asked to take a leave of absence by CBS. CBS itself was forced to apologize. Now, NY Magazine asks "Can 60 Minutes Afford to Take Lara Logan Back?"
posted by nevercalm at 6:41 AM PST - 42 comments

The Department of Immigration and Border Patrol of Australia's secret blacklist of immigration lawyers and agents has been discovered. DIBP claims that the list is used for "risk assessment" for partner visas and has "no impact" on assessing cases. The Migration Alliance, the lobby group of Australian migration agents that broke the news of the list, is not convinced.
posted by divabat at 10:24 PM PST - 38 comments

Flying Robot Rockstars (SLYT)
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:22 PM PST - 9 comments

Jailed Al Jazeera Journalist Is Actually Kind of a Dick by Jason Mojica (Vice News) [more inside]
posted by Golden Eternity at 8:49 PM PST - 28 comments

For one reason or another, no one has done a thorough evaluation of rock-paper-scissors. That is, until recently: Zhijian Wang and a group at Zhejiang University in China carried out a study with 360 students recruited from the University. The students were split into 60 groups of six players, and each group played 300 rounds of Rock-Paper-Scissors, with an additional financial incentive to the winners of each group. Winners stuck with with their selected action, while losers cycled through actions (rock, paper, scissors). No word on how well this works with expanded versions of the game (previously).
posted by filthy light thief at 6:42 PM PST - 23 comments

Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology. The fourth book from the digitalculturebooks imprint of the University of Michigan Press, Pastplay includes a wide range of essays, all available online for free. T. Mills Kelly reflects on his historical methods course which resulted in a historical hoax, “the last American pirate,” declared one of the 10 biggest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s first ten years. Matthew Kirschenbaum discusses if board games work better than computer games for teaching history. The book's chapters cover successful combinations of play, technology, and history. Yet, many are wary, as a "playful approach to teaching and learning with technology can seem like the worst of all possible worlds: the coupling of strategies developed for entertainment with tools created for commerce." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:12 PM PST - 16 comments

90's Southern Gothic rockers The Rock*a*Teens have reunited and are going on tour. Their unique mixture of dark, swampy rock influences have been praised by Dan Bejar as "the most underrated American rock ’n roll band of the ’90s," and Will Sheff of Okkervil River as, "masterpieces buried in muck." The band features Chris Lopez, who you may know from aughties band Tenement Halls, and Kelly Hogan, who's worked with Neko Case. Playlist after the jump. [more inside]
posted by gorbweaver at 4:41 PM PST - 18 comments

VOMICA is a short horror film about a British commando raid that finds an ancient evil in the crypts and tunnels of occupied France. It recently won Best Short Film prize at the 2014 H P Lovecraft film festival, and is available to watch on Vimeo—for today only—if you go here and use the password 'mayday'.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 4:26 PM PST - 34 comments

Have you ever wanted to visit Japan? Enjoy this tranquil video journey. ありがとう! [more inside]
posted by taro sato at 3:21 PM PST - 12 comments

Bonding over Bond: Superego’s Matt Gourley and Matt Mira of The Nerdist Podcast love James Bond so much they decided to make a podcast about it. Each episode they invite a guest to take a serious — and seriously funny! — deep dive into “the greatest film franchise known to man.” Oh, and it's called James Bonding! (Of course there are Paul F. Tompkins epsiodes, why do you ask?) [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 2:34 PM PST - 18 comments

Inside, please find a list of forty-three movies, TV episodes, and short subjects by Werner Herzog, all of which can be streamed, along with some short descriptions of their content. One or two of the films are in German without subtitles; this is noted in the description. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 10:40 AM PST - 64 comments

Anne Helen Petersen of " Scandals Of Classic Hollywood" fame talks about Zac Efron, the impossible demands of movie masculinity, and the history of the Teen Idol Industry on BuzzReads
posted by The Whelk at 10:17 AM PST - 24 comments

The Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Projects has been tackling this and other vital subjects from the world of popular culture. As well as the Winnie the Pooh question, they consider whether Miley Cyrus really can come on like a wrecking ball, where a tiny frog gets the extra mass to turn into a human prince, Sherlock's ability to see dog hairs at a great distance, how many lies Pinocchio could tell before the weight of his enlarged nose caused his neck to snap and the feasibility of Gus Fring's last walk. Word of warning: they're all PDFs. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 10:12 AM PST - 9 comments

For the Explore the North (Dutch) festival held in Ljouwert, Fryslân last year, British electronica group / video slingers Public Service Broadcasting was requested to make two songs/videos over the 1963 Elfstedentocht, perhaps the toughest edition of that tour ever held. Taking footage and voice overs from the Fries Film Archief, the results are Elfstedentocht part 1 and Elfstedentocht part 2 (English subtitles in the commentary section). (further reading: goodnewsfortheinsane explains the Elfstedentocht; Public Service broadcasting previously.)
posted by MartinWisse at 10:04 AM PST - 4 comments

"The GOP Has Finally Found a Way to Defeat the Tea Party"
Electability was trumping ideological purity—just as the establishment had planned.
posted by davidstandaford at 9:18 AM PST - 93 comments

In a small gallery of six images wired.co.uk shows how the branded chocolate eggs are created. The pictures don't seem to show you *precisely* how they make get the fondant middle into the 'egg' but the six pictures do illustrate some of the chocolatey magic. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 8:11 AM PST - 39 comments

In honor of May the Fourth, I present to you more information about Ewoks than you ever cared to know: The Return of the Subaltern (Part One and Part Two)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:04 AM PST - 9 comments

Breaking Cat News is a webcomic by Georgia Dunn about three feline TV journalists who report on such breaking news as the people are building box forts, the vacuum is out, the woman is trying to make the bed and the cat is in the backyard again.
posted by Kattullus at 6:20 AM PST - 56 comments

It’s called “part extraction,” and you don’t even need a local anesthetic to perform it.
posted by fix at 5:55 AM PST - 4 comments

Frank and inspiring words from a twenty-five year old RMT activist, Lorna Tooley.
posted by Mistress at 3:42 AM PST - 18 comments

"Integer BASIC, written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter of the Apple I and original Apple II computers. Originally available on cassette, then included in ROM on the original Apple II computer at release in 1977, it was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners. Thousands of programs were written in Integer BASIC." Metafilter's own Steve Wozniak discusses how he wrote BASIC for the original apple from scratch. (Previously.)
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:41 PM PST - 67 comments

Saturday's close shave by asteroid 2014 HL129 came just days after its discovery on Wednesday, April 28
posted by butterstick at 9:22 PM PST - 41 comments

Your mind tells you there is a problem whenever it detects a somewhat possible unpleasant future experience, which it can do all day, and it happily will if you don't call its bluff. Of course there's an infinite supply of potential disasters. These are just thoughts, but they seem like realities, and any one of them can create an emotional pitfall now no matter what actually happens later.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:06 PM PST - 29 comments

Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever (average people have a vocab of 5,000 words). I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.

posted by cthuljew at 6:29 PM PST - 79 comments

puppy aeneid
posted by grobstein at 4:34 PM PST - 8 comments

Amy Schumer's tale of courage, sex and self-worth as told at the Ms. Foundation Gala. "I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will. I will speak and share and fuck and love and I will never apologize to the frightened millions who resent that they never had it in them to do it."
posted by rogerrogerwhatsyourrvectorvicto at 3:59 PM PST - 57 comments

This essay by music journalist Taylor Parkes does an extraordinarily good job of explaining why Britpop was so deeply and unremittingly horrible. [more inside]
posted by motty at 3:08 PM PST - 87 comments

The poet Rosemary Tonks turned her back on the literary world in the mid-1970s, leaving behind her a handful of strange and brilliant poems and a small band of devoted admirers who longed to know what had happened to her. For forty years she disappeared completely, 'evaporated into air like the Cheshire Cat', as Brian Patten remarked in a 2009 BBC documentary, The Poet Who Vanished. Now, with news of her death at the age of 85, the story of her life is starting to emerge.
posted by verstegan at 2:39 PM PST - 14 comments

Abandoned artificial satellites. Tanks jettisoned from shuttles. Refuse generated during space station construction. This junk, space debris, is traveling around the Earth at speeds approaching 8 km/s. This is a story of 2075, a time in which this space garbage has become a serious problem. This is Planetes, a near-future hard sci-fi story that focuses on a small group of debris collectors who are part of a larger company. Both the original manga and the anime adaptation set small personal stories and dramas in the realistic context of near-future space exploration, complete with radiation sickness, impacts of growing up on the moon, and of course, the dangers of space debris. The reality of the show is emphasized by a recent JAXA presentation was titled PLANETES could be a true story?: Instability of the current debris population in LEO, and the English DVDs include interviews with NASA staff who work on assessing orbital debris.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:06 PM PST - 35 comments

The Corona Atlas of the Middle East uses spy satellite imagery to reveal as many as 10,000 previously unknown archaeological sites.
posted by MoonOrb at 1:52 PM PST - 7 comments

...but not quite what you think. SFW
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:25 PM PST - 13 comments

Valley of Dolls

Eleven years ago, Ayano Tsukimi returned to her home in Nagoro. Confronted with constant departures, she has populated the village with dolls, each representing a former villager. Around 350 of the giant dolls now reside in and around Nagoro, replacing those that died or abandoned the village years ago.

In a recent documentary titled The Valley Of Dolls, Fritz Schumann explores Tsukimi's world, highlighting the time and artistry that goes into making the figures, and explaining her motivations. In it we're shown around a local school, once filled with children and teachers, that now houses dozens of dolls, sitting statically, waiting for class to begin.

posted by infini at 11:16 AM PST - 13 comments

The short life of the male marsupial known as antechinus, which always ends due to his body crashing after a multi week testosterone fueled breeding season.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:37 AM PST - 29 comments

“He did what he did out of fear,” Michael’s father says now. “He was mentally ill. Not criminally responsible means you’re not morally responsible.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” says Rebecca, who rested her hand on her brother’s shoulder as they walked out of court that day.

How does a family cope when one of them kills his mother in the midst of a psychotic episode?
posted by MartinWisse at 9:21 AM PST - 25 comments

With Career View, The Dissolve (previously) offers an extensive survey, and critical summary, of a career in film. [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 8:06 AM PST - 14 comments

Simple grid-based movie posters
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 7:38 AM PST - 44 comments

Afgoo_Head: mystery man of medical marijuana creates giant weed cigars. Interview: 1, 2, 3. (Weed porn, NSFW in some states.)
posted by xowie at 7:09 AM PST - 14 comments

Similar in form to Boomshine but way grosser, play Sneeze and infect the world with your germs.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:18 AM PST - 5 comments

In the past month since publishing his essay, "Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege," Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang has become a hero of many in right-wing politics for his refusal to believe that he enjoys privilege. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:54 AM PST - 279 comments

To help promote their business selling vouchers usable at various UK restaurants, RestauarantsChoice.co.uk set up a subsite, "The Internet Foodie Database" with a list of the Top 250 Food Flicks. Surprisingly, #1 on the list with a rating of 9.3 was "Bill and Ted's Bogus Jerky", the sequel to "Bill and Ted's Egg Salad Adventure", which only rated a 6.4. But this was far from the first effort to create a definitive list of Movie/Food Puns... [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:04 AM PST - 4 comments

Hey Pass Me A Beer II [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:28 AM PST - 11 comments

One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google’s project managers. All of them.
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:05 PM PST - 28 comments

Six years ago, the comic book adaptation Iron Man premiered in US theaters, kickstarting the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In 364 days is the premiere of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the MCU's eleventh completed film. To wallow in mild nostalgia, here's the original theatrical Iron Man trailer, plus Robert Downey Jr.'s screen test for the role. For another little blast from the past, this CNN Money article from May 2007 recounts Marvel's financial woes and checks out those ambitious Hollywood plans with a cautious eye. [more inside]
posted by nicebookrack at 10:09 PM PST - 62 comments

So it's Kentucky Derby time, once again. But I don't care much for horse racing. So I could say it's really just an excuse to post this wonderful video of Chris McMillian on how to properly craft a Mint Julep. But that would be a lie. I don't care much for Mint Juleps either. They're really just an excuse to post this heart-breakingly beautiful poem about Mint Juleps: [more inside]
posted by mikeand1 at 8:21 PM PST - 28 comments

Vice has photos and updated information about the Baphomet statue that the Church of Satan wants to install at the Oklahoma City Courthouse.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:47 PM PST - 128 comments