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"The first Gallery dedicated to artists lying behind cinema, comics, video games masterpieces… and who creat [sic], to entertain, the most significant icons of our time." The gallery has previously featured exhibitions from webcomic artist Scott Campbell, H.R. Giger, propaganda-style Futurama posters, Superman penciller Tim Sale, sketches from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and filmmaker Sylvain Chomet. [more inside]
posted by kagredon at 11:52 PM PST - 5 comments

The Sex Pistols final concert @ Winterland, 1/14/78
posted by Ardiril at 8:11 PM PST - 44 comments

Los Angeles grandmother sells suicide kits to allow the elderly to "die with dignity."
posted by hermitosis at 5:59 PM PST - 92 comments

Current TV previously & previously, the media company founded by Al Gore after the 2000 election, has picked up the kinds of in depth long form journalism being rapidly dropped by major networks, but has been tantalizingly unavailable for those without cable; until now. They have been putting their Vanguard episodes up on their website and on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 4:31 PM PST - 23 comments

I asked what he had in mind, and he explained that he was taking a friend and embarking on a round-the-world trip, from the jungles of Africa to the streets of New York by way of India and Australasia, and planning to record any musicians he could find on the way into his Apple Powerbook, using it as a fully fledged multitrack recording studio. His intention thereby, he claimed, was to create a CD, DVD, and documentary film, all three of which would provide a snapshot of mankind at the turn of the new Millennium, and form a vast multimedia project designed to, as he put it, "celebrate the unity and the diversity of humanity". [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:26 PM PST - 5 comments

Andrew Norman Wilson was fired from his job at Google for investigating the working conditions of yellow badge employees misusing company equipment: [more inside]
posted by AlsoMike at 3:49 PM PST - 159 comments

The Death and Life of American Planning - Planning professor Thomas J. Campanella discusses the legacy of Jane Jacob's effect on planning in America: First: "Privileging the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise meant a loss of professional agency." Second: " It diminished the disciplinary identity of planning." Third: "The seeming paucity among American planners today of the speculative courage and vision that once distinguished this profession." Have these culminated in turning American planning into a "trivial profession" whose goals of equity, social justice, and sustainability are self-undermined?
posted by stratastar at 3:41 PM PST - 40 comments

"On November 22, 1997, there was a party at 635 Logan Street, Steubenville, Ohio. Hubbard attended this party. At the party were several members of the gang known as the Crips. It is contested whether Hubbard is a member of the Crips. During that evening, Wise God Allah, a.k.a. Grier Montgomery, was walking down the street outside of the party. Wise God Allah was known to be a member of the rival gang the Bloods. Hubbard and up to nine other men began shooting at Wise God Allah. One of the shots hit Wise God Allah. The gunshot wound was fatal."*

"On one record I did called 'Wise' that didn't make the album the Supreme Clientele—I couldn't use it, they took it off**—I cried writing it. I wrote it on the beach. And I cried. And it started raining when I was crying. It was in Miami. I cried writing it, and then when I went to go record it, it had some tears coming to my eyes too, recording it, because I had to zone out, I couldn't really do it in front of everybody. I don't like to record in front of a lot of people especially when I'm writing emotional stuff." - Ghostface Killah [audio interview] [more inside]
posted by jng at 3:31 PM PST - 11 comments

$26.74bn in revenue, £0.69 an hour - is Apple exploiting Chinese workers ?
posted by sgt.serenity at 2:32 PM PST - 156 comments

Superplexus Circles, 24"
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:11 PM PST - 30 comments

Nearly twenty years before the debut of the Academy award-winning clay-mation film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Steve Box, Terry Brain, and Charlie Mills created one of the most widely-recognized British kids' shows of the 1980's... The Trap Door. [more inside]
posted by lemuring at 11:49 AM PST - 12 comments

The first official pics of Stern's new Tron pinball machine have been released. According to Stern, this game will continue their recent trend of keeping games "short" and "random". Features include a miniature (non-working, of course) arcade cabinet over a cellar hole, a dropping three-target assembly (as seen on Attack From Mars and Spiderman) with a whirlwind disc behind it, and a third flipper. Like Avatar, it looks like Tron will have a "normal" and "LE" release, with the LE version adding lots of EL wire all over the playfield.
posted by luvcraft at 11:10 AM PST - 34 comments

Finnish YouTube user Ishexan has uploaded seven English subtitled movies in parts: Broken Blossoms (1919), Aelita (1924), The Gipsy Charmer (1929), The Tragedy of Elina (1938), The Activists (1939), The Wooden Pauper's Bride (1944), and Sampo (1959), which is based on the epic poem The Kalevala. The films are mostly Finnish, though Aelita is a silent Russian sci-fi film, and Sampo was a joint Finnish and Soviet production. More film clips inside (mostly Finnish documentaries and "dorky musical numbers"). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:44 AM PST - 12 comments

Were you at the royal wedding?
posted by wpenman at 9:24 AM PST - 96 comments

From wide-eyed Ze Frank comes a new useless-and-joyful social thingy called Star.me that's like Farmville if Farmville involved giving people stars that look like animals. Sign up for an account with the promo code "sportsracers", offered by Ze on The Show::Replay, which celebrates The Show's five-year anniversary with added commentary.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:45 AM PST - 46 comments

Last night at midnight, more than a gigabyte of internal memos from the US Chamber of Commerce and two other conservative think-tanks were leaked to the Internet. Although no announcement has been posted to the semi-official Anonymous web site, the archive contains a README file crediting the hacker/cracker/griefer collective. [more inside]
posted by verb at 8:38 AM PST - 50 comments

Starting in the summer of 2009, Southern Souls began by capturing unique performances by musicians that call southern Ontario home. Seeing musicians play in the places that they live and breathe, places they themselves have chosen—in the street, in a store, in a kitchen or bedroom—is almost a homecoming for the music itself, returning it to the places in which it started.

[more inside]
posted by purephase at 8:32 AM PST - 5 comments

The 10 Pathogen-Food Combinations That Most Hurt Public Health
posted by jjray at 8:08 AM PST - 12 comments

Sadness is a Blessing - Lykke Li. (Single link Vimeo music video) Youtube version. (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:41 AM PST - 17 comments

Remove the scourge of conflict - "Taming mass violence is the theme of the World Bank's latest World Development Report, which focuses on 'conflict, security and development' [pdf] ... Mass violence destroys all hopes of progress. We should make a huge effort to eliminate this scourge. It seems feasible. It is desirable. So try."
posted by kliuless at 6:32 AM PST - 18 comments

It's not quite the Nile, but there is political strife there too. The Illinois river town of Cairo (KAY-row), IL, is surrounded by the Ohio and the Mississippi, and is in danger of being flooded. The Army Corps of Engineers wants to activate a flood mitigation plan by breaching some levees into spillways designed to mitigate such a flood. Unfortunately, those floodways are in Missouri, and they would rather not have a bunch of farmland flooded just to save some little town in Illinois. Judge Limbaugh (yes) gave the OK, but the battle isn't over yet.
posted by gjc at 5:45 AM PST - 39 comments

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff. Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.
>_ [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:54 AM PST - 63 comments

Rediscovered work by DuMaurier. "Lost for more than 70 years, this dark story of a man's obsessive passion for Rebecca, a mysterious violinist, hasn't been published since it appeared in a small collection in 1937."
posted by bardophile at 2:31 AM PST - 5 comments

Fungus of the month , since 1997. Discover the bright aqua green stain fungus, which turns wood green, and was used by woodworkers in the Renaissance to add natural greens to inlaid wood work. Stinky and obscene dog stinkhorn fungus (maybe NSFW), like pink wieners growing out of your mulch. And many more, poisonous, infectious (warning: gross), hallucinogenic, with interesting photos and stories, for what he calls "the myco-curious". Bonus: I survived the destroying angel, an account of what happens if you eat a poisonous Amanita mushroom and are really, really lucky. [more inside]
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:41 AM PST - 22 comments

10 Creepy Plants That Shouldn't Exist
posted by shivohum at 9:55 PM PST - 42 comments

Over the past 50 years, the small coastal plain (campo), some 30 kilometers southwest of the city of Almería, has been intensively developed for agriculture. An estimated 20,000 hecatres of extra-early market produce is grown in greenhouses in the Campo de Dalías, and it accounts for over $1.5 billion in economic activity. [more inside]
posted by Casimir at 9:15 PM PST - 24 comments

MIT now owns non-voting majority of Bose thanks to a generous alum. NYT, CNN.
posted by staggernation at 8:09 PM PST - 67 comments

New Jersey indie punks Titus Andronicus have released the video for No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future, the third song off their acclaimed Civil War themed concept album The Monitor. Its the second video from The Monitor, after last year's A More Perfect Union. The album, released last year, uses the Civil War as a loose metaphor for the New Jersey band living in Boston and dealing with growing up. It includes spoken quotes from Abe Lincoln and Walt Whitman (read by Craig Finn). The clip, directed by Tom Scharpling, is more traditional than his well-loved videos for Ted Leo and The New Pornographers and shows the band touring their beloved New Jersey. [more inside]
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:27 PM PST - 104 comments

A wave of powerful storm cells swept the southeastern United States this week, spawning hundreds of tornadoes that wreaked havoc from Texas to Virginia. While damage was widespread throughout the region, the most terrible toll was seen in Alabama, which has accounted for two-thirds of the more than 300 reported deaths -- the deadliest since the Great Depression -- and where many small towns were simply wiped from the map. Especially hard-hit was the university town of Tuscaloosa, the state's fifth-largest, where a monstrous F5 tornado (seen in this terrifying firsthand video) tore a vicious track through entire neighborhoods and business districts -- narrowly missing the region's primary hospital -- and continuing a path that rained debris as far as Birmingham, over sixty miles away. The disaster prompted a visit from President Obama today, who declared "I've never seen devastation like this" after surveying the area with Governor Robert Bentley, Senator Richard Shelby, and Mayor Walter Maddox. More: photos from In Focus and The Big Picture, aerial footage of the aftermath, "before and after" sliders, the path of the Tuscaloosa twister on Google Maps, People Locator, local aid information, MetaTalk check-in thread
posted by Rhaomi at 6:18 PM PST - 101 comments

The Internet's most comprehensive examination of the watches worn by Fox Mulder on TV's 'The X-Files'. [more inside]
posted by burnmp3s at 5:07 PM PST - 44 comments

Genius of Live from the Tom Tom Club. Disc two features 12 remixes of their original megahit, Genius of Love.
posted by puny human at 4:20 PM PST - 34 comments

Berkeley rapper Lil' B announced at Coachella he is doing "the most controversial thing in hip-hop". He's releasing an album titled I'm Gay. Only he's not gay. Well, not gay in the gay way. He's gay in the really happy way. Lil' B informed MTV News that he's "taking the initial steps to break barriers" between the hip-hop community and homosexuals. He has received death threats as a result of his message. GLAAD remains skeptical about the rapper's motives.
posted by quadog at 4:16 PM PST - 61 comments

What’s Left of the Left - Paul Krugman's Lonely Crusade for Liberalism. After President Obama met with a group of prominent economists in December of 2010, among them Alan Blinder, the latter remarked, somewhat bleakly and apologetically: "In the United States, there is no left left". Paul Krugman is a lonely man. [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 3:46 PM PST - 100 comments

I am a 91-year-old bodybuilder (SLgrauniad)
posted by Tom-B at 2:28 PM PST - 43 comments

A map of every street tree in Washington, DC.
posted by schmod at 1:29 PM PST - 33 comments

From Draculin to Spermadine, Fucitol to Arsole, here is your guide to molecules with silly names. (via kottke)
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:00 PM PST - 15 comments

Alan Wolfson's Canal Street Cross Section, the latest of his urban miniatures, will be exhibited, along with many other works of a similar vein, at New York's Museum of Art and Design June 7 through September 18 (previously).
posted by nj_subgenius at 12:04 PM PST - 12 comments

After suffering a series of strokes earlier this week, feminist science fiction author and essayist Joanna Russ has died. Russ's best known work is probably her novel The Female Man; this and her other works were often misunderstood and dismissed by the male-dominated science fiction field of the 70s. Despite this, her short story "When It Changed" (which was included in Harlan Ellison's Again Dangerous Visions) won a Hugo award in 1973, and her novella, "Souls," won a Nebula award in 1983. In retrospect, of course, hers is one of the names that will be remembered from that era of imaginative writing.
posted by aught at 11:44 AM PST - 87 comments

Grandmothers are agitated to the point of singing K’naan songs. This basically concerns the frustration over the Canadian Senate killing Bill C-393 (a law to facilitate production of cheaper life saving HIV/AIDS drugs for developing countries). With the new election looming, the “Grannies” would like to see folks use aidsaction.ca to email their candidates and ask them about their Access to Medicines stance.
posted by davidng at 11:39 AM PST - 5 comments

Furthermore, let’s remember that Alderaan isn’t gone. It’s just blown up. Suddenly all the metallic elements that were languishing away in the planetary core are floating around in the void, ripe for the plucking. And anyone who can plausibly claim to have owned them is dead. You can build a lot of Death Stars with that much tungsten. Well, not even a lot—but maybe one.

The Overthinking It Think Tank takes a look at “the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the planet doesn’t comply.” [more inside]
posted by kipmanley at 11:30 AM PST - 78 comments

The Washington Post has invited Donald Trump as its guest for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. WaPo writers Ezra Klein and Dana Milbank are not amused, with the latter pointing out that his paper had recently taken Trump to task for his rampant birtherism. No word yet on how the POTUS might react.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:20 AM PST - 58 comments

Great Moments in Werner Herzog Voiceovers [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:09 AM PST - 29 comments

Good answers at a quora.com post about bad designs that might have best been not created.....
posted by skepticallypleased at 10:20 AM PST - 70 comments

Since the late '70s, Gordon Monahan has been making a career of extracting the unheard from pretty much anything he can get his hands on. Monahan's works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. Such pieces include long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996). His work for electronic tone generators and human speaker swingers (Speaker Swinging, 1982), is a hybrid of science, music, and performance art, where minimalistic trance music based on the Doppler Effect contrasts with issues central to performance art such as physical struggle and 'implied threat'. John Cage once said, "At the piano, Gordon Monahan produces sounds we haven't heard before." [more inside]
posted by wcfields at 10:17 AM PST - 4 comments

The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (Halyomorpha halys) is an invasive insect introduced from China and first spotted in the United States in 1998 in Allentown, PA. [more inside]
posted by electroboy at 9:47 AM PST - 64 comments

After Daily Beast columnist Andrew Sullivan lambasted The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence's Hunky Jesus Contest in San Francisco's Dolores Park with a short post flamingly titled "The Tired, Lame Bigotry Of Some Homosexuals," the Sisters responded. Sullivan reacted to the responses with an escalation, calling the Sisters "smug liberal bigots." Is the Hunky Jesus Contest "everyone's favorite blasphemous hoot" or a "profane and shockingly insensitive spectacle" that "illustrates the secular, pro-'gay' Left's hypocrisy in demanding 'respect' for homosexuals and transsexuals"? (previously)
posted by mrgrimm at 9:34 AM PST - 145 comments

The United States of Environmental Superlatives
posted by PepperMax at 9:32 AM PST - 26 comments

Yes, we turned Office into a game! "Is this Microsoft tone genuinely corny-earnest, reflecting the kind of middle-school pep-rally sensibility that you can only imagine Apple hipsters sneering and snickering at (making you want to punch the hipsters) and Google engineers looking at in amazement? Or is it triple-backflip hipsterism itself, an Onionesque by-golly mockery of corniness? I suppose this is one of the enduring mysteries of life." [Previously] [Previously-er]
posted by -->NMN.80.418 at 9:06 AM PST - 64 comments

"You've seen ants. Thousands of them. And most of the time, you've seen them in colonies, living as a group. But have you seen them float as a group? Apparently a single fire ant will struggle in water, but a cluster of them can bob happily for months. A new study has used time lapse photography to figure out why — and how — that is."
posted by ocherdraco at 9:01 AM PST - 40 comments

There's a world of music offered online, and some of it is legitimately free. But if you're looking for more than single tracks as offered by RCRD LBL, but you're daunted by the sheer volume of netlabel releases on Archive.org, MeFite sleeping bear offers an alternative: Melodic Expectation, reviews of music released for free by artists and labels. There are 36 posts to date, with new additions every weekday. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:30 AM PST - 12 comments

A German tourist films a trip to New York City in 1983 and 86: Times Square, The Subway
posted by The Whelk at 7:32 AM PST - 53 comments

The Monkees' Head: 'Our fans couldn't even see it' At the height of their fame, the Monkees teamed up with Jack Nicholson to film the psychedelic classic Head – and destroy their careers in the process. So how do they feel about it now? [more inside]
posted by jack_mo at 7:22 AM PST - 69 comments

Elephants Reunited After 20 Years | A slow motion dog | my hip hop dog | Baby and dog having fun with bubbles | sleepy kitty is sleepy | adjustable bark volume control |horse skipping rope | fat kitty on exercise program and all kinds of videos of critters on Dogwork.com.
posted by nickyskye at 7:02 AM PST - 40 comments

Inside Pop - The Rock Revolution is a CBS News special, broadcast in April 1967. The show was hosted by Leonard Bernstein and is probably one of the first examples of pop music being examined as a 'serious' art form. The film features many scenes shot in Los Angeles in late 1966, including interviews with Frank Zappa and Graham Nash, as well as the now legendary Brian Wilson solo performance of "Surf's Up." (MLYT) [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:30 AM PST - 15 comments

Ev'ry truly cultured music student knows: you must learn your scales and your arpeggios. Even if you're the lead singer of a death metal band (SLYT).
posted by SomeTrickPony at 6:00 AM PST - 46 comments

Friday Flash Fun in the (temporary) form of Soul Brother, a retro style 2d flash game from adult swim. You character can jump into a fresh body when killed, which soon proves useful as all the inhabitants of this world have different talents, and thanks to you, very short life spans. [more inside]
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 5:57 AM PST - 10 comments

I drive past the Meadowlands every day now for the past 2 years on the NJ Turnpike. I kept seeing construction equipment and this area of dead dumping land slowly transform into one with actual streams like out of some plan. Turns out, there was. [more inside]
posted by rich at 4:14 AM PST - 19 comments

KTRU Departs FM Airwaves Defiant, Unique As Ever: 2 weeks ago The FCC Approved controversial sale of Rice University's radio station, KTRU, to the University of Houston and after 40 years of student-run broadcasting, KTRU's FM signal was cut off promptly at 6 a.m. yesterday, leaving a sizable hole in Houston's FM band. The triumphant speech of Jesse Jackson at the 1984 Democratic convention faded into the wall of sound of The Flying Luttenbachers "The Pointed Stick Variations," reaching an almost unbearable harshness before everything ceased. [Previously]
posted by Blake at 3:46 AM PST - 50 comments

Physics tricks could create one-way soundproofing. Materials that genuinely discriminate between the direction of light or sound might be possible, according to a new study. That could make for true one-way mirrors or for directional soundproofing—imagine, for instance, a wall through which sound can enter but not escape.
posted by Leisure_Muffin at 10:11 PM PST - 35 comments

How I Wrote is a series of videos from The Guardian where musicians perform a song after talking about it a little bit. Among the artists who've taken part are Rufus Wainwright, Kristin Hersh, Corinne Bailey Rae, Laura Marling, Keren Ann, Patrick Wolf, Elbow, Gruff Rhys, Warpaint, Cee Lo Green, Antony and the Johnsons, P. J. Harvey and Emmy the Great, who sings a song about the Royal Wedding, appropriately enough for today (though I suppose the Cee Lo Green song is appropriate too).
posted by Kattullus at 8:42 PM PST - 27 comments

"Let's pretend it's an alternate world, or maybe sometime in the future, and there is no free search. You have to pay for your Google, or Bing, or whatever. How much would you be willing to pay?"
posted by bayani at 6:56 PM PST - 118 comments

Australian comedy troupe The Chaser (best known for breaking into the APEC summit in 2007) have been banned from reporting on the Royal Wedding by the Royal Family. The Chaser respond. [more inside]
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 5:53 PM PST - 168 comments

Split Enz were to New Zealand what the Beatles were to the UK, and like the fabs their legacy is impressive: an endlessly entertaining back-catalogue and some inspiring solo and band offshoots. One of these, Crowded House, captured more of the world's attention, but few in New Zealand would question the priority of the Enz. Which must be why, in 2007, Radio New Zealand made an eight-hour documentary series split over ten podcasts about their fascinating journey from art-folk-classical-prog to New Wave pop mastery: Enzology is essential listening for any Split Enz fan, featuring "excerpts from all the hits and numerous album tracks, plus previously unreleased demos, live recordings and studio out-takes gathered from the band members' personal archives and elsewhere". [more inside]
posted by rory at 5:16 PM PST - 63 comments

The Carolina Panthers have drafted Cam Newton with the top pick in tonight's NFL Draft (watch the 1st round live here). The draft is taking place against the uncertainty of an intense battle between the owners and players (previously on mefi). On Monday, District Judge Susan Nelson issued her opinion ending the lockout of the players, who will be reporting back to work by next week, although at least one team was not allowed to enter facilities today. Although the league asked for a stay of the ruling, Judge Nelson denied the request yesterday, lifting fans' hopes that the 2011 season will be played.
posted by ofthestrait at 5:11 PM PST - 25 comments

Late Bloomer (SLYT, NSF4th graders)
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 4:30 PM PST - 40 comments

ProCSSor is a powerful (and wholly free) CSS prettifier that lets you format CSS in the exact way you want. Turn your CSS into something that is visually more compelling and readable with a minimum of effort.
posted by netbros at 3:58 PM PST - 27 comments

What goes better than alcohol and cooking? My Drunk Kitchen brings you important recipes for when you're boozed, like grilled cheese, mac & cheese, omelettes, and everyone's favorite: cookies! [more inside]
posted by whitneyarner at 3:29 PM PST - 53 comments

In the landmark 900th issue of Action Comics, Superman has renounced his American citizenship. [more inside]
posted by MegoSteve at 3:28 PM PST - 117 comments

Apple's revenues and net earnings for the first calendar quarter of 2011 both beat the reported sales and profits of its rival Microsoft for the first time in recent history. It's been an epic rivalry between these two computer tech giants. Apple had an early lead, was overtaken by Microsoft in a rather spectacular fashion. And then, slowly, like a guerilla campaign from distant provinces, Apple came back. At least by one measure - earnings - a measure that seemed destined to always be in Microsoft's favor, Apple has now taken the lead. [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 3:23 PM PST - 333 comments

Towards an Apartheid Economy? A 1996 Harvard Business Review article on rising inequality, by Richard Freeman. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 2:13 PM PST - 34 comments

Jorge Luis Borges delivers the Norton lectures at Harvard, 1968: The Riddle of Poetry :: The Metaphor :: A Poet's Creed
posted by puny human at 1:47 PM PST - 17 comments

Almost Amis. [more inside]
posted by TheWash at 1:23 PM PST - 16 comments

West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011.
Meanwhile a British firm has been found to have offered spying software to the Egyptian regime – Gamma International's Finfisher program would have enabled government spies to monitor activists and censor websites.
posted by adamvasco at 1:11 PM PST - 6 comments

Go figure: How to succeed in business by doing nothing Article about variability in business and why it is sometimes better to do nothing. "You're a dynamic business leader. Let's say you make widgets - though you might equally make big-budget Hollywood movies. Your widgets, or your movies, vary. Some widgets are perfect, some a tad too long. Some movies make mega-bucks at the box office, some bomb. So what do you do? Well, you're dynamic, so you react, of course. Something must be done. " [SLBBC]
posted by marienbad at 1:06 PM PST - 16 comments

Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins of George Mason University published a new paper "Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy" examining the parallels with the US military's other recent exaggerations. "Cybersecurity is an important policy issue, but the alarmist rhetoric coming out of Washington that focuses on worst-case scenarios is unhelpful and dangerous. Aspects of current cyber policy discourse parallel the run-up to the Iraq War and pose the same dangers. Pre-war threat inflation and conflation of threats led us into war on shaky evidence. By focusing on doomsday scenarios and conflating cyber threats, government officials threaten to legislate, regulate, or spend in the name of cybersecurity based largely on fear, misplaced rhetoric, conflated threats, and credulous reporting. The public should have access to classified evidence of cyber threats, and further examination of the risks posed by those threats, before sound policies can be proposed, let alone enacted. ... No one wants a “cyber Katrina” or a “digital Pearl Harbor.” But honestly assessing cyber threats and appropriate responses does not mean that we have to learn to stop worrying and love the cyber bomb."
posted by RSaunders at 12:43 PM PST - 17 comments

In which the folks at the Barryfest blog attempt to create a chart, diagram, graph or other visual aid inspired by each and every Steely Dan song
posted by mintcake! at 12:25 PM PST - 48 comments

The Evangelical Adoption Crusade [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:08 PM PST - 133 comments

How Britain's largest corporations helped engineer the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber.
posted by reenum at 11:49 AM PST - 10 comments

The Comic Stylings of Brian Williams. How’s an anchor to cope when network newscasts keep losing ground? Having a second career helps.
posted by Four-Eyed Girl at 11:32 AM PST - 61 comments

Reflections: a hundred years of British cinema (six-minute film). Via the Projected Picture Trust.
posted by paduasoy at 11:23 AM PST - 5 comments

Achievement Metrics claims that a player's speech can predict how he'll perform in the NFL.
posted by beisny at 10:12 AM PST - 37 comments

Storify is a new social media platform that makes it easy to assemble and winnow Flickr photos, tweets, Facebook posts, Google search results and URLS into a coherent story. It went into public beta on April 25th. [more inside]
posted by msalt at 10:11 AM PST - 17 comments

Rick Hill was vacationing in Hawaii. So was Joe Parker. The two lived within one town of each other in Massachusetts, but discovered on that Hawaiian beach, when Joe offered to take a picture of Rick with his fiancee, that they have the same father.
posted by zizzle at 9:58 AM PST - 31 comments

The green flash isn't quite the light show that some might imagine, but is still impressive. But sunsets aren't alone in producing the green flash - the flash can also appear above the moon. Up on Cerro Paranal in northern Chile, ESO Photo Ambassador Gerhard Hüdepohl has captured a very clear example of the a green flash above the moon. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:19 AM PST - 18 comments

Writing advice from George Saunders. [via]
posted by AceRock at 8:04 AM PST - 28 comments

The 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Well Blowout: A Little Hindsight by Carl Safina.
posted by jjray at 7:51 AM PST - 5 comments

Eponym, Nym Words, A Dictionary of Medical Eponyms, American Proprietary Eponyms, & Other Proprietary Eponyms.
posted by Fizz at 7:43 AM PST - 16 comments

Keynes v. Hayek Rap Battle: Round 2 (SLYT, about 10 mins) EconStories revives the econ beef to end all beefs. Previously. [more inside]
posted by dismas at 7:15 AM PST - 32 comments

The largest single cause of death of large mammals in North America: hunting
posted by londonmark at 5:53 AM PST - 233 comments

A new paper by William J. Bruno of the Theoretical Biology & Biophysics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory argues that past arguments about the impossibility of biological tissue damage from cellphone signals have failed to consider a quantum effect whereby multiple photons in a small volume can have constructive interference, and that such an effect likely does occur in practice. Synopsis here. (previously) [more inside]
posted by crayz at 5:33 AM PST - 38 comments

"It’s a safe bet that most hard-core porn watchers anywhere aren’t doing it to expand their minds, and computer keys are germy enough as they are." -- Death and Taxes [more inside]
posted by inkyroom at 10:48 PM PST - 199 comments

The True Battle of Chernobyl (SLYT)
posted by mexican at 10:07 PM PST - 20 comments

The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel, 360 degree panorama of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. (via)
posted by gruchall at 9:54 PM PST - 24 comments

"Value-added modeling is promoted because it has the right pedigree -- because it is based on "sophisticated mathematics." As a consequence, mathematics that ought to be used to illuminate ends up being used to intimidate." John Ewing, president of Math for America and former executive director of the American Mathematical Society, criticizes the "value-added modeling" approach used as a proxy for teacher quality, most famously in a Los Angeles Times story that called out low-scoring teachers by name. A Brookings Institution paper says value-added modeling is flawed but the best measure we have of teacher value, arguing that the metric's wide fluctuations from year to year are no worse than those of batting averages in baseball. (Though the weakness of that correlation is mostly a BABIP issue.) Can we assign a numerical value to teacher quality? If so, how?
posted by escabeche at 7:01 PM PST - 61 comments

Achievement Porn
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:13 PM PST - 86 comments

How is abbey formed?
How is abbey formed?
How girl get regnant?
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 5:58 PM PST - 251 comments

The Airtight Garage (some images may be NSFW) is a blog that explores the artwork of Moebius (Jean Giraud), France's most acclaimed comic book artist. It is named after The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius, a comic loosely based on Micheal Moorcock's protean hero. Moebius was recently the subject of an appreciation in Comics Alliance.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 5:20 PM PST - 49 comments

Third, class arbitration greatly increases risks to defendants. Informal procedures do of course have a cost: The absence of multilayered review makes it more likely that errors will go uncorrected. Defendants are willing to accept the costs of these errors in arbitration, since their impact is limited to the size of individual disputes, and presumably outweighed by savings from avoiding the courts. But when damages allegedly owed to tens of thousands of potential claimants are aggregated and decided at once, the risk of an error will often become unacceptable. Faced with even a small chance of a devastating loss, defendants will be pressured into settling questionable claims.

—Justice Scalia delivers the opinion of the Court, and a knife in the back of class-action suits. [more inside]
posted by kipmanley at 3:23 PM PST - 101 comments

Images of times past: abandoned monuments in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet era architecture in Bulgaria. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 12:23 PM PST - 49 comments

Lynn Haludren, better known as the Empire Carpet Man, died yesterday at the age of 89. [more inside]
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 12:20 PM PST - 83 comments

I just want to remind everyone that capybara, previously mentioned on MetaFilter, are awesome. The subject of song and poetry, capybara are the world's largest (non-extinct) rodent. This site has more information, including a list of zoos where you might find them and information on capybara in literature or on your dinner plate, [more inside]
posted by Vibrissa at 11:41 AM PST - 57 comments

Window Painting and What A Wonderful World from artist Dan Berglund.
posted by puny human at 10:26 AM PST - 1 comment

Where is the Puck? The Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup last season for the first time in 50 years. But what happened to the puck that was used to score what some are calling the "most famous goal in Chicago sports history?"
posted by zarq at 10:12 AM PST - 132 comments

After rumors late last year about the Delicious bookmarking service being shut down, it was just announced that it has been sold. It's present version will disappear in July 2011. If you want your bookmarks to be transferred to the new incarnation, you have to opt in. According to a post on the Delicious help pages: "Sorry if we've caught you by surprise. Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS."
posted by kdern at 9:58 AM PST - 72 comments

Swindon Viewpoint has recently released a glorious cache of rare videos from everyone's favorite English Settlers XTC! Please to be finding early live performaces by the handsome devils, early studio versions of your favorites, earlier still performances by The Helium Kidz, and even a lovely tour of Swindon with mad genius Andy Partridge! (Then with hair!) [more inside]
posted by Krazor at 9:47 AM PST - 19 comments

Amina A. is a Gay Girl in Damascus. On Tuesday, she was visited by the Syrian security services.
posted by Rumple at 9:46 AM PST - 68 comments

Before the iconic Power Rangers, Toei Productions tried some other "Super Sensei" series including 1977's JAKQ (pronounced jah-kuh) with their playing-card-themed identities. With online poker sites down, maybe it's time for them to make a comeback?
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:45 AM PST - 10 comments

12 videos of creepy automata (well, actually only 11, because one of them is no longer online)
posted by luvcraft at 9:12 AM PST - 18 comments

Emmanuel "Toto" Constant led a paramilitary organization called FRAPH that terrorized Haiti after the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When FRAPH's fortunes declined, Toto mysteriously appeared in New York City, where he was scorned by the Haitian community. Justice eventually caught up to Toto, who is now imprisoned in New York state. [more inside]
posted by reenum at 8:53 AM PST - 6 comments

The E. chromi project is forging ahead with its plan, using recombinant bacteria to detect and display disease states of the human body in your toilet. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 8:14 AM PST - 18 comments

What would have happened if a science fiction classic had been written by the father of French philosophy? Existential Star Wars. Extra special bonus: a little girl feels the power of the dark side.
posted by scalefree at 7:26 AM PST - 24 comments

John Mueller and Mark Stewart may have found the one part of government we can afford to cut in their paper "Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security" From the abstract "The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades."
posted by RSaunders at 6:36 AM PST - 30 comments

Vortex-based mathematics is the most advanced ever known to mankind. Don't have time for a time cube? Time need no longer limit us. Here, Marco Rodin (inventor of the Rodin Coil) gives us the background.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:33 AM PST - 44 comments

Michael had always claimed he could make anything from wood, and James called his bluff in a big way. More than 1,000 man hours and a considerable amount of skill and ingenuity later, the SplinterBike was ready to ride.
posted by veedubya at 4:46 AM PST - 39 comments

Hacker Typer - Now you can look like you're doing something important on your computer, like you've always wanted to! (hit hack and just start bashing at your keyboard)
posted by azarbayejani at 4:04 AM PST - 69 comments

Handwritten 1961 memo in father's immigration file notes Obama born in Hawaii. "Documents obtained from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service through a Freedom of Information Act request offer evidence that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. A memo dated Aug. 31, 1961 from William Wood of Immigration and Naturalization Services indicates that Barack Obama, Sr., was attending the University of Hawaii on a student visa and that a son, Barack Obama, II, was born in Honolulu on Aug, 8, 1961." [Image of Memo]
posted by Fizz at 2:55 AM PST - 708 comments

Flogging as an alternative to incarceration? A thoughtful essay that considers flogging as an alternative to incarceration; the author uses this as a rhetorical device to point out the inefficiencies of incarceration, and get a conversation going. Some of the comments in the forum are priceless.
posted by Vibrissae at 2:35 AM PST - 48 comments

SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes. Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite.
posted by Leisure_Muffin at 8:32 PM PST - 144 comments

Moving Beyond the Automobile is a series of ten short videos by Streetfilms that highlights new directions in urban transportation. It shows how cities in the U.S. are encouraging a shift away from car dependency and making it easier and more pleasant to get around by other means. [more inside]
posted by parudox at 7:25 PM PST - 36 comments

Despite the federal election focus on BC ridings, Vancouverites are having a hard time looking past the municipal. Things are quite dramatic in the urban planning scene. The city's regional growth plan was recently paralyzed by disagreement from Coquitlam. TransLink announced permanent cuts to bus service during Earth Week, describing it as "service optimization," highlighting its own chronic funding issues. The city successfully stopped a "megacasino" project after community backlash, but the $3 billion freeway Gateway Project continues despite ongoing protests. As the city struggles to find its way to the goal of Greenest City 2020, it's a good time to look at the paths not taken, via this excellent podcast on Vancouver's relationship with roadways. Part of a series called "Moving Through" from the Museum of Vancouver. [more inside]
posted by mek at 7:05 PM PST - 26 comments

Louisiana-born, Texas-based record producer Huey Meaux, the so-called "Crazy Cajun", has died. He was the man behind Barbara Lynn's 1962 hit You'll Lose a Good Thing. Three years later, in a move to cash in on the British Invasion, he created a faux-British rock band called "the Sir Douglas Quintet" around San Antonio-born singer-songwriter Doug Sahm, and produced their hit, She's About a Mover. Meaux also produced Tex-Mex rocker Freddy Fender's bilingual hit Before the Next Teardrop Falls as well as Fender's Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. Sadly, however, Meaux had a very ugly darker side: he was arrested not once but twice on child-sex charges, doing prison time in the late 60s, and an 11-year bid from '96 to '07. Some of the ugly details of this side of his life are detailed in this Houston Press article from 1996, shortly after his arrest, which will pretty much make your skin crawl... Well, so long Huey.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:18 PM PST - 50 comments

Dave Lowery, lead singer and guitarist in Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, has a new side project: he's started blogging at 300songs.com. Recent topics include the bands, the labels (both the good and the bad), and what it's like to make a living as a musician, even if you have to sell out to do it.
posted by dvorak_beats_qwerty at 4:08 PM PST - 33 comments

Eloisa James weighs in on historical sex scenes. After attending Penn State's conference on Historicizing Sex, NY Times Bestselling romance author/ Shakespearean scholar Eloisa James writes about how we view our sexual history through a contemporary prism. [more inside]
posted by jenlovesponies at 2:27 PM PST - 47 comments

Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity have been down since April 20 2011 due to an illegal intrusion. Today Sony announced that user data - birthdate, user name, password, e-mail address, possibly credit card information, and more - has been compromised for its 69 million users, exposing them to identify theft amongst other things. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:58 PM PST - 271 comments

Tim Heidecker endorses Donald Trumps for president
posted by The Devil Tesla at 1:52 PM PST - 128 comments

Funny Bones -- Anatomy of a Celebrity Caricature. Artist John Kascht looks for the unique character in Conan O'Brien's face and body. And hair. (Half-hour video)
posted by TimTypeZed at 1:25 PM PST - 10 comments

Mr. Moritz and the Machine, How I Came to Work at the Wendy's and other comics by Nick St. John. [more inside]
posted by Memo at 12:28 PM PST - 31 comments

A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can’t Hear Them
posted by ryoshu at 12:12 PM PST - 49 comments

Why we should do away with stock-based executive compensation. Three excerpts from a new book on executive pay by Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's business school: The next financial crisis could be right around the corner. How an economic theory changed the way CEOs get paid. What the NFL can teach us about executive compensation.
posted by russilwvong at 12:06 PM PST - 39 comments

Aw, a science flash mob. [SLYT]
posted by wpenman at 12:02 PM PST - 16 comments

Nadezhda Korotkaya, 77, a widow who lives alone in her small wooden house on the edge of Stary Vyshkov, still remembers the World War II. "The Germans came and went," she said. "But Chernobyl came here to stay." It was 25 years ago today that reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant exploded, following an emergency shutdown (detailed recounting of the disaster on Wikipedia). A memorial was held in Kiev, Ukraine, this morning for the liquidators who were the first human responders, with a bell struck at the exact moment of the Chernobyl explosion on April 26, 1986. See also: a look back, with The Big Picture. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:54 AM PST - 20 comments

Phoebe Snow, singer of 1970s hit 'Poetry Man,' dies at 60. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 10:36 AM PST - 46 comments

"I don't think the chief of police drinks water when he's having a meal." Members of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the French riot police, are up in arms about a new regulation forbidding them to drink alcohol during the workday. The ban is said to be a reaction to widely publicized photos of riot police drinking beer while policing a high-school student demonstration in Perreux-sur-Marne.
posted by escabeche at 9:40 AM PST - 104 comments

The Burns Archive is a collection of over 700,000 historical photographs that document disturbing subject matter: obsolete medical practices and experiments, death, disease, disasters, crime, revolutions, riots and war. Newsweek posted a select gallery this past October, as well as a video interview and walk-through with curator and collector Dr. Stanley B. Burns, a New York opthalmologist. (Via) (Content at links may be disturbing to some.) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:35 AM PST - 15 comments

Warning - Man with mullet performing erotic 80's porno movie dance gyration thingy.
posted by sgt.serenity at 9:12 AM PST - 64 comments

Suffering from emotional distress caused by receiving a parking ticket? Not to worry -- members of NYC's Parking Ticket Emotional Reclamation Project places a therapeutic hand-written note with art into the ticket envelope in hopes to "restore emotional balance to New York, The World, The Universe."
posted by bayani at 9:09 AM PST - 11 comments

Google Translated from nub1an's livejournal Some stunning wilderness-travelogue photography from Russian trekker and (self-described-)amateur photographer "nub1an" (Ilya Kondrashov). Untranslated link.
posted by J0 at 8:58 AM PST - 9 comments

After 107 submissions, Roger Ebert wins The New Yorker cartoon caption contest. Ebert's earlier blog about captioning. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 8:17 AM PST - 91 comments

Michael Hansmeyer: Computational Architecture. Subdivision: Ornamented Columns -- "A full-scale, 2.7-meter high variant of the columns is fabricated as a layered model using 1mm sheet. Each sheet is individually cut using a mill or laser. Sheets are stacked and held together by poles that run through a common core." [more inside]
posted by Gator at 7:04 AM PST - 17 comments

IMF bombshell: Age of America nears end. According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now. [more inside]
posted by three blind mice at 7:00 AM PST - 159 comments

New York to L.A. By taxi. For $5,000. Now they're headed home.
posted by xowie at 6:43 AM PST - 34 comments

Mark Taylor. Reform the PhD system or close it down. Nature 472, 261 (2011) [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 6:34 AM PST - 54 comments

Strangers, Again, a short film by Wong Fu Productions, takes viewers on an introspective journey through the stages of a romantic relationship. (Previous Wong Fu Production films on Metafilter)
posted by SkylitDrawl at 6:07 AM PST - 2 comments

Simple and effective! While there was dismay and discussion about the Supreme Court ruling that allows Westboro to continue their protests, a small town in Rankin County, Mississippi shows we don't need laws to effectively keep them away.
posted by kthanksbai at 5:43 AM PST - 116 comments

The Blue Sky In Games campaign is an old but still relevant call to embrace bright colors and happy themes in videogames. It's the opposite of the currently prevailing Real Is Brown style. Because of cheerful Sega games like Outrun and Afterburner, it is often referred to as 'Sega Blue Skies'.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 5:33 AM PST - 33 comments

"I said that I wasn't a sex symbol and that if anybody tried to make me one I'd shave my head tomorrow". The rumors have been swirling all day, but sadly appear to be confirmed - Marianne Joan Elliot-Said aka punk legend Poly Styrene has passed away after battling breast cancer. Her new album , Generation Indigo is scheduled to be released today. [more inside]
posted by louche mustachio at 2:02 AM PST - 98 comments

Is the World Too Big to Fail? [more inside]
posted by Shit Parade at 12:37 AM PST - 62 comments

Vancouver comedian Guy Earle and the restaurant he was performing at were fined a combined C$22,500 by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal after a 2007 incident where Earle mocked a member of the audience. [more inside]
posted by inturnaround at 11:11 PM PST - 185 comments

What's IstyOsty? Well suppose you want to look at an article in the Daily Mail... [more inside]
posted by the latin mouse at 10:53 PM PST - 15 comments

Kids shouldn't be given cooking shows—or maybe they should.
posted by Taft at 10:01 PM PST - 28 comments

In 2009, Telebrands Corporation released the Comfort Wipe.
But that's not all! Josh Rimer introduces... the Comfortable Stick! Because toilet paper is so archaic and disgusting. (NSFW at all, at all)
posted by dunkadunc at 7:18 PM PST - 62 comments

MIT is expected to announce tomorrow its naming of Joichi Ito as head of the MIT Media Lab (NYTimes). This is noteworthy because rather than being a star of academia, design, or engineering, he is a 44-year-old venture capitalist. [more inside]
posted by thedaniel at 5:02 PM PST - 74 comments

Cute overload The Shiba Inu Puppy Cam has returned, this is the third (and, according to the site, last) litter from the original puppy cam dog mom that we've seen before. Take a break from the world...
posted by tomswift at 4:45 PM PST - 36 comments

Dads. The Original Hipsters.
posted by ob at 3:56 PM PST - 106 comments

What Is Good for the Heart May Not Be Good for the Prostate, Study Suggests. In a major study that appears to overturn a lot of previous research, the largest and most authoritative study ever to examine the association of dietary fats and prostate cancer risk has found an inverse association in the effect of Omega-3 fatty acids in heart disease and in prostate cancer. A lot of recent conventional wisdom has been upended, with the role of all fatty acids undergoing substantial revisions in our understanding. [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 3:51 PM PST - 120 comments

The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an object’s speed as its displacement per a given time. But some researchers theorize that this Newtonian idea of time as an absolute quantity that flows on its own, along with the idea that time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, are incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a view that corresponds more accurately to the physical world: time as a measure of the numerical order of change.
posted by finite at 2:01 PM PST - 126 comments

The Douglass Blvd. Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky has voted to stop signing marriage licenses until gay marriage is legalized by the state.
posted by reenum at 1:21 PM PST - 71 comments

"Jersey Shore" Gone Wilde [more inside]
posted by redyaky at 1:14 PM PST - 38 comments

Adam Buxton reviews YouTube comments
posted by mippy at 12:24 PM PST - 49 comments

"Good people, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the "clean" version of our new album, The Hot Sauce Committee pt 2 has leaked. So as a hostile and retaliatory measure with great hubris we are making the full explicit aka filthy dirty nasty version available for streaming on our new site. We hope this brings much happiness, hugs, and harmony. Enjoy Kikoos for life!" [more inside]
posted by nickheer at 11:32 AM PST - 59 comments

Every year, nine million children under five die from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and malaria. Often, the treatments for these diseases are cheap, safe, and readily available. So why don't people pick these 'low-hanging fruit'? Why don’t mothers vaccinate their children? Why don’t families use bednets, or buy chlorinated water? And why do they spend such large amounts of money on ineffective cure instead?

Poor Economics is a book and website by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It has maps, graphs, and data drawn from the research at MIT's Poverty Action Lab. It is currently being reviewed and discussed (1, 2, 3) at the Economist. BONUS: Duflo discusses the book and Randomized Controlled Trials (Wikipedia: RCT).
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:11 AM PST - 46 comments

After nearly a century, Keiko Fukuda still lives for judo [video]. Earlier this month, Fukuda turned 98. The last surviving student of Judo founder Jigoro Kano, she teaches classes in the Bay Area despite having lived nearly a century. Fukuda, at 9th degree black belt, is the highest-ranking woman in judo history. [more inside]
posted by jeffmshaw at 10:01 AM PST - 20 comments

Flags of Convenience allow ship owners to register ships to countries other than their own. More than half of current merchant ships are registered under them. As you might imagine, such a system can lead to abuse. In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Rose George suggests some changes. [more inside]
posted by beisny at 9:51 AM PST - 15 comments

Texas is burning. Despite it being only April, due to severe drought conditions, over 1.8 million acres have already burned throughout the state, which could soon surpass the two million acre record set in 2006. Here are the 10 largest current wildfires as seen from orbit. [more inside]
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:42 AM PST - 51 comments

"For the progress of humanity, work alone is not adequate, but the work should be associated with love, compassion, right conduct, truthfulness and sympathy. Without the above qualities, selfless service cannot be performed."

On Sunday morning, Indian guru Sri Sathya Sai Baba passed away. He leaves behind a massive empire, several million mourning devotees worldwide, an extensive religious philosophy, a great deal of controversy and a legacy of large-scale philanthropic projects in India, including free hospitals and mobile medical facilities, a free university and schools, and other efforts which included supplying clean water to hundreds of rural villages. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:19 AM PST - 41 comments

Happy Dyngus Day! Like St. Patrick's Day for the Polish.
posted by ridiculous at 8:37 AM PST - 22 comments

Bill Blackbeard, founder of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, passed away March 10. The Comics Journal calls him "without question or quibble the only absolutely indispensable figure in the history of comics scholarship for the last quarter century." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 8:28 AM PST - 14 comments

"This is a somewhat odd venture: a translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus into the domain of software development." Wait, not so crazy, Harrison Ainsworth explains, "Central in the Tractatus is the concept of the ‘proposition’: a statement about the world that can be true or false. It is a logical artifact used to describe the world (and so links logic and world together). This maps straightforwardly to software: a proposition becomes a program. Where a proposition describes the world, a program constructs the imagination, or intended-world – an artifact. A program is like an executable proposition."
posted by geoff. at 6:44 AM PST - 29 comments

The Bourbon-Powered Car of the Future... TODAY!
posted by .kobayashi. at 6:36 AM PST - 26 comments

(notes on) biology, a short stop-motion animation (5.39) by ornana films, features a robot elephant. You have to wait a bit, but it's worth it. Stuff gets good at about 2.25.
posted by bwg at 6:00 AM PST - 7 comments

A federal justice report on policing in New Orleans since 2009 presents damning evidence of brutality, cop misconduct and systemic abuse of black citizens post-Katrina. The city’s jails are not far behind. No limits to the law in NoLa
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:56 AM PST - 111 comments

Massive leak reveals secret dossiers on 759 captives The Guantanamo Files New York Times and Guardian
() For all the sensitive types that can't read actual wikileak files with out having tanks on your lawn or SWAT teams down your chimney, please rest assured that none of my links here or inside lead directly to *sekrets*) [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 1:37 AM PST - 380 comments

Rumor Sweeping World's Science Community that CERN's LHC has Detected the Higgs Boson -The "God Particle" The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not certain at this point if the memo is authentic, or what the data it refers to might mean — but the note has sent the physics community into full buzz mode.
posted by Leisure_Muffin at 10:21 PM PST - 102 comments

Living Island is Pogo's latest bit of audio-visual remixery, using H.R. Pufnstuf as the source. Bonus bits inside. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:18 PM PST - 27 comments

How to tell people they sound racist [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 8:04 PM PST - 156 comments

Atlas Hoods: Botswana's Cowboy Metalheads (via).
posted by nasreddin at 7:41 PM PST - 35 comments

Tom Junod writes about cooking, his mother, and mashed potatoes. [more inside]
posted by WalterMitty at 7:20 PM PST - 14 comments

Blogging the Hugos: Decline (part 1, part 2, part 3), is a series of blog posts covering some dystopian trends in recent Hugo nominees and itself winner of the of the BSFA award for non fiction. Meanwhile the 2011 Hugo finalists have been announced, with Mefi favorites featuring strongly: In Best Novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (previously), In Best Short Story The Things by Peter Watts (previously). Doctor who features heavily under Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (too many posts to mention), but has strong competition from Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.
posted by Artw at 7:06 PM PST - 27 comments

Though mentioned intermittently, Mr. Harper's determination to muzzle critics will not be a “ballot box question” for most Canadians when they vote. Yet the implications for a Canada ruled by an unrestrained Harper majority government are obvious, and terrifying. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has now published an excellent commentary by Maria Gergin called “Silencing Dissent: The Conservative Record”. [via Gerald Caplan for the Globe and Mail] [more inside]
posted by ServSci at 6:59 PM PST - 33 comments

Cheetah woman - lion man, big cat whisperers. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 6:35 PM PST - 11 comments

Seoul as seen through music videos, whether driving (1, 2), sitting (3), running (4), or walking (5). [more inside]
posted by needled at 6:32 PM PST - 5 comments

If you ever needed to know which booze has the most alcohol, the fewest calories, and costs the least, but were too lazy to do the math yourself, there is now Get Drunk But Neither Broke Nor Fat.

previously
posted by spitefulcrow at 4:59 PM PST - 126 comments

Webstock! The best little web design (and development, and content) conference around. The kind of place with opening credits, swag that includes confidence-boosting pencils, all the free ice-cream you can eat, and NZ Sign Language interpreters for the whole event.
Also, lots and lots of clever people talking. [more inside]
posted by roobot at 4:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Today is a day to celebrate the Risen God. I mean, of course, Cthulhu, that most adorable of Old Ones, who stars in The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu. If you haven't been eaten yet and need to waste time until then, The Calls for Cthulhu series is a nice way to distract yourself from your impending doom. If all that cuteness isn't enough, or perhaps too much, then you might want to check out oldie but goodie Cutethulhu.
posted by Kattullus at 3:21 PM PST - 35 comments

Cat videos, we've all seen them. They are in fact the lingua franca of the internet. But none of them, believe me, can quite prepare you for the pure psychedelic strangeness that is Puss 'N Boots. From the wonder world of K. Gordon Murray, the same man who gave us Santa Claus And His Helpers.
posted by puny human at 12:56 PM PST - 26 comments

Victoria Looseleaf's mesmerizingly WTF facial-stretch video set to Placido Domingo has been making the rounds this weekend. But who is Victoria Looseleaf? [more inside]
posted by BeerFilter at 12:17 PM PST - 42 comments

Children in foster care in Michigan get an allowance for clothing. Republican State Senator Bruce Caswell wants to limit their clothing purchases to thrift stores only.
posted by helloknitty at 11:04 AM PST - 238 comments

Gearbox Software helps a fan with a modest proposal. (with some help from Borderlands' Claptrap and Anthony from "Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?"
posted by empath at 9:36 AM PST - 29 comments

I am an artist who by a stroke of good fortune met a brave American lawyer who represents several hundred Iraqi detainees in the US federal courts....the Iraqis I interviewed, released by the American military after many months or years of detention, were never formally accused of a crime, brought to a trial or given legal representation. Daniel Heyman paints and draws while sitting in on interviews between former Abu Ghraib detainees and their lawyer Susan Burke. Interview (including Heyman's thoughts about Errol Morris' documentary Standard Operating Procedure). Review. Another gallery. Related: The Detainee Project. Via zunguzungu. [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 9:22 AM PST - 5 comments

Cranking. "She couldn't really help my Dad. My Dad couldn't really help her. But they sure tried. She cranked and cranked. I was seven. I didn't know how to help anyone." - A brief essay on life, happiness and work by Merlin Mann.
posted by Memo at 8:15 AM PST - 49 comments

Huge cache of frozen carbon dioxide found on Mars.
posted by The Whelk at 7:50 AM PST - 45 comments

Update: In Sept. '09 I posted about Artis Gilmore being denied his place in the Basketball Hall Of Fame. Injustice rectified. [more inside]
posted by planetkyoto at 7:50 AM PST - 9 comments

BBC Radio 4 now has a dedicated online program library! Rather than hunting through the site, you can now browse by subject and/or program from one main 'Collections' page. It's not all of the output by any means, but there's plenty there to keep you going, such as the philosophy archives from Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time", or various mathematics programs from different series. There's much much more as well. [more inside]
posted by carter at 6:14 AM PST - 11 comments

Straight outta the Department of Obscure and Unlikely Covers, here's Hank Crawford's version of Johnny Paycheck's Take This Job and Shove It. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:41 AM PST - 58 comments

The Jeremy Kyle Show has been described as 'human bear-baiting', but the programme itself makes great claims about the good it does. So what happens when the cameras stop rolling? At the end of the day... Previous
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:21 AM PST - 26 comments

MicrobeWiki is a free wiki resource on microbes and microbiology [more inside]
posted by Confess, Fletch at 9:53 PM PST - 6 comments

I learned to program... [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:26 PM PST - 114 comments

Micheal Johansson makes installation art (that doesn't suck -Ed.) from household items
posted by mhjb at 8:00 PM PST - 13 comments

Hazel Dickens, bluegrass and country singer, daughter of West Virginia, half of the singing group Hazel & Alice, and a voice for American miners, died on Friday at a hospice in Washington, D.C. She was 75. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:52 PM PST - 25 comments

If you like the subtle and lean animated gifs of If We Don't, Remember ME (previously) you'll probably like the ones at From Me To You (via this ask metafilter question)
posted by aerotive at 6:11 PM PST - 22 comments

Oakland artist Momoko Sudo paints lines. One at a time, free-hand.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 6:08 PM PST - 16 comments

The Internet can be a powerful tool when it comes to collaborations between artists of all ilks. Laptop band Project Jenny, Project Jan harnessed said power when it set out to create a video for its new song, “Lucky Me,” producing a lovely, painterly video courtesy of a Turkish Ebrû artist the band had never met. Hikmet Barutçugil redefined the aspects of Ebrû with a scientific approach and managed to transfuse marbling into other disciplines, from architecture to popular crafts. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 5:29 PM PST - 1 comment

Terraria is a recently announced game that is currently in closed alpha. It is similar in play style to the Internet favorite Minecraft (previously, and previously-er, and previously-er), except it operates in a 2D, sidescrolling world. Players harvest resources to craft items and structures to defend themselves against enemies. A teaser trailer is available here, and a more extensive gameplay trailer is available here. The developers are currently uploading "let's play" videos on to their youtube account: part one here, and part two here. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 4:11 PM PST - 46 comments

Cul de Sac is a daily newspaper cartoon by DC-area artist Richard Thompson (previously). In July of 2009, Thompson announced on his blog that he had been diagnosed with Parkinsons's disease. Earlier this year, friends of Thompson launched Team Cul de Sac, a fundraising project for Parkinson's research. The project has been accepting donations of artwork by cartoonists, to be published and sold in a book later this year. One recent donation to Team Cul de Sac is particularly noteworthy: a brand new painting by Bill Watterson. [more inside]
posted by eggplantplacebo at 3:51 PM PST - 10 comments

"The Mark of Cain" is a 73 minute documentary by Alix Lambert about Russian prison tattoos and the "Thieves-in-law" who often wear the tattoos. [more inside]
posted by selton at 2:46 PM PST - 20 comments

Andreas Cellarius was a scholar of the 17th Century who produced one of the most famous cosmological atlases of all time, Harmonia Macrocosmica, featuring 29 beautiful plates (large, high-quality scans), illustrating various aspects of the Universe as understood by the Western science of his time. It's impossible to pick favorites among them, but here are three examples: Phases of the Moon, Sizes of the Celestial Bodies and Stars and Constellations of the Northern Sky.
posted by Kattullus at 2:46 PM PST - 16 comments

Lewis R. Binford, one of the most influential American archaeologists of the last half-century and an early advocate of a more scientific approach to investigating ancient cultures, died on April 11 at his home in Kirksville, Mo. He was 79. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation at 1:58 PM PST - 7 comments

The Sabich is a popular Israeli pita sandwich based on the traditional Babylonian-Jewish Shabbat morning meal. It it is usually seasoned with Amba, the mango pickle condiment of Indian Origin which the Baghdadi Jewish community of India brought to Baghdad (along with Sambusak, a variant of the Simosa). [more inside]
posted by beisny at 12:40 PM PST - 15 comments

Where's My Cell Phone? Can't find your cell phone? No one around to call it for you? This may help.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 12:26 PM PST - 41 comments

"He did more good in his time than almost any other of his contemporaries" This week marks the 100th anniversary of the death of John Passmore Edwards. Philanthropist, activist, MP, journalist, editor and proprietor, chartist and pacifist, campaigner for peace, for the abolition of capital publishment and flogging and for provision of free libraries. His autobiography. [more inside]
posted by biffa at 11:37 AM PST - 3 comments

• It was written by Raymond Scott in 1937, and first heard by the world played by the Raymond Scott Quintette on CBS Radio's Saturday Night Swing Club.
• It was first recorded in 1937 and released by Master Records. It was later re-released by Brunswick and then Columbia.
• It contains a middle section that has a greatly different tempo and style from the rest of the song, to the degree that it is sometimes considered to be two different songs.
• It was a popular tune of its time. Among Raymond Scott's admirers was Carl Stalling, music director for Warner Bros. cartoons. Stalling's appreciation for Scott lead to his music being featured frequently in Warner cartoons. Itself, it has been used in dozens of classic cartoons, especially in places depicting rapid motion or heavy machinery. Despite this, no Warner cartoon contains a complete version of the work.
• It's now so recognized from its use in cartoons that most people can probably hum portions of its middle potion, and recognize the rest, even if they don't know it's name. It's so connected with cartoons that Cartoon Network used it as a distinctive bumper tune from 1997 to 2003.
• Regardless of its iconic nature, it's still in copyright and is controlled in the US by Music Sales Corporation, and elsewhere by Warner/Chappell Music.
• That song is called "Powerhouse."

[more inside]
posted by JHarris at 11:34 AM PST - 62 comments

A $23,698,655.93 book about flies.
posted by kipmanley at 11:05 AM PST - 57 comments

Last year, BBC America noticed a spike in piracy of Doctor Who episodes as fans were either frustrated with the 2 week gap between UK and US premiere and/or spoilers and gossip everywhere. The solution, as demonstrated by shows like The Walking Dead, seems to be to broadcast world wide on the same day. [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:36 AM PST - 338 comments

Comedian Stewart Lee on not wanting to be a "content provider"
posted by Artw at 9:15 AM PST - 44 comments

Days after Google Video announced the impending death of Google Video, prompting jscott to start archiving as many videos as the Archive team could and a subsequent Metafilter post on the best of Google Video, it turns out that Google has relented and removed the deadline. It will also be migrating the videos over to Youtube.
posted by titantoppler at 8:58 AM PST - 31 comments

Fall in love with Mr. Momus. See the new videosongs from his soon to be released EP, the Thunderclown: Shangri-La :: Willow Pattern :: We Don't Have To Make Children :: I Want To Be Good :: The Teacher :: Midas :: The Thunderclown :: Produced in collaboration with John Henriksson of Tona Serenad.
posted by puny human at 8:44 AM PST - 9 comments

Cracked.com and VirusComix join forces to present: Non-bullshit Fables.
posted by Eideteker at 7:50 AM PST - 19 comments

The Evolution of April O’Neil.
posted by Fizz at 5:12 AM PST - 60 comments

Just in time for Easter, Simon's Cat meets a bunny.
posted by tomswift at 3:49 AM PST - 28 comments

Man unveils interactive toothpick sculpture of San Francisco that took 35 years to create . Mindblowing. (single vimeo link)
posted by the_bone at 12:43 AM PST - 55 comments

Children's drawings painted realistically.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 11:57 PM PST - 32 comments

For Sale: One Shunned House. The house at 135 Benefit Street, Providence RI is for sale. This house was the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's short story The Shunned House. Even without the Lovecraft connection, the house has an eerie history. It can be yours for $925,000.
posted by marxchivist at 8:24 PM PST - 33 comments

It has applications in health care, pharmaceuticals, facial recognition, economics/related areas, and of course, much much more. Previously, MeFi discussed controversial homeland security applications, and the nexus between social networking and mobile devices that further contributes to the pool. With plenty to dig into, let's talk Data Mining in more detail. [more inside]
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:15 PM PST - 14 comments

Something wonderful is happening.
gaiman/palm/folds/kulash/awesome-music-filter
posted by es_de_bah at 6:00 PM PST - 50 comments

50 pictures of Basset Hounds running. If you aren't satisfied with just pictures, well there's videos of Basset Hounds running in slow motion (1,2) and videos of them shaking in slow motion (1,2).
posted by MaryDellamorte at 5:29 PM PST - 34 comments

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) crashed yesterday, taking with it popular sites like Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Hootsuite, Act.ly, and about 70 other sites. Amazon.com was affected, as was some functionality of the New York Times. Amazon Web Service's Health Dashboard indicates that there are still major operating disturbances. [more inside]
posted by 2bucksplus at 4:01 PM PST - 135 comments

Deadspin tells the story of the unlikely friendship between Kendrick Perkins of the Oklahoma City Thunder and two fans.
posted by reenum at 3:02 PM PST - 22 comments

The Canal des Deux Mers connected the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, the Zuiderzee Works reclaimed part of shallow inlet of the North Sea to expand the Netherlands, so why not try taming the Mediterranean and irrigating Africa? Part ocean reclamation, part power generation (the "white coal" of falling water), Atlantropa wasn't simply the stuff of science fiction. First called Panropa, it was the long-term goal of a German architect and engineer named Herman Sörgel, a dream that lasted until his death in 1952, and the Atlantropa Institute continued on another 8 years. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:45 PM PST - 17 comments

"Hahn-Bin, a 22-year-old protégé of the eminent violinist Itzhak Perlman ... holds Mozart and Warhol in equal esteem ... [he's] a rare bridge between Carnegie Hall, where he [made] his mainstage debut on March 13, and the Boom Boom Room [at The Standard Hotel], where he performed at a party hosted by V Magazine during New York Fashion Week."* [more inside]
posted by ericb at 2:37 PM PST - 14 comments

Remember interesting music videos? [SLYT] The musical group tUnE-yArDs, fronted by Merrill Garbus, has been linked before, but I just stumbled across this video. For her song 'Bizness' from her recently released [on 4AD] album. Think Peter Gabriel in his ethnomusical-borrowing days, with a splash of Deep Forest -- and the video's worth watching, too. Not your usual girl with a ukelele.
posted by benito.strauss at 2:33 PM PST - 29 comments

Climategate: What Really Happened? How climate science became the target of "the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 1:46 PM PST - 73 comments

High-achieving Asian-American students are being shut out of top schools around the country. Is this what diversity looks like now? "'There’s a form of redlining or holding Asian-American students to higher standards than any other group.' Although Asian-Americans represent less than 5 percent of the US population (and slightly more than 5 percent in Massachusetts), they make up as much as 20 percent of students at many highly selective private research universities – the kind of schools that make it into top 50 national rankings. But, critics charge, Asian-American students would constitute an even larger share if many weren’t being filtered out during the admissions process." [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 12:22 PM PST - 417 comments

How Genius Works. The Atlantic asks artists like T.C. Boyle, Tim Burton, Paul Simon, and Frank Gehry (and others who aren't so well-known) to describe their creative process.
posted by helloknitty at 12:01 PM PST - 59 comments

Friday Flash Fun: Realm of the Mad God is a co-op MMORPG shooter with cute 8-bit graphics. Death is permanent, play addictive. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:41 AM PST - 18 comments

Was J'aime Kirlew, self-proclaimed "Diva for Coupons" and participant on TLC's Extreme Couponing shown committing fraud? Many couponers (discussion begins with second comment on the page) think she's done it before going on TLC (youtube links in thread may be broken). Bud Miller from the The Coupon Information Corporation says "This whole thing is kind of sad.". Fraud may be reduced with implementation of the GS1 databar (wikipedia) which contains more data than the traditional UPC code.
posted by vespabelle at 9:58 AM PST - 137 comments

PFC Rupert Valero is a U.S. soldier stationed in Afghanistan who makes amazing custom toy robots out of recycled materials.
posted by MegoSteve at 9:51 AM PST - 11 comments

Seth Mnookin courageously fought heroin addiction and re-launched himself as a well-regarded writer. His new book The Panic Virus raised several questions about the science behind claims that vaccinations contribute to autism, and that the consequences of doing so resulted in the reemergence of formerly eradicated diseases such as measles and whooping cough. In that light, he recently criticized a new PBS Series which, despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary, again suggests the vaccination-autism connection. This led to a classless attack on Mnookin's former struggles with addiction. His pained response.
posted by littlemanclan at 9:49 AM PST - 80 comments

Novel First Sentences, Novel Last Sentences
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:28 AM PST - 54 comments

Symmetry. [more inside]
posted by pwally at 8:45 AM PST - 16 comments

Beastie Boys 25 years later are still fighting for their right. Starring: Jack Black, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, David Cross, Will Arnett, Amy Poehler, Jason Schwartzman, Adam Scott, Rainn Wilson, Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny, Alicia Silverstone, Martin Starr, Ted Danson and Rashida Jones. Here's a link to the original. This may be NSFW.
posted by TheBones at 7:20 AM PST - 55 comments

Flash Fun Friday! Elephant Quest: the best elephants-with-lasers Castlevaniaesque RPG you will play all day. [more inside]
posted by keeo at 7:11 AM PST - 21 comments

Iraq Vet Who Advocated For Others Kills Himself "Handsome and friendly, Clay Hunt so epitomized a vibrant Iraq veteran that he was chosen for a public service announcement reminding veterans that they aren't alone." - Clay Hunt died March 31 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The article states he had been dealing with "survivors guilt" and frustrated by a difficult disability claim process from wounds received in Iraq.
posted by randomkeystrike at 6:36 AM PST - 70 comments

Coverhithe : While you wait for his next book, the Guardian has a new short story from China Mieville.
posted by biffa at 6:08 AM PST - 4 comments

Yale's 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators tracked across ten policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national government scale of how close countries are to established environmental policy goals.
posted by wilful at 5:48 AM PST - 8 comments

Alaska man prints poster-sized boarding pass. No extra TSA pat downs, no enraged passengers.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 5:21 AM PST - 55 comments

"By this point there was devastation everywhere. All junctions were blocked by overturned glass bottle dumpsters and makeshift neighbourhood roadblocks blocks." Last night, a huge clash between protestors and the police kicked off in the colourful Stokes Croft area of Bristol. The cause? A recently-opened Tesco Express supermarket.
posted by hnnrs at 5:00 AM PST - 55 comments

(Good) Friday Flash Fun: Stalwart is a tricky little avoidance platformer with charming low-fi graphics and great music.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 11:05 PM PST - 12 comments

Bacon-wrapped cupcakes: What could possibly go wrong? Well, try explaining your Internet-famous project (Epic Meal Time) in English on Quebec’s most popular French-language talk show. Bonus difficulty points: You already are from Quebec, but you don’t speak French well enough to swagger through an interview. Anglo journo Fagstein analyzes the “controversy.” (The interview in question, from Tout le monde en parle, on YouTube; alternate.)
posted by joeclark at 7:43 PM PST - 87 comments

Working best at coffee shops. Destination: Laptopistan. Why work doesn't happen at work.
posted by AceRock at 7:04 PM PST - 73 comments

Madelyn Pugh Davis, one of the three masterminds behind I Love Lucy and a pioneer for women writers in radio and television, has gone on to the great Vitameatavegamin commercial in the sky. She was 90. [more inside]
posted by scody at 5:53 PM PST - 20 comments

Meatcraft - Real World Minecraft
posted by Artw at 4:43 PM PST - 13 comments

The Booth At The End is a drama about a man who makes deals. 62 parts, each lasting just two pretty fantastic minutes. [more inside]
posted by sleepcrime at 3:22 PM PST - 25 comments

The science education video series Sixty Symbols (previously) explores the Cadbury Creme Egg. [more inside]
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:05 PM PST - 25 comments

Portal 2 has finally hit the streets, and despite a somewhat rocky start with their controversial promotional ARG (previously), it looks to be a huge success. Interestingly for such a critically-acclaimed blockbuster, the title's core ideas steam from a pair of concept projects from student design school DigiPen: the original portal system from Narbacular Drop (video - download - previously) and the sequel's physics-altering gels from Tag: The Power of Paint (video - download - previously - previouslier). Combine these innovative ideas with some Lost-meets-Life After People level design, excellent voice acting, and top-notch writing, and it's easy to see why so many people called in sick this past week. But playing the game is just the beginning -- look inside for a collection of easter eggs, story theories, videos, and other goodies from the post-mortem. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:31 PM PST - 420 comments

Captured: A Look Back at the Vietnam War on the 35th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. (The following photo collection contains some graphic violence and depictions of dead bodies.)
posted by docgonzo at 2:13 PM PST - 17 comments

From an early age, it was clear that Carly Fleishmann had autism. Furthermore, she couldn't speak, and professionals who had diagnosed her considered her moderately to severely cognitively impaired. Therapy helped, but she still wasn't able to speak. Then at age ten, working with a computer equipped with pictures and symbols, she started typing and spelling words. She started with single words, then wrote sentences, describing how she felt, and how she wanted people to treat her. Her story has been presented on a variety of shows, often with insight provided by Carly that she typed with one finger. As her writing ability has improved over the years, she has shared her thoughts through her blog (and as a guest on Larry King's blog), on her own Twitter feed, and Facebook page. Now 16, she recently appeared again on TV, talking through her writing (transcript). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:09 PM PST - 46 comments

... and there is no dark matter/energy! Dr. Philip Mannheim has succeeded in developing a cosmological and quantum field theoretic consistent PT symmetric theory that contains no kind of dark matter and dark energy. Space is flat in the absence of matter, and even the largest galactic rotation curves are predicted. Perhaps most interestingly, it also handles the cosmological constant and zero-point energy 'problems' simultaneously! (This is the final paper in a long list of publications, but it makes the case such that it's importance is immediately recognized. I leave it to the experts to recognize it's true beauty.) All hail the internets!
posted by quanta and qualia at 11:41 AM PST - 210 comments

Shawarma Law. The Ed and Moe Show is a web comedy series from Dearborn, MI - birthplace of Henry Ford, home to the highest concentration of Muslim Arabs in North America (about 1/3 the population), and a target of ignorant crankery (previously). Well Ed and Moe have seen this kind of thing before. Co-creator Mike Eshaq doesn't want you to counter-protest, he's asking people to come to the Dearborn Civic Center Friday April 22 at 4pm to celebrate Shawarma Law. It's not Ramadan right now and there's nothing to be afraid of. If you can make it, come on up and share the love. Detroit Free Press coverage. Previous episodes of The Ed and Moe Show: 1 2 3 4.
posted by McLir at 11:32 AM PST - 16 comments

The Girl Who Played With Fire: Rolling Stone profiles the "rise, fall and stubborn survival" of Kiki Kannibal, ‘The Most Hated Girl on the Internet’
posted by zarq at 11:30 AM PST - 203 comments

Selling heroin on Craigslist. [more inside]
posted by sveskemus at 11:04 AM PST - 32 comments

Max Mathews, died today, here in San Francisco. One of the fathers of electronic music, whose early voice synthesis project became a centerpiece in 2001: A Space Odyssey - HAL singing that old tune "Daisy Bell."
posted by njohnson23 at 11:01 AM PST - 28 comments

What Congress Would Look Like If It [Demographically] Represented America (full size infographic). Net worth of lawmakers (related, previously).
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:39 AM PST - 69 comments

When film critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer, he lost the ability to eat and speak. But he did not lose his voice. In a moving talk from TED2011, Ebert and his wife, Chaz, with friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, come together to tell his remarkable story. [Ted Talk video - 20minutes]
posted by hippybear at 10:11 AM PST - 10 comments

Ann Steel -- My Time
posted by puny human at 9:54 AM PST - 13 comments

"This conflict of interest hits at the heart of the attorney-client relationship." Robert Caulley has served 14 years of a life sentence for the murder of his parents, a crime he says he didn't commit. Some hope that unknown DNA found on a gun at the crime scene will prove his innocence, citing similar exonerations in other high-profile Ohio cases, but so far Caulley's attempts to revisit his case with further DNA testing have failed. But look, Caulley already had his day in court with his lawyer by his side, doing everything possible to clear him, right? So he thought -- until he learned that his defense attorney was sleeping with his wife during his trial.
posted by escabeche at 9:33 AM PST - 20 comments

'Herman Wouk Is Still Alive' a new short story by Stephen King. Interview where, among other things, King discusses the origins of the story, his creative process in general, the status of the short story today, and his liking for Judas Priest. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:07 AM PST - 59 comments

The Texas A&M Student Senate has voted to support and advocate for student-funded traditional family values education on Texas public school campuses. [more inside]
posted by fugitivefromchaingang at 8:51 AM PST - 96 comments

Gauss Facts
posted by jjray at 7:35 AM PST - 29 comments

Lego Great Ball Contraption. (YouTube). Not enough balls? Try this one. (YouTube) More about Great Ball Contraptions: one two
posted by Legomancer at 6:54 AM PST - 31 comments

Logos + Truth Sunglasses: Honest Logos
posted by Memo at 6:37 AM PST - 44 comments

Matt and Jamie Danielson, with the aid of their bankruptcy attorney, were able to use a little known loophole in the Iowa law to void their mortgage and own their house outright after making just one payment. However, further investigation has uncovered some unsavory events in the couple's past.
posted by reenum at 6:36 AM PST - 60 comments

"Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: “How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?” ... At the end of the day his “method” amounted to a set of exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!" Matthew Stewart on the fruitlessness of management science. "According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group."
posted by geoff. at 6:35 AM PST - 54 comments

Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it. That's a fantasy shared by many music fans—and, mutatis mutandis, film buffs as well. We all know the Internet has made available a lot of things that were previously hard to get. Recently, though, there are indications of something even more enticing, almost paradisiacal, something that might have made Bangs put down the cough syrup and sit up straight: that almost everything is available.
posted by octothorpe at 5:12 AM PST - 136 comments

"The Architecture of Access to Scientific Information: Just How Badly We Have Messed This Up" Lawrence Lessig speaking at CERN on April 18, 2011. Long (~50 min), but wonderful and totally worth it (and the second half is about Youtube and remix culture).
posted by unknowncommand at 10:54 PM PST - 52 comments

The Canadian Pirate Party is official, registered, and running 10-12 candidates in the current federal election. The recent debate over usage-based billing convinced at least one of its candidates of its potential appeal to voters. They are unabashedly an issue-based party, whose platform deals with intellectual property, privacy, net neutrality, and government access/openness. [more inside]
posted by kevinsp8 at 9:50 PM PST - 13 comments

Nerds Ruin Everything. XKCD Sucks. Gamers Are Embarrassing. Defunct: Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits Stuff Geeks Love. Classic: Five Geek Social Fallacies
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:51 PM PST - 205 comments

TV On The Radio's Gerard Smith Dead At 34. Smith was TV On the Radio's bassist. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 7:10 PM PST - 84 comments

One year after BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a hydraulic fracturing operation in northern Pennsylvania experiences a blowout resulting in the release of fracking liquids. The use and chemical content of fracking liquids is a point of contention when debating what role natural gas will play in the future of energy.
posted by nowoutside at 6:58 PM PST - 84 comments

Puzzle Hunters - a high-quality, original animation by Matt Wilson (formerly of Bonus Stage)
posted by LSK at 6:12 PM PST - 4 comments

Avoid the News: Towards A Healthy News Diet. (large-ish PDF) Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey. Make news as inaccessible as possible . . . . After a while, you will realize that despite your personal news blackout, you have not missed – and you’re not going to miss – any important facts. If some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community, you will hear it in time – from your friends, your mother-in-law or whomever you talk to or see. When you are with your friends, ask them if anything important is happening in the world. The question is a great conversation starter. Most of the time, the answer will be: “not really.”
posted by jason's_planet at 4:58 PM PST - 113 comments

"My NY Mets sketchbook. I create an entry after each Mets game or commentary on the crazy stuff going on around the team."
posted by clorox at 4:17 PM PST - 9 comments

British photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed by artillery fire in Libya today. He was 41 years old. [more inside]
posted by Rangeboy at 3:22 PM PST - 70 comments

"Weird" Al Yankovic wanted to do a parody of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," so he did what he usually does: he contacted the artist and asked permission. Lady Gaga said she'd have to hear the lyrics, so Weird Al wrote the lyrics and sent them to her. Gaga then said she's have to actually hear the song, so Weird Al went into the studio and recorded it - at which point Gaga refused to give her permission. Weird Al responded by doing something he's never done in his entire career: he's asserted his fair use rights and made an unapproved parody available to the public.
posted by mightygodking at 11:04 AM PST - 503 comments

The Thinking Atheist: 'Nothing More To Talk About' (SLYT) - Many religious family members pray for their atheist and agnostic loved ones graciously, honoring personal boundaries and showing respect for the skeptic's right to form his/her own worldview... This video is not about them...
posted by MrBCID at 10:37 AM PST - 344 comments

On April 20th, 1979, President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a giant swimming swamp rabbit. With pics, 'cause it happened. [more inside]
posted by davidjmcgee at 10:27 AM PST - 73 comments

Paige Johnson works as a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. [...] Her current landscape research is focused on the strange and fascinating story of atomic gardening, a post-war phenomenon in which plants were irradiated in the hopes of producing beneficial mutations.
Pruned talks to Paige Johnson about atomic gardens.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:00 AM PST - 21 comments

Yvonne Strahovski, of Chuck fame, lampoons Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Gaga in Three Pop Stars, One Song. Somewhat NSFW-ish, but the lyrics are quite witty and the tune is ear-worm-y. [SLCH]
posted by shiu mai baby at 9:59 AM PST - 30 comments

Writer Cath Elliot, recently nominated for the Orwell Prize for political writing, posts about what are, sadly, often the occupational hazards of being a political woman online. (NSFW language; author has tagged post with a trigger warning fwiw)
posted by mippy at 9:45 AM PST - 50 comments

Conceptual art collective, and part-time unemployment agency, Workforce Central Florida recently began the "Cape-a-bility Challenge" that has been taking some flack for spending $73,000 giving 6000 red capes (costing $14,000 for the capes alone) to the unemployed in their battle against the verbosely named existential super-villian Dr. Evil Unemployment. [more inside]
posted by wcfields at 9:45 AM PST - 34 comments

"Cumbia is one of the world's great dance grooves. It is made up of merry guitars and accordions, torrid brass, and insistent, deep-toned drums and percussion, pounding out a lopsided, strutting 4/4 rhythm with a kick like nitroglycerine. Cumbia is the result of three colliding cultures that settled in Colombia at different times. Indigenous peoples were followed by the Spanish conquistadors, who added on Moorish influences from the sack of Granada. Finally, African slaves were brought in, and they supplied both the rhythm and the means to bring it forth. From its beginnings as a courtship dance among the slave population, cumbia gradually became the soul of the entire nation." PRI's The World asks, which do you prefer, Cumbia old or Cumbia new? For Cumbia old the list is long: Amaneciendo! :: Cumbias En Moog "Cumbia De Sal" :: Cumbia Sampuesana :: Pedro Laza - Cumbia del Monte :: Gabriel Romero - La Subienda :: Cumbia plegaria :: Soledad - Lucy Gonzalez :: La Zenaida :: For Cumbia new start here: Chancha via Circuito and then check out the ZZK Mix Tapes: Fauna Megamix :: Tremor :: King Koya
posted by puny human at 9:44 AM PST - 24 comments

Meet Doctor Doom "Forty years ago, with his band Pentagram, Bobby Liebling invented a style of fiendishly heavy metal that hardly anyone heard. He spent the ensuing decades in a haze of hard drugs and big trouble. (5 arrests, 35 detoxes, more than 200 hospital visits.) Now, with the genre he spawned on the rise and a young wife and baby boy in tow, Liebling is feeling the first rumblings of success. Here's where things start to get weird." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:03 AM PST - 26 comments

iPhones Found to Track Your Movements, Keep Record Security researchers have discovered that without any input from the user, iPhones permanently record the movements of their owners. Download an open-source app (Mac) here to reveal your own geo history.
posted by modernnomad at 7:22 AM PST - 370 comments

Famous dictators and the books/poetry they write. [more inside]
posted by gman at 7:09 AM PST - 20 comments

Amazon has announced that library lending will be available on the Kindle later this year. Teaming with Overdrive, the program will start with 11,000 libraries in the United States. One of the key features touted by the company will be that users "can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library. Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them." Could this be a possible death blow to the Nook?
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 6:50 AM PST - 93 comments

The poor in Ethiopia are often unable to buy newspapers, so they 'rent' papers for 20-30 minutes at a time from local entrepreneurs.
posted by reenum at 6:29 AM PST - 26 comments

Could you live in repurposed freight containers? How about a pig sty or a water tower? You can really fix a water tower up nicely. Folks can live in all kinds of things, including an old cement factory. [more inside]
posted by kinnakeet at 6:16 AM PST - 38 comments

Lovely and haunting photographs of 25 Shipwrecks from around the world. [more inside]
posted by benzo8 at 1:27 AM PST - 25 comments

Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci take a closer look at issues regarding the availability of medical marijuana. [more inside]
posted by KChasm at 12:51 AM PST - 41 comments

Four Photographers on Three Wheels: William Eggleston's Tricycle and Before. Mark Feeney's lecture examines the humble tricycle in twentieth century photography. He compares photos by Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Bill Owens and, of course, William Eggleston.
posted by bstreep at 10:07 PM PST - 2 comments

Nantucket Sleighride takes its title from 19th century whaling slang. The song is dedicated to the memory of Owen Coffin, ship's mate aboard the Whaleship Essex. [more inside]
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:00 PM PST - 14 comments

Longform.org has the 2011 Pulitzer prize winners in unadorned plain text. Instructions below for using Longform with Instapaper. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 8:37 PM PST - 15 comments

Should Cops Be Allowed to Scan Your Phone During a Traffic Stop? In Michigan, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a complaint [PDF letter here] alleging that Michigan State Police officers used forensic cellphone analyzers to snoop in drivers' cellphones during routine traffic stops. [Before they fulfill an ACLU FOIA request, the MSP wants a $272,340 deposit up front to cover their costs of retrieving analyzer data, which is obtained without the cellphone owner's knowledge.]
posted by cenoxo at 8:36 PM PST - 96 comments

The AV Club has been writing in-depth recaps of Batman: The Animated Series. They were originally written by Leonard Pierce but after a small scandal Oliver Sava has taken over the write-ups. They've already covered some of the series best-loved episodes, including Feat of Clay, Heart of Ice, and the Mask of the Phantasm film. [more inside]
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:37 PM PST - 53 comments

"What's on the menu?", the New York Public Library asks. Cincinnati Ham, Champagne Sauce. Baked Weakfish. Republican Punch. Cup of Beef Tea. [more inside]
posted by nev at 5:38 PM PST - 46 comments

Long before he wrote DVD reviews for The New York Times, Dave Kehr spent 11 years at the Chicago Reader perfecting the 100-word capsule review into a vehicle for his succinct, astute writing on a wide variety of films. All of them can be read for free at the Chicago Reader's website. Additionally, his long-overlooked long reviews have just been collected and published. [more inside]
posted by alexoscar at 4:52 PM PST - 26 comments

Kris Kuksi makes sculptures, paintings, and drawings. A time-lapse of his sculpting process and a walkthrough with details. He has a book and sells his sculptures. His most famous work is perhaps Church Tank. [Previously]
posted by lemuring at 4:44 PM PST - 7 comments

Christopher Hitchens rails against monarchy and the Royal wedding.
posted by beisny at 3:34 PM PST - 268 comments

Just A Smack On The Ass: A Tale of Sexual Assault, Vengeance and Nervous Swearing. Stop Street Harassment offers further ideas for targets and bystanders to think about. [more inside]
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 3:29 PM PST - 70 comments

The Latest Enemies of Iran: Dogs and Their Owners [more inside]
posted by PepperMax at 3:00 PM PST - 34 comments

He is from Miami. They are from Orlando. [more inside]
posted by anigbrowl at 2:40 PM PST - 9 comments

Alan Moore and Ian Gibson's epic story The Ballad of Halo Jones concluded 25 years ago today (bar the odd strange one page appearance hinting at why it did not return). Despite being unpopular with readers at first due to it's female protagonist and relative lack of action it is now rightly regarded as one of 2000ads classic stories. However despite Quality Comics reprinting a color monthly version (which was anything but quality) it has remained a rarity in the US, until now. But how would the other 6 chapters of the planned 9 part chapter have gone? Moore revealed how it would have ended in a recent interview.
posted by Artw at 2:33 PM PST - 20 comments

Comics writer Scott Synder has noticed that the same two background characters appear in a number of different Marvel and DC comics. Who are these 'Hipster Cops'?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:00 PM PST - 48 comments

She was Sarah Jane Smith: intrepid reporter, beloved companion, and stalwart defender. She was in two different spin-offs. The BBC is confirming that Elisabeth Sladen of Doctor Who and environs, is dead at 63.
posted by Legomancer at 1:26 PM PST - 223 comments

Urban explorers surreptitiously gain access to the Post Office Railway underneath London, take lots of photos.
posted by grouse at 1:06 PM PST - 37 comments

There are many ways to be immortal. Israel Aharoni, a Jewish biologist working in Turkish-controlled Jerusalem, imagined that his enduring legacy would come from giving Hebrew names to the animals of the Holy Land.... In the spring of 1930, Aharoni staged an expedition to the hills of Syria, near Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world. His quest was simple: he wanted to catch the rare golden mammal whose Arabic name translates roughly as 'mister saddlebags.' [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 1:01 PM PST - 10 comments

The Tao of Poo We can exhaustively ­explore every aspect of athletic life -- victory, defeat, violence, racism, drugs, brain damage, paralysis, death -- but nothing reveals as much about the physiology, psychology and sociology of sport as the excretory experience of athletes.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:48 PM PST - 41 comments

Baseball fans: Curious how far that home run went? Try HitTracker. [more inside]
posted by starman at 12:32 PM PST - 5 comments

ShelvAr: an augmented reality app for shelf-reading library stacks, from Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group (MU ARRG!).
posted by steef at 12:09 PM PST - 25 comments

Andres Serrano (some NSWF images) has made controversial art for decades, with his piece Piss Christ causing controversy shortly after it was created in 1987. In 1989, the photograph initiated outrage against the National Endowment for the Arts because of "anti-Christian bigotry". Then the piece was physically attacked two times in one weekend, when it was first shown in the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997. In December 2010, the Collection Lambert museum of contemporary art in Avignon, France opened a show called "I Believe in Miracles" that includes pieces of minimal art, conceptual art and land art, and includes Piss Christ. The photograph had been shown in France before without disturbance, and had been shown without incident in Collection Lambert for four months, but around 1,000 protesters marched to the museum on Saturday, and on Sunday vandals succeeded in attacking the picture, breaking the plexiglass shield and slashing the photograph. The museum is open again, and the damaged work is still on display. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:55 AM PST - 142 comments

Tommy Wonder Performs the Cups and Balls I ran across this performance of one of magic's oldest tricks. It's probably the best version I've seen so far. In my opinion it's even better than Dai Vernon's.
posted by wackyvorlon at 10:41 AM PST - 33 comments

What we do is what we do. The brand new DEVO video takes the crowd-sourcing/focus-grouping element of their album Something For Everybody to the music video world. It's a 360-degree video where the user can control the camera. (For the lazy among us, there's also a "random" button that moves from shot to shot.) The link also includes a brief interview with DEVO co-founder/video co-director Gerald V. Casale.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 10:09 AM PST - 15 comments

What happens when you let your boyfriend do your makeup. (via The Hairpin)
posted by hermitosis at 9:27 AM PST - 73 comments

Jan Brewer, the Governor of Arizona, has vetoed the controversial 'birther bill' that would require presidential candidates to provide AZ's secretary of state with proof of citizenship before they could appear on the ballot, up to and including a 'circumcision certificate'
posted by FatherDagon at 8:59 AM PST - 114 comments

"Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer, who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, infancy and creativity." Here are a collection of Bruno Munari's Faces. You can see more of the maestro's work in this short documentary: 1, 2, 3, and on this Italian children's show from the 1970s. And here are scans from some of Munari's famous illustrations for children's books.
posted by puny human at 8:36 AM PST - 5 comments

David Axe is on his way back from reporting for 6 weeks in Afghanistan. [more inside]
posted by garlic at 8:35 AM PST - 7 comments

'Star Wars' Producer Gary Kurtz Reflects When George Lucas and I began planning the first film, we had no idea what it would become; the kind of devotion it would attract... So what was it that made Star Wars so different, so special? I can give you one small example of the kind of care we took when putting the film together...
posted by modernnomad at 7:12 AM PST - 132 comments

Philosophical Referee Symbols.
posted by escabeche at 7:12 AM PST - 22 comments

egapbew a fo kcab [TUMBLR]
posted by Fizz at 5:28 AM PST - 39 comments

2D glasses for 3D movies! Hank Green, one half of the VlogBrothers, comes up with a solution for people who'd like to watch 3D movies without the headache.
posted by litnerd at 5:02 AM PST - 35 comments

Norwegian marathon runner Grete Waitz dies at 57. [more inside]
posted by iviken at 4:03 AM PST - 17 comments

Inspired by a recent AskMe, a search for videos featuring the 'Iroha Uta' turned up a number of interesting versions. The iroha is a pangram based on the Japanese syllabary, and thus uses each of the 48 characters once and only once (Wikipedia explanation). Let's start with the 'lovely' Hatsune Miku singing it. (Bonus: she includes hand symbols for each character - used by this young lady for her version.) [more inside]
posted by woodblock100 at 3:27 AM PST - 8 comments

Having trouble forming (and then keeping) good habits? Habit Judo may be the answer. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 2:55 AM PST - 84 comments

"Are you going to issue a tornado forecast?" [asked the general]. We both made abortive efforts at crawling out of such a horrendous decision. We pointed out the infinitesimal possibility of a second tornado striking the same area within twenty years or more, let alone in five days. "Besides," we said, "no one has ever issued an operational tornado forecast." [more inside]
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:44 PM PST - 9 comments

Team Ghost Riders [more inside]
posted by Minus215Cee at 11:38 PM PST - 12 comments

A collection of first-person accounts of the men and women who defended the Soviet Union against the Fascist invasion, and eventually participated in the race to Berlin. via the War Nerd
posted by pompomtom at 9:56 PM PST - 22 comments

ヘヤ メタフィテレ! ヰテ ヨウ ナメ イン ジャパネセ! [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 at 9:50 PM PST - 50 comments

Waffle shop is a place to eat waffles, and also a live streaming talk show. [more inside]
posted by idiopath at 9:49 PM PST - 13 comments

Holy Rollers (the documentary) Card-Counting Christians.
posted by klausman at 7:14 PM PST - 24 comments

"From then on, the difference became clear. It’s the male band members who don’t take you seriously, and when you get upset with how you’re treated, ask you if you’re menstruating. It’s the promoters and planners who screw you, then call you a diva when you assert yourself. It’s the kids who don’t talk to you after your set, but talk to your male bandmates because they assume you’re only there for show. It’s the people who think you’re sleeping with the guitarist, the people who assume you’re queer, or the journalists who mention your weight in reviews. It’s every single time a producer has told me I can’t play guitar on my own record because “sweetie, you’re not a studio musician” or “sing it again, but naked.” Mariel Loveland from Candy Hearts and Lauren Denitzio from The Measure [SA] discuss sexism in modern punk rock. For further reading there's Jessica Hopper's classic essay Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t. Previously.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:56 PM PST - 38 comments

IAMTHECOINIAMTELLINGTHISSTORYIAMINAGRIDCONSISTINGO
FTWENTYTHOUSANDCOINSAGRIDTWOHUNDREDROWSLONGBYONEHU
NDREDROWSHIGHEACHCOINISALETTERTHEREARENOSPACESANDN
OPUNCTUATIONMARKSTHEREISAHIDDENCLUETOHELPYOUFINDME

[more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:43 PM PST - 44 comments

Join a research expedition to Antarctica's Mertz Glacier. Stunning photos, videos, interactives. [more inside]
posted by puffl at 5:33 PM PST - 7 comments

Pony Polka!
posted by furiousxgeorge at 5:31 PM PST - 24 comments

"Estonian sculptor Mati Karmin creates mind-blowing furniture made out [sic] from sea mines." That is all. [more inside]
posted by kinnakeet at 4:22 PM PST - 23 comments

The economic case for on-street bike parking (they are not just for the folks in Portland).
posted by aniola at 4:01 PM PST - 39 comments

The Science of Why We Don't Believe In Science. Or How To Win An Argument: Try Not To Rely on Facts. MotherJones investigates what recent research can tell us about how we reason (or don't).
posted by Diablevert at 3:50 PM PST - 45 comments

Cellist Kevin Olusola incorporated beatboxing into a piece called Julie-O. [more inside]
posted by gman at 3:14 PM PST - 16 comments

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything. The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.
posted by crossoverman at 2:44 PM PST - 89 comments

Austin Breed is a 19-year-old game designer. His works are typically said to fall under the "art game" genre but are in fact better understood as interactive experiences that deal with everything from the idea of faith to the emotional turmoil of long distance relationships. Here are my favorites: Distance, A Mother in Festerwood, Sweatshop Boy, Good Fortune. [more inside]
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 2:43 PM PST - 16 comments

9 Things The Rich Don't Want You To Know About Taxes - "4. Many of the very richest pay no current income taxes at all: Paulson made himself $9 billion in fees in just two years. His current tax bill on that $9 billion? Zero... 9. Other countries do it better: no one in Germany or the rest of the modern world goes broke because of accident or illness" (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:41 PM PST - 191 comments

As discussed over the weekend, in less than two weeks the millions of videos uploaded to six-year-old erstwhile YouTube competitor Google Video will no longer be viewable. Though a download button has been added to each video page for easy back-up, that will only be available though May 13th, and the company will not be offering transfer service for users with YouTube accounts. The search giant has been slowly winding down the service over the years since their billion-dollar buyout of YouTube, controversially revoking purchased content (with a refund) in 2007 and disabling new uploads in 2009. The shutdown is a big blow to the web video ecosystem, as Google Video was one of the few major services to allow free hosting of long-form video, including the content for many popular MetaFilter posts. But all is not lost! Reddit users have organized a virtual potluck to share the most interesting and unique videos not available anywhere else, and the Archive Team, preserver of doomed web properties like Geocities (previously), is partnering with Archive.org to back up as much content as possible. In that spirit, click inside for a list of some of the most popular Google Video-centric content posted here over the years. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:32 PM PST - 53 comments

NPR's On the Media dedicated its hour this weekend to the new Egyptian media landscape (direct MP3 link). [more inside]
posted by domnit at 1:23 PM PST - 5 comments

"Prehistoric Beast" (1984), a film by Phil Tippett [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 1:11 PM PST - 8 comments

In 2000, microbial ecologist Roy Cullimore and Charles Pellegrino (author of Ghosts of the Titanic) discovered that the Titanic was being eaten by an extremeophile super-organism, transforming the steel into huge pillars of rust. [Previously, regarding the Titanic.] [more inside]
posted by mephron at 12:56 PM PST - 16 comments

Nouveau Shamanic: The Nicolas Cage Method. "I had realized that I’d developed my own style and process and school of acting which is called Nouveau Shamanic..." — Nicolas Cage, 1964-
posted by chunking express at 11:27 AM PST - 155 comments

"The tale is stranger than fiction." begins the opening line of The Oregonians retrospective "Rajneeshees in Oregon The Untold Story." The cult, began by sex guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh came to a self-rule a rural part of Oregon that battled with the native residents of the area. The conflict lead to a bio-terror attack on the residents of The Dalles to sway the outcome of a local election, global manhunts, and jail. [more inside]
posted by wcfields at 10:38 AM PST - 91 comments

As part of making documents available following Freedom of Information Act requests, the FBI has set up The Vault, including documents on unexplained phenomenon. One document in particular, the Guy Hottel memo, had some proclaiming "these are the real life X-Files." Except it's not - the document is real, but the report was based on a hoax that is known by many UFO debunkers.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:38 AM PST - 12 comments

Oracle didn't see this coming. There were some significant concerns when Oracle took stewardship of Sun's open source projects like MySQL and OpenOffice, and these concerns led to contributors to OpenOffice asking Oracle to fork over control of the project. Oracle refused. [more inside]
posted by juiceCake at 6:57 AM PST - 108 comments

The disturbing yet beautifully illustrated world of Anton Semenov. [more inside]
posted by Gator at 5:54 AM PST - 8 comments

The Wank Bank SLYT from the fine folks of Burnistoun
posted by mippy at 3:17 AM PST - 26 comments

Peeps Show V: This year's winning diorama depicts the dramatic rescue of 33 mine workers in Copiapo, Chile | Vote for your favorite | Marshmallow Peep Art | Peeps Show IV |Peeps Show III | Peeps Show II | the first Peep Show | Peepshi (Peep sushi) | Peepsicles | Peep Modernist - The Best Peep Art Creations. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 1:16 AM PST - 21 comments

In the tropics one must before everything keep calm. Some backstory on the making of Apocalypse Now, originally published June of 1977. [more inside]
posted by nevercalm at 10:54 PM PST - 47 comments

For their 43rd anniversary issue, New York Magazine chose "to explore, across time, one of the things that has most defined New York life for centuries and has become a unit of measurement for our successes and failures: The Apartment: A History of Vertical Living" / Sardine Life: What a century and a half of piled-up housing reveals about us. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:00 PM PST - 33 comments

Reactor shutdowns nine months away: Tokyo Electric Power Co. announced Sunday that it will take six to nine months to complete a cold shutdown of the damaged reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, while the United States proposed a daring plan to use a remote-controlled helicopter and cranes to pluck out their spent fuel rods... If all goes well, displaced residents from the evacuation zone should know within six to nine months whether they will be able to go home, trade minister Banri Kaieda said. [Previously] [Open MeFi pro vs. con nuclear policy thread] [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 8:19 PM PST - 497 comments

In 1946 Charlie Wohlford, leveraging his reputation for repairing Canadian loggers' boots to better than new, founded Dayton Boots. The company emphasized quality and grew largely on word of mouth. In 2010 they hired Rethink Canada for an ad campaign. The result was interesting.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:42 PM PST - 81 comments

Farewell Good Brothers "An off-beat, irreverant and often hilarious documentary about the making and the makers of a modern myth - the widespread belief in flying saucers and alien visitations. Combining strange and unusual archive footage from the 1950s with several contemporary interviews, the film focuses on a few people who helped to pioneer such beliefs; the so-called ‘contactees’ and on one leading researcher who believes in them." (1991, 77 mins.)
posted by puny human at 6:23 PM PST - 13 comments

Retrospace (previously) gives us a series of cards from lounge acts that appeared at the Biltmore Motor Hotel in Union City, Tennessee, sometime in the Seventies. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:02 PM PST - 12 comments

Cathy's House [SLYT]
posted by Fizz at 6:00 PM PST - 32 comments

As he travels the highways of America, courthouselover stops in every county and parish along the way to snap a photo of its courthouse. "From the Prairie-style courthouses in the Dakotas to the antebellum beauties of Alabama, and from the Romanesque masterpieces of Central Texas and Indiana to the Mission style structures of New Mexico, they are all national treasures." [more inside]
posted by SpringAquifer at 5:54 PM PST - 33 comments

Is Star Wars sexist? Cracked examines the lack of strong female characters in Star Wars.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 4:52 PM PST - 125 comments

A dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 4:48 PM PST - 19 comments

Bill Moyers interviews David Simon "Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America."
posted by bitmage at 3:46 PM PST - 67 comments

"Despite promises that the 43rd Parliament would be kindlier and gentler, it has been characterised by vitriol in question time, a Prime Minister labelled a liar - and outside Parliament, a bitch - and an Opposition Leader called an extremist. Both sides complain the other is mean." [So much for kinder, gentler politics]
posted by vidur at 1:58 PM PST - 35 comments

Fareed Zakaria: Are America's Best Days Behind Us? - "We have an Electoral College that no one understands and a Senate that doesn't work, with rules and traditions that allow a single Senator to obstruct democracy without even explaining why. We have a crazy-quilt patchwork of towns, municipalities and states with overlapping authority, bureaucracies and resulting waste. We have a political system geared toward ceaseless fundraising and pandering to the interests of the present with no ability to plan, invest or build for the future. And if one mentions any of this, why, one is being unpatriotic, because we have the perfect system of government, handed down to us by demigods who walked the earth in the late 18th century and who serve as models for us today and forever. America's founders would have been profoundly annoyed by this kind of unreflective ancestor worship." [for/against]
posted by kliuless at 1:23 PM PST - 84 comments

Author Greg Mortenson who wrote Three Cups of Tea is facing claims that key stories in the book are false. "It's a beautiful story. And it's a lie," author Jon Krakauer is quoted by CBS as saying.
posted by woodjockey at 10:50 AM PST - 72 comments

They created a home together that catches the eye, and their story of love and art is even more captivating, despite tragedy and loss.
posted by batmonkey at 9:54 AM PST - 7 comments

Walking While Black is still more of a problem to the NYPD than Biking While White. [SLYT] This recent incident, caught on video, demonstrates in real time the ways that law enforcement frequently ignores enforcing the law in favor of teaching a lesson to the law-abiding smart aleck. [more inside]
posted by whimsicalnymph at 8:54 AM PST - 206 comments

Big dust up about kin selection. Biologists E.O. Wilson, Martin Nowak, and Corina Tarnita publish a paper attacking kin selection, the idea that the reproductive success of a gene is influenced not only by its effects on its carrier, but also by its effects on related individuals (kin) carrying the same gene. 130 some odd other biologists respond. Richard Dawkins weighs in. Some talking bears offer a summary. [via]
posted by AceRock at 8:18 AM PST - 46 comments

How Rogue Ended Up On The Sofa - a look at the descendants of the classic game, including MeFi's own 100 Rogues.
posted by Artw at 7:36 AM PST - 52 comments

What MeFite doesn't like a good niche museum? We've had posts about the great overview site Museum of Museums [previously], Patrick Acton's Matchstick Marvels [previously and previously], cat museums [previously] and even a mention of Velvetaria, the Museum of Velvet Painting [previously] - sadly now closed, awaiting new digs. I'd like to add a new one. May I present The Hendrikje Museum of Handbags and Purses? [more inside]
posted by likeso at 5:21 AM PST - 29 comments

In Defense of Offensive Art - What the hell does Odd Future's music mean?
posted by azarbayejani at 4:20 AM PST - 46 comments

Pizza Island is a cartoonist collective in Brooklyn. Each cartoonist has a workspace unique to their style and workflow: Kate Beaton, Domitille Collardey, Sarah Glidden, Meredith Gran, Lisa Hanawalt, and Julia Wertz.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:59 AM PST - 22 comments

The Birka Jazz Archive is a treasure trove of record jackets from all eras of jazz. American releases are grouped by label (for example, Columbia, Blue Note, Atlantic, etc.) with, in some case, further sub-categorization by designers or visual artists (such as the amazing David Stone Martin). European releases are sorted by country (France, Sweden, Germany, etc.) and it all adds up to a fabulous online resource for jazz fans and graphic design fans alike.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:10 AM PST - 9 comments

Cheap 3D printing has the potential to change the way we produce and consume objects in the same way the cheap PCs and the internet changed the way we produce and consume information. Once again it is hobbyists and university labs who are democratizing the technology. They are looking forward to the day when anyone can make designer bath fixtures, functional appliances, custom surgical implants, or even business opportunities at the click of a button.

However some are warning that overly broad patents could derail the whole revolution. Even more worrisome is the prospect that existing IP law is completely unprepared for a future where the cost boundary between ideas and physical objects has crumbled. Will commercial interests demand a crack down on "pirated" printouts? Will Open Source manufacturing bring about a Star Trekian utopia? It's hard to predict what will happen when everything is commodified.
posted by Popular Ethics at 10:14 PM PST - 96 comments

Google has announced that "on April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback". If you happen to have uploaded video on Google Video, you have until May 13, 2011 to download uploaded videos.
posted by Mike Mongo at 9:04 PM PST - 147 comments

One of the US's world-class orchestras ... has decided it must re-organize to survive. 'A big orchestra has never done this before.' Led by Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the music for Disney's groundbreaking 1940 animated feature Fantasia.

The 111-year-old ensemble acquired a top-notch reputation while under the baton of Eugene Ormandy between 1936-1980. There's been "a 'tremendous decline' in audiences over the past five years." And $33M in revenue won't cover $46M in expenses.
posted by Twang at 9:02 PM PST - 48 comments

Not the Royal Wedding [slyt] [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 8:06 PM PST - 29 comments

Lil Buck & Yo-Yo Ma collaboration. More about the event. Charles "Lil Buck" Riley is better known for his Memphis Jookin - here are a few samples: Choppin Like That - Cartoon V; Soulja Boy - Birdwalk and Paper Planes. He also once made an appearance on Ellen's Incredible Audience Talents segment (at about 1:40)
posted by madamjujujive at 7:55 PM PST - 8 comments

Last month, the BBC's Comic Relief Night (Red Nose Day, previously) featured the premiere of a two-part mini-sketch from "Doctor Who" penned by current showrunner Steven Moffat: Time and Space. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:30 PM PST - 22 comments

Bad (and some so bad they're good) excerpts from bad romance novels. Includes things like: "And as he ground sinuously against her tender flesh, she began to quake and contract, whimpering with tortured delight. Her senses exploded; her very body seemed to dissolve into a fierce, white-hot blast of elemental heat. And in that boundless, exploding star of pleasure she felt his essence mingle with hers as he buried his face in her hair and erupted, pouring his passion into her soft, responsive frame."
posted by fantodstic at 6:41 PM PST - 95 comments

Benton Harbor's elected officials have been unelected by the Governor of Michigan. [more inside]
posted by tomswift at 6:28 PM PST - 73 comments

Ubiquitous yet mysterious, timeless yet tied to a golden age, mainstream yet frequently experimental: the BBC steps Into The Music Library. While music libraries like DeWolfe and KPM are best known as the source of many classic TV themes and film soundtracks, they're also responsible for incidental compilations are now both influential and appreciated in their own right, such as Basil Kirchin's Abstractions of the Industrial North and Barbara Moore's Vocal Shades and Tones.
posted by holgate at 5:36 PM PST - 4 comments

Todd Lamb has put together a gallery of notes he's posted around New York City which request people to meet "Chris" to do tedious things. (Previous Todd Lamb) [more inside]
posted by gman at 4:59 PM PST - 25 comments

I ain't gonna pee-pee my bed tonight. YouTUbe; 2.10. [more inside]
posted by bwg at 4:49 PM PST - 50 comments

We tend to think of blogs that showcase large images as a phenomenon of the past few years. But NASA's Earth Observatory has been posting its Image of the Day since April 1999 (when its first "large" image available for download was a 214 KB jpeg of the North Pole). Now, Image of the Day has downloads of images in multiple formats, most of which measure in megabytes, not kilobytes, and these stunning images of the earth's surface give context to the human activity down below: a toxic spill in Hungary, wildfires in Mexico, the growth of a coal mine in West Virginia, agriculture in Brazil, snowmelt flooding in Fargo, North Dakota, last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, artificial islands in Dubai, the aftermath of Japan's recent tsunami.
posted by ocherdraco at 4:26 PM PST - 4 comments

A cellular-automaton-based music sequencer. For when you're ready to upgrade from the (multiply) previously posted Matrix Watch this demo for inspiration.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:20 PM PST - 29 comments

I Have 1 Day is a pixel-graphic point-and-click game, very cleverly executed. [more inside]
posted by timory at 2:44 PM PST - 12 comments

Dear Canada: [SLYT] An Open Letter to Canada.
posted by Fizz at 2:34 PM PST - 33 comments

Attention Internet: This is a penguin being tickled. [more inside]
posted by flex at 2:24 PM PST - 67 comments

Color Me Obsessed is a new documentary about legendary Minneapolis rock band The Replacements. It features over 140 interviews with rockers, journalists and fans (including Colin Meloy, Craig Finn, Tommy Ramone and Robert Christgau) but not one note of the Mats music. Director Gorman Bechard has been documenting the making of the film on his blog and screening it in select cities.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 9:49 AM PST - 63 comments

El Tiede: The Mountain. A timelapse of shots taken from the El Tiede mountain, known for being an excellent site for astrological observations. Includes a timelapse of the Milky Way, as seen through a sandstorm coming off from the Sahara Desert. (SLYT)
posted by flibbertigibbet at 9:46 AM PST - 15 comments

Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor: Did a Spiral of Silence Shut Down the Story? Kentucky journalism professor Brad Scharlott makes a case. Reporter (and former Palin communications director) Bill McAllister, mentioned by name in Scharlott's article, says 'If we ever meet, I'll slap you.' Scharlott writes an op-ed in response. [more inside]
posted by box at 7:50 AM PST - 226 comments

"First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches." Tina Fey's The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter from her new book Bossypants. You can hear her read this piece at the beginning of her interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
posted by Kattullus at 7:26 AM PST - 94 comments

Mike Massé does a lot of nice covers - to a smattering of customers live at Pie Pizza in South Jordan, Utah [more inside]
posted by Arch_Stanton at 7:19 AM PST - 10 comments

The Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail is America’s first water-based national historic trail. It consists of the combined routes of Smith’s historic voyages on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries in 1607-1609. Designated by Congress in December 2006, the trail stretches approximately 3,000 miles up and down the Bay and along tributaries in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 6:37 AM PST - 5 comments

Chinese Pole Dancing (SLYT, SFW) — More than it says on the tin.
posted by cenoxo at 6:34 AM PST - 17 comments

In the current issue of Science, a New Zealand researcher, Quentin Atkinson has published his findings there was a single origin of human language. (abtract only: article behind paywall) Using the phoneme as the unit of analysis, Atkinson investigated whether phonemes demonstrated a serial founder effect, analogous to the genetic process. Results support an African origin of human language. [more inside]
posted by palindromic at 6:13 AM PST - 28 comments

Hot Coffee, a documentary film by Susan Saladoff, debuted at Sundance to considerably more enthusiasm than one would expect for a film about tort reform. [more inside]
posted by steambadger at 6:07 AM PST - 29 comments

File-Sharers Await Official Recognition of New Religion
* All knowledge to all
* The search for knowledge is sacred
* The circulation of knowledge is sacred
* The act of copying is sacred.

Too religious for you? Then try the remix manifesto.
posted by telstar at 3:21 AM PST - 58 comments

Not just the young: Photographer Isa Leshko shows us elderly animals (and a few more on her own site).
posted by nobody at 9:25 PM PST - 25 comments

The mustache is back. (SLFODVRSVPLMNOP)
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:02 PM PST - 26 comments

"Let's start hanging bankers, I think that could be a solution" (slyt)
posted by 445supermag at 7:41 PM PST - 76 comments

Your 2010 Federal Taxpayer Receipt. "In his State of the Union Address, President Obama promised that this year, for the first time ever, American taxpayers would be able to go online and see exactly how their federal tax dollars are spent. Just enter a few pieces of information about your taxes, and the taxpayer receipt will give you a breakdown of how your tax dollars are spent on priorities like education, veterans benefits, or health care." [more inside]
posted by saulgoodman at 7:20 PM PST - 72 comments

"We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated," he said in his lawyer voice. "What does that mean?" I asked, picking at the mauve paint on my hands. I later discovered that for most kids, declaring emancipation is an extreme measure -- something you do if your parents are crack addicts or deadbeats. "You would need to become financially independent," he said. "You could work for me at my law firm and pay rent to live here." This was my moment of truth as an objectivist. If I believed in the glory of the individual, I would've signed the petition papers then and there. But as much as Rand's novels had taught me to believe in meritocracy, they had not prepared me to go it alone financially and emotionally. I began to cry and refused.
posted by fernabelle at 6:10 PM PST - 99 comments

On living in the James Merrill House by Ivy Pochoda from Writers' Houses. Poems referenced: Willoware Cup :: The Victor Dog :: Mirabell: Books of Number :: Lost in Translation :: Another April :: The Book of Ephraim :: The Mad Scene
posted by puny human at 5:29 PM PST - 6 comments

On the cusp of Holy Week, Ricky Gervais enlightens with an essay outlining why he is a good Christian. [more inside]
posted by hugandpint at 4:37 PM PST - 66 comments

"J. Crew's president and creative director Jenna Lyons painting the toenails of her son Beckett in an ad was sent to customers last week in a feature, 'Saturday with Jenna.'* "'Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink,' says the caption. 'Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.'" Result: social conservatives go nuts. [more inside]
posted by ericb at 4:15 PM PST - 104 comments

Bela Kovacs and the Trail of Blood is an involving little flash mystery puzzler, mostly finding items and clues, but with more variety than the general escape-the-room game and nice atmospherics.
posted by klangklangston at 3:47 PM PST - 9 comments

Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of lulz. Intended "in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by 4chan and other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly disillusioned by the site's legal woes and nihilistic trajectory, has permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like Know Your Meme (which recently sold to Cheezburger Networks for a cool $N million, discussed here). Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed... forever.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:27 PM PST - 84 comments

Wanderlust: GOOD Magazine, in collaboration with Graham Roberts, maps the most famous journeys in history - some fiction, some non-fiction. Wanderlust includes trips like Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth to the voyages of Marco Polo and Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. However, it's not just a map with journey lines on it; Wanderlust is a history lesson. Select a trip for a summary and explore highlights of the journey.
posted by nickyskye at 2:34 PM PST - 3 comments

At least nine foreign and six Libyan jouranlists are missing in Libya. Three of the Western journalists were spotted in a detention camp in Tripoli.Two others are still missing and unaccounted for, South African Anton Lazarus Hammerl and American freelancer Matthew VanDyke. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented over 80 attacks on the press in the last month. With Qaddafi forces firing cluster bombs in civilian areas, one wonders how we can expect these journalists to be returned safely home. Perhaps Turkey can intercede? There is a facebook campaign for at least one of the journalists. Of course, this problem is worldwide.
posted by cal71 at 1:59 PM PST - 10 comments

Online Poker Doomsday. Feds indicted eleven executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. They face charges of bank fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors also want $3 billion in civil money laundering penalties. Poker players panic. [more inside]
posted by Yakuman at 1:24 PM PST - 121 comments

"In the sweet leisure of his retirement — if you don’t count the chemotherapy — former Poynter president Jim Naughton" (and the only member of the White House Press Corps to ever question a US President while wearing a chicken head,) has written a memoir: "46 Frogs: Tales of a Serial Prankster." Poynter Online has posted four excerpts as part of their ongoing Best Practices: Leadership & Management series:
* Turning the boss’s office into a fun & inviting place
* How bringing 46 live frogs into the newsroom fosters a philosophy of fun
* How newsroom humor can create a sense of togetherness
* Interviewing the U.S. president while wearing a chicken head

posted by zarq at 1:15 PM PST - 3 comments

Why did Carolyn Wonderland sing her wedding vows to her husband A. Whitney Brown? Because she can. The Story [NYT link]. Also, a pic of the happy couple with Michael Nesmith presiding. [more inside]
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:44 PM PST - 20 comments

Norman Mailer's apartment. Available now.
posted by littlemanclan at 12:08 PM PST - 19 comments

Somewhere between the ultimate physics simulator and a freeform 2-D version of Minecraft lies The Powder Toy, a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. With over 150 elements available to build from (and a full implementation of the game of life), users have built "working" electricity-generating reactors, rockets, and destructible city models. The Powder Toy is a variant on the venerable Falling Sand Game, the most impressive version of which is the Powder Game, now up to version 8, and playable online as a Java applet. [more inside]
posted by blahblahblah at 11:37 AM PST - 20 comments

Rent Liechtenstein. Last Summer, Snoop Dogg tried to rent Liechtenstein for a music video shoot. Now, thanks to Airbnb, you can actually rent the entire country for $70k a night, with a two-night minimum. [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:35 AM PST - 57 comments

Life Size Dinosaur Puppet Scares Children at Elementary School.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 9:41 AM PST - 98 comments

Last week during the Senate budget negotiations, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), gave a speech that included the following statement: "If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." That statement is drastically different from the statistics reported by Planned Parenthood, which list 90 percent of its services as preventive in nature, compared with 3 percent that are abortion-related. When asked about this apparent discrepancy, Jon Kyl's office replied that "his remark was not intended to be a factual statement." And that is when things got noisy. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:59 AM PST - 133 comments

I Heart Banana Slugs, or Is That Piece of Poop Moving?! Daniel Williford, a District Interpretive Specialist working in the Bay Area's Santa Cruz Mountains, gives an enthusiastic overview of the beloved banana slug. [more inside]
posted by PepperMax at 7:29 AM PST - 49 comments

Kiva Ford is an incredibly talented glassblower. By day, he creates custom scientific glassware for research and discovery chemistry. In his off hours, he creates artistic glass pieces that are both lovely and impossibly small. [more inside]
posted by avoision at 7:16 AM PST - 29 comments

Friday Flash Fun! In Pigs Can Fly, navigate a cute little piggy to the magic potion to help him grow wings and fly away.
posted by phunniemee at 7:13 AM PST - 9 comments

"I'm not the kind of person to do that kind of thing in public," says Jonathan Williams, one of two men on a first date asked to leave the John Snow pub for "obscene" behavior on Wednesday. [more inside]
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:28 AM PST - 90 comments

Is Sugar Toxic? 9 pages, plus 90 minutes of extra science. [Previously]
posted by rusty at 5:49 AM PST - 93 comments

Tablet Magazine has published a list of The 100 Greatest Jewish Songs [more inside]
posted by beisny at 12:29 AM PST - 64 comments

A 1970s recording of Mike Oldfield and friends playing Tubular Bells live part 1
Part 2
Part 3
posted by boo_radley at 11:31 PM PST - 53 comments

Lynn Tilton: Billionaire¹ Industrialist² and Woman³. Does what it says on the can. [more inside]
posted by davidpriest.ca at 9:33 PM PST - 65 comments

Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define is the winner of a 2008 New York Times essay competition asking college students to write about what love is like for them. The competition runs again this year.
posted by shivohum at 8:45 PM PST - 66 comments

BBC Human Planet: The Douche For a few weeks, the BBC film crew had the opportunity to follow a unique specimen, they were able to observe and record its mannerisms, rituals and way of life. The result of this is BBC Human Planet: The Douche.
posted by Fizz at 8:30 PM PST - 49 comments

Do you like Pac-Man but always thought "What this game really needs is to be a gigantic, player-created never-ending maze of interconnected Pac-Man boards"? Me neither. Fortunately, someone else did. [more inside]
posted by 40 Watt at 8:28 PM PST - 37 comments

"Customers wanting a RAL paid Jackson Hewitt a $24 application fee, a $25 processing fee, and a $2 electronic-filing fee, plus 4 percent of the loan amount. On a $2,000 refund, that meant $131 in charges—equivalent to an annual interest rate of about 170 percent—not to mention the few hundred bucks you might spend for tax preparation."
posted by vidur at 7:40 PM PST - 70 comments

"In life you often look around for someone or something to compare yourself favourably with. The games dealers and supervisors in a casino whose souls are troubled can look to the poker machines and say, well at least we provide entertainment (we’re in the hospitality industry, don’t you know!). But in reality, that was just bullshit we told ourselves. The machines blinked and made music while they took the money; we smiled and chatted aimlessly while we took it." Former casino worker Greg Jericho has written an exhaustive article about the human and economic costs of poker machines. It comes in the middle of an anti-pokies campaign by Independent Senator Nick Xenophon that is being bitterly opposed by the Australian Hotels Association.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:37 PM PST - 44 comments

Excellent footage of the stunningly beautiful yet bizarre courtship and mating behavior of the Peacock Spider.This is quite possibly the first footage of this quality that shows this behavior. Many jumping spiders have elaborate courtship dances. More Previously.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:57 PM PST - 71 comments

How a Magnet Can Turn Off Speech
posted by jefficator at 6:56 PM PST - 51 comments

Kittens. Poptarts. Rainbows.
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:12 PM PST - 45 comments

Kevin Na made it to the 9th hole of the first round of the Valero Texas Open on Thursday with a decent score of one under. Unfortunately, he left the hole with a much, much worse score. [more inside]
posted by RyanAdams at 5:47 PM PST - 39 comments

Tony Orrico: Human Spirograph (Via) [more inside]
posted by ColdChef at 4:52 PM PST - 21 comments

A postmortem at gamasutra on the independently developed game Super Meat Boy. On their design philosophy that in part makes the game so popular: "It was vital for us to bring back the difficulty of the retro age, but also reinvent the idea of what difficulty meant. Frustration was the biggest part of retro difficulty and something we felt needed to be removed at all costs, in order to give the player a sense of accomplishment without discouraging them to the point of quitting. At its core, this idea was quite basic: Remove lives, reduce respawn time, keep the levels short and keep the goal always in sight. On top of these refinements, we added constant positive feedback, and even death became something to enjoy when you knew that upon completing the level you would be rewarded with an epic showing of all your past deaths. The replay feature was a way to remind the player that they were getting better through their own actions and reinforce that feeling of accomplishment of doing something difficult and succeeding."
posted by SpacemanStix at 4:47 PM PST - 18 comments

"Hello, we are Karmin! The little band with a big sound. A girl with a guitar and a guy with a box. Amy and Nick from Boston." Look At Me Now - Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne :: Written in the Stars - Tinie Tempah :: Teenage Dream - Katy Perry :: We R Who We R - Ke$ha :: Price Tag - Jessie J :: website
posted by puny human at 4:27 PM PST - 34 comments

A very eloquent and tranquil performance of a young chap from Sweden playing C418's "Sweden" that you may have heard from Minecraft on classical guitar (SLYT)
posted by Cogentesque at 3:52 PM PST - 6 comments

Rarely is the question asked -- is our business majors learning?
posted by escabeche at 3:03 PM PST - 92 comments

15 years ago Dayton, Ohio band Brainiac released their third, and final full-length album Hissing Prigs in Static Couture on Touch & Go records. Lead by Tim Taylor on vocals/keyboards the album perfected a brand of short-circuit robot rock that made dance music out of violent shrieks and spasms. The band has been credited by Trent Rezor in 'really inspiring to me from a sonic influence' and eulogized by Jeff Buckley at his last gig. [more inside]
posted by wcfields at 1:08 PM PST - 41 comments

In a heartbreakingly candid blog post, Paul finally explains his deepest, darkest secret to his friends, his family and the world:

That last photo I'm aware of that exists with me smiling with an open mouth is my eighth grade school picture. [...] By the time I was 17, I had cavities in three of my top front teeth and virtually no enamel resembling anything pearly or white when I opened my mouth...so I quit opening it.

His blog now follows his progress as he goes through reconstructive dental care, shares anecdotes from his past, and encourages others to ask for help.
posted by halseyaa at 1:02 PM PST - 82 comments

The Truth About Race, Religion, And The Honor Code At BYU. Deadspin has released an exposé on Brigham Young University's Honor Code, which prohibits students from having sex or drinking alcohol. The article accuses the University of selectively punishing minority (and especially African American) athletes who violate the Code. Co-authored by Darron Smith, a former BYU instructor. Responses from former BYU students at Religion Dispatches, the Deseret News and the Provo Daily Herald. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:46 PM PST - 108 comments

Allen Human Brain Atlas - Brain Explorer 2 is a desktop software application for viewing the human brain anatomy and gene expression data in 3D. "Until now, a definitive map of the human brain at this level of detail simply hasn't existed," said Allan Jones, the nonprofit institute's chief executive. "For the first time, we have generated a comprehensive map of the brain that includes the underlying biochemistry." | Functional Neuroanatomy | 10 Great Sites for Reviewing Brain Anatomy | Harvard Brain Atlas. Bonus link: Brain massage with cosmic energy application in Pushkar, India. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 12:18 PM PST - 12 comments

Videogame players die a thousand deaths, complete with appropriately nostalgic soundtrack. [via BB]
posted by bayani at 12:17 PM PST - 30 comments

ABC cancels “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.” Thanks to the slow decline of soap operas -- and the coming signoff of cable's SOAPnet, two more daytime series will end decades-long runs. The replacements are a food show called The Chew and a lifestyle show tentatively titled The Revolution. AMC ends in September and OLTL in December; SOAPnet goes dark in January, 2012 [more inside]
posted by Yakuman at 12:07 PM PST - 112 comments

iTr3vor does not seem to know how to un-mirror his video clips and has only the vaguest understanding of copyright law. But he does like dancing in Apple Stores to the works of Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Rebecca Black, among others.
posted by silby at 11:11 AM PST - 86 comments

Zoopreme Court Ever wanted to remember all the justices of the Supreme Court, past and present? Well it's a whole lot easier if they are animals. Dan Schofield and Alice DuBois are illustrating all 112 justices as various critters, as well as several landmark cases.
posted by melissam at 10:54 AM PST - 16 comments

I'd like to welcome you all lords and ladies, gentlemen, ladies, time-ladies, time-lords, aliens and those of you in the cheap seats to a documentary produced and aired by WYES-TV New Orleans in 1986, focusing on Panopticon, the first US Doctor Who convention. (1, 2, 3) (MLYT, in authentic multi-copy VHS fuzz-o-vision!) [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:25 AM PST - 17 comments

Hand drawn 3D comics lettering: Stone Type. Classic front page lettering from Superman, The Spirit, Sgt. Rock, La Garage Hermetique, The Incredible Hulk &c.
posted by Tom-B at 10:09 AM PST - 14 comments

Fans of George RR Martin's "The Song of Ice and Fire" series are eagerly awaiting "A Dance With Dragons", the next book. This anticipation has led to hostility from some fans as to Martin's work ethic and the manner in which he spends his personal time.
posted by reenum at 9:50 AM PST - 206 comments

Out of thin air? "Have you ever said something like 'Let me buy you a beer next week'? I'm sure you have. We all issue promises of this sort. And we frequently use such promises as a form of currency... I have just described a simple credit exchange. Societies rely heavily on promising-making and promise-keeping. It is the foundation of all financial markets. I'd like to point out something about the promises you make. They are made 'out of thin air.' " [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM PST - 47 comments

MLVP: directing duo DANIELS' (previously) video for Manchester Orchestra's "Simple Math".
posted by progosk at 9:30 AM PST - 4 comments

VegNews, the vegan lifestyle magazine, regularly publishes recipes for vegan dishes, with accompanying food-porn photos. Yesterday, VegNews was revealed to be using stock photos of actual meat dishes to represent their vegan analogues. Vegans are, understandably, appalled. But in an industry where deceptive food photography is customary, is authenticity of food illlustration a valid concern?
posted by Pants McCracky at 8:36 AM PST - 148 comments

Benjamin Darvill, a.k.a. Son of Dave, is a one-man band of sorts, combining harmonica, vocals, beat-boxing, a rattle and foot-stomping to create his own infectious form of blues. Darvill, a Canadian formerly with Crash Test Dummies, has released four albums to date as Son of Dave, his latest and best being 'Shake A Bone', recorded and mixed by Steve Albini in Chicago, the title track used briefly in an episode of Breaking Bad. [more inside]
posted by bwg at 8:06 AM PST - 3 comments

Everything Popular Is Wrong. Stefan Goldmann on the state of electronic music. [more inside]
posted by mkb at 7:40 AM PST - 62 comments

An interesting article from Wired about Soviet photo manipulations from the 1960s space race. [more inside]
posted by PepperMax at 7:10 AM PST - 14 comments

1) Make fake army 2) Collect Fees 3) Profit 4) Go to Jail - Yupeng Deng created the U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve Unit in Southern California for Asian immigrants. Unfortunately for all, the US Government wasn't aware of this... SGV Tribune story (pictures), NY Times story
posted by Argyle at 6:57 AM PST - 42 comments

The NIST Digital Archives is an online collection of scientific instruments from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But even the experts don't always know what it is they've got, and they'd like your help. Any idea what you're supposed to do with Eight Dials Set in a Wooden Frame? How about Metal Instrument in Wood Case?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:56 AM PST - 20 comments

Galileo Lectures In 2009, to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo first turning a telescope skywards, Radio New Zealand National, in partnership with the Royal Society of New Zealand, released this kickin' series of five lectures spanning the evolution of cosmology, extra-solar planets, near-earth objects, the nascent field of neutrino astronomy and prospects for the future as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope comes online early in the next decade. It's a great listen and best of all, it's free to download as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis!
posted by treyka at 6:04 AM PST - 4 comments

Does this give you head tingles? It's ASMR. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. And no, it's not masterbatory. Need another fix? [more inside]
posted by GamesRmeLife at 5:53 AM PST - 96 comments

2010 was the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity, in case you missed it.
posted by londonmark at 4:43 AM PST - 1 comment

Hello, my name is FRIDA. I am a concept, developed as part of the Rosetta project, en EU-funded initiative to support the development of robots. Take a good look at me. I can be very romantic.
posted by anigbrowl at 1:10 AM PST - 21 comments

Cute Roulette
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:58 PM PST - 28 comments

PDF: Indoor cultivation of Cannabis is estimated to consume 20 TWh/year, equivalent to that of 2 million average US homes. This is about 1% of national electricity consumption, and results in emission of 17 million metric tons of CO2 to contribute to global warming. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:10 PM PST - 89 comments

Shaun of the Dead in 30 Seconds, Scott Pilgrim Style [more inside]
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:14 PM PST - 40 comments

Solarized is the mother of all colour schemes. "Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined set of hues based on fixed color wheel relationships. It has been tested extensively in real world use on color calibrated displays (as well as uncalibrated/intentionally miscalibrated displays) and in a variety of lighting conditions."
posted by chunking express at 7:07 PM PST - 93 comments

All of the media consumed by Steven Soderbergh in one year [PDF]
posted by shakespeherian at 6:56 PM PST - 45 comments

Hugh Grant's Linda Tripp. The movie star puts his press pass in his hat band and makes the front page with an exposé of a paparazzi. [more inside]
posted by Diablevert at 6:01 PM PST - 35 comments

Shortly after the unrest in Libya started, the country was cut off from the internet, cell phone infrastructure was limited and used to send SMS messages calling on subscribers to attack foreigners, and satellite phones were jammed. In response, engineers have recently re-routed some of the national cellphone network to make a new system, Free Libya. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 4:50 PM PST - 15 comments

Australian author, John Birmingham, recently visited New York and has written an op-ed piece on the tipping culture in America. He found it strange, given tipping does not exist in Australia but he wondered if Australia should perhaps adopt it, especially if it could provide an increased level of service. However given the oft-discussed troubles with tipping and the somewhat decent base wage in Australia, one might think adopting tipping is probably not a good idea. Even some US businesses are now banning employees from taking tips, so perhaps this form of payment-for-service, described by Birmingham as "an excuse for slavery" will see its end soon.
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:26 PM PST - 281 comments

wake up, cat!
posted by puny human at 3:34 PM PST - 68 comments

A released FAA investigation describes how in October last year, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) deliberately landed his plane on a closed runway, and then caused the plane to "hop" over terrified construction workers and their vehicles. More recently, Senator Inhofe has taken to the Senate floor in praise of his friend (and friend of C Street), deposed Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo. [Previously, previously]
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 2:28 PM PST - 78 comments

The candy cigarette has found a rightful heir. KidZania, an international chain of family entertainment centers, invites children to be the adults in a simulated city-state. It claims to teach children about work and money, but its critics say that KidZania, full of sponsored and branded activities, is an early introduction to corporate consumerism. (via)
posted by domnit at 2:00 PM PST - 43 comments

Ghostface Killah's Top 10 Softest Rappers in the game
posted by AceRock at 1:40 PM PST - 78 comments

Shit Harper Did Does exactly what it says on the can. Example: "Canadian PM Stephen Harper weakened regulations so that more pesticide residue could be left on your fruits and vegetables." "Harper decorated the government lobby in parliament with photos of just himself, instead of the traditional portraits of former Prime Ministers." And much more.
posted by Fizz at 12:54 PM PST - 93 comments

Quickish is a new site offering "real-time-ish" short-form sports news and analysis links, gathered and recommended by the site's proprietor, Dan Shanoff. Link suggestions from readers are welcome. NiemanLab interviews Shanoff. If his name sounds familiar, it's because he used to do the Daily Quickie on ESPN.com.
posted by beagle at 12:31 PM PST - 4 comments

802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91, he tells his story. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:21 PM PST - 29 comments

Spring (aka scurvy season) is a great time to learn more about a wonderful weed! The dandelion, considered by many to be a scourge, a lawn-wrecker and a pest but others see it as an ingredient in many tasty recipes and as medicine.
posted by vespabelle at 11:53 AM PST - 43 comments

Open Letter TO JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. The Democrat from Springfield responds to the Chase CEO's letter to shareholders.
posted by boo_radley at 11:42 AM PST - 38 comments

"Sailors and cats have a special relationship that dates back thousands of years." The U.S. Naval Institute posts pictures of sailors and their cats, with photos from the 1880:s through the 1950:s.
posted by gemmy at 10:48 AM PST - 51 comments

One hundred years ago Don Leslie was born. Leslie invented the Leslie speaker that made the Hammond organ famous. Listen to Svoogaloo by Sven Hammond Soul and the Organ grinder's swing by Jimmy Smith and my favorite Billy's Bag by Billy Preston. [more inside]
posted by Waslijn at 10:01 AM PST - 33 comments

The Yes Men pull one over on the AP, by convincing them that GE was going to donate their 3.2 billion dollar tax credit in response to public anger over the fact that they pay no taxes.
posted by Jon_Evil at 9:48 AM PST - 64 comments

Oregon lawmakers Rickroll the legislature
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:41 AM PST - 24 comments

New electrical conductivity measurements show the subterranean extent of the Yellowstone supervolcano to be a lot larger than previously known.
posted by jjray at 9:32 AM PST - 39 comments

Two weeks ago, the "Stupid Man Commercials. Why?" post on MeFi front page drew a heap of interest. Today, courtesy of the Leo Burnett ad agency, and on behalf of their client, Manwich, we present "Girly Men." Six days after the start of the campaign, the ads have been pulled. (Unlike Amalgamated's campaign for Mike's Hard Lemonade, who mocked girly-man-Joey-the-intern for a whole year back in 2008.) Should we be surprised that the Manwich campaign would come from an ad shop whose tagline reads: "Big ideas come out of Big Pencils"?
posted by wensink at 9:07 AM PST - 139 comments

Law enforcement authorities are in awe of the new wave of narco "supersubs" that are being found in the jungles of Colombia. [more inside]
posted by reenum at 9:07 AM PST - 59 comments

Whiskerino is no more, Goatee Groundhog Day has come and gone and Moustache May is still a few weeks off. Whose fecund, feral, facial hair can sustain us in the meantime? None other than Brian Wilson, closing pitcher of the San Francisco Giants, and his virtual beard. Touch it!
posted by mostlymuppet at 7:04 AM PST - 22 comments

The urge is mightier than the pen for Vaclav Klaus. Of course, it goes viral, even though Chilean officials say it was a gift.
posted by chavenet at 6:45 AM PST - 25 comments

Fruit of the poisonous tree is a legal term used to describe illegally gained evidence. The logic of the terminology is that if the source of the evidence is tainted, then anything gained from it is as well.

For the uninitiated, such terms used as described make for odd introductions to supreme court arguments (PDF warning) [more inside]
posted by AndrewKemendo at 5:16 AM PST - 26 comments

Just over a year ago New Zealand's parliament debated, passed and then scrapped a law which would in effect withdraw internet access from those accused of illegal filesharing. Today, the New Zealand government is using "urgency" (ostensibly called in order to pass Christchurch earthquake emergency legislation) to pass a new version of that controversial law.
posted by chairish at 4:09 AM PST - 66 comments

700 kids in rural Chongqing dance to Michael Jackson's "Dangerous". Direct link. Photos. Chongqing, China.
posted by nickyskye at 2:19 AM PST - 19 comments

Covering Tohoku The Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan (FCCJ) has posted a special edition of its No. 1 Shimbun covering the Tohoku Earthquake: FCCJ members, many of them freelancers, were the first on the scene after the quake and have led coverage since. Weeks after the global media pack left, they're still here. There's articles by veteran Japan reporters such as Charles Pomeroy who recently retired to Otsuchi after covering Japan for 50 years, to newer stringers such as Gavin Blair who worked as a "fixer" for foreign prima-donna journos dashing in and out of the disaster zone. There is a photo by photographer Rob Gilhooly who recently made a heartbreaking trip into the exclusion zone near the plants. Although not included in No 1 Shimbun, freelancer Yas Idei provides a Japanese perspective (in English) about the multiple disasters. Idei's piece about Rokkashomura is pretty enlightening, frightening, and depressing.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:18 PM PST - 23 comments

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? The Real Housewives of Wall Street (via) [more inside]
posted by The Emperor of Ice Cream at 9:54 PM PST - 109 comments

David Byrne Takes On The Man. Good ole Charlie [Crist], used Bryne's (Talking Heads) song, Road to Nowhere, during Crist's failed run for Senator of FL in 2010, without permission, without licenses. The lawsuit that was filed was settled this week, which culminated in Crist issuing a YouTube apology. Crist also told the Associated Press that Byrne "couldn't have been more of a gentlemen" when the two met to settle the case.
posted by edgeways at 9:16 PM PST - 51 comments

How to Get a Real Education, by Scott Adams
posted by shivohum at 9:07 PM PST - 600 comments

Garry Newman, the creator of the insanely popular Garry's Mod, which is a sandbox game that uses Valve's Source Engine, has come up with an ingenious way to catch people who pirate the game.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:37 PM PST - 39 comments

Are graphical calculators pointless? Graphical calculators are required by many college-level math courses, but they don't perform as well as mobile phones. Pedagogically, they may be less useful than a slide rule. [more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet at 8:34 PM PST - 64 comments

We care about climate change, but we hate the idea of having to do anything about it. Professor of Public Ethics at CAPPE, Clive Hamilton (also author of Requiem for a Species and Affluenza), tells it like it is on climate change policy in Australia.
posted by bystander at 8:20 PM PST - 125 comments

Little Village Elementary Academy on Chicago's West Side has prohibited students from bringing packed lunches from home, unless they have a medical excuse. Despite stricter nutritional standards implemented by the Chicago Public Schools last year to help curb childhood obesity, some parents are not happy. (Tangentially, I watched this clip about the school food in France and got sort of jealous.)
posted by bayani at 8:02 PM PST - 101 comments

``Several people had pledged their penises over the years — including an American, a Briton, and a German — but Arason's was the first to be successfully donated, Hjartarson said.'' [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:38 PM PST - 38 comments

Tastebuds is a new dating site that matches users based on their favorite music.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:36 PM PST - 117 comments

The IOWEYOU project. You can't go to a shop and buy these clothes. Because each textile is unique they have an app that allows you to trace your garment right back through the production process to the actual weaver that hand-wove the fabric. You can see some of the delightful people involved in the project at their YouTube channel.
posted by unliteral at 6:03 PM PST - 18 comments

Thank you for visiting HuffingtonPostLawsuit.com. On April 12, 2011 Plaintiff Jonathan Tasini, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, filed a federal class action lawsuit against The HuffingtonPost.com, Inc., AOL Inc., Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer for unjust enrichment and deceptive business practices. For more information, please see a copy of the complaint or contact Kurzon Strauss LLP.
posted by cenoxo at 6:03 PM PST - 85 comments

1980SLYT: Kim Mitchell* - "Go For a Soda" (1984). In whiche our protagonist experiences his favorite rock singer (1) step out of the television, (2) do a little dance on the table, and (3) join his band in the refrigerator. All while singing a Hard Rock Anthem about the joys of S-O-D-A. [ *wiki • via the voice of great antiquity's great blog post about being a contestant on Jeopardy. via jessamyn ]
posted by not_on_display at 5:49 PM PST - 43 comments

An amazing bit of photoshoppery transforms an extreme oblique view of a poster into a straight on view.
posted by Mitheral at 5:07 PM PST - 71 comments

In 1947 Zippo founder George G. Blaisdell celebrated his lighter's success by commisioning the Zippo Car. [more inside]
posted by milestogo at 4:49 PM PST - 21 comments

China bans time-travel movies. [via]
posted by crossoverman at 4:23 PM PST - 59 comments

The Ten Best Musician/Comic Artist Friendships
posted by Artw at 4:08 PM PST - 31 comments

Following on the heels of NASA's announcement of the final resting places of the various space shuttles, NASA, in conjunction with William Shatner, released a final video commemorating the program. (SLYT)
posted by Heliochrome85 at 3:59 PM PST - 25 comments

Idiots Failing at the Guitar Spin Trick
posted by Ardiril at 3:50 PM PST - 36 comments

Crimemapping.com is where you go to see colorful US crime maps. [more inside]
posted by lemuring at 2:44 PM PST - 24 comments

I'm in training - don't kiss me - Daniel Douglas aka Claude Courlis aka Claude Cahun was a French artist, photographer and self confessed narcissist.
She began a long lasting relationship and collaboration with her stepsister Suzanne Malherbe aka Marcel Moore at an early age.
Cahun was imprisoned by the Nazis and condemmed to death but was released shortly before the war ended. She left a diary; and Jersey Heritage Trust has more.
She was also a writer. A short video of some of her self portraits as a slide show.
posted by adamvasco at 1:53 PM PST - 7 comments

Stonewall is a UK-based European charity founded as a response to the controversial Section 28 (which prohibited local authorities and teachers from intentionally promoting homosexuality) that was enacted in the UK in 1988. In the decades since being founded, the charity has become well-known for lobbying for gay rights. In 2005, Stonewall started Education for All, a campaign against homophobic bullying and for an inclusive learning environment for all. The charity has included support from famous people before, and now includes Sir Ian McKellen and others going to secondary schools to talk with kids and teachers about homophobia. (via TheophileEscargot on MetaChat)
posted by filthy light thief at 12:55 PM PST - 26 comments

An Ode to Paul Simon's Graceland, now 25. "Here is Simon proving that he could be divorced and soft in the middle and still make an album that put him back on the playing field, and as a center forward. This, too, is why I think the album has been such a mainstay of so many station wagons since the late 80s: It said to those rear ends planted in those drivers’ seats, “Our idols have aged and proven human. They have turned into yuppies like us who smoke weed only occasionally and in comfortable living rooms with Persian rugs and who have kids who play soccer, and that’s okay." Don't miss the covers and rare editions at the the end of the article. Unfortunately they miss Tangoterje's amazing "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" dub edit. Obligatory, the Zimbabwe concert.
posted by geoff. at 12:39 PM PST - 195 comments

In a lecture entitled The State of White America Charles Murray, a W. H. Brady Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the controversial The Bell Curve, details the thesis of his upcoming book Coming Apart: Over the last half century, the United States has developed a new lower class and a new upper class that are different in kind from anything America has ever known. The second contention of the book is that the divergence of America into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America. [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 12:04 PM PST - 75 comments

"...perhaps she will." [SLYT] Sariah Gallego Joins the Dark Side.
posted by Fizz at 11:16 AM PST - 44 comments

The Sakawa Boys: Inside the Bizarre Criminal World of Ghana’s Cyber-Juju Email Scam Gangs is a short documentary about Sakawa, the Nigerian mix of African black magic and Internet scamming that has grown into its own cultural phenomenon, complete with clothing brands, music, and "Nollywood" movies. Previously, we have seen I Go Chop Your Dollar, whose star was subsequently arrested. See also this (PDF alert!) academic paper on the subject
posted by Obscure Reference at 11:12 AM PST - 14 comments

The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle. It's back! The third Humble Bundle (previously: 1 2) includes Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, and more, all from indie Finnish developer Frozenbyte. Pay what you want and choose how to split the proceeds between the EFF, Child's Play, Frozenbyte, and Humble Bundle Inc.
posted by kmz at 11:11 AM PST - 34 comments

Paul Ceglia has refiled his lawsuit against Zuckerburg and Facebook. With a much larger law firm. And a lot more evidence. Ceglia has produced more than a dozen of what he says are emails between him and Mark Zuckerberg from July 2003 to July 2004, the year in which Facebook was created. [more inside]
posted by jeanmari at 11:02 AM PST - 87 comments

Put another way, the company that owns The Washington Post is almost entirely at the mercy of the Federal Government and the Obama administration -- the entities which its newspaper ostensibly checks and holds accountable. "By the end of 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government." The Post Co.'s reliance on the Federal Government extends beyond the source of its revenue; because the industry is so heavily regulated, any animosity from the Government could single-handedly doom the Post Co.'s business... -- Glenn Greenwald examines WaPo's entanglement with for-profit education
posted by hippybear at 10:38 AM PST - 27 comments

Susan Orlean's short essays for The New Yorker have an air of effortlessness to them, as if they were something she just tossed off while taking a break from her more important subjects, but their brevity reveals a true mastery of form, and at their best, they are brimful of surprisingly elegant sentences, self-deprecating wit and a kind of warmly feminine, disarmingly sly charm: On Adopting a Stray Cat :: The Difficulties of E-mail :: The Joys of Snooping :: Books That Changed Her World :: World War I :: Heat Wave :: Fear of Flying :: Chickens
posted by puny human at 10:09 AM PST - 21 comments

According to Science Daily a New Study (done on mice) found drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better. When we drink alcohol our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn't stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations. [more inside]
posted by Blake at 8:25 AM PST - 40 comments

Have you been keeping up with research on the inflammation theory of depression and mental illness? If you'd like to explore the pathology if inflammatory cytokines in the development of depression, this paper breaks it down. [more inside]
posted by xarnop at 8:08 AM PST - 51 comments

The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit shows Americans (and a few Canadians) what a Fukushima-sized evacuation zone might mean to them.
posted by rhombus at 6:14 AM PST - 197 comments

Imagine this: you live in a fairly remote place and need emergency eye surgery to save your sight that very same day. you get onto a plane but mid-trip your flight gets cancelled because of a technical problem. flying with most airlines we know would mean you'd miss your surgery and be in a pretty tough spot. but not when you're flying SAS. instead of leaving you stranded with a voucher, the airline found a replacement aircraft at another airport, flew it over to the passenger and got her to her surgery on time (original article). there is a lot going wrong in the airline industry these days but in my book that's pretty awesome.
posted by krautland at 2:29 AM PST - 63 comments

The veteran recording engineer and seven-time grammy winner Roger Nichols lost his battle with pancreatic cancer and passed away April 9th at age 66. Though not a household name, you've undoubtedly heard at least one album he did the sound for. Some of the artists he engineered recordings for were Stevie Wonder, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Frank Zappa, Donald Fagen, John Denver, the Beach Boys, Crosby Stills & Nash, Al Di Meola, Roy Orbison, Andy Laverne, Plácido Domingo, Gloria Estefan, Diana Ross, Rickie Lee Jones, Kenny Loggins, Mark Knopfler, Michael McDonald, and Toots Thielemans, among others. He also invented the first functional drum sampling machine WENDL (.pdf file), first used on the 1979 "Gaucho" album. He is likely best known for the amazing pristine sound he achieved for every album done by Mssrs. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, aka Steely Dan. He was a giant in his field, a real innovator, and it is a sad loss for the industry.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 10:45 PM PST - 28 comments

Derailing a train isn't as easy as you might think. [1944] (Declassified WW2 OSS training video.) [more inside]
posted by crunchland at 9:49 PM PST - 54 comments

The mayor of Washington DC has been arrested, along with 6 of the 12 members of its city council, during a protest today near a US Senate office building, objecting to the city's use as a bargaining chip while negotiating the 7th Continuing Resolution to avoid a government shutdown last Friday. The bill prohibits the District of Columbia from locally funding abortion services, and imposes a locally-unpopular school voucher program. Had the government shutdown taken place, the DC government would have also had to suspend most of its operations including trash pickup. For those of you keeping track, Vince Gray is the 3rd (of 6) DC mayor to be arrested while in office. [more inside]
posted by schmod at 6:50 PM PST - 93 comments

For most of his 81 years, Sir Roger Moore has played invincible leading men. "But behind the scenes he has cheerfully hidden a list of real (and imagined) ailments.You are late,’ says Sir Roger Moore in a deep growl. I apologise. I had thought the interview was at nine o’clock. ‘I am just off to the funeral parlour,’ he continues." [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 5:33 PM PST - 87 comments

With Marvel Comics hinting that Black Panther will become "American Panther", a typical storm of controversy and speculation has occurred over the supposed Americanization of an African character. The artists over at The Temple of Cartoon Mojo on the other hand, wondered what would happen if MORE iconic characters were made patriotic. The results range from the silly, to the utterly awesome.
posted by happyroach at 5:29 PM PST - 79 comments

First Orbit. "On 12th April 2011 it will be 50 years to the day since Yuri Gagarin climbed into his space ship and was launched into space. It took him just 108 minutes to orbit Earth and he returned as the World's very first space man. To mark this historic flight we have teamed up with the astronauts onboard the International Space Station to film a new view of what Yuri would have seen as he travelled around the planet. Weaving these new views together with historic voice recordings from Yuri's flight and an original score by composer Philip Sheppard, we have created a spellbinding film to share with people around the World on this historic anniversary." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 5:07 PM PST - 32 comments

Years after its final broadcast, the award-winning, pond-hopping, cult comedy hit Whose Line is it Anyway? is returning to television! Sort of! Tonight in just a few minutes, Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza (promo, sample segment) makes its debut on GSN, reuniting Carey with popular "Whosers" Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, Greg Proops, Brad Sherwood, Wayne Brady, and many more. Though the show will air every weekday, you don't have to wait around for new episodes to get your improv fix -- in spite of the lack of DVD box sets, there's a veritable treasure trove of past content available free from multiple online sources, including the complete run of the American Whose Line on both YouTube and fansite WatchWLIIA along with every episode of the original UK run from Channel4's official YouTube channel and their streaming video site 4oD. Too much content? Look inside for selections of the show's most hilarious moments as sampled from the show's burgeoning TVTropes entry. See also: Fan guide - American episode guide (UK version) - List of game types [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:00 PM PST - 49 comments

The Yellow Plague: Asians and Asian Americans in Post-Apocalyptic and Zombie Fictions
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 4:43 PM PST - 34 comments

The recently retired Manny Ramirez was one of the most inscrutable players in recent history. Ben McGrath of the New Yorker attempted to figure out Ramirez's motivations in this 2007 piece.
posted by reenum at 4:34 PM PST - 32 comments

Free Darko calls it quits. Contributors to the irreverent basketball writing site that Brian Philips describes as "a vintage record shop that radiation turned into a grad student" talk about what Free Darko meant to them. Also, an interview with Free Darko writer and illustrator Bethlehem Shoals and Jacob Weinstein.
posted by AceRock at 4:24 PM PST - 19 comments

Head Tracking for iPad: Glasses-Free 3D Display - Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory track the user's head using an iPad's front facing camera, using the positional data to create the impression of depth without the use of specialized glasses [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:22 PM PST - 23 comments

Adobe announces Photoshop Touch SDK plus three Photoshop iPad apps
posted by Artw at 3:45 PM PST - 30 comments

/ / R | | P \ \ for the recently departed John McCracken (1934 – 2011), a West Coast artist who brought a New Age openness to Minimalist sculpture, along with a vocabulary of bright, sleek slabs, blocks and columns that balanced teasingly between painting and sculpture. [more inside]
posted by wcfields at 3:43 PM PST - 5 comments

Photographer Nate Bolt, on a overnight San Francisco to Paris flight, set up a time lapse camera to record the journey (with permission), and found midflight that he was shooting an aurora borealis. [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 3:32 PM PST - 14 comments

The Death of Downtown Chicago and 20 More Maps Of U.S. Population Change, 2000-2010 [more inside]
posted by T.D. Strange at 2:52 PM PST - 42 comments

Old Hong Kong/Macau clips 1949-1989 by Michael Rogge, now 81, who was stationed in Hong Kong and Japan. He documented his life in photos and 16mm film, clips on YT | his YouTube channel | Old Japan in 1870 Engravings. Taken from a Dutch magazine 'De aarde en haar volken' of 1875. Engravings done by French artists. | Old JAPAN in 1869 in engravings French engravings, part of a travelogue, picture a weird Japan. Pictures appeared in Dutch magazine 'De Aarde en haar Volken' of 1869 and were engraved by French artists. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 2:10 PM PST - 5 comments

A logic puzzle called NAWNCO.
posted by lemuring at 1:39 PM PST - 62 comments

"The Harper government misinformed Parliament to win approval for a $50-million G8 fund that lavished money on dubious projects in a Conservative riding, the auditor general has concluded." Or maybe not - the final report won't be released until Parliament is sitting again. Or, maybe not - John Baird says the Conservative party would agree to a release of the final report.
posted by joannemerriam at 12:59 PM PST - 96 comments

Statistical hypothesis testing with a p-value of less than 0.05 is often used as a gold standard in science, and is required by peer reviewers and journals when stating results. Some statisticians argue that this indicates a cult of significance testing using a frequentist statistical framework that is counterintuitive and misunderstood by many scientists. Biostatisticians have argued that the (over)use of p-vaues come from "the mistaken idea that a single number can capture both the long-run outcomes of an experiment and the evidential meaning of a single result" and identify several other problems with significance testing. XKCD demonstrates how misunderstandings of the nature of the p-value, failure to adjust for multiple comparisons, and the file drawer problem result in likely spurious conclusions being published in the scientific literature and then being distorted further in the popular press. You can simulate a similar situation yourself. John Ioannidis uses problems with significance testing and other statistical concerns to argue, controversially, that "most published research findings are false." Will the use of Bayes factors replace classical hypothesis testing and p-values? Will something else?
posted by grouse at 12:56 PM PST - 45 comments

Recently, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton released the 35th annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, covering the legal status of human rights in more than 190 countries and territories around the world. This year, Clinton had tough words for China, amid crackdowns on dissent. In response, China provides a profile of the US, pointing out actions related to Wikileaks, civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prisoner abuse scandals related to counterterrorism initiatives. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:46 PM PST - 47 comments

Photos of Auto Buds. "Auto Buds are two cars of the same make, model, color, or as identical as possible, that are parked right next to each other or in close proximity."
posted by geoff. at 12:18 PM PST - 67 comments

An exegesis of sexual subtext in "Predator" [more inside]
posted by jtron at 11:45 AM PST - 93 comments

The Periodic Table of Storytelling. via
posted by Rumple at 11:23 AM PST - 31 comments

The Economist is holding an online debate on nuclear power. These debates provide a great opportunity to get an overview of the different perspectives on an issue. If f you are so inclined, you can share your own views on the topic too. Today's discussions focus on a contribution by Amory Lovins.
posted by philipy at 11:08 AM PST - 68 comments

Thick As A Brick (Google Video, YouTube) is Jethro Tull's 1972 album/song of epic proportions. The lyrics are lengthy and confusing. But they are not incomprehensible! You can learn to play the whole thing. It also had very extensive packaging. [presented here in nice clickable-article format]
posted by hippybear at 10:27 AM PST - 55 comments

Tama River Film: Tama River by Anders Edström & Karen Langley. Music: Yoko Ono, Let’s Go On Flying. Model: Ai Tominaga
posted by puny human at 9:10 AM PST - 8 comments

George Takei and Patty Duke filmed a series of Star Trek themed spots promoting the Social Security Administration's website.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:50 AM PST - 42 comments

A girl and her room. Photographer Rania Matar has taken dozens of pictures of teenage girls in their bedrooms, in both the US and the Middle East. (Slightly NSFW) (via)
posted by shakespeherian at 7:48 AM PST - 103 comments

9-year-old Naomi Kutin squats 187 at a bodyweight of 88 lbs. This breaks the 100% Raw record for the 97 lb class, held for a number of years by a woman in her late 20's. [more inside]
posted by Anatoly Pisarenko at 7:42 AM PST - 58 comments

The reality of For Profit Educatation in Infographic form. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 7:41 AM PST - 60 comments

Google launches a trivia game where Googling is not cheating, but encouraged
posted by ConstantineXVI at 6:49 AM PST - 25 comments

After completing it's final mission in March, Space Shuttle Discovery has been returned to the Kennedy Space Center's Orbiter Processing Facility, where it is being dissembled for cleaning and decommissioning. Spaceflight Now has pictures of the process.
posted by helloknitty at 6:34 AM PST - 43 comments

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

With these words, an unknown hacker named Linus Torvalds released Linux into the world, 20 years ago this year. [more inside]
posted by DU at 5:11 AM PST - 232 comments

Swedish "Pirate" MEP Christian Engström has announced that today or tomorrow Europe will be voting on extending copyrights for recorded music from 50 years to 95 years.

Recently, Engström and Dutch liberal party D66 MEP Marietje Schaake have submitted a formal question to the European Commission on the conflict of interest arising from their appointment of Maria Martin-Prat. Martin-Prat has spent years directing 'global legal policy' for IFPI, the global recording industry's London-based trade group, but will now be overseeing IPRED and the ongoing ACTA proposals (previously).

On the other side of the pond, Judge Beryl Howell has overturned restrictions established by lower courts on the issuing mass subpoenas to ISPs during her first week on the U.S. D.C. District Court (previously, known results). Beryl Howell was recently employed as an RIAA lobbyist and Executive Managing Director and General Counsel at the pirate chasing company Stroz Friedberg.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:17 AM PST - 209 comments

A law has come into force in France which makes it an offence for a Muslim woman to conceal her face behind a veil when in public. [more inside]
posted by dubold at 2:51 AM PST - 430 comments

The annual Melbourne University Puzzle Hunt is back - and this time they need your help fending off villians with your puzzle-solving abilities. Anyone from anywhere in the world can compete in teams of 1 to 10 people (or you can see the puzzles for yourself and play at home). [more inside]
posted by divabat at 10:42 PM PST - 7 comments

"This is the story of Walter and Ina…" "It begins before they met, when he was taking aerial photographs of occupied France from a Sopwith A2, and she was looking for work in rural Texas and worrying about the boys “over there.” They continued on separate paths until 1924." I'm a sucker for a good love story, and one that elicits nostalgia through historical documents is even better. Here is one such story. Although I have only just now begun to read the correspondence myself, I immediately thought that MeFi was a good place to share it. The curator of these letters is Dr. Alan Dove, a virologist and podcaster. Walter and Ina were his grandparents.
posted by Moody834 at 7:37 PM PST - 4 comments

“The flapper movement is not a craze, but something that will stay,” the author maintained. “Many of the phrases now employed by members of this order will eventually find a way into common usage and be accepted as good English.” [more inside]
posted by timory at 6:05 PM PST - 83 comments

On filming desperately graphic war footage. Aussie photojournalist was 5 metres away when a 12 year old suicide bomber detonated a bomb.
posted by malibustacey9999 at 5:39 PM PST - 89 comments

WWII German soldiers speak about their experiences. 'The myth that the Nazi-era German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, was not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war. Now two German researchers have destroyed it once and for all. Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide.''What already seems hardly feasible for current military operations like the war in Afghanistan is nearly impossible when it comes to an event that happened so long ago as World War II. Nevertheless, two German historians have managed to produce precisely such a documentary of perceptions of the war using live historical recordings.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 5:25 PM PST - 39 comments

A Tragedy of Errors. On Feb. 21, 2010, a convoy of vehicles carrying civilians headed down a mountain in central Afghanistan and American eyes in the sky were watching. "The Americans were using some of the most sophisticated tools in the history of war, technological marvels of surveillance and intelligence gathering that allowed them to see into once-inaccessible corners of the battlefield. But the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe." FOIA-obtained transcripts of US cockpit and radio conversations and an interactive feature provide a more in-depth understanding of what happened.
posted by zarq at 4:23 PM PST - 57 comments

Jörg Piringer presents all displayable characters in the unicode range 0 - 65536 (49571 characters). one character per frame.
posted by juv3nal at 3:43 PM PST - 82 comments

Have you ever gotten lost in the Myst-inspired architecture of Anthology Film Archives’ website, or struggled awkwardly with the Chinese puzzle box-construction of BAMcinematek’s calendars? Have you ever circled the block at Lincoln Plaza in search of the secret entrance to the fabled Walter Reade Theater? (Hint: look behind the waterfall.) Have you found yourself asking time and again, “What the fuck is Union Docs?”

The brainchild of critic Paul Brunick, Alt Screen is a new site billed as "a comprehensive digital resource covering film exhibitions and related special events in the New York City area." The contributing editors include blogger Jim Emerson, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky [previously] and Nathan Lee (apparently coming out of retirement).
posted by alexoscar at 3:30 PM PST - 8 comments

Picma Squared (flash, game) "You got your Picross in my Minesweeper!" "You got your Minesweeper in my Picross!" [more inside]
posted by Ufez Jones at 3:29 PM PST - 8 comments

What If Your Favorite Album Was a Book? Rock classics from from Arcade Fire to Zeppelin, reimagined as book covers. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:13 PM PST - 32 comments

Luis Posada Carilles Acquitted. [more inside]
posted by lalochezia at 2:55 PM PST - 8 comments

A lion taxidermied by a taxidermist who had never seen a lion. - more info here in Swedish (translation). More daft taxidermy.
posted by Artw at 2:02 PM PST - 46 comments

Remember, only you can prevent unboxing videos. (SLYT)
posted by yellowbinder at 1:07 PM PST - 76 comments

Zerosomethings are adorable: angst-free, energetic, usually related to me. They will grab onto one my legs to get a free ride, and I will always give it to them. A precocious twentysomething's artful musings on the series of life-stages most of us have passed, are passing, or will pass through in the course of ordinary survival. Reading "-Somethings" I am reminded of Gail Sheehy's classic Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (read a portion here), a thought-provoking and somewhat more academic investigation of how we change over time.
posted by fernabelle at 12:47 PM PST - 30 comments

Cédric Sam has released an updated version of his 2008 Google Maps and Google Earth layers showing Canada's 2008 federal election data in every riding across the country, accessible down to the polling district level. A great GIS data visualization tool for understanding how your riding or district may vote on May 2.
posted by HLD at 12:10 PM PST - 5 comments

Putzmeister pumps Fukushima up. [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 11:54 AM PST - 15 comments

What Is to Be Done? Tim Kreider of The Pain muses about the future of cartooning as a payable profession
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:30 AM PST - 41 comments

Subjects don't need formal logic training. They don't need math or philosophy. Fewer than 10 percent of the participants got it right when Peter Cathcart Wason performed his 1966 study, the Wason Selection Task. But according to an essay by Bruce Schneier referencing the work of evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, that number improves, by 65 to 80 percent "...when the rule has to do with cheating and privilege."
posted by fartknocker at 9:40 AM PST - 35 comments

Sunday Morning Music (at least in PST): Evan Brewer plays a melancholy little piece on two six-string basses (SLYT).
posted by Existential Dread at 9:30 AM PST - 1 comment

The Classic Schwinn Sting-ray: A Lucky Boy's First Fast Wheels
posted by puny human at 8:54 AM PST - 40 comments

Ikea's U.S. factory churns out unhappy workers. A union-organizing battle hangs over the Ikea plant in Virginia. Workers complain of eliminated raises, a frenzied pace, mandatory overtime and racial discrimination.
posted by hippybear at 8:27 AM PST - 105 comments

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting Maut ka Kuan, a.k.a. Death Pit or Well of Death, a inverted cone of wooden planks assembled for the express purpose of driving motorcycles and cars in circles at speeds that make them stick to the walls. The drivers can collect a little cash along the way.
posted by bwg at 6:30 AM PST - 42 comments

FNET is a low-cost, GPS-synchronized wide-area power system frequency measurement network. Highly accurate Frequency Disturbance Recorders (FDRs) [...] measure the frequency, phase angle, and voltage of the power signal found at ordinary 120-V electrical outlets. Animated map. [via]
posted by slater at 4:34 AM PST - 26 comments

A statue of an angel holding a mobile phone has been unveiled at St John’s Cathedral in the southern Dutch city of 's-Hertogenbosch. The cathedral features a lot of statues. Among them gargoyle like statuettes on the flying buttresses. [more inside]
posted by joost de vries at 1:54 AM PST - 72 comments

19 year-old Virginia Frances Sterrett was commissioned by the Penn Publishing Company to illustrate Old French Fairy Tales by Comtesse de Segur (1920). Sterrett was already ill with tuberculosis, the disease that would end her life at age 30. [more inside]
posted by nev at 8:05 PM PST - 26 comments

YouTube user deb4tlj has uploaded seven out-of-print titles to YouTube: three silent films starring Lon Chaney -- The Penalty (1920), The Unknown (1927), and Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928); two films starring Bela Lugosi -- Island of Lost Souls (1932) and Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932); and two films starring Boris Karloff -- The Ghoul (1933), and The Walking Dead (1936). [Notes inside] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:08 PM PST - 15 comments

Indian prison authorities in Hyderabad have opened up a call centre inside the jail with hopes of servicing customers from the UK.
posted by reenum at 6:57 PM PST - 41 comments

Writers and Kitties That's pretty much it. Authors and their cats. My favorite is Mark Twain.
posted by desjardins at 6:27 PM PST - 51 comments

Domestic Cat and Captive Dolphin make nice [SLYT]
posted by humannaire at 6:12 PM PST - 45 comments

A Political Meltdown: For decades, Canada has been a world leader in the production of medical isotopes. So why did the government announce that it was dumping the entire program? (alt)
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 5:06 PM PST - 22 comments

75 Abandoned Theaters From Around The US
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:02 PM PST - 55 comments

The Civil War Journal of Nehemiah Wallington , digitized by the John Rylands Library, is one of the surviving diaries kept by this seventeenth-century Puritan. Although Wallington recorded a number of key events, like the execution of Archbishop Laud, the diary has garnered most attention for its report of the Chelmsford witch trials, overseen by Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins (enter "witchcraft" into the search box to see Wallington's account). For more of the intellectual context for early modern witch-hunting in the British Isles, see the Witches in Early Modern England and Survey of Scottish Witchcraft databases, as well as the handy collection of primary texts in Cornell's Witchcraft Collection.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:50 PM PST - 13 comments

Double suspension action! Teen suspended for outing pornstar office assistant, and a cop wants in on the action too. All links (here at least) SFW.
posted by kneecapped at 3:36 PM PST - 66 comments

Friday Saturday Flash Fun: Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars, by Auntie Pixelante.
posted by egypturnash at 1:57 PM PST - 9 comments

A video has been making the rounds of twin babies having a little conversation. Patton Oswalt and Michael Chiklis recreate the scene (mostly) detail for detail.
posted by codacorolla at 1:12 PM PST - 49 comments

The New Biology - Eric Schadt's quest to upend molecular biology and open source it. (via)
posted by kliuless at 11:00 AM PST - 35 comments

Harvard's 1869 Entrance Exam (PDF - NYT)
posted by The Whelk at 9:40 AM PST - 77 comments

I'll never forget the day that I realized that over half of the movies I truly loved were all directed by one guy. To name just a few of his brilliant films: 12 Angry Men, Anderson Tapes, Dog Day Afternoon (NSFW), Serpico and of course, the grand-daddy of conspiracy love stories Network. Sidney Lumet. RIP (prev)
posted by victors at 9:35 AM PST - 86 comments

Ah, or Ahhhhh, a minimalist Lego animation about people(?).
posted by Kaatridge at 9:26 AM PST - 7 comments

Chicks With Steve Buscemi's Eyes. Surprisingly horrifying.
posted by saladin at 9:16 AM PST - 77 comments

Man builds large format camera out of lego, that is all.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:42 AM PST - 17 comments

Recent research on children. (1) Brothers and sisters who argue a lot can improve their language, social skills and outcomes: Guardian article; paper on part of the research (pdf). (2) First findings from Understanding Society. Conclusions include: the unhappiness of children’s mothers with their partners affect children’s happiness, but this is not the case if children’s fathers are unhappy in their relationships; having older brothers or sisters doesn’t appear to affect children’s happiness, but having younger brothers or sisters is associated with less happiness; not living with both natural parents has a greater negative impact on a young person’s life satisfaction than their material situation. (3) A longitudinal study on people now in their forties has found that for these people reading is linked to career success, though not necessarily to better pay, whilst playing computer games and doing no other activities was associated with less likelihood of going to university. In particular, those who owned a ZX Spectrum or Commodore C64 were less likely to go to university. thinq interview with researcher. Guardian article. Telegraph article. (4) Poll about children’s attitudes to losing in sport. Press release. Data from children’s survey. Data from parents’ survey. (All three are PDFs.)
posted by paduasoy at 3:52 AM PST - 28 comments

Freezerburns, the video channel dedicated to reviewing frozen food, samples frozen treats for dogs and cats.
posted by mippy at 3:47 AM PST - 14 comments

William F. Buckley meets Hugh Hefner. A philosophical debate.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:22 AM PST - 24 comments

The Ward (Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3) is a silly little Lovecraftian sitcom from the folks who bring us the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. (previously: 1, 2, 3, 4) The guys Lackey and Fifer are also writing a graphic horror novel set in the Jazz Age, Deadbeats.
posted by JHarris at 1:46 AM PST - 11 comments

"But when Britney [Spears] got healthy, Jamie’s lawyers actually pushed for greater authority and, on October 28th of 2008, Jamie secured a permanent conservatorship. PERMANENT. HE OWNS HER FOREVER."
posted by dirigibleman at 12:49 AM PST - 98 comments

A gamma ray burst nicknamed GRB 110328A (i.e. detected 3/28/2011) appears to be the legacy of a star being torn apart by a supermassive black hole, leaving a peak brightness one trillion times the sun's brightness as it met its ancient inevitable end.
posted by jjray at 8:10 PM PST - 51 comments

On NPR Science Friday (1-hour audio), Werner Herzog and Cormac McCarthy discuss science, art and the abyss of humanity.
posted by stbalbach at 7:55 PM PST - 34 comments

Anybody want to buy a brand newC-64? How about a VIC Pro? An Amiga 1000? Commodore USA has risen from the grave. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:31 PM PST - 70 comments

"In November 1855, the Great Ansei Earthquake struck the city of Edo (now Tokyo), claiming 7,000 lives and inflicting widespread damage. Within days, a new type of color woodblock print known as namazu-e (lit. "catfish pictures") became popular among the residents of the shaken city. These prints featured depictions of mythical giant catfish (namazu) who, according to popular legend, caused earthquakes by thrashing about in their underground lairs. In addition to providing humor and social commentary, many prints claimed to offer protection from future earthquakes."
posted by madamjujujive at 5:19 PM PST - 19 comments

Too much bad news and worry lately? Maybe a quick dose of the jubilant new song "Sydney (I'll Come Running)" by Brett Dennen will help. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 4:49 PM PST - 20 comments

Louis Marinelli, activist for the National Organization for Marriage and founder of their 2010 "Summer of Marriage" bus tour, has announced today that he now supports full marriage equality. Gay rights blog Good As You has a detailed rundown of the story, including a spotlight on NOM's immediate efforts to discredit Marinelli's involvement in their organization.
posted by palomar at 4:08 PM PST - 79 comments

Featuring 2052 performers from 58 countries, I give you Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 2.0 performing Sleep. [SLYT]
posted by Lutoslawski at 2:25 PM PST - 34 comments

One in every 8 babies born in the US is premature. A new study (pdf/via) published online Wednesday in Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology indicates that vaginal progesterone gel can help women who are pregnant for the first time and at risk of premature birth extend their pregnancies, reduce potential complications and boost the health of their newborns. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:12 PM PST - 18 comments

Does your movie have a large crowd scene? Extras and CGI are expensive! Why not go with an Inflatable Crowd? [more inside]
posted by yellowbinder at 1:45 PM PST - 55 comments

Good Results of Bad Habits? Research Explains Paradox. There's a lot of research that shows the deleterious health effects of stress. So shouldn't alleviating stress be a net positive for your health? Why, yes, of course. But what if you relieve stress by a lot of bad habits which themselves have bad health effects? Apparently, you still benefit by reducing stress. Advances in psychosomatic medicine have highlighted the link between your mental state and your physical health, but for all of history, human beings have self-medicated their mental health with "bad habits" at the cost of physical health. [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 1:43 PM PST - 37 comments

20 Even Stranger and More Wonderful Books. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 11:54 AM PST - 56 comments

Disasteradio-Visions [SLYT]
posted by The Power Nap at 11:21 AM PST - 12 comments

What the Exodus from Egypt would have looked like if Moses had a laptop, Google Maps and Facebook. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 11:01 AM PST - 34 comments

Rob Walker, who writes the "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine, talks with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich about the whys and wherefores of their popular WNYC science radio show and podcast, RadioLab.
posted by ocherdraco at 8:59 AM PST - 63 comments

Dare 2 Share Ministries offers profiles and tips on how to "share your faith" with fourteen different types of friends a teen Christian might have, such as Andy the Atheist, Marty the Mormon, Jenna the Jew, Sid the Satanist, Mo the Muslim and Willow the Wiccan. If none of those strategies work, they also offer articles on how to "use the buzz in current teen culture to initiate God-talk with your friends" by "sharing your faith" through Indiana Jones, Halo 3, Brokeback Mountain, Kung Fu Panda and The X Files.
posted by jardinier at 8:47 AM PST - 287 comments

Will there be a government shutdown? Everything seems to hang on GOP riders. But it affects more than the federal employees and contractors. For example, National Parks will close. And so will DC services. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton tells Congress off, while DC residents wonder what are we going do with all our trash?
posted by troika at 7:14 AM PST - 806 comments

Best of a Normal Day; SLYT, 2.00.
posted by bwg at 6:28 AM PST - 14 comments

Meet Rob Granito, Professional Comic Book Con Artist. Sure, his art is perhaps a little similar to other work, and yeah, his claims of industry contacts are pretty much made up, and he's been banned as a fraud from multiple conventions, but hey, a playa's got to get paid, right?
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:16 AM PST - 56 comments

Archived Baseball photos from 1917-1956 Today, the Boston Public Library will publish on the Internet the first 100 of a trove of nearly 3,000 rarely seen baseball photographs taken by Leslie Jones, who worked for the Boston Herald and the Boston Traveler from 1917 to 1956. Moments preserved by the shutter and squirreled away in his Dorchester basement, where he kept tens of thousands of images. The Boston Globe has a selection published here. The first batch of snapshots was released to coincide with today’s Opening Day at Fenway Park. Library staff plan to upload several dozen more images each week until all 2,881 photos are online. The project is part of a broader initiative by the library to give the public unfettered access to Jones’s entire archive of tens of thousands of images. He photographed car wrecks and ice-crusted fishing trawlers; shot luminaries like Albert Einstein and Amelia Earhart; and the people of Boston.
posted by Gungho at 6:11 AM PST - 18 comments

NYC mayor: Military trial appropriate in 9/11 case. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried at a military tribunal in Guantanamo. US Lawmakers Say Politics Played Role in Military Trial Decision. Attorney General Eric Holder blames congress for forcing his hand on this. Slate blasts the Obama administration as "Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong". Previously, the opposite.
posted by rodmandirect at 5:35 AM PST - 42 comments

In 1981, 27-year-old Joseph Paul Jernigan shot and stabbed the man who discovered him stealing a microwave oven. Jernigan was sentenced to death, and a prison chaplain convinced him to donate his body to science. Thirty years on, 1871 slices of his body are animated on a laptop screen and photographed on a long exposure in various dark locations, reconstructing Jernigan as the subject of a haunting new project.
posted by creeky at 4:25 AM PST - 45 comments

Geoff Barrow of Portishead calls "Top Post-Punk Artists as Determined by RYM Ratings" an "amazing musical journey." But that's far from the most interesting list Rate Your Music user Goregirl has created. [more inside]
posted by waitingtoderail at 3:26 AM PST - 41 comments