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Giochi dell'Oca - A large (2,265) collection of The Game of the Goose circa 1550 to 2014. Some of them with detail e.g. Games of the Pilgrim's progress - Going to Sunday School - Tower of Babel and The New Game of Human Life.
posted by unliteral at 10:12 PM PST - 3 comments

Possibly the most loved and used fighting knife in the world, the Fairbain-Sykes Fighting Knife is a stilletto daggar designed and produced during WWII for commando troops and still used to this day. The knife was designed for a precise grip and a long thin blade that could go through a Soviet Army greatcoat to the ribs and slice, rather than tear, for faster death. The knife's history is worth a small book alone, but the two men who invented it also helped invent modern police fighting and close combat, and probably inspired Q from James Bond. [more inside]
posted by viggorlijah at 9:48 PM PST - 30 comments

Monopoly is back: Barry Lynn on the concentration of American economic power — and how we can restore fairness. Highlights: [more inside]
posted by cthuljew at 8:59 PM PST - 47 comments

Sports Bar are a band from Richmond, Virginia that play fun, fast, lo-fi, riff-heavy upbeat rock songs with lyrics like "My friends are your friends but your friends are bullshit!" and "Waaa-ohhhh-ohhh-wa-oh-OH-oh-oh!" It's the summer party music you didn't know you needed, and because their one album and two EPs can be downloaded for free from Bandcamp: Cassette, Tyler Perry's Sports Bar, and I Want To Waste Away With You.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:00 PM PST - 16 comments

Cats love car racing. Dogs too.
posted by jaguar at 6:29 PM PST - 6 comments

Dogfights on Connery, in Planetside 2
posted by Sebmojo at 6:12 PM PST - 9 comments

Who's hacking whom? U.S.-based computer security firm Norse has released a real-time animated map that illustrates ongoing cyberattacks around the world.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:07 PM PST - 30 comments

You've almost certainly heard of bicycle racing, but how about tricycle racing? This three-wheeled sport can be found in the U.K. and Europe. These are full adult-sized tricycles, featuring 700C wheels and drop bars, but beware! They do not handle anything like their two-wheeled brethren. [more inside]
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 4:26 PM PST - 32 comments

HTML5up.net provides free, Creative Commons licensed, HTML5 website templates you can use to make a modern-looking website. [more inside]
posted by pombe at 4:14 PM PST - 26 comments

The militant Sunni group Isis has said it is establishing a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the territories it controls in Iraq and Syria. This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders," its spokesman warns. Standing on a border sign he threatens to "break the borders" of Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 3:16 PM PST - 161 comments

This blog will keep you up half the night when you should be trying to sleep for an early morning meeting. The post The Secret History Behind Today’s Algeria-Germany #WorldCup Match being timely and tweeted is what brought it to my attention. But what to share? There is so much good stuff, that the rabbit hole beckons...
posted by infini at 3:13 PM PST - 581 comments

NBC's cult sitcom Community has been uncancelled and will have a sixth season on Yahoo Screen. Previously. The main cast are all scheduled to return, as well as showrunner Dan Harmon.
posted by Small Dollar at 3:10 PM PST - 141 comments

Magma, basically the go-to band when one wants to prove their music snobbery due to their ridiculously dense music to go along with their ridiculously dense mythology told completely in their own constructed language of Kobaïan over the course of every single release they have ever made. Save for one. The band once and only once recorded an album of songs that not only diverged from their celestial storytelling but used Earthly languages. An attempt to bring the band to a wider audience by bandleader Christian Vander, it is regarded fairly universally as their worst record, "Merci" was a mixed bag of 80's synth pop and attempts at being soulful. [more inside]
posted by mediocre at 2:11 PM PST - 16 comments

"His work is rooted in the power of collaboration within systems: instructions, rules, and self-imposed limits. His methods are a rebuke to the assumption that a project can be powered by one person’s intent, or that intent is even worth worrying about. To this end, Eno has come up with words like “scenius,” which describes the power generated by a group of artists who gather in one place at one time. (“Genius is individual, scenius is communal,” Eno told the Guardian, in 2010.) It suggests that the quality of works produced in a certain time and place is more indebted to the friction between the people on hand than to the work of any single artist." The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones on Brian Eno's career and new album High Life.
posted by porn in the woods at 12:54 PM PST - 9 comments

Breaking The Low Mood Cycle - a guest post at Captain Awkward discusses how to change your behavior to feel good about yourself and be better at doing you. The post has a humorous tone, reminiscent of Allie Brosh.
posted by desjardins at 11:57 AM PST - 31 comments

Globe Trot (50 filmmakers, 23 countries, 1 dance) A fun little romp around the world as over 50 people do a cool dance that combined with sharp editing can't help but make you feel good. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by mathowie at 11:28 AM PST - 4 comments

"For a kid growing up with the fear of estrangement from the people they love the most, the possibility that someone else out there might see enough good in them to take them in — not regardless of their differences, but in celebration of them — is as empowering as a superhero story can get." In a series of three essays for LGBT Pride Month, ComicsAlliance's Andrew Wheeler explores the X-Men as a metaphor for queer family and community, the marginalization and hatred that LGBT people face, and queerness itself.
posted by narain at 10:51 AM PST - 31 comments

The most rapidly expanding U.S. metro area is a Manhattan-sized retirement village – with more golf carts than New York has taxis. “They own everything,” said Andrew D. Blechman, author of “Leisureville,” a book about The Villages and other retirement communities that ranks Morse’s as the biggest. “You basically have a city of 100,000 people, owned by a company.”
posted by Strass at 9:42 AM PST - 187 comments

The Supreme Court holds closely held corporations cannot be required to provide contraception coverage with Justice Alito authoring the majority decision. Justice Ginsburg, in her dissent, calls it a "decision of startling breadth." SCOTUSBlog has a live blog of todays' decisions, which also includes Harris v. Quinn, on the ability of unions to require certain types of employees to contribute.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:57 AM PST - 1112 comments

The Arranged Marriage That Ended Happily Ever After: How My Parents Fell In Love, 30 Years Later
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:22 AM PST - 34 comments

Body Positive Art by Carol Rossetti [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:42 AM PST - 6 comments

But, look: banging this book on its metaphorical pate with a knobstick for manifold failures of expression and general Thoggism, as I might do with another writer, is no fun. It’s like slapping a puppy. One of the pleasures of Brooks’ writing is that he is so in-the-bone unpretentious; there’s no overweening Jordan-ic or Donaldsonian self-importance here. And (not to abdicate the responsibilities of criticism or anything) there’s a level of response which boils down to: ‘either you enjoy reading sentences like Paranor has fallen! A division of Gnome hunters under the command of the Warlock King has seized the Sword of Shannara! [147] or you don’t.’

Science fiction writer and critic Adam Roberts reviews Terry Brooks' first Shannara Trilogy and ... likes it? [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:01 AM PST - 150 comments

Lovatt reasoned that if she could live with a dolphin around the clock, nurturing its interest in making human-like sounds, like a mother teaching a child to speak, they'd have more success. - stories from the NASA- funded project to teach Dolphins to talk using LSD (among other methods. )
posted by The Whelk at 9:46 PM PST - 36 comments

“Pawzing Workout, Resuming Workout” [YouTube] – A black bear encounter while running in Matcheetawin Trails, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.
posted by D.C. at 9:32 PM PST - 45 comments

Lawyers who represented Ted Bundy, Jon Venables, Charles Manson and Charles Ng discuss what its like to represent them.
posted by Admira at 9:24 PM PST - 29 comments

Zalmai Zahir (ʔǝswǝli) talks about learning Lushootseed, the native language of Puget sound, and it's history: Quoting the Ancestors [more inside]
posted by nangar at 8:18 PM PST - 2 comments

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007 (Previously on Metafilter), the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq”. Embassy officials ordered the investigators to leave Iraq immediately, and no charges were ever pressed. [more inside]
posted by anemone of the state at 7:38 PM PST - 62 comments

Generational Poverty Is the Exception, Not the Rule [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 3:35 PM PST - 65 comments

A Giant Network of Trampolines Suspended in an Abandoned Welsh Slate Mine Open to the public July 4th, 2014
posted by telstar at 2:28 PM PST - 58 comments

A mahout is the person charged with looking after an elephant, a relationship that lasts for the duration of both their lives. As part of his responsibilities, the mahout regularly bathes the elephant in his charge, massaging its thick hide with the husks of coconuts.
posted by growabrain at 1:29 PM PST - 19 comments

Where does the new inter­est in the “his­tory of cap­i­tal­ism” come from? I’d suggest the following rudiments of an answer. The financial crisis of 2008-09 has clearly placed certain issues of historicization on the agenda. If the accelerated and seemingly unstoppable drive for the “flattening” of the world through a process of neoliberal globalization since the early 1990s has not actually brought us to a permanently unfolding and self-reproducing neoliberal present, but has rather encountered severe structural problems, then how do we historicize this current time? That is, how do we understand the contemporary crisis of capitalism, in all its political and social ramifications, in relation to longer-run processes of capitalist restructuring and their logics of development and difficulty; and how do we locate the history of the present inside a larger-scale framework of periods and conjunctures? [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 1:14 PM PST - 9 comments

But what about those tech entrepreneurs who lose – and keep on losing? What about those who start one company after another, refine pitches, tweak products, pivot strategies, reinvent themselves … and never succeed? What about the angst masked behind upbeat facades?
posted by lenny70 at 1:09 PM PST - 36 comments

Presented for your enjoyment and perusal: the Apollo 11 Flight Plan, and other fun reading material. [more inside]
posted by TheNewWazoo at 12:40 PM PST - 23 comments

The year is 1793. In this story, you will take the role of a fictional physician, Dr. John Brooks, as he navigates a disaster of a kind not altogether uncommon in U.S. cities before the 20th century... How Dr. Brooks fares will depend entirely on your decisions. Every choice has a consequence. Choose wisely. [more inside]
posted by oinopaponton at 11:42 AM PST - 19 comments

One-third of the food on our plate now relies on just one pollinator — the honeybee. And it’s dying. The land of milk and honey is fast becoming a land without wildflowers, thanks to insecticides called neonicotinoids. "In the past decade, in most states and especially in the Midwest, the amount of honey produced by each hive has crashed. That’s clear evidence that bees are seriously impaired, said Susan Kegley, a pesticide researcher in Berkeley, Calif., who works with beekeepers. In Minnesota, for example, production per hive has plummeted by one-third in the past decade."
posted by thescoop at 10:38 AM PST - 68 comments

My Imaginary Friends: The Beauty YouTuber Economy [more inside]
posted by danabanana at 10:17 AM PST - 32 comments

The problem with false feminism: "My friends have asked for it and I feel like the internet needs it, so I’m going to go through, point-by-point and in no particular order, the top handful of reasons people have given for thinking Frozen is a feminist triumph, and I’m going to debunk them all." [more inside]
posted by flex at 6:50 AM PST - 199 comments

This weekend is the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts for 2014. Amongst a diverse range of musical and artistic acts the Saturday headline, a surprising choice to many, was Metallica. They came, they wandered around a bit beforehand, they did their greatest hits, they were LOUD. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 5:01 AM PST - 37 comments

Moa’s Ark (1990) [more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 3:27 AM PST - 3 comments

Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to recommend meditation over on the green. [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 12:28 AM PST - 48 comments

Mexico tried giving poor people cash instead of food. It worked. [more inside]
posted by tybeet at 4:47 PM PST - 70 comments

Bob Ihlenfeldt, aka Rob Fitzgerald, aka Rob the Bouncer, died recently. I started reading about his exploits as a bouncer years ago. I bought his book. I didn't know that he was also the Angry Coach at EliteFTS. Here is the last post on his later blog. He was always an excellent writer.
posted by philquadra at 1:47 PM PST - 20 comments

An excerpt from Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography
posted by Sparx at 1:34 PM PST - 16 comments

My Militia Weekend, in which a left-leaning blogger visits the 3rd Annual Alaska Prepper, Survivalist & Militia Rendezvous.
posted by zamboni at 1:18 PM PST - 71 comments

“Old school cool“ are recent history's coolest kids, from beatniks to bikers, mods to rude boys, hippies to ravers. And everything in between.
For example this stylish, handsome 1940’s swagger, which was found on this maternal family album.
All are taken from r/OldSchoolCool.
See all images on one page @ imgur.
And of course, an original source of The Cool Hall of Fame at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 12:38 PM PST - 23 comments

A Pallas's Cat investigates a camera! Previously
posted by winna at 10:55 AM PST - 31 comments

One hundred years ago today, an age came to an end and a terrible war was spawned. On June 28, 1914, 20-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess of Hohenberg Sophie, in the city of Sarajevo. This triggered a diplomatic crisis which metastasized into the first World War.
posted by doctornemo at 10:31 AM PST - 70 comments

"Fashionable bigotry (also called "hipster racism" or "ironic racism") is this strange, newish phenomenon that's been popping up all over the arts and entertainment industry. You've got the Flaming Lips, Macklemore, Fallin, Ullman and Silverman to name a few. Count Tarantino in, too, as he's basically the modern godfather of the stuff." -- Minneapolis artist/performer/critic Rob Callahan.
posted by artof.mulata at 9:57 AM PST - 93 comments

(tw: rape) Kathleen Hale reflects on her assault, the subsequent trial, and the relationship between predators and prey.
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:08 AM PST - 28 comments

Last December, Benjamin Curtis, half of the dream pop duo School of Seven Bells, died at the age of 35 after a battle with lymphoblastic lymphoma. On Wednesday, Culture Collide released the video for a new cover of Joey Ramone's "I Got Knocked Down (But I'll Get Up) [SLYT], which Curtis helped record from his hospital bed. [more inside]
posted by that silly white dress at 9:06 AM PST - 6 comments

"Patrick Haggerty grew up the son of a dairy farmer in rural Washington during the 1950s As a teenager, Patrick began to understand he was gay–something he thought he was hiding well. But as he told his daughter Robin, one day, when he went to perform at a school assembly, his father Charles Edward Haggerty, decided to have a serious talk with him." (transcript)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:36 AM PST - 22 comments

“Je Suis La Jeune Fille.” “Yes, that’s French they’re speaking. But no, these children aren’t French – they’re American!” If you grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, or watched children's TV programming from that era in the US or UK, no doubt you saw that commercial for Muzzy (formally titled Muzzy in Gondoland). The show was first produced by the BBC in 1986 to teach English as a second language, as seen in this playlist of five videos, and later expanded with Muzzy Comes Back in 1989 (six episode playlist). The shows were both translated in to French, German (playlist), Spanish (and the Spanish vocabulary builder), and Italian (Muzzy in Gondoland, Muzzy Comes Back).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:25 AM PST - 32 comments

Melissa Leo's fabulous house, built with Constant van Hoeven.
posted by xowie at 7:29 AM PST - 11 comments

Facebook scientists, having apparently become bored with optimizing advertising algorithms, are now running social science experiments on the users. Link to the actual paper. I assume they are already selling this to the advertisers as a way to alter "brand perceptions."
posted by COD at 7:05 AM PST - 354 comments

My sculptures are invented only to sustain themselves, functioning as self-resolving problems. The result is an object that has been invented only to compensate for the complications created by its own existence. The piece alone represents the need and the resolution.

Dan Grayber's mechanical contraptions
posted by rebent at 6:09 AM PST - 16 comments

The Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Hugo awards are the Triple Crown of science-fiction writing. If Ancillary Justice claims the Hugo, it will become the first novel to win all three. After years toiling in obscurity, Leckie's given up trying to wrap her mind around how quickly she and her gun-slinging, galaxy-traversing heroine, Breq, have climbed to critical and popular adoration.

[...]
Leckie's success — and the fact that it was achieved with a novel that not only has a strong female protagonist, but also refers to all of its characters, male or female, as "she" — comes at an interesting time. Barely a year ago the science-fiction community was tearing itself apart over sexism allegations. Seemingly in response, the 2013 Nebula Awards marked the first time in its nearly 50-year history that all of the winners were women.

The St Louis Riverfront Times takes a look at the success of local author Ann Leckie and what it means for science fiction as a whole. (print edition.)
posted by MartinWisse at 6:02 AM PST - 47 comments

Justine Griffin, a reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, decided to become an egg donor. She documents her journey in a three-part feature, The Cost of Life: "This began as a way for me to honor a childhood friend who passed away and a hopeful account of my experience with the fertility industry. But it devolved into a tangle of broken promises, scary science and questionable experiences — ending with a ruptured cyst on my ovary and a fear that my future reproductive health may be in jeopardy." [more inside]
posted by flex at 6:00 AM PST - 10 comments

Apple is discontinuing another of their "pro" apps, Aperture. [more inside]
posted by juiceCake at 5:34 AM PST - 44 comments

Francesco Maglia: The Umbrella Maker Of Milan — The Maglia family have been partners with the rain since 1854, when they began producing umbrellas in Milan. Here's our portrait of Francesco Maglia.
posted by cenoxo at 4:27 AM PST - 16 comments

Just another period western meta comedy short film: The Gunfighter. SLVimeo, via. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 12:28 AM PST - 19 comments

My black friends call it Murderland. My white friends call it Charm City, a town of trendy cafés. I just call it home.
posted by josher71 at 10:40 PM PST - 18 comments

The Big Lobotomy: How Republicans Made Congress Stupid

A quick refresher: In 1995, after winning a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, one of the first things the new Republican House leadership did was gut Congress’s workforce. They cut the “professional staff” (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the “legislative support staff” (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker’s office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research. (The Republicans who took over the Senate in 1995 were less draconian, cutting committee staff by about 16 percent and leaving the committee system largely in place.) Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:38 PM PST - 27 comments

Bobby Womack--one of the last surviving soul greats from the Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding generation--has died. Nicknamed "The Preacher" for his authoritative, church-trained voice and the way he introduced songs with long discourses on life, Womack never had the success of contemporaries like Marvin Gaye, Al Green or Otis Redding. For a good part of his career, he was better known as a songwriter and session musician. [more inside]
posted by magstheaxe at 7:40 PM PST - 46 comments

I Sent All My Text Messages in Calligraphy for a Week. "The idea: I wanted to message friends using calligraphic texts for one week... Before I started, I established rules for myself: I could create only handwritten text messages for seven days, absolutely no using my phone’s keyboard. I had to write out my messages on paper, photograph them, then hit “send.” I didn’t reveal my plan to my friends unless asked, and I received a variety of responses." [more inside]
posted by quin at 6:24 PM PST - 42 comments

After digitizing over 15,000 books, Routledge has made 6,000 of these e-texts free for viewing during the month of June.
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 5:42 PM PST - 7 comments

The US doesn't need network neutrality, it needs competition
posted by indubitable at 4:49 PM PST - 25 comments

How Eddie Van Halen Got His Hands on an Ultra-Rare Flying V Prototype. In 1982, a guitar dealer hired by Eddie made a bogus deal for a legendary guitar and the original owner's son tells the tale.
posted by Benway at 4:06 PM PST - 16 comments

While the farewell scene between David Tennant's 10th Doctor and Billie Piper's Rose has just topped SFX magazine's poll of greatest moments in sci-fi, the BBC has announced that on August 23rd, Peter Capaldi's 12th Doctor will appear in his first episode, entitled "Deep Breath" and directed by Ben Wheatley (previously). Here's a teaser. [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 4:04 PM PST - 66 comments

220 images from Alien including behind the scenes photos, concept art and early effects shots.
posted by brundlefly at 3:18 PM PST - 21 comments

It appears that we're doing a bit better... "After ten years in orbit, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite has been in orbit sufficiently long to show that people in major U.S. cities are breathing less nitrogen dioxide – a yellow-brown gas that can cause respiratory problems."
posted by HuronBob at 1:11 PM PST - 20 comments

For the first time, Primatologists have observed chimps in the wild spreading a cultural fad through their troop.
posted by symbioid at 12:26 PM PST - 52 comments

How to Pick a Life Partner. From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole. But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined. So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays. This is the second of two posts. The first one tells us why we suck at picking life partners. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 12:03 PM PST - 46 comments

Vice talks to 4 urban explorers who visited/photographed Neverland Ranch
posted by k5.user at 11:30 AM PST - 56 comments

Building a plausible world: a step-by-step tutorial, from plate tectonics to trade winds. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 11:21 AM PST - 13 comments

The Awl reflects on the color of the Internet.
posted by fings at 11:14 AM PST - 34 comments

“Greyhound has become generic for bus travel,” says Robert Gabrick, author of Going The Greyhound Way. “Like Kleenex for tissues.”
posted by ellieBOA at 11:11 AM PST - 17 comments

Things Cut in Half
posted by gwint at 9:46 AM PST - 39 comments

Prodigy, the New Kids On the Block, and fandom in an early online community.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:48 AM PST - 12 comments

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats: "The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong." [more inside]
posted by mondo dentro at 8:47 AM PST - 132 comments

A Woman Should Run for President Against Hillary Clinton. Or Many Women. (Rebecca Traister for the New Republic)
posted by box at 8:45 AM PST - 170 comments

Film director Guillermo del Toro has confirmed that not only will there be a sequel to Pacific Rim on 7 April 2017, but also an animated series. No details, but in the meantime, enjoy these concept art clips and discussion about the Mako Mari test.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:42 AM PST - 179 comments

Very pregnant Alysia Montano runs at U.S. Championships Montano said she knew she wouldn’t advance out of the first round. Rather, she viewed her participation as a celebration. Video of the race and her finish.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:23 AM PST - 34 comments

When Falcon 9 attempted its soft water landing it recorded video, sadly not in the best condition. But SpaceX released the video to the public in the hope of recovering more. The NASA Space Flight forums released a description of how they restored the video.
posted by ElliotH at 3:56 AM PST - 15 comments

To put it simply, this is why we can't have nice things. If the only thing that gets a serious segment of fandom up in arms about Game of Thrones's use of rape and violence against women is the fear of having tarnished the gleam of a favorite male woobie, then the showrunners have absolutely no reason to change their behavior. If they know that favorite characters can get away, literally, with murder so long as the person they murder is a woman who hurt them and slept with other men, they will simply keep showing us that. I'm not saying that I have the solution here, and god knows that simply by continuing to watch the show I'm part of the problem. But it is enormously frustrating to watch a critical conversation build around this show and its handling of violence against women, only to devour itself when it becomes clear that the real problem is a man.

Abigail Nussbaum takes a long hard look at Game of Thrones, its fandom and the way both handle rape.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:52 AM PST - 228 comments

A cosmonaut's youtube account. [more inside]
posted by Brodiggitty at 2:41 AM PST - 2 comments

Although North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is supposedly a big fan of American pop culture, his celebrity crushes no longer include Seth Rogen and James Franco. The country has threatened to inflict a "merciless countermeasure" on the United States if they don't ban upcoming comedy The Interview, in which the actors play characters who become entangled in a plot to assassinate the North Korean leader (Randall Park). "The act of making and screening such a movie that portrays an attack on our top leadership... is a most wanton act of terror and act of war," said a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
posted by changeling at 9:33 PM PST - 72 comments

The Grammy nominated, golden record album from Frank Sinatra that nobody has heard of. Despite featuring one of Frank Sinatra's more iconic songs, this little known three part concept album known as the Trilogy: Past, Present, and Future was meant to be a reflection of Frank Sinatra's career, starting with the Past which included many of his classic numbers, and then going into the Present, which mostly consisted of covers like those of The Beatles and Elvis, but where it gets really interesting is in the Future. [more inside]
posted by KernalM at 9:23 PM PST - 13 comments

We have previously discussed "Starcrash" (trailer) here on the Blue, but we have only scratched the surface. After all, we're talking about nothing less than Roger Corman's answer to "Star Wars", and even that description does not do the film justice. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:58 PM PST - 41 comments

A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:47 PM PST - 36 comments

A slide show of polar Svalbard (aka Spitzbergen).
The major settlement Longyearbyen (wiki) at 78 degrees North is the most northernmost settlement of any kind with greater than 1,000 permanent residents.
The UN is calling on Norway to close the coal mines on Svalbard. (See History) which is now better know for it's Global Seed Vault.
(previous).
posted by adamvasco at 7:22 PM PST - 7 comments

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the release of Prince's Purple Rain... [more inside]
posted by jonp72 at 7:22 PM PST - 43 comments

Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws
posted by Vibrissae at 6:28 PM PST - 42 comments

Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something. Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—”Where is everybody?” It turns out that when it comes to the fate of humankind, this question is very important. Depending on where The Great Filter occurs, we’re left with three possible realities: We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked.
posted by michswiss at 6:01 PM PST - 141 comments

Black Glamour Power - a Collectors Weekly interview with Nichelle Gainer of Vintage Black Glamour (previously): "A lot of people think of vintage black pictures as either civil-rights photos or black ladies at church, or maybe sharecroppers picking in the cotton fields and sweating from the hard work. That’s fine. Those are our pictures. But that shouldn’t be the only image of us. It’s nice to see a black woman who is not sweating in the field, but glistening from all this bling, like Josephine Baker, dripping in diamonds. Sometimes you want to see that. Why not? It’s easy to take glamour for granted. You can be a white woman, and you can care less about Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich, and that’s fine. But you know what? Black women haven’t had the same option." [more inside]
posted by flex at 5:50 PM PST - 12 comments

"One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course … For me, the really fascinating questions about black slave-owning are how many black "masters" were involved, how many slaves did they own and why did they own slaves?" Henry Louis Gates Jr. on black slave owners.
posted by klangklangston at 5:27 PM PST - 56 comments

How Poor Young Black Men Run From The Police [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:51 PM PST - 21 comments

Welcome to Detroit's water war – in which upward of 150,000 customers, late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last decade, are now threatened with shut-offs. Local activists estimate this could impact nearly half of Detroit's mostly poor and black population – between 200,000 and 300,000 people. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 4:17 PM PST - 39 comments

A Photographic Look at the Birth of Gay Pride
posted by scody at 3:38 PM PST - 9 comments

This new Pantone ad campaign features cartoon, muppet icons. Via The Ephemerist, which also mentions a similar previous campaign. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:14 PM PST - 8 comments

With the completion of the group stages, three quarters of the matches in the 2014 FIFA World Cup have been played. Now, it's a straight round-by-round elimination for the remaining 16 teams in their quest to reach the final. There's been biting, alternative commentary, mood swings, (allegedly) sulky England players, exciting matches, the USA vs Ronaldo, Europeans taking early return flights, deep analysis, a fantasy league and many goals - but who will finally lift the trophy in Rio's Estádio do Maracanã on Sunday 13th July? [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 2:53 PM PST - 1833 comments

What is the greatest danger of algorithmic culture? Christian Sandvig describes it as "corrupt personalization."
posted by Tesseractive at 1:49 PM PST - 36 comments

SCOTUS just overturned abortion clinic buffer zones in an unanimous decision. So remember that there are people who escort patients past the protesters. (Last link has autoplay video.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:36 PM PST - 187 comments

Point Break (A Wes Anderson film). Point Break (A film by Joe Swanberg). Point Break (A Tommy Wiseu film) Point Break (A film by David Lynch). Point Break (A Terrence Malik film). Point Break (from director Michael Bay). Lars Von Trier's Point Break.
posted by mediocre at 1:01 PM PST - 26 comments

Why Chicago’s MasterChef Star Killed Himself
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 12:54 PM PST - 35 comments

You Are Here maps out neat things like the best mode of transportation in your city, incidences of illness at New York City hospitals, permanent US visa applications and street greenery.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:28 PM PST - 10 comments

A lovely little twist on the old fairy-tale, by the ever-marvelous Ursula Vernon.
posted by The otter lady at 11:55 AM PST - 16 comments

Treading a line between post-punk and dance, the English band Shriekback had only a few minor hits (My Spine (Is the Bassline), Nemesis) and then vanished into obscurity, more of a "who were they then" than a "where are they now". They were Carl Marsh, Dave Allen (formerly of Gang of Four), Barry Andrews (formerly of XTC), and Martyn Barker. One notable fan was Michael Mann, who used the band's music in his movies Band of the Hand ("Faded Flowers" from Oil and Gold) and Manhunter ("This Big Hush" and "Coelacanth" from Oil and Gold and "Evaporation" from Care), and also in at least one episode of Miami Vice ("Underwaterboys" from Big Night Music). They put out two records on Y Records (Tench (1982), Care (1983)), two on Arista (Jam Science (1984), Oil and Gold (1985)), and two on Island (Big Night Music (1986), Go Bang! (1988)). This last album was an obvious push to appeal to a wider demographic. It tanked, and the band soon dissolved. Except they didn't. [more inside]
posted by Legomancer at 11:30 AM PST - 47 comments

Visualizing Algorithms shows you how computer algorithms can be represented visually, leading to better understanding of how the algorithms work:

"Have you ever implemented an algorithm based on formal description? It can be hard! Being able to see what your code is doing can boost productivity. Visualization does not supplant the need for tests, but tests are useful primarily for detecting failure and not explaining it. Visualization can also discover unexpected behavior in your implementation, even when the output looks correct."
posted by quiet earth at 10:31 AM PST - 29 comments

"And looks like an almost goal. If that whole goal system would have been moved over maybe thirty more feet, we would have been looking at a goal." -- MeFi favorite Reggie Watts (previously) doing World Cup commentary alongside MeFi favorite Peter Serafinowicz (previously) on his Mixlr account, where Serafinowicz has been providing comedic commentary for the games for the last week. [via]
posted by Room 641-A at 9:01 AM PST - 16 comments

A new study suggests that dads who equally divide household chores with their wives tend to have daughters whose career aspirations are less gender-stereotypical. The study results suggest that even when fathers publicly endorse gender equality, when there is a traditional division of labor at home daughters are more likely to see themselves in traditionally female-dominant jobs.
posted by rcraniac at 8:50 AM PST - 66 comments

"Maybe we smoked something; maybe we didn't. It didn't matter. It was just solid, absurdist, out-there humor." A Monty Python retrospective.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 7:58 AM PST - 112 comments

The Absolutist: [The New Yorker] Jeffrey Toobin profiles the current state of Ted Cruz.
posted by Fizz at 7:55 AM PST - 32 comments

Frederick Clarkson describes a shift in organization among the Christian Right from the prominent national organizations of Falwell and Dobson to a decentralized constellation of ministers and commentators far less well known to the mainstream. “Rumblings of Theocratic Violence” provides a detailed rundown of their activities and explains why they merit close attention: [more inside]
posted by audi alteram partem at 7:43 AM PST - 70 comments

Tony Horwitz: I was a digital bestseller! [NYT] It netted me nothing!
David Gaughran: No, you weren't. (Your publisher duped you and you're stretching the truth.)
Tony Horwitz: OK, fine.

Previously: Amazon v. Hachette. Currently: Salon weighs in. (Gaughran not amused.)
posted by psoas at 6:04 AM PST - 38 comments

Fuck yeah, floppy guys! (YouTube music video, Axis of Awesome, via ABC TV's Fresh Blood)
posted by flabdablet at 5:49 AM PST - 8 comments

In case you are thinking otherwise, I was not scouring the text for these solecisms, setting out to set you up, but like all people who are preparing a review I was keeping notes throughout the reading. The protocols around a first novel by a young writer do matter. I kept noting all the bad stuff (much more than reported here), but I was looking for good bits with which to try to encourage you. I found none. It gradually dawned on me that I was wasting my time. Barricade was unyielding in its awfulness. It was a book I did not wish to write about.

Christopher Priest is less than complimentary about fellow science fiction writer Jon Wallace's Barricade. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 1:21 AM PST - 149 comments

A 9-minute Dutch animation about a daughter who remembers her father. The Academy Award winner in 2000 for animated short films, and multiple other awards. A more detailed review here and an in-depth interview with Michael Dudok de Wit, but these are best read after watching the film first. No dialogue, sepia-tinged and with an accordion-dominated soundtrack. Possibly NSFW if your workplace minds you suddenly bursting into noisy sobs. Dudok de Wit is now working on The Red Turtle, a dialogue-less feature and the first Western project with Studio Ghibli as co-producer.
posted by viggorlijah at 11:45 PM PST - 13 comments

Jamie DeWolf, Beat Poet. L. Ron Hubbard’s great grandson talks about his family. [more inside]
posted by five fresh fish at 8:47 PM PST - 8 comments

Have an android phone? And a pizza box? Then you can build your own Virtual Reality system. Cardboard, from google.
posted by empath at 7:42 PM PST - 34 comments

The OECD has for a long time offered up measures of human wellbeing across a range of indices. Now they've taken the resolution a step further, providing measures of well being at a regional level for 300 regions/provinces/states across the developed world. How does your neck of the woods fare? What other part of the world is comparable to where you live? Allow your location and see.
posted by wilful at 6:00 PM PST - 44 comments

Max Landis invited a bunch of strangers together (including Haley Joel Osment) and invited them to slap each other (behind the scenes).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:49 PM PST - 47 comments

World Cup Downhill MTB Run - With No Rear Tire
posted by aniola at 3:41 PM PST - 36 comments

Welcome to the Internet crowdfunding, where the cutest, blondest, and most adorable victims of unverifiable woe seek to fund their health care via the largesse of outraged strangers. This isn't uncommon. We've seen the stories about mean things written on receipts, or even fingers in chili. [more inside]
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 3:30 PM PST - 104 comments

The Pugs of Westeros: Scenes from HBO's series Game of Thrones recreated with pugs. Don't miss the making-of video.
posted by 2bucksplus at 2:41 PM PST - 31 comments

How to write 225 words per minute. With a pen. Dennis Hollier, in the Atlantic, writes about Gregg shorthand, a piece of analog data-compression technology now largely forgotten and probably forever unequalled.
posted by escabeche at 1:07 PM PST - 54 comments

Esther Honig, a freelance journalist based out of Kansas City, sent an unaltered photograph of herself to more than 40 Photoshop aficionados around the world. “Make me beautiful,” she said, hoping to bring to light how standards of beauty differ across various cultures. (SLBF)
posted by josher71 at 12:40 PM PST - 139 comments

This is not a think piece about how "problematic" the terrible fuckin puppets are in DirecTV's new series of ads currently running over and over during every commercial break of every TV show. It's A FACT PIECE. And the facts are in: Fuck these puppets. (Gawker)
posted by davidjmcgee at 11:59 AM PST - 136 comments

Living the Fitbit life.
posted by ellieBOA at 11:02 AM PST - 90 comments

The greatest TV show never seen: "The Fantastic Four" (1963-64)
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:20 AM PST - 25 comments

Karim Benzema is ticked off because you stretched out his favourite t-shirt. FIFA filmed every footballer present at the 2014 FIFA World Cup folding their arms and looking moody, to be used in VFX. Now, thanks to Josh Cluderay, you can find out why they look so pissed.
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:04 AM PST - 40 comments

Judge strikes down Indiana gay marriage ban
posted by leotrotsky at 9:42 AM PST - 129 comments

"The twist here is that this is not an actual fighting game, it’s a Whac-a-mole title, one of those games where little heads pop up and you have to use a hammer to hit them back into the ground. The whole machine is Street Fighter II themed, the moles are Bison (Vega) characters and the on-screen characters play out a fight based on your performance."
posted by griphus at 9:11 AM PST - 4 comments

ZEPPELIN TOOK MY BLUES AWAY Trading Cards – An Illustrated History Of Copyright Indiscretions!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:09 AM PST - 29 comments

Bibliotherapy:

From June 2013, a new scheme, Reading Well Books on Prescription will be available in libraries throughout England. This new scheme has been developed by The Reading Agency and The Society of Chief Librarians and aims to bring reading's healing benefits to the 6 million people with anxiety, depression and other mild to moderate mental health illnesses. There is growing evidence showing that self-help reading can help people with certain mental health conditions get better. Reading Well Books on Prescription will enable GPs and mental health professionals to prescribe patients cognitive behavioural therapy through a visit to the library. Here they can get books to help them understand and manage conditions from depression to chronic pain.

More on the program from the Boston Globe. Previously.
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:54 AM PST - 6 comments

"If the phone rang and you were in another room, you had to come running: in that immediate sense, and in a way that now seems comical, your phone controlled you. And before the ‘90s, there was no caller ID, an inconvenience which ensured, for that benighted first century-plus of the instrument’s analog existence, the first premise of phone horror—that you could never know for certain whose voice, or what sound, would issue from the other end of that raised receiver." - HiLoBrow is in the middle of a series exploring the tropes and history of Phone Horror. Of particular note is the brief historical connection between the telephone and the world of occult crypto-science - The Atlantic explains further.
posted by The Whelk at 8:42 AM PST - 53 comments

In an interview published Monday with Playboy magazine (mostlySFW), Gary Oldman, the British actor who first gained critical recognition in 1987 for his portrayal of gay playwright Joe Orton, defended Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin and use of the other "F" word. He has since walked it [most of the way] back.
posted by wensink at 8:13 AM PST - 124 comments

The Stranger's Queer Issue 2014 – How to Make Sure We Don't Leave Trans People Behind

• How to Stop the Stupid Debate About Taxpayer Dollars Funding "Sex Change" Surgeries
• How to Stop Thinking All Trans People Are the Same
• How to Date a Trans Person / How to Have Sex with a Trans Person
• How to Make Seattle Better for Trans People
• I Am the Best Feminist, for I Am Dating a Trans Woman
• How to Treat Trans Sex Workers with Respect
• About the Word "Tr-nny" by Mx Justin Vivian Bond
• How Zackary Drucker Photographs Trans People—Including Herself
• CeCe McDonald Speaks Freely About Being in Prison, Laverne Cox, Penis Pumps, and Gay Men Taking Women Seriously
• Interviews with Mac S. McGregor and Clyde Petersen
• Pride Everything 2014!

posted by and they trembled before her fury at 8:07 AM PST - 43 comments

Internet TV/DVR start-up Aereo lost its copyright-infringement case at the Supreme Court today in a 6-3 decision, with Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissenting. This decision effectively reverses an earlier lower court ruling that found Aereo safely within the law. Although Aereo based its case on the 2008 Cablevision decision, which upheld the legality of cloud-based DVR systems, the majority ruling (PDF) states that "[B]ehind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly." This decision effectively puts Aereo out of business, given CEO Chet Kanojia's earlier statement that there was "no Plan B" if the Supreme Court ruled against the company. [more inside]
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:45 AM PST - 146 comments

Rocks Made Of Plastic Found On Hawaiian Beaches. But is it rock, or just fused detritus? Depends on the timescale, similar to how the beaches of Normandy are part shrapnel. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:37 AM PST - 15 comments

The Supreme Court has unanimously reversed (large PDF) the California Court of Appeals in Riley v. California, deciding that police cannot search the contents of a phone without a warrant during an arrest, and that "the fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:30 AM PST - 56 comments

@GenerateACat is a Twitter bot which will make cats for you. Exquisite gatos, lovely kitties, brilliant felines. By @mousefountain, a.k.a. Gruau Pomme Lackey, a pixel artist and game designer.
posted by codacorolla at 7:04 AM PST - 4 comments

Fat Cat Art: Artist Svetlana Petrova inserts her kitty Zarathustra into famous paintings.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:34 AM PST - 10 comments

Finding out that the gorillas, badgers, giraffes, belugas, or wallabies on the other side of the glass are taking Valium, Prozac, or antipsychotics to deal with their lives as display animals is not exactly heartwarming news.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:00 AM PST - 64 comments

How not to say the wrong thing... A simple rule for dealing with other people's difficult life events.
posted by HuronBob at 3:30 AM PST - 46 comments

Pharrell Williams-HAPPY (Swahili version)
posted by Sebmojo at 1:42 AM PST - 21 comments

Tony Blair rises every couple of months, like a bubble of swamp gas. First there’s an uneasy buried rumbling, then small tremors shake the surface, and then suddenly he bursts through, a gassy eruption stinking of farts and sulphur. It doesn’t matter how many rounds you fire into his shambling frame; he just won’t die. Whenever something unpleasant happens in the Middle East, whenever some huge corporation is discovered to be starving people to death or poisoning them through calculated negligence, whenever the chaos of the international order starts to wobble into another death-spiral, a damp wind blows through a graveyard somewhere in England and Tony Blair emerges from his tomb. There’s something viscerally revolting about the man. His fake chumminess and his sham gravitas are both as nauseatingly contrived as his shiny oily skin, hiding what can only be bloated rotting organs inside. He’s a gremlin, an incubus, very strange and very cruel and very foreign to our world. But still there’s a decaying vestige of that charm, the memory of the love in which he was once held, that universal joy when he finally ended a generation of Conservative rule by ending the Tory monopoly on evil.

Inspired by his latest pronouncements, Sam Kriss talks about the role of Tony Blair in UK politics.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:08 AM PST - 23 comments

The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1%, says an ex CIA spy: The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:55 AM PST - 35 comments

Eli Wallach has died. At the ripe old age of 98, after a career spanning six decades.
posted by MeanwhileBackAtTheRanch at 11:11 PM PST - 49 comments

Artist Mike Stinnett carves one-of-a-kind walking sticks out of a single piece wood, often with elaborate rattlesnakes motifs. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 10:39 PM PST - 7 comments

Greenhouse is a browser app for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that allows you to mouse over any Congressperson's name in your browser to reveal where their campaign money comes from. [more inside]
posted by sockermom at 9:27 PM PST - 23 comments

Does what it says on the tin. Lest you think I'm kidding: Annoying Cursor. Brrriiinnngggg. Instant CSI. Chat with iGod. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 9:14 PM PST - 13 comments

NYT Minus Context (SLTwitter) -- Does exactly what it says on the tin.
posted by schmod at 8:43 PM PST - 5 comments

How to approach refactoring by Venkat Subramaniam (YouTube lecture) [more inside]
posted by flabdablet at 8:09 PM PST - 16 comments

Every Sunday, Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, starting at the very beginning.
posted by Deoridhe at 7:41 PM PST - 17 comments

So earlier today Luis Suarez, striker for the Uruguay side, bit Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini on the shoulder during their respective teams' final group play match for the World Cup. This is not the first time he's done this--in fact, folks were taking bets that Suarez would bite someone during World Cup play. Biting is a major taboo in sports, and sure enough, Suarez is now facing a ban of up to 24 games by FIFA. Indeed, Suarez has a history of violent behavior and racist statements, even when you leave aside the biting incidents. And yet, despite all this, Suarez is generally regarded as one of the best soccer players in the world today. So it's fitting that, just before this year's World Cup began, ESPN published an essay by Wright Thompson (previously) on the many myths and contradictions that surround Luis Suarez.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:47 PM PST - 167 comments

Why you're (probably) not a great communicator [more inside]
posted by flex at 6:14 PM PST - 22 comments

PianoPhase.com is a Web-based recreation/visualization of the first section of American "minimalist" composer Steve Reich's landmark piece, Piano Phase (1967). Created by interactive artist Alexander Chen. [more inside]
posted by mykescipark at 4:14 PM PST - 17 comments

In the spirit of movie geekery as well as "if you're gonna do something, do it right", may I present The HAL Project: A fiver year project (and counting!) to faithfully recreate the computer displays in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as a screensaver.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 3:35 PM PST - 22 comments

It's This or Get a Real Job is the subtitle to Greg Fallis' blog in which the former military medic, private detective, counselor in the Psychiatric/Security unit of a prison for women, professor at The American University in Washington, D.C. and at Fordham University in New York City, writer and photographer, offers his opinions on a variety of topics, such as mistakes, "After the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, Field Marshal FitzRoy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan (GCB, PC) acknowledged his error and said, “Well, let’s not do that again.” And he never ordered another cavalry charge against a redoubt with a battery of fifty cannons. That wasn’t Lord Raglan’s first mistake; he also had an arm shot to pieces at the Battle of Waterloo. But as his arm was being amputated, Raglan told the surgeon, “My bad, learned my lesson, sorry to be a bother.” And he never had another arm amputated for the rest of his life. Lesson learned."
posted by Atreides at 1:53 PM PST - 28 comments

The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States (PDF); prospectus (PDF); press coverage (YT) - "The signature effects of human-induced climate change—rising seas, increased damage from storm surge, more frequent bouts of extreme heat—all have specific, measurable impacts on our nation's current assets and ongoing economic activity. [The report] uses a standard risk-assessment approach to determine the range of potential consequences for each region of the U.S.—as well as for selected sectors of the economy—if we continue on our current path..." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:49 PM PST - 34 comments

BBC Arts is now hosting the entirety of a performance of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier live from Glyndebourne. This version was recently presented streamed into cinemas. A podcast about the production is available here at Glyndebourne's own website.
posted by feelinglistless at 1:29 PM PST - 3 comments

In the LA Review of Books, Stephen Marche reflects upon the Literature of the Second Gilded Age. In his recently published book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Thomas Piketty argues that when r>g, that is, when an economy's annual rate of return on capital exceeds the economy's annual rate of growth, wealth inequality tends to increase, and that this condition has held both during the 19th century and since around the latter quarter of the 20th century. Unusually for an economics book, Piketty's work makes reference to several pre 20th-century works of fiction. Stephen Marche discusses role of this literature in Piketty's book. He goes on to critique the modern American social-realist novel. Although these books are not discussed by Piketty, according to Piketty's research they too pertain to a time in which r>g. Marche however accuses the more modern literature of being a "restrained, aspirational product" with "most of its sting removed".
posted by mister_kaupungister at 1:25 PM PST - 15 comments

Website Doctor Who Spoilers, which specializes in collecting behind-the-scenes photos from location shoots, has published a handy and clickable chart of most of NuWho, including the forthcoming season, with links inside each one to tons of photos and background info on each location. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 12:12 PM PST - 8 comments

The BeyondSynth Podcast is a podcast with artists and producers who make synthwave/new-retro/electronic music. From his home base in Canada, Adam talks to the top artists in the scene. Links to guests' music pages for each episode inside. [more inside]
posted by rebent at 11:35 AM PST - 12 comments

In the ultra-competitive worlds of business and freelancing, should mentorship come with a fee? Arguments for and against: "When someone asks to pick my brain, I bristle. My brain is how I earn my living — would you ask a plumber to unclog a drain for free?" "Not every investment of time has to be 'worth it.' Sometimes you just have a brief conversation with someone because—why not?"
posted by rcraniac at 9:54 AM PST - 76 comments

The first Women in Science Writing: Solutions Summit took place at MIT on June 13-15. Here's a brief roundup, with plenty of links and stats that look at gender bias and harassment in science journalism.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:48 AM PST - 27 comments

If you've browsed collections of glassware from decades and centuries past, you might scratch your head and wonder, what exactly was the use of this item? This reverse glossary of vintage and antique terms may help, or it might confuse you further. For instance, why were there fine glass celery dishes and celery vases of glass and silver? Take a look back, at home in the nineteenth century with celery at the dining table. Celery was once a status symbol, due to its high cost (Google books preview), and was included in tonics and sold in the 1897 Sears Roebuck & Co. Catalogue in a malt compound (Google books preview). Kalamazoo even boasted of being the Celery City in the late 1800s and for a few decades to follow. But the craze faded as celery cultivation became easier. One of the few remaining products from the celery craze is Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda, an acquired taste.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:25 AM PST - 64 comments

What was the average American college graduate's college-related debt in 2013? What state has the highest rate of poverty in the United States? Answer these and other depressing questions (or submit your own) at How Wrong You Are.
posted by desjardins at 9:01 AM PST - 40 comments

Fifty years ago this week Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner, three voting rights workers were savagely beaten and shot to death by klansmen after being stopped by a Neshoba County, Mississippi Sheriff's Deputies. Today, sheriff's deputies across Mississippi have been tasked with preventing voter intimidation in the ugly Republican primary runoff election between incumbern Thad Cochran and Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel. [more inside]
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 8:37 AM PST - 56 comments

The National Theatre of Scotland is spending 24 hours staging and live streaming 185 five minute plays on the subject of independence, created by people all over Scotland and beyond, as a creative reflection on the forthcoming independence referendum. [more inside]
posted by penguin pie at 8:04 AM PST - 1 comment

Inside the Soviet Union's Secret Erotica Collection (The Moscow Times). "Across from the Kremlin, the country's main library held a pornographic treasure trove." Photogallery. "Legend has it that Soviet henchmen used to come to the archive".
posted by stbalbach at 8:01 AM PST - 25 comments

Two-Stroke Toilets
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:30 AM PST - 30 comments

In the wake of England's exit from the 2014 World Cup, QPR Manager Harry Rednapp said in an interview with BBC Five Live that some players didn't want to play for England.

"When full internationals came around, two or three players didn't want to go and play for England. They'd come to me 10 days before the game and say: 'Gaffer, get me out of the game. I don't want to play in it.'"

England Captain Steven Gerrard then called on Rednapp to name names, however Rednapp has so far refused. Former England Manager (91-93) Graham Taylor then came out and said that players not wanting to play for their country is "nothing particularly new". And finally, ex Arsenal and England striker Ian "Wrighty" Wright wades into the debate in The Sun
posted by marienbad at 7:20 AM PST - 141 comments

I was sitting NIFOC and TLOL when I ran across this list of Internet slang [PDF] developed for FBI agents trying to navigate Twitter's ARE. [more inside]
posted by sparklemotion at 6:41 AM PST - 44 comments

Morrissey recently canceled the remainder of his USA tour after coming down with an illness he allegedly caught from his opening act, Kristeen Young, who denies she was the cause of the illness. This was not Morrissey's first instance of controversy on this tour, however. ----- "And before last night’s show at the Observatory in Orange County, he incurred the wrath of the Scottish band PAWS when his management attempted to get their set that night canceled. PAWS and We Are Scientists were scheduled to play a smaller room within the same venue, but Morrissey didn’t want any chance of sound-bleed during his set, and his management allegedly demanded that PAWS cancel their opening set and We Are Scientists only take the stage, for a shortened set, after the Morrissey show was already over. PAWS were actually going to be paid double for the canceled show, but the idea of canceling at Morrissey’s behest didn’t sit well with them, and they lashed out against Moz on Facebook, calling him a 'rich, has-been, ego maniac acting like a baby throwing toys from a pram.'" Morrissey denies the allegations.
posted by josher71 at 6:19 AM PST - 72 comments

Artist Walks A Cabbage In Public To Question How Society Value Things In a project that started since year 2000, Chinese artist Han Bing has documented a series of photographs that see him walking a cabbage on a leash in public.
posted by Fizz at 6:09 AM PST - 33 comments

how a woman's plan to kill herself helped her family grieve
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 5:50 AM PST - 53 comments

Counterintuitive as it may sound, it is perfectly fine and acceptable to just use common sense when editing Wikipedia.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:18 AM PST - 42 comments

“But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?” Virilio replies: “We’ll dream of being blind."
posted by 0bvious at 4:11 AM PST - 5 comments

In a post-speedo world of increasingly European beachwear the mankini, popularized by Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat, provides an alternative method of support and coverage for the discerning sunbather. This item of modesty, predominately marketed for the male physique but occasionally for the female, has been designed across a range of colors, styles, pouch volumes and variations in the number and positioning of straps. However, the approaching summer brings more swimwear options... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 2:54 AM PST - 87 comments

On 24 June 1914, a young man caught the 10.20 train from London to Malvern. At around 12.45 the train stopped at a small country station in Gloucestershire. And what happened then? Well .. nothing much. The station closed in 1966, but this afternoon a special train will be stopping there, unwontedly, to mark the centenary of one of the best-loved poems in the English language. [more inside]
posted by verstegan at 1:16 AM PST - 19 comments

This American Life did a show at Brooklyn Academy Of Music earlier this month. As a salute to the space they were in, they did a show [audio download, transcript, streaming available here] which adapted radio journalism into opera (including a world-premiere from Philip Glass), Broadway Musical (in which a story from 2011 about undercover cops looking to bust drug dealers in high schools gets adapted by an actual Broadway composer and starring actual Broadway performers), and a current live-television performer adapts one of her stories as a radio drama. A video of the performance, including nearly another hour's worth of journalism-adapted-into-performance is available, Louis CK-style, for $5.
posted by hippybear at 12:21 AM PST - 15 comments

An interview with Peter Unger, Professor of Philosophy at NYU, regarding his new book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy: "In a way, all I’m doing is detailing things that were already said aphoristically by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. I read it twice over in the sixties, pretty soon after it came out, when I was an undergraduate. I believed it all — well, sort of. I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and so it just went on. And basically what Philosophical Investigations says is that when you’re doing philosophy, you’re not going to find out anything. You find out some trivial things, you’ll be under the delusion that you’re doing a great deal, but what you should do is stop and do something more productive."
posted by bookman117 at 9:26 PM PST - 113 comments

About the multi-talented Mason Williams [previously, and best known as composer of the iconic "Classical Gas"] -- Throughout his years in the Navy and college he wrote a series of poems he titled Them Poems. As he entered the folk music scene in the early 60's he wound up rooming with long time friend Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles. Some of the language from Them Poems is a consequence of creative word play that Ed and Paul Ruscha riffed on with Williams over the years. Ed Ruscha provided us with this recording [also released as "The Mason Williams Listening Matter", and reviewed here on allmusic by Eugene Chadbourne] from 1964. Recording starts around 35 seconds in. Also, here's Mason performing "Them Tummy Gummers" on Johnny Cash's variety show. Finally, Mason Williams Online.
posted by not_on_display at 4:40 PM PST - 12 comments

Take Me to Sanborns: Swiss Enchiladas and Race in Mexico City.

One afternoon early in their stay, [Jack] Johnson and Etta – who was white – walked into the famous Sanborns cafe in Mexico City's historic center for lunch. But before they could even place their order, owner Walter Sanborn refused to serve Johnson on racial lines. Johnson went and found a few of the generals he had met and told them what happened. They returned to Sanborns together and all sat down at the counter. They ordered ice cream. Everybody was served except for Johnson.

posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:08 PM PST - 53 comments

Very cute dog and cat video. (SLYT)
posted by BoscosMom at 3:35 PM PST - 22 comments

The Dissolve's Nathan Rabin kicks off One and Done - a look at writers, directors and actors who only made a significant contribution to a single film - with a dive into Carrot Top's Chairman of the Board.

Cribbing from Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Yahoo Serious, this 1998 opus failed to establish the college prop comic as a box office draw. However, the appearance of Chairman of the Board co-star Courtney Thorne-Smith on Conan O'Brien (with guest Norm MacDonald) is unforgettable.
posted by porn in the woods at 3:20 PM PST - 53 comments

A federal judge in New York has ruled against a group of parents who had filed a lawsuit, asserting that the New York City policy that allows schools to ban unvaccinated kids from attending classes when another child has come down with a vaccine preventable illness infringed on their practice of religion. The decision cites Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), where the SCOTUS upheld Cambridge, Mass, Board of Health’s authority to require vaccination against smallpox during a smallpox epidemic.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:21 PM PST - 88 comments

After a successful campaign to remind Boston drivers to use yah blinkah, the state of Massachusetts is now holding a contest to come up with additional messages to show to the drivers of the state. [more inside]
posted by Melismata at 1:57 PM PST - 79 comments

Yo: Dumb app, security risk, passing fad, and/or "easily the worst piece of software I've ever used"?
posted by mudpuppie at 1:52 PM PST - 128 comments

Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire's Music Biz Misadventures
posted by valkane at 1:29 PM PST - 7 comments

On Sunday, Poverty Point, LA, was granted World Heritage recognition by UNESCO's (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Committee. [more inside]
posted by msbubbaclees at 12:57 PM PST - 19 comments

“In a city that has chronic housing shortages, the number of Airbnb homes that appear to not be available on the rental market is significant"
posted by ellieBOA at 12:28 PM PST - 113 comments

How much do Belchers of "Bob's Burgers" actually pay in rent?
posted by The Whelk at 12:23 PM PST - 67 comments

Chris Broad bought up a bunch of copies of a Japanese book called 正しいFUCKの使い方 (How to Use "Fuck" Correctly) and proceeded to introduce it to some locals.
posted by gman at 11:54 AM PST - 57 comments

Clarence Thomas's Counterrevolution: "The first time Clarence Thomas went to Washington, DC, it was to protest the Vietnam War. The last time that Clarence Thomas attended a protest, as far as I can tell, it was to free Bobby Seale and Erikah Huggins." Corey Robin (previously) discusses the intellectual legacy of Justice Clarence Thomas. See also: "Clarence X? The Black Nationalist behind Clarence Thomas's Constitutionalism. [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:08 AM PST - 80 comments

The gameplay in Bungie's Destiny "alpha" has been almost completely overshadowed by reaction to the voice acting by Peter Dinklage. Even Bungie itself has started producing shirts featuring the most infamous line: "That wizard came from the moon". Now, Justin McElroy (of the McElroy podcasting empire) has secured exclusive behind the scenes audio of the VO session.
posted by kmz at 10:00 AM PST - 92 comments

Yo ho, matey! Ever get to sorting through Doom mods and think "Wow, that's a lot of techbases and hell castles. I'd really prefer something a bit more Monkey Island-esque"? If so (and even if not), you'll want to check out Pirate Doom, which dresses up Doom monsters as pirates (down the Imps' fancy hats) and sends the player through 18 levels of pirate-demon action! Rock Paper Shotgun has a quick writeup, Doomed has a review of an older version, and here's a video of level 2, "Melee Island", to give a good idea of what you're in for. [more inside]
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:58 AM PST - 10 comments

Washington Post: CIA hatched plan to make demon toy to counter Osama bin Laden's influence
posted by prize bull octorok at 8:44 AM PST - 39 comments

[Special person A] took an [unbelievable number of weeks] paid leave from her job as a performance art archivist and digital [string of four arbitrary letters that suggest a marketing-related acronym] strategist to commit to the search. "It was scary," she whispered, "My apartment was well below market rate at $8,000 a month—how was I going to find what I needed on such a limited budget?"

-Mad Libs: New York Times Real Estate Edition
posted by griphus at 8:38 AM PST - 25 comments

Next Time on Lonny is a very funny (but, warning, occasionally very offensive and/or violent) web series with a twist. The first season (first episode) was self-produced, but the second season (first episode of S2) has been produced by Ben Stiller (here, held hostage), and has higher production values and guest stars.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:31 AM PST - 9 comments

A brief history of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:54 AM PST - 76 comments

Want to get out alive? Follow the ants - "Emergency exits work better when they are obstructed." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:01 AM PST - 42 comments

Watch every lightning strike in North America, in real time.
posted by theodolite at 5:21 AM PST - 46 comments

Scott Aaronson on building a 'PageRank' for (eigen)morality and (eigen)trust - "Now, would those with axes to grind try to subvert such a system the instant it went online? Certainly. For example, I assume that millions of people would rate Conservapedia as a more trustworthy source than Wikipedia—and would rate other people who had done so as, themselves, trustworthy sources, while rating as untrustworthy anyone who called Conservapedia untrustworthy. So there would arise a parallel world of trust and consensus and 'expertise', mutually-reinforcing yet nearly disjoint from the world of the real. But here's the thing: anyone would be able to see, with the click of a mouse, the extent to which this parallel world had diverged from the real one." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:56 AM PST - 45 comments

Today sees the start of the final round of group games in the 2014 World Cup. Each day, there are 4 games, the final 2 games from each group. Both matches in each group will be played simultaneously, after a scheduling rule change by FIFA after an infamous 1982 World Cup Finals match. But last night, Algeria qualified for the knockout stages after beating South Korea 4-2. This is the first time in history an African team has scored 4 goals at the World Cup Finals.
posted by marienbad at 1:29 AM PST - 528 comments

My goal here -- beyond the selfish utilitarian aspect of organizing my research -- is much in parallel with that of sites like the Medieval People of Color blog, or Kameron Hurley's award-nominated essay "We Have Always Fought". I want to help change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art, and imagination. I want to do it to help other authors find inspiration and support for the stories they want to tell. And I want to do it to affect the reception of my own writing. My project will be flawed in that it will privilege topics and interpretations of personal interest to me. (A geographic focus on Europe and it's neighbors. A temporal focus that ends before the 20th century and focuses strongly on the pre-modern. An examination of the data through a lesbian lens even when other lenses, such as transgender ones, are equally valid.) This is a caveat but not an apology. If I weren't doing it for selfish reasons, I wouldn't be doing it at all.

The Lesbian Historica Motif Project is a series of posts at The Rose Garden looking at source material about lesbian women throughout history.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:51 PM PST - 14 comments

Intersections are basically death traps, where right-turning drivers threaten collisions at any moment . [SLSmithsonian]
posted by jojomnky at 8:08 PM PST - 146 comments

What refuse in India's streets reveals about America’s hidden trash problem
posted by infini at 4:22 PM PST - 42 comments

Charlie Barsotti, one of the great cartoonists, passed away. Charlie drew close to fourteen hundred cartoons for The New Yorker over the years, beginning in the nineteen-sixties and continuing right through last week’s issue.
Many more here. Previously.
posted by growabrain at 12:02 PM PST - 45 comments

Call Me Ishmael: call a number and leave a voicemail about a book you've loved and a story you've lived. Later, that anonymous voicemail will be transcribed and made into a short video for everyone to see.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 10:52 AM PST - 8 comments

A 36 year old FDNY "probie" fights his first fire (SLNYTimes interactive)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:22 AM PST - 9 comments

Every drink in every(*) Pynchon novel. List of drinks by book. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:50 AM PST - 21 comments

COVER VERSIONS: 25 OF THE BEST ANDY WARHOL RECORD SLEEVES
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:33 AM PST - 18 comments

Take neat 4-colour selfies at the INTERSTELLAR SELFIE STATION [more inside]
posted by Quilford at 6:15 AM PST - 16 comments

Dylan Moran on the differences between a weekend with and without kids.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:47 AM PST - 145 comments

Several couples reminisce about when and how they started fucking: Josh and Debra, Zack and Evan, Isaac and Doris.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:01 AM PST - 28 comments

Today at 6 PM Eastern, the United States plays Portugal in the World Cup. The United States has never been very successful in World Cup soccer (football), but it has come close. The United States shocked the world by coming in third in 1930 and again by defeating England in 1950. In 2002, the U.S. had an upset against Portugal, but could it happen again? Playing for Portugal is Cristiano Ronaldo, possibly the best player in the world, whose fancy footwork is legendary.
posted by twoleftfeet at 4:24 AM PST - 351 comments

The only comics-related Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes Celine Dion Fanvid worth taking seriously
posted by The Whelk at 10:51 PM PST - 46 comments

Mountain Lab: An Interview With Scott McGuire

"As a form of minor architecture," the resulting short article explained, "tents are strangely overlooked. They are portable, temporary, and designed to withstand even the most extreme conditions, but they are usually viewed as simple sporting goods. They are something between a large backpack and outdoor lifestyle gear—certainly not small buildings. But what might an architect learn from the structure and design of a well-made tent?" Amongst the group of people we spoke with that day was outdoor equipment strategist Scott McGuire, an intense, articulate, and highly focused advocate for all things outdoors.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:37 PM PST - 14 comments

Grantland's longform piece on former Philadelphia high school basketball superstar Eddie Griffin, whose brief career and life ended in 2007 when he crashed his SUV into a train. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 9:01 PM PST - 3 comments

The Owl Whisperer (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by palegirl at 7:56 PM PST - 49 comments

I DON’T WANT TO BE RIGHT: why do people persist in believing things that just aren't true? The New Yorker asks. Alternatively, a BBC Future author offers up some beguiling and subtle solutions in The best way to win an argument.
posted by quin at 7:34 PM PST - 60 comments

As ‘Top Secret!’ approaches its 30th anniversary, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and Val Kilmer provide an oral history of the making of a comedy classic.
posted by valkane at 3:07 PM PST - 93 comments

James Chaney. Andrew Goodman. Michael Schwerner. Murdered by the KKK 50 years ago today, in one of the galvanizing events of the struggle for civil rights in the South. (previously 1, 2, 3) [more inside]
posted by scody at 1:07 PM PST - 31 comments

Lou Reed Lou Reed [more inside]
posted by kittensofthenight at 10:13 AM PST - 21 comments

On Thursday, Wikileaks (previously) released the text (wikileaks) of a 19-page, international trade agreement being drafted "in secret" in Geneva by representatives of more than 50 countries, entitled the Trade in Services Agreement. [more inside]
posted by Roger_Mexico at 8:42 AM PST - 80 comments

Eric Meyer is an expert on the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) system used to control the appearance of web documents. He's the author of multiple books on CSS, and the "chaperone" of the css-discuss mailing list. His daughter, Rebecca, passed away, and her family asked that those attending memorial services wear purple, her favorite color. Dominique Hazaël-Massieux requested that a purple be added to the CSS color list be named "Becca Purple" in her memory. Eric suggested that it be named rebeccapurple because his daughter wanted everyone to call her Rebecca after she turned six, and she was six for almost twelve hours. Today, a co-chair of the CSS Working Group announced approval of the change. From now on, rebeccapurple means #663399.
posted by grouse at 8:23 AM PST - 161 comments

How To Marry The Right Girl: A Mathematical Solution
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:16 AM PST - 66 comments

The famous Iron Maiden tune. Sort of. [more inside]
posted by vapidave at 4:13 AM PST - 25 comments

Chili's Has Installed More Than 45,000 Tablets in Its Restaurants — When your server is a screen, you spend more money. Hungry? No human server in sight? With a flick of your wrist, you can instantly order more appetizers and drinks, indulge your whim for Baby Back Ribs, let the kids play games, read the news, pay your check (with a default tip), and get done faster. Be sure to save room for some Cinnamon Molten Cake: doesn't it look tasty?
posted by cenoxo at 3:30 AM PST - 210 comments

Camouflage! In 1983, Chris Sievey, the man who would be Frank Sidebottom released a single whose b-side contained three programmes for the ZX81, one of which was a music video to be played whilst listening to the record. This was an incredibly difficult thing to do. Now we can all watch it.
posted by feelinglistless at 1:52 AM PST - 18 comments

The Photographic History of the Civil War (10 vols.; 1911) offered context for thousands of striking images from the American Civil War: 1 - The Opening Battles; 2 - Two Years of Grim War; 3 - The Decisive Battles; 4 - The Cavalry; 5 - Forts and Artillery; 6 - The Navies; 7 - Prisons and Hospitals; 8 - Soldier Life / Secret Service; 9 - Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray; 10 - Armies and Leaders. It was also a capstone in the intriguing career of a little-known popular historian and silent era filmmaker. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:49 AM PST - 9 comments

Hummingbirds have been slow to give up their secrets, but slowly, we've learned to understand them.

Thanks to a certain resemblance to an insect, the hummingbird is known in French as “oiseau mouche” (fly bird). Its fondness for the calyxes of blossoms has inspired the Portuguese names “beija flor” (flower kisser) and “chupa flor” (flower sucker), and the related Spanish “pica flor” (flower poker). In other languages, hummingbirds are known as “Kolibri,” a word likely of Caribbean origin, or Trochilidae, their scientific name (which was provided by Carl Linnaeus and, curiously, seems to relate to a different bird — a type of kinglet called “trochilus” by the ancient Greeks). These inventive names reflect the wonder and enigma that surrounds these creatures and the peculiar abilities and proclivities that set them apart from other birds.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:35 PM PST - 37 comments

The Hex clock is a clock that tells both what time and color it is.
The Color Clock converts the time to hexadecimal.
Some other formats.
posted by growabrain at 8:32 PM PST - 15 comments

Imbued with asymmetrical charm and handcrafted whimsy, Storybook Style houses evoke the aesthetic of classic fairy tales, inside and out. [more inside]
posted by Lou Stuells at 8:24 PM PST - 13 comments

Four years ago, a group of punk anarchists with no political experience led by Icelandic comedian Jón Gnarr formed a joke political party, the Best Party, to campaign for Reykjavik's mayoral and city council positions, hoping to lighten up local politics in the wake of the catastrophic Icelandic financial meltdown. To everyone's surprise, they won. [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:17 PM PST - 30 comments

Time for laundry, but wait... my coin jar is empty. Oh, if only there were a place that I could trade bills for those pesky quarters! But now with Washboard.co I can order quarters online—and for only a 50% markup! [more inside]
posted by blueberry at 4:39 PM PST - 146 comments

For those of you born in the 80s or later, this is what counted for primetime entertainment back in our day.
posted by mudpuppie at 3:54 PM PST - 148 comments

8088 Dominion is a production by demoscene programmer Jim Leonard (a.k.a. Trixter) displaying full-motion color video with audio on a 1981 IBM PC 5160. The production is a followup to a similar 2007 demo, 8088 Corruption, but with improved graphical fidelity. [more inside]
posted by figurant at 3:23 PM PST - 12 comments

One of the most intriguing personalities in Southern medical history of the nineteenth century is Dr. Henry Clay Lewis (1825-1850), whose fame rests not on his accomplishments in medicine, but upon his humorous writings published under the pseudonym "Madison Tensas, M.D., the Louisiana Swamp Doctor." Though Lewis was a practicing doctor, his true identity as the author of the "Southern grotesque" (previously) pieces was not known until after his death. His works pre-dated the Southern Gothic style (prev), and are unusual for their time in that "[Lewis] presents his black characters with as much pain and grotesqueness as his white characters, steering away from the time's usual stereotypes." You can read a longer biography and a summary of his style here, or just dive in and read his works, which available online in Odd leaves from the life of a Louisiana "swamp doctor", which was also published as The swamp doctor's adventures in the South-west (also available with fourteen illustrations) on Archive.org.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:33 PM PST - 6 comments

Fight Back Texas: An oral history of the fight for abortion rights in Texas. [more inside]
posted by donajo at 2:03 PM PST - 9 comments

Vladimir Nabokov’s Unpublished ‘Lolita’ Screenplay Notes
posted by brundlefly at 1:44 PM PST - 6 comments

Holding Pattern is a Tumblr of some images of airports from Google maps.
posted by carter at 1:42 PM PST - 8 comments

The Google Street Art Project is an online collection and exhibition about the history, locations and artists of street art. Explore all the street art exhibits by place, artist, collection, medium, and more. Part of the Google Cultural Institute.
posted by Room 641-A at 1:39 PM PST - 1 comment

Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it’s a command-line “supercut” generator. The code is on github
posted by The Whelk at 1:39 PM PST - 13 comments

Explorer Shivani Bhalla Helps People and Lions Coexist (and in turn helps those people as well) It's articles like this that make me smile. If only there were more arrangements like this for other endangered animals as well.
posted by moonphases at 1:03 PM PST - 3 comments

The Ultimate Chinatown Filming Location Map of Los Angeles "The movie was released 40 years ago tomorrow, on June 20, 1974, and to mark the day we've mapped out all of its real-life locations, with help from this old LA Times article, The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, and Filming Locations of Chicago and Los Angeles. Take the Chinatown tour this way..."
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:01 PM PST - 19 comments

Homer Simpson backing into things. Upload an image to replace the bushes. Pizza, pot, the Blue.
posted by porn in the woods at 12:58 PM PST - 21 comments

What is unique about pro wrestling is this: it is the only creative endeavor where the audience affects the work in real time. A long time ago some smart aleck described pro wrestling as “a LARP where the wrestlers are playing athletes and the audience is playing the audience, and everybody’s in on it.” And that’s exactly true. Now, of course, pro wrestling is still a scripted affair and on a case-by-case basis the audience doesn’t usually change the outcome of a story as it happens – [...] But it’s more than just simply cheering for the guys you like and booing the guys you hate; the crowd is an integral part of wrestling now.

Christopher Bird (aka the Mighty mightygodking) explains why wrestling is the one true performance art.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:14 PM PST - 55 comments

In a suprise move, a "bombshell" even, Disney and Lucasfilms have announced that Rian Johnson will write and direct the next two films in the Star Wars franchise, Episodes VIII and IX, taking the reins from JJ Abrams after Episode VII. Copious previously. Johnson has previously directed Brick, Looper, and three episodes of Breaking Bad. Johnson responded thusly on Twitter.
posted by dry white toast at 11:58 AM PST - 137 comments

A primer for marketing to understanding Generation Z
posted by psoas at 11:36 AM PST - 50 comments

Big Data Pictures is a tumblr for visualizations of big data.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:05 AM PST - 10 comments

Are you a fascist? Take this quiz to find out.
posted by Daddy-O at 10:26 AM PST - 157 comments

To Straight and Back: My Life as an Ex-Ex-Gay Man Afterward people began emailing and Facebooking me, telling me stories that were very much like those of my friend in the Portland coffee shop, “I wanted to be like you and your wife; you were held up as poster children. And I hated myself because I couldn’t be you.” That really rocked me. I hadn’t realized all this while I was preaching the ex-gay gospel. I’d been shielded from it. Previously
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:11 AM PST - 20 comments

The Shadow Paperback Book Covers by Jim Steranko...at least most of them... [more inside]
posted by Think_Long at 9:42 AM PST - 9 comments

Eccentric Japanese bedroom musician Ventla is in the process of releasing 100 digital albums for free over the coming years, and he's already up to 25. Think J Dilla meets J-pop in the form of small, extremely evocative song sketches. At his most extroverted he sounds like a buzzing 8-bit executive lounge dance party, and when he's introverted it's like strolling through a rainy park full of sleeping flamingos. [more inside]
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:42 AM PST - 7 comments

Euclid is a game of geometry played in your browser.
posted by boo_radley at 9:38 AM PST - 71 comments

Gilbert Legrand creates characters out of ordinary objects. More at his website.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 9:14 AM PST - 2 comments

Gerry Goffin, lyricist for many of the songs that those of us over 50 grew up on, passed away Thursday at his home in Los Angeles, at age 75. [more inside]
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 9:13 AM PST - 22 comments

When we last looked at the West African Ebola outbreak in April it was already beginning to peak. However in the past 30 days it has become the worst Ebola outbreak history with no end in sight. A senior official for Médecins Sans Frontières says it is 'totally out of control'. [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 9:04 AM PST - 21 comments

The movie was shot over nine weeks in Brooklyn, entirely on Stuyvesant Avenue between Quincy Street and Lexington Avenue.... [more inside]
posted by magstheaxe at 8:50 AM PST - 17 comments

It's now been a day since we saw defending World Cup and Euro champions Spain lose to Chile, 2-0, a day since they were mathematically eliminated from the knockout stages, and a day since we witnessed the grisly end of an era. It was a profound moment in soccer and in soccer's history, and still, all I can think about is boxing.
posted by josher71 at 8:05 AM PST - 57 comments

Hospice, Inc. (A Huffington Post project)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:06 AM PST - 20 comments

Seizing of America. How United States took over 1.5 billion acres from native peoples.
posted by zeikka at 5:58 AM PST - 90 comments

In what early press reports call a "surprise vote" in a "late night session," the US House of Representatives voted to defund controversial NSA surveillance activities. [more inside]
posted by grobstein at 5:29 AM PST - 55 comments

With a vague promise to support more women in the workplace as one of the key points of pushing an economic recovery, the reality is much more bleak for working women in Japan. Yesterday, while delivering a speech on the importance of supporting working mothers, Ayaka Shiomura, a member of the Tokyo government assembly was heckled, with jeers from other lawmakers demanding to know why she hadn't gotten married, and demanding to know if she was able to bear children. The Liberal Democratic Party has so far refused to reprimand the members responsible, and while members of Shiomura's party point out that Tokyo Governor Yoichi Masuzoe (with his own history of outright sexism) was evidently laughing as Shiomura at first laughed in disbelief, then was quickly reduced to tears (Japanese link, no English subtitles).
posted by Ghidorah at 12:49 AM PST - 80 comments

What happens when you take four cameras and shoot a timelapse of the night sky, and then stitch the resultant videos together? Pure trippin' amazement.
posted by pjern at 11:30 PM PST - 14 comments

A documentary of unknown provenance on Prince in the 1980s.
posted by MoonOrb at 10:34 PM PST - 11 comments

In 2004, pianist Branka Parlić performed a series of pieces by Philip Glass at the synagogue at Novi Sad. Metamorphosis One. Metamorphosis Two. Metamorphosis Three. Metamorphosis Four. Metamorphosis Five. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:31 PM PST - 15 comments

Seven video essays by Matt Zoller Seitz on Wes Anderson films. [more inside]
posted by hamandcheese at 7:57 PM PST - 18 comments

'This elegantly beautiful supercut on “the tactile world of Robert Bresson” by Kogonada for Criterion shows the great French director’s notoriously precise skill is applied even at the slightest hand gesture. There are no faces in this video yet the drama of these scenes is palpable.'
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 7:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Waterson and Mattherson, the only two US east coast servers for the MMOFPS Planetside 2, are merging this month. On hearing the news, players from each server began talking smack, smack that quickly escalated to a call for a Server Smash, a 240 vs 240 campaign lasting 2 hours on one of the Planetside continents, to decide the surviving server name. [more inside]
posted by Slackermagee at 7:22 PM PST - 8 comments

How a journalist with a dark past learned to pry info from the government—and redeemed himself in the process.
posted by valkane at 7:12 PM PST - 12 comments

For those of you unfamiliar with the history of Gary Busey (previously), a quick recap: His first appearance on film was in 1968. He would receive his breakout role ten years later playing the title role in The Buddy Holly Story. Ten years after that, Busey was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in which he did not wear a helmet, resulting in a fractured skull and suspected brain damage. In the years since, he has continued to work in Hollywood and also projected an increasingly erratic personality. How much of it is an act? Only Busey knows for sure. But given his recent commercials for Amazon Fire TV (and outtakes), we have to ask ourselves: Is this in poor taste?
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:23 PM PST - 54 comments

Women too awesome, awful or offbeat for the movies [more inside]
posted by shino-boy at 6:01 PM PST - 24 comments

"A Walking Map of Philadelphia's Cats in Windows"
posted by angrycat at 4:12 PM PST - 41 comments

Magma pay tribute to Otis Redding as only Magma can. [slyt]
posted by mediocre at 4:05 PM PST - 6 comments

On the first day of [the 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo], the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 2:47 PM PST - 41 comments

Ayn Rand's Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Collectivism

“In the marketplace of ideas,” Harry went on, “Voldemort has the same right to disseminate his philosophy as you do. If his philosophy is sound, it will flourish. If his philosophy is unsound, you have nothing to fear.”

posted by fight or flight at 2:20 PM PST - 44 comments

"[S]tock jobbers[,]... confidence men,... an impecunious transportation entity", politicos, judges, scoundrels and Jackie O.: the near-death of Grand Central Terminal, and how it foretold the 2008 financial crisis. [sl Harper's]
posted by killdevil at 2:12 PM PST - 5 comments

New NSA Revelations: Inside Snowden's Germany File [more inside]
posted by bukvich at 1:40 PM PST - 48 comments

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first real “slasher” film, and it changed many things—the ratings code of the Motion Picture Association of America, the national debate on violence, the Texas Film Commission, the horror genre—but it remained a curiously isolated phenomenon. The film itself, involving five young people on a twisted drive through the country, is a strange, shifting experience—early audiences were horrified; later audiences laughed; newcomers to the movie were inevitably stricken with a vaguely uneasy feeling, as though the movie might have actually been made by a maniac—but the story behind the film is even stranger." We begin with a couple of stolen barbecue chicken wings....
posted by zarq at 12:42 PM PST - 51 comments

Its subject is Knoll's then-girlfriend Jennifer, topless on the beach in Bora Bora, gazing out at To'opua island. The young couple worked together at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm's special-effects company, and were enjoying some well-earned R&R after working 70-hour weeks on the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Looking back, Jennifer says: "It was a truly magical time for us. My husband actually proposed to me later on in the day, probably just after that photo." Little wonder that John would name the photo Jennifer in Paradise.

If you were around when Photoshop was first released, you know the image, as it was the first photoshopped image in the world and use in a lot of the early demos for the programme. Bonus: for the twentieth anniversary release of Photoshop 1.0, John Knoll replicates the demos he used to do to sell Photoshop to Adobe.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:06 PM PST - 37 comments

The Guardian on the decline of America's shopping malls. "Dying shopping malls are speckled across the United States, often in middle-class suburbs wrestling with socioeconomic shifts. Some, like Rolling Acres, have already succumbed. Estimates on the share that might close or be repurposed in coming decades range from 15 to 50%. Americans are returning downtown; online shopping is taking a 6% bite out of brick-and-mortar sales; and to many iPhone-clutching, city-dwelling and frequently jobless young people, the culture that spawned satire like Mallrats seems increasingly dated, even cartoonish.

The trend is especially noticeable in the Midwest, a former blue-collar bastion where ailing malls have begun dotting suburban landscapes. Outside of Chicago, Lakehurst Mall was levelled in 2004 and the half-vacant Lincoln Mall is costing its host village millions in botched redevelopment plans. Dixie Square Mall sat vacant for more than 30 years after serving as the backdrop for the iconic chase scene in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. It was finally demolished in 2012. Many others will similarly lie dormant as they wait for the wrecking ball."
posted by porn in the woods at 11:34 AM PST - 181 comments

Ian Bogost in the Atlantic, on Darmok. Ian Bogost, creator of Cow Clicker and noted contrarian, looks at the TNG episode Darmok.
posted by mwhybark at 11:12 AM PST - 80 comments

Some genius inventor in South Korea has come up with a clean, easy way to unclog toilets without a plunger! (Maybe.) Introducing, the Pongtu!
Trigger Warning: Toilet with Brown Water
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:53 AM PST - 76 comments

Rainbow-Cake Recipe Inspires Comment Apocalypse - sometimes you should read the comments, because they're an amazing trainwreck.
posted by desjardins at 10:48 AM PST - 107 comments

We hold that the claims at issue are drawn to the abstract idea of intermediated settlement, and that merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.
...
We must first determine whether the claims at issue are directed to a patent-ineligible concept. We conclude that they are.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled 9-0 [pdf], invalidating many but by no means all software patents, in Alice v CLS Bank. [more inside]
posted by atbash at 10:32 AM PST - 55 comments

Clarity Campaign Labs invites you to use TargetSmart U.S. voter data to discover, via seven yes/no/don't care questions, What town matches my politics? Business Insider uses it to determine the most liberal and conservative towns in each state.
posted by psoas at 9:20 AM PST - 87 comments

Study says Earth on brink of mass extinction event The new study focused on the rate, not the number, of species disappearing from Earth. It calculated a "death rate" of how many species become extinct each year out of 1 million species. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 9:14 AM PST - 43 comments

"The routine Cosby was about to perform—immortalized on the landmark album To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With—represented a turning point in his career. A full 16 years before The Cosby Show debuted, the performance would serve as the blueprint for the themes that would define his work: the father as a loving disciplinarian; the siblings who could switch from screaming at one another to plotting together at the drop of a hat; the confidence that no matter what conflicts and tragedies arise, the bonds of family will hold. In To Russell, Cosby didn’t just find his voice; he tapped into something deeper." [more inside]
posted by I am the Walrus at 9:06 AM PST - 35 comments

Dancing in the Street with all music removed. A musicless musical video, with some interpretive dubbing.
posted by codacorolla at 8:15 AM PST - 34 comments

The Hollywood Reporter Roundtable video: Comedy Actresses. Stacey Wilson sits down with The Big Bang Theory's Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, New Girl's Zooey Deschanel, Nurse Jackie's Edie Falco,The Mindy Project's Mindy Kaling, Shameless' Emmy Rossum, and Orange Is the New Black's Taylor Schilling, to talk about stupid questions from the media, disastrous auditions, odd fan interactions, the crazy stuff people tell them, and the state of American TV. (1:03:14, highlight transcription available)
posted by The Whelk at 8:11 AM PST - 18 comments

Squirrel and Hedgehog - Yes folks, this is a North Korean cartoon produced in house ... The animation is really good, (episode 24 and on is animated in Flash, while before it was all hand drawn) the story is pretty complicated sometimes, and the characters are cool. The only thing actually wrong with this show, other than it being blatant propaganda, is that the lipsync is awful. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 7:31 AM PST - 8 comments

The complete animations for Star Wars Chess on Sega CD: Rebel Alliance and The Empire.
posted by griphus at 6:13 AM PST - 24 comments

A motley group of role-players adventure in a strange, forbidding world...(via io9.com)
posted by Renoroc at 5:08 AM PST - 27 comments

A former member of a tight-knit college prayer group describes his community's disintegration — and how one of its members ended up dead.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 4:57 AM PST - 67 comments

Marina Abramović's Video Diary. The artist Marina Abramović's latest show is a 512 hour long performance piece at the Serpentine Galleries in London, where across the opening hours of seventy-two days, she's inviting a maximum of a hundred and sixty people into an almost completely empty gallery space (the whole gallery space is empty in fact) and asking them to share that space with her and now and then following her whispered orders to stand in various places including facing a wall. For the duration she's also posting a nightly video diary at thespace.org and at the Serpentine's own website in which she describes the days events.
posted by feelinglistless at 3:57 AM PST - 16 comments

Evolutionary biologist debunks viral video. Science!
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:48 PM PST - 21 comments

Reading: The Struggle

What I’m talking about is the state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction—for immersing oneself in it and then coming back and back to it on numerous occasions over what could be days, weeks, or months, each time picking up the threads of the story or stories, the patterning of internal reference, the positioning of the work within the context of other novels and indeed the larger world. Every reader will have his or her own sense of how reading conditions have changed, but here is my own experience.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:24 PM PST - 38 comments

Every year students at Madonna University's Sign Language Studies program create ASL music videos of popular songs, incorporating elements of ASL poetry and storytelling. Each video comes with a comprehensive guide explaining the translations and artistic choices behind each line of the video. Some examples: Pompeii by Bastille, Four Women by Nina Simone, and of course Bohemian Rhapsody.
posted by divabat at 9:20 PM PST - 2 comments

Michael Lewis's expose of high frequency trading, Flash Boys, has already been mentioned on the blue, but, unusually for a work of non-fiction it ends with a cliffhanger. At the end of the book, Lewis stares up at a microwave tower in central Pennsylvania that had created a new, faster link between financial markets in Chicago and the East Coast: "I noticed, before we left, a metal plate attached to the fence around the tower. On it was a Federal Communications Commission license number: 1215095. The number, along with an Internet connection, was enough to lead an inquisitive person to the story behind the tower. The application to use the tower to send a microwave signal had been filed in July 2012, and it had been filed by . . . well, it isn’t possible to keep any of this secret anymore. A day’s journey in cyberspace would lead anyone who wished to know it into another incredible but true Wall Street story, of hypocrisy and secrecy and the endless quest by human beings to gain a certain edge in an uncertain world. All that one needed to discover the truth about the tower was the desire to know it.” Now we know that truth. [more inside]
posted by blahblahblah at 8:42 PM PST - 56 comments

Today the High Court of Australia ruled (Williams v Commonwealth of Australia [2014] HCA 23) for the second time that Commonwealth funding of school chaplains was unconstitutional. This is in direct contradiction of the Abbott government's recent budget moves to totally defund secular counsellors in favour of a $244M school chaplaincy program[me]. [more inside]
posted by wilful at 8:06 PM PST - 48 comments

President Obama is now the first president to be 3D scanned and printed. The...creation will be housed at the National Portrait Gallery.
posted by MoonOrb at 7:27 PM PST - 41 comments

Israeli artist inserts himself into every frame of a Britney Spears video.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:41 PM PST - 9 comments

"Hi, Marc... You seem to think everyone's worried about robots. But what everyone's worried about is you, Marc. Not just you, but people like you. Robots aren't at the levers of financial and political influence today, but folks like you sure are. People are scared of so much wealth and control being in so few hands... Unless we collectively choose to pay for a safety net, technology alone isn't going to make it happen." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:32 PM PST - 50 comments

First Moon Party A new ad from Hello Flo, a tampon subscription service.
posted by ColdChef at 6:02 PM PST - 76 comments

What do you do after working for Bank of America, betting against the lives of AIDS patients, becoming the financial adviser and official court jester to the King of Tonga, getting sued for embezzling and accused of massive passport fraud? You turn to creating smooth jazz, of course. The life of Jesse Bogdonoff. Previously.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:04 PM PST - 7 comments

“We decided that animal health, and human health, would be our priority,” Oosterlaken told me last fall in his barn, surrounded by warm plastic-lined pens where sows snoozed and new piglets squealed. “I don’t need to take antibiotics every day. There’s no reason my pigs should either.”
posted by Michele in California at 4:41 PM PST - 34 comments

The great jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader Horace Silver has died at age 85. [more inside]
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 3:45 PM PST - 39 comments

Perhaps you have always wondered what the HTTP status codes would look like if they were dogs. (SLWebsite, inspired by HTTP status cats)
posted by scrump at 2:20 PM PST - 13 comments

Time for a new OK Go video!
posted by curious nu at 1:36 PM PST - 64 comments

With the passing of Casey Kasem, noise artists Negativland have released the the original un-mixed studio multi-track tape "stems" for their 1991 single "U2" and are welcoming remixes on their facebook page. Previously.
posted by Catblack at 1:06 PM PST - 21 comments

On Monday, journalist Conor Dougherty tweeted a picture of a transcript from a 1984 deposition where, upon being asked if his mother preferred to be addressed as "Miss" or "Mrs.", she responded, "Doctor." It was retweeted more than 2000 times. Here's the backstory.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:13 PM PST - 63 comments

Wavepot is an online waveform editor and basic DAW programmable in javascript. Choose a project on the right hand side to get started tweaking. Simple Sine is the most basic example, and projects like "ice cream" and "late morning" have complex patterns and bassline examples.
posted by boo_radley at 12:01 PM PST - 22 comments

Competitive board gamers are a serious lot. Perhaps none are more serious than the players of the most ruthless and harrowing board game of all: Diplomacy.
posted by absalom at 10:57 AM PST - 181 comments

The one thing that drives me nuts about this show is all the snappy banter. I understand that they have to make the show interesting, but if a guard came in and saw that you had smeared food on the wall, they would have thrown a bucket and scrubber in and not fed you again until you cleaned that shit up. They certainly wouldn’t have allowed you to talk about the food on the wall, or wait for you to give this quirky explanation. This is like a scene from Blossom or something, where the guard is playing the exasperated Dad character. It’s like, “Oh, Piper! What wacky antics have you gotten into now?”

One ex-con reviews Orange is the New Black. Part II, III.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:22 AM PST - 191 comments

Mavis Staples speaks about "The Weight" in "The Last Waltz." Elon Green asks Mavis Staples about her memories of the Staple Singers' unforgettable collaboration with The Band, captured on film in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Waltz." [more inside]
posted by Sheydem-tants at 9:09 AM PST - 19 comments

Coder's High. Metafilter's own David Auerbach, who says he's now a former programmer, describes a satori-like absorption that comes only from things like debugging.
posted by grobstein at 8:22 AM PST - 70 comments

"Postpartum depression isn’t always postpartum. It isn’t even always depression. A fast-growing body of research is changing the very definition of maternal mental illness, showing that it is more common and varied than previously thought." ‘Thinking of Ways to Harm Her’ and "After Baby, an Unraveling". [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:29 AM PST - 58 comments

U.S. Patent Office Cancels Trademark For Redskins Football Team. How will the ruling impact the name? [more inside]
posted by troika at 7:16 AM PST - 284 comments

With Michael Bond's beloved children's classic coming to life on your screens in Christmas 2014, the horrifying CGI rendering of Paddington has spawned a new meme called "Creepy Paddington." [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:48 AM PST - 107 comments

Who really controls Hollywood? Now it can be told! (SLFOD)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:51 AM PST - 8 comments

Researchers at Oxford University have developed glasses that enhance images of nearby people and objects to help those with failing vision.
posted by ellieBOA at 3:39 AM PST - 15 comments

For fans of Team Fortress 2, Valve inside jokes, wacky skits about corpses, animated shorts and bread-based warfare, presenting: TF2 - Expiration Date.
posted by fight or flight at 3:06 AM PST - 31 comments

Paninimania: Sticker Rarity and Cost-Effective Strategy [PDF] [more inside]
posted by alby at 2:47 AM PST - 16 comments

Ruthanna Emrys' post-Lovecraftian novelette The Litany of Earth serves as a starting point for Ada Palmer's polyhistoric thoughts about repurposed fiction, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Marvels: Discontinuity and Empathy: a non-review of “The Litany of Earth” by Ruthanna Emrys..
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:31 AM PST - 4 comments

This Is Phil Fish. A video that's not entirely about Phil Fish. (SLYT, 19:05) Previously: 1, 2
posted by jklaiho at 1:13 AM PST - 63 comments

Childhood - a hand-bound book of Japanese styled illustrations paying homage to nostalgic activities and toys. From artist Chet Phillips.
posted by Lou Stuells at 11:49 PM PST - 6 comments

"Pizza was created on June 11, 1889 by hero genius Raffaele Esposito. We celebrated Pizza's 125th birthday at our studio by ordering delivery from every pizzeria in New York."
posted by pwally at 10:46 PM PST - 84 comments

David Sullivan was a private investigator who specialized in cults. In 2013, Harper's printed a fascinating, if too brief, overview of Sullivan's career in cult rescue. Among his other accomplishments he allegedly assisted in procuring a confession in the Helzer Brothers murders. He died of cancer shortly after the publication of the article, before he could even start on his memoirs.
posted by ChrisR at 10:17 PM PST - 25 comments

The Beyoncélogues:
Mine
Irreplaceable
If I Were A Boy [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:10 PM PST - 10 comments

Many PC gamers were disappointed that Ubisoft's latest AAA game Watch_Dogs did not look as nice as when displayed at E3 in 2012. But this week a modder discovered that code to improve the game on PC is still buried within the released game, and can be turned back on without difficulty or performance hits. Ubisoft has yet to answer whether (or why) their PC release was deliberately handicapped. [more inside]
posted by waraw at 8:03 PM PST - 109 comments

Pretty much everything, says Jezebel. Or, as Salon puts it, it paints a gentler picture--and makes him look even worse. Here's the NYMag profile in question, which was authored against a backdrop of several complaints about the well-known fashion photographer. Richardson defended himself in March. At least two models Richardson has photographed have sued him; the suits have been settled. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 7:23 PM PST - 71 comments

"Doraleous and Associates are open for business." [Youtube] "An animated comedy/fantasy series that follows Doraleous & his associates as they travel Nudonia righting wrongs & promoting freedom." [Complete Channel Playlist]
posted by Fizz at 6:46 PM PST - 6 comments

How did Donelle Woolford's work cause Yams Collective (mNSFW) to withdraw from the Whitney Biennial? [more inside]
posted by klangklangston at 4:57 PM PST - 50 comments

How the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally - "The United States health care system is the most expensive in the world, but this report and prior editions consistently show the U.S. underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance. Among the 11 nations studied in this report—Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the U.S. ranks last, as it did in the 2010, 2007, 2006, and 2004 editions of Mirror, Mirror. Most troubling, the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, the U.S. is last or near last on dimensions of access, efficiency, and equity." [full report (pdf)] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:32 PM PST - 69 comments

Peter Frampton was a GOD during my high school daze (SLYT) Take note at 10:00, when he takes over the drums.
He hasn't lost anything but a bit of hair. He still tours and has the chops.
He is playing his beloved 1954 Les Paul
After the happy reunion, he plays it for the 1st time.
Peter Kenneth Frampton (born 22 April 1950) is an English rock musician, singer, songwriter, producer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. He was previously associated with the bands Humble Pie and The Herd. Frampton's international breakthrough album was his live release, Frampton Comes Alive!. The album sold more than six million copies in the United States alone and spawned several hits. Since then he has released several major albums.[2] He has also worked with David Bowie and both Matt Cameron and Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, among others. Frampton is best known for such hits as "Breaking All The Rules", "Show Me the Way", "Baby, I Love Your Way", "Do You Feel Like We Do", and "I'm in You", which remain staples on classic-rock radio. He has also appeared as himself in television shows such as The Simpsons and Family Guy. Frampton is known for his work as a guitar player and particularly with a Talkbox and his tenor voice. (WiKi) [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 4:10 PM PST - 55 comments

Two 14 Year Olds Hack Winnipeg ATM. "Matthew Hewlett and Caleb Turon, both Grade 9 students, found an old ATM operators manual online that showed how to get into the machine's operator mode.... Hewlett and Turon were even more shocked when their first random guess at the six-digit password worked. They used a common default password." [more inside]
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 4:03 PM PST - 26 comments

Celsus is a collaborative wiki for articles related to the history, design, construction, and renovation of libraries. [more inside]
posted by carter at 3:51 PM PST - 1 comment

What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. The championing of "disruption" in modern business is built around some very flaky research that does not bear out its sweeping conconclusions.
posted by smoke at 3:30 PM PST - 53 comments

Interested in the World Cup, but a complete ignorance of soccer tactics keeping you from enjoying the game? You need to read Zonal Marking. A one-stop tactics warehouse, Zonal Marking is written in its entirety by Michael Cox and includes detailed post-game analysis as well as in-depth profiles of every team taking part in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. [more inside]
posted by 256 at 2:32 PM PST - 63 comments

"The concept is a staple of the global culture of fantasy novels and video games, many of which feature a blue bar of magical energy called 'mana.' "But how did this happen? How did a concept from Pago Pago become part of global gaming culture? How did an Austronesian spiritual force come on board the Exodar, and become part of the life of my draenei shaman?" A lengthy look at the history of "mana," from Pacific Islanders to RPGs and trading card games.
posted by jbickers at 1:49 PM PST - 66 comments

"For a long time, being both liberal and a gun owner didn’t seem like a big deal. 'Guns were certainly an issue,' Robinson says, 'but owning firearms wasn’t enough to get you tossed out of the movement.' After Sandy Hook, though, that changed 'with a speed that was truly breathtaking.'"
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 12:49 PM PST - 177 comments

Holt, Reinhart, and Winston published Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League in the fall of 1980 ... In over-the-top comically implausible prose, [Cleo] Birdwell, a twenty-three-year-old from Badger, Ohio, narrates her inaugural season with the New York Rangers. She has a Midwestern practicality and straight-forwardness, a sly humor, and an unusually subversive sexual candor and agency, chronicling—sans any standard female shame or hesitancy—her plentiful sexual liaisons with a gamut of neurotic men. The dialogue is masterful and playful and the humor unremitting. Yet beneath Birdwell’s narration, a foreboding lurks—a tinge of sadness and an existential-like searching-ness. That’s because Cleo Birdwell is a pseudonym for Don Delillo.
posted by chavenet at 11:38 AM PST - 17 comments

Explore the U.S.S. Enterprise with Pixeltrek.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:32 AM PST - 87 comments

Like…I don’t eat pork. I quit swine in ‘99. I could tear up some porkchops and bacon as a kid, but it wasn’t a struggle to quit pork. I don’t think back like “man, remember how good that porkchop was back in ‘97, second week a May?” But I do that with Spider-Man—the Return of the Goblin arc, his first meeting with Luke Cage, that time Betty Brant said something nice about him and he was like “Dang, i never noticed her before, but she’s cute AND she’s on my side” like a doggone teenaged idiot, Mary Jane going Sibyl to get a soap opera job and dodging stalkers…I can recite it chapter and verse. So cold turkey wasn’t really an option, or rather, I wasn’t in a position where cold turkey was feasible.

On his Tumblr, David Brothers talks how hard and easy it was to give up reading Marvel and DC comics (edited version from his blog)
posted by MartinWisse at 9:23 AM PST - 69 comments

Google prepares to kill independent labels on YouTube.
posted by boo_radley at 9:17 AM PST - 118 comments

In 1976, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics ran a household survey that marked a crucial departure from other census exercises. The Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD) did not ask Brazilians to choose a race category among pre-determined choices; instead, researchers went out and asked people to describe the colour they thought they were.

posted by brokkr at 8:54 AM PST - 15 comments

For it is the future generation in its entire individual determination which forces itself into existence through the medium of all this strife and trouble...That growing affection of two lovers for each other is in reality the will to live of the new being, of which they shall become the parents...The lovers have a longing to be really united and made one being, and to live as such for the rest of their lives; and this longing is fulfilled in the children born to them, in whom the qualities inherited from both, but combined and united in one being, are perpetuated...Therefore Nature attains her ends by implanting in the individual a certain illusion by which something which is in reality advantageous to the species alone seems to be advantageous to himself... Arthur Schopenhauer on the Metaphysics of Love.
posted by shivohum at 8:50 AM PST - 11 comments

science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 7:56 AM PST - 88 comments

Why 2014 Should Be Another Freedom Summer. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:28 AM PST - 11 comments

Swiss Timber Bridges via Happy Pontist.
posted by nthdegx at 6:19 AM PST - 20 comments

Richard D. James’ Caustic Window LP (MLYT) After a successful kickstarter campaign fans get the goods
posted by we are the music makers at 3:59 AM PST - 27 comments

Les Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride is a collection of found photographs by film-maker Sébastien Lifshitz showing (mostly anonymous) gay couples together in the early years of the 20th century. 'He found most of his collection in the US and western Europe, but none in the UK: “Maybe the British think such photographs have no value, or are too private to sell.”'. In 2012, Lifshitz released Les Invisibles, a related documentary exploring the lives of 11 gay and lesbian individuals over the age of 70. [more inside]
posted by dng at 3:24 AM PST - 8 comments

The Last Billboard is a 36 foot long rooftop billboard located on the corner of Highland and Baum in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Each month a different individual is invited to use the billboard. The custom designed billboard consists of a rail system with heavy wooden letters that are changed by hand.
posted by frimble at 12:04 AM PST - 49 comments

FT: A Portrait Of Europe's [well, at least the UK's] White Working Class [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:03 PM PST - 29 comments

How to eat a raw egg... if you happen to be an Arctic Wolf. Bonus feature: Wolf pup with hiccups. Brought to you by the Wolf Conservation Center's social media effort.
posted by HuronBob at 8:42 PM PST - 13 comments

Lou Reed's 1979 LP The Bells, featuring Don Cherry and Nils Lofgren, turned 35 in April.

Lester Bangs' take: Lou Reed is a prick and a jerkoff who regularly commits the ultimate sin of treating his audience with contempt. He's also a person with deep compassion for a great many other people about whom almost nobody else gives a shit. I won't say who they are, because I don't want to get too schmaltzy, except to emphasize that there's always been more to this than drugs and fashionable kinks, and to point out that suffering, loneliness and psychic/spiritual exile are great levelers. The Bells isn't merely Lou Reed's best solo LP, it's great art. Everybody made a fuss over Street Hassle, but too many reviewers overlooked the fact that it was basically a sound album: brilliant layers of live and studio work in a deep wash of bass-obsessive noise. Most of the songs were old, and not very good, with a lot of the same old cheap shots.
[more inside]
posted by porn in the woods at 6:15 PM PST - 53 comments

10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing.
posted by quin at 5:18 PM PST - 104 comments

Sub Commander is a free roguelike submarine simulator in the vein of FTL or Dwarf Fortress (but not as hard). You control the crew of a blocky nuclear attack submarine with an impressive number of onboard systems as you complete randomly generated missions. Everything from nuclear reactors to fire to ocean thermal layers to a world map complete with ports and realistic enemy ships is accurately modeled. Rock Paper Shotgun has two reviews, so far of this very playable work-in-progress. Currently only for Windows, but plays well with emulators. The learning curve is a bit steep, so some hints inside... [more inside]
posted by blahblahblah at 4:09 PM PST - 27 comments

Hell on Wheels: Are bad trucking laws partially to blame for Tracy Morgan's accident?

Two days before Kevin Roper crashed his Walmart big rig into Tracy Morgan’s limousine, critically injuring the comedian and killing his colleague James McNair, the Senate Appropriations Committee quietly loosened the laws governing truckers’ hours on the road. Senator Susan Collins slipped an amendment into an appropriations bill suspending for one year a rule limiting truckers to 70-hour work weeks, with a mandatory 34-hour “re-start” once they hit that threshold. Under the amendment, the law would revert to an 82-hour workweek. The Truck Safety Coalition denounced the measure: “What is being portrayed as a small change to the rest period actually has a large impact on crash risk and will set back safety for everyone sharing the roads with large 80,000-pound trucks.”

posted by tonycpsu at 4:05 PM PST - 78 comments

HP scaling memristor and photonic computing: "the device is essentially remembering 1s or 0s depending on which state it is in, multiplying its storage capacity. HP can build these chips with traditional semiconductor equipment and expects to be able to pack unprecedented amounts of memory—enough to store huge databases of pictures, files, and data—into a computer. In theory, that would remove the need for a conventional slow disk/fast memory system. With the Machine's main chips sitting on motherboards right next to the memristors, they can access any needed information almost instantly..." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:46 PM PST - 66 comments

Vessyl is $199 app-cup that tells you what you poured into it.
posted by The Whelk at 1:28 PM PST - 158 comments

Anita Sarkeesian has released the third video in her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series. It's an exhaustive (and exhausting) look at how women have been used as background decorations in video games for the last three decades. [previously]
posted by Ouverture at 12:13 PM PST - 203 comments

This PewResearch animation graphically shows the growing polarization among US voters during the past 15 years. Part of a 121 page pdf. Pew doesn't address why polarization is happening, but the pundits will try: "Voters are becoming angrier because living standards are falling and the middle class is shriveling." Democrats blame corporations, Republicans blame the government and the Dallas Fed blames robots. [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 10:04 AM PST - 211 comments

Austin-based Latin funk band Brownout covers Black Sabbath on their forthcoming album Brownout Presents Brown Sabbath. [more inside]
posted by oakroom at 9:38 AM PST - 21 comments

Baseball Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn has died at age 54. In his 20 years with the San Diego Padres, Gwynn racked up over 3,100 hits, a .338 career batting average--the 18th-best of all time--and eight batting title, the second-most in Major League history.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:24 AM PST - 72 comments

The Skunk is designed to control crowds without endangering the lives of security staff. Bright strobe lights and on-board speakers enable operators to communicate with and warn the crowed. If things get out of control the Skunk can use its four paintball guns to disperse or mark people in the crowd. Four ammunition hoppers can load different types of ammunition such as dye marker balls, pepper spray balls or solid plastic balls.

The early customers are South African mine owners, who hope to use them to control striking workers.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:04 AM PST - 114 comments

On a bright April morning in Menlo Park, California, I became an Internet spy. This was easier than it sounds because I had a willing target. I had partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) tech correspondent Steve Henn for an experiment in Internet surveillance. For one week, while Henn researched a story, he allowed himself to be watched—acting as a stand-in, in effect, for everyone who uses Internet-connected devices. How much of our lives do we really reveal simply by going online? Ars tests Internet surveillance—by spying on an NPR reporter.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:44 AM PST - 15 comments

The News Where You Are (SLYT) [via].
posted by feelinglistless at 7:35 AM PST - 7 comments

(LHR) Heathrow Airport 1964. Fifty years ago it was the worlds busiest airport, now it's lost that distinction.
posted by Xurando at 5:05 AM PST - 68 comments

"She’s something female characters so often aren’t in action/adventure films with male protagonists: She’s interesting. Too bad the story gives her absolutely nothing to do." [How To Train Your Dragon 2 spoilers]
posted by valkane at 4:12 AM PST - 119 comments

Footballing History was made last night when France striker Karim Benzema scored against Honduras. Due to the position of the Honduran Goalkeeper, it was impossible to tell if the ball had crossed the line, and the goal line technology was called into action and controversially gave a goal.
posted by marienbad at 12:53 AM PST - 111 comments

Guns n' Roses, Welcome to the Jungle: guitars and bass only (impeccably clear tracks); lead guitar and bass removed (highlighting the vocal and drum tracks).
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 11:34 PM PST - 29 comments

After a decade and $40 billion, U.S. missile defense system can't be relied on, even in carefully scripted tests. But U.S. lawmakers and the Obama administration 'have protected flawed missile defense system's funding and want to spend billions more to expand it'. 'Despite years of tinkering and vows to fix technical shortcomings, the system's performance has gotten worse, not better, since testing began in 1999. Of the eight tests held since GMD became operational in 2004, five have been failures. The last successful intercept was on Dec. 5, 2008.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 8:25 PM PST - 54 comments

Whisper is an app that allows users to "anonymously share your thoughts and emotions with the world, and form lasting and meaningful relationships in a community built around trust and honesty." Secret is an app " to openly share what you're thinking and feeling with your friends. Speak freely, share anything." The Genius of Whisper, the Massively Popular App You Haven't Heard Of. With New Anonymous Social App Secret, the Merit Is in the Message. Two Apps, One Hot Trend [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:11 PM PST - 71 comments

The World's Ball - the NYT reviews the design evolution of the soccer/football from 1930 to the present
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:00 PM PST - 23 comments

Hairless Animals: some are born that way, some suffer from stress or alopecia. All look quite a bit different from their furry or feathered kin.
posted by quin at 2:21 PM PST - 51 comments

Pistola Derringer hecha en casa. The same builder also documents his build of a "Colt Derringer modelo 3"
posted by 445supermag at 1:41 PM PST - 16 comments

Some people familiar with the LessWrong memeplex have suffered serious psychological distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas ... The notion is taken sufficiently seriously by some LessWrong posters that they try to work out how to erase evidence of themselves so a future AI can't reconstruct a copy of them to torture. Yudkowsky considers the basilisk would not work, but will not explain why because he does not consider open discussion of the notion of acausal trade with possible superintelligences to be provably safe.

If it's the first time you've heard of Roko's Basilisk, this post may have unfortunately put (a perfect future simulation of) you in danger of eternal torture by a Friendly Artificial Intelligence.
posted by crayz at 1:04 PM PST - 271 comments

Earlier this year venerable academic publishers Springer and IEEE were impelled to remove more than 120 physics papers from their published proceedings because the papers were computer-generated nonsense. The SCIgen program (and its math-oriented fork) is available for the non-discriminating would-be author to generate such word salad. It's previously been used to perform hoaxes (previously, previouslier) of the kind that Alan Sokal wrought on a post-modern journal. (After the papers are published, the hoaxers claim incompetence by editors.) But in this case the papers don't appear to be hoaxes -- they're instead perhaps generated to pad academic CVs, with the publishers all too willing to take the publication fees. [more inside]
posted by zittrain at 12:39 PM PST - 39 comments

Sialoliths are typically small, like María’s. But occasionally physicians run across monsters (sometimes referred to as megaliths): One paper describes a seven-centimeter stone the size of a “hen’s egg.” The big ones, of course, must be surgically removed, something I learned when I stumbled across a horrifying, yet mesmerizing video of a sialolith excision. (That video led me to another, and then another, and . . . well, let’s just say the rabbit hole of sialolith surgeries is bottomless. I’ll save you some time and just point you to the best one.) For smaller stones, however, doctors like to avoid the scalpel. While surgery might save some pain and suffering, the salivary glands are really close to some facial nerves that you definitely don’t want to cut.

So it turns out the salivary glands can also suffer from something like kidney or gall stones. Yes, the author, Cassandra Willyard, is so kind as to link to a video of a sialolith extraction. Link via Io9, who have a nice image of a megalith taken out of somebody's salivary glands.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:13 PM PST - 36 comments

Francis Fukuyama on 'The End of History?' twenty-five years later: "liberal democracy still doesn't have any real competitors," but to get there... [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:11 AM PST - 29 comments

Cleopatra's Needle, the 3,500 year old obelisk that has been installed in Central Park for the past century, is about to cleaned, with lasers.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:04 AM PST - 21 comments

The psychedelic, Tangerine-Dream-like, light dances of time lapse filmmaker Richard Bentley:
The Atomium in Brussels
Dubai skyline
Washington DC
Others
posted by growabrain at 9:53 AM PST - 1 comment

Casey Kasem, the resonant voice of Top 40 radio and a vocal fixture on cartoon programs for the past 40 years, has died, according to his daughter. He was 82. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 9:00 AM PST - 81 comments

How corporations became people you can't sue.
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:01 AM PST - 75 comments

Tim Jenison had a theory that Joseph Vermeer had made used of particular lens technology to make his paintings almost photo-realistic. To test this, he recreated the setting of The Music Lesson from scratch, harpsichord and all, and even recreated the theorised lenses using 17th century tools. For someone who doesn't know how to paint, he sure did a good job.
posted by divabat at 1:18 AM PST - 85 comments

On March 23, the floodgates of the Morelos Dam, near Yuma, Arizona opened, unleashing a three-day "pulse" into the dry Colorado River delta. The waters recently reached the Sea of Cortez, and a group of scientists and journalists were there to raft it. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 11:09 PM PST - 18 comments

C86 Compilation Oral History
posted by sleepy pete at 5:51 PM PST - 19 comments

Emulation of famous OB-X, OB-Xa and OB-8 synths. Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, for Windows and Mac.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:36 PM PST - 21 comments

Two weeks ago, a group of Serbian expat academics in the UK posted a scathing and detailed critique of the Ph.D. dissertation of Serbian Minister of Internal Affairs, Nebojša Stefanović, alleging plagiarism and academic fraud. The authors claimed that the "procurement of dubious academic degrees ... is a serious problem in the Serbian system of higher education" and promised to "to continue to examine suspicious doctoral and masters dissertations belonging to other public figures in Serbia." The reaction has not been uneventful:

• Immediate denial-of-service attacks were launched against the website publishing the allegations, pescanik.net.
• A strong defense of Stefanović was made by Serbian Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vučić: "I've never heard a more stupid explanation [of plagiarism]".
• The dissertation was verified as "absolutely authentic scientific work" by Mića Jovanović, the rector of the degree-granting insititution in Belgrade, Megatrend University.
• Further investigations by Pescanik revealed that Rector Jovanović's own claim of a Ph.D. from the "University of London" is dubious.
• The Serbian Minister of Education called for Jovanović to resign as rector of Megatrend; he complied.
• Former-Rector Jovanović traveled to London on Friday (in his private jet) to "find his dissertation". He claimed he was successful and would prove everything on Monday.
• Minister Stefanović continues to deny the charges of plagiarism.

[more inside]
posted by pjenks at 3:43 PM PST - 55 comments

Technological Mandalas
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:34 PM PST - 12 comments

How relevant is Machiavelli's manual The Prince in contemporary Politics ? This Documentary finds out.
posted by sgt.serenity at 2:22 PM PST - 21 comments

At only thirteen years old, Tavi Gevinson was proclaimed the world's most famous fashion blogger. At the age of fifteen, she founded Rookie Magazine, an online magazine aimed primarily at teenage girls. Her newest project? Being a grown up. (Previously on Metafilter.)
posted by SkylitDrawl at 2:17 PM PST - 58 comments

A brick Sistine Chapel on the brink of brick civil war? Sounds like a job for the History Cops.
posted by fuse theorem at 12:32 PM PST - 9 comments

Most expensive rescue in German history as man begins second week trapped 3000 feet underground in cave — It may take rescuers a week to evacuate speleologist Johann Westhauser after he was injured by a rockfall in the depths of Germany's Riesending Cave.
posted by cenoxo at 12:00 PM PST - 53 comments

Why does this species—a species composed of rock—have sexual dimorphism even more stark than mountain gorillas? What purpose does this serve? Come to think of it—why do the women have plant hair? It appears to be growing out of their skulls—so it must be parasitic. But this is a sentient species in a futuristic setting, meaning that if it were a non-beneficial parasite, they’d have removed them. So are Granok-plants an example of resource-resource mutualistic symbiosis? Wouldn’t the males then also cultivate plant-hair? Why is it gender-segregated?

Bryce Mainville is unimpressed by the character design in the new sci-fi MMO Wildstar. Bonus: Cassandra Khaw's difficulties with creating ugly female characters in Wildstar.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:09 AM PST - 173 comments

It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork. "A Bitcoin mining pool, called GHash and operated by an anonymous entity called CEX.io, just reached 51% of total network mining power today. Bitcoin is no longer decentralized. GHash can control Bitcoin transactions."
posted by chunking express at 10:19 AM PST - 162 comments

Nathan Fielder's Ingenious Dumb Humor - "How the star of Comedy Central's 'Nathan for You' makes the most of uncomfortable moments." (via; previously 1,2,3)
posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM PST - 10 comments

One man's favorite adventure novels published before the '80s. "Why does my Top Adventures List project stop in 1983? Primarily because I figure that adventure fans already know which adventure novels from the Eighties, Nineties, and Twenty-Oughts are worth reading; I’m interested in directing attention to older, sometimes obscure or forgotten adventures." (Hat-tip: DGStieber)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:57 AM PST - 29 comments

The Vancouver School Board's controversial new gender identity policy (pdf, faq) is on the cusp of passage, even in the face of opposition from evangelical christian chinese parents protesting against it. One Vancouver mother speaks out for her 11 year old transgender son, and in support of VSB's new transgender policies (audio, interview starts at 1m30).
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 8:55 AM PST - 83 comments

Life, After. When I tripped, I reached reflexively to break my very real fall with my completely imaginary left hand. My fall was instead broken by my nose, and my nose was broken by my fall. (previously)
posted by Memo at 7:56 AM PST - 14 comments

FK (Falklands): WE HAVE LOTS OF NEW FRIENDS
LON: WHAT ABOUT INVASION RUMOURS
FK: THOSE ARE THE FRIENDS I WAS MEANING

Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the ceasefire which ended the ten-week Falklands War. The war began when Argentine forces invaded the nearly undefended British archipelago, and ended with a decisive British victory following a counter-invasion (which the US Navy had considered to be a “military impossibility”). This war—in which 649 Argentine soldiers, 255 British soldiers, and 3 civilians were killed—is still a fresh memory for the countries involved, as seen from growing tensions between the Argentina and England sides at the World Cup in Brazil. Only two current England players and four current Argentina players had been born when the war occurred.
posted by 256 at 7:39 AM PST - 63 comments

A tour of Boston (et environs) via car in 1964 Take a ride through the Cambridge, Boston, Brookline and Brighton streets of 1964. As notable for what's still there as what isn't. In 1964, Government Center is a construction site, the Citgo sign is not yet the neon icon we all know and love, and the Prudential Tower was brand new. And yet it all look so familiar as you pass the three-deckers in Cambridge and Brighton, ride down the tree-lined Jamaicaway, and dodge those Ford Fairlanes, Nash Ramblers, and '57 Chevys on Storrow and Mem Drive.
posted by briank at 7:37 AM PST - 19 comments

Spread from a 1949 issue of LIFE magazine charts what is low-brow, high-brow and inbetween
posted by The Whelk at 7:35 AM PST - 184 comments

Anthony Burgess' previously unpublished introduction to Dubliners. Joyce's stories have their centenary this year.

Colm Tóibín and Eimear McBride.

Bit of a warm-up for Bloomsday.
posted by Segundus at 1:23 AM PST - 9 comments

Koh Yao Noi Island [Vimeo], near Phuket, Thailand, shot using GoPro from a Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopter.
posted by MoonOrb at 10:59 PM PST - 15 comments

Simpson is in Lovelock because he was convicted of kidnapping and armed robbery in Nevada in 2008; he's serving a sentence of up to 33 years, with the possibility of parole in 2017. He will turn 67 next month, but the O.J. personage who remains a cultural touchstone is much younger. That one was born 20 years ago this week, on June 17, 1994, a day that spawned a series of events that are as ingrained in Americana as anything that happened at Valley Forge or in Dealey Plaza. Sports Illustrated tackles Orenthal James Simpson.
posted by porn in the woods at 5:44 PM PST - 139 comments

The Hoverboard is a real product sold by Zapata Racing. It is a surfboard with a powerful hydropropulsive jet attached at the back, capable of sustained tethered flight and mid-air surfing maneuvers. [more inside]
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:13 PM PST - 38 comments

Not enough kicking of balls around to watch? Here is some more kicking of balls around. Moose playing with ball. Other moose playing with ball. Horse playing with ball. More horses playing with balls. Crow and Dog play with ball. Elephant plays with ball. Squirrel plays with ball. Deer plays with ball. Goat plays with ball. Rhinoceros plays with ball. Tiny parrot plays with ball.
posted by Erasmouse at 2:58 PM PST - 18 comments

"Marvel: Ultimate Alliance"
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 2:29 PM PST - 37 comments

Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot. "Since he first became a household name a year ago, Edward Snowden has been a modern Max Headroom, appearing only as a face on a screen broadcast from exile in Hong Kong or Russia. But in the age of the telepresence robot, being a face on a screen isn’t as restrictive as it used to be." Indeed: Snowdenbot performs tele-diagnosis and offers aid to reporter who had first epileptic seizure. [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 2:08 PM PST - 20 comments

Ever felt as though the ups and downs of the NBA playoffs and the chase for a ring is like an epic tale? Game of Thrones, NBA edition, part 1. [YouTube, 2:03] & Game of Thrones, NBA edition, part 2. [YouTube, 2:11]
posted by cashman at 1:59 PM PST - 10 comments

If a cat said hey instead of meow (SLYT)
posted by bq at 1:15 PM PST - 49 comments

Between 9am and 9pm yesterday, the people of (the province of, not the city) Ontario took to the polls to elect a new government and (possibly) a new premier. Things did not turn out exactly as predicted. [more inside]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:59 PM PST - 128 comments

How Britney Spears went to Vegas and became a feminist role model. No, really. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:58 AM PST - 47 comments

What would a warp-drive ship actually look like? Artist Mark Rademaker has unveiled a set of concept images imagining what a faster than light spaceship would really look like based on theoretical done by Harold White and NASA on an Alcubierre Drive. Video lecture.
posted by stbalbach at 11:18 AM PST - 95 comments

I am appalled at what that means – that the survival skills that the bull has painstakingly learnt over half a century have been rendered useless by the poachers’ use of mass-produced Chinese goods; GPS smart-phones, cheap motorcycles and night vision goggles. I think the old bull knows that poachers want his tusks, and I hate that he knows. More than anything, I hate the thought that poachers are now closing in on one of the world’s most iconic elephants.

The Guardian [more inside]
posted by infini at 10:44 AM PST - 69 comments

TravelByDrone is a site that lets anyone upload videos and add the corresponding location, which is then pinned onto a map for you to choose from. [more inside]
posted by gman at 8:47 AM PST - 16 comments

Flann O'Brien: The Lives of Brian [VIMEO]: A documentary about Flann O'Brien aka Brian O'Nolan. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:43 AM PST - 13 comments

Inside Andy Green's 1000mph office
posted by flabdablet at 8:05 AM PST - 26 comments

George F. Kennan, bigot. David Greenberg reviews The Kennan Diaries in The New Republic and discovers that the father of containment hated everyone, but didn't hate everyone equally. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:52 AM PST - 29 comments

On Talmudic and fundamentalist approaches to continuity in the Star Trek franchise. Just as St. Paul didn't realize he was founding a religion, D.C. Fontana [writer of several episodes for Star Trek: TOS] didn't know she was setting up 50 subsequent episodes in each script.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:50 AM PST - 76 comments

hit by a car, an emergency doctor experiences firsthand the shortcomings in ER care
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 5:45 AM PST - 131 comments

Peppa Pig is ten years old! [more inside]
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 4:14 AM PST - 52 comments

Betrayal is what led to his defenestration from ESPN the last time around. Betrayal is why his best piece of writing never found the audience it deserved. And betrayal is at the heart of why the most prominent black sportswriter around is also the most hated sportswriter in the black community, and why, 10 months after Jason Whitlock first announced his new endeavor, a black sports and culture site that he'll run under the aegis of his old enemy ESPN, the project is still struggling to get off the ground.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:56 AM PST - 20 comments

Have you ever wondered what a prog metal cover of Gershwin would sound like? Liquid Tension Experiment - Rhapsody in Blue
posted by Rhomboid at 3:46 AM PST - 35 comments

"Maybe Angola will colonise us now," says Vasco Lourenço, the head of Associação 25 de Abril, an organisation that is trying to preserve the spirit of the 1974 revolution. Forty years ago he was one of the young army officers who took up arms to end the Salazar dictatorship and colonial wars.

While Portugal is still in the throws of recession, Angola is booming and investing heavily in its old colonial ruler. Now Portugal is struggling with the effects of this investment and the implications it brings with it.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:36 AM PST - 17 comments

The US Marshals Service is auctioning off the bitcoins seized from the servers of the Silk Road online drug marketplace last year, in lots of 3000 coins. You have until June 23rd register as a bidder and wire your $200,000 deposit. (Silk Road previously)
posted by silby at 10:50 PM PST - 79 comments

On being a barista in San Francisco: But I had set up a trap for myself. By smiling this hard all the time, by acting so very whimsical, I could not easily reveal any part of my true and at that time rather angry self.
posted by MoonOrb at 10:49 PM PST - 63 comments

Phenderson Djèlí Clark details H. P. Lovecraft's racism (earlier version with links to recommended reading/listening). Daniel José Older situates HPL's racism within a more general aesthetics of disgust. Silvia Moreno-Garcia engages with racism in both HPL and Robert E. Howard through work such as co-editing a multicultural issue (pdf) of Innsmouth Magazine (formerly Innsmouth Free Press) and a new Sword & Mythos anthology. Balogun Ojetade explains how confronting racism in HPL and REH spurred his participation in the sub-genre of Sword and Soul.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:55 PM PST - 47 comments

The SFMTA has published excerpts of their photo archives from donated collections, spanning the post-1906 earthquake period all the way up to modern times. [more inside]
posted by slater at 8:34 PM PST - 9 comments

Caveirão (SLVimeo) It's 3:33 AM! Do you know where the spirits of your city are? In honor of the Brazilian World Cup - and the sacrifices made for it - an animated short feature in the tradition of Ghost Busters and Night Watch, with a decidedly modern, Brazilian take.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:25 PM PST - 2 comments

The Italian Garden Project Old world gardening know-how, traditions, recipes, memories and more... The mission of The Italian Garden Project™ is to celebrate the joy and wisdom inherent in the traditional Italian American vegetable garden, preserving this heritage and demonstrating its relevance for reconnecting to our food, our families, and the earth. For several years Mary Menniti has been documenting through video and oral history how her some of her first generation Italian immigrant neighbors have adapted traditional Old World gardening techniques and plants to Western Pennsylvania's less forgiving climates. One the gardens has even been included in the Smithsonian's Archive of American Gardens.
posted by DarthDuckie at 7:19 PM PST - 11 comments

F.D.R 's New Deal explained to the public via cartoons, shorts, and newsreels
posted by The Whelk at 5:16 PM PST - 7 comments

ECO VIRTUAL / / / Advanced Climate Research & Analysis Music [more inside]
posted by porn in the woods at 4:53 PM PST - 4 comments

Scenes From My Imaginary Friendship With Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
posted by brundlefly at 4:30 PM PST - 36 comments

On the occasion of Speed's 20th anniversary, Hitfix presents an oral history of the movie, as told by the people on the bus.
posted by Rangeboy at 12:43 PM PST - 42 comments

Google just bought out skybox for $500MN. Skybox is a startup with grand amibitions: create cheap satellites which can be used to provide almost real time-time, sub one meter resolution imagery of earth. Even with six small satellites orbiting Earth, Skybox could provide practically real-time images of the same spot twice a day at a fraction of the current cost. The startup sent up its first satellite SkySat-1 last November. The satellite can provide HD images and videos (90 sec clips at 30 frames/second) The start-up hopes to combine its satellites with software which can analyze the visual data to collect information. It hopes that it can use its combination of hardware and software capabilities to gather real time information to estimate oil reserves in saudi Arabia, track fuel tankers in China's 3 main economic zones, rate of increase of electricity usage in India, number of cars in all wallmart parking lots. [more inside]
posted by TheLittlePrince at 12:19 PM PST - 99 comments

Can you guess what the invention does? Beautiful and baffling machines in wood and brass from the Age of Steam. Selected from the collections of the Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum.
posted by Erasmouse at 12:12 PM PST - 16 comments

Various news sources report that Charles Wright will today be named the next Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States Library of Congress. An extensive biography and 50 poems are available from the Poetry Foundation. [more inside]
posted by Jahaza at 11:43 AM PST - 21 comments

Change, the third book in the Legend of Korra, was officially completed last week, as announced by co-creator Mike DiMartino, and while an airing date remains unknown, the unexpected leak of three to four episodes from the season has resulted in an earlier than expected release of the season's trailer, just over two minutes of speculation creating, excitement inducing, animation for Legend of Korra fans. Fire Lord Zuko, anyone? [more inside]
posted by Atreides at 11:36 AM PST - 57 comments

In capital cities across Europe, taxi drivers took to the streets without passengers Wednesday afternoon. They slowed to a snail's pace in what Parisians called "Operation Escargot." Horns blared around Trafalgar Square in London. In Berlin, taxis massed at the Central Station. All to protest the smartphone app Uber. [more inside]
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 11:19 AM PST - 180 comments

Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band is a 3-piece country blues band from Brown County, Indiana. They share some metafilter politics, but sing about a few more unique experiences, too. Ben plays drums, Breezy plays washboard, and the Reverend himself plays guitar and the bass line (at the same time), sometimes on a cigar box guitar. If you like what you've heard: hop a train or an old pickup, scream at the night, share some pot roast and kisses, watch out for the devils who look like angels, and don't forget to clap your hands.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:17 AM PST - 4 comments

"My name is John Lindo and I love to dance!" [more inside]
posted by jammy at 11:13 AM PST - 20 comments

Cao Hui is a Chinese artist who seeks the "inner reaches of things" like furniture, classical sculpture, and clothing. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:11 AM PST - 6 comments

The new standard for dogsitting has been set. (SLYT)
posted by Lou Stuells at 10:56 AM PST - 28 comments

Tesla Motors announced today that the company will no longer defend its patent portfolio, on the heels of an earlier announcement that the company would open up the designs and specifications for its "supercharger" system.
posted by schmod at 10:50 AM PST - 78 comments

There was a time when the US was a marijuana friendly country but the Roosevelt administration thought it was killing America's youth and future so in 1937 pot was banned. By an ironic twist of fate, five years later the Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to grow hemp to help the country defeat the nazis. Of course, the mirage didn't last long. Cannabis was banned and rebanned. The US pushed forward the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Drugs and 9 years later President Nixon signed the Controlled Substance Act. War on Drugs was at full throttle. Now, after six months of Colorado's green experiment, money is flowing and crime is decreasing. Please, let me try to predict the future: Ironically, curiosly and logically, the US will be marijuana friendly again and a bunch of countries will follow its path... again.
posted by LetsKa at 10:44 AM PST - 23 comments

Christopher Ketcham of the New Republic accuses Chris Hedges of widespread plagiarism.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

[more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:23 AM PST - 66 comments

How to look like you know loads about football
posted by capnsue at 10:11 AM PST - 29 comments

Clickhole is a branch of The Onion solely dedicated to lampooning the clickbait universe.
posted by Philipschall at 9:59 AM PST - 35 comments

Ubisoft dropped plans to have playable female assassins in the multiplayer mode of the upcoming game Assassin's Creed: Unity.

The studio "had to" cut female assassins from the co-op mode, Amancio explained in response to a question from Polygon's Ben Kuchera, because keeping them in would have doubled the cost of pretty much everything: "it's double the animations, double the voices, all that stuff, double the visual assets—especially because we have customizable assassins."

Once again from Ubisoft, Far Cry 4 will not have playable female characters in multiplayer either:

"...I can guarantee you that in the future, moving forward, this sort of stuff will go away. As we get better technology and we plan for it in advance and we don't have a history on one rig and all this sort of stuff. We had very strong voices on the team pushing for that and I really wanted to do it, we just couldn't squeeze it in in time. But on the other hand we managed to get more of the other story characters to be women... We did our best. It's frustrating for us as it is for everybody else, so it's not a big switch that you can just pull and get it done."

Animator Jonathan Cooper, who is currently with Naughty Dog and has previously worked on the Mass Effect series (whose main character could be either male or female, and whose final installment with multiplayer also featured female playable characters for multiple species including human) has another perspective on how the extra work could be planned for and handled. Twitter, with the hashtag in the post title, has its own perspective. [more inside]
posted by seyirci at 9:53 AM PST - 136 comments

Know Your Double: A doppelgänger field guide by John Martz (previously).
posted by homunculus at 9:42 AM PST - 43 comments

Crawling the lost tracks of Latin America. Artists Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene, a.k.a. "Los Ferronautas," converted a car into a retro-futuristic rail vehicle they dubbed SEFT-1 (Sonda de Exploración Ferroviaria Tripulada, "Manned Railway Exploration Probe") to explore the abandoned passenger railways of Mexico and Ecuador.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:38 AM PST - 7 comments

Milena Sidorova is a soloist in the Dutch National Ballet. The Spider. Full Moon (aka the Pillow Dance). Reality Conundrum.
posted by Think_Long at 8:53 AM PST - 8 comments

"While the problem of consciousness is far from being solved, it is finally being formulated mathematically as a set of problems that researchers can understand, explore and discuss.

Today, Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart.

Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. 'I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,' he says."
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:14 AM PST - 234 comments

Dan Savage, the University of Chicago, free speech, and LGBT slurs.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:13 AM PST - 352 comments

Between 2002 and 2006, the Hubble telescope took photos of an explosion coming from a red variable star in the constellation Monoceros, about 20,000 light years from the Sun. This is a time-lapse video of those photos.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:22 AM PST - 35 comments

I like to be out there on the edge with people who, as I say somewhere, haven’t got time to be neurotic.
posted by valkane at 6:00 AM PST - 5 comments

"Childhood, as I knew it, was rife with secrecy and weirdness, with actions that made sense to you but not anybody else. It’s no wonder that I fell in love with Moomin." Alex Ohlin writes about Tove Jansson and Moomin, for The Millions. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 5:11 AM PST - 21 comments

Terry Cavanagh's indie hit VVVVVV was an instant success, melding a Commodore 64 look and feel to a difficult but forgiving platformer whose only controls are move left, move right, and reverse gravity. The second edition of the game expanded from Windows and OSX to Linux, and added a level editor which could be used to make and export custom maps. Today, Cavanagh has announced VVVVVV: Make and Play Edition, which contains only the level editor and the ability to play custom levels, and which can now be downloaded for free for Windows, OSX, and Linux.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:11 AM PST - 18 comments

Composer John Powell on the creative challenges in scoring the sequel “If you’re trying to evoke the joy of flying, you just try and make it as wonderful-sounding as possible in a way you’d imagine it would feel to fly. It’s that simple. I knew I had to deliver music that was as good as the film as I was fitting it to.”
posted by wallawallasweet at 12:34 AM PST - 12 comments

On Tuesday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu said that the laws governing K-12 teacher job security were unconstitutional. Treu declared the rules governing K-12 teacher tenure in California were unconstitutional because they affect predominately minority and poor students, allowing incompetent instructors to remain in the classroom. He said in the decision that the protections "impose a real and appreciable impact on students' fundamental right to equality of education." He went on to say that the evidence for this "shocks the conscience." The decision ends the process of laying off teachers based solely on when they were hired. It also strips them of extra job safeguards not enjoyed by other school or state employees. And, lastly, it eliminates the current tenure process, under which instructors are either fired or win strong job security about 18 months after they start teaching. The case was brought by a Silicon Valley group, Students Matter. The suit has highlighted competing views of teacher tenure. The decision has lead to significant and spirited debate over K-12 teacher job protections.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 11:38 PM PST - 138 comments

The Miss World contest of 1970, of course, isn’t famous for its motley crew of judges but for the feminist protest that took place in the middle of the show. While the judges were putting women in order of beauty, Bob Hope the London-born compere, came on stage to go through a comedy routine. All of a sudden about fifty women and a few men started throwing flour bombs, stink bombs, ink bombs and leaflets at the stage wile yelling “we are liberationists!”, “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry” and “ban this disgraceful cattle market!”. The worldwide live television audience couldn’t fail to notice what was happening. Bob Hope certainly noticed and he quickly tried to flee the stage as the missiles flew by. Julia Morley, the wife of the organiser Eric Morley, grabbed hold of his ankle in a desperate attempt to stop him leaving. It only took a few minutes for the police to restore order but ‘Women’s Lib’ had in one fell swoop established itself as part of the seventies.

The Anorak looks back at (the judges) of the 1970 miss world competition.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:31 PM PST - 25 comments

Publishers Weekly: "What MTV did for music videos and record sales, BookReels wants to do for book trailers and book sales." No, but they have collected about 3000 book trailers and interviews. New Yorker: The Awkward Art of Book Trailers: "Then there is the leading book-trailer auteur of our time, Gary Shteyngart." TheRumpus: Fantastic Book Trailers and the Reasons They’re So Good: "There tends to exist a general skepticism toward book trailers."
posted by stbalbach at 11:15 PM PST - 8 comments

Some guy has reviewed 290 film noir flicks and is still going.
posted by MoonOrb at 10:44 PM PST - 15 comments

On Tuesday, a group of Islamic militants that were thrown out of al-Qaeda for being too violent took over Iraq's second largest city. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (abbreviated as ISIS) kicked the Iraqi Army out of Mosul, a wealthy city in northwestern Iraq. Today, ISIS secured another northern city, Tikrit. It currently controls an area "the size of Belgium," according to Jason Lyall, a Yale University political scientist who studies insurgencies. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 9:12 PM PST - 214 comments

Molly Crabapple talks Snowden, Pussy Riot, and Cecily McMillan: "Cooing over foreign dissidents allows establishment hacks to pose like sexy rebels—while simultaneously affirming that their own system is the best. The dissident fetishist takes a brave, principled person, and uses them like a codpiece of competitive virtue.

The Kremlin loves (American) whistle-blowers. The State Department loves (Russian) anarchist punks."
posted by anemone of the state at 8:52 PM PST - 16 comments

Axon: A Neuron building game.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 7:20 PM PST - 25 comments

Musings on, in the age of digitization and photocopies and the dying off of old collectors, what it means to be a book collector by Johan Kugelberg of Boo-Hooray (the guy who cataloged Afrika Bambaataa's collection for Cornell University, and I can't believe there isn't a Previously for that!) [more inside]
posted by larrybob at 6:57 PM PST - 4 comments

High-profile progressive Mormons Kate Kelly, the founder of the Ordain Women movement (previously), and John Dehlin, most well-known as founder of Mormon Stories Podcast (previously and previouslier), have been invited by the LDS Church to disciplinary councils that will most likely result in their excommunication from the church. [more inside]
posted by subversiveasset at 5:15 PM PST - 65 comments

DisneyToon Studios is best known for their spin-offs of Walt Disney Animation Studios films, like the Tinker Bell and Planes series, or the execrable string of direct-to-video sequels to Disney movies released from the mid-nineties to mid-2000's. But around 2005, they had a different spin-off in development: an epic, dark prequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
posted by Small Dollar at 4:29 PM PST - 10 comments

On May 13th, the film world was shocked and saddened by the tragic death of documentary filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul, who had won an Oscar just last year for the documentary "Searching for Sugar Man". In the month that has passed since then, more details have emerged of the months and days that led up to his suicide. The Hollywood Reporter profiles the life and death of Bendjelloul and takes a look at how sudden success can bring about even more sudden depression.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 3:54 PM PST - 16 comments

Bloodletters and Bad Actors Mefi's Own Max Sparber looks at the early days of Omaha theater, back when it was a frontier town, its amusements were questionable, and vice was rampant, with occasional forays into more recent performing arts misbehavior. [via mefi projects]
posted by The Whelk at 3:49 PM PST - 4 comments

if Upworthy ran a university their doctoral theses would probably sound like these.
posted by divabat at 2:40 PM PST - 30 comments

There's no simple or singular means of explaining why publications thrive or die. Entertainment Weekly rose and declined with larger waves affecting the entertainment and publishing industries at large, but its story is more than just that of print media at the turn of the century. That might be the environment, but the larger narrative is that of widespread deregulation in terms of media ownership and the resultant flurry of mergers, acquisitions, and conglomerate masterplanning.

The history of the business of EW.
posted by psoas at 1:38 PM PST - 16 comments

Some highlights from Joshua Rifkin's career(s):

• At the age of 21, in only five weeks, he wrote and conducted The Baroque Beatles Book, an album of Beatles themes rendered in the styles of Bach and Handel.
• On Wildflowers and In My Life, he arranged some of Judy Collin's best tracks, including "Albatross" and "Suzanne."
• Rifkin helped kickstart the 70s ragtime renaissance with three acclaimed Joplin albums.
• In 1981, he published an infamous paper _[JSTOR] declaring that Bach's choral work wasn't actually choral work as we understand it. Rather, Bach intended only one singer to take each vocal part...

[more inside]
posted by Iridic at 1:18 PM PST - 9 comments

On June 6th 1944 Jim Radford, aged just 15, was serving on the HM Rescue tug Empire Larch at Gold Beach tasked, amongst other things, with building the breakwater and later the mulberry harbour there. 70 years later an 85 year old Jim stood up in front of a packed Albert Hall in London and, accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra, sung his autobiographical composition - The Shores of Normandy. [more inside]
posted by garius at 12:27 PM PST - 5 comments

Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, was a dangerous place to be in the late 1970s. With bombs, shootings, British Army Patrols, riots on the streets, and The Ramones and New York Dolls on the turntable, the most punk thing 5 Catholic lads could do was to sing upbeat songs about adolescent lust, girls, getting nowhere with said girls, and the general struggles of being young. In the bleeding heart of The Troubles, The Undertones escaped by dreaming of a life more ordinary. [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 11:16 AM PST - 38 comments

Think Instapaper is a misnomer? With PaperLater (from Newspaper Club), you can save things online to read later, on paper. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:58 AM PST - 43 comments

Marion Zimmer Bradley, award-winning author (The Mists of Avalon, Darkover, amongst others) not only aided and abetted her husband in child abuse (Walter Breen, a man who was first convicted in 1954), she also took part in it, according to an email from her daughter published yesterday.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:29 AM PST - 288 comments

The awesome Rick Reilly's last column addresses fathering and sports. Until 2008 the "back page" columnist for Sports Illustrated, Reilly is retiring from ESPN. He is already a member of the Sportswriters Hall of Fame and was 11 times voted Sportswriter of the Year.
posted by bearwife at 9:42 AM PST - 16 comments

2014 iPhone Photography Awards "All images must be taken with an iPhone, iPod or an iPad. The photos should not be altered in Photoshop or any desktop image processing program." [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 9:39 AM PST - 27 comments

can theatre bring justice to homeless transgender youth?
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 9:01 AM PST - 1 comment

I have no idea how much of this is staged vs actually going off script, but either way Tom Hanks at CES 2009 is pretty entertaining.
posted by kmz at 8:41 AM PST - 10 comments

How Much Does It Hurt?
Zohydro is the new FDA-approved painkiller that some doctors think the FDA had no business approving. And in ERs across America, they’re anxiously awaiting the fallout.
posted by davidstandaford at 8:31 AM PST - 55 comments

Korean grandmothers sell Bacchus drinks (energy drinks) and sex on the side. Once part of Korea's economic engine, older Korean women are turning to prostitution to pay for their living costs. The Bacchus women also work the hiking trails where they offer coffee and sex.
posted by ichimunki at 8:30 AM PST - 34 comments

Personality Psychology Proves It: Internet Trolls Really Are Horrible People.
posted by shivohum at 6:07 AM PST - 72 comments

While the World Watched At the same time Argentina hosted the 1978 World Cup, the nation's dictators were waging their "Dirty War" of repression, kidnappings and torture. As the tournament again draws near, ghastly memories are flooding back.
posted by modernnomad at 2:07 AM PST - 22 comments

Troubled Welds on the Bay Bridge: How mismanagement and an inexperienced contractor built a bridge whose stability in an earthquake is in question [more inside]
posted by meowzilla at 11:41 PM PST - 39 comments

Three friends from Japan visit all ten burger chains in LA in a single day.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:02 PM PST - 88 comments

Act 1, scene 1. "The stage directions read, “Vienna. The Ringstrasse promenade at Sirk Corner. Flags wave from the buildings. Soldiers marching by are cheered by the onlookers. General excitement. The crowd breaks up into small groups.”[2] The newsboys with their “Extra Extra,” announcing the outbreak of war, are interrupted by a drunk demonstrator who shouts “Down with Serbia! Hurrah for the Hapsburgs! Hurrah! For S-e-r-bia!” and is immediately kicked in the pants for his mistake (LTM, p. 69). A crook and a prostitute exchange insults, even as two army contractors, talking of possible bribes the rich will use to avoid the draft, cite Bismarck’s words, in Neue Freie Presse (Vienna’s major newspaper at the time of the assassination of the archduke in Serbia), to the effect that the Austrians deserve kissing. One officer tells another that war is “unanwendbar” (of no use) when he really means, as his friend points out, “unabwendbar” (unavoidable) (LTM, pp. 70–71). A patriotic citizen praises the coming conflict as a holy war of defense against “encirclement” by hostile forces, and the crowd responds by making up rhymes (in Viennese dialect) denigrating the enemy (LTM, p. 72)." [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 9:01 PM PST - 9 comments

Factbot is a machine that makes up lies. ᔥ
posted by unliteral at 7:25 PM PST - 44 comments

Parklets! Parklets are popping up everywhere! Parklets are beautiful! A brief history tells of how parklets started in San Francisco with PARKing Day, a topic previously covered. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 6:57 PM PST - 19 comments

The book is considered the rarest of Sendak’s published work — so rare that it’s practically impossible for even art historians to get their eyes on a copy for scholarly work. To commemorate the 86th birthday of Maurice Sendak (previously), Maria Popova (previously) has published scans of illustrations Sendak did for an ultra-ultra-rare edition of William Blake's Songs of Innocence.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:42 PM PST - 13 comments

Inge Morath was invited by Robert Capa to become one of the first female members of Magnum and is perhaps best known for her stills in 1960 on the set of The Misfits.
High quality reportage photography, where she met Arthur Miller who was to become her husband.
Not so well known is the conceptual Masks series with Saul Steinberg shot over several years.
posted by adamvasco at 6:34 PM PST - 3 comments

United States Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, Majority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, has lost the Republican primary election in Virginia's 7th Congressional District to Dave Brat, a political newcomer and economics professor at Randolph-Macon College. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 6:25 PM PST - 336 comments

"Why I'm sending 200 copies of Little Brother to a high-school in Pensacola, FL." [boing boing] "The principal of Booker T Washington High in Pensacola FL cancelled the school's One School/One Book summer reading program rather than letting all the kids go through with the previously approved assignment to read Little Brother, the bestselling young adult novel by Cory Doctorow. With Cory and Tor Books' help, the teachers are fighting back." [VIDEO RESPONSE]
posted by Fizz at 6:07 PM PST - 58 comments

Gary Lachman, occult author and ex-Blondie bass player, has just published a new biography of Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World. Excerpts from the book are online here and here. He is interviewed on the Expanding Mind podcast with Erik Davis and Maja D'Aoust here. [more inside]
posted by bukvich at 5:21 PM PST - 38 comments

The Believer takes a longform look at Humboldt County's marijuana cultivation culture. Since the early ’70s, when growing began to replace a foundering timber industry in Humboldt, reliance on the marijuana economy has only increased. By 2012, it was thought that marijuana accounted for one billion of the county’s four-billion-dollar economy. During my stay, I don’t remember seeing a clothing store, bookstore, supermarket, bar, restaurant, supply shop, gas station, repair shop, pharmacy, or burrito shack that wasn’t patronized by someone with direct ties to a pot farm. You could smell the skunk, see the twenties. In parkivng lots, souped-up grower trucks growled by—mostly Toyotas, a status symbol in Humboldt. Somewhere along the way, that back-to-the-land exodus begun in San Francisco some forty years ago, when poor hippies left the city and went north, into the woods, in search of a simpler, cheaper life, their own piece of Arcadia on which food and intoxicants alike could be grown, to offer a thumbnail history—somewhere along the way, that movement morphed into a thriving industry.
posted by porn in the woods at 5:17 PM PST - 18 comments

Wodehouse on Conan Doyle. I have noted before, while reading Right Ho, Jeeves, how much it draws from and parodies the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, the whole book can be read as if Bertie Wooster is Sherlock Holmes, or at least that he imagines himself to be. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 5:02 PM PST - 25 comments

Mesmerizing internal Scientology promotional video - GATII Success Stories
posted by The Whelk at 3:28 PM PST - 229 comments

Author John Higgs explains why we shouldn’t fix typos. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:02 PM PST - 47 comments

When money's tight, humans define 'people like me' as more deserving. [LATimes link, user privacy settings in browser]. 'The recession from which the United States is recovering, unemployment among blacks and Latinos has been deeper and more entrenched; incomes in black and Latino communities have fallen more sharply; and recovery has been slower and far less complete. Labor economists cite a host of structural and institutional reasons for these racial and ethnic disparities - that African Americans, for instance, are more likely to be employed in hard-hit public sector or manufacturing jobs than in business or knowledge-based industries. But new findings from a psychology lab suggest another powerful contributor: in circumstances of scarcity, whites see blacks as blacker and are more likely to identify those of ambiguous or mixed race as black. And given the opportunity to divvy up scarce resources, whites are stingier with those of color than they are to those they identify as white.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 2:45 PM PST - 16 comments

In fact, we have no idea. "LGBT organizations declared foreign agents in one fell swoop, gays being blacklisted by banks, employers, and landlords—welcome to the new reality of being LGBT under Putin." [more inside]
posted by FlyingMonkey at 1:56 PM PST - 33 comments

New wave: 24 photographers changing the way the world sees Russia
posted by KokuRyu at 1:22 PM PST - 8 comments

The Racism Beat - Cord Jefferson writes about the repetitive mental strain of being a writer on racism.
posted by Conspire at 1:21 PM PST - 14 comments

A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand are integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco.

So it turns out many of the prawns on sale at your local supermarket are produced by slave labour.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:04 PM PST - 60 comments

Why should I have to hear about a guy comparing his girlfriend to a dog while I’m buying vegetables? [more inside]
posted by monospace at 11:08 AM PST - 582 comments

How To Catch A Chess Cheater: Ken Regan Finds Moves Out Of Mind [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:07 AM PST - 13 comments

Presdient Obama gave a speech (video, transcript) at the United States Military Academy last month that outlined American foreign policy.
Reaction has been mixed. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:52 AM PST - 55 comments

An interactive visualization of Boston's subway system in February. With it, you can see where trains on the red, blue, and orange lines were at any moment on February 3 were in space and along their paths between stations, among many other things. [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 9:11 AM PST - 29 comments

"Not Alone" is the title of the first report of The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. This report comes after a number of incidents of sexual assault were under-investigated or ignored at numerous college campus' in the US. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:28 AM PST - 115 comments

A year ago, Microsoft was crucified in the press for the PR fiasco of the Xbox One, with rival Sony winning thunderous applause for its PS4 by simply maintaining the status quo. But after doing a 360 180 on its hated policies, Redmond is attempting to close the gap with the most valuable package deal since The Orange Box. A remarkable feat of engineering, Halo: The Master Chief Collection will feature on a single disc the complete HD-remastered campaigns of Halos 1-4 alongside Ridley Scott's Nightfall, the Halo 5 beta, and the holy grail of Xbox gaming: every last one of the series' 100+ multiplayer maps in a single unified matchmaking system incorporating the original engines, gameplay mechanics, and idiosyncrasies of each. Ten years after Halo 2 (and four years after MS shut the taps), IGN suspects a plan by 343 to rekindle (and data-mine) Bungie's magic for an uncertain Halo 5, while Eurogamer welcomes the return of what it calls online FPS's peak. [More reaction: NeoGAF - Ars Technica - Reddit] Bungie, meanwhile, stood with Sony to showcase its upcoming Destiny, the vaunted space epic that will beta this summer before facing its revamped forerunners later this year. More E3 coverage: Microsoft (5min) - Sony (5min) - Nintendo (airing noon EST) - SW: Battlefront - AC: Unity - MGS5: The Phantom Pain - Evolve - No Man's Sky - The Order: 1886 - Sunset Overdrive - Grim Fandango - Bloodborne - Arkham Knight - Scalebound - Mortal Kombat X - The Division - LittleBigPlanet 3 - Inside - Uncharted 4 - Crackdown
posted by Rhaomi at 8:20 AM PST - 175 comments

It says a lot more about America (United States) than food.
posted by rmhsinc at 7:58 AM PST - 38 comments

In 1965, Army Pfc. Pierre Mathieu Van Wissem left two boxes of personal belongings with his Okinawan landlord, Seikichi Tamanaha. “I decided to keep them for him because I know how much they meant to him,” [Tamanaha] said. “All these years, I had some hope that he would come back one of these days to pick them up.” The soldier never returned. But nearly 50 years after the landlord promised he'd keep the boxes safe, he reached out across the world to return them to Van Wissem’s children. From Stars and Stripes: Returned photos reveal a father never known, 50-year-old promise kept.
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:09 AM PST - 12 comments

This week the FDA announced it will not permit American cheesemakers to age cheese on wooden boards, potentially destroying the ability to make or import a wide variety of artisanal cheeses. Despite being legal in the various cheese making states and having been used for hundreds of years, the FDA is cracking down under the Food Safety Modernization Act. A sampling of cheeses impacted: Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Cabot Clothbound, Marieke Feonegreek, Bleu Mont Bandaged Cheddar, along with parmesan, aged cheddar and the only American produced Limburger. [more inside]
posted by Muddler at 6:59 AM PST - 347 comments

Conducting Idina Menzel from the bathroom at Radio City [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:54 AM PST - 37 comments

Finding the Beatles too intense, too lyrical? Try 101 Strings Imagine a person who in the late sixties decided that the Beatles were too intense, too opinionated for them; they loved the music but not the message. That person could get just what they wanted in the form of the 101 Strings
posted by Ferreous at 12:32 AM PST - 63 comments

John Oliver examines the music download purchasing habits of Syria's president, and engineers the momentary catharsis of mildly irritating one of the worst people on the planet. Right Said Fred performs their tribute to Assad.
posted by hippybear at 11:52 PM PST - 17 comments

"If you sit down more than 11 hours a day, one study suggests, you’re 40 percent more likely to die in the next three years than I am. I’m standing up. I’ve been standing up all day. I’ll be standing up all month, in fact, without a break. I expect at the end of that month I’ll be sore but triumphant, glowing with smug enlightenment..."
posted by John Cohen at 9:27 PM PST - 73 comments

Today marks the 25th anniversary of a dark day for Star Trek fandom: the release of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier... ...or to give it its proper name, “The Worst Star Trek Movie That Isn’t Star Trek Into Darkness.” [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 8:30 PM PST - 239 comments

19 year old blogger Some Wonderful Kind of Noise watches the original Star Wars movies for the first time and writes about it. Star Wars. Empire Strikes Back. Return of the Jedi. [more inside]
posted by Sebmojo at 8:22 PM PST - 150 comments

Den of Geek provides a brief survey of rotating sets in film as far back as Royal Wedding in 1951 all the way up to Inception in 2010. In the world of music video, Metallica did their own interesting... ahem, spin on it for "The Memory Remains". The television show "Glee" paid tribute to Royal Wedding with their own rotating room song and dance number. Finally, the Den of Geek article states that such effects require, "intense planning, expensive materials and an army of builders". Nonsense.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:32 PM PST - 10 comments

Throughout the last three decades, Wael Hallaq has emerged as one of the leading scholars of Islamic law in Western academia. He has made major contributions not only to the study of the theory and practice of Islamic law, but to the development of a methodology through which Islamic scholars have been able to confront challenges facing the Islamic legal tradition. Hallaq is thus uniquely placed to address broader questions concerning the moral and intellectual foundations of competing modern projects. With his most recent work, The Impossible State, Hallaq lays bare the power dynamics and political processes at the root of phenomena that are otherwise often examined purely through the lens of the legal. In this interview, the first of a two-part series with him, Hallaq expands upon some of the implications of those arguments and the challenges they pose for the future of intellectual engagements across various traditions. In particular, he addresses the failure of Western intellectuals to engage with scholars in Islamic societies as well as the intellectual and structural challenges facing Muslim scholars. Hallaq also critiques the underlying hegemonic project of Western liberalism and the uncritical adoption of it by some Muslim thinkers. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 6:35 PM PST - 6 comments

Draped in a glittering techni-colour dreamcoat and hiding somewhere behind an animatronic dick-face, it's Anklepants - lord of mutant bass and distorted pop electro.
posted by empath at 5:46 PM PST - 12 comments

The Extraordinary Anti-Nazi Photomontages of John Heartfield, a dadist who collaborated with George Grosz and had a lifelong friend in Brecht.
This is a tribute website from his grandson.
Heartfield pioneered photomontage and inspired Siouxsie and the Banshees Metal Postcard.
Essay from the Getty and a little more.
(Previously ''The Man who Pissed off Hitler.'' but fpp links are dead.)
posted by adamvasco at 5:09 PM PST - 10 comments

Endless Hobbit Anna Repp's illustration of The Hobbit as one continuous scroll, with new artwork added almost every week.
posted by joannemerriam at 4:25 PM PST - 11 comments

In the Indianapolis suburbs, officers said they needed a mine-resistant vehicle to protect against a possible attack by veterans returning from war. A look at the redistribution of surplus tools of combat to state and local law enforcement. (SL NYT)
posted by porn in the woods at 3:37 PM PST - 126 comments

Shit Showreels Say, by Peter Quinn [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 1:52 PM PST - 6 comments

Belushi as Venckman, Bill Murray handing out cash to homeless folks, and a bus full of schoolkids yelling "Dickless!" at William Atherton: on the 30th anniversary of Ghostbusters, here's an informative infographic full of movie trivia.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:46 PM PST - 26 comments

Sumana Harihareswara (Senior Technical Writer for Wikimedia Foundation, member of the Board of Director's of the Ada Initiative, blogger at Geek Feminism, and Metafilter's own brainwane) gave the keynote address at this year's WikiConference in NYC on May 30. She used her experience at Hacker School to talk about, among other things, how to create a community that does not celebrate liberty at the expense of hospitality: If we exclude no one explicitly, we are just excluding a lot of people implicitly. Including people like me. [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 1:09 PM PST - 14 comments

Formerly one of the most dangerous cities in America, Richmond CA reports its lowest homicide rate in 33 years, thanks in part to a program which provides counseling and stipends to the young men most likely to commit violent crimes.
posted by Wavelet at 12:59 PM PST - 29 comments

The Sad, Century-Long History of Terrible Wizard of Oz Movies. Would you like an exhaustive list? Sure you would... [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:26 PM PST - 75 comments

PSY's new music video HANGOVER (ft. Snoop) knows that success is measured in reaction gifs. (slyt)
posted by postcommunism at 11:51 AM PST - 92 comments

We need a theory of jerks. We need such a theory because, first, it can help us achieve a calm, clinical understanding when confronting such a creature in the wild. Imagine the nature-documentary voice-over: ‘Here we see the jerk in his natural environment. Notice how he subtly adjusts his dominance display to the Italian restaurant situation…’ And second – well, I don’t want to say what the second reason is quite yet.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:38 AM PST - 57 comments

The Cartographer Who Mapped Out Gotham City from Smithsonian Magazine. A look at a real-life map of a fictional city. Illustrator Eliot Brown "didn’t just design the city; he designed an implicit history that writers are still exploring."
posted by HonoriaGlossop at 10:16 AM PST - 39 comments

Rik Mayall, English writer, comedian and actor, has died at age 56. [more inside]
posted by Lucinda at 9:57 AM PST - 209 comments

Writer Carrot Quinn is walking from Mexico to Canada for the second time. In 2013, she hiked the Pacific Coast Trail (2,663 miles) from Mexico to Canada. [more inside]
posted by Ideefixe at 8:57 AM PST - 13 comments

Stick Family Feud: "Whether you love them or hate them— and many do despise them—few trends reveal shifting family values in a mobile, personal-branding-obsessed society as do family stick figures."
posted by galvanized unicorn at 7:49 AM PST - 247 comments

The Case Against Sharing: "The sharing economy’s success is inextricably tied to the economic recession, making new American poverty palatable. It’s disaster capitalism. 'Sharing' companies are not embarrassed by this — it appears to be a point of pride." [more inside]
posted by ryanshepard at 7:12 AM PST - 130 comments

Envisioning the American Dream is "a visual remix of the American Dream as pictured in Mid-Century media" that discusses topics such as Man and Machines, Vintage Advice for Cheaters, and Suburbia for Sale, amongst many others.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 7:07 AM PST - 5 comments

In the weeks following Kinkade’s death , his estate tried to protect his brand: the gag order on his mistress and a statement attributing his death to natural causes were among the efforts they made to prevent the public from learning about the seedier side of Kinkade’s life. They didn’t work—but it didn’t matter. The Thomas Kinkade Release Calendar
posted by R. Mutt at 5:57 AM PST - 145 comments

Fractal art has been with us for some time, but to my knowledge there are only two people attempting any serious art criticism of the genre. Both of them live at Orbit Trap, a blog about fractal art, where the authors trace the line that separates "the art folks from the science fair enthusiasts" and occasionally rail against the ubiquity of pretty spirals. Fuh-fuh-fuh ... fractals is Tim Hodkinson's latest round-up of things that caught his eye. Includes a pleasantly seasick video journey through a 3D fractal world plus some magnificent still works and a few of Tim's opinions.
posted by valetta at 5:41 AM PST - 19 comments

But from a method of creating a more informed electorate, the voter packet has come to be seen as a goody bag. Does anyone think that the thousand new Worldcon members who joined after the nominations were announced did so because of a genuine interest in the award? A sizable percentage of them, at least, probably did so in order to get free ebook copies of the entire Wheel of Time series for a mere $50.

Science fiction critic Abigail Nussbaum talks about the expectations the Hugo Awards Voters packet sets for the awards themselves (And also why calling people entitled for being disappointed Orbit didn't include its nominations is wrong).
posted by MartinWisse at 3:48 AM PST - 41 comments

Travel was always desirable to them / And they visited every continent … They considered travel and homeland synonymous / For them, every valley and desert was home. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 2:16 PM PST - 7 comments

I was expecting sexual stuffed animals come to life, but ended up experiencing something completely different. "This weekend I attended Califur, the annual Southern California Furry Convention, and talked to an attendee about misconceptions of the community." [SLBF]
posted by hippybear at 1:10 PM PST - 222 comments

Don JeVore: You Hate Musicals Because You Are Dead Inside.
posted by The Whelk at 12:02 PM PST - 210 comments

You may have heard how sounds travel farther during a temperature inversion, when air near the ground is cooler than the air above. But do you know how this phenomenon is related to the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico? [more inside]
posted by mbrubeck at 11:40 AM PST - 13 comments

The young men and women enlisting in the armed forces now were in pre-school on 9/11. "As a nation we have internalized our longest military conflict; it has suffused the social, political, and cultural body. The war is not something the nation is doing; it's simply something that is." Vox on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from Jessica Lynch to Bowe Bergdahl. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:47 AM PST - 91 comments

A supercomputer has fooled judges a third of the time that it is a 13 year old Russian schoolboy named Eugene Goostman.
posted by 0bvious at 10:45 AM PST - 65 comments

Now you can stop asking.
posted by ssmug at 10:00 AM PST - 103 comments

BODYGOD combines chopped & screwed rock and pop loops with nth-generation VHS sources, often with unexpected emotional weight.

I Believe In Me, So You Believe In You
I Hate Myself
I'm Drunk and High at the Same Time
I Still Think About Her
I'll Always Be There When You Wake
When The Dogs Do Find Her
Burn Out
How Many More Times Can I Say I'm Sorry?
Everybody Seems to Think I'm Lazy

posted by porn in the woods at 9:55 AM PST - 15 comments

The Rise And Fall Of Chuck Blazer, The Man Who Built And Bilked American Soccer
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:45 AM PST - 9 comments

Burritos provide a good way to experiment precisely because they represent a relatively narrow range of experience. There are different burrito styles across the country — more than you might gather if your burrito-eating ambitions have never ventured beyond Taco Bell. But there are fewer parameters to control for when rating burritos than when comparing movies, or doctors, or colleges.
Nathaniel Read ("Nate") Silver is launching a national, 64-restaurant Burrito Bracket
posted by growabrain at 9:28 AM PST - 81 comments

This song (based on the literature of Tolkien) will change your life. Almost Famous - Stairway to Heaven - Deleted Scene. [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 8:39 AM PST - 57 comments

You remember how Jimi Hendrix played the guitar behind his back, and with his teeth, and all that, right? And it was some cool stuff, for sure. But he ain't got nothing on the komuz players of Kyrgyzstan. Nuh-uh. They turn that instrument every which way but loose.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:41 AM PST - 25 comments

A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I's feet and wetting they. [more inside]
posted by infinitewindow at 11:01 PM PST - 33 comments

The 24 worst places on Earth for someone with acrophobia.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:43 PM PST - 119 comments

Small Cool 2014, Apartment Therapy's 10th Annual Smallest Coolest Home Contest (previously), is in full swing. The first round of voting is now open and will continue until June 13th. Voting for the grand prize will take place June 17 - June 18. To be considered, homes must be under 1000 sq ft. Awards are given out in five categories:

• Teeny-Tiny (400 sq ft and under)
• Tiny (400-600 sq ft)
• Little (600 - 800 sq ft)
• Small (800-1000 sq ft)
• International (under 1000 sq ft).

Previous year's winners and entries: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005-2006
posted by Room 641-A at 6:25 PM PST - 63 comments

Beautiful, hopeful newfound photos of the protests at Tiananmen Square
posted by Mistress at 5:35 PM PST - 50 comments

From the alto flute, heard from time to time in Romantic classical music, to the hyperbass flute, which makes a sound like a star dying or being born, I give you: the low flutes. [more inside]
posted by KathrynT at 2:10 PM PST - 27 comments

To be gay, Christian and black in Harlem West African asylum seekers face a new kind of discrimination in the US
posted by infini at 2:03 PM PST - 7 comments

Petittube is a Youtube video aggregator that shows you videos with 50 views or less. [possibly NSFW results]
posted by Taft at 2:02 PM PST - 25 comments

The Seattle Symphony's "Sonic Evolution" program links up the Symphony with other Seattle area artists. Last night, the hip players at the Seattle teamed up with Sir Mix-a-Lot for what Mix described as '"Orchestral Movements from the Hood" Night'. The results are on youtube: Posse on Broadway and Baby Got Back
posted by rmd1023 at 1:26 PM PST - 21 comments

The US Secret Service, the federal law enforcement agency tasked with protecting the safety of current and former national leaders and their families, visiting heads of state, and others, posted a work order on Monday seeking the development of social media analytics software capable of detecting sarcasm online.
posted by chavenet at 1:21 PM PST - 73 comments

"Every history geek has some sort of fascination with the Mitfords. It’s like being an American politics nerd and obsessing over the Kennedys, it’s practically required." -- Bibliodaze ranks the Mitford sisters, from best to worst.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:28 PM PST - 48 comments

The Running of the Goats (SLYT)
posted by Doktor Zed at 11:10 AM PST - 35 comments

Lockheed Martin is in a race with SpaceX who recently made a big splash with 3D printed spacecraft parts. Lockheed shows its vision (video) for a next generation 3D printer, capable of printing not just parts but an entire plane as a print-job (c.f. previously war robots). This technology may perhaps combine with a new class of fractal nano supermaterials, which are stronger than steel but nearly as light as air, the promise to create mass produced ultra-light vehicles, aircraft and other things. [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 10:37 AM PST - 34 comments

The unlikely life of Pig the dog. "We assumed that by now, she would be suffocating under her own organs, or something like that, because of her shape."
posted by grobstein at 9:59 AM PST - 27 comments

The Articulatory IPA: voiced bilabial plosive, voiceless alveolar fricative, onset r coda l, and more [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:40 AM PST - 7 comments

Sweetness is code for feminine. It’s code for not being able to handle “reality” and having to cover it up.
posted by xingcat at 8:06 AM PST - 234 comments

In the journal Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, the proposition paper 'Publisher, be damned! from price gouging to the open road' (replicated) criticises the large profits made by commercial publishers on the back of academics’ labours, and the failure of the Finch report on open access to address them. After a lengthy delay, the paper was eventually published, but only with a large disclaimer from the publishers (Taylor and Francis) and after a stand-off with the editorial board. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 3:58 AM PST - 36 comments

With Google+, it became clear that we were all little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data. The rise and fall of Google+ once again engenders strong feelings, this time in Violet Blue.
posted by telstar at 3:19 AM PST - 104 comments

Baby elk Scoop 'n' Run. Banff National Park personnel move an urban elk calf to a more isolated spot so its mother won't feel the need to keep charging at people. (SLYT)
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 1:02 AM PST - 27 comments

On March 5th, the Associated Press asked: “What are seemingly jet-propelled cats and birds doing in a 16th century German artillery manual?” It was a good question. [...] European History People sent burning pigs stampeding toward their neighbors regularly and would put a rooster on trial for real actually with a lawyer and everything if someone said it laid an egg without a yolk. If someone like that was soberly strapping a rocket to a cat and you interrupted them in their cat-to-rocket-strapping-room they’d look up like “Yeah?” and they would have this big pinky white person expression on their face like it wasn’t even a little bit weird. [more inside]
posted by 23 at 9:19 PM PST - 33 comments

The purpose of this compilation was to take all the JD tracks known to be set at the incorrect pitches and correct. (SLYT)
posted by CrowthorneRoad at 9:03 PM PST - 31 comments

How the US Postal Service works offers a glimpse into the massive automation behind the AFCS (Advanced Facer Canceller System) which helps deliver 150 million of pieces of mail daily
posted by growabrain at 8:57 PM PST - 31 comments

Using a unique animation technique involving traditional animation cels and his iphone 5s, Hombre_mcsteez turns everyday life into an odd creature infested cartoon universe. (yt) [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 7:08 PM PST - 17 comments

Claire Meyer and Alan Linic, a twentysomething couple in Chicago, have been keeping a public record of every fight they have fought since August of 2013.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 6:48 PM PST - 73 comments

Ever wondered just how an episode of The Price is Right gets pulled off? How the right things are behind the right doors at the right time? How the contestants get picked? The show recently recorded a pretty awesome behind-the-scenes look at how it all comes together.
posted by rollbiz at 6:29 PM PST - 32 comments

Before HyperCard, before info, before ENQUIRE, the word "hypertext" was coined by Ted Nelson, who founded his ambitious hypertext project Project Xanadu, in 1960. It has been software's oldest vaporware (older, even, than "vaporware"). It was released today. [more inside]
posted by Zed at 5:28 PM PST - 49 comments

This year's Women's Prize For Fiction has been won by A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride. [more inside]
posted by dng at 4:41 PM PST - 7 comments

The United States Chemical Safety Board and Hazard Investigation Board, an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that investigates the cause of chemical accidents (About the CSB Video (14 minutes), website) has released a well-made animated video (11 minutes) detailing the root cause of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in conjunction with a two-volume draft report about the disaster. This is just the latest in a series of informative and fascinating safety videos released by the CSB. [more inside]
posted by Small Dollar at 4:13 PM PST - 18 comments

”Practicing openness and making oneself radically vulnerable is not only scary, it is the opposite of what we are taught to do within the logic of the contemporary university (and society more generally). Our marginalization, meager pay and lack of job security, along with the attacks on professors by students and the administration’s refusal to back up even tenured professors, all contribute to a culture of paranoia and enmity (among administration and faculty, among tenure-track faculty and adjuncts, among professors and students). Even when we manage to maintain our commitment to our students (and we do), the university seeks to capture this affective relationship and use it to further exploit us when we ask for fair wages or better conditions with the reprimand that ‘we are doing this for the students and not the money.’ Just as the practitioners of modernity gutted the erotic and sold us the pornographic, administrators attempt to gut the material and affective conditions of teaching and sell us ‘passion.’” Dr Priya J. Shah: "My Last Day as a Professor."
posted by koeselitz at 4:08 PM PST - 40 comments

WW2 & The Origins Of Radar :World War II led to an explosion of new technologies that would have profound effects in the postwar period. Although advanced Nazi aircraft, guided weapons, and long-range rockets are well known, in reality the Allies led the Germans in many fields, and not only had more resources to draw from but were much better organized to exploit their new inventions. The atomic bomb is the most spectacular example of Allied technical superiority, but just as significantly, the Allies developed radar and other new "electronic warfare" technologies at a rate that left the Axis in the dust. Winston Churchill called the race for electronic superiority the "Wizard War". This document provides a history of the Wizard War.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 4:05 PM PST - 13 comments

A federal judge has overturned Wisconsin's ban on same sex marriage. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:15 PM PST - 123 comments

The terrible (awesome?) fan-fic crossover story idea generator.
posted by The Whelk at 2:03 PM PST - 76 comments

How do you destroy the aesthetic integrity of the world's fourteenth tallest building? All you need are five massive letters.
posted by Iridic at 1:28 PM PST - 76 comments

What hospitals can learn from flight safety measures. After his wife died due to a mistake during a very simple procedure, Martin Bromiley decided to use his pilot experience to examine how such mistakes can be avoided in the future. It involves changing the whole hierarchy of the hospital environment.
posted by JanetLand at 1:24 PM PST - 26 comments

The United States is dealing with a booming population and shortage of good rangeland to raise cattle, paired with an increase in foreign demand for beef, resulting in a spike in the cost of meat. Frederick Burnham and Fritz Duquesne, formerly sworn enemies, put aside their grievances to answer the meat question, and an unrelated invasion of the Brazilian Water Hyacinth in one fell swoop with the the introduction of African Hippopotamuses to the bayous of Louisiana. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:42 PM PST - 44 comments

The award-winning Australian television series McLeod's Daughters aired from 2001 – 2009. A drama, the story begins by following the lives of half sisters Claire and Tess McLeod, reunited after they inherit a vast outback cattle farm (“Drover’s Run”), that has been handed down through the men in their family for generations. 224 episodes were produced, and all are available on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:36 PM PST - 11 comments

50 photos de la Libération de Paris se fondent dans le présent. [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 12:02 PM PST - 16 comments

In 1992, the then-young independent British record label Warp Records launched a series entitled Artificial Intelligence. A foray into what the label called “electronic listening music”, the seminal chain of albums forever altered the way electronic music was viewed, written, and heard. At the time, most of the electronic music known to the public was club/rave/dance music. Though this had it’s place, Warp’s founders, Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell, had a vision of electronic music that could be listened to and enjoyed rather than only dance to.

Warp's Artificial Intelligence series revisted.
posted by jontyjago at 11:39 AM PST - 30 comments

Flickr user Missing Brick recreates scenes from Aliens (and a few more) with Lego minifigs.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:36 AM PST - 8 comments

Before Game of Thrones (before Xena even), D&D geeks who wanted to see prime time TV shows with castles and swords and such were mostly out of luck. However, if one looks deep into the ranks of one-season-wonders, one will find the curious artifact from 1992 called Covington Cross. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:00 AM PST - 30 comments

50 background paintings from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? [via]
posted by brundlefly at 10:56 AM PST - 28 comments

A week later she got back to me and said do you really want all of these deaths? I said I do. She told me I would be charged for each record. Then she asked me did I realize the enormity of the numbers of deaths there?”

The registrar came back with a list of 796 children. “I could not believe it. I was dumbfounded and deeply upset,” says Corless. “There and then I said this isn’t right. There’s nothing on the ground there to mark the grave, there’s nothing to say it’s a massive children’s graveyard. It’s laid abandoned like that since it was closed in 1961.”

It had long been known children had died in the Mother and Baby home for "fallen women" in Tuan Galway, but it was not until local historian Catherine Corless started investigating that it became clear that between 1925 and 1961, 800 children were buried in a mass grave on the site, possibly inside a septic tank. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 10:21 AM PST - 116 comments

Dumbsto.re [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:29 AM PST - 22 comments

Harry Leslie Smith describes his despair at the coalition's dismantling of the welfare state
posted by Ned G at 8:58 AM PST - 39 comments

Why Isn't Delonte West in the NBA? David Haglund takes a detailed look at the treatment and perception of mental illness and "crazy" behavior in the NBA and in the sports world at large. [more inside]
posted by sallybrown at 7:59 AM PST - 12 comments

Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 7:25 AM PST - 56 comments

Vin Scully: voice of the Dodgers for 64 years "My idea is that I'm sitting next to the listener in the ballpark, and we're just watching the game," Scully says. "Sometimes, our conversation leaves the game. It might be a little bit about the weather we're enduring or enjoying. It might be personal relationships, which would involve a player. The game is just one long conversation and I'm anticipating that, and I will say things like ‘Did you know that?' or ‘You're probably wondering why.' I'm really just conversing rather than just doing play-by-play. I never thought of myself as having a style. I don't use key words. And the best thing I do? I shut up."
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 7:09 AM PST - 20 comments

Alain Resnais, the French filmmaker who helped introduce literary modernism to the movies and became an international art-house star with nonlinear narrative films like “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad,” died on [March 1] in Paris. He was 91. NYTimes Obit [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 6:51 AM PST - 28 comments

Experience D-Day like your grandparents did, if they weren't in the military on June 6, 1944. Archive.org has the the complete D-Day broadcast from CBS radio.
posted by COD at 4:58 AM PST - 30 comments

Loafing with puffins. RSPB staff can be isolated for up to three weeks at a time on tiny Coquet Island, home to approximately 44,000 nesting seabirds, including rare terns, and puffins. Wardens Paul Morrison and Wesley Davis showed the BBC's Helen Mark around, and described their conservation work and what they get up to on rainy days.
"They look very Glam Rock but I have a suspicion it's going to be Abstract Jazz."
posted by Catch at 10:08 PM PST - 10 comments

Anatomy of a failure, with vampires. Icelandic Eve-creator CCP's World of Darkness MMO was shut down recently. This Guardian article gives a behind-the-scenes rubberneck at what went wrong.
posted by Sebmojo at 7:42 PM PST - 77 comments

Terrifying hail storm aftermath photos. Via r/weather.
posted by Bee'sWing at 7:11 PM PST - 58 comments

Tim Geithner says he doesn't know how he went from a "mediocre student" to leading the response to the "largest destruction of GDP in world history." His resume highlights were from addressing economic crises in developing countries in ways that correlated strongly to increasing poverty and reducing growth. His main response to critics of his "bailout the top" approach is that disaster was the only alternative.
posted by blankdawn at 5:59 PM PST - 39 comments

Fabricator, garage inventor, and enthusiam personified, Colin Furze decided to make some of the neater aspects of the X-Men universe a little more real. [previously] [more inside]
posted by quin at 4:48 PM PST - 15 comments

Alinea was the first restaurant I was ever involved in and our own managers viewed me as an outsider to hospitality – and in many ways rightly so. When I said, “We should just sell tickets,” it was mostly laughed off completely. The attitude was – that’s not fine dining, that’s not hospitality, that’s not soigné. (...) I assumed at the time, about a year before we opened, that I would simply adopt the ticketing software from a theater system, sports ticketing software, or event tickets to use at Next. But it was immediately clear that none of these would work. Restaurants have a very different type of seating template than a theater show or sporting event. None of the ticket software systems met even half of our needs.
posted by un petit cadeau at 4:14 PM PST - 46 comments

@SavedYouAClick brings a new functionality to the 'joke twitter account' by retweeting click-baity headlines and spoiling them with well-under-140-character explanations:
...Sending text messages. RT @Upworthy: They could've waited till they got home. Doing it in a car is SO not OK.
...A piano. RT @HuffingtonPost: You won't believe what just washed up in the East River
...The article doesn't answer this. @alistdaily: How #Beyonce became a #marketing star
...Use 2005 as your baseline instead of 2014. RT @Slate: This one weird trick will help you cut carbon emissions overnight
...RT That's me! @jackshafer: New @ReutersOpinion: The guy who reads crap on the Web so you don’t have to
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:51 PM PST - 41 comments

surviving in new york city, 5 cents at a time
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 2:59 PM PST - 29 comments

“I’ve used the contemporary archaeology of Olompali to address the concept of stereotype, in this case, what we generally consider to be the ‘hippie,’" - California state archaeologist, E. Breck Parkman has published a paper analyzing the diversity of vinyl records excavated from the ruins of Rancho Olompali in Marin County, California. The site, formerly closely associated with the Grateful Dead, was the home of the Chosen Family commune from 1967 to 1969. The commune and the mansion both met their end in '69, razed by an electrical fire. [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:57 PM PST - 9 comments

Yes, Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Young Adult Books (SLSlate)
posted by box at 2:12 PM PST - 453 comments

The second-largest religion in each state
Christianity is by far the largest religion in the United States; more than three-quarters of Americans identify as Christians. A little more than half of us identify as Protestants, about 23 percent as Catholic and about 2 percent as Mormon. But what about the rest of us?
posted by davidstandaford at 1:30 PM PST - 103 comments

Somebody is providing guest art for this week's Pearls Before Swine strips. Somebody who can draw a fantastic scene of Martian robotic destruction. Somebody who hasn't drawn a comic strip in 19 years?
posted by rouftop at 12:58 PM PST - 136 comments

The Awl: How to make a salad without all those dumb leaves
posted by The Whelk at 12:52 PM PST - 107 comments

Butter Ya'Self (Vimeo; YouTube) is "basically ... the story of Drake and Lil’ Wayne [as told with an anthropomorphic banana, hot dog bun, and stick of butter]. ButterKrust is 100% based on Wayne – Nana Splits isn’t based on anyone real but his relationship to ButterKrust is based on Drake’s relationship to Lil’ Wayne. The most important thing I wanted to express in this video is the relationship between them, how tight they are and how much Nana Splits looks up to ButterKrust." That's the story from Julian Petschek, who is studying at The California Institute of the Arts. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:38 PM PST - 2 comments

Nintendo would like to remind you that the Year of Luigi isn't over. And how could it be, when the best part of Mario Kart 8 might just be Luigi's Death Stare? Spawning a number of gifs, videos, remixes, oh so many parodies, and a subreddit (r/LuigiDeathStares) already more popular than r/MarioKart, Luigi and his angry eyebrows are having a moment.
posted by 2bucksplus at 12:22 PM PST - 60 comments

"It was the dark ages of American soccer, with the United States preparing to host a World Cup for a sport that its public had virtually no common appreciation for. Since the collapse of the North American Soccer League in the 1980s, the country didn’t even have a professional top division – Major League Soccer was a mere glimmer in Doug Logan’s eye. It was a time when the notion that airing football matches in the US could be a viable, lucrative endeavour received “zero respect”, in Keane’s words, from broadcasters. Burdened by extortionate broadcasting agreements with pay-per-view carriers, Keane would often record European matches for diehard fans who had no idea which teams won over the weekend."
posted by marienbad at 12:21 PM PST - 21 comments

"Elephants are obviously amazing, or rather, they are obvious receptacles for our amazement, because they seem to be a lot like us. They live about as long as we do. They understand it when we point at things, which our nearest living evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, doesn’t really. They can unlock locks with their trunks. They recognize themselves in mirrors. They are socially sophisticated. They stay with the same herds for life, or the cows do, anyway. They mourn their dead. They like getting drunk. When an elephant keels over, its friends sometimes break their tusks trying to get it to stand up again. They bury their dead. They bear grudges against people who’ve hurt them, and sometimes go on revenge campaigns. They cry. So why would you want to put a bullet in one?" ... Journalist Wells Tower accompanied one of Botswana's final elephant hunts. This article contains graphic content of an elephant hunt which some may find disturbing.
posted by zarq at 12:13 PM PST - 36 comments

Celebrate the (admittedly still in-progress) first millennium of American awesomeness on July 4, with the release of a new comedy-music benefit compilation titled 2776: A Millennium of American Asskickery. Proceeds go to OneKid OneWorld. The album tells the story of America's past, present and apocalyptic future. Put together by Daily Show writer Rob Kutner, Tonight Show writer Joel Moss Levinson, and Steven Levinson, the album features a stacked roster of indie musicians and comedians, including Will Forte, Aubrey Plaza, Patton Oswalt, Aimee Mann, The Sklar Brothers, Reggie Watts, Right Said Fred with Reggie Watts and Mayim Bialik, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog with The Rebirth Brass Band, Maria Bamford & Jonathan Katz, Andrew WK, Bobcat Goldthwait & Sally Timms, Paul F. Tompkins, Yo La Tengo with Ira Glass and Eugene Mirman, Neko Case & Kelly Hogan and more... [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:50 AM PST - 2 comments

Today, June 5, would be the 70th anniversary of D-Day if not for the last-minute prognostication of British meteorologist James Stagg. The planners of the Normandy landings originally designated June 5, 1944 as D-Day, basing their decision on a favorable combination of tide patterns and a full moon, which would help with pilot visibility. On the evening of June 4, however, Royal Air Force meteorologist Captain James Stagg met with Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower with a dire last-minute warning: a large storm brewing just north of Scotland would bring heavy winds, turbulent seas, and thick cloud cover over the English Channel. Ike's decision to change the invasion to June 6, on the advice of a lone meteorologist practicing an emergent and unreliable science, may have been the turning point of the war. Historian John Ross, author of The Forecast for D-Day and the Weatherman Behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble, contends, "Had Ike listened to his countrymen's predictions and launched D-day on June 5, it would have failed with catastrophic consequences for the Western Allies and world history."
posted by eitan at 11:00 AM PST - 40 comments

"In Silicon Valley, where The Work of creating The Future is sacrosanct, the suggestion that there might be something not entirely normal about this—that it might be a little weird that investors are sinking millions of dollars into a laundry company they had been introduced to over email that doesn't even do laundry; that maybe you don’t really need engineers to do what is essentially a minor household chore—would be taken as blasphemy."
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 10:44 AM PST - 215 comments

"Earlier this year a conservator at the Hamilton Kerr Institute made a surprising discovery while working on a 17th-century painting owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum. As Shan Kuang cleaned the surface, she revealed the beached whale that had been the intended focus of the composition."
posted by brundlefly at 9:59 AM PST - 37 comments

Pat Perry's surreal sketchbook and surreal art [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:43 AM PST - 7 comments

This Hotline Miami 2 trailer has insipred this Source Filmmaker remake of the same trailer with TF2 characters. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:17 AM PST - 11 comments

Study finds strong evidence for discriminatory intent behind voter ID laws State legislators who support voter ID laws are motivated in no small part by racial bias, according to a new study from the University of Southern California. The study finds strong evidence that "discriminatory intent underlies legislative support for voter identification laws." [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:11 AM PST - 51 comments

Before Rockwell, a Gay Artist Defined the Perfect American Male. [more inside]
posted by bibliogrrl at 9:00 AM PST - 42 comments

The challenge of adding new subterranean floors to London houses has become a highly lucrative business. The difficulty is in getting the digger out again. To construct a no-expense-spared new basement, the digger has to go so deep into the London earth that it is unable to drive out again. What could be done?
posted by Chrysostom at 8:08 AM PST - 80 comments

The video for Perturbator's (previously) She is Young She is Beautiful is an amalgam of Gothic horror, cyberpunk science-fiction, late 80s anime aesthetics, post-apocalytpic Miami and the best parts of b-movie cinema. All done up in a pixel art style reminiscent of the classic Out of This World (recently) series of adventure games.
posted by codacorolla at 7:50 AM PST - 23 comments

Terminator 2 by way of Grand Theft Auto V (found via AV Club)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:44 AM PST - 3 comments

Japanese kids house dancing (SLYT) Does exactly what it says on the tin.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 7:23 AM PST - 9 comments

In August, Lego will launch a new line depicting women scientists, that will include an astronomer with a telescope, a paleontologist with a dinosaur skeleton and a chemist in a lab. The idea for the set was submitted by Dr. Ellen Kooijman, a geochemist in Sweden. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:20 AM PST - 44 comments

That time Wolverine teamed up with "celebrity" chef Chris Cosentino and made fun of vegetarians.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:16 AM PST - 27 comments

The day I left my son in the car
posted by flabdablet at 6:02 AM PST - 507 comments

“Hindus are, on average, richer and more educated than Muslims. But oddly, the child mortality rate for Hindus is much higher. All observable factors say Hindus should fare better, but they don't. Economists refer to this as the Muslim mortality puzzle. In a new study, researchers believe that they may have found a solution to the puzzle. And, surprisingly, the solution lies in a single factor – open defecation.” [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 5:56 AM PST - 32 comments

The Antikythera mechanism (wiki), the world's oldest computing device, has fascinated mankind since it was discovered by sponge divers in 1900. Modern technology has revealed much of how the mechanism works, but there is still plenty of mystery surrounding the artefact. One example is "Fragment D", which doesn't fit in with the rest of the recovered pieces. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is setting up an expedition to explore the wreck, this time using a nifty hi-tech exosuit, eliminating many of the disadvantages of using regular diving equipment or remotely operated submersibles. The hope is to recover a hypothetical second mechanism, in addition to the other valuable archaeological finds still waiting at the shipwreck site.
posted by Harald74 at 3:55 AM PST - 34 comments

While Australian public TV channels ABC2 and SBS2 contemplate a possible merger, on their official Twitter accounts sparks fly.
posted by divabat at 9:45 PM PST - 18 comments

Personal electronic warfare? Glasshole.sh detects any nearby Google Glass trying to use wifi and disconnects it. In a networked world, it renders you invisible.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:03 PM PST - 218 comments

Darren Aronofsky is developing Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam) as an HBO series. Atwood says on Twitter that she's "met+ brainstormed with the Team and they're terrific!" Aronofsky had signed on with HBO in January.
posted by davidjmcgee at 5:13 PM PST - 72 comments

I only agreed to do it because I thought it wouldn't happen. Twenty-one albums in 21 nights? More than 270 songs? Are you nuts? Sure, let's do it.

In May and June 2008, Sparks celebrated what was nearly their 40th year as a band with an astonishing three-week concert series: every night, they performed one of their then-21 albums in its entirety, ending with the just-released Exotic Creatures of the Deep. Unlike most groups that formed in 1969, Sparks has kept themselves appealing and intriguing through a series of reinventions that saw them playing glam rock and disco, new wave and a couple varieties of synthpop. Unusually for a band in its third decade, 2002 saw a critically-acclaimed near-complete reinvention of their musical approach, one that emphasized minimalist layering, unusual (and hilarious) genre juxtapositions [note: kitties], and unusually clever and sinister approaches to lyricism. 21x21, then, was a virtuosic tribute to a virtuosic band, one whose appeal was far, far more than surface deep. Which is why, thank God, there is... [more inside]
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:13 PM PST - 55 comments

Marcos stepping down demonstrates the strength of this autonomous community. On May 2, 2014, José Luis Solís López, better known as Galeano was murdered in the community of La Realidad in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Galeano was murdered by three gunshots after he, unarmed, was surrounded by paramilitary troops and refused to surrender. The attack took place on the eve of a meeting that the Zapatistas had planned to hold with other indigenous organizations and indigenous people of Mexico during which spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos had planned possibly to reappear after a public absence of nearly six years. During the attack, a number of people were injured, and a Zapatista school and health clinic in La Realidad, both of which were symbols of the movement’s autonomy, were destroyed. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 5:09 PM PST - 14 comments

Tom Smucker, one of the first wave of rock writers, gives The Beach Boys Smiley Smile a close listen.
posted by sleepy pete at 5:07 PM PST - 11 comments

After the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canadian prostitution laws (previously), the Conservative Party has introduced new measures that would legalize the sale of sex, but that also criminalize the purchase of sex or soliciting in public, print or online. [more inside]
posted by Reversible Diamond-Encrusted Ermine Codpiece at 4:58 PM PST - 38 comments

Apple's WWDC keynote showcased some of the upcoming advancement in their platform, but let's take time to reflect on The future that everyone forgot. Chris DeSalvo, formerly of Danger, talks about the Hiptop/Sidekick and what they did. Such as in 2004 they created a GameBoy Advance + Hiptop phone that never shipped. Chris also went onto Google, worked on Android, and penned another piece of phone-lore: The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android
posted by wcfields at 2:07 PM PST - 24 comments

A study (pdf) released by the nonprofit Stop Street Harassment shows that 65% of American women have experienced some form of street harassment – 41% of women were subject to physically aggressive harassment in public like being flashed or fondled. Men also report being harassed (and men who identified as LGBT were much more likely to be harassed than heterosexual men). No matter who was being harassed, men were most likely to be the harassers.
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 2:05 PM PST - 152 comments

What If the Best Way to End Drunk Driving Is to End Driving?
posted by desjardins at 2:01 PM PST - 80 comments

65 to 70 million U.S. adults, 3 or 4 of every 10, have an arrest or conviction record, greatly reducing their chances of getting a job, if they even get an interview, as many job applications ask applicants to check a box if they have a criminal record. "Ban the Box" is the slogan used by groups who are trying to counter this practice. The ban is spreading with cities and states around the country "banning the box" from government job applications, and some jurisdictions are forcing private employers to ban the question, too. A few major companies have removed such questions from their applications ahead of the local and state requirements, with Target following Wal-Mart's decision (previously).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:35 PM PST - 65 comments

New York Times editorialist Maureen Dowd traveled to Denver to try some THC-laced cookies. Her experience was unpleasant. [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:28 PM PST - 254 comments

Last year, Sophie's "Bipp" came out and blew a bunch of people's minds. It was XLR8R's best track of 2013 ("On a very basic level, it's almost impossible to define exactly (or even approximately) what 'Bipp' is.") Now the mysterious Sophie is going to be working with equally unusual J-pop star Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (of "PONPONPON" fame/notoriety), pointing toward something singular and unprecedented on the horizon. On some level "Bipp" might be a pop manifesto of sorts, or a distilled blueprint for the future - global and k-/j-pop influenced, strange and disorienting, candy-coated and synthetic to an uncomfortably garish extent. A lot of people are wondering what happens next. Well, a post-Bipp (or post-ringtone) era might be underway: enter A.G. Cook, Hannah Diamond, and the rest of the shadowy collective PC Music. [more inside]
posted by naju at 12:13 PM PST - 48 comments

The 1974 Cleveland Indians baseball team "were a smorgasbord of mediocre and forgettable talent playing in an open-air mausoleum" where 85% of the seats at home games went unsold. So the Indians tried to drum up business with a "10-Cent Beer Night" promotion. What could possibly go wrong? The final tally, 40 years ago this evening: 25,134 fans in attendance. 60,000 Genesee beers at 10¢ each. 50 cops. 19 streakers. 7 emergency room injuries. 9 arrests. 2 bare moons. 2 bouncing breasts and 1 sportswriter, punched in the jaw. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:04 PM PST - 28 comments

Vinkensport (finch sport), or vinkenzetting (finch sitting) is a Belgian, primarily Flemish, sport involving a box, a bird, and a counting stick. The bird that sings the most times in an hour wins. Here is a short and somewhat doubtful documentary.
posted by hydrophonic at 11:16 AM PST - 9 comments

A Linguist on the Story of Gendered Pronouns. Gretchen McCulloch talks about why we have pronouns, why gender is a thing in English, and how gender is a thing in other languages. [more inside]
posted by clavicle at 11:04 AM PST - 110 comments

Joanna Piacenza tackles difficulties she sees in the American conception of Buddhism. She was spurred out of writing silence several months ago by Time Magazine choosing for the second time in a decade to sell their magazine with a consumerist representation of Buddhism depicted on their cover with an pretty and ethereal looking white woman. Today, she published an article in First Things on why she believes Buddhism can't be just "an add-on: an energy boost in your spiritual smoothie," but is a religion and the American attitudes that she sees as enabling this misconception.
posted by Jahaza at 10:26 AM PST - 125 comments

Cable TV apps (aka 'TV Everywhere') are soaring in popularity, according to the Adobe Digital Index.
posted by xowie at 10:25 AM PST - 45 comments

In a world On May 30th the 15th Annual Golden Trailer Awards were handed out in Beverly Hills, CA. There are a total of 75 categories; the 17 top awards were handed out live at the sold-out show and are linked below the fold. [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 10:22 AM PST - 11 comments

We join the action in the quarter finals , where the line up is as follows: Croatia v Spain, Bosnia v Italy, Brazil v Argentina, and Belgium v Chile, in The Guardian's World Cup of World Cup 2014 songs, as voted for by Guardian readers.
posted by marienbad at 9:54 AM PST - 13 comments

He tells you he is one of the martyrs now. He tells you it is not safe for you to stay in your apartment, that soldiers may come soon. At any moment. You agree. It is time to go. You don't have the leisure to cry now over Ali's death now but you are eternally saddened. You pack only the most essential belongings for yourself, Emad and Yara. Before you head down the stairs with your children, you take one last look back at your home and whisper, xaatrak to yourself. Goodbye.

1,000 Days of Syria is a "choose your own adventure" historical fiction newsgame, in which you live the first 1,000 days of the Syrian conflict through the eyes of one of three optional characters. Guardian article, wiki, trailer. [more inside]
posted by alon at 9:15 AM PST - 3 comments

Borrowed words in English: tracing the changing patterns [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:57 AM PST - 2 comments

From Journey to Beyoncé: The 150 Greatest Schlock Songs Ever [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 8:51 AM PST - 116 comments

The U.K. newspaper The Guardian combines photos from today and D-Day to show what's happened on and around the D-Day landing beaches in the seventy years since. [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 8:30 AM PST - 22 comments

Interview with David Graeber Why do the least productive people get paid the most money? What ever happened to the big increase in leisure that everyone was expecting 50 years ago? Graeber tells us. [more inside]
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:02 AM PST - 130 comments

James Somers thinks you’re using the wrong dictionary.

In 1807, [Noah Webster] started writing a dictionary, which he called, boldly,An American Dictionary of the English Language. He wanted it to be comprehensive, authoritative. Think of that: a man sits down, aiming to capture his language whole. Dictionaries today are not written this way. In fact it’d be strange even to say that they’re written. They are built by a large team, less a work of art than of engineering. When you read an entry you don’t get the sense that a person labored at his desk, alone, trying to put the essence of that word into words. That is, you don’t get a sense, the way you do from a good novel, that there was another mind as alive as yours on the other side of the page.

posted by thursdaystoo at 7:57 AM PST - 27 comments