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"Generally speaking, media fandom operates on a labor theory of value—not necessarily in the Marxist sense of the phrase, but in the sense that value derives from work. Fandom's gift economy assigns special worth to "gifts of time and skill" (Hellekson 2009, 115), gifts made by fans for fans. The worth of these gifts lies not simply in the content of the gift, nor in the social gesture of giving, but in the labor that went into their creation." -- Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom's gift economy by Tisha Turk.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:53 PM PST - 4 comments

Piip-show is a live webcam focused on a coffee shop for birds. No birds around? You can rewind the video to look for them, or check out the highlight videos and snapshots below.
posted by moonmilk at 10:17 PM PST - 18 comments

At last! The language-learning minds at Rosetta Stone have teamed up with ThinkGeek to bring you: Rosetta Stone Klingon, the first comprehensive full-immersion audio course of its kind. Whether you need to swear a blood oath before the High Council, or just want to be able to confidently order fresh gagh at that important business lunch, today is a good day to die learn Klingon! [more inside]
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:05 PM PST - 20 comments

Ever wonder where the "House" in "House Music" comes from? In 1977, a young DJ named Frankie Knuckles started DJing at a club called the Warehouse in Chicago, bringing the new style of continuously mixing dance records with him, and perfecting it, just as cheap electronic drum machines enabled anyone to put together a dance record in their basement. All the people whose minds were being blown by the new music went to the local record stores to demand "Warehouse Music", and the world of music was changed forever. Frankie Knuckles died today, leaving a legacy that started in the '70s and carries on to the Grammy-winning success of acts like Daft Punk today.
posted by empath at 9:14 PM PST - 71 comments

Written for the dedication of The John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts in 1971, Leonard Bernstein created MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers as a memoriam for John F Kennedy and as a thoroughly modern theater musical piece to reflect both its current times and universal questions of faith and existence. A recasting of the Tridentine Mass (in Latin), featuring additional lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a brilliant lyric quatrain from Paul Simon, the full staging requires multiple choruses, a full stage performance company (including ballet cast), a marching band, a rock band, and many others. The 2012 BBC Proms featured a concert performance [1h56m, including introduction sequences]. MASS has had very few full theatrical stagings since its premiere, although now, over 50 years after its creation, it is beginning to find new acclaim and appreciation. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:07 PM PST - 10 comments

A Complete Guide to New York City Pizza Styles

Although New York City has long had a clearly defined and ubiquitous style of pizza, the city's appetite for the dish knows no bounds. While New Yorkers can certainly be parochial and protective of their home slice, they can also be open and accepting of different pizza points of view. Here is a look at the predominant forms of pizza found in New York City with information about how they developed over the years, and a glimpse at some of the more eclectic and disparate variations on the theme.

posted by Lexica at 8:14 PM PST - 126 comments

The New York Public Library has released more than 20,000 high resolution cartographic works (maps!) for free, to view and download. "We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions." All can be viewed through the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections page and downloaded through their Map Warper. (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 5:46 PM PST - 11 comments

Research on DNA extracted from the skulls of Black Death victims has revealed that the plague was not spread by rat fleas after all, and instead must have been airborne. [more inside]
posted by Sara C. at 5:28 PM PST - 91 comments

"Hannibal exists in a world where all metaphors move from abstract to concrete and literal—they become embodied. Metaphorical vision and 'seeing' become a giant eye stitched from human flesh." The mind and the body in Hannibal. Spoiler heavy up to the most recent episode. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 5:24 PM PST - 1812 comments

Part 1 and Part 2 of a 35MM promo reel for Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The reel features some alternate takes and cut scenes, and is possibly narrated by Kubrick himself. via Cinephilia, who also have a bunch of great photos of Kubrick at work on the set.
posted by griphus at 5:11 PM PST - 6 comments

A video review of David Bowie's 'The Next Day' Collectors Edition packaging by Pixie Hulme (some swearing)
posted by Lanark at 4:47 PM PST - 25 comments

Al Gore invented the Internet, so that one day we could have the glory that is the mashup of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories and Strongbad's Fhqwhgads. via A.V. Club (SLYT)
posted by 4ster at 4:12 PM PST - 46 comments

London to Amsterdam, Saint Petersburg and Tokyo to New York, well known historical paintings of city scenes around the world superimposed on to Google Street View by Halley Docherty (whose username is shystone on Reddit) | Google Street View Paintings by Raul Moyado Sandoval that he calls Metapanoramas | Also Paintings as Google Street View Maps via Lileks' wonderful Lint. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 3:58 PM PST - 4 comments

Finland and American Intelligence: A Secret History
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:56 PM PST - 3 comments

Six games that really get suicide. A very interesting look and insight into six video games with a pronounced realistic theme of depression and suicide.
posted by mediocre at 3:28 PM PST - 8 comments

It used to be that when his trading screens showed 10,000 shares of Intel offered at $22 a share, it meant that he could buy 10,000 shares of Intel for $22 a share. He had only to push a button. By the spring of 2007, however, when he pushed the button to complete a trade, the offers would vanish. In his seven years as a trader, he had always been able to look at the screens on his desk and see the stock market. Now the market as it appeared on his screens was an illusion.

In an excerpt/adaption of his new book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, Michael Lewis follows Brad Katsuyama from uncovering evidence of high-speed electronic front-running to the founding of the IEX exchange intended to discourage it. The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street (SLNYT).
posted by figurant at 1:39 PM PST - 147 comments

You say you just learned of the passing of comedian Eddie Lawrence last week at the age of 95?
He was best known for his 1956 routine "The Old Philosopher", in which he gloomily described a litany of sometimes absurdly funny mishaps then changed gears into a cheerleading chant ending in "NEVER GIVE UP (BANG! BANG!) THAT SHIP!*" It was a big hit single (and Dr. Demento staple**) and led to a series of follow-ups, including "Son of the Old Philosopher", the Christmas-themed "Merry Old Philosopher", "The Radio DJ's Old Philosopher" (filled with inside-the-biz jokes) and "The Old Philosopher On The Range", as well as radio commercials based on the bit: "Leave It To (John) Leavitt"***. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:06 PM PST - 22 comments

Alex Leavitt at Medium.com looks at reddit's breaking news threads from the Aurora shooting to the Boston bombings. Leavitt will present "Upvoting Hurricane Sandy: Event-Based News Production Processes on a Social News Site"at the SIGCHI (society for professionals, academics and students who are interested in human-technology & human-computer interaction) conference next month.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:32 AM PST - 13 comments

Shigeru Ban’s Pritzker win proves that building hope is finally in vogue

The architecture world has a new laureate, and he builds in cardboard. Japan’s Shigeru Ban was named this week as the winner of the Pritzker Prize, an annual award that is often called architecture’s Nobel – and his win sends a clear and timely message. Social change, sustainability and improving the lives of the many: This is what matters now to the world of architecture. With Ban’s Pritzker, the global design elite is marking that shift.

Take a Tour of Pritzker Winner Shigeru Ban's Paper Tube Structures [more inside]
posted by infini at 11:09 AM PST - 9 comments

The incredible cityscapes of Ben Sack See a timelapse (via)
posted by dhruva at 10:56 AM PST - 2 comments

Th 4th season The Walking Dead ended last night and reviewers are weighing in on its shocking and brutal finale. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:48 AM PST - 208 comments

Andrew Liptak has been writing a bi-monthly column on the history of Speculative Fiction for Kirkus Review since May 2012, in which he covers authors, artists, themes and times in history. From T.H. White's 'Once and Future King', to Isaac Asimov and the Three Laws of Robotics, from Changing the (Sci-Fi Publishing) Playing Field: H.L. Gold & 'Galaxy Science Fiction' to The Elusive Margaret St. Clair, and even A Brief History of the Dystopian Novel, Liptak illuminates dusty shelves of speculative fiction. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:49 AM PST - 11 comments

Chad Sell is a comic artist and creator of the inept superhero Manta-Man and the no-nonsense Part-Time Ninja (among others) as well as a prolific illustrator of the queens of RuPaul's Drag Race.
posted by psoas at 7:51 AM PST - 24 comments

Shrinking Majority of Americans Support Death Penalty "According to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, 55% of U.S. adults say they favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder. A significant minority (37%) oppose the practice. While a majority of U.S. adults still support the death penalty, public opinion in favor of capital punishment has seen a modest decline..." Jamelle Bouie at Slate notes that , "Nearly twice as many whites as blacks favor the death penalty. There is a simple, and disturbing, reason why" and blames racism. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:09 AM PST - 144 comments

The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University is exhibiting a collection of 445 photo booth photographs of the same man, taken from the Great Depression through the 1960s. When photography historian Donald Lokuta showed his collection of images of the man to Nakki Goranin, author of American Photobooth, it turned out she had seven pictures of the same man in her own collection. They are hoping this exhibit turns up someone who recognizes him and can share his story. More of the photos included in this Star Ledger article.
posted by katinka-katinka at 6:44 AM PST - 14 comments

The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz. The Boston Globe reviews over 7,000 pages of discovery documents in the Aaron Swartz case (previously): Most vividly, the e-mails underscore the dissonant instincts the university grappled with. There was the eagerness of some MIT employees to help investigators and prosecutors with the case, and then there was, by contrast, the glacial pace of the institution’s early reaction to the intruder’s provocation.... MIT never encouraged Swartz’s prosecution, and once told his prosecutor they had no interest in jail time. However, e-mails illustrate how MIT energetically assisted authorities in capturing him and gathering evidence — even prodding JSTOR to get answers for prosecutors more quickly — before a subpoena had been issued.... Yet if MIT eventually adopted a relatively hard line on Swartz, the university had also helped to make his misdeeds possible, the Globe review found. Numerous e-mails make it clear that the unusually easy access to the campus computer network, which Swartz took advantage of, had long been a concern to some of the university’s information technology staff.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:24 AM PST - 53 comments

If Minecraft was an evil F2P game (SLYT)
posted by Zarkonnen at 5:34 AM PST - 22 comments

Conner Habib is a writer, porn actor, and lecturer. What he wants to know is why people hate porn stars. [SFW]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 1:00 AM PST - 88 comments

If you don't like Marcellus Laroon's pictures of London street life in the late 1600s, perhaps Thomas Rowlandson's "Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders" from 1820 are more to your liking. Moving up in society, take a look at what the fat cat bankers of 1824 wore, courtesy of Richard Dighton and contrast them with the costumes of the lower orders as depicted by T. L. Busby in the same year. All found at the Spitalfields Life blog, which has an uncanny knack for finding these extraordinary depictions of London street life in previous centuries.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:19 PM PST - 11 comments

How to think of the risks of Autism. "As a statistically minded neuroscientist, I suggest a different approach that relies on a concept we are familiar with: relative odds. As a single common measuring stick to compare odds, I have chosen the “risk ratio,” a measure that allows the bigger picture to come into focus." A succint NYT op-ed that is also a good primer on assessing health risks in general as well as the impact of media coverage on skewing risk perception.
posted by storybored at 10:02 PM PST - 20 comments

“Just as leaves in a tree are naturally arranged to get the maximum sun, we’ve mathematically arranged these balconies and cantilevers to catch and shade the sun.”
posted by bswinburn at 9:17 PM PST - 29 comments

How Reader's Digest Became a Chinese Stooge Larkin was delighted when Reader's Digest said it would take her work for one of its anthologies of condensed novels. Thirst would reach a global audience and – who knows? – take off. Reader's Digest promised "to ensure that neither the purpose nor the opinion of the author is distorted or misrepresented", and all seemed well. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 9:14 PM PST - 38 comments

Holy shit! I don't like to editorialize, but someone needs to give this nine year old a recording contract, stat!
posted by dobbs at 6:57 PM PST - 41 comments

Daniel Johnston and The Swell Season (Glen Hansard) on Austin City Limits.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 5:45 PM PST - 21 comments

Alz is a flash-game/short-film about what it's like to live with Alzheimer's. (SLNG, via)
posted by tybeet at 4:35 PM PST - 6 comments

45 Safety Rules written and illustrated by an eight-year-old.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 3:43 PM PST - 55 comments

S For Snail. Pictures of whimsical molluscs.
posted by jrossi4r at 2:53 PM PST - 6 comments

Why Scandal beats House Of Cards at its own game
Why ‘Scandal’ can’t hold a candle to ‘House of Cards’
Barack Obama Says Life in D.C. is “More Boring” Than Scandal and House of Cards Depict [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:49 PM PST - 59 comments

Actor Brian Cox meets Professor Brian Cox. After having been mistaken for one another for years, even to the point of apparently being invited to events when the other was expected, the two Brian Coxes hadn't previously met. Now here they are bumping into one another live on camera at the Empire Film Awards (on YouTube).
posted by feelinglistless at 1:30 PM PST - 24 comments

“What your mind believes, your body manifests.” Executive charisma coach Olivia Fox Cabane says she can make anyone more likable—for a price. But can charisma really be taught?
posted by rcraniac at 12:21 PM PST - 38 comments

Neither dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.
posted by latkes at 11:36 AM PST - 63 comments

What did Mozart do all day? A poster breaks down the daily habits and self-reported routines of hundreds of composers, painters, writers, scientists, etc to illustrate how people find the time to construct their work.
posted by The Whelk at 10:22 AM PST - 68 comments

Rwanda: 20 years later
posted by infini at 9:47 AM PST - 13 comments

An interview with physicist Freeman Dyson in Quanta magazine.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:51 AM PST - 32 comments

Veiled Truths by Hossein Fatemi [New York Times] [ Photo essay.] Photographs of women in Iran — who still face censure for insufficiently modest dress — through their hijabs.
posted by Fizz at 8:17 AM PST - 10 comments

Coltrane in "A love supreme" sessions. "Whenever photographer Chuck Stewart was hired by a record company to document a recording session, he would shoot during the rehearsal takes. Recently, his son David was browsing through his archives when he found six undeveloped rolls of film from December 1964, 50 years ago.. They portrayed saxophonist John Coltrane . . . with his quartet, making a work that would soon be hailed as a masterpiece and a landmark of 20th-century music: A Love Supreme." [more inside]
posted by goofyfoot at 7:20 AM PST - 9 comments

Geoff Dyer writes about having a stroke, and about life and light in California.
posted by Lezzles at 6:12 AM PST - 24 comments

More visualizations of the personification of our favorite search engine - now with added competitors! [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:59 AM PST - 17 comments

Burn, Destroy, Wreck, Kill - SB Nation reports from the inside of the fan culture of the biggest rivalry in the MLS, the Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers. The rivalry game between the two cities is on April 5th.
posted by Punkey at 10:59 PM PST - 46 comments

Carrier Access Codes are a largely dated*, though still functional service to select your long-distance telephone carrier per phone call. In the United States, these "dial-around codes" reached a (commercial) peak in the late 1990s, as seen with ads featuring such semi-notables as Marla Gibbs, Christine Taylor and Reginald VelJohnson, Harry Anderson, John Lithgow, Tony Danza, Doug Flutie, and even Alf and some well-known friends. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:37 PM PST - 71 comments

MAGNESIUM is the graduation film of Dutch filmmaker Sam de Jong about a young gymnast in the days before a major competition.
posted by Wemmick at 4:13 PM PST - 11 comments

Surfridge is a ghost town in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. It overlooks the Pacific Ocean and is now home to 125,000 El Segundo blue butterflies.
posted by xowie at 12:59 PM PST - 20 comments

Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Segal sing "Confrontation" from Les Miserables on Inside the Actors Studio. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:44 PM PST - 101 comments

Enter a word in english to display translations on a map. via
posted by Brent Parker at 12:08 PM PST - 52 comments

"In the early 1970s, arson became a spectacular growth industry. Buildings throughout the borough were burned intentionally in an effort to recoup much of their lost value. In 1976 Roger Starr, city housing commissioner, later New York Times urban affairs editor, proposed a plan he called “Planned Shrinkage.” The city, he said, is divided into neighborhoods that were “productive” and others that were “unproductive,” a drag on the tax base. We have to eliminate the unproductive. This meant to “stop the Puerto Ricans and rural blacks from living in the city.” If we turn off water, electricity, sanitation, and stop making repairs when systems break, we can drive the unproductive out. In the past, the urban system took “ the peasant . . . and [turned him] into an industrial worker.” But now “there are no industrial jobs,” and it is our task to “keep [this man] a peasant.” We must “reverse the role of the city” as a world-historical force. " -- Marxist philosopher and lifelong Bronx resident Marshall Berman, who sadly passed away last year talks about the attempted urbicide of the South Bronx and how it rose up again from it in his last public lecture at the City College of New York
posted by MartinWisse at 10:27 AM PST - 30 comments

Animals aren’t tools for thinking. Animals are some of the basic building blocks of thought itself

When he’s teaching, my friend the writer William Fiennes sometimes asks students to write about an encounter they have had with an animal at some time in their lives. What they soon discover is that the animal is always some unspoken aspect of themselves. The rat in the compost bin. The teenage girls escaping from a predatory geography teacher who stumble on a sheep giving birth. The deer shot by two boys who’ve stolen a gun. Put an animal in a story and it is never just an animal.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:08 AM PST - 43 comments

Hiring, rewarding, and empowering top performers Compared to most fast-food chains, Chipotle favors human skill over rules, robots, and timers. So how did the Mexican-style food chain come to be like this while expanding massively since the 2000s? In part due to promoting from within instead of hiring culinary graduates.Today nearly 96% of hourly managers are the result of internal promotions.
posted by 2manyusernames at 7:30 AM PST - 61 comments

"In a real ukulele-smasher, Honolulu claimed the top spot for both jazz and reggae, while Green Bay, Wisconsin, revealed an achy, breaky heart for country. For the Day-Glo spandex set, our data on EDM suggests you’ll find the highest concentration of like-minded people in Jacksonville, Florida."

A Deep Web Guide to America's Taste In Music.
posted by timsteil at 7:19 AM PST - 40 comments

"If you think you know what Middle Eastern music sounds like, think again — because Beirut-born electro-pop singer Yasmine Hamdan is positioning herself in an incredibly interesting place."
posted by desert_laundry at 5:22 AM PST - 21 comments

There was a time when professional bowlers reigned supreme. In the "golden era" of the 1960s and 70s, they made twice as much money as NFL stars, signed million dollar contracts, and were heralded as international celebrities. After each match, they’d be flanked by beautiful women who’d seen them bowl on television, or had read about them in Sports Illustrated. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 4:57 AM PST - 63 comments

It took a while, but someone has finally lampooned Cadillac's much-derided "Poolside" commercial starring Neal McDonough. And not just any old someone: the Ford Motor Co.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:24 AM PST - 103 comments

Interview with Cheers theme songwriter Gary Portnoy.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 7:50 PM PST - 23 comments

Alexis Diaz’s Surreal Murals Explore Metamorphosis.
posted by homunculus at 7:20 PM PST - 4 comments

February was a great month for hip hop aficionados, what with De La Soul's Valentines gift of their entire back catalog free for download and filthy light thief's extensive post on producer J Dilla. But if that wasn't enough peanut butter and chocolate for you, here's some more mixed all together just like you like: Smell the DA.I.S.Y. is a new mix tape from De La Soul featuring some re-worked vocals over unreleased Dilla beats.
posted by carsonb at 7:08 PM PST - 5 comments

Last week, Kate Bush announced her first set of concerts in 35 years. The promotional image, which featured Kate in the ocean with a life vest, was unfortunately released during the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Social media was quick to find fault, and Kate quickly apologized and replaced the image on her website. Fans came to her defense, pointing out that the image referred to the concept suite The Ninth Wave, the second side of her fifth album, Hounds of Love. The set of songs, referencing both the painting The Ninth Wave by Ivan Aivazovsky as well as Tennyson's Idylls of the King. The controversy apparently did not dissuade fans from the upcoming concerts, which sold out today within 15 minutes.
posted by waytoomuchcoffee at 7:07 PM PST - 25 comments

Shelby and Shiloh ... a duet... By the way, if you're a Husky fan (or even a generic dog fan) , this is just one video of hundreds on the Gone To The Snow Dogs youtube channel (a great place for kids to learn about dogs....)
posted by HuronBob at 6:51 PM PST - 9 comments

How does Brazil keep the World Cup party going? Send in the army.
The Soldiers' occupation of 'strategic' Rio favelas shows just how far the state will go to prevent embarrassment during the World Cup; where the Slums lack sewers and running water 3 Years After Being 'Rescued' and parts of the city look like a War Zone.
Much is also to blame on Corrupt Police and Militia.
Here is a 3 part History of Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police
Part I: 19th Century Beginnings
Part II: From Dictatorship to Drug War
Part 3: Community Policing .
posted by adamvasco at 5:09 PM PST - 16 comments

It would be hard to find two more disparate and distinctive genres than the playful TV adventure shows of the 1960's and the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970's. Yet they both owe a great deal to the same man: Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr., who not only had a hand in the "Batman" TV show but also penned "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor", died today at the age of 91.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 2:21 PM PST - 18 comments

Last night on the show Colbert's show posted a tweet, "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever." That didn't sit well with twitter user and blogger Suey Park who created and then promoted the hashtag #cancelcolbert. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 2:06 PM PST - 595 comments

Did you know there's a direct correlation between the decline in Spirograph popularity and the rise in gang activity? Reverse this deplorable trend by playing around with the Guilloché spiral pattern generator! [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 1:24 PM PST - 34 comments

Who are the Nazi War Diggers?

Now four men – the War Diggers - are scouring Eastern Europe in a battered Soviet era jeep, armed with metal detectors, shovels and sheer grit. Their mission is to uncover these forgotten battlefields and the buried stories in them. This is a race against time to get the history from the ground before it’s lost forever.

Talent biographies are available here. Conflict Antiquities has a long list of unanswered "urgent ethical and legal questions". The Anonymous Swiss Collector has a response from National Geographic [opens as word document], but questions remain. Archaeologists, osteologists, anthropologists, and others have not been pleased: the #NaziWarDiggers hashtag has more responses. [more inside]
posted by jetlagaddict at 1:04 PM PST - 14 comments

Aboriginal people do a cheeky take in response to Ellen DeGeneres' infamous "selfie" (some proceeds went to protest seal hunting). And while people protest the seal hunts, it doesn't address food insecurity issues for Northerners. A recent report released by the Council of Canadian Academies cites many key findings, such as "many factors enable or serve as barriers to food security and food sovereignty" and "there is no single way to “solve” food security issues in the North. A range of holistic approaches is required."
posted by Kitteh at 12:38 PM PST - 50 comments

Beer labels can be an art, which is why the New York Times asked design god Milton Glaser to critique some. If you want much more, Oh Beautiful Beer offers a wonderful rundown of great graphic design in the world of beer, and Paste produced its own list of favorites, as has the community on Gizmodo. If this is all too crafty, there is a list of the best designs of bottom shelf beer as well. And that isn't even touching the best beer names (pun warning).
posted by blahblahblah at 12:37 PM PST - 20 comments

These Are Cats Sitting On Glass.
posted by xbonesgt at 11:43 AM PST - 14 comments

The original story of Kitty Genovese’s death, first promulgated by the New York Times in a front-page article 50 years ago today—young single woman brutally murdered while 38 strangers watched and did nothing—was incorrect in almost every particular.
posted by latkes at 11:31 AM PST - 41 comments

Thank Goodness We Don't Have To Do That Anymore: a selection of US social customs and rituals that have mercifully passed on. Spinster Etiquette! Paying Calls! Hand Kissing! Bathing Machines! Wedding Gift Displays!
posted by The Whelk at 11:13 AM PST - 87 comments

Legendary old school tabletop RPG artist David Trampier (mentioned previously a few times on the blue) created some of the most striking iconic art which helped define the look of 1st edition Advanced D&D. He grew disillusioned with the business in the late eighties and cut off all contact with his former employers (ceasing cashing royalty checks), disappearing with such finality that Dragon Magazine assumed he was dead. By chance, some fifteen years later he appeared in a local news story in Carbondale, Illinois where he was working as a taxi driver. He politely but firmly rejected all invitations to step back into his previous career. This week he passed away at the age of 59. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:59 AM PST - 64 comments

Because the Coens have tried their hand at numerous genres, from noir to screwball to outright surrealism, it wasn’t immediately apparent that they were making the same basic movie over and over. After 30 years and 16 features, however, it’s now hard not to notice that prototypical Coen protagonists are hapless, well-meaning schlemiels upon whom life exacts a toll that’s much worse than they deserve. In the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, it’s a hard world for little things (and everyone else)
posted by timshel at 10:18 AM PST - 73 comments

This is what happens when you build a cube out of one-way mirrors. From an industrial design collective called Numen/For Use.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:16 AM PST - 14 comments

“How do you manage to breathe enough to play that thing?” Good question. It’s one I’ve asked myself a lot lately because until recently, I hadn’t practiced the tuba regularly in—(these are confessions from the tuba world, right?)—a decade, not since I took lessons in college. I’ve continued to play for TubaChristmas, for fun whenever my dad or brother feel like jamming, and for sundry church functions—just enough to warrant owning my own tuba. But, in January, I was asked to join a local British-style brass band for their upcoming competition in April. Not wanting to be the weakest link, as I suspected I was, I instated a weekly practice goal: a minimum of a half hour, four times a week. Let me tell you, a lot of rust accumulates in ten years.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:26 AM PST - 46 comments

This MikuMikuDance video (original uploaded here) is what you get if you take the 1955 Tom and Jerry cartoon Down Beat Bear and replace Tom, Jerry and the titular bear with Reimu Hakurei, Remilia Scarlet and Hong Meiling from the Team Shanghai Alice Touhou Project bullet hell shooter games. There's also a nifty side by side comparison of the original and remake you can check out how faithful it's been done. MikuMikuDance (previously) is a free download for those wanting to create similar videos, as is the slightly more ambitious offshoot MikuMikuMoving.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:01 AM PST - 9 comments

George RR Martin has published a chapter of the Winds of Winter on line. SPOILERS!
posted by pjern at 10:58 PM PST - 124 comments

"Debate has surrounded the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes for decades. Some have argued medical marijuana legalization (MML) poses a threat to public health and safety, perhaps also affecting crime rates ... we analyzed the association between state MML and state crime rates ... Results did not indicate a crime exacerbating effect of MML on any of the Part I offenses. Alternatively, state MML may be correlated with a reduction in homicide and assault rates, net of other covariates." (Press Release) [more inside]
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 10:41 PM PST - 21 comments

The designers of the hit iOS game "Threes" reveal the complete design process behind it and their thoughts on clones.
posted by empath at 10:05 PM PST - 117 comments

Mike Tyson highlights with Street Fighter sound effects is a great success. [SLYT]
posted by Lutoslawski at 9:06 PM PST - 25 comments

In this reddit music thread, John Carter Cash talks in some detail about what it was like to grow up with his father, Johnny Cash (1932-2003). [more inside]
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:16 PM PST - 15 comments

Brendan Eich, creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla, has been named Mozilla's new CEO. In light of revelations about Eich's 2008 donation of $1,000 supporting California's Prop 8 gay marriage ban, pop and pop indie app company Rarebit is protesting Eich's promotion to the top position by withdrawing its Color Puzzle game from the Firefox Marketplace and halting development for Firefox OS. Rarebit owes its existence to the Supreme Court's reversal of Prop 8 and DOMA—before its cofounders were married, founder Michael Catlin was in the US on a temporary work visa. Eich made a statement of support for LGBT people in Mozilla, but did not address the donation. [more inside]
posted by domnit at 7:52 PM PST - 549 comments

What's the matter with Kansas? It's the crippling tax cuts.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:48 PM PST - 58 comments

Safe for work unless there are concerns about the word merkin: Nadia Kamil's Feminist Burlesque (single link video)
posted by juliplease at 7:37 PM PST - 36 comments

The Interpreters We Left Behind. "As our troops pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we're abandoning fixers and translators to the dangerous countrymen who view them as traitors. Asylum in the U.S. could be their last hope. If only we'd let them in."
posted by homunculus at 4:40 PM PST - 26 comments

"How can I be happy?" Narrated by Stephen Fry
[more inside]
posted by jammy at 4:31 PM PST - 46 comments

"This is a project I've worked on for around 14 months! It contains just about every character that appears in Futurama." The cast of Futurama. [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 3:10 PM PST - 24 comments

How long can your digital life keep up the appearance of your actual life? A Michigan woman quit her job in 2008 and told her neighbors she was going abroad. Her bills were paid automatically and her neighbors mowed the lawn until her money ran out in 2013, when the bank foreclosed on her house. A mummified body believed to be hers was discovered in the garage, but authorities are struggling to definitively identify it. There's a Facebook page set up by her family dedicated to finding out what happened to Pia Farrenkopf.
posted by immlass at 1:50 PM PST - 73 comments

Imagining art triumphing over consumerism in an urban utopia. (Art project, via.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:58 PM PST - 27 comments

Dispatch from Haiti: Quiet Before The Storm "For the past five years, I've traveled annually to Haiti. When I first went there as a reporter I ended up staying through an earthquake, a cholera outbreak (and the protests it inspired), and a fraudulent election (plus more protests) over the following two years. I just made another trip there to consult on a research project. And when I come back to the States, here's what people always ask me: How are people doing down there? Are things getting any better?"
posted by capnsue at 11:37 AM PST - 29 comments

The NLRB has ruled that football players at Northwestern University are college employees and can form a union. [more inside]
posted by Aizkolari at 11:10 AM PST - 60 comments

Scan the shelves in any bookstore in China and you are likely to find best-selling self-help books based on Jewish knowledge. Most focus on how to make cash. Titles range from 101 Money Earning Secrets From Jews’ Notebooks to Learn To Make Money With the Jews. The Chinese Believe That the Jews Control America. Is That a Good Thing?
posted by timshel at 10:07 AM PST - 85 comments

Ninety-two years ago, a 34-year-old Chicago man named Joseph Wozniak woke up missing one of his balls, which had been surgically removed by hoodlums. As the Lawrence Journal-World had the story, he was on his way home from the bar when "four men leaped on him, put a bag over his head, and loaded him into an automobile." They then drugged him and stole one of his testicles, presumably "for an experiment in gland transplantation, perhaps for the purpose of rejuvenating some infirm or aged man." This is how the front page of the paper looked on Oct. 14, 1922. (SL: GAWKER EMPIRE)
posted by josher71 at 9:27 AM PST - 51 comments

On April 4th, DailyCandy and Television Without Pity will be shuttered by NBCUniversal. TWOP's forums will remain until May 31st.
posted by griphus at 9:22 AM PST - 221 comments

Julianne Ross asks: Must Every YA Action Heroine Be Petite? Amy McCarthy asks a similar question: Why do all our young adult heroines look the same? Mandy Stewart also offers up her own advice: Be Divergent and Other Lessons for My Daughter. Interview with Veronica Roth on her book 'Insurgent' and feminism. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:27 AM PST - 141 comments

"Anita", a documentary by director Freida Mock, which opened in New York and Los Angeles last weekend, looks back on the journey of Anita Hill, who famously testified that her former boss and then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Trailer [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:21 AM PST - 32 comments

The American Scholar recently shared their pick of 10 11 best sentences, plucked from novels. And if you fancy such lists, The Atlantic collected some authors' favorite first lines books, and Sabotage Times has a list of 20 best opening lines from books, while the Shmoop blog has 25 best opening lines, plus (snarky) speculations on the thought processes behind those lines. And then American Book Review goes all out with a list of the 100 best opening lines (3rd party commentary) and 100 best last lines from novels. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:55 AM PST - 61 comments

CBS-owned music site Last.fm have announced an end to streaming radio services. In a move widely attributed to the punishing costs of licensing, last.fm will now source music from Youtube and Spotify rather than from its own bespoke music database. Existing subscribers, particularly Canadians, are not best pleased. With Pandora stocks already in trouble due to licensing costs, what does this mean for the future of user-curated internet streaming radio? [more inside]
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:44 AM PST - 74 comments

Dreamworks animator Daniel Hashimoto turns his three-year-old into an action movie hero. (via) [more inside]
posted by quiet coyote at 7:41 AM PST - 13 comments

The Hipster Music Index [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:15 AM PST - 72 comments

Filmmaker IQ offers an extensive variety of free online courses, articles and tutorial videos for aspiring filmmakers. Their image gallery is also fun to browse through. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 6:58 AM PST - 8 comments

Please, critics, write about the filmmaking Movies and television are visual art forms, and aural art forms. They are not just about plot, characterization and theme. Analytical writing about movies and TV should incorporate some discussion of the means by which the plot is advanced, the characters developed, the themes explored. It should devote some space, some small bit of the word count, to the compositions, the cutting, the music, the decor, the lighting, the overall rhythm and mood of the piece.
posted by Wolof at 6:23 AM PST - 41 comments

"I’m just trying to color a sketch of how hard a problem practical logistics are. Supply chains are really, really tricky, and it would be quite a trick to sign up for them without entraining a bunch of stuff to do with credit supply, labor and safety laws, and so on. That bureaucracy is sometimes bad, sometimes unnecessary and corrupt, but it’s also what makes it work. The real world is not a packet network – physical objects come with complex and inseparable contexts, and they are produced by a huuuge machine full of flywheels with unfathomable inertia." -- Charlie Lloyd writes about living on a small island, seasteading and how independent you can really be in the modern world.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:22 AM PST - 80 comments

Eight years after the Million Dollar Homepage (previously) sold out its pixels and funded Alex Tew's college education, 22% of the page has fallen victim to link rot. Article inspired by musings from our own Fearless Leader.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:11 AM PST - 22 comments

Camera Used by Astronauts on Moon "Pulls $940 Gs" at Auction — The history of Hasselblad cameras used (and perhaps abused) during the Apollo moon missions.
posted by cenoxo at 5:00 AM PST - 9 comments

Afghan war rugs Traditional rug-making techniques meet contemporary political imagery. See also the 'Rugs of War' project.
posted by infini at 3:19 AM PST - 13 comments

As Michael Jackson couldn’t fluently play any instruments, he would sing and beatbox out how he wanted his songs to sound by himself on tape, layering the vocals, harmonies and rhythm before having instrumentalists come in to complete the songs.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:17 AM PST - 44 comments

"Why Wu-Tang Will Release Just One Copy Of Its Secret Album"... [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata at 9:50 PM PST - 50 comments

Who Needs A Boss? "Historically, worker co-ops have held the most appeal when things seem most perilous for laborers. The present is no exception." The New York Times examines the worker co-operative as a model that supports job security and eliminates inequality.
posted by deliciae at 9:39 PM PST - 43 comments

Healthtalkonline.org is a database of hundreds of interviews with patients afflicted by various conditions, ranging from ethnic experiences in mental health to Alzheimer's to experiences with being a clinical trial subject to cancer. It also includes a section on youth experiences with illness.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 8:05 PM PST - 1 comment

A mashup of 43 iconic cartoon theme songs, performed by Ensemble ACJW at Carnegie Hall. How many can you name?
posted by Pizzarina Sbarro at 7:48 PM PST - 14 comments

Slow Life: time-lapse, macro video of corals and sponges by Daniel Stoupin [previously]
posted by brundlefly at 4:26 PM PST - 18 comments

With suicide on the rise (previously), the directors of the Golden Gate Bridge are finally considering the construction of a $66 million safety net. That is, if the funding completely comes through. Opponents believe the net will be an eyesore and will simply lead people to other locations/methods.
posted by ReeMonster at 3:49 PM PST - 101 comments

Yes, there’s cumbia in Brazil!
posted by Tom-B at 1:05 PM PST - 14 comments

Why are Christians so concerned about sex? When English interpretations of the New Testament talk about ‘sexual immorality’ they are really translating the Greek word porneia (πορνεία), it’s used almost every time the topic of sex comes up and often when talking about the worst sins in general. If you can really grok what Paul was talking about as he uses the root for the word over and over again (it appears 32 times in the New Testament) then the rest falls into place. Now porneia has always been translated into Latin as fornication, while being understood by many conservatives to just be a 1:1 stand in for ‘any sexual expression not between husband and wife’. However, Porneia in post-classical Corinthian Greek did not mean generic sexual sin, or even sex outside of marriage, at all exactly and neither did fornication in actual Latin. The truth, like in many things, is a little bit more complicated and a lot more interesting. TRIGGER WARNINGS AHEAD FOR DEPICTIONS OF SEXUAL EXPLOITATION IN CLASSICAL GREECE, ALSO AN NSFW VASE. (SFW version) [via mefi projects]
posted by jaduncan at 12:45 PM PST - 108 comments

Real-life Marge Simpson by photographer Alexander Khokhlov
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:35 AM PST - 21 comments

Li-sa-X is an adorable 8 year old Japanese girl who plays rock guitar covers (youtube channel)
posted by roaring beast at 10:53 AM PST - 42 comments

Three bald eagle chicks recently hatched on Catalina Island, just southwest off the coast of Long Beach, California. Now you can watch a live cam of the mother and her hatchlings. [UStream] [more inside]
posted by mykescipark at 10:41 AM PST - 19 comments

Bill De Blasio blamed the lack of racial diversity in New York City's top high schools, such as Stuyvesant, on the standardized admissions test, and campaigned on ending it. The New York Times has written pieces reminding of it. But the parent of a biracial son attending Stuyvesant has a different argument: that the problem is not with the test, but with the substandard education system that dominates much of New York City.

"By having these pathetic SHSAT results publicized year after year, it shines a light on just what an awful job inner city schools are doing educating those students who can’t afford to buy their way out of a broken system, either through private schools or private tutoring centers. If the specialized high schools’ racial balances were “fixed,” we might be tempted to consider the problems they expose 'fixed,' too."

posted by corb at 8:36 AM PST - 165 comments

Watching a curator crank out headlines is a bizarre experience, insofar as it’s almost indistinguishable from watching people toss out parodies of Upworthy headline styles—either way, the mind runs immediately to stock phrases like “you’ll never believe,” “you’d be wrong,” or “everything wrong with [topic] in one [piece of content].”

Nitsuh Abebe visits the Upworthy offices.
posted by frimble at 8:15 AM PST - 85 comments

...whispers the word Alzheimer's." Seth Rogen (yes, THAT Seth Rogen) gives a moving speech about funding for Alzheimer's research.
posted by Kitteh at 7:56 AM PST - 64 comments

Patatap might be the most fun you can have mashing a keyboard.
posted by oulipian at 7:44 AM PST - 24 comments

Why I’m Jealous of My Dog’s Insurance (SLNYT)
posted by deathpanels at 5:07 AM PST - 113 comments

Though Llewyn appears stuck, he’s the nomad always ecstatic in his circumlocutions. He’s on a road to nowhere but at least trudging on a path to somewhere. The rest of the world marks time, gliding smoothly along the straight line of the future, arrested comfortably in the steady flow of the ever-present, and being naively present relieves one from the nightmare of history. Maybe the materialization of Dylan’s music in the final minutes, when it wasn’t there in the beginning, is another sign that Llewyn’s time has passed, and it’s time to, um, face the music. Like clockwork he goes into the alley to confront the shadowy figure, and takes his punch (this time not saying “I’m sorry?” before the fist collides with his face, however). Consigned again to this cesspool, he doesn't stay down but ascends through iron bar shadows and follows his bellicose aggressor, who gets into a cab and drives off. Llewyn looks on somewhat wistfully, not saying “farewell” in accord with Dylan but rather says “Au revoir”—indicating they’ll see each other again. At that quiet utterance the cab’s wheels screech and turn a sharp corner. The linear trajectory forward is thwarted and Fate's Emissary will inevitably come around again. The Orbital Noose: Inside Llewyn Davis
posted by timshel at 4:23 AM PST - 25 comments

Mental Floss makes couplets from literary first lines and hip hop hits using the "generate line" feature from rappad.co.
posted by klangklangston at 11:38 PM PST - 59 comments

Has pop music criticism really devolved into lifestyle reporting as alleged by this Daily Beast article? The response by Slate reviewing Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream". [more inside]
posted by lizarrd at 10:48 PM PST - 66 comments

25 Things you should know about life with a toddler. [more inside]
posted by Lord_Pall at 9:10 PM PST - 141 comments

Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills since 1959, has passed away at the age of 95. Wilson was the last of the eight AFL team owners known as the "Foolish Club," and is notable for his continued support of other small market teams, including voting against moving the Cleveland Browns in 1995 (one of only two to do so), and subsequently hosting a Browns Day in Buffalo. He saved the Oakland Raiders from bankruptcy, and insisted that the AFL postpone their games the day after JFK's assassination. As positive memories were shared on twitter from around the league, Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, NY, has left a light on in his honor.
posted by troika at 7:39 PM PST - 29 comments

Many people who say they can multitask show a cognitive deterioration when trying to perform more than one task at once. But according to Psychology Today, there are a small group of people who can actually multitask flawlessly.
posted by reenum at 7:36 PM PST - 51 comments

More than a few groaners.
posted by pjern at 7:02 PM PST - 42 comments

Since winning government in September 2013 (previously) Australia's conservative Coalition Government has been causing controversy, recently leading to nationwide protests (previously). Undaunted, this week the Coalition voiced support for the rights of bigots (more on that issue here), and reintroduced Knights and Dames. So, where's a depressed politics junkie to turn? To comedy, of course! After a successful crowdfunding campaign, satirical political comedy collective A Rational Fear are producing a 10 week season of Australian political comedy. [more inside]
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:44 PM PST - 41 comments

World Order take us on a tour of Akihabara. World Order release yet another fabulous video. Previously. Previouslier.
posted by arcticseal at 6:33 PM PST - 7 comments

Syracuse punk band Perfect Pussy's debut album Say Yes to Love is receiving very positive reviews. But something in these reviews is missing, says Ad Hoc Magazine. A piece about underground culture, mass media, and yes, Lady Gaga.
posted by mahershalal at 3:22 PM PST - 25 comments

Mark Zuckerberg buys Occulus Rift the darling of 3D VR gaming (previously: 1, 2) for about $2B. Given that the Oculus Rift was poised to be a major breakthrough for gaming, getting acquired by a advertising company social network has sent The Internet into a collective freakout.
posted by mathowie at 3:02 PM PST - 333 comments

James Rebhorn, an actor often playing a man in a suit, Dies at 65 after a 12-year struggle with skin cancer.

Mr. Rebhorn had memorable supporting roles in major films and worked consistently in television and theater. He appeared in more than 50 films, including “Meet the Parents,” “Independence Day,” “My Cousin Vinny” and “Cold Mountain.”

He penned his own obituary which can be read here.
posted by Fizz at 2:37 PM PST - 57 comments

In How History Can Be Used in Fiction historian Ada Palmer explores how two TV series about the Borgia family succeed or fail at conveying a period feel, where and why modern sensibilities influence the shows, and how the characterization of a protagonist whose age is historically uncertain can be affected by making him younger or older. It finally concludes with a discussion of why communication can be more important than accuracy and why some changes from historical fact strengthen fiction and others weaken it. [more inside]
posted by Wretch729 at 2:13 PM PST - 59 comments

"I seriously believed that someone with too much time on their hands had photomanipulated some screenshots of Rapunzel and tried to pass them off as the official Frozen designs. After all, there was no way that a major animation studio like Disney would knowingly, willfully produce three princesses with the Exact Same Face." -- Why do the Frozen heroines Anna and Elsa have the same face, a face they share with Rapunzel?
posted by MartinWisse at 2:13 PM PST - 118 comments

Hettienne Park writes a thoughtful response to recent events in Brian Fuller's Hannibal (link to Nerdist Writer's Panel podcast), specifically the most recent episode, Takiawase (link to AV Club Review). Spoilers ahoy in all links.
posted by PussKillian at 2:09 PM PST - 620 comments

You don't necessarily have to be into Minecraft to find this video of light speed visualized with Minecraft pretty neat. [SLYT]
posted by Lutoslawski at 1:20 PM PST - 5 comments

"The greatest challenge to 21st century paleontology: When commercialization of fossils threatens the science," a commentary by four paleontologists. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 1:06 PM PST - 5 comments

What Good Is Information? - "The internet promised to feed our minds with knowledge. What have we learned? That our minds need more than that" [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:07 PM PST - 24 comments

Why Alain de Botton is a moron. Alain Botton on why he is not a moron.
posted by shivohum at 11:56 AM PST - 91 comments

Teens React to Nirvana [SLYT]
posted by fuse theorem at 10:59 AM PST - 212 comments

This morning, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, two cases where private corporations have challenged the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage mandate. Previously, and previously [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:52 AM PST - 158 comments

This Is a Generic Brand Video. This is a supplementary link.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 10:25 AM PST - 18 comments

Someone is leaving what appear to be coded messages in the stacks of Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario. (via)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:55 AM PST - 62 comments

From 1851 to 1858, Henry David Thoreau noted a number of natural occurrences in detail, including the first flowering dates for over 500 species of wildflowers in Concord. Additionally, Alfred Hosmer, a botanist in the same area, had recorded the flowering dates of over 600 species of wild plants in 1878 and from 1888 to 1902. With that data, Richard Primack, a biology professor at Boston University, and fellow researcher Abraham Miller-Rushing spent years aligning old plant names with current names to study the change flowering patterns from the recorded past to present. Their phenological study concluded that plants in Concord, on average, are now flowering 10 days earlier than they were in Thoreau's time (full article for the journal BioScience). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:53 AM PST - 3 comments

"Stevenson High's star player Jalen Brunson was in the process of scoring a Illinois state semifinal record 56 points when he sank what would have been a three-point shot. The basket was waived off as a foul. Brunson raised his hands in protest. Photographers captured the moment." But what really happened? [more inside]
posted by The Girl Who Ate Boston at 9:19 AM PST - 69 comments

BEEF!!! But as with all quality emo, there was an issue, and that issue is invariable: There was a girl. (As Wikipedia correctly notes, the genre is androcentric, or places men at the centre of its perspectives. While women are the frequent topics of songs, their perspectives were shockingly scarce in emo.)
posted by josher71 at 7:05 AM PST - 23 comments

Best use of a vacuum cleaner ever.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:02 AM PST - 21 comments

A Dotted Line , is Nickel Creek's first studio album in 8 years. NPR has a "first listen" available for your pleasure.
posted by HuronBob at 6:56 AM PST - 41 comments

In a study and trial somewhat breathlessly reported as Norwegian troops get unisex dorms, the Norwegian Armed Forces has tried out unisex dorm rooms with two women and four men to a room, and consider the experiment a success, with better unit cohesion and lower rate of sexual harassment as results. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 6:19 AM PST - 38 comments

Evolutionary biologists at Northumbria University have used science to figure out "attractive human dance moves" that demonstrate optimum genotypic and phenotypic health to prospective mates. "Cutting-edge motion capture technology" was used to record good and bad dancing. (Technoviking was reportedly unpleased.)
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:14 AM PST - 26 comments

Sometimes nothing satisfies quite like the funky bass lines you hear played on the ghimbri in Moroccan Gnawa music, not to mention the ecstatic singing. And Hamid Kasri is one of the greatest exponents of the music. Check him out here and here . [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 2:48 AM PST - 11 comments

Billy Joel loses his place in 'We Didn't Start The Fire', stops the band, then tells the audience why there's no point finishing the song. "An authentic rock 'n' roll fuck up."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 2:03 AM PST - 129 comments

Ars Technica Picks Their Least Favourite ST:TNG Episodes
posted by modernnomad at 1:06 AM PST - 188 comments

You may already be familiar with Garfield Minus Garfield (mefi post), weirder variants like the currently inactive Garfield Minus Plus (James) Garfield) (and my personal favorite: Garfield minus Garfield's Thoughts.) Now there's Garfield Minus Jon (Arbuckle) Plus Jon (Osterman).
posted by kagredon at 12:27 AM PST - 22 comments

Graph TV uses IMDb data to visualize jumping the shark, among other things. Arrested Development. Breaking Bad. 30 Rock. Gilmore Girls. The Shield. [Via.] [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:38 PM PST - 97 comments

Trading business cards at GDC is a social ritual. Tarot is a social ritual. Games are social rituals. I expect that, if I combine all three, I’ll achieve a moment of perfect clarity about human social rituals. [more inside]
posted by hellojed at 8:44 PM PST - 7 comments

Inside the Kafkaesque World of the US’s "Little Guantánamos" We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref. “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the first five years of her life, she only knew him as the man on the other side of a plexiglass window in a communication management unit in an Indiana federal penitentiary. Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law.
posted by jaduncan at 7:04 PM PST - 16 comments

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.” And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”
posted by sf2147 at 4:35 PM PST - 212 comments

"As fate would have it, my first week on the call-center floor fell on a weekend, which is a casual dress period. I made friends as soon as I hit the floor because c’mon, who doesn’t love me?! The very next day I came in and did all the dapper bois proud. Black slacks, white dress shirt with a pink/black/white silk tie. Hair freshly twisted up with my shades on. And yes I turned many heads. I walked in and saw all the women in the office look over to watch me walk down the aisle. I got to my group and nobody said a word. And then finally one of the women supervisors said “Ooh I like your tie.” And so my journey as the first boi in began."
posted by MartinWisse at 1:34 PM PST - 98 comments

Why is Kim Kardashian on the cover of April Vogue? In an uncharacteristically verbose and thoughtful entry, Go Fug Yourself considers the motivations of Anna Wintour, Kris Jenner, Kanye West, and the audience they're all aiming for.
posted by psoas at 1:03 PM PST - 158 comments

In the first two parts of a five-part series, The Atlantic looks at US cities with the highest levels of income segregation and US cities where the poor are segregated from everyone else. (dlTheAtlantic)
posted by Kitteh at 12:19 PM PST - 43 comments

Photographer Elke Vogelsang's thirty, joy-filled, dog portraits that will bring a smile to your face.
posted by quin at 11:38 AM PST - 18 comments

Facebook Fatigue [SLYT] [via: comediva]
posted by Fizz at 11:22 AM PST - 60 comments

Time travel, Dunder Mifflin-style. Over the last 18 months, filmmaker and digital artist Joe Sabia indexed every cultural reference from The Office, over 1,300 mentions across all 190 episodes, and used Wikipedia to find their year of origin. With the help of programmer Aaron Rasmussen, he built the The Office Time Machine to navigate it all, year-by-year, in historical order. [more inside]
posted by waxpancake at 11:19 AM PST - 17 comments

May Berenbaum, head of the University of Illinois' entomology department: "There are about 500 species of gerrids in the world and, as far as I know, not a single one of those 500 species is eusocial (i.e., has a complex social structure with reproductive division of labor and cooperative brood care)," she said. "I don't even know of an example of maternal care in the whole group."
posted by helpthebear at 10:55 AM PST - 35 comments

The Vikings invented soap operas and pioneered globalisation - so why do we depict them as brutes?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:50 AM PST - 51 comments

Malcolm Gladwell writes a compelling take on the history of the Branch Davidians and how their millennial Christian beliefs led to their ultimate confrontation with the FBI. "I came out the little driveway on the side of the building and got onto the main driveway that ran along the front of the building. As I turned the corner . . . one of the agents outside a tank started screaming at me to come over to him. My left ankle was all blistered, the skin was rolling off my hands, and my face was burned down the right side of my neck where the mask had been. I guess I took the mask off after I got out. It was kind of melting onto my face. . . . He was cussing me out, telling me if I made a false move he was going to blow my so-and-so head off. But he said: you’re gonna remember this day for the rest of your life. I thought: at least that is a true statement." [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata at 10:22 AM PST - 106 comments

"s/s/s started to sound like the Nazi Schutzstaffel with a lisp so we had to change it. We wanted a word with three S’s and Sisyphus felt like a capable anti-hero—endless struggle, the human plague, the existential condition. We are all working towards nothing. Also, the apparent futility of this collaboration—a black rapper from Chicago, a white singer-songwriter from Detroit, and an arty producer with cool glasses, though I dunno where Ryan’s from, Cleveland? We have so little in common but we have deep love for each other and we are pushing that stone together." That's Sufjan Stevens, talking about his collaboration with the rapper Serengeti (David Cohn), and singer/producer Son Lux (Ryan Lott), who released their Beak & Claw EP last year as s/s/s (Bandcamp), and have recently released their debut album as Sisyphus (Bandcamp). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:51 AM PST - 30 comments

A detailed, completely mental, somewhat plausible scheme for how a Guaranteed Minimum Income would work.
posted by Diablevert at 9:21 AM PST - 140 comments

What 11-Year-Old Kareem Granton Saw During 5 Days Roaming New York City (Warning: Slideshow format, but with original artwork.) [more inside]
posted by Pfardentrott at 9:17 AM PST - 31 comments

Sir Ian McKellen walks the Royal Shakespeare Company through MacBeth's famous soliloquy, in 1979.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:08 AM PST - 30 comments

The Uncomfortable. A treasury of poorly designed things.
posted by phunniemee at 9:02 AM PST - 39 comments

23. On screen, your hero can blow away 500 bad guys, but if he smokes one fucking cigarette, you’re in deep shit. Sam Mendes’s 25 Rules for Directors
posted by timshel at 8:50 AM PST - 16 comments

Oderus Urungus, the founder and lead singer of Gwar, has died.
posted by skycrashesdown at 8:31 AM PST - 85 comments

I Sold My Undergraduate Thesis to a Print Content Farm: A trip through the shadowy, surreal world of an academic book mill.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:21 AM PST - 46 comments

The future of sex? Once derided as being like a plastic bag with the erotic appeal of a jellyfish, the female condom is being reinvented as the next big thing in safe sex. (via).
posted by adamvasco at 5:35 AM PST - 53 comments

There's a new trend in Bangkok where males have embraced what they believe to be Mexican gangster culture, by emulating what they see on television and YouTube.
posted by gman at 5:18 AM PST - 39 comments

The old Maumee & Western Railroad, in northwestern Ohio, had, arguably, the worst railroad track in existence. Built in a swamp, the line has, apparently, never had any maintenance since it was completed in 1964. Railfans used to travel there hoping to catch the (seemingly inevitable) derailment. So far as can be found, it never happened.
posted by pjern at 9:53 PM PST - 25 comments

The winners of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year have been announced. "Diagram devotees have spoken, and spoken in no uncertain terms: poo wins prizes."
posted by anothermug at 8:44 PM PST - 17 comments

Students take over Taiwan's Legislature amid massive protests against a trade bill with China. Student protesters stormed Taiwan's Legislative Yuan last week, overwhelming police, and have occupied it since as protests grew outside. Last night, another group of students stormed the Executive Yuan, but were removed, sometimes violently, by riot police. The Presidential Office is surrounded by barricades and police checkpoints. The protests began after the ruling party, the Kuomintang, declared a review of a China trade pact to be concluded after months of wrangling between it and the opposition in the Legislature. The students originally wanted the review to continue, but they're now demanding that it be scrapped altogether.
posted by Poagao at 8:38 PM PST - 22 comments

Tumbleweed Firenado
posted by Confess, Fletch at 6:29 PM PST - 26 comments

Chess has been played in a lot of movies. I mean, a lot. Some of the more notable matches include Ron Weasley kicking ass, HAL stealing from Schlage, a Bond villain stealing from Spassky, and Death just screwing with the audience. Then there is Thomas Crown, who might just have been named for a promising young British player who tragically died at the age of eighteen.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:22 PM PST - 27 comments

Wikipedia is edited by bots. That's a good thing.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:10 PM PST - 33 comments

The July 23, 1966 issue of Norman Cousins' The Saturday Review used 30 pages to focus on The New Computerized Age (Link to chapter PDFs), digitized and licensed for your enjoyment by Unz.org. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan at 4:43 PM PST - 2 comments

Gavin Aung Than's Zen Pencils (previously here & here & here) deviated from its usual "illustrating great quotes" format for a little story, "The Artist-Troll War": part one, part two, part three, part four. You can't argue with that, can you? Well, Kris Straub, whose webcomics include the pychological-horror of Broodhollow (previously here), the satirical sci-fi of Starslip and the "I was Meta before you knew what it meant" Checkerboard Nightmare, used his usually-quick-and-dirty gag comic Chainsawsuit (previously here and kind-of here) to make a response.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:33 PM PST - 49 comments

GQ, otherwise known as the Girls' Quartet, absolutely RIPS IT UP in a barbershop medley of Something Good and Happy Together.
posted by KathrynT at 1:10 PM PST - 35 comments

Jordan Wolfson and Spectral Motion take us another step closer to the singularity with a vision of the exotic dancers of 20 minutes from now. [more inside]
posted by sparklemotion at 11:43 AM PST - 90 comments

The world's fish are in danger—as is everyone who depends on them (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 10:40 AM PST - 52 comments

A Toronto woman returns from the laundry room to find her little one missing. Following a botched ransom call and online appeals for help (with grainy surveillance footage of the abduction), the three-year-old was recovered after being sold into servitude on the black market. [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 10:36 AM PST - 39 comments

"A number of liberals reacted harshly to Ryan. I'm not sure why. What Ryan said here is not very far from what Bill Cosby, Michael Nutter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama said before him. The idea that poor people living in the inner city, and particularly black men, are "not holding up their end of the deal" as Cosby put it, is not terribly original or even, these days, right-wing. From the president on down there is an accepted belief in America—black and white—that African-American people, and African-American men, in particular, are lacking in the virtues in family, hard work, and citizenship:

If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

Cousin Pookie and Uncle Jethro voted at higher rates than any other ethnic group in the country. They voted for Barack Obama. Our politics have not changed. Neither has Barack Obama's rhetoric. Facts can only get in the way of a good story. It was sort of stunning to see the president give a speech on the fate of young black boys and not mention the word racism once. It was sort of stunning to see the president salute the father of Trayvon Martin and the father of Jordan Davis and then claim, "Nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life." [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 10:34 AM PST - 75 comments

Lessons From A Demigod

The Epic of Gilgamesh has been read in the modern world for a little longer than a century, and, in that time, this oldest of stories has become a classic college text. In my own courses on ancient literature and mythology, it is the book I always begin with. But why should a tale whose origins stretch back more than four thousand years draw such attention in an age of genetic engineering and text messaging? The answer I have given to hundreds of students is that almost every joy and sorrow they will face in life was revealed in Gilgamesh millennia before they were born. Reading Gilgamesh will not only teach them to face the challenges that lie ahead, but also give them an appreciation for the idea that no matter how much our modern world might seem different from earlier times, the essence of the human experience remains the same.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:04 AM PST - 33 comments

Extreme Barbie Jeep Racing [more inside]
posted by 445supermag at 9:49 AM PST - 15 comments

It's only one race into the 2014 Formula One season, and if you're interested in knowing more about this world of specialized racing cars, there was a roundup of documentaries on Reddit last year. While the links are all dead, it's a handy guide to films you can find online. For your viewing pleasure... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:44 AM PST - 14 comments

The US Office of Personnel Management's Retirement Operations Center is housed about 230 feet below the surface inside the caverns of an old limestone mine. The trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag. [more inside]
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 8:45 AM PST - 71 comments

The Vatican is digitizing its massive trove of ancient documents to make them available to the world for free online. [more inside]
posted by Jacob Knitig at 7:10 AM PST - 27 comments

Mikhail Sadovnikov uses his clay, his hands, and a potter's wheel to draw you into his spinning world of music and improvisation. [15:25] [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 7:07 PM PST - 13 comments

Egress Methods A Twitter bot that adds one or two more to Paul Simon's Fifty ways to leave your lover. [via mefi projects]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 6:19 PM PST - 28 comments

A plane crashes in the bitter cold. A single survivor. A visitation. Kate Craig's Heart of Ice
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:46 PM PST - 40 comments

A hawk flying through holes in slow motion [SLYT].
posted by panaceanot at 5:34 PM PST - 30 comments

For those who don't quite "get it" when someone makes a tulip joke in any given Bitcoin thread. This is a short documentary on the phenomenon of Tulip Mania, a period in Dutch economic history when Tulips became such a hot commodity that empires were born and lives ruined all over the value of tulip bulbs. [slyt]
posted by mediocre at 2:59 PM PST - 27 comments

Fast workers:
Manual hand rolled bagel maker.
Lace Maker in Brugge, Belgium.
Beer bottle opener (9 sec.)
Dismantling a Jeep (4 min).
Apple cutter.
Veggie cutting (must be a re-post).
Also, watermelon. etc. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 12:51 PM PST - 63 comments

What we talk about when we talk about gangs "Gangs (and their many incarnations) are complex social networks whose roots are deeply intertwined with those of the communities and socio-economic environments they call home. Not unlike the military, they offer youth a surrogate family, something to belong to, someone to watch their back, and something to fight for. But they also offer so much more – the promise of a social circle, the possibility of controlling what would otherwise control them, an outlet for frustration or revenge, and a name, status, and “juice” (respect). Respect, in particular, is a highly coveted commodity for kids that feel beat down or oppressed by circumstance. If they can prove themselves worthy of being feared, people will be less likely to mess with them just for the hell of it." [more inside]
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 11:32 AM PST - 30 comments

Mark Ames follows up on The Techtopus (previously) with a new report showing a much larger conspiracy than has been previously reported: [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 11:06 AM PST - 74 comments

"What had fallen into my hot little hands was none other than one of the booklets that Patricia Pulling and her fellow members of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons would hand out to people - police, pastors, parents, teachers, and librarians - to help 'educate' them about this terrible 'danger.' It was a crowning jewel to any collection of anti-RPG propaganda."
posted by griphus at 10:45 AM PST - 86 comments

SuperAwesomeMicroProject (youtube) is a life-size LEGO hot rod, powered by air. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:14 AM PST - 7 comments

It remains one of the best science-fiction shows of the last 20 cycles: Farscape. It has been 15 years since the first episode aired. So why not enjoy the 15 best frelling moments from Farscape? Or the 10 must-watch Farscape episodes (or are they?). Or ponder what the cast members think since the show was cancelled? Because, with no space shows on TV anymore, the show with the muppets, shot in Australia, still matters. And Farscape isn't dead. Or is it?
posted by Mezentian at 8:31 AM PST - 103 comments

Dying Rotterdam zookeeper gets goodbye kiss from a giraffe, courtesy of the Dutch Ambulance Wish Foundation (Dutch, facebook), which organises ambulance transport to fullfill the last wishes of terminally ill people.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:14 AM PST - 26 comments

Slice King Phil Hartman on the Legacy of Two Boots You'd think that after 26-and-a-half years I would have figured it out, and I have a lot of employees that have been with me for 20 or 25 years. It requires constant vigilance and a lot of pizza eating. I can't tell you how much pizza I eat.
posted by R. Mutt at 6:58 AM PST - 43 comments

Turkey: The Erdogan-Gulen showdown - "A political fight to the death had just broken out between Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister, and his former allies in the movement of Mr Gulen... The prime minister argues that the Gulenists have set up a 'parallel state' within the bureaucracy, following orders from Pennsylvania and pursuing an agenda of their own." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:54 AM PST - 30 comments

Dogs Gone Wild: Photos of ‘Creative’ Fur Styles at A New Jersey Dog Grooming Competition
posted by Going To Maine at 6:53 AM PST - 18 comments

Magic for Dogs by Jose Ahonen
posted by moonmilk at 10:00 PM PST - 48 comments

Carole Vance and Kim Hopper had been professors at the Mailman School of Public Health for decades — 27 and 26 years, respectively. Vance... has done “pioneering work on the intersection of gender, health and human rights”; Hopper “is both an advocate for the homeless and one of the nation’s foremost scholars on homelessness.” They were fired not because of any shortcomings in their research or teaching, but because they hadn’t raised enough money." Here's why it matters. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 9:03 PM PST - 43 comments

A new twist on the classic concept of the dancing baby animation. [– Possibly disturbing] [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 4:28 PM PST - 46 comments

What the Next Generation of Health & Fitness Software Can Learn from Wii Fit.
posted by Kitteh at 4:14 PM PST - 26 comments

Chilean Rose Tarantula Molting
posted by Confess, Fletch at 3:32 PM PST - 47 comments

A federal judge has overturned Michigan's ban on same sex marriage and adoption. (pdf). There is no stay in the ruling.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:23 PM PST - 79 comments

Out in the field with one of Alberta's few female trappers. Emily the Trapper is smart, loves animals, and thinks your ideas about fur trapping are all wrong. [more inside]
posted by arcticseal at 1:51 PM PST - 13 comments

My Dementia: Telling who I am before I forget, by author Gerda Saunders
posted by zarq at 1:28 PM PST - 16 comments

How to impede a waddle of penguins.
posted by mudpuppie at 12:31 PM PST - 56 comments

In the face of racism, the great African-American jazz saxophonist Lester Young was “cool.” Credited with bringing the word into the modern American vernacular, “I’m cool” wasn’t Young’s reference to the sunglasses he wore day and night on stage, or the saxophone slung across his shoulder. It was his response to a divided society, a way of saying that he was still in control...
posted by jim in austin at 12:07 PM PST - 69 comments

Before you go to bed tonight, don't forget to turn out the light.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:50 AM PST - 55 comments

James Dewar, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, and the quest for liquified hydrogen and helium. Come for the superfluidity, stay for the Supreme Court of the Netherlands decisions and multiple lab assistants losing eyes in explosions.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:16 AM PST - 34 comments

Think You Know Ugly? Think Again

You might feel revolted by an object, but if you try to objectively explain why it is ugly, it’s harder than you think. Most people are influenced by the dominant tastes and fashion sensibilities of their generation, class, and ethnic group, and when you remove those factors from the equation, an exact, universal definition of “ugliness” becomes almost impossible to pin down.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:50 AM PST - 60 comments

Killing Conservative Books: The Shocking End Of A Publishing Gold Rush A decade ago, mainstream publishers became convinced they could make millions by churning out books for the right — and now the bubble may be bursting. (SLBuzzFeed)
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:19 AM PST - 97 comments

Supreme Court of Canada kicks out one of its own. "The Supreme Court has dealt a stunning blow to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, ruling that his latest appointee to that court, Justice Marc Nadon of Quebec, is not legally qualified for the job."
posted by blue_beetle at 8:07 AM PST - 46 comments

Tiny Worlds: a series of films about tiny machines in the city like a tiny bulldozer, a tiny logging truck, and a tiny submarine.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:17 AM PST - 8 comments

The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists [New York Times]

How a new breed of activists is using science to show — once and for all — that someone can be truly attracted to both a man and a woman.

posted by Fizz at 7:17 AM PST - 81 comments

God Speed You! Black Emperor (1976) is a documentary of the Japanese bōsōzoku (motorcycle gang) calling themselves "Black Emperors," and their interactions with the law, their parents and each other.
posted by griphus at 7:10 AM PST - 13 comments

The AP Stylebook as dropped the distinction between "over" and "more than." Journalists everywhere appear to be outraged. Others think it is no big deal. Dictionaries tend to agree.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:58 AM PST - 55 comments

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is without a doubt the most boring, soulless, stacked revolution I’ve ever read. The people of the Moon – that is, actually THREE people on the moon (the Prof, Wyoh, and a reluctant Mannie) – decide one day to revolt when supercomputer Mike informs them that cannibalism will ensue in nine years should things progress down the same path. This is especially troubling in the context of modern reading, considering the many revolutions around the world that have and continue to happen today – these are powerful movements with drastic, often violent but always life-changing consequences. In contrast, Heinlein’s contained, sanitized revolution – planned and powered by the smartest AI computer everrrrr! – is so theoretical, so calculated, so utterly artificial that it loses any meaning. Is revolution the simplistic, quick, predictable thing that Heinlein creates in this frankly soulless book?" -- To prove their real fan status, Ana Grilo and Thea James (aka the Booksmugglers) review arguably Heinlein's greatest novel and find it wanting. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 2:21 AM PST - 285 comments

"professorial women were rounded up in a meeting room, offered unappealing sandwiches." Classics professor Barbara Graziosi in the Times Higher Education: "But I am not sure that these inequalities quite explain the low submission of women in the RAE and now, perhaps, the REF. Is there something that favours men in the way assessment exercises are set up? Or are women simply less good at research?" [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:02 AM PST - 18 comments

'The media is a chaotic place. Like an ocean or a weather system, it no longer respects authority. In fact, those who attempt to impose their authority are ridiculed, while brilliant and valuable tidbits emerge from the most remote and seemingly inconsequential sources.... Younger, media-savvy viewers instinctively reject authoritative voices and laugh at commercials in which people try to act "cool." ' That was Douglas Rushkoff's assessment of companies courting the youth demographic as covered in print in 2000, and the next year in video as the PBS Frontline documentary, Merchants of Cool (streaming documentary; prev: 1, 2, 3, 4). Earlier this year, Rushkoff revisited the topic with PBS in Generation Like (streaming documentary), in a time when young people are generally happy to tell the world what brands they like as a way of identifying who they are. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:53 PM PST - 44 comments

What's the link between household income during childhood and job choice during adulthood? Stats and pretty graphs ahoy!
posted by forza at 8:11 PM PST - 44 comments

Last week, a publication based in New York that is called “New York,” asked the question, “Is San Francisco New York?”

A publication based in San Francisco answered, quite resolutely, “No.”
posted by four panels at 8:06 PM PST - 74 comments

Heds will roll: Inappropriate but amusing headlines that never made it to print.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 7:07 PM PST - 66 comments

Princesses come in all shapes and sizes. A photo set of two best friends.
posted by yerfatma at 6:34 PM PST - 21 comments

The world's first Apple reseller is no more. Minneapolis-based FirstTech sold its first computer, an Apple II, in 1977 as a sideline to its growing technology business. By 1984, Apple computers were its primary focus. The world's first Apple reseller, FirstTech actually used its own boilerplate legal documents and swapped in Apple's name when drawing up its first sales contract. Its final day of business will be March 29. [more inside]
posted by CommonSense at 5:23 PM PST - 37 comments

R.I.P. Lucius Shepard On March 18th, Science Fiction Literature lost one of it's best short story writers, Lucius Shepard [more inside]
posted by Francis7 at 2:25 PM PST - 34 comments

In the past weeks, there have been 20 confirmed cases of the measles in New York. After being virtually "eradicated" in the United States in 2000, 2013 saw 189 cases reported. The most recent outbreak seems to have spread due to "failure of medical workers to recognize the disease quickly enough and to quarantine patients so they would not infect others." And via Slate: "I’m a Pediatrician. Should I Treat All Kids, or Just the Vaccinated Ones?"
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:48 AM PST - 228 comments

FYI, we came close to losing the power grid back in 2012. What we? Oh, just the planet.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:48 AM PST - 40 comments

Westboro church founder Fred Phelps has died. Fred Phelps -- the founding pastor of a Kansas church known for its virulently anti-gay protests at public events, including military funerals -- has died. [more inside]
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 10:18 AM PST - 276 comments

Vinyl Terror and Horror uses physically altered vinyl records and many turntables to produce an eerie soundscape.
posted by codacorolla at 9:28 AM PST - 11 comments

Louis C.K. makes an assumption, is proven wrong, and is justly spanked (SLYT).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:26 AM PST - 109 comments

"I say “you” deliberately here, because much of the writing about low-wage workers tends to obscure just that fact — that these stories could well be about you. Too much writing on the left and the right has tended to treat the people in some of the nation’s most common jobs as if they are some exotic Other rather than our neighbors, our family members and ourselves. " --Sarah Jaffe on the media's strange ways of talking about low-wage workers.
posted by The Whelk at 9:07 AM PST - 39 comments

Derivative Clicker
posted by oceanjesse at 8:47 AM PST - 118 comments

The Anfield Wrap reviews the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:56 AM PST - 21 comments

How to keep headphone wires from getting tangled.
posted by shivohum at 6:53 AM PST - 60 comments

GQ visits the Cute Animal Viral Machine at the heart of Buzzfeed. "One joke in the BuzzFeed offices is that no one employed there can quite explain to their parents what exactly it is they do. To those parents, I would like to say: I can't entirely explain it, either, but whatever it is, these men and women are so fucking good at it. They have thought hard about who looks at what and why. Jack has done entire studies on why cats have triumphed over dogs on the Internet. (The answer involves 'path dependency,' the fancy economics term for when one product, like VHS, conquers another equally legitimate one, like Betamax.) He can tell you with some certainty that a reader of BuzzFeed is equally inclined to click on a photo of a dog or a cat—but that he or she is significantly more likely to share the photo of the cat with others. (Why? 'Totally non-data-driven theory is that dogs are trying too hard,' Jack says.)"
posted by bl1nk at 5:36 AM PST - 24 comments

Of course, you have to help PAY for the party. "Something seems broken here. Asking people for money to put on an event they may not even be able to participate in? How is there no level that gives you an all-access badge? How does throwing a million dollar party to raise a quarter of a million dollars for charity make sense? I'm not begrudging people the good times they have at Nerd HQ, and more power to everyone who felt included and part of a fun event. But this seems like a huge misuse of crowdfunding to me, the kind of situation that sours people on the very concept. Zach Levi wants to throw a party and for you to pay for it... and maybe you can get in, if you wait around long enough in line."
posted by Kitteh at 4:38 AM PST - 58 comments

Chief Scientist Demetrios Matsakis gives us a tour of the U.S. Naval Observatory's Time Services and explains where time comes from.
posted by gman at 4:07 AM PST - 33 comments

The Overprotected Kid
A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk-taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:29 AM PST - 169 comments

Ethan explaining "Cockblocking" to his Grandfather
posted by pjern at 10:04 PM PST - 38 comments

Trinity College Dublin has added high-quality scans of the Book of Kells to their archives. These scans are now viewable by the public online.
posted by daisystomper at 9:55 PM PST - 9 comments

EVERYBODY every every body 네 맘을 흔들어 [more inside]
posted by one teak forest at 9:39 PM PST - 12 comments

Four year, four months after Dominic Stanton, aka Domu (among other stage names), retired from the music industry, he has returned. Under the Weather (Bandcamp) is a three-track EP, spanning an updated take on his his trademark heavy breaks, a slightly housier direction, and lush hip-hop inspired instrumental. It was released on the new Sector 12/12 label, which earlier released another 3 track EP, Past Twelve, from Infest aka Robbert Peperkamp.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:36 PM PST - 1 comment

So, what has been the greatest legacy of the Wu-Tang Clan over these last 20 years?
posted by Renoroc at 8:19 PM PST - 20 comments

There are two main options when a sneeze is coming - let it happen, or try to ride it out. The decision often depends on your situation. For one unlucky trombonist, it was while playing in an orchestra at a church in Tiptree, Essex. He tried to ride the sneeze. He failed (SLYT). (via) [more inside]
posted by 4ster at 8:15 PM PST - 22 comments

FREE TO PLAY [1h15m] is a feature-length documentary that follows three professional gamers from around the world as they compete for a million dollar prize in the first Dota 2 International Tournament.
posted by hippybear at 8:05 PM PST - 32 comments

I lost my phone after the St. Patty's parade and thought it was gone forever. However, we used the find my friends app to track it down and the guy who found it decided to document his adventure before leaving it at a local bar! I don't know who he is but thank you so much stranger!
posted by Maaik at 7:34 PM PST - 17 comments

Dark Patterns is a term used to describe web design that intentionally exploits specific aspects of the users psychology to drive them into making certain kinds of decisions. [an update to this fantastic previously] [more inside]
posted by quin at 7:09 PM PST - 48 comments

"Self-proclaimed knowledge, music, LEGO and die-cast car junkie, Adly Syairi Ramly presents a collection of 20 iconic bands that he’s taken the time to recreate with everyone’s favorite building blocks." [more inside]
posted by juliplease at 6:44 PM PST - 20 comments

Meet Scott, the cool young Republican! A new ad campaign from the RNC showcases a young man named Scott Greenberg, a young voter who is 'ticked off' with politicians. [more inside]
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 6:33 PM PST - 142 comments

Adorable toddler sees no problem with cookies. [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by Mogur at 5:27 PM PST - 24 comments

Maybe you anticipated the explosion, the sound of shattering glass, and the flames rising out of the flowing gasoline. But did you ever anticipate all the dancing? Here's a supercut of Christopher Walken's dance scenes, from 57 movies. [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 3:34 PM PST - 36 comments

Left-Wing Darling Pacifica Radio Is Sliding Into the Abyss "The recent internal strife at Pacifica underlines a depressing truth for liberals, for whom the radio network is — or at least was — an important voice in an increasingly homogenized broadcast media landscape." [more inside]
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 2:31 PM PST - 102 comments

Debbie and Marcie arrive at college unaware of the dangers of RPGing. They are soon indoctrinated into this dangerous lifestyle where they face the threat of learning real life magical powers, being invited to join a witches’ coven, and resisting the lure of Ms. Frost, a vile temptress of a GM. But what peril must the two friends face when they stumble across the Necronomicon and their fantasy game becomes a reality game? Find out in Dark Dungeons! [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 2:20 PM PST - 58 comments

The Murders at The Lake. "In the summer of 1982 the city of Waco was confronted with the most vicious crime it had ever seen: three teenagers were savagely stabbed to death, for no apparent reason, at a park by a lake on the edge of town. Justice was eventually served when four men were found guilty of the crime, and two were sent to death row. In 1991, though, when one of the convicts got a new trial and was then found not guilty, some people wondered, Were these four actually the killers? Several years after that, one of the men was put to death, and the stakes were raised: Had Texas executed an innocent man?" [more inside]
posted by zarq at 1:55 PM PST - 18 comments

The Only Fantasy World Map You'll Ever Need.
posted by fings at 12:48 PM PST - 100 comments

"I introduced an element of randomness into a recent map design. Misplaced buildings and overlapping areas of texture bring energy and excitement to the experience of viewing a map. The end result is a little disorienting, but still mostly familiar."
posted by moonmilk at 12:36 PM PST - 19 comments

In a hard-hitting interview on CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Mark Critch asks Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow tough questions about her platform and does some mayoral candidate debate roleplaying to prepare her for going head to head with the incumbent Toronto mayor Rob Ford. (SLYT)
posted by orange swan at 12:07 PM PST - 32 comments

I think about that a lot these days, as now, I’m 37 and uh…I ain’t OLD like your pappy or anything, but for a guy in a punk rock band, 37 is old. This is a game played mostly by people aged 23-33. You fall on one side or the other of that spectrum, your age suddenly becomes an interesting factor in who you are and what you’re doing, particularly the farther away you get.
posted by josher71 at 10:33 AM PST - 88 comments

If there's a literary equivalent of reality television right now--albeit one with more reflections on the cultural taboos surrounding dead bodies and the lingering consequences of the Holocaust--it's Karl Ove Knausgaard's sprawling autobiographical novel My Struggle (Min Kamp). [more inside]
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:17 AM PST - 19 comments

Cao Shunli died while incarcerated recently for advocating the right of ordinary Chinese citizens to have input into China's entry in the UN's Universal Periodic Review, a new set of human rights reports for every UN member state. She died because she was denied medical care. Her family has not been allowed to see the body. [more inside]
posted by Jacob Knitig at 8:03 AM PST - 8 comments

"But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry." Mandatory fun, the drudgery of child's play, and the American trend toward rejuveniliaztion are among the topics touched on in "Play, Dammit."
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:48 AM PST - 73 comments

Vanity Fair interviews George R.R. Martin about his plan for staying ahead of HBO.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:41 AM PST - 334 comments

After a grand total of eleven teasers (featuring Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton,) FX has released a trailer for their upcoming TV series Fargo.
posted by griphus at 7:18 AM PST - 57 comments

Does slacktivism work? Using a series of field and laboratory experiments, the authors found that those who engage in slacktivism can and do sometimes engage more deeply. "In other words, those whose initial act of support is done more privately (for example, writing to a member of Congress) are more likely to engage in deeper, more costly forms of engagement later on. Those whose initial support is public (i.e. through posting to Facebook or Twitter) are less likely to engage more deeply. Moreover, the researchers find that most appeals for token engagement “promote slacktivism among all but those highly connected to the cause.” [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:50 AM PST - 23 comments

Watch the one woman band Kawehi build and then sing a cover of Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box". Then enjoy her doing similar with Nine Inch Nails' "Closer." Now groove on her original music.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:09 AM PST - 17 comments

I feel like I should let you know what you’re in for. This is a long story about a juggler. It gets into some areas that matter in all sports, such as performance and audience and ambition, but there’s absolutely a lot of juggling in the next 6,700 words. ... The usual strategies of sportswriting depend on the writer and reader sharing a set of passions and references that make it easy to speed along on rivers of stats and myth, but you almost certainly don’t know as much about juggling as you do about football or baseball. Dropped: Why did Anthony Gatto, the greatest juggler alive — and perhaps of all time — back away from his art to open a construction business?
posted by metaBugs at 5:55 AM PST - 30 comments

Reggae: The Story Of Jamaican Music, is an excellent BBC Documentary in three parts: 1 - Forward March, 2 - Rebel Music and 3 - As Raw As Ever.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:46 AM PST - 16 comments

Pete Holmes, who was previously highlighted here for his "Ex-Men" sketches, has decided that the one-on-one-interview-with-pop-culture-characters format really works for him, and so we now have "Street Fighter Red Tape" with Ryu, Vega and Chun-Li. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:23 AM PST - 13 comments

"In this excerpt from Keith Cameron's new biography Mudhoney: The Sound and the Fury from Seattle, spanning the end of grunge's golden era (Fall 1993 to Fall 1994), we have Mudhoney opening area tours first for Nirvana and then Pearl Jam - the latter of which is shattered by Kurt Cobain's suicide - and joining Vedder & co. for a tour of the White House, during which President Bill Clinton meets with Eddie Vedder to discuss whether or not he should address the nation about Cobain's suicide."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:21 AM PST - 3 comments

Bored with basketball but want some Tournament action in your March-to-Early April? MentalFloss.com has collected* a list of (More Than) 11 OTHER March Madness Tournaments, covering books, music, TV, webcomics, various flavors of sci-fi and fantasy, plus bunny slippers, hot dog toppings, the (previously here) WORST Company in America and MORE! [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:03 AM PST - 34 comments

When I come across the task, "Proposal Flash Mob in Central Park,” I know immediately that I am exactly the wrong person for the job. The training video opens in a mirrored dance studio, with a man in a tight-fitting black t-shirt. "Please make sure you are familiar with this choreography before you commit to that rehearsal so we don't have to waste any time,” he explains in a high-pitched voice before counting out about three minutes of what looks to me like complex choreography. During slow claps at baseball games, I'm the fan who claps on the wrong beat. A real rabbit might have a better chance of learning this dance."

A journalist's month-long experiment with the gig economy.
posted by FJT at 11:30 PM PST - 54 comments

Darwin's Children Drew All Over the On The Origin of Species Manuscript.
posted by ShooBoo at 11:01 PM PST - 19 comments

Jeff Goldblum, as Dr. Ian Malcolm, utters an odd little laugh in Jurassic Park. Here it is, extended to 10 minutes. And if that's not enough, try 10 hours! But that's too straight-forward, so Soundcloud user FLIPSHOT made a dance remix, which YouTube user MrTabarnaco2 made into a music video of sorts.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:02 PM PST - 43 comments

In 2004, Roy Rapoport set out to write a simple chatbot to help get the development team's coffee orders straight. What he ended up with was a bank. (via)
posted by jenkinsEar at 7:56 PM PST - 23 comments

Remember Goldieblox who fought for their right to infringe? Beastie Boys have agreed to settle the lawsuit, for a percentage of the revenues to be donated to one or more charities selected by Beastie Boys that support science, technology, engineering and mathematics education for girls. Class.
posted by dabitch at 4:20 PM PST - 116 comments

Crates in video games. (previously) Trains in video games. Birds in video games. Wall art in video games. Luchadores in video games. Foliage in video games. (previously) Logic in video games. Easter eggs (secret content) in video games. Normal eggs (and other food) in video games. Toilets in video games. Improved women's armor in video games (slightly NSFW). (previously) Bears in video games. Mickey Mouse in video games. Love in video games.
posted by Evilspork at 3:55 PM PST - 21 comments

[Paul] De Man may have been a scoundrel who found a career teaching a certain method of reading, but that method of reading does not turn people into scoundrels. Probably ninety-nine per cent of the people who studied with de Man wouldn’t run a red light—forget about altering a transcript or voluntarily collaborating with Nazis. If there is an ethical takeaway from what de Man taught, it would be self-doubt.

In The New Yorker Louis Menand attempts to find common ground between Paul De Man's methods of literary criticism and his sordid life in a long review of Evelyn Barish's The Double Life of Paul de Man. The biography has been criticized by Peter Brooks, De Man's former student, and was reviewed unfavorably by Susan Rubin Suleiman in The New York Times.
posted by Kattullus at 3:52 PM PST - 21 comments

When Australian prime minister Tony Abbott paused on the lawn of Parliament House to engage a group of high school students in conversation, he may have been hoping to impress some future voters. However, the questions fired at him by the 14-year-olds - about asylum seekers, gay marriage and why he has appointed himself Minister for Women - seemed to take him aback (warning: camera is level with Abbott's crotch.) The students involved later participated in the March in March – a series of protests against current government policies which took place in 29 locations across Australia over three days. Despite over 100,000 turning out, the protests was little coverage by mainstream media – leading to criticism even from within the media’s own ranks.
posted by andraste at 3:42 PM PST - 32 comments

Asian male stereotypes complicate my love life.
posted by rcraniac at 2:44 PM PST - 242 comments

“I’ve been cursed at over the phone because we couldn’t take someone’s unwanted rooster.”
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:33 PM PST - 63 comments

"The Harvey/Renee Index doesn’t distinguish between the different types of Renees. Any character who can be identified with one or more groups that are currently marginalized based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender is a Renee. Anyone who is white, non-Hispanic, cisgender, straight, and male is a Harvey." -- Diversity in the Big Two's superhero comics being a perennial hot topic, Comics Alliance comes up with a novel way to quickly establish a diversity baseline: the Harvey/Renee index. (Named of course for Gotham's greatest cops Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya.)
posted by MartinWisse at 1:46 PM PST - 31 comments

Toronto animator Kurtis Scott takes on the little horrors and thoughts of subway travel. (YTplaylist)
posted by Kitteh at 1:24 PM PST - 6 comments

Mike Konczal, for Democracy Journal: The Voluntarism Fantasy [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 12:47 PM PST - 33 comments

Each week, the Internet Archive's tumblr account is completely transformed by a digital resident along a theme of their choosing. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:40 PM PST - 3 comments

Elderly man rides giant pig through town. I don't think there's any need to say more than that, except that there are pictures.
posted by moonmilk at 12:30 PM PST - 46 comments

New Snowden disclosures: "The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording '100 percent' of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place." [more inside]
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 12:21 PM PST - 60 comments

This afternoon, the City of New York announced a $98 million settlement in United States of America and Vulcan Society, Inc. v. City of New York, a federal class action lawsuit that alleged that the New York City Fire Department engaged in discriminatory hiring practices, using written examinations with discriminatory effects and little relationship to the job of a firefighter to select more than 5,300 candidates for admission to the New York City Fire Academy in 1999 and 2002. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:54 AM PST - 50 comments

Ireland, as much of the world knows it, was invented in 1991.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:05 AM PST - 196 comments

The only thing green about that bud is its chlorophyll. In California, indoor marijuana grows account for about 9 percent of household electricity use. An indoor grow module accommodating four plants sucks as much electricity as 29 refrigerators. For every pound of pot grown 4,600 pounds of CO2 goes into the atmosphere. The energy needed to produce a single joint is enough to produce 18 pints of beer and creates emissions comparable to burning a 100-watt lightbulb for 25 hours. The production and distribution of pot in America emits as much carbon as 3 million cars. And other fun facts.
posted by three blind mice at 8:44 AM PST - 147 comments

Remember The Gleaners Kitchen? If you were looking forward to a free meal, there's some bad news.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:30 AM PST - 87 comments

Gender-specific books demean all our children. So the Independent on Sunday will no longer review anything marketed to exclude either sex [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 6:34 AM PST - 187 comments

What is life like when having your period puts your health at risk and means you are shunned by society? Rose George reports from Nepal and Bangladesh on menstrual taboos.: Blood speak [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:41 AM PST - 42 comments

Italian models in high end clothing BASE jump from spectacular Monte Brento!
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 10:39 PM PST - 27 comments

Neil Degrasse Tyson answers the question: who's the greatest physicist in history? slowed down. [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski at 8:43 PM PST - 30 comments

Wild Beasts are a band from Kendal, England. They have built their sound on Hayden Thorpe's marmite-like countertenor and Tom Fleming's bass, and complex, somewhat sex-obsessed lyrics. Inside, please find a review of the band's history and discography. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 8:41 PM PST - 13 comments

I am not as self-righteous as the way I am talking to you all. Actually I never got the opportunity to express myself. I grew up with my head bent, occupied the lowest place in my family and was surviving under the radar as a member of my family. But later I met a woman who was like a mother to me, and she told me that I was an amazing woman, a hero. I may not have the body of Joan of Arc, but I have sacrificed what is most precious to me – my womanhood, for my country. But you will never see our names engraved in a tower. The reason for this omission is likely their own shame. They could not protect me from the hands of disaster. In what face would they applaud the fact that I am a war heroine? I have been ridiculed and shamed in cruel and heartless ways, but somehow a power greater than me has helped me keep my head high.

Rape survivors of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War were given the title "Birangona": an attempt by the first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to respect the sacrifices of these women that sadly backfired. Ami Birangona Bolchi by Bangladeshi academic and social worker Nilima Ibrahim, published in 1994, chronicles first-hand stories of these women, grappling with the tension between their status and their lived experience. Recently there have been multiple translations of Nilima's work, as well as more interviews and poetry as well as an upcoming British stage production.
posted by divabat at 8:03 PM PST - 8 comments

62-year-old John Mellencamp on success, ageing and lessons learned. [single-page print view]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 7:28 PM PST - 47 comments

Interested in items that have washed ashore years after a tsunami? Crab trap rodeos? Art from floating trash? The NOAA Marine Debris Program has a blog for you. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:19 PM PST - 11 comments

The Kincaid Weekender presents local news, politics, sports, theatre reviews, and keeps you up to date with goings on at the stockyards. A pitch-perfect comedic take on small town New Zealand. Dryer than Flight of the Conchords, subtler than Night Vale. Produced for the 2014 New Zealand Fringe Festival and written by award-worthy comedian Jonny Potts.
posted by Catch at 5:10 PM PST - 4 comments

Urban Jungle: post-apocalyptic Google Street View
posted by brundlefly at 2:25 PM PST - 26 comments

Francis Ford Coppola's first studio picture (and Fred Astaire's swan song) was a big-budget musical about a leprechaun who magically ends racism in the deep south state of "Missitucky." Look!—to 1968's Finian's Rainbow. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 2:02 PM PST - 43 comments

Parasitic Junk in Your Trunk "The little monsters jump off the adult wasp host, and scamper over to a wasp nest’s nursery. There they use enzymes to dissolve their way into the larval wasps, drop off their legs, and get busy eating. They wrap themselves in an envelope of their own skin, and also make a blanket from their host’s skin tissue. And here is where things get really weird."
posted by dhruva at 12:36 PM PST - 58 comments

Chef Mo' the pitbull whips up one of his favorite snacks before sharing them with his 8 furry siblings. [more inside]
posted by sparklemotion at 11:16 AM PST - 18 comments

Castletown Donkey Derby 1994
posted by rollick at 11:11 AM PST - 13 comments

So, it's almost spring here in the UK, and after a sunny weekend your thoughts might be turning to doing some Open Water Swimming! [more inside]
posted by tinkletown at 11:10 AM PST - 25 comments

It's pretty widely known that there have never been snakes in Ireland, so who did Saint Patrick chase out? The case has been made that the story of Saint Patrick chasing out druids (snake-tattooed pagans) is also a myth (and Patrick wasn't even Irish). But that doesn't mean there are no reptiles in Ireland. The only native land-based reptile is the viviparous lizard, though there are other reptiles that are semi-inhabitants of Ireland. And this brings us to the the amateur survey of Ireland's lizards, newts, frogs and slow worms, one of a number of such surveys hosted by Biology.ie, "Ireland's premier Biodiversity Awareness portal."
posted by filthy light thief at 11:01 AM PST - 32 comments

doge2048
posted by fight or flight at 10:55 AM PST - 75 comments

"The first journalist to attempt reporting on the Wikileaks cables was David Leigh of The Guardian. The material arrived as a single 1.7GB CSV file containing 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables from 1966 to 2010. If you’ve ever tried to open a 1.7GB file, you know you probably can’t. Microsoft Word and Excel will plain refuse. Windows Notepad and Mac TextEdit will try, but slow to a crawl." At Opennews Source, Jonathan Stray has written a helpful beginners' guide to dealing with large amounts of documents for journalists and interested lay people.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:45 AM PST - 18 comments

Daily affirmations from Skeletor (SLTumblr) Skeletor is....LOVE!
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 10:42 AM PST - 38 comments

Julie Ann Horvath has left Github, claiming a strong culture of sexism and intimidation. Github is investigating the claims, and has suspended two employees.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:03 AM PST - 234 comments

Italian advocacy group Coor Down helped a pregnant woman understand what to expect with her soon-to-be born Down Syndrome child by gathering 15 people with Down Syndrome from various countries to answer her question.
posted by gman at 9:29 AM PST - 14 comments

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight re-launched this morning. Opening manifesto. Building an NCAA bracket. An article about a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other. Toilet seat covers. 2014 midterms. And why this winter is so miserable. Among other gems.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:14 AM PST - 79 comments

"The detection of gravitational waves in the afterglow of the Big Bang — if confirmed — opens a new chapter in astronomy, cosmology and physics. The signature, seen by the BICEP2 radio telescope at the South Pole, packs at least three discoveries into one: It provides the most direct evidence for the existence of the waves predicted by Einstein; it is the proof of ‘cosmic inflation’ that physicists had been eagerly awaiting; and it opens a window into the unification of the fundamental forces of nature and into quantum gravity." NYT article, in depth Nature News feature. [more inside]
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:30 AM PST - 59 comments

Clarissa Dickson Wright has passed away, aged 66. The surviving half of the BBC cooking show Two Fat Ladies, she "was utterly non-PC and fought for what she believed in, always, with no thought to her own personal cost," her agent said in the announcement. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 7:43 AM PST - 51 comments

Chamallow, le chat roi de l'évasion (SLYT). [more inside]
posted by ersatz at 7:40 AM PST - 27 comments

This Is What Happens When You Put Dogs In A Photo Booth
posted by like_neon at 6:43 AM PST - 18 comments

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. The standard lorem ipsum text has been translated by Jaspreet Singh Boparai. Lorem ipsum is a standard placeholder text which has been used since the 16th Century and is a mangling of a passage from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum, specifically Book 1, passages 32-33, which you can read in translation here.
posted by Kattullus at 6:03 AM PST - 15 comments

CMOS for imaging is the technology behind billions of cameras ( smartphones,....). Yet that technology simply did not exist 19 years ago. Eric Fossum started its development within NASA's and Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab but he also shepherded that technology through the Technology Readiness Level ladder from a single item to its current market thereby reducing then incumbent technology (CCD) to a niche market. That story is recounted in one of his recent video presentation entitled CMOS Image Sensors: Tech Transfer from Saturn to your Cell Phone.
posted by IgorCarron at 3:43 AM PST - 28 comments

Hasperat is a well-known spicy Bajoran food resembling a burrito. It is made using a specially prepared brine, which if made correctly causes the eyes to water and sears the tongue. Another method of serving hasperat is in a hasperat soufflé. And now, you can make hasperat at home, or any number of other tasty Star Trek treats!
posted by moink at 11:57 PM PST - 40 comments

The infamous, sprawling Winchester Mystery House has plans to allow overnight stays and full onsite alcohol consumption
posted by The Whelk at 11:18 PM PST - 46 comments

Stand up comedy as gifs. Ron Funches, Chelsea Peretti, Tig Notaro, Aziz Ansari, Demetri Martin, Wyatt Cenac, Sheng Wang, Maria Bamford, and Eugene Mirman, to name just a few.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:55 PM PST - 23 comments

Modern proggy jazz trio The Bad Plus has adapted Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring for their unique style. For a limited time, the album is available to hear online via NPR.
posted by hippybear at 8:37 PM PST - 21 comments

Personal productivity has been discussed a lot on MetaFilter. Getting to Done? I never got anything done. 43 Folders? That's so ten years ago. Instead, why don't you Gamify Your Life?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:09 PM PST - 59 comments

For a while, the first African American graduate of the University of Vermont was George Washington Henderson, who would become the first black inductee to Phi Beta Kappa. Except he wasn't the first black graduate... [more inside]
posted by papayaninja at 8:04 PM PST - 8 comments

"Magician Prankster" MagicofRahat gives a homeless man a 'winning' lottery ticket [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 6:56 PM PST - 50 comments

We lost a great one... Asheton co-formed the Stooges in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Mich., along with Pop, Dave Alexander and guitarist Ron Asheton, his older brother who died in 2009. Their best known songs include “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Search and Destroy,” and the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. The rock and punk world has lost one of the greats as Stooges drummer Scott Asheton has passed away at the age of 64. Iggy Pop revealed the news to fans via a post on his Facebook page, revealing that the drummer died Saturday night (March 15). Asheton joined Pop and his late brother Ron as part of the original Stooges lineup in 1967. During their tenure, they released the classic albums ‘The Stooges,’ ‘Fun House’ and ‘Raw Power.’ The band split in 1974, but both Asheton brothers were part of the Stooges reunion in 2003. Ron Asheton, who was the band’s original guitarist and also played bass at times, died in 2009. As for Scott Asheton, he manned the kit for The Stooges until 2011. [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 5:54 PM PST - 45 comments

Alex and I have lived together for 9 years. In those 9 years we have packed up, moved and unpacked his record collection 5 times. It’s about 15 boxes, about 1500 hundred records “that includes the singles and stuff, which you’re also going to have to review.” Is what Alex just said to me from the other room... Here are the rules I’ve set for my self. Start with the “A’s” these records are set up in alphabetical order by artist. Listen to the entire thing even if I really hate it. And make sure to comment on the cover art. Are you with me? Let’s see how far I can go. (20 so far...)
posted by Going To Maine at 3:51 PM PST - 229 comments

QuiQui promises to deliver small drugstore items to the door of your Mission District (of course) apartment in 15 minutes or less for a mere $1 per delivery fee.
posted by latkes at 3:23 PM PST - 84 comments

Wake up and smell the bacon!! There's an iPhone app for that, if you add a small attachment from Oscar Mayer.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:08 PM PST - 14 comments

As reported recently by the San Jose Mercury News, Asian-American Democrats in the State Assembly now look to be blocking the reinstatement of race-based affirmative action in California, previously on the fast track for the November ballot, after it passed through the State Senate with all Democrats, including three Asian Americans, supporting the measure, and all Republicans opposing. [more inside]
posted by MattD at 1:42 PM PST - 74 comments

Bay Area radio station 105.7 (Santa Clara) has been playing Nelly's 2002 hit "Hot in Herre" for over 48 hours as part of a format change promotion. Originally released in 2002, St. Louis rapper's "Hot in Herre" was produced by the Neptunes on the album "Nellyville." Media outlets around the country have taken notice, including Gawker, Time, and Rolling Stone. As one might imagine, Twitter has also responded. You can listen to the radio station right here.
posted by mostly vowels at 1:14 PM PST - 64 comments

"Heaven Is a Place on Planet X" by Desirina Boskovich. "Break! Break! Break!" by Charlie Jane Anders. "System Reset" by Tobias Buckell. These three short stories are from The End is Nigh anthology, the first volume of The Apocalypse Triptych, three anthologies of stories about life just before, during, and after the apocalypse. "Post-apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that have already burned. Apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that are burning. The End is Nigh is about the match." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 11:55 AM PST - 14 comments

"I’ve said this many times before and I’ll say it many times again, but one of the joys of webcomics is their ability to cover every possible subject and fill every conceivable niche. Say, for example, you’re into early Irish literature and you want to read it in comics form. Webcomics are happy to help you out. At this very moment, in fact, there are at least two ongoing webcomics based on the Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Cattle Raid of Cooley, the central epic of the Ulster cycle: Patrick Brown’s The Cattle Raid of Cooley and M.K. Reed’s About a Bull. Thank you, webcomics! You’ve justified the existence of the Internet yet again!" -- Shaenon Garrity reviews two niche webcomics.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:01 AM PST - 17 comments

In August 1989, 23-year-old professional ice-hockey player Duncan MacPherson travelled from New York to Europe, to enjoy a holiday before starting a new job in Scotland. He hired snowboarding gear and took a lesson on the Stubai Glacier. Then, according to the Austrian authorities and the owners of the ski resort, he simply disappeared. In Cold a Long Time: An Alpine Mystery, John Leake details the coverup and corruption that started then and continued for years after MacPherson's body melted out of the ice in 2003. Warning: the website contains close-up pictures of MacPherson's damaged body. [more inside]
posted by daisyk at 10:00 AM PST - 22 comments

Free Money for Everyone - "A wacky-sounding idea with surprisingly conservative roots may be our best hope for escaping endless, grinding economic stagnation." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM PST - 19 comments

Fred Phelps, longtime head of the Westboro Baptist Church previously previously previously previously previously previously previously, is "now on the edge of death" in a Topeka hospice, says his son Nate previously in a piece in the Topeka Capital-Journal. Media reaction has been, in a word, unmixed. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:27 AM PST - 193 comments

I Will Survivor -- a mashup of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger."
posted by jason's_planet at 8:25 AM PST - 20 comments

Philadelphia native and comedian David Brenner has passed away at age 78. [more inside]
posted by Rob Rockets at 8:10 AM PST - 33 comments

Goodnight Clock. In which the celestial accuracy of the children's classic Goodnight Moon is analyzed.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:49 PM PST - 22 comments

Transcontinental Yelling With Jo (An Englishwoman) and Mallory (An American)
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:16 PM PST - 89 comments

Delivering ten-minute chunks of surreal Irish humor, Soupy Norman may be the best series you've never seen. [more inside]
posted by Itaxpica at 5:43 PM PST - 15 comments

' “Episode one, and a robot sprouts from a lump on a boy’s forehead. I certainly did not see that coming” (Tamplin 304). Director Tsuramaki was quoted in an interview, “I'd like you to think of FLCL as imagination being made physical and tangible, just as it is for me when I take whatever is in my head and draw it.” (Surkult). [FLCL, pronounced] Furi Kuri, or Fooly Cooly, keeps its audience on its toes waiting for the next bizarre turn of events. However, if the viewer pushes past the first layer – which can at first be confusing – they can reach the heart of this anime. This series is, quite simply, a coming of age story.' Of course, it's not really that simple, so let's dig in! [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 4:30 PM PST - 66 comments

Factcheck: The Keystone XL Project. An evenhanded summary of the controversy around the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
posted by bitmage at 4:07 PM PST - 75 comments

The effortless grace of an astronaut on the lunar surface is a thing of beauty. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by griphus at 3:11 PM PST - 30 comments

Henry and Caitlin.....met over several glasses of rose and quickly recognized their shared passion for all things food, photography, travel, and art. Their collaborations have spanned a decade, and they continue to push the boundaries always attempting to find a balance between beauty and the far fetched. With food as their favored medium they always manage to turn the mundane into works of art. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:09 PM PST - 3 comments

As the twittersphere ridicules a White Man March in NYC, perhaps now is the time to watch Aamer Rahman, one half of the comedy tour Fear of a Brown Planet (with Nazeem Hussain), on the topic of Reverse Racism.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:43 PM PST - 89 comments

The delightful Bill Cunningham covers the latest trends in groceries gone awry at this year's Paris Fashion Week.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:50 PM PST - 8 comments

Interviews with interesting people, pulled from Reddit, organized, and made prettier.
posted by Renoroc at 10:51 AM PST - 54 comments

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution - "[Charles Percy Snow] was pleading for a more adequately educated ruling class so that the suffering of the poor might be ameliorated... Snow wanted to believe something like this: political decisions in the modern world often concern how to deploy science and technology, so people well-trained in science and technology will be better prepared to make those decisions. But that's a syllogism without a minor premise." (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 8:32 AM PST - 37 comments

A Preliminary Phenomenology of the Self-Checkout. An essay in six parts. [more inside]
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:29 AM PST - 61 comments

In his series of blog posts How to Make Master in 300 Difficult Steps, John Chernoff, with humour and modesty, recounts his numerous attempts to surpass 2200 USCF and become a Candidate Master in the game of chess. (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8)
posted by Quilford at 7:10 AM PST - 4 comments

You thought Google buying robot technology was scary? We've discussed here the unease brought on by Google's purchase of Boston Dynamics, the maker of "terrifying robots", and recently the prediction of robots rising by Google's Director of Engineering, but it turns out that Google may not be the problem. Truly terrifying robots are already here and could show up in your home if you happen to have mounds of disposable cash and no sense of boundaries. No this isn't April 1, yes this is legit.
posted by jeremias at 6:52 AM PST - 53 comments

Here are some compilations of old drive-in theater intermission shorts, obsolete advertising for vanished venues. Won't you please visit our celestial snack bar? The show starts in ∞ minutes. Hover over links for more detail.
1 (10m, corn dogs, Dairy Queen) - 2 (10m, Butch, Eskimo Pie) - 3 (7m, public displays of affection) - 4 (3m, cable TV)
5 (10m, PSAs) - 6 (10m, performing food!) - 7 (9.5m, racist indians, snack bar gnomes) - 8 (10m, Jay Ward-like cartoon roundup)
9 (4m, daylight savings time) - 10 (13m, shrimp rolls, local ads) - 11 (10.5m, Dr Pepper robbery, conformity, PSAs) - 12 (14m, Creepy the Clown and "Dutch Treete")
13 (10m, Optigan music spectacular!) - 14 (2m, EAT CANDY BARS) - 15 (9m, Swiss people are magical) - 16 (5m, assorted animation)
17 (17m, Snacks in Space) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 4:14 AM PST - 48 comments

"Picture the scene: you’re on Family Feud (US) or Family Fortunes (UK), and the oily host summons you to go head-to-head with a member of the opposing family. “Hands on the buzzers, please. Top eight answers in this round. We asked 100 people…to name something associated with Holland.”

Suppress lewd thoughts of red-light districts, window brothels, and sex clubs—this is a family show—and quick, the buzzer!

[...]

And that, in essence, is Huis ten Bosch, a $3bn theme park answer to a quiz show question nobody asked."
posted by MartinWisse at 4:03 AM PST - 26 comments

The 7 Most Annoying People To Watch TV With, in comic form.
posted by bongo_x at 9:45 PM PST - 136 comments

See how close you live to a nuclear power plant on this interactive map featured in Smithsonian. It's created by ESRI, home to all kinds of other maps, like the Battle of the Big Boxes, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the location of uninsured Americans, a Timeline of the UK's Tallest Buildings, and more. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 9:33 PM PST - 38 comments

Goat Bath.
posted by codacorolla at 8:37 PM PST - 30 comments

Gary Burger, lead singer and guitarist for seminal proto-punk band The Monks, passed away early Friday morning after battling pancreatic cancer. He was 71. [more inside]
posted by Fuzzypumper at 8:29 PM PST - 30 comments

JOGGING is a collaborative art Tumblr previously featured on Yahoo News and recipient of a Rhizome Art Grant. Cofounder and frequent contributor Brad Troemel recently had a show at the Zach Feuer gallery in New York, which prompted Art F City's Paddy Johnson to wonder: Does Brad Troemel's Internet Art Work in a Gallery Setting?
posted by shakespeherian at 7:13 PM PST - 5 comments

How clones, fear, sanitisation and free-to-play soured Apple’s iOS gaming revolution
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:03 PM PST - 65 comments

#Mcconnelling some strange b-roll of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (designed for use by SuperPACs) lends itself perfectly to literally any and every song set as its soundtrack.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:47 PM PST - 154 comments

The Guardian has an article describing an upcoming study, funded by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and written by a team headed by Safa Motesharrei at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), discussing the prospect that "global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution". [more inside]
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:08 PM PST - 101 comments

Two commercials came out this week from KUKA starring their robot and their new spokesman. Timo Boll vs the Agilus robot, and the obligatory The Making Of video to go with it. Player reaction ranged from FAKE!!! to possible-but-highly-staged. It's at least more real than the Bruce Lee/Nokia video. [more inside]
posted by MtDewd at 2:16 PM PST - 16 comments

Mefites are awfully fond of abandoned places, whether they be water parks, train stations or even entire communities. But how about golf courses? A look at what has happened to some of the abandoned courses in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (via Salon).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:39 PM PST - 20 comments

'Madeline L’Engle said, “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” I know that when I’m meeting older people, anyone for that matter, you look in the person’s eyes and their eyes are behind the façade. You feel more connected with somebody’s soul in that sense. So instead of judging a book by its cover, looking at this old person like maybe they’re not capable of this or that, I wanted to show how full and beautiful they are. They’ve already lived what I’m living. They have so much knowledge, and they’re still living.' Jason Bard Yarmosky on the portraits of his grandparents: Elder Kinder (2011), Elder Kinder (2012), Dream of the Soft Look (2013) [via Everlasting Blort] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:08 PM PST - 7 comments

Western firms have piled into emerging markets in the past 20 years. Now comes the reckoning

Although the average company has prospered, there have been disasters; plenty of firms and some whole industries need a rethink. The emerging-market rush may end up like a giant version of the first internet boom 15 years ago. The broad thrust was right but some big mistakes were made.

posted by infini at 11:48 AM PST - 16 comments

The William Jefferson Clinton Library has been releasing, in batches, thousands of pages of previously classified documents.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:58 AM PST - 17 comments

The Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections ended on March 6 And the news coming out of it was astounding. 33 years after the first cases were described, researchers are genuinely excited about where we are and where we are going. [more inside]
posted by Sophie1 at 8:53 AM PST - 29 comments

"Yes?" she asked me, and the tone of her voice calmed me down. It was as if she was saying, Brandon, I already know what you want to tell me. Please, just say it. Brandon Ambrosino writes about coming out as a student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Recently Ambrosino was hired for Ezra Klein's new journalism venture, Vox, a decision that has bred controversy. Andrew Sullivan explains, and defends him.
posted by shivohum at 7:29 AM PST - 182 comments

Marty Hart watches.... [SLYT]
posted by Fizz at 7:03 AM PST - 55 comments

Acknowledged to be one of the few British politicians who became more left-wing after having actually served in government, former veteran left-wing campaigner Tony Benn has died at home aged 88. Tony was a British Labour Party politician and Member of Parliament (MP) for 50 years, and a Cabinet Minister under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. His legacy can be seen in postage, in the powerful five questions, the speeches he gave, and his diaries.
posted by Wordshore at 5:08 AM PST - 84 comments

For a few years, Converse has been bringing three disparate music artists together to create a song. The most recent release "Hero" features Frank Ocean, Diplo, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon from the Clash. [more inside]
posted by superquail at 11:43 PM PST - 17 comments

"On a sunny day at the very beginning of this millenniums, a crazy frenchman found himself in the desert of Sinai. After some puffs of a magic smoke he wondered - how come that there are no cinemas in the middle of the desert...?"
posted by miss lynnster at 11:42 PM PST - 28 comments

In the end, the only thing that could create the necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we loved. Zadie Smith on climate change at a personal level.
posted by Athanassiel at 8:06 PM PST - 46 comments

Today, the UC Davis student newspaper, The California Aggie, put out its last print edition. The Aggie has been in dire straits for some time. Ad revenue started to plummet in 2009 and the paper has been working off of its reserve funds. Publication was cut from five days a week, to four days a week, to one day a week. Very few of the staff have been paid at all and those who were earned around $2 an hour. Despite the print change, the paper was due to run out of money by June 2014. Then came a last gasp, paper-saving measure: Measure 1, proposed for the winter 2014 ASUCD ballot, would add a $9.30 increase to student fees in order to subsidize the formerly independently run paper. But.... [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:52 PM PST - 33 comments

"...the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve..." Information Management: A Proposal is a brief technical paper first published on 12 March 1989. Within three years the author, Tim Berners-Lee, elaborated on the original proposal and created the WorldWideWeb. The W3C has launched a 25th anniversary commemorative website to mark the paper's birthday, and Berners-Lee will be giving a TED talk this weekend about the web.
posted by ardgedee at 6:27 PM PST - 6 comments

Richard D. James is someone whose work can probably be considered outsider art. By almost anyone's standards, his work is eccentric, quirky and idiosyncratic. Its flaws (such as tape hiss and clipping) are arguably as charming as its finer points (such as whole worlds of original sounds), and its deviations from the norm are what make it so endearing, otherworldly and engaging. James seems a good subject for a case study due to how little music theory he took for granted, and how much he built his own musical principles from scratch, which is a noble goal for anyone trying to carve their own niche in the musical ecosystem.
posted by mannequito at 6:09 PM PST - 46 comments

In a quick follow-up to this previous post... Pet Shop Boys have turned Ms Bliss's speech into a dance track: The Best Gay Possible (Oppressive Dance Mix). [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:54 PM PST - 4 comments

(Mildly NSFW-ish lyrics) Youtube user strizzalo does a slow, sensitive, acoustic cover of The Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch."
posted by jason's_planet at 5:44 PM PST - 16 comments

Ban Bossy : Beyonce: I'm not bossy, I'm the boss. "When a little boy asserts himself, he's called a “leader.” Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded “bossy.” Words like bossy send a message: don't raise your hand or speak up. By middle school, girls are less interested in leading than boys—a trend that continues into adulthood." [more inside]
posted by Kerasia at 3:41 PM PST - 136 comments

You should be ashamed -- or maybe not. 'Shame on you. These three simple words can temporarily -- or, when used too often, permanently -- destroy an individual's sense of value and self-worth.' A paper by Thomas Scheff, professor emeritus of sociology at UC Santa Barbara 'The Ubiquity of Hidden Shame in Modernity' explores the danger of hidden emotions: ""In modernity, shame is the most obstructed and hidden emotion, and therefore the most destructive," said Thomas Scheff, professor emeritus of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. '"Emotions are like breathing -- they cause trouble only when obstructed." When hidden, he continued, shame causes serious struggles not only for individuals but also for groups.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 3:23 PM PST - 34 comments

"If you want to be cosmopolitan, you’ll buy star anise, kimchi, and coconut oil. If you want to prevent cancer, buy collard greens, blueberries, and omega-3 eggs. If you want to eat food free of pesticides and high fructose corn syrup, buy organic meat, flour, and dairy. Compound all of these seemingly innocuous exercises in American Dreaming with diet fads like “clean” eating, Westernized veganism, or the paleo diet, and you’ll get a supermarket full of people staring at labels, searching the copy for proof of ideological and medical purity. I need to buy this if I want to be good, if I really want to take care of myself and my family. As it turns out, this moralistic way of framing choice is extremely profitable for food processors, restaurants, and produce retailers: we’ve been effectively held captive by our own consciences."(slBitchMagazine)
posted by Kitteh at 1:46 PM PST - 143 comments

The legendary TV production manager and inspiration for the film set term "Abby Singer Shot" has passed away at 96. [more inside]
posted by Sara C. at 1:09 PM PST - 21 comments

Hal Douglas, who for many of us was THE voice of movie trailers in the 1990's, has passed away at age 89. The Guardian pays tribute with a half dozen of his best trailers. And then, of course, there's the legendary trailer for "Comedian".
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:13 PM PST - 59 comments

"As an important part of daily nourishment, women had always produced beer at home and for their own household. However, in Holland from the beginning of the thirteenth century beer production for the general market commenced. In the developing cities more and more labour was divided among specialised craftsmen. Professional breweries were established and the beer industry became a serious trade." -- female brewers in Holland and England, a paper by Marjolien van Dekken looking at how the brewery industry changed in Early Modern Times from largely homebrewed and controlled by women to a more large scale and male dominated industry. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 12:12 PM PST - 10 comments

The generic war game has come under fire from many sides, prompting more thoughtful games, such as the recent Spec Ops: The Line (previously) and others. However, short of post-apocalyptic zombie-type games, no one has thought to make a game about the civilians - survivors living in the cities that other people battle over. Until now.

In This War of Mine, the focus is shifted away from military operations portrayed in most games. Instead, it is a dark survival game where players control a group of civilians trying to stay alive in a besieged city. During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, offering players time to craft, trade, upgrade their shelter, feed and cure their people. At night they must scavenge nearby areas in search for food, medicines, weapons and other useful items. This War of Mine was inspired by real-life events and delivers a message. "This can happen in your city, in your country."

posted by corb at 12:03 PM PST - 62 comments

Oh, I'm sorry, they're out of Odorless surprise. How about a new-to-you gamin? They never have that at the end of the week, they get it fresh on Monday. What about a Refurbished gintleman? It's been out for two weeks. They were expecting it this morning. Well, there's always more to browse at the Non-Stop Scroll Shop! It's online, unlike Apple Cabin and it's curious mailers (previously; more) [via mefi projects]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:51 AM PST - 19 comments

Apparently back in those days your grandpa still goes on about when gas was less than a buck a gallon and air was free, service stations also gave away some cool swag.
posted by Oriole Adams at 11:37 AM PST - 53 comments

"The only way to end Haiti’s cholera epidemic is to keep infected waste out of food and water. A subterranean network of pipes, pumping stations, and waste-treatment plants would be the ideal solution, but Haiti’s successive governments have had too little money, power, or will to build massive public works on their own.... International donors have been little help: in one case, the U.S. government, to protest the way an election was conducted, withheld funds to build water and sanitation infrastructure in northern Haiti for more than ten years. From 1990 to 2008, the proportion of Haitians with access to basic sanitation decreased from 26% to 17%. Cholera broke out in 2010. Four years into the epidemic, a trip to the bathroom for most Haitians still means looking for an open field or wading into a public canal at dawn. Those who can afford to, dig cesspools under outhouses. When the cesspools get full, it’s time to call a man like Leon." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:24 AM PST - 11 comments

Stacey Nightmare is a completely normal human woman who vines under the name Stacey Nightmare for no reason at all. She enjoys fitness and music. She has a pet spider named Gretchen. She lives in Brooklyn. [[Everything nsfw]]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:18 AM PST - 25 comments

IF you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat. But what if that meat is us?
posted by brenton at 10:33 AM PST - 57 comments

Are the robots about to rise? Ray thinks so...

Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find... And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI"... Peter Norvig, Google's research director, said recently that the company employs "less than 50% but certainly more than 5%" of the world's leading experts on machine learning. And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it's in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet.

In late 2012, Ray became Google's new Director of Engineering, empowering him with extraordinary resources and latitude. [more inside]
posted by tybeet at 9:49 AM PST - 124 comments

What do you get when your funeral director is a former women's magazine writer who describes herself as "a Kundalini-yoga-practicing Buddhist Presbyterian on the board of Brooklyn Heights Synagogue"? It's Amy Cunningham's blog The Inspired Funeral, chronicling trends, products, history, music and ideas related to all sorts of grieving traditions. (From this NYT article about boomers gravitating towards greener burials and funerals.) [more inside]
posted by Madamina at 9:27 AM PST - 15 comments

A sports arena in Boise is being sued after it was revealed that their $4 "Regular" beer and $7 "Large" beer were the same size, though different shapes. Two fans produced a Youtube that proved it and it went viral.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:19 AM PST - 85 comments

A videoblogger from the U.K. named Jonny Benjamin started a social media campaign called #FindMike to track down the stranger who convinced him not to end his life in 2008.

Earlier this year, Benjamin found "Mike" (whose real name is Neil Laybourn) with help of Rethink Mental Illness, the organization that helped launch Benjamin's search. In the video, you can watch their heartwarming reunion.
posted by yeoz at 8:36 AM PST - 6 comments

"The breach could have been stopped there without human intervention. The system has an option to automatically delete malware as it’s detected. But according to two people who audited FireEye's performance after the breach, Target's security team turned that function off." Bloomberg reports today on "Missed Alarms and 40 Million Stolen Credit Card Numbers: How Target Blew It." (The Target breach, previously.)
posted by jbickers at 8:27 AM PST - 52 comments

Come on in and sit down. I wanna talk to you about trains for a minute. That's pretty much it. Still chuckling...
posted by Namlit at 7:05 AM PST - 47 comments

Congratulations, you won the lottery and got offered a tenure-track job offer in the humanities! Now it's time to start negotiating. But don't negotiate on the terms, because your new colleagues might decide to rescind the offer. Further coverage at Inside Higher Ed.
posted by escabeche at 6:28 AM PST - 246 comments

Let Me Live That Fantasy. "In search of Puddles, the saddest clown of all, whose voice — along with Lorde’s music — made him an Internet star."
posted by homunculus at 10:10 PM PST - 31 comments

Six years ago, PBS's feature documentary program, Frontline, aired Sick Around the World, a documentary examining health care systems around the world -- and specifically how all those featured were generally superior to the American system. (2008 MeFi post) Today, the American Senate subcommittee on primary health and aging brought the debate over single-payer care to Washington. C-SPAN has a fine video of the hearing, which features seven witness representing health care systems and think tanks from around the US and the world. [more inside]
posted by greatgefilte at 9:06 PM PST - 53 comments

"In 2012, automobile collisions killed more than 34,000 Americans, but unlike our response to foreign wars, the AIDS crisis, or terrorist attacks—all of which inflict fewer fatalities than cars—there’s no widespread public protest or giant memorial to the dead. We fret about drugs and gun safety, but don’t teach children to treat cars as the loaded weapons they are."
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:59 PM PST - 227 comments

On Aug. 1, 1833 the British outlawed (most) slavery in her colonies. There were, however, still crops that needed tending. Fortunately, Germany had excess people desperate for a better life. Some (as we have seen) of them wound up in Texas. Some, willing to sign on as indentured servants, wound up in Jamaica. Seaford Town Jamaica, to be exact. Their descendants can still be found. There is now a documentary on the subject. (Extended trailer can been seen here)
posted by BWA at 7:29 PM PST - 6 comments

"I had heard about this film through various channels off and on through the years. It had gotten to the point where it was almost apocryphal in my mind.... Nobody knew where it was, nobody had ever seen it, but I was aware it existed. It was like the holy grail." said Wayne Petersen, director of the Massachusetts Important Bird Areas program for Mass. Audubon on the archival footage of the extinct heath hen discovered, restored and premiering at the Mass Audubon Birders Meeting this month. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 7:15 PM PST - 20 comments

A show about Nothing (SLVimeo)
posted by griphus at 5:29 PM PST - 18 comments

SXSW Mario Kart Real live Mario Kart at SXSW [more inside]
posted by Jaelma24 at 5:18 PM PST - 4 comments

"In 1805, a twenty-three year-old Bostonian called Frederic Tudor launched a new industry: the international frozen-water trade. Over the next fifty years, he and the men he worked with developed specialised ice harvesting tools, a global network of thermally engineered ice houses, and a business model that cleverly leveraged ballast-less ships, off-season farmers, and overheated Englishmen abroad. By the turn of the century, the industry employed 90,000 people and was worth $220 million in today’s terms. By 1930, it had disappeared, almost without trace, replaced by an artificial cryosphere of cold storage warehouses and domestic refrigerators." [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:58 PM PST - 46 comments

Bennett Foddy (of QWOP fame) explains why some multiplayer games aren't cut out for online multiplayer.
posted by Copronymus at 2:36 PM PST - 54 comments

As it turned out, when I started working in Brooklyn, the most difficult to serve were the ones who wanted—or expected, really—for you to be cool, or at least receptive to a certain projection of hip-and-coolness. It was nice, at first, to have a job that let me swear and show my tattoos, but the pleasure of that freedom waned somewhat when most of my interactions became about the "fucks" and body modifications. If I had a quarter for every time I showed off my expensive liberal arts degree, holding up my end of a conversation about New York’s small presses or the most recent issue of The New Yorker, my tips certainly would have been better.

Molly Osberg: Inside the Barista Class
posted by RogerB at 2:10 PM PST - 195 comments

Chain of Life is a three part article done by The Star Ledger of New Jersey, following a rare instance where six patients in New Jersey and New York received kidney transplants in March from six living donors, all unrelated and previously unknown to them. Over 36 hours.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:59 PM PST - 4 comments

"Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent." [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 12:09 PM PST - 39 comments

With St. Patrick's Day fast approaching, it's a great opportunity to have a look at "Danny Boy". [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:34 AM PST - 50 comments

Giovanni Battista d'Antonio Braccelli was a Florentine artist (PDF*) who was active from 1616 to 1649, and is little known beyond some highly creative works. Finding details on his life can be more difficult due to multiple forms for his names (Giovanbatista, Bracelli, Braccielli, Brazzè, and the nickname "il Bigio" - the gray one) within his own work and secondary sources, and early writers conflated his biography with that of a Genoese painter of the same name. But if you enjoy surreal illustrations, check out Braccelli's Bizzarie di varie figure (online view from Gallica - Bibliothèque nationale de France; online and PDF in the US Library of Congress collection** from Lessing J. Rosenwald). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:32 AM PST - 6 comments

Six Ways America Is Like a Third-World Country
posted by infini at 11:15 AM PST - 126 comments

Use your name as starting seed in Conway's Game of Life.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:56 AM PST - 35 comments

In this episode, we follow an assembly line as it processes bags of Oreo-style cookies into raw materials.
posted by anazgnos at 9:20 AM PST - 54 comments

Top-secret documents reveal that an elite unit at the National Security Agency has developed technology allowing it to automatically install malware on millions of computers worldwide in what it calls 'industrial-scale exploitation'. TURBINE, developed by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit (mentioned previusly here), is a command-and-control suite automating tasks that previously had to be performed manually: Using 'internet chokepoints' and a capability called SECONDDATE, the NSA can perform man-in-the-middle attacks to quietly redirect web browsers to FOXACID malware servers en masse.
posted by anemone of the state at 9:13 AM PST - 110 comments

While CNN is known for its flashy technology displays like holograms of Will.I.Am and its glossy map displays, not everything about the network is so up-to-date: the CNN Interactive: In-Depth Food website appears to have remained unchanged since 2001. via
posted by Going To Maine at 8:38 AM PST - 56 comments

Drowning In Light

n 1996, Yale economist William D. Nordhaus calculated that the average citizen of Babylon would have had to work a total of 41 hours to buy enough lamp oil to equal a 75-watt light bulb burning for one hour. At the time of the American Revolution, a colonial would have been able to purchase the same amount of light, in the form of candles, for about five hour’s worth of work. And by 1992, the average American, using compact fluorescents, could earn the same amount of light in less than one second. That sounds like a great deal. Except for one thing: We treat light like a drug whose price is spiraling toward zero.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:28 AM PST - 75 comments

"In 2011, when we blogged about the Shaftesbury Psalter (which may have belonged to Adeliza of Louvain; see below), we wrote that medieval manuscripts which had belonged to women were relatively rare survivals. This still remains true, but as we have reviewed our blog over the past few years, it has become clear that we must emphasize the relative nature of the rarity – we have posted literally dozens of times about manuscripts that were produced for, owned, or created by a number of medieval women." -- For International Womens' Day last week, the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog showcases a selection of manuscripts that belonged to some of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 8:00 AM PST - 11 comments

What would a great ad for a university of technology be? An ad, that itself, solves a problem through technology This is exactly what the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru and their ad agency Mayo DraftFCB have done - the first billboard in the world to make drinking water out of thin air and alleviate the lives of Peru's people.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 7:45 AM PST - 14 comments

Robot Jackalope -- "a blog about design, programming and general geekery" -- tackles The Geometry of Starship Design -- the USS Enterprise
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:28 AM PST - 42 comments

The Egyptian Military's War on Alcohol Just before the Ahmed Hamdy tunnel, which links Egypt's main bulk of land to the Sinai Peninsula, there are two consecutive checkpoints. One of them is run by the military, and the other by the Ministry of Interior. This weekend, on a trip to Sinai with a group of friends, we were stopped at the military checkpoint. The conscripts insisted on searching us, and a mere inquiry as to what the purpose of the search was made them adamant on going through every bag.
posted by modernnomad at 12:12 AM PST - 20 comments

Carry cash, take the metro and always look at people's feet – Araz Fazaeli, who lives in Paris but runs the street style blog Tehran Times with a team in Iran, offers his tips about how to make the most of the capital.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:49 PM PST - 17 comments

(USAFilter) Beatlemania was ignited in the U.S. by a teenage Marylander. And some other facts about your home state.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:35 PM PST - 46 comments

A Lie Agreed Upon: David Milch's Deadwood (SLVimeo, NSFW). A video essay by film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, narrated by Jim Beaver and edited by Steven Santos, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the show's premiere. [more inside]
posted by zombieflanders at 6:02 PM PST - 81 comments

Chien drôle mange à table [slyt]
posted by mattoxic at 4:43 PM PST - 20 comments

7 month old baby pulls tail of cat. Cat scratches baby. Father of baby kicks cat butt. Then things go rapidly downhill between the 22 pound house cat "with a history of violence" and the family... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 3:38 PM PST - 140 comments

Street Fighter: The Movie -- What Went Wrong (via)
posted by davidjmcgee at 3:13 PM PST - 118 comments

Brian Greene is now offering an online course on the theory of relativity. There are two versions of the class, one with math and one without. Additional information was provided during Greene's recent Ask Me Anything on reddit, during which he agrees with a redditor who recommends Leonard Susskind's "Theoretical Minimum"(previously) as a good preliminary.
posted by Ipsifendus at 2:07 PM PST - 42 comments

On April 7th, Quebeckers will head to the polls because of a snap election called by the PQ minority government. Of course, as in this part of Canada, election time is never without controversy. Between Liberal leader Phillippe Couillard touting the benefits of bilingualism and CAQ leader Francois LeGault presenting his budget if his party is elected, it all pales to this past weekend's announcement that Quebec media oligarch Pierre Karl Peladeau is running in a riding for the Parti Quebecois. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 1:40 PM PST - 103 comments

Melody Jo Samuelson, a staff psychologist at California's Napa State Hospital (Previously), recently won a million-dollar judgement against the state and her supervisors. She had been told to declare mentally ill patients competent to stand trial. [more inside]
posted by larrybob at 1:35 PM PST - 18 comments

Last Friday, Chipotle filed a lawsuit against Frank Ocean for failing to deliver a song he was due to record for an ad campaign. Ocean was paid in advance but apparently thought he was promoting responsible farming, not Chipotle’s brand. Ocean responded on Tumblr with This.
"Pure Imagination" was eventually recorded by Fiona Apple (previously) but has been criticised and parodied due to its greenwashing of Chipotle’s real-life meat sources.
posted by Lanark at 12:45 PM PST - 74 comments

My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
posted by cosmic.osmo at 11:27 AM PST - 237 comments

It has been said in half-jest that Pepsi was the official soda of the Cold War. Vice President Richard Nixon shared a Pepsi with Soviet Russia's Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, at the opening of the "American National Exhibition" in Moscow on July 24, 1959, after the famous "Kitchen Debate" (CBS newscast on Archive.org; transcript with two photos from the day). But how was it that Pepsi was the only Western soda-pop available there that day? Look to Donald Kendall, a long-time pal of Richard Nixon, who starting out in 1947 selling fountain syrup in New York, and rose through the ranks to be President of Pepsi Cola International by 1957. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:24 AM PST - 13 comments

Nils Horner was killed on the street early this morning. Here is a short article in English from a Swedish source. [more inside]
posted by Namlit at 11:20 AM PST - 12 comments

United States Senator Dianne Feinstein Publicly Accuses C.I.A. of Spying on Congress. 'The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of improperly removing documents from computers that committee staff members had been using to complete a report on the agency’s detention program, saying the move was part of an effort to intimidate the committee.' 'Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the committee, suggested on the Senate floor that the agency had violated federal law and said the C.I.A. had undermined Congress’s constitutional right to oversee the actions of the executive branch.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 10:28 AM PST - 163 comments

Herzog Plays: Dark Souls 2 [SLYT]
posted by Fizz at 10:21 AM PST - 21 comments

From writing about Tree-Living Anarchists to a recent GQ story on Drone pilots, Matthew Power wrote "The kind of stories I've gotten to do have involved fulfilling my childhood fantasies of having an adventurous life." He had an adventurous life and brought us along with him. RIP.
posted by history is a weapon at 9:02 AM PST - 19 comments

A collection of reader 'Top Tips' from UK 'true life' magazines. [more inside]
posted by mippy at 8:55 AM PST - 39 comments

World Lite is a polemic against 'world literature' published last year in the magazine N+1. It is the latest salvo in a long-running debate about the term. M. Lynx Qualey of Arabic Literature (in English) gave a response to N+1, and so did Poorva Rajaram and Michael Griffith in Tehelka, N+1 responded to both, and the article was discussed at the Hay Festival in Dhaka. The N+1 article references Franco Moretti, who framed the contemporary version of the debate when he published Conjectures on World Literature and More Conjectures in 2000 and 2003 respectively. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus at 8:25 AM PST - 9 comments

Polyhedra and the Media - On the new polyhedra of Schein and Gayed, and mathematical journalism.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:24 AM PST - 20 comments

Vasa Real, a central Stockholm high school with special classes for Jewish pupils was covered in Nazi graffiti on Monday morning, leaving a parent in tears and fearing the rise of fascism in Europe. [more inside]
posted by three blind mice at 6:14 AM PST - 42 comments

"Margery Kempe was a self-proclaimed holy woman, visionary, mystic and medieval pilgrim. She is also unique because although she was not proficient at reading and writing, she was determined to record her visions, journeys and spiritual experiences. She dictated her book to a scribe of which only one copy survives, now housed in the British Library. Nearly everything we know about her comes from her book." -- Susan Abernethy writes about a woman we only know about because she wrote a tell-all autobiography.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:55 AM PST - 18 comments

Between Two Ferns [previously] welcomes President Barack Obama.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:39 AM PST - 129 comments

Arguably the most successful UK trade union leader of our time, the tireless Bob Crow, General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union has passed away.
posted by Mistress at 4:10 AM PST - 37 comments

"We asked twenty strangers to kiss for the first time..."
posted by disillusioned at 8:55 PM PST - 117 comments

While the UK-based FACT magazine surveys a broad range of popular music content, its regular mix series tends to focus on electronic and hip-hop. Since January, however, the website has featured three distinctive mixes that buck this general trend: Peanut Butter Wolf's 24-hour soul music mix for Valentine's day; the Wild Beasts's eclectic, short-and-sweet mix of classical, black metal, poetry, rock, and folk in support of their new album Present Tense; and Slowdive's rock-and-shoegaze mix compiling many of their inspirations in celebration of the band's reunion. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 7:12 PM PST - 6 comments

Stephen Colbert, as "Stephen Colbert" gave the closing keynote speech at the 2014 RSA Conference in San Francisco. While this speech has not been made officially available, it has been posted in its entirety to YouTube. Part 1, Part 2 [total length <20m] [warning - audience video of conference hall video screens -- content overcomes video shortcomings]
posted by hippybear at 6:23 PM PST - 24 comments

The Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, which has been in Crested Butte, CO since 1988, announced a few months ago they would be moving to Marin County, considered the birthplace of the sport. It seems like a natural move to many, but others (including many in bike forums) point out the irony of moving to an area where bike trail access has become so limited. The Angry Singlespeeder is not happy.
posted by bongo_x at 6:17 PM PST - 18 comments

Broken Stride

There's an ongoing culture war in America between fitness enthusiasts and automobiles — a quiet, persistent, and almost entirely one-sided battle that creates new casualties every day. The legal skirmish surrounding the death of Ashley Poissant reveals this stark divide. The Clinton County District Attorney and Poissant's friends insist that when an 85-year-old man with an unsafe level of alcohol in his blood and a steering wheel in his hand collides with and kills a 27-year-old woman, it is a crime, a form of homicide. Trombly's attorney says it's a horrible accident, one that the women contributed to by running at dusk on the wrong side of the road. He believes an accident, even a fatal one, doesn't warrant sending an octogenarian to a New York state penitentiary.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:13 PM PST - 94 comments

DIY model rocket builders do it (YT) Just searching for cool things (COOL!) people do that I'd like to try.... Prev on the Blue... Steve Eves launched a 1:10 scale Saturn V.
Of course you can get just a lil creepy with this sort of thing.
then again...be a 12 year old already. [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 6:10 PM PST - 21 comments

2048, a tile game.
posted by grouse at 6:10 PM PST - 120 comments

Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash has developed the Foldoscope (pdf), an Origami-based paper microscope. A shave and a haircut is two bits (25 cents), the Foldoscope costs only twice that.
posted by Rob Rockets at 5:52 PM PST - 10 comments

Green Mountain plans to launch "Keurig 2.0" this fall, a new set of machines that will only interact with Green-Mountain-approved pods. For a corporation, a lease is always going to be more attractive than a sale. If they can turn owners into users, they will.
posted by latkes at 5:31 PM PST - 172 comments

Many animals, cats in particular, are graceful creatures capable of leaping high and far with remarkable precision. But sometimes they miss. (SLAnimalGIFsTumblr)
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 1:59 PM PST - 73 comments

The small town of Hampton, Florida (pop. 477), is facing disincorporation after a state audit discovered massive irregularities in its finances and records. The audit was triggered by the excessive ticketing practices linked to the town's notorious speed trap on a corridor of U.S. 301. As The New York Times reports, between 2011 and 2012 the Hampton police (many of whom were essentially irregular volunteers) issued 12,698 speeding tickets to motorists on the 301 corridor. [more inside]
posted by kewb at 1:44 PM PST - 68 comments

Arms Wide Open. Inside Rio's iconic statue of Cristo Redentor.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:35 PM PST - 19 comments

RC Subaru WRX STi versus many many stick bombs. Perhaps I'm easily impressed but they brought out a lot of very nice equipment to do this shoot.
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 1:31 PM PST - 20 comments

9 Steps For Dating Like a Cowardly Drone
posted by The Whelk at 1:05 PM PST - 94 comments

Rails-to-Trails Essentially Told To Take A Hike

"For all I know, there is some right of way that goes through people's houses, you know," Justice Stephen Breyer said, "and all of a sudden, they are going to be living in their house and suddenly a bicycle will run through it."

The Supreme Court struck a decisive (8-1) blow against rails-to-trails programs today with its ruling on Marvin Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States. [more inside]
posted by entropicamericana at 12:37 PM PST - 93 comments

Why flying 'Internet drones' over Africa is a dumb, libertarian fantasy
posted by infini at 12:13 PM PST - 48 comments

The Waboba ("WAter BOuncing BAll"), has attracted all sorts of fans since it went into production over five years ago. Now it can count one more: The U.S. Navy.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:02 PM PST - 13 comments

In February 2008, Yehia Gad sequenced Tutankhamun's genes in front of a documentary crew from the Discovery Channel. Jo Marchant writes about the previous work studying his tomb and remians and the unfortunate timing of the last study. (King Tut Previously) [more inside]
posted by Hactar at 11:23 AM PST - 12 comments

Why we find some languages more beautiful than others.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:10 AM PST - 95 comments

In San Francisco, a homeowner gave his house a Twitter account that posts an update when there is unanticipated movement on the first floor, and welcomes him home. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 9:40 AM PST - 47 comments

"Armed with Science," is a new science-focused TV show developed by two of the Department of Defense's in-house research laboratories and the Pentagon. They have always developed some crazy tech work, like perception tests on their robots. If Skynet is going to be real, I think these are the agencies that will put the terminators online.
posted by nealrodriguez at 8:59 AM PST - 4 comments

Photojournal of Spain's new squatters: families, young professionals, degree-holders, single mothers, the elderly. "I have grandchildren," she says. "When I die I would like to be able to say to myself that they will have jobs, homes and a happy life. The corralas are important. They set an example to people who are struggling. They show that we can help ourselves and each other. I don't know what the future will hold for any of us, but one way or another I believe that this will be a successful fight. I have to, otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep at night." [more inside]
posted by alon at 8:48 AM PST - 11 comments

Why Gay Men Still Love "The Golden Girls" (SLBuzzfeed)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:30 AM PST - 51 comments

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the classic Infocom text adventure based on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." To celebrate, BBC has put up a "spit and polish" refresh of the game, playable in your browser. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 6:43 AM PST - 81 comments

Pour out a little Chinaco

The godfather of liberal bloggers, Terry R. Coppage, aka Bartcop, passed away last Wednesday.

Bartcop was a snarky, no-holds barred, riotous – at times mean-spirited, but never untruthful – oasis of hilarity and vitriol, where politicians and a compliant media were called out for their bullshit. Along with Media Whores Online (‘The Horse”), no journalist was ever again safe from having their stories fact-checked online and then held up to ridicule.

Bartcop was the brainchild of Terry R. Coppage, based out of his beloved and sometimes mocked Tulsa, Oklahoma home. Terry was fearless in a way that other media critics couldn’t be for a simple reason: he wasn’t angling to move up the fawning beltway food chain with a guest spot at The Washington Post. He didn’t pull punches and he called bullshit for what it was: “bullshit.”

The site was crude, the graphics sometimes even cruder (I have a special place in my heart for his animated gif of Tim Russert repeating “Clinton’s cock” over and over and over again), but most importantly it dispensed with the niceties with a wicked grin with a well-placed deflating shiv between the ribs.
posted by sensate at 5:26 AM PST - 25 comments

The fascinating thing about the sexist Dutch slur kenau -- aimed at women deemed too aggressive or bossy -- is that it originated as the given name of a heroine of the Eighty Years War, Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer who during the 1573 Siege of Haarlem led a monstrous regiment of women in defence of her home town against the Spanish oppressor. Last week a movie was released retelling her legend, which prompted the Haarlem Frans Hals Museum to create a short documentary about her, Kenau: heroine or harridan, looking at the historical truth of Kenau Hasselaer's life, which has been subtitled in English.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:36 AM PST - 19 comments

“The good news is that there are solutions. The weakness of mass surveillance is that it can very easily be made much more expensive through changes in technical standards: pervasive end-to-end encryption can quickly make indiscriminate surveillance impossible on a cost-effective basis. The result is that governments are likely to fall back to traditional, targeted surveillance founded upon an individualized suspicion. Governments cannot risk the discovery of their exploits by simply throwing attacks at every “endpoint,” or computer processor on the end of a network connection, in the world. Mass surveillance, passive surveillance, relies upon unencrypted or weakly encrypted communications at the global network level.”

Edward Snowden submits written testimony to an EU committee investigating mass surveillance, and answers questions. The testimony takes place 3 days ahead of his highly anticipated SXSW appearance, to take place later today. Snowden is expected to speak about privacy, security, mass surveillance programs, free speech and whistle-blowing in a rare remote video appearance before a live audience.
Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo finds this “deeply troubling” in a letter he's sent to the organizers of the conference.

Meanwhile, people who wish to #asksnowden questions can use the hashtag on Twitter. The talk is to take place at 12pm PT, today.
posted by fantodstic at 3:32 AM PST - 88 comments

Postal History Corner: Canadian Postal and Philatelic History is chock full of fascinating information and high quality images and has been doing so for four years. [more inside]
posted by Mizu at 3:10 AM PST - 4 comments

Adam Lanza's father, Peter Lanza, speaks with the New Yorker, his first interview since the Sandy Hook shootings.
posted by skycrashesdown at 9:36 PM PST - 104 comments

Charlene deGuzman and Miles Crawford settle that age-old question, "What should we eat?" With drums.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 8:41 PM PST - 10 comments

Stream or download songs from 100 of the bands at the SXSW Festival.
posted by Sebmojo at 8:08 PM PST - 13 comments

A catalog of places that used to be a Pizza Hut. The iconic "Red Roof" design was the subject of a recent episode of 99% Invisible (previously).
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:21 PM PST - 73 comments

So, your boat - the MS Pride of Calais or Ostend Spirit - is off to be scrapped. How do you park it at the scrap yard; delicately and gently? Maybe not.
posted by Wordshore at 6:49 PM PST - 34 comments

Woman exits elevator on her 60th birthday and is given a lovely surprise. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus at 6:10 PM PST - 26 comments

Inside The One-Man Intelligence Unit That Exposed The Secrets And Atrocities Of Syria's War

He had no formal intelligence training or security clearance that gave him access to classified documents. He could not speak or read Arabic. He had never set foot in the Middle East, unless you count the time he changed planes in Dubai en route to Manila, or his trip to visit his in-laws in Turkey. Yet in the 18 months since Higgins had begun blogging about Syria, his barebones site, Brown Moses [previously], had become the foremost source of information on the weapons used in Syria's deadly war. Using nothing more sophisticated than an Asus laptop, he had uncovered evidence of weapons imported into Syria from Iran. He had been the first person to identify widely-banned cluster bombs deployed by Syrian forces. By The New York Times' own admission, his findings had offered a key tip that helped the newspaper prove that Saudi Arabia had funneled arms to opposition fighters in Syria.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:05 PM PST - 12 comments

POINT: Getting Ready For MLS? Allow Us To Convince You Otherwise COUNTERPOINT:Reading Deadspin? Allow A Former MLS Player To Convince You Otherwise
posted by josher71 at 3:57 PM PST - 68 comments

Milk products and production relationships. An elaborate, color-coded Wikipedia diagram showing both common pathways such as raw milk to cream to butter, and more esoteric pathways to products such as quark, pasta filata, and schmand.
posted by grouse at 3:46 PM PST - 31 comments

"In 1986, Californian legislators created the State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility... [Its] final report became a the foundational works of the self-esteem movement. It concluded that:

"Self-esteem is the likeliest candidate for a social vaccine, something that empowers us to live responsibly and that inoculates us against the lures of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic welfare dependency and educational failure. The lack of self-esteem is central to most personal and social ills plaguing our state and nation as we approach the end of the 20th century."

Is the relentless pursuit of self-esteem really all cracked up to be? The man who destroyed America's ego tells the story of social psychologist Roy Baumeister, and how his efforts have shed light on some of the core tenets of the self-esteem movement. (via) [more inside]
posted by tybeet at 3:33 PM PST - 48 comments

In its constant endeavor to identify emerging trends, the New York Times has uncovered a boom in monocle wearing... again. But they're not the only ones ever to be manipulated by the Monacle Lobby. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:57 PM PST - 48 comments

Are you a fan of inventive, black-humored sci-fi/fantasy animation? Desperate to fill the Futurama-shaped hole in your heart? Look no further than Rick and Morty, the superb new Adult Swim series from animator Justin "Lemongrab" Roiland and Community darling Dan Harmon. Inspired by a (terrible and very NSFW) Back To The Future knock-off, the show pairs a naïve young teen (Morty) with his cynical, alcoholic, mad scientist grandfather (Rick), each episode exploring a trope -- dreams, aliens, innerspace, parallel universes, virtual reality -- and turning it inside-out with intricate plotting, eye-catching art, and dark, whipsmart humor (with plenty of improvisation along the way). A ratings hit already secured for a second season, the show returns from an Olympics-induced hiatus tomorrow -- in the meantime, why not sample the six episodes aired so far: Pilot - Lawnmower Dog - Anatomy Park - M. Night Shaym-Aliens! - Meeseeks and Destroy - Rick Potion #9. Want more? Promo/highlight reel - AV Club reviews - TVTropes - Reddit - Rick & Morty ComicCon panel - Storyboard Test - Soundtrack samples - Play the "Rushed Licensed Adventure" point-and-click game
posted by Rhaomi at 2:20 PM PST - 82 comments

Finite time blowup for an averaged three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation - "[Terence Tao] has shown that in an alternative abstract universe closely related to the one described by the Navier-Stokes equations, it is possible for a body of fluid to form a sort of computer, which can build a self-replicating fluid robot that, like the Cat in the Hat, keeps transferring its energy to smaller and smaller copies of itself until the fluid 'blows up.' " [1,2,3] (previously)
posted by kliuless at 1:49 PM PST - 15 comments

Previously on the blue. Raphael Pirker, a.k.a. "Trappy" was the first person ever to to fined by the FAA for the commercial operation of a drone. However, instead of paying up, Pirker decided to contest the ruling with a little pro bono legal help. Last Thursday evening, the judge issued his ruling. The judge dismissed the FAA's case, agreeing with the defense that since the FAA never created any legally binding rules for small drones to begin with, they cannot now apply rules that would be used for a pilot flying a full size manned aircraft to drone operators. For now, the ruling means that commercial operation of SUAS in the United States is, basically, legal. Within 24 hours of the ruling, the FAA appealed the case to entire board of the NTSB. SUAS experimenters who have been waiting in the wings are pleased with the ruling.
posted by smoothvirus at 1:42 PM PST - 13 comments

7 Visionary Women Who Paved The Way For Electronic Music
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:12 PM PST - 48 comments

Cultural production of ignorance provides rich field for study. 'Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world's leading experts in agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It's a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities.' [LATimes link, use privacy setting in browser for access] [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 12:59 PM PST - 20 comments

David Wasting Paper queries 200+ illustrators, comic book, strip, gag, and editorial cartoonists on their trade, tools, favorite things, and more in his compulsively readable Cartoonist Survey(s) [more inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:59 AM PST - 3 comments

“It isn’t just the crazy cat ladies, although they’re there in droves. It’s the six year-olds chanting the name of their favourite cats. It’s the hipsters there smoking cigarettes, hip-hop dudes, country dudes… It is the kind of thing where you have to learn to make everybody happy,”
posted by jason's_planet at 9:57 AM PST - 6 comments

After the success of releasing the television pilot for Battlestar Galactica in movie theaters (in Sensurround) in 1978, Universal Pictures decided on a theatrical release for it's other science fiction TV series: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. The film version of the pilot was essentially the same as what later appeared on NBC... except with a very different style of opening credits and theme song.
posted by jca at 9:14 AM PST - 81 comments

The Sun's page 3 has been featuring nude women since the 1970s. Last week the British newspaper teamed up with CoppaFeel, a young charity for breast cancer awareness, to inspire women to touch their own breasts. The headline reads "Page 3 v breast cancer", next to a model in a pair of underpants who barely covers her breasts. Readers are encouraged to ‘Check ‘Em Tuesday’ and post pics on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with the hashtag #checkemtuesday.

While some applaud the newspaper for putting an important women’s health issue on the front page, others are against the sexist representation of women and concerned it could trivialize breast cancer.

Not only due to the titillating images on page 3, The Sun's readership is still mostly male. So does this campaign exist for women?
posted by travelwithcats at 8:29 AM PST - 53 comments

Each week for a year, the folks in the special collections library at the University of St. Andrews are taking a how-to book from the collection and following its instructions for a project, in order to get a clearer sense of what life was like a century or two ago. Thus far in 52 Weeks of Historical How-Tos, they've learned how to make shoe polish like an 1825 footman, bake mince pie from 10 different recipes dating from 1710-1862, perform parlour tricks to amaze your friends, and take photographs via the wet collodion process.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:57 AM PST - 10 comments

Behind the scenes of Cuba Gooding's 1996 Oscar acceptance speech As the director calls the shots from inside the TV truck, Cuba corpses. Cue music. And then...
posted by sweet mister at 5:43 AM PST - 58 comments

Deathigner is an animated, charming look at how mortality personalities learn to do what they do.
posted by mikurski at 10:25 PM PST - 12 comments

Chris Lilley is an Australian comedian, television producer, actor, musician and writer, who got his major start as the drama teacher, Mr. G., in the sketch comedy series Big Bite. The series ended after one season, and Lilley went on to create four subsequent mocumentary-style series, We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year, Summer Heights High, Angry Boys, and most recently Ja'mie: Private School Girl. Each show consists of primary characters all played by Lilley, ranging from a 47 year old woman with skeletal dysplasia, a 13-year-old school boy with a Tongan accent (NSFW language), a 24 year-old African American rap artist from Los Angeles (NSFW language), and a 16 year old girl from a grammar school, to name a few. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:34 PM PST - 32 comments

You may be familiar with the 'business cat' memes I Should Buy A Boat Cat (aka Sophisticated Cat) and Business Cat (see also). And perhaps you followed Matthew Inman's workplace adventures of the Bobcats at The Oatmeal. More recently, Tom Fonder at Happy Jar has been developing a subset of comics centered on his own version of a cat who also happens to be a CEO. So far: Coffee; Briefcase; Pay Rise; Poster; and Fight and Flight.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 8:04 PM PST - 34 comments

What happens to our financial safety net when we are already renting out our couches, giving rides after work, and running tasks on the weekends just to stay afloat?
posted by latkes at 7:25 PM PST - 76 comments

Jamestown Baloos (1957) [SLYT] by Robert Breer [PDF] (previously) "is a frenetic, three-part stop-motion animation that features an army of everyday forms and figures — geometric shapes, a piece of string, newspaper clips, a pin-up girl, even Napoleon Bonaparte — flashing across the screen. Placed in increasingly compromised situations and choreographed to a jingoistic tune, the figures essentially become puppets of their former selves. Such unrelenting visuals recall not only Fernand Léger’s early experimental film, Ballet Mécanique (1924), as Breer himself has mentioned, but also early twentieth-century Dadaist collage. Dada artists like Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch created witty, unapologetic works that reflected the chaos and violence of modern existence. Jamestown Baloos serves, as their works did, as a pointed indictment on the absurdity of war."
posted by Room 641-A at 7:23 PM PST - 2 comments

In Defense of Talking Funny: an examination of dialects and how people deal with them.
posted by flatluigi at 6:41 PM PST - 60 comments

Yeah, it sucks that we're losing an hour tonight. But it could be worse. We could be losing eleven days.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:26 PM PST - 28 comments

The Identity Project "seeks to explore the labels we choose to identify with when defining our gender and sexuality." Accompanying each portrait are words the subjects prefer to use to describe themselves -- "Boi," "Provocateur Lesbian Dandy," "Queer Femme Beefcake," "Gold Star Gay Wife," "Gay Masculine of Center," "Lezzer Queer Bossy Mama," "Inbetweener," "Legally Married." By San Francisco photographer Sarah Deragon. [more inside]
posted by Narrative Priorities at 5:31 PM PST - 55 comments

We can't create Jurassic Park era (yet) but there is a place on Earth lost to time, a modern proxy of the Pleistocene (35,000 to 12,000 years ago). Other than the mammoth and a few other species, the flora and fauna remain largely unchanged, even the climate is similar to the last ice age (cold and dry). There are wild horses, reindeer, saiga antelopes, argali sheep, wolverines and snow leopards. The Altai and Sayan mountains of western Mongolia and southern Russia (map)... [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 5:12 PM PST - 2 comments

Space Replay is a floating black sphere that follows people around and plays back ambient sounds it has recorded. It was designed and built by Francesco Tacchini, Will Yates-Johnson and Julinka Ebhardt.
posted by Kattullus at 4:05 PM PST - 35 comments

The Almighty Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Order Flow Chart by TrekBBS members Thrawn and 8of5 is an optional but relatively complete guide to the modern continuity in Star Trek novels, including "relaunch" titles and crossover series. [Via.] [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:50 PM PST - 15 comments

Today, March 8, is International Women's Day, a day to celebrate the social, political and economic achievements of women, and focus attention on areas still needing action. In the run-up to the event, Reuters photographers in countries around the globe took a series of portraits of women and their daughters. They asked each mother what her profession was, at what age she had finished education, and what she wanted her daughter to become when she grew up. They also asked each daughter at what age she would finish education and what she wanted to do in the future. (SLAtlantic)
posted by capricorn at 1:52 PM PST - 11 comments

Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie - "The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion, with a watermelon soon to follow—aren't genetically modified at all. Monsanto created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn't mean they are low tech, exactly. Stark's division is drawing on Monsanto's accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods ick factor." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:34 PM PST - 52 comments

The Men of Atalissa
PBS's POV collaborates with the New York Times on a 35-minute documentary about the intellectually disabled men exploited for thirty-five years by Henry's Turkey Service in Atalissa, Iowa. (The documentary at the NYT or embedded in a Q&A with the journalists at PBS's POV.) [more inside]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:11 PM PST - 11 comments

After 12 years of anticipation, the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere is ready for its close-up. How 10,000 workers lifted 104 floors, gave new life to an international symbol and created one spectacular view.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:10 PM PST - 47 comments

This site has the aim of encouraging a wider reading of all types of literature, through a series of recipes inspired (directly or indirectly), by those works. It explores the ways in which descriptions of food are used to elicit meaning for a character trait, a foreign country, or social etiquette. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:38 AM PST - 6 comments

Earlier this week, the captain of a Westjet flight received a note from a passenger regarding her place in the "cockpit". At the time Westjet declined to comment, feeling no need to "lend credibility to the author of the note." In honour of today being International Women's Day, Westjet has provided a more subtle response.
posted by nubs at 11:31 AM PST - 82 comments

It turns out that fish may need bicycles after all. Or, more accurately, fish need more bicyclists, and fewer motorists. "Water pollution attributable to automobiles includes oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, antifreeze, [copper], etc." (via rootsimple.com) See also
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 11:14 AM PST - 4 comments

Grime numbers station, by Autodespair. [more inside]
posted by avocet at 10:48 AM PST - 11 comments

Hip hop artist Mac Lethal recites the alphabet very fast. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 10:30 AM PST - 13 comments

Britain will betray the United States and Ukraine to keep laundering dirty Russian money. "The city has changed. The buses are still dirty, the people are still passive-aggressive, but something about London has changed. You can see signs of it everywhere. The townhouses in the capital’s poshest districts are empty; they have been sold to Russian oligarchs and Qatari princes."
posted by four panels at 10:23 AM PST - 64 comments

So, what's it like to go to the Oscars with Jennifer Lawrence?
posted by The Whelk at 10:03 AM PST - 96 comments

Melee combat enthusiasts rejoice! Cold Steel (previously) are back with a whole bunch of new videos showing off their newest armaments. The more exotic selections include the Battle Star, the Boomerang, the Viking Axe, the Grosse Messer, the Sergeant's Halberd, the War Hammer, the War Club, the Sword Cane, and a brand new video for the beloved Two Handed Great Sword. (WARNING: Pig carcass butchery and tactical dummies full of blood ahead.) [more inside]
posted by griphus at 8:40 AM PST - 66 comments

Talking gender to Africa

International donors have sought to improve the social, political and economic position of women in Africa through an approach known as “gender”. This donor-driven strategy is failing. The jargon of gender programmes is ambiguous and easily misunderstood. It fosters inaction and lip service on the part of patriarchal African governments and civil servants. Gender has become the preserve of the educated elite. The voices of African women have been lost.

[more inside]
posted by infini at 8:32 AM PST - 6 comments

Time In Motion are GIFs of the previous Time Is A Dimension by Fong Qi Wei. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:29 AM PST - 1 comment

The Teaching of Arithmetic: The Story of an experiment. In the fall of 1929 I made up my mind to try the experiment of abandoning all formal instruction in arithmetic below the seventh grade and concentrating on teaching the children to read, to reason, and to recite - my new Three R's. And by reciting I did not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or of the textbook. I meant speaking the English language. I picked out five rooms - three third grades, one combining the third and fourth grades, and one fifth grade. I asked the teachers if they would be willing to try the experiment.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:55 AM PST - 18 comments

Jean Bon-Bon is a very sad guy in pursuit of cookies on the streets of Paris. Les Mousserables is a Sesame Street parody which explores the many emotions which a powerful musical can create.
posted by hippybear at 7:52 AM PST - 6 comments

Nike's 23-Year Journey to make McFly's Shoes Real [more inside]
posted by Elementary Penguin at 6:39 AM PST - 26 comments

Artist Jesse Krimes created a 39 panel allegorical mural while incarcerated in a federal prison in Butner, NC. The multi media piece is made primarily from prison bedsheets and photos from the NY Times. A little more about Krimes.
posted by mygothlaundry at 4:41 AM PST - 16 comments

Glasgow graffiti artist Rogue One casts some new light on a dark and dank local underpass. [more inside]
posted by Caskeum at 4:32 AM PST - 14 comments

"Geek Love touched a nerve at the beginning of the ’90s, as grunge rock poured from the Pacific Northwest and independent movies like Reservoir Dogs (1992), Clerks (1994), Kids (1995), and Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) flourished. In the same way that punk and grunge felt real—not like slick stadium rock, big-budget studio movies, hokey scripted TV—Geek Love achieved a fresh kind of authenticity. The Binewskis felt real, even as their lives and their story were fantastical. There was something about the idea of a freak show, an entertainment that hadn’t thrived in American culture for generations, which felt just right in the early ’90s."
posted by R. Schlock at 4:30 AM PST - 27 comments

Poetry Everywhere , produced by WGBH, in cooperation with the Poetry Foundation, presents videos of poetry being read, often by the author. And, if you want to introduce a child to poetry, don't miss the animated films made by students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (there even seems to be one written and animated especially for MetaFilter, Spacebar)
posted by HuronBob at 2:58 AM PST - 2 comments

The Equipping and Handling
Vessels
UNDER SAIL OR STEAM. [more inside]
posted by vapidave at 1:14 AM PST - 9 comments

"I want to make fictional worlds, inhabited by large robots and machines, all over the Google campus" Google has recently shown a great deal of interest in robots, snapping up companies right and left. Mark Pauline, a noted expert in the field, offers his services to the search behemoth.
posted by mecran01 at 8:50 PM PST - 27 comments

Malaysia Airlines MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is missing.

Flight MH370, operated on the B777-200 aircraft, departed Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am on 8 March 2014. MH370 was expected to land in Beijing at 6.30am the same day. The flight was carrying a total number of 227 passengers (including 2 infants), 12 crew members.

Rumors that the plane has landed in Nanning, China are debunked. Chinese media had originally reported Vietnamese officials saying they've picked up a signal, but this has also been refuted. There has been no contact nor distress signals, and the case is especially puzzling as the plane lost contact at the safest moment of the flight. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 8:48 PM PST - 1881 comments

I've seen a lot of great bands play public transportation, and TOO MANY ZOOZ is the cream of the crop.
posted by Lutoslawski at 8:40 PM PST - 13 comments

Six Degrees Records is a record label based in San Francisco that represents a range of "world music" sounds. You can dig into their discography through official mixes from the label or the usual array of samplers on Soundcloud, or listen to a ton of complete albums from 17 artists and groups on Bandcamp, from Malian guitarist and singer Vieux Farka Touré to the man who made the label, Karsh Kale, who is considered one of the pioneering figures in defining the Asian Underground genre, to the Brazilian singer/songwriter, Céu and the Iranian singer and musician, Azam Ali. If this is all too overwhelming, just grab the free 10-track sampler.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:48 PM PST - 8 comments

Here's what Jurassic Park would look like if the raptors were cats.
posted by codacorolla at 5:58 PM PST - 34 comments

Exactly what it says on the tin -- 40 Worst Book Covers and Titles Ever These things have got to be real, no one could ever dream this stuff up. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 5:56 PM PST - 65 comments

Comedian Aziz Ansari has posted a subreddit asking for relationship and dating experiences. Ansari and NYU professor Eric Klinenberg are using the subreddit as part of their research for a new book on modern romance in the US and elsewhere. [more inside]
posted by sweetkid at 5:50 PM PST - 27 comments

Concept artist and animator Lindsey Olivares has been seized by a vision. A vision of chicken telenovelas. (scroll past all the chicken pics and sketches for part 1). Part 2, with even more dazzling drawing and hand-lettering. Also be sure to enjoy her gif moments with Nana (or with bicycle) and her lovely student film.
posted by Erasmouse at 4:13 PM PST - 6 comments

MEG - PRECIOUS is a music video. Enjoy.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:00 PM PST - 4 comments

At three, Ron Suskind's son, Owen, was diagnosed with regressive autism and all but lost his speech. A year later, watching Disney's The Little Mermaid, Owen's parents heard him speak again. Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney. (SLNYTimes Magazine, with video) [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:29 PM PST - 19 comments

Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister were the victims of medical and genetic experiments at the hands of Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. She recently did an AMA on Reddit.
posted by gman at 2:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Mental health problems are on the rise among UK academics amid the pressures of greater job insecurity, constant demand for results and an increasingly marketised higher education system. [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 2:00 PM PST - 21 comments

SCENE I.
An Anti-Chamber in the Palace.
Enter RIGDUM-FUNNIDOS and ALDIBORONTIPHOSCOPHORNIO, courtiers.

Rigdum-Funnidos: Aldiborontiphoscophornio!
Where left you Chrononhotonthologos? [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 1:19 PM PST - 12 comments

Catch the Throne (soundcloud) is a Game of Thrones-inspired mixtape featuring Big Boi, Common, Wale, and others. [more inside]
posted by OverlappingElvis at 11:53 AM PST - 28 comments

“Broad City” and the rise of the female stoner [more inside]
posted by mysticreferee at 11:02 AM PST - 35 comments

Spring Fashion Preview, by Hannibal Burres and friends on Funny or Die's new humor "magazine", The Occasional.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:23 AM PST - 26 comments

Sea Turtles' "Lost Years" Transatlantic Journey Mapped for First Time "Researchers' stick-to-it-iveness, along with advice from a manicurist lead to radio tags that tracked baby loggerheads across the Atlantic (full paper) without hindering them"
posted by dhruva at 10:14 AM PST - 8 comments

Photos from a Surrealist Ball at Château de Ferrières, one of the Rothschild family’s gigantic mansions. There is no such thing as the Illuminati.
posted by philip-random at 9:55 AM PST - 75 comments

A police officer forcibly escorted Baltimore Sun photo editor Chris Assaf away from the scene of a police-involved shooting on Feb. 21. He had been taking pictures from outside the police lines, but an officer told him he had to move back further. Assaf protested, stating he was within his First Amendment rights to be where he was standing. Another officer then forced him to move. The Sun is posting all of Assaf’s images from the shooting scene as well as photos taken by Sun photographer Lloyd Fox, who witnessed and documented the incident. Lt. Eric Kowalczk, the chief spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, said the department has opened an internal investigation into the allegation. He declined to comment more specifically on the incident, “because we have an investigation and we don’t want to prejudice that.” (contains some mildly graphic pictures in both links)
posted by josher71 at 9:49 AM PST - 112 comments

Debo Adegbile was selected by President Obama to be assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The Senate, aided and abetted by seven Democratic senators, killed his nomination. Why? Because he’s fought for civil rights.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:21 AM PST - 48 comments

A montage of famous witches set to Eartha Kitt
posted by The Whelk at 9:10 AM PST - 9 comments

mini subway game alpha
posted by garlic at 8:28 AM PST - 89 comments

Victor Vasquez knows NYC commuting can be depressing. As he says, “Standing under someone’s armpit, you just want to get home.” The MTA conductor livens things up with his unscripted announcements on the 1 train.
posted by mlle valentine at 8:19 AM PST - 39 comments

The Invention Of The AeroPress

There’s really nothing bad to say about the device other than the fact that it’s a funny-looking plastic thingy. Then again, its inventor, Stanford professor Alan Adler, is a world renowned inventor of funny-looking plastic thingies; while Adler’s Palo Alto based company Aerobie is best known today for its coffee makers, the firm rose to prominence in the 1980s for its world-record-setting flying discs. This is the story of how Adler and Aerobie dispelled the notion of industry-specific limitations and found immense success in two disparate industries: toys and coffee.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:15 AM PST - 95 comments

Six Miles Out
posted by anastasiav at 7:59 AM PST - 25 comments

Cosmos, Carl Sagan's short lived television science program from 1980 was a groundbreaking triumph and firmly established Sagan as a household name. [more inside]
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:58 AM PST - 97 comments

If you've time to spare, the Unusual Locomotives page is a good index for your perusal. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 7:38 AM PST - 12 comments

PowerPointless
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:36 AM PST - 34 comments

Quite unlike many similar Wikipedia entries, the Russian Jokes, Russian Political Jokes and Jewish humor articles are treasure troves of actual jokes and anekdoty.
posted by griphus at 7:30 AM PST - 33 comments

Succulent cupcakes that look like succulents. And how to make your own!
posted by moonmilk at 7:08 AM PST - 25 comments

With this song, 2 Live Crew basically took the distinctive bass riff from the original Orbison song and changed the lyrics in true Crew style. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. is probably the seminal case for the modern application of the fair use doctrine. The lightning rod was 2 Live Crew and their allegedly parodic use of the "Pretty Woman" song. Instead of dismissing the Crew's claim on the basis that they had used the appropriated material for commercial gain, the court looked at the other factors of permissible fair use and determined that parody was indeed protected fair use, even though the perpetrators gained financially. [more inside]
posted by three blind mice at 6:09 AM PST - 17 comments

Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Hugh Bonneville and musical guest Paloma Faith were recently on The Graham Norton Show. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. This may possibly be the best episode of this or any talk show that will ever exist.
posted by hippybear at 9:09 PM PST - 51 comments

A short and sweet 10-minute documentary on musician and artist Daniel Johnston. [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 9:06 PM PST - 12 comments

While you can still follow live events in the Ukraine, with either the compulsively complete live Reddit feed or the constantly updated BBC feed being good choices, there has been increasingly useful analyses of the history and politics of the situation. Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on the region, wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books describing the roots of the recent uprising, with a great overview of how "people associated with Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Polish, and Jewish culture have died in a revolution that was started by a Muslim." Other history is provided by a detailed explainer by the Guardian, in maps by National Geographic, and the dueling arguments about the roots of the conflict from the the semi-official Russia Today and the US State Department.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:37 PM PST - 467 comments

"Certainly, there appears to be a large correlation between artists and depression. But I would argue that artistic expression is not a symptom of depression so much as a response to it. I see writing as an act of resistance against an occupying enemy who means to kill me. It’s why I’m writing this now." YA author Libba Bray on living with depression.
posted by changeling at 7:04 PM PST - 15 comments

Artist Paul Hanley illustrated a 58 figure all-Doctor canonicity-be-damned "Who's Who?" of sorts titled "The Infinite Doctor" 53 men, 4 women, all Doctor. Alternate annotated version.
posted by mediocre at 6:38 PM PST - 13 comments

Last Day for Last Abortion Clinic in the Rio Grande. “Honestly, I think they’ll go south of the border, if they have to,” said a 23-year-old woman who was one of the last patients to be seen at the clinic and who traveled to San Antonio for her abortion last month. “It’s cheaper and it’s closer. To go to San Antonio is so much more of a hassle and costs a lot more.”
posted by four panels at 5:55 PM PST - 81 comments

Coach Dean Smith once led the Carolina Tarheels to a record number of victories. Now, at age 83, dementia has robbed him of the memories of the victories his teams won and the players and families who he so greatly impacted. Tommy Tomlinson pens a thoughtful and elegiac article that's as much about dementia as it is about the Tarheels and the winningest coach in men's basketball* *at time of retirement.
posted by librarylis at 5:49 PM PST - 14 comments

Sean Blanda asks, "Do We Really Need Managers?" He interviews one of the founders of Treehouse, a startup company which has transitioned to a structure with no one in a traditional management role. To show that such an approach can work in the long term, Blanda refers to Gore - managerless since 1958. [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:02 PM PST - 102 comments

This book deals with the Dialect of the English Language that is spoken in Ireland. As the Life of a people—according to our motto—is pictured in their speech, our picture ought to be a good one, for two languages were concerned in it—Irish and English. ... Here for the first time—in this little volume of mine—our Anglo-Irish Dialect is subjected to detailed analysis and systematic classification.

P.W. Joyce's 1910 work, "English as We Speak it in Ireland," is a fascinating chronicle of a language's life, and no mistake. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:47 PM PST - 8 comments

Sherwin Nuland, surgeon and award-winning author who challenged idea of dignified death, has died at age 83. The son of first generation immigrants, Nuland survived a troubled childhood and succeeded in medical school only to face near-paralyzing depression, for which he was successfully treated with electroconvulsive therapy (first-person TED talk). His award-winning book, "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter", included realistic descriptions of the process of death and helped to frame the national debate on assisted suicide. [more inside]
posted by warm_planet at 3:39 PM PST - 13 comments

Hieu Nguyen, at the 2013 National Poetry Slam, on losing your language and your culture.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:25 PM PST - 19 comments

Causal link found between vitamin D, serotonin synthesis and autism in new study
posted by Evilspork at 2:20 PM PST - 91 comments

The Articulate Troll. Giant Bomb's Patrick Klepek has a long conversation with a troll. The troll was originally one of the ones featured in Klepek's article Our Internet Empathy Problem, written about the torrent of abuse aimed at Dong Nguyen for pulling Flappy Bird. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 2:09 PM PST - 31 comments

Daniel Muessig wants to be your criminal defence lawyer.
posted by alby at 1:39 PM PST - 26 comments

Three thousand years ago, more or less, a Tyrrhenian farmer was working his land when a little boy appeared before the blade of the plow, as suddenly as though he'd risen from below the ground, or had been transformed from a clod of earth. This boy, who was called Tages, had the wizened face of an old man and the gift of prophecy, and he immediately began to speak on how the future might be discovered. The twelve Etruscan peoples gathered around to listen to him and write down his teachings, from which two schools of divination would develop: haruspicy (the future read in the livers of sheep) and brontoscopy (the future read in thunder.) Translated excerpts from a brontoscopic calendar, which assigns meaning to thunder on every day of the lunar year, may be found here.
posted by Iridic at 11:55 AM PST - 42 comments

Ever since Rob Thomas’s beloved TV show Veronica Mars got canceled, he’s wanted to make it into a movie. Turns out all he needed was the help of 91,585 of his biggest fans. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:53 AM PST - 141 comments

Hammerhead shark swarm in Mozambique
posted by roaring beast at 11:36 AM PST - 20 comments

Forbes has brought forth its annual string-of-zeroes-envy/porn-list of the world's gazillionaires. Missing from the list is Eike Batista, recently the seventh wealthiest individual in the world who lost over 99% of his wealth in eighteen months and his assets are being sold off. [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:25 AM PST - 61 comments

“Maybe stop trying so hard to find shortcuts to “hack” your life. The best things are hard. Invest in the journey. Just sayin’.”
posted by divabat at 10:14 AM PST - 53 comments

I am The Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes... I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak. So tonight, I tell you this story.... If you lived near a west coast CBS radio affiliate between May 16, 1942 and September 22, 1955, you probably heard The Whistler, or at least knew of the radio mystery series that was somewhat in the style of the better-known franchise, The Shadow. If you missed it, you can catch up on Archive.org, with selections from 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951 and '52, or browse through a collection of 502 episodes. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:00 AM PST - 16 comments

On March 7th, 2014, Star Wars: The Clone Wars series comes to a close with the release on Netflix of the Lost Missions, 13 final episodes that represent a shortened season 6. Hyping the release is a nearly three minute long trailer which reveals, among other things, foreshadowing of Order 66, the secret order to eliminate the Jedi programmed into the clone army, and of force ghosts, among trying to help tie the prequel films together. [more inside]
posted by Atreides at 9:49 AM PST - 54 comments

Conducting is the art of directing a musical performance by way of visible gestures. (Wiki). Case in point (SLYT)
posted by growabrain at 9:21 AM PST - 9 comments

NASA's 2015 budget request has been released (PDF, OMB Summary), with an interesting mission study : $15 million to look at a unmanned mission to Jupiter's moon Europa. Why Europa? It may have more water than Earth, sloshing around under a thick ice, which makes it a major contender for harboring life. Don't get too excited just yet though. The mission would't launch until around 2025 and would arrive in Jupiter's orbit in the early 2030s. That's a long way off, but a particular US Congressman really wants this mission to happen.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:47 AM PST - 69 comments

11 French Tourist Tips For Visiting America. Tips For Russians. Tips For Japanese Visitors.
posted by The Whelk at 8:37 AM PST - 162 comments

Inside the new arms race to control bandwidth on the battlefield [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:10 AM PST - 23 comments

"On Monday, veteran Washington Post editor and New Yorker contributor Marc Fisher published a deeply reported, scrupulous Columbia Journalism Review cover story on how the Internet’s metabolism and economy [including instant-headline video start-up NowThisNews], which places a premium on being first to a story and on attracting clicks, has led to compromises when it comes to the whole accuracy thing. As if on cue, a fun news story has been making the rounds in the past few days: A survey found that 11 percent of Americans believe that "HTML" is a sexually transmitted disease. Other findings included that 20 percent believe a "motherboard" is a cruise-ship deck and 15 percent believe "software" is a type of clothing. The survey itself... may not exist." -- TNR on the Circular Fact Checking ecosystem of online news reporting.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:27 AM PST - 38 comments

Administrator Hiring Drove 28% Boom in Higher-Ed Work Force, Report Says The report, "Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive: Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education," says that new administrative positions—particularly in student services—drove a 28-percent expansion of the higher-ed work force from 2000 to 2012...What’s more, the report says, the number of full-time faculty and staff members per professional or managerial administrator has declined 40 percent, to around 2.5 to 1. Full-time faculty members also lost ground to part-time instructors (who now compose half of the instructional staff at most types of colleges)...And the kicker: You can’t blame faculty salaries for the rise in tuition. Faculty salaries were "essentially flat" from 2000 to 2012, the report says. And "we didn't see the savings that we would have expected from the shift to part-time faculty," said Donna M. Desrochers, an author of the report.
posted by mediareport at 7:16 AM PST - 86 comments

"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection." Newsweek claims to have found Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. [more inside]
posted by memebake at 6:34 AM PST - 450 comments

Who is each borough of London's best selling music act? [more inside]
posted by panaceanot at 5:05 AM PST - 29 comments

a song.... about a narcoleptic squirrel... and, for those of you with little kids, LOTS of neat songs (including "kitten sleeping in a cup", "Shark Cat" , and, my own favorite "Snow Dogs")
posted by HuronBob at 4:14 AM PST - 4 comments

Since the taxonomical work of Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs* in the early twentieth century, organologists have classified musical instruments into four major categories, each distinguished by its primary sound-producing mechanism: idiophones (vibrating body), membranophones (vibrating membrane), chordophones (vibrating strings) and aerophones (vibrating air columns). Beyond these basic divisions, scholars have proposed such logically consistent additions as electrophones (for electronic instruments) and corpophones (for the human body as a source of sound). We propose a seventh category: fictophones, for imaginary musical instruments. Existing as diagrams, drawings or written descriptions, these devices never produce a sound. Yet they are no less a part of musical culture for that. Indeed, fictophones represent an essential if hitherto unrecognized domain of musical thought and activity, and it is in order to catalog these conceptual artifacts that we have established the first institution of its kind: The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.
posted by carsonb at 10:22 PM PST - 18 comments

The new Trailer Park Boys seasons 8 and 9 will debut be on Netflix (all round, internationally). In addition, all previous seasons, the new Trailer Parks Boys 3: Don't Legalize It film (in time), and Swearnet the Movie will be available Netflix wide. Reaction to the announcement has been mixed. Particularly from those who have paid for Swearnet.com subscriptions. Mike Smith (Bubbles) responds.
posted by juiceCake at 9:58 PM PST - 33 comments

Here's a well-off gentleman with 18 cats who's transformed his home into a stunning kitty paradise.
posted by porn in the woods at 7:31 PM PST - 59 comments

Judgmental maps of cities/areas including Los Angeles (featuring “botoxed cougars in luxury condos”), Northern Virginia (including “closeted Hispanic husbands”), Richmond, VA (where one finds the “scary Walmart”), Memphis (where there are “people proud, yet ashamed, to be from Memphis"), Chattanooga (see “rich white people & gnomes”), Nashville (one part is “gentrified to a great level of inconvenience”), Phoenix, San Antonio, and “Canada, prolly.”
posted by goofyfoot at 6:40 PM PST - 115 comments

This guy is annoyed with his burrito. [SLMedium]
posted by jeoc at 5:45 PM PST - 64 comments

Coming to terms with depression and needing "the little blue pill."
posted by rcraniac at 5:41 PM PST - 30 comments

Top 20 Bubble Butts From The Toast
posted by bq at 4:34 PM PST - 33 comments

Vizify, the service which turns social data into pretty pictures, have been acquired by Yahoo. According to their announcement, "we just couldn’t say no to the opportunity to bring our vision to the hundreds of millions of people who use Yahoo every day." Vizify, operating out of Portland, was 2 years and 9 months old. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:07 PM PST - 26 comments

"The world has a sick sense of humor and throws you for a loop." (via Permatemp Corporation.) [more inside]
posted by simulacra at 3:51 PM PST - 1 comment

Pete Holmes jokes about cosmic ping-pong
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 3:28 PM PST - 12 comments

Triple Crwn Winners-3 Perfet games pitched-23 300 games bowled-50k Rick Baird notched 18 straight hole-in-one shots to record a perfect putt-putt score. In more than 50 years of sanctioned competition, it was just the third time that anyone had achieved the feat. Putt-putt is different from miniature golf. It’s played only on official courses; there are no pirate ships, no windmills, and no holes that cannot be conquered with one stroke — if you execute the perfect shot. On that day in 2011, Baird executed the perfect shot 18 times in a row [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 3:23 PM PST - 29 comments

As Gawker has done for a couple years now, they sent letters to all the U.S. death row inmates who have execution dates in the upcoming year. Texas inmate Ray Jasper, who is set to be executed later this month, responded with an incredible letter on his thoughts about the US justice system, race, Christianity, and society as a whole.
posted by gman at 3:21 PM PST - 82 comments

The Future has arrived.
posted by Fizz at 2:40 PM PST - 56 comments

Stephen Glass was a well-known journalist at The New Republic who was exposed for multiple instances of fabricating stories and lying to cover up the details (previously here and here), as well as burning a few bridges in his attempt to explain his actions. A movie was made about this, and he wrote a book. Since Glass’s fall, he has gone to law school and has been practicing as a paralegal at a Los Angeles law firm with the hopes of becoming a lawyer. He has passed the bar exams in New York and California. However, there is a required ethics review in both states before one is allowed to practice. He was already denied (informally) a license in New York, and a final decision in California was appealed to the California Supreme court, who ruled last month conclusively that Glass would not be allowed to practice law in California. Here is the 33-page ruling. [more inside]
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:55 PM PST - 68 comments

The College Board announced today that the SAT will be undergoing major changes. The announced changes include the removal of the penalty for incorrect guesses, the essay section becoming optional, and a revision of the vocabulary section. [more inside]
posted by DRoll at 1:35 PM PST - 71 comments

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel is a tediously accurate model of the Solar System that Josh Worth made to explain to his daughter just how difficult it is to go on holiday to Mars.
posted by Kattullus at 1:14 PM PST - 68 comments

The Swahili Coast and its culture in the medieval period (roughly the tenth to fifteenth centuries) is relatively little studied, compared with other cultures of its size and influence, though it represents a key node in the development of global trade before the European Age of Discovery. Its history is known in broad strokes, but less is known about how the medieval Swahili lived and how they incorporated influences—from religion to architecture—from across the Indian Ocean world. Fleisher and his codirector, Stephanie Wynne-Jones of the University of York, looked for a site that would allow them to examine such questions in detail. “We had an inkling Songo Mnara would be that site,” he says, “but it has completely exceeded our expectations. --
posted by MartinWisse at 12:43 PM PST - 9 comments

Street kids take justice into their own hands when "Bad Elmo" returns to San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. [more inside]
posted by drlith at 9:47 AM PST - 52 comments

I, Too, Am Harvard. A photo campaign highlighting the faces and voices of black students at Harvard College. 63 students participated, sharing their experiences with ignorance and racism. "Our voices often go unheard on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is questioned-- this project is our way of speaking back, of claiming this campus, of standing up to say: We are here. This place is ours. We, TOO, are Harvard." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:44 AM PST - 38 comments

At the finish of every race, she staggers and crumples. Kayla Montgomery is a a high school track star in North Carolina. Kayla Montgomery has early-onset multiple sclerosis. The two are apparently related. Because M.S. blocks nerve signals from Montgomery’s legs to her brain, particularly as her body temperature increases, she can move at steady speeds that cause other runners pain she cannot sense, creating the peculiar circumstance in which the symptoms of a disease might confer an athletic advantage.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 9:40 AM PST - 27 comments

Literature courses often examine works with grotesque, disturbing and gruesome imagery within their narratives. For instance ... “Mrs. Dalloway” paints a disturbing narrative that examines the suicidal inclinations and post-traumatic experiences of an English war veteran. By creating trigger warnings for their students, professors can help to create a safe space for their students

The "trigger warning" has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped?
posted by bhnyc at 9:24 AM PST - 280 comments

Late in 2013, Guillermo del Toro released a voluminous book, entitled Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions. As he explains in the video, the 256-page hardcover is a selection from his notebooks, where the director developed many of the monstrosities we’ve seen on screen. The Guardian notes that there’s something of da Vinci’s notebooks in del Toro’s records: the small, neat script, mixed in with the wonderfully detailed sketches, combine to give the impression of del Toro doing his best to record the torrent of his imagination before the thoughts disappear. In this post, we include a number of these images.

Previously [more inside]
posted by infini at 9:07 AM PST - 4 comments

Musician Matthew Herbert presents a half hour program for BBC Radio 4 on The Art of the Loop. (Herbert's personal contract for the creation of music.) [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 8:51 AM PST - 34 comments

A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America, powered by the repo industry
posted by shothotbot at 8:31 AM PST - 44 comments

Newspapers: still the most important medium for understanding the world
Adam Curtis: “We don't read newspapers because the journalism is so boring” [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:59 AM PST - 21 comments

Warfarin, for decades the standard of care for stroke prevention in patient with atrial fibrillation, has met its match! Novel oral anticoagulants are the new standard of care, with a favorable efficacy:safety profile compared with warfarin. And what’s more, they don’t require regular monitoring like warfarin. [more inside]
posted by Mister_A at 7:54 AM PST - 31 comments

In 1966, I started one of the world’s first computer dating services. One problem: I had no computer.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:38 AM PST - 18 comments

Neurobiologist Stephan Guyenet provides two video introductions to his intriguing hypothesis about the cause of obesity: frequently eating highly palatable processed foods (foods with high "reward" effect in the brain) alters the hypothalamus, raising the body's homeostatic set point. [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:19 AM PST - 23 comments

Joe Bell is 95 years old, and a World War II veteran. He wears his uniform to the senior center on Veterans Day or to meet with other vets. This past weekend, he put on his uniform to cheer on runners in a race that benefits the foundation for fallen Army Ranger Pat Tillman. His neighbor, Julia Prodis Sulek, a reporter for the Mercury News, captured what happened next. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:18 AM PST - 15 comments

"Like a human who just went through laser vision correction, the International Space Station (ISS) recently got a clearer view of our world. That improved view is opening up new vistas for students in American classrooms." A gorgeous photo of British Columbia's snow-capped mountains was the first view delivered via the Window Observational Research Facility at the U.S. Laboratory Science Window on the International Space Station. This video explanation of the window (part 2) is hosted by three-time shuttle veteran Mario Runco.
posted by jbickers at 6:48 AM PST - 9 comments

Ai WeiWei, the Chinese contemporary artist and cultural critic, finds that imitation is the greatest form of flattery when Maximo Caminero smashes one of his installations (The art world is not impressed). Now, you too can follow in these illustrious footsteps with Ai Wei Whoops!
posted by chainsofreedom at 6:21 AM PST - 27 comments

Noam Chomsky gives a lecture at West Point on just war theory. [more inside]
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 5:22 AM PST - 9 comments

El Hielo by La Santa Cecilia [more inside]
posted by Dip Flash at 4:58 AM PST - 1 comment

Linguistic relativity is the idea that the language people use affects or even limits the way that they can think. This idea was developed in the early 20th century, and continues to be a matter of disagreement among linguists and cognitive scientists. The Cambridge and Oxford university presses are even publishing dueling upcoming books on the subject, The Bilingual Mind, which examines linguistic relativity in the context of people who speak more than one language, and The Language Hoax flatly denies that it exists.
posted by grouse at 4:25 AM PST - 50 comments

If you have been one of the thousands of tourists drawn in every day to San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, you may have been walking down past Tarantino's restaurant, taking in the tourist-trap sights, when one of the bushes on the sidewalk -- come to think of it, the only bush on the sidewalk -- suddenly jumps at you while growling. Congratulations; you are the most recent wharf-goer to fall victim to The World Famous Bushman. [more inside]
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 1:18 AM PST - 19 comments

"I wasn't drawn to Worf at first... it was just another job." A quarter century after Star Trek Next Generation closed shop, what remains? Worf, that is what. Appearing for seven seasons in Next Gen, and another four in Deep Space Nine, Michael Dorn's Worf appeared in more Star Trek episodes than any other character. Infinitely quotable , a fine singer, and handy with romantic advice, Worf was a complete badass with a bat'leth. Except when he got his ass kicked. There are rumors of a Captain Worf Star Trek show--but those rumors all seem to be started by Michael Dorn. Even though everyone thought he was wrong, his fame endures.
posted by LarryC at 12:18 AM PST - 83 comments

Victor Wooten discusses being born into a musical family in a TED talk entitled Music as a Language. In contrast, Alex Lifeson as a teenager clashes with his parents about choosing music over school in an excerpt from the documentary Come On Children.
posted by mannequito at 11:49 PM PST - 15 comments

"And let it be set down, Bob was one of the most amazing composers of the 20th century, and the greatest genius of 20th-century opera. I don’t know how long it’s going to take the world to recognize that. And it hardly matters. He knew it. That the world was too stupid to keep up was not his problem." Robert Ashley dies at 83. [more inside]
posted by roll truck roll at 10:18 PM PST - 14 comments

Fans of both Joy Division and Star Trek TNG may be amused by the imposition of the pulsar graph as Worf's ridges (as well as Peter Hook's Extraordinary Stories), but they may also be interested in reading one's man attempt to find out if the image itself is copyrighted or in the public domain.
posted by juiceCake at 9:35 PM PST - 34 comments

Just some old school ST:TNG for your Tuesday night: "The Worf of Starfleet" [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:47 PM PST - 47 comments

New Marijuana Study Says Everyone Knows You're High And You'll Likely Be Stoned Forever (SLOnion...or is it?) [more inside]
posted by zombieflanders at 6:53 PM PST - 91 comments

stetson (the horse) rolling in the snow (SLYT)
posted by griphus at 6:49 PM PST - 19 comments

Shamus Young examines the idea of "story collapse" (the moment where a story reaches a critical point of ridiculousness and causes you to question every other aspect of it) by deconstructing the Thieves Guild quest-line in Skyrim: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5. Entertaining reading for writers, designers and gamers alike.
posted by codacorolla at 6:39 PM PST - 90 comments

The drama issues from the assailability of vital, tenacious men with their share of peculiarities who are neither mired in weakness nor made of stone and who, almost inevitably, are bowed by blurred moral vision, real and imaginary culpability, conflicting allegiances, urgent desires, uncontrollable longings, unworkable love, the culprit passion, the erotic trance, rage, self-division, betrayal, drastic loss, vestiges of innocence, fits of bitterness, lunatic entanglements, consequential misjudgment, understanding overwhelmed, protracted pain, false accusation, unremitting strife, illness, exhaustion, estrangement, derangement, aging, dying and, repeatedly, inescapable harm, the rude touch of the terrible surprise — unshrinking men stunned by the life one is defenseless against, including especially history: the unforeseen that is constantly recurring as the current moment.

Philip Roth on his life as a writer.
posted by shivohum at 5:33 PM PST - 16 comments

Aitken's recent work "The Source" (2012) explores the root of creativity. Six projections in a pavilion designed by David Adjaye, cycle through many more interviews with artists, architects, and musicians such as Adjaye, Liz Diller, William Eggleston, Philippe Parreno, Paolo Soleri, Tilda Swinton, and Beck among others. Wikipedia [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 4:10 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Zombies occupy a variety of liminal spaces wherein contemporary social tensions are reflected and refracted. These tensions, however, have historical and ongoing parallels with images of "Indians." Zombies reveal societal ambivalence about race, class, gender, ethnicity, political power, agency, and other aspects of social reproduction. In other words, zombies touch upon all the anxieties commonly associated with colonialism.

If you only watch one hour-long lecture on the Anthropology of Zombies today, then make it this one by Native American scholar Chad Uran.
posted by Rumple at 3:50 PM PST - 71 comments

At the conclusion of the 'In Memoriam' segment during the Oscars Sunday, viewers may have noticed a small graphic and photo identifying Sarah Jones on screen. Not a movie star, famous director or other Hollywood luminary, Sarah was an assistant cameraperson killed in a horrific on-set train accident two weeks prior. The push to have her recognized at the Oscars was driven in part by the Facebook group 'Slates for Sarah', where hundreds of production crews across the globe have posted tribute photos mourning her loss. Her death is being investigated as negligent homicide, and has spurred 'below-the-line' crew worldwide to demand greater set safety protocols.
posted by skammer at 3:19 PM PST - 118 comments

Lip Flip with Jiimmy Fallon & Tina Fey: After Tina expresses interest in interviewing herself, she and Jimmy swap mouths for an in-depth chat that ends with a duet of Endless Love. [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A at 2:06 PM PST - 35 comments

Somebody put a camera on a pelican's beak & it's awesome!! (SLYT)
posted by The Blue Olly at 1:43 PM PST - 39 comments

W.H. Auden had a secret life that his closest friends knew little or nothing about. Everything about it was generous and honorable. He kept it secret because he would have been ashamed to have been praised for it. [more inside]
posted by Diablevert at 1:00 PM PST - 55 comments

Adorably perplexed kids react to rotary phones. (via Mental Floss)
posted by mireille at 12:21 PM PST - 186 comments

Last night, the synthpop band Future Islands (previously on MF) previewed their new LP performing “Seasons (Waiting On You)” on Late Show with David Letterman. Singer Samuel T. Herring’s performance is always something to behold, but his gravely shouts and epic dance moves had a particular effect on Letterman, who seemed even more jazzed than usual.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:03 PM PST - 32 comments

Creative writing professor Hanif Kureishi says such courses are 'a waste of time' [The Guardian] Buddha of Suburbia author, who teaches subject at Kingston University, added that many of his students could 'write sentences' but not tell stories.
posted by Fizz at 10:52 AM PST - 122 comments

Earlier this year Tracy Halvorsen wrote an article called Baltimore City, You're Breaking my Heart. It was received with...uh, mixed results. Now Andy, from the blog B'more Connected has looked at the article from the point of view of statistics. "I think nearly everybody can agree with the basic premise suggested by Halvorsen’s article. I will paraphrase that premise as: It is tragic and frustrating when our neighbors, friends, or coworkers are the victims of violent crimes. Violent crime is too frequent in Baltimore. Something needs to be done to decrease that crime. Beyond that, I think we see Baltimore differently."
posted by josher71 at 10:15 AM PST - 53 comments

Lifehacker: "One of the more annoying things about Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon's television streaming libraries is the vast difference between the selection available. It would be almost impossible to get a thorough idea of who has the better library without searching for hundreds of TV shows on each service and comparing them manually. So we did just that." [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 10:02 AM PST - 105 comments

Molly Lewis' (Previously: 1, 2, 3): The Year of the Beard. Starring a few familiar faces. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:20 AM PST - 5 comments

(Warning: most links contain artistic nudes) In February, Chicago curator Paul-David Young announced a gallery show featuring found, sometimes nude self portraits from an unknown artist. Claiming to not know the identity of the artist, Young romanticized the unknown origins of the photos, implied the artist was impossible to find, and drew parallels with the Vivian Maier story. After some light digging, however, Animal New York was quickly able to identify the subject as digital artist Molly Soda, who has a popular presence on YouTube and Tumblr. [more inside]
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 8:32 AM PST - 45 comments

QCF Design talks about making their game Desktop Dungeons more gender neutral. [more inside]
posted by arcolz at 8:12 AM PST - 26 comments

"I will be honest," says Muruganantham. "I would not even use it to clean my scooter." The incredible and funny story of a man who set out to change the way sanitary pads are viewed and made in India.
posted by secretdark at 8:07 AM PST - 36 comments

American electronics chain Radio Shack's dismal sales are resulting in a plan to shutter as many as 1100 of its stores. But let's look back to a happier time for the company, starting with their first catalog in 1939 and continuing through the decades: a fascinating stroll down memory lane at the Archive of Radio Shack Catalogs.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:40 AM PST - 130 comments

"There are 274,165 registered voters named Martin, making it the 181st most common name. Compared to other voters, 30.3 % have a more Democratic name than Martin. Probability that voters named Martin:
have a gun in their house: 48.1%
Attend religious services weekly: 49.6%
Have a college degree: 54.0%."
How Democratic or Republican is your first name?
posted by MartinWisse at 6:57 AM PST - 186 comments

There are many, many random numbers involved in the score for the piece. Every time I ran the C-program, it produced a new "performance".... The one we chose had that conspicuous descending tone that everybody liked. It just happened to end up real loud in that version.

James Moorer relates the rather unexpected manner in which he composed one of the one of the world's best known pieces of computer generated music: "Deep Note" from the THX trailer. [more inside]
posted by rongorongo at 5:49 AM PST - 15 comments

Discovering Free Will (Part II, Part III) - a nice discussion of the Conway-Kochen "Free Will Theorem". [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 5:25 AM PST - 92 comments

The Collected Wisdom of Bill Murray
posted by Optamystic at 3:54 AM PST - 38 comments

Why playing with algebraic and calculus concepts—rather than doing arithmetic drills—may be a better way to introduce children to math.
posted by Pudhoho at 12:23 AM PST - 65 comments

Supermassive black hole in the Perseus cluster sings only B-flat. [via science.nasa.gov] [more inside]
posted by simulacra at 11:10 PM PST - 30 comments

As England was fighting for its life against the Nazis, the British government sent its most charming spies — including Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Noël Coward and David Ogilvy — to America to blackmail, bully and cajol the U.S. into the war effort. [They were part of a] British spy ring that operated in Washington, D.C., during World War II.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:06 PM PST - 21 comments