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In this, the fifth NVArt competition, artists from all over the world are challenged to create vehicle designs for a future on the move ... transport in the style of Syd Mead. - Entries, Honorable Mentions, Winners. (via)
posted by Artw at 10:40 PM PST - 6 comments

For the past month or so I've been daily watching YouTube episodes about Mike "LionKing"'s 2008 hike across the USA on the American Discovery Trail. There are 66 episodes (4-8 min ea) which is a lot and probably difficult to absorb in a sitting or day, but if you spread it out, you'll get the impression a long haul experience from Delaware to California, w/out the sore feet. He is the first to hike the entire trail non-stop, including both parts of the mid-country loop.
posted by stbalbach at 9:54 PM PST - 9 comments

BEER CAMP! (slbierstube)
posted by Danf at 8:33 PM PST - 7 comments

How Ink Is Made is a visually stunning, SLYT look at the involved, far-more-physical-than-I-would've-thought ink-making process.
posted by disillusioned at 6:41 PM PST - 73 comments

Have you been thinking about what to do with all the leaves that have fallen in your yard? Try leaf art.
posted by Xurando at 4:55 PM PST - 19 comments

Guster's video "Do You Love Me [also YouTube]", with bonus footage: treatment proposal, abandoned concept, working on a frame 168, in the studio. "Do You Love Me" has been chosen as this week's iTunes free video download [iTunes Music Store link]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:33 PM PST - 26 comments

The Neo-Samurai (previously) is back! Please enjoy fabled MMArtist Genki Sudo's music video Mind Shift, choreographed with his group World Order. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 2:52 PM PST - 19 comments

Mefites love type foundries. Here are some more. Typeplus | Klim Type Foundry | Process Type Foundry | Typejockeys | Village | Darden Studio | Bold Monday | Hand Made Font | SMeltery | Reserves | righttype | OurType | Colophone Foundry
posted by netbros at 2:03 PM PST - 20 comments

The Beatles in German: "Sie liebt dich" ("She Loves You"); "Komm gib mir deine Hand" ("I Want to Hold Your Hand"); "Geh raus" (quick and dirty rendering of "Get Back"); "Mein Herz ist bei dir nur" (Tony Sheridan and the Beat Boys' version of "My Bonnie".) [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 1:36 PM PST - 62 comments

Starlet Showcase
posted by Joe Beese at 12:57 PM PST - 18 comments

NOM Exposed collects information about the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a secretive front group for the Mormon and Catholic churches which funds other front groups across the country, in their fight against recognition of same-sex marriage rights in the United States. NOM Exposed pulls together biographies about the leadership behind the organization, the ties to extremist religious and other groups, the money trail and the shadowy outfits where the cash leads, the organization's ethical, campaign finance, and other legal violations across the country (such as that pointed to here), and various propaganda that NOM uses to spread its message.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:08 PM PST - 91 comments

Open House New York is one week away. Next weekend in New York City, there will be hundreds of talks, tours, and open houses in places that are normally not so accessible to the public. See the listings here. The good ones book fast.
posted by pollex at 11:28 AM PST - 19 comments

Oak Reed was a write-in candidate for homecoming king who won with a majority of the votes. The school administration took away his crown, saying that since Oak is biologically female, he isn't eligible to win the title. Well, his classmates didn't like that.
posted by domo at 11:09 AM PST - 81 comments

The Combating Terrorism Act (C-17) has passed second reading in Canada's House of Commons with the support of both Liberals and Conservatives. The bill would allow terrorism suspects to be jailed without trial for up to 12 months. So far it has been completely ignored by Canada's mainstream media. [more inside]
posted by twirlip at 9:22 AM PST - 30 comments

Aaron-Carl Ragland, known simply as "Aaron-Carl" to most, was a songwriter, remixer, producer, radio show host, record label founder and all-around character. The news of Ragland's death was first posted on his friend and fellow Detroit musician Piranha Head's Facebook page in a status update, saying simply: Just lost one of his best friends, Aaron-Carl, and my arms are far too short to box with GOD. One of the best Human beings in the WORLD is gone. I have no words. Music is Silence. Aaron-Carl himself posted this video just five days ago on his blog discussing his diagnosis and upcoming surgery after canceling his upcoming European tour. Factmag reports that Aaron-Carl is believed to have died shortly after or during essential lymph node surgery; it appears that he died overnight after beginning his first chemotherapy session. [more inside]
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:19 AM PST - 15 comments

Following a question posed by the Washington Post last week about religion and the Tea Party, Religion Nerd takes issue with one columnist's opinion.
posted by Rykey at 9:15 AM PST - 31 comments

The Suck Fairy. "The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 9:12 AM PST - 167 comments

Poet and editor Michael Gizzi, known equally well for his own verbally inventive work and for publishing the work of other innovative poets (he used to edit Hard Press and lingo magazine), has died. He got his start studying at Brown with National Book Award winning poet and editor Keith Waldrop, whose Burning Deck Press published Gizzi's most recent collection, New Depths of Deadpan. The first ("Michael") link has many further links to Google Books versions of Gizzi's collections (as usual semi-blocked, but you can flip through them to get a sense of the career).
posted by aught at 9:05 AM PST - 4 comments

As mentioned previously, Toronto's mayoral candidates are almost farcical, with the most boring candidate caught in a sex scandal, another candidate who has the world's worst case of foot in mouth disease, and another who thought that presenting himself as a Mafia Don was a good idea. Thankfully, there's still Steve Murray. Because Toronto deserves something. If only he hadn't missed the registration deadline. [more inside]
posted by krunk at 8:42 AM PST - 16 comments

USDA glues acetaminophen-laced frozen mice to cardboard, bombs Guam treetops to kill snakes
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:20 AM PST - 48 comments

Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide this week after his sexual encounter with another young man was broadcast online by his roommate via hidden webcam. Afterwards, Clementi probably started this thread at justusboys.com [NSFWish ads] (screencaps here) asking for help in coping with the incident. His last contact with the world was a Facebook status update reading simply: "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry." Many thousands have acknowledged his passing on several different FB tribute pages. Another page cries out for the roommate, Dharun Ravi, and his accomplice Molly Wei, to be charged with more than just "invasion of privacy." Previously, related.
posted by hermitosis at 8:06 AM PST - 335 comments

Steal This Presentation. "Right now someone is out there dying from a boring presentation. Hopefully, it's not yours." A crash course in getting the fugly out of your slides.
posted by storybored at 7:44 AM PST - 53 comments

The History of Rap w/Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, The Roots. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by sexymofo at 7:16 AM PST - 49 comments

Animator Greg Franklin has teamed up with a few of his favorite comedians to produce shorts based on their standup. (Videos NSFW) Kyle Kinane "Bunnies"
Jackie Kashian "Animals"
Myq Kaplan "Jews and Sea Creatures"
[more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:16 AM PST - 13 comments

8-bit computer in Dwarf Fortress? I'll see that and raise you a Minecraft-based 16-bit computer (well, ALU) described in The Elements of Computing Systems and designed in Baezon's Redstone Simulator.
posted by griphus at 7:00 AM PST - 95 comments

The San Francisco Fire Department has a ladder making shop (SLYT)
posted by zerobyproxy at 6:23 AM PST - 19 comments

Mike Doyle (blog one, blog two) is an artist who was previously known (by boardgamers) for boardgame artwork. He burned out on boardgame art and has taken up a new medium...with stunning results. This is his very first model and it's an astounding work of craftsmanship, detail, mood, and tone. This is the kind of work that many builders would kill to do after several years of building. [more inside]
posted by Legomancer at 6:13 AM PST - 13 comments

Old advertisements from old theatre programmes. Indexed by date and category. [more inside]
posted by primer_dimer at 4:48 AM PST - 7 comments

The Wellcome Library Blog is the accompanying blog to London's Wellcome Collection.
Each post examines new acquisitions or existing holdings of this fascinating and eclectic collection. This week's post is about Graphic Medicine - the intersection of Graphic Novels and Medicine. Interesting posts in just the past few months include Japanese colour printing, Do the English really have bad teeth?, A hot night in Bengal, Murder - He telegraphed and a post on Early Cycling.
posted by vacapinta at 4:25 AM PST - 5 comments

Tony Curtis, Hollywood Legend, Navy Man, star of The Defiant Ones, Some Like It Hot and The Great Race, has passed away. [more inside]
posted by crossoverman at 4:07 AM PST - 75 comments

Kieron Gillen on being a games journalist. Advice from the man who, after fifteen years, has called time on his involvement with the same profession - and a good read for writers in general.
posted by mippy at 3:30 AM PST - 15 comments

Inside C Street–Six Questions for Jeff Sharlet

It’s about the Idea… the monolithic vision of fundamentalism always threatening to subsume the many lowercased ideas that constitute democracy. In Uganda, we see the Idea verging on murder, in the military, we see it gathering force, at C Street we encounter its enduring corruption.

( Jeff Sharlet previously).
posted by adamvasco at 3:02 AM PST - 13 comments

Pictorial Janus (SLYT)
posted by yaxu at 2:45 AM PST - 20 comments

Three time Tour de France champion Alberto Contador has tested positive for clenbuterol. I know what you're thinking... [more inside]
posted by Chuckles at 1:54 AM PST - 36 comments

Res Obscura is a blog by Ben Breen, a graduate student of early modern history, which styles itself "a compendium of obscure things." Indeed, even the asides are full of wonder, such as the one about Boy, the famous Royalist war poodle of the English Civil War, which is but a short addendum to a post about witches' familiars. Here are some of my favorite posts, Pirate Surgeon in Panama (and a related post about 18th Century Jamaica), vanished civilizations, asemic pseudo-Arabic and -Hebrew writing in Renaissance art, and a series of posts about the way the Chinese and Japanese understood the world outside Asia in the early modern period (Europeans as 'Other', Europeans as 'Other,' Redux and Early Chinese World Maps).
posted by Kattullus at 12:43 AM PST - 16 comments

Is a black person more likely to be accused of committing a crime than a white person? Here's an interesting video study.
posted by MikeF7033 at 10:45 PM PST - 84 comments

Seaquence "...is an experimental musical petri-dish. Adopting a biological metaphor, Seaquence allows you to create and combine musical lifeforms into unique, dynamic compositions."
posted by gwint at 10:32 PM PST - 2 comments

"Elevated" (part 1, 2), a short film about three people trapped in an elevator, by Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube and Splice. With bonus Spanish subtitles.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:51 PM PST - 5 comments

"The internets a creepy thing, especially if you have kids. It says something very creepy about the fact that I use the same machine to masturbate with as I use to teach my kid the alphabet." Comedian Greg Giraldo died of a drug overdose.
posted by fungible at 7:23 PM PST - 63 comments

"With Google Mobile, you can search for things nearby without entering your location. Just type or speak what you're looking for." [more inside]
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 7:10 PM PST - 31 comments

Lasse Gjertsen's short but epic animated film Consoul will rock your socks off.
posted by dunkadunc at 5:58 PM PST - 14 comments

Dance Fortress 2: The agents of Team Fortress 2 hang loose and party down.
posted by The Whelk at 4:59 PM PST - 18 comments

Paganini for face.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:50 PM PST - 22 comments

Can men and women really be just friends?
posted by AceRock at 4:40 PM PST - 114 comments

The 2010 Brooklyn Space Program. Here is Luke Geissbuhler's homemade spacecraft. It is made of awesome.
posted by CunningLinguist at 4:38 PM PST - 23 comments

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.
posted by MegoSteve at 4:36 PM PST - 158 comments

Deep brain stimulation. Not just for highly trained neurosurgeons anymore. Try it yourself! Game and photos (“very graphic!”) (via MindHacks.)
posted by Faze at 4:31 PM PST - 7 comments

Using a 3-D petri dish, Researchers at Brown University and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island have built a completely functional artificial human ovary that will allow doctors to harvest immature human egg cells (oocytes) and grow them into mature, ready-to-be-fertilized human eggs outside the body. (In vitro) The advance could eventually help preserve fertility for women facing chemotherapy or other medical treatments that may be destructive to ovarian folliculogenesis. Press Release. Article link. (paywall) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 3:48 PM PST - 24 comments

"If someone ever asks you to describe the Internet to them in four words look them straight in the eye and say “cats morphing into croissants.”" May not apply to black cats, unless you like badly burned croissants. Croissants are good for breakfast, but so is bacon. And waffles. And cereal. And if you include "civet cats", coffee (via). And maybe even Pop Tarts. Seriously. (Sadly the t-shirt has been discontinued.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:23 PM PST - 21 comments

Astronomers have found the first exoplanet within the "habitable" band around a star, or within the distance band around a start that would allow for liquid water. The planet is roughly 3 times the size of the Earth and orbits red dwarf Gliese 581 every 36.6 days at a distance of about 13 million miles.
posted by Punkey at 2:46 PM PST - 85 comments

World War I will officially financially end this Sunday on the 20th anniversary of the Reunification of Germany (German Unity Day) and 91 years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles as the last debt is paid. [more inside]
posted by Deflagro at 2:45 PM PST - 33 comments

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) has started to be fast-tracked through the legislative process. This bill would create two blacklists (without due process) of domains which ISPs would be forced to block, based on alleged copyright infringement. The RIAA claims that such websites put Americans at risk (but doesn't state exactly what the risk is). Wired Magazine calls it the "Holy Grail of intellectual-property enforcement." The EFF has started an online petition against it and is encouraging internet engineers to speak out against it. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:32 PM PST - 33 comments

"A solitary man who knew his likes and lived within his means, a man who could be counted upon." Responding to vicious Internet snark following a hit-and-run death, the St. Petersburg Times asked award-winning obituary writer Andrew Meacham to write on the life of 48 year old dishwasher and Boston sports fan Neil Alan Smith.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 1:59 PM PST - 50 comments

Leave your lights on, and get ready to explore the world of dreams. [more inside]
posted by Askiba at 1:29 PM PST - 9 comments

Arthur Penn, the director of Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, The Miracle Worker, and Night Moves, has died of congestive heart failure one day after his 88th birthday.
posted by Joe Beese at 12:55 PM PST - 34 comments

Commonwealth, schmommonwealth. The Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games are on. Horse lovers the world over are enthralled by the high drama and hijinks in Lexington, Kentucky this week. Already there's been a controversial withdrawal following a travel-related mishap (on the very same flight hilariously previewed here.) In all the excitement, Eitan Beth-Halachmy, a "cowboy dressage" rider in the opening ceremony, seems to have burst a spleen. As expected, the Dutch took the gold medal in Dressage despite one of their team being disqualified with a horse bleeding from the mouth. Some point to training methods like rollkur, or hyperflexion, saying they are cruel and abusive. The FEI has banned rollkur; former advocates say that what they do is not rollkur, but "LDR" (long, deep and round.) Look at the lawsuits fly! In happier news, the gloriously named Nobby took the gold medal in the Endurance event. "He could go another 100 miles today if you wanted him to," rider Maria Mercedes Alvarez Ponton said of the 15-year-old bay Arab gelding. Still to come, the equestrian triathlon: Eventing! [more inside]
posted by rdc at 12:24 PM PST - 16 comments

While working on a PhD, did you ever feel no one understood your research? Well instead of writing your dissertation about your topic, ““Microtubule Catastrophe in Living Cells” or “Hydrodynamic Trail Following in a Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina)”, you can dance to it. Or, if you don’t want to dance to a science topic, then change your topic and publish research about zombies as a disease model. [more inside]
posted by Wolfster at 12:22 PM PST - 3 comments

ArtPrize is an open art contest based in Grand Rapids, MI. It is the largest art contest in the world. Last year's winner Ran Ortner went from not being able to pay his phone bill to receiving a $250,000 prize. Researchers are looking into the local economic impact. So far, 34,000 people have registered to vote.
posted by morganannie at 10:52 AM PST - 19 comments

Three Question Marks: the photo/story/painting blog of artist "merkley???" [ALL LINKS VERY NSFW]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:24 AM PST - 13 comments

Question: What can you make with a single sheet of paper? Answer: Apparently, some pretty damn cool art.
posted by sarastro at 10:04 AM PST - 30 comments

Guidebook . The GUI gallery. [more inside]
posted by jtron at 9:46 AM PST - 21 comments

Americans have no idea how rich the rich are, nor how poor the poor are.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:40 AM PST - 230 comments

Daniel Lanois, discusses the making of Le Noise with Neil Young. [more inside]
posted by timsteil at 8:59 AM PST - 31 comments

Meet Agnes Milowka, cave diver. She does things that I, for one, only have nightmares about. [more inside]
posted by googly at 8:26 AM PST - 43 comments

Michael Maren, an outspoken critic of foreign aid and development assistance, gave an interview to Might Magazine about the flaws in the current models for aid to Africa.
posted by reenum at 7:53 AM PST - 17 comments

Children's book author Mo Willems + chalk + dining room = Delightful Dining Room Doodles. For bonus dinnertime doodles, add a big roll of paper and crayons, and mix well. [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco at 7:42 AM PST - 15 comments

Pee2Pee Processing
posted by DU at 7:40 AM PST - 4 comments

An interview with Andrew Shirvell, the assistant Attorney General of the state of Michigan regarding Chris Armstrong, the first openly gay student president of the University of Michigan Student Assembly. Armstrong is currently the target of the blog Chris Armstrong Watch. He's labeled a racist elitist liar, a privileged pervert, and is accused of having a radical homosexual agenda. Facebook postings are used extensively as proof. The author of the blog? None other than the assistant Attorney General himself. [more inside]
posted by Anonymous at 6:18 AM PST - 179 comments

(over-simplified) Anatomy of a Typical Phone Conversation
posted by ocha-no-mizu at 6:09 AM PST - 19 comments

My friend, the dead tree. For five years, Kevin Day has been photographing a single dead tree at Langley Country Park in Berkshire. He talks a little about the process at theMET.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 6:05 AM PST - 4 comments

A Which? survey has found that supermarket deals actually offer a worse price for the customer. But to the vigilant folk of Flickr, this is old news. [more inside]
posted by mippy at 3:26 AM PST - 50 comments

Jenny Hagel has a three part YouTube series about "a dumpy women's studies professor [who] transforms herself into a ghetto fabulous rap star to convince people to care about feminism. When she's finished rapping...they still don't care." Parts 1, 2 and 3.
posted by Kattullus at 12:33 AM PST - 31 comments

Judge sides with motorcylist in videotaping incident. Previously [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 11:29 PM PST - 37 comments

Pizza! Slice Harvester is one man's quest to taste and review every pizza slice offered by NYC's pizzerias. His mission statement reads, "...I'm going by neighborhood, starting in Manhattan, getting a plain slice at every place. I am f***ing sick of the current trend in Pizza Journalism that's all about f***ing artichoke guacamole tahini pizza on rice dough. That s*** isn't pizza. Sorry."
posted by Arthur Phillips Jones Jr at 11:26 PM PST - 66 comments

Op-Ed at 40, A Brief History of the Art, Four Decades of Illustration at the New York Times is an awesome 10:20 minute mini documentary video with a selection of brilliant political, social satire cartoons and insightful illustrations. Bonus link: DailyOpEd.com – Read and search over 100 major newspaper op-eds. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 11:25 PM PST - 2 comments

The Charleston + Daft Punk = Awesome (SLYT)
posted by Mr_Zero at 10:10 PM PST - 22 comments

"U.S. should be able to shut Internet, former CIA chief says" From the LA Times.
posted by flotson at 10:00 PM PST - 95 comments

Going to Ikea anytime soon? Stop by the kitchen section pick up their new baking cookbook, Homemade is Best, for free! (Limited time offer, only available in Sweden.) Try a game of guess-the-recipe and look at all the pretty pictures. [via]
posted by phunniemee at 8:28 PM PST - 19 comments

The history of sovereignty can be understood through two broad movements, manifested in both practical institutions and political thought. The first is the development of a system of sovereign states, culminating at the Peace of Westphalia(check out the cool maps) in 1648. The second movement is the circumscription of the sovereign state, which began in practice after World War II and has since continued through European integration and the growth and strengthening of laws and practices to protect human rights. via [more inside]
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 8:19 PM PST - 27 comments

The Three Stooges Breakdancing (slyt)
posted by marxchivist at 8:01 PM PST - 19 comments

He is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch. "If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth." [more inside]
posted by vidur at 6:39 PM PST - 21 comments

Star Wars - '77 - '80 Collector's Blog. "I have a passion for collecting vintage Star Wars merchandise from the late 70's. Action figures, comics, trading cards etc - anything related to the first Star Wars movie. But why only until 1980? It's not that I don't love The Empire Strikes Back and beyond (I really do), but there is something about that first wave of Star Wars mania that really grips me, back when it was all fresh and exciting..."
posted by Fizz at 6:36 PM PST - 41 comments

Marnie the Ringneck meets the Bunny. SLYT; warning: cute overdose.
posted by bwg at 5:41 PM PST - 24 comments

Coming soon to a library near you, outsourcing. LSSI is now the 5th largest library services provider in the US. The ALA is surprisingly neutral on this issue. "In general, there is no evidence that outsourcing per se has had a negative impact on library services and management. On the contrary, in the main outsourcing has been an effective managerial tool, and when used carefully and judiciously it has resulted in enhanced library services and improved library management. Instances where problems have arisen subsequent to decisions to outsource aspects of library operations and functions appear to be attributable to inadequate planning, poor contracting processes, or ineffective management of contracts."
posted by Xurando at 5:31 PM PST - 45 comments

The Great West End and Railroad Square Handcar Regatta and Exposition of Mechanical Wonders of 2010 As if September wasn't already a fine month in Northern California for urban artistic eccentricity, the Santa Rosa Handcar Regatta just completed its third iteration. Human-powered vehicles, human ingenuity, and general googawfery, the festival picks right up where How Berkeley Can You Be left off... Yeah, yeah, yeah SLST (Single Link Steam Punk)...but that is some fun shit right there... Coming soon to an abandoned rail bed near you?
posted by piedrasyluz at 4:59 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

The BBC breathlessly reports a new Iranian wonder weapon. Except that it is not new. Not Iranian either. And possibly not much of a weapon... [more inside]
posted by Skeptic at 4:18 PM PST - 56 comments

erkie A bookmarklet that lets you destroy ads and other parts of the page asteroids-style by moving around with the arrow keys and shooting with the spacebar.
posted by Deathalicious at 4:12 PM PST - 20 comments

Birds of Prey Theme Song, courtesy of the newest iteration of animated Batman, the Brave and the Bold. The Huntress, Black Canary and Catwoman sing about the sexual prowess of the DC universe's finest super-heroes. [more inside]
posted by jabberjaw at 2:58 PM PST - 34 comments

Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses honor, moral revolutions, and the condemnation of future generations. His new book The Honor Code chronicles how the concept of honor has been crucial in the fight against immoral practices like dueling, foot-binding, and slavery. (See also 1, 2)
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:49 PM PST - 14 comments

After a meteoric rise in popularity in the US as a health drink, Kombucha has been pulled from the shelves of many major retailers over concerns that the drink often contains significant amounts of alcohol due to bottle-fermentation. On the bright side, it isn't too hard to find a mother and brew your own. But fermentation fetishists everywhere are left to wonder: Is Kefir next? More generally, do the trade-offs necessary to conform to commercial food regulations destroy the benefits of fermentation?
posted by kaibutsu at 2:05 PM PST - 67 comments

Sally Menke , the woman who edited every Quentin Tarantino film, has died at age 56. [more inside]
posted by joechip at 1:43 PM PST - 62 comments

POM Wonderful may not be so wonderful, but that might not be so surprising, given the history of Stewart and Lynda Resnick. The couple are involved with much more than pomegranate juice: they own Fiji Water, pesticide manufacturer Suterra, Paramount Agribusiness (source of citris, well-known pistachios and other nuts), and former owners of the Franklin Mint. This round with the Resnicks started in February 2010, with a warning from the FDA, which lead to a confusing bit of restraining order requested, then soon after requested to be withdrawn (with fears of pushing the First Amendment too far). That phase is past, but POM Wonderful is now stating they believe "very strongly in its first amendment rights to communicate the promising results," results which look similar to placebos taken by control subjects. The FTC is not impressed.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:32 PM PST - 25 comments

Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview In an Oval Office interview, the president discusses the Tea Party, the war, the economy and what’s at stake this November.
posted by joedan at 1:11 PM PST - 255 comments

After five years of number-crunching and methodological controversy, the NRC's rankings of US graduate programs were released today, three years after the target date and fifteen since the previous ranking. Peruse the results at phds.org. Instead of numerical ratings, the NRC released two rankings, the "R-ranking" and the "S-ranking", each one with a wide error bar around it. Confused yet? Brian Leiter thinks the philosophy rankings "qualify as somewhere between "odd" and "inexplicable."" The University of Washington's CS department says their ranking of 15-32 is "clearly erroneous." Obviously, the only appropriate response is to compute asymptotic formulae for the number of possible fuzzy rankings.
posted by escabeche at 11:48 AM PST - 40 comments

A superior court judge in Ontario has struck down several prostitution laws, on the basis that they endanger prostitutes. That is all.
posted by mightygodking at 11:47 AM PST - 41 comments

With the unveiling of the BlackBerry Playbook, a 7" iPad competitor solidly aimed at business, are the tablet wars heating up?
posted by Artw at 10:56 AM PST - 253 comments

"Along with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol's name is famously associated with the path-breaking criticism of Cahiers du Cinéma and the rise of the French New Wave. But whilst Truffaut and Godard saw themselves as auteur and innovator, to survey Chabrol's long career is to see a craftsman productively immersed in the conventions and compromises of mainstream filmmaking."

One of the fathers of the French New Wave, often compared to Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol passed away last week at the age of 80. [more inside]
posted by HumanComplex at 10:55 AM PST - 11 comments

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells have a long two-part essay in the New York Review of Books on the current economic slump. The Slump Goes On: Why? And The Way Out of the Slump.

Since around June 2009 many indicators have been pointing up: GDP has been rising in all major economies, world industrial production has been rising, and US corporate profits have recovered to pre-crisis levels. Yet unemployment has hardly fallen in either the United States or Europe--which means that the plight of the unemployed, especially in America with its minimal safety net, has grown steadily worse as benefits run out and savings are exhausted. And little relief is in sight: unemployment is still rising in the hardest-hit European economies, US economic growth is clearly slowing, and many economic forecasters expect America's unemployment rate to remain high or even to rise over the course of the next year.

[more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 10:29 AM PST - 41 comments

Docs Teach, a new website from the National Archives, offers teachers access to more than 3,000 digitized documents from NARA's collections, along with classroom activities using them. It's the latest in a series of efforts under the recently appointed Archivist of the United States David Ferriero to enhance the agency's presence on the web. (via) [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:03 AM PST - 5 comments

Meet Rob Ford, the frontrunner in Toronto's mayoral electoral race. He has complained about city spending on AIDS prevention, claiming that only homosexuals and drug users are at serious risk of getting AIDS. He says he supports the views of a right-wing pastor who thinks that same-sex marriage will "dismantle" civilization.He has called Asian people "Orientals" and suggested that they are taking over, then when rebuked explained that he thought this was a positive thing. He has suggested that Toronto cannot handle any more immigrants and that in a "perfect world" Toronto's population would remain even. He recently suggested banning marathons from public streets. And now, he has released his long-awaited financial plan with a bizarrely bad Youtube video where he stammers his way through a series of savings promises that simply do not add up. So what should we do when Rob Ford becomes mayor? That's easy. Make lots of Photoshop memes.
posted by sayitwithpie at 9:40 AM PST - 83 comments

Insurance companies are considering forming a "private navy" of quick-response boats, crewed by armed mercenaries, to protect Western shipping from attacks by so-called Somali pirates.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:39 AM PST - 48 comments

The John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation has announced the 2010 $500,000 grant winners. Among the winners this year are David Simon, (Homicide:Life on the Streets, The Wire, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, The Corner, etc.) who has said he feels a bit awkward about the award, with something of a "nagging notion of shame pulling on my shirtsleeve."
posted by bearwife at 8:56 AM PST - 51 comments

Felicia Day tweeted about halkun's project to import plans for the Enterprise into Minecraft virtual reality. This video walkthrough is the result.
posted by cgc373 at 8:55 AM PST - 109 comments

Catering to fraternal lodges looking to have some fun with initiates, The DeMoulin Brothers provided men of a certain era, with "danger on demand," [more inside]
posted by timsteil at 8:44 AM PST - 11 comments

The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. ... Driving home the changes, OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:01 AM PST - 45 comments

Kill Whitey. It's the Right Thing to do. [more inside]
posted by googly at 7:09 AM PST - 141 comments

Thousands of broadband customers in the UK have had their personal details uploaded to web, complete with the names of pornographic movies they are alleged to have downloaded. [more inside]
posted by afx237vi at 6:46 AM PST - 70 comments

Mixtapes have been a way for rappers and producers to promote their music and have it heard for pretty much the entire history of hiphop, and they're still called mixtapes even though most have abandoned tapes for CDs and, in turn, CDs for mp3s. But there's such a glut of stuff on the market - Atlanta's Gorilla Zoe, for instance, released a mixtape a day throughout February - that it can be difficult to have a clue what's going on. One site I've found useful for just barely keeping up with things is DatPiff. [more inside]
posted by Dim Siawns at 6:40 AM PST - 11 comments

Thought Audio is a small, simple and likable free library of classic literature and philosophy MP3 audio downloads.
posted by nickyskye at 10:47 PM PST - 21 comments

Oonce Oonce.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:56 PM PST - 59 comments

Pornland. At the beginnings of the 1950s, porn was something boys indulged in behind the barn and creeps enjoyed in dingy little movie theatres. 60 years later, porn is everywhere. Michael Enright recently interviewed academic Gail Dines on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition. Listen to the interview here. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 9:44 PM PST - 75 comments

The Angry Monk [more inside]
posted by MetaMonkey at 9:41 PM PST - 14 comments

Google recently rolled out its new instant search feature which accompanies its older "suggest" function. Both use an algorithm in an attempt to keep the search engine clean and out of trouble. The people at 2600.com are compiling a list of both objectionable and NOT objectionable terms (NSFW). [more inside]
posted by gman at 9:20 PM PST - 50 comments

The Good Men Project: "What makes us different? Oh, just a few things: We talk about sex without “selling sex.” We publish daddy bloggers, Army Lieutenants, and a transgender FTM who wants desperately to be a good man. We celebrate women (which may be why we’ve been so popular with them), and we publish women. We talk about fathers and sons without resorting to predictable clichés. We publish compelling features about the death penalty, adolescence, teen suicide, and addiction... Can a men’s magazine that doesn't caricaturize men prosper? Do men want to read about what it means to be a good man?"
posted by ocherdraco at 8:21 PM PST - 62 comments

Jay-Z, Buffett and Forbes on Success and Giving Back
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 8:11 PM PST - 10 comments

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine [more inside]
posted by A dead Quaker at 6:08 PM PST - 28 comments

The hidden wonders of a British landmark. Long before Pink Floyd floated a pig above its 340ft chimneys, Battersea Power Station was an iconic landmark, described from the start as a 'temple of power': a brick cathedral to rank alongside St Paul's. Its four-pillared outline is as familiar as the building's sad decline since being decommissioned in 1983. After numerous failed redevelopment attempts from various owners, Battersea Power Station is now on the 'buildings at risk' register. Photographer Peter Dazeley set out to document the legendary building as part of a personal project. [via]
posted by netbros at 4:08 PM PST - 32 comments

Fallen [SLVimeo]. A bit of melancholy existentialism? An atheist manifesto? Just an adorable animated short? In any case, it's the saddest, sweetest, most wonderful thing I've seen all week.
posted by eugenen at 4:05 PM PST - 36 comments

Insane russian biker (youtube) takes a Yamaha R1 down the Warsaw highway in moscow. Biker culture is taking off in a land where it is too cold to ride for half the year.
posted by Lanark at 3:29 PM PST - 88 comments

Mural Locator highlights street art around the world.
posted by Xurando at 3:25 PM PST - 2 comments

Belgium : delicious fries, chocolate and beer, beautiful and quirky art, a deranged king, a great singer, terrible weather and utterly infuriating politics.
posted by Skeptic at 3:10 PM PST - 59 comments

Planescape Torment (wikipedia) is widely regarded (1, 2, 3, 4) as one of the best story-driven CRPGS ever crafted, cliche amnesiac-protagonist notwithstanding. Here's a "Vision Statement" design document from when it was known as Last Rites. (2.4MB PDF, Spoilers OBVIOUSLY)
posted by juv3nal at 3:02 PM PST - 72 comments

Chris Cunningham's video for Gil Scott-Heron's New York Is Killing Me. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 2:52 PM PST - 27 comments

A press conference was held this afternoon at the National Press Club in Washington, where at least a dozen former U.S. Air Force personnel, mostly officers who worked on secret projects connected to sensitive nuclear weapons sites, are admitting that they were privy to UFO and alien-related incidents that occurred during their time of service. In this clip, you will hear from: Retired Air Force Captain Robert Salas, Former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dwayne Arneson and Former Air Force Official Bill Jameson. [via NECN]
posted by not_on_display at 1:51 PM PST - 98 comments

Adam Higginbotham wrote an interesting article in 2007 about Chuckie Taylor's reign of terror in Liberia. (Note: PDF link) [more inside]
posted by reenum at 1:51 PM PST - 9 comments

Hottest Spot in Vegas? Vdara hotel features an unintended reflection of the sun that some are calling a "death ray."
posted by Brian B. at 1:28 PM PST - 46 comments

Aaron Meyers has mapped NASA LIDAR data of Earth's moon to frames of an animated gif created by Paul Robertson [previously, previously]. This is the result. This is the result in GIGANTO-VISION [7000x7000]. This is some video, compressed to hell and back. Via Waxy Links
posted by brundlefly at 1:07 PM PST - 23 comments

"The Dungeon Master", a short-story about Dungeons and Dragons by Sam Lipsyte in this weeks New Yorker.
posted by stbalbach at 12:14 PM PST - 67 comments

Looking to indulge your interests in both cartomancy and science? Check out the Science Tarot Deck. (FB link) [Previous decks] Via [more inside]
posted by benzenedream at 11:56 AM PST - 11 comments

Video of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, a newly minted Superfund site in all its horrific glory. SLYT (via Brownstoner
posted by R. Mutt at 11:33 AM PST - 35 comments

Gloria Stuart, actress in 'Titanic,' dies at 100. Veteran of Hollywood's golden era, Gloria Stuart experienced a revival in her career when she was cast in James Cameron's Titanic as the older version of Kate Winslet's character Rose. [more inside]
posted by chillmost at 11:08 AM PST - 27 comments

Swiss Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz gets the giggles while discussing cured meat imports. Becomes internet star.
posted by CunningLinguist at 10:11 AM PST - 39 comments

Anish Kapoor turns the world upside down
posted by Artw at 9:54 AM PST - 21 comments

The owner of Segway, James Heselden, has died, after accidentally driving his Segway over a cliff. This, only two months after the Department of Justice, which implements the American Disabilities Act, addressed Segway as a mobility device for disabled persons.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:04 AM PST - 112 comments

Google awards $10 million for “world changing” ideas. [more inside]
posted by Babblesort at 9:01 AM PST - 46 comments

This is a news website article about a scientific paper.
posted by grouse at 8:57 AM PST - 57 comments

Winners of the UN Citizen Ambassadors "What would you say...if you had the chance to talk to world leaders?" A video contest held by the UN to encourage "world citizens" to participate in global issues has picked 6 winners: Africa. Asia. Eastern Europe. Latin America & the Caribbean. Western Europe and Other States*. Host Country (United States). [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious at 7:50 AM PST - 9 comments

MeFi favorites Ben Folds and Nick Hornby have recorded an album together: Lonely Avenue. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:42 AM PST - 13 comments

"The Home Owner's Association at my building has been leaving me notes asking me to clean up my parking spaces in the garage...Apparently, the rules say that only bicycles are allowed to be stored in these spaces. In the spaces I have: 2 bicycles...and one mechanical pony..." [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:28 AM PST - 75 comments

Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. Earlier this summer, Golnaz Esfandiari examined the "Twitter Devolution" in Iran*. Anne Applebaum commented on the Twitter revolution that wasn't in Moldova last spring. [more inside]
posted by availablelight at 4:46 AM PST - 46 comments

“They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.” The administration plans to submit legislation to Congress in 2011 which would mandate any communications technology operating in the United States to include technical measures to comply with wiretap orders. [more inside]
posted by Vetinari at 4:02 AM PST - 197 comments

The BBS scene in China. Here, here and here.
posted by lipsum at 2:29 AM PST - 12 comments

Mr. Bungle Monday!!! In their 15-year career, the band only made one music video and it was banned by MTV for being ... well, generally deranged. Quote Unquote was originally called Travolta but Warner Bros. pressured them into changing the title. Luckily, their 3rd and final album left enough of a lasting impression to warrant fanmade videos. Thus, we now have: a)YT user tkan's Chris Cunningham-inspired Retrovertigo & the Hitchcock-esque Pink Cigarette clips; b)YT user Illusionoel's Goodbye Sober Day, which reworks footage from Baraka; and c)Vertigo, a beautiful medley of the album itself, California, performed by a highschool drumline [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 12:40 AM PST - 28 comments

Intelligent YouTube Channels. A large collection from many sources, such as the Richard Dawkins channel l The 92nd Street Y l Big Think l Philip Scott Johnson's collection of art videos l MoMA l Vanity Fair l Yad Vashem a leader in Holocaust education l KQED Public Media l The Research Channel l YouTube EDU, which centralizes all of its educational/academic content. This is the best place to start if you’re looking for lectures and courses l The Spoken Verse l universities like Stanford and Cambridge. Previously.
posted by nickyskye at 10:20 PM PST - 15 comments

The "Civilization" theme -- now with lyrics!
posted by empath at 9:58 PM PST - 59 comments

The FBI has a long history of targeting peace and social justice activists. Now activists across the country are sounding the alarm. It's happening again.
posted by history is a weapon at 7:38 PM PST - 102 comments

The Lynchsons is a remixed episode of the Simpsons with strange graphical glitches, almost no discernable plot, rythmic noise collages, mis-cued and distorted music, and an overall odd sensibility. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 7:28 PM PST - 70 comments

A gang of thieves dubbed "the vacuum burglars" has struck for the fifteenth time in France, drilling a hole in the pneumatic tube that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room. They then sucked rolls of cash totalling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock. A classic exploitation of a vulnerability in a system. But is it worth it to fix? via, via [more inside]
posted by nevercalm at 6:04 PM PST - 35 comments

Royal Navy Field Gun Competition 1997: Take it apart and put it back together, again and again, and fast. A history of the event.
posted by bwg at 5:24 PM PST - 14 comments

If Men Could Menstruate. [more inside]
posted by lauratheexplorer at 5:14 PM PST - 159 comments

Instant Bueller !
posted by Fizz at 2:58 PM PST - 29 comments

Gamecontrollers: A History [more inside]
posted by johnny novak at 12:21 PM PST - 15 comments

On September 18th, Mitchell Heisman posted his 1904 page long suicide note online, and then shot himself in the head on Harvard square. The note, according to wikipedia, "discusses sociobiology, transhumanism, history, religion, death, nihilism and other philosophical issues at some length".
posted by DZack at 11:46 AM PST - 145 comments

When the Tea Party takes over the comics page. - Comics reimagined by Ward Sutton for the Boston Globe [more inside]
posted by BeerFilter at 9:22 AM PST - 58 comments

Comedy's 17 Favorite Comedians [more inside]
posted by Flashman at 9:14 AM PST - 71 comments

Insiders Tour of Akihabara. The guys over at toykohackerspace provide us with a guide to the ultimate in geek shopping; whether it's custom CNC'ed radio enclosures, every tweezer imaginable, or you just want to buy a robot, Akihabara is the place to be. [via /.] [more inside]
posted by Mach5 at 8:45 AM PST - 20 comments

It's possible to use Photoshop to simulate the depth of field, color saturation, and camera angle associated with tilt-shift photography. ArtCyclopedia applied this process to Van Gogh paintings. (via) [more inside]
posted by emilyd22222 at 8:36 AM PST - 91 comments

Le Cirque Romanès is believed to be Europe's only Gypsy Circus.
Deemed good enough to represent France at the World Expo in Shanghai, it may be forced to close by Nicolas Sarkozy's government. This traditional Circus in a tent, where the artists still live in caravans stars as an added bonus a Cat on a trapeze.
More about Le Cirque Romanès. (Recently)
posted by adamvasco at 3:22 AM PST - 28 comments

Cory Booker does not approve this message. A SLYT parody of that overplayed pop throwaway New York song popular right now.
posted by vrakatar at 2:12 AM PST - 25 comments

The original beatboxing. Sheila Chandra shows us how it's done.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:21 PM PST - 32 comments

Mallory's Clothes. As per the Tumblr description, a comprehensive rundown, in chronological order, of Mallory Keaton's outfits from the series Family Ties (1982-1989). Found by Matthew Perpetua (behind the Fluxblog mp3 blog), then also discovered by Justine Bateman herself.
posted by myopicman at 7:56 PM PST - 32 comments

There has been a new discipline developing in molecular biology for some time now, Bioanimation! Projects have ranged in size from WEHI's colossal compilation to Harvard Biovision's magnum opus "Inner Life of the Cell" to commercially produced masterpieces to smaller projects by university PIs and enthusiasts. much [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 4:34 PM PST - 29 comments

"It was like trying to have a relationship with a sea sponge, or a single-cell protozoa. She didn't do anything! Or at least, nothing I could understand." — Phillip Toledan, The Reluctant Father. A photo-essay on the cultural expectations of parenthood.
posted by chunking express at 4:24 PM PST - 96 comments

Caldwell Tanner has struck upon an intriguing way to learn about history.
posted by Evilspork at 3:10 PM PST - 12 comments

They call it the "Ring of Steel" The NYPD is tightening surveillance in New York's subways by installing a new surveillence system modeled after London's so called "Ring Of Steel" . The $200 million system, paid for with federal funds and mismanaged by the MTA and Lockheed Martin, is part of what will one day be a 3,000-camera network of "public and private-sector cameras." London, feeling it's title as the most surveilled city in the world threatened, is now considering using unmanned drones for covert aerial surveillance, security, or emergency operations.
posted by SpaceJazz at 2:51 PM PST - 46 comments

In a victory unexpected until the last 24 hours of the race, Ed Miliband has beaten older brother David to win the leadership of the (UK) Labour Party. [more inside]
posted by penguin pie at 2:50 PM PST - 29 comments

Sudan is at a crossroads. A referendum in three months will probably see South Sudan, a mainly Christian and animist region the size of Texas, to become an independent country. The Muslim north has greatly modernized but citizens believe they will take armed revenge on the south. After almost 50 years of fighting, the costs may be high.
posted by parmanparman at 2:28 PM PST - 7 comments

Red Gummy Bear + Potassium Chlorate = SHINY BRIGHT EXPLODING FUN. [SLYT]
posted by Fizz at 1:11 PM PST - 54 comments

10 years and 10,000+ posts old yesterday. The web creation of MetaFilter's own, quonsar and madamjujujive, Everlasting Blort, - a compendium of the web's weird underbelly, updated daily with links to the strange, absurd, bizarre, humorous.
posted by nickyskye at 11:33 AM PST - 51 comments

Eating 'local' is touted as healthier and friendlier to the environment than shopping from large commercial food sources that spend petroleum products shipping food hundreds and thousands of miles from their place of origin. Farmer's markets are on the rise. Yay! But some of those farmers have a secret: They don't grow their own. [more inside]
posted by SLC Mom at 9:06 AM PST - 147 comments

It's hard to explain why this video of an anonymous family at Christmas set to Baxendale's song Flash Gordon works so well for me, other than to say that it just makes me happy. Maybe it will make you happy too? (also featuring Cheech and Chong, Tony Bennet, and dancing Darth Vaders)
posted by puny human at 9:00 AM PST - 4 comments

From his cubicle inside a sprawling beige stucco building, Stephan works as the leader of the document execution team for GMAC Mortgage. He has signed off on as many as 10,000 foreclosures in a month, according to court documents. That's barely a minute per case... [more inside]
posted by ghharr at 6:55 AM PST - 96 comments

The Emergency Bra: "We can save not only our own lives, but also a man of our choice next to us."
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:39 AM PST - 41 comments

Soldier-Artists in Vietnam. Flack jackets, pistols, iodine pills, insect lotion, sketch pads wrapped in plastic bags... Jim Pollock was a member of the Vietnam Combat Artist Program and this is his story (click through the links within the links to learn more).
posted by amyms at 12:24 AM PST - 7 comments

Games industry news site Gamasutra regularly posts "postmortems," features by game developers talking about what went right and what went wrong during the development of a game. They are remarkably candid and offer a close look at how the games were made, and often focus on awesome obscure and/or independent games. Some of the best: Dejobaan Games' AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Erik Svedäng's Blueberry Garden, ACE Team's Zeno Clash, Square Enix's The World Ends With You, Quantic Dream's Indigo Prophecy, and Defense of the Ancients. The one for Deadly Premonition (previously) is unfortunately not available for free online, but there are highlights and an interview. Also great: Where Realtime Worlds went wrong, a series of blog posts about the problems surrounding the currently-flopping MMO APB. [more inside]
posted by The Devil Tesla at 10:36 PM PST - 24 comments

Frustrated by the number of untrustworthy news sources? NewsTrust is a news feed which allows users to rate the journalistic quality of an article, video, or audio report. You can also look at the overall ratings for the source (ie. Fox News or PBS).
Here's a video describing how it works. Or if you're very patient, watch the Google TechTalk.
posted by cman at 9:18 PM PST - 17 comments

Yeah that's right. The Last Dragon is the Greatest of All-Time. Why? For me there are so many reasons.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:13 PM PST - 29 comments

Miracles is the newest mashup by Norwegian Recycling, one of the few artists specializing in putting large numbers of samples into a single song. Others include the fantastic DJ Earworm (previously) and, of course, Girl Talk.
posted by flatluigi at 8:39 PM PST - 16 comments

Thanks, Bing! It was a long haul for the Pirates, they hadn't won since 1925, and, until recently, we didn't have a film record of the win.
posted by HuronBob at 7:48 PM PST - 21 comments

Beautiful banknote vignettes which were used in the 19th century by the United States to combat counterfeiters. Brought to you by MeFi's peacay.
posted by gman at 4:28 PM PST - 9 comments

Toxie, the adorable little toxic asset purchased by NPR's Planet Money, has died. Her story is told through adorable animation, a radio segment, a text story, and there's even a song at the bottom of the page.
posted by hippybear at 3:59 PM PST - 56 comments

did you know its national punctuation day again
posted by Avenger50 at 3:31 PM PST - 56 comments

The 14 Best Title Cards From 'Batman: The Animated Series' (previously)
posted by Artw at 2:44 PM PST - 60 comments

One week. Two development summits. Hundreds of heads of state, development luminaries, CEOs, and social entrepreneurs. Celebrity star power (pdf). No poor people. Aid Watch spent three days trying to make sense of the greatest show on earth to help the world’s lowest.
posted by The Lady is a designer at 1:20 PM PST - 9 comments

Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. [more inside]
posted by magstheaxe at 1:07 PM PST - 33 comments

Property Value on Median Home by State Nothing but data here, depicted visually: Property Taxes by State, Median Home Value, Taxes as a Percent of Home Value, Median Income for Homeowners, and Taxes as a Percent of Income.
posted by jefficator at 12:24 PM PST - 41 comments

In the wake of increasingly prominent appearances by South Asians in American television (Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Danny Pudi), NBC has launched Outsourced (preview) (full pilot on Hulu), a comedy about an American who moves to Mumbai to manage a call center. Featuring a mostly South Asian cast, the show is a potential high-water mark for Indians in popular American media. But is the show's portrayal of Indians progressive, or does it get bogged down in stereotypes and clichéd jokes about spicy food and funny names? Himanshu Suri of art rap trio Das Racist weighs in. [more inside]
posted by naju at 12:11 PM PST - 87 comments

From the Guardian PovertyMatters Blog : Will the meeting in Rome result in action against food speculation?.
At an emergency meeting in Rome The UN has warned of major new food crisis; environmental disasters and speculative investors are to blame for volatile food commodities markets.
The EU is to wage war against speculation in these markets.
Early in 2008 Eric Touissant, (President of CADTM) explained How the Food and Financial Crises Are Interconnected.
This July Harpers published The food bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it by Frederick Kaufman. (previously).
posted by adamvasco at 12:02 PM PST - 12 comments

Hey ladies, want to get with a geek but don't know how? Let Leslie Sobon, AMD's VP of Product Marketing, show you the way. (You can rinse your brain out with this when you're done.)
posted by griphus at 11:55 AM PST - 117 comments

Rare fossilised flower found, related to sunflowers. "A 45 million-year-old fossil flower found in northern Argentina has uncovered the evolutionary roots of Earth’s most populous plant family. Image can be viewed here. Called Asteraceae, the family includes dozens of domesticated species — from sunflowers, daisies and chrysanthemums to lettuce, artichoke and tarragon — and some 23,000 undomesticated plants. But despite its ubiquity, Asteraceae’s fossil legacy is sparse, containing little more than pollen grains. A few larger, detailed fossils exist, but they’re relatively young."
posted by Fizz at 11:46 AM PST - 7 comments

The existence of male runners in women's races have some worried: Interlopers Run Amok: Guys Crash Road Races for Women. They Come in First, Are Dissed at Finish; For Meeting Fit Females, 'It's Hard to Beat.' But for others, it's the races themselves that are the problem: Marathon organizers are also doing their part to 'discourage male interest' ... 'We're making this race so girly that men won't want any part of it' — and, of course, plenty of women won't either. It seems rather ironic for a woman who has proven her physical strength and endurance to be rewarded by being treated like a dainty little princess.
posted by ocherdraco at 11:37 AM PST - 78 comments

Warning of a "creeping Middle Eastern influence" in our nation's school textbooks, the Texas State Board of Education will vote today on a resolution [.pdf] that would prohibit the State of Texas from purchasing textbooks which exhibit a "pro-Islamic/anti-Christian bias”. Reaction in Texas is mixed. [more inside]
posted by Avenger at 10:22 AM PST - 130 comments

Princess Leia's dad died l Carrie's tweet l Eddie Fisher RIP l [He] became one of the last great young crooners of the pre-rock and roll period, with 35 of his recordings reaching the Top 40 through the end of the decade l His career as a pop singer was overshadowed by his marriages to Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor l When Eddie Fisher was with Debbie Reynolds. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 10:15 AM PST - 38 comments

"The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying." Harlan Ellison is not dead, but he's anticipating it, saying that Madcon this weekend in Madison, Wisconsin will be his final public appearance and that his next book will be his last. [more inside]
posted by Zed at 10:09 AM PST - 89 comments

Ever since the Women's Health Initiative published data showing increased risk and little benefit with post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy it has become more controversial and the FDA now recommends using the lowest dose possible for the shortest time, if using it at all. Why was HRT so popular in the first place? It now appears one reason was that what appeared to be legitimate articles in peer reviewed journals were actually ghostwritten by drug companies. [more inside]
posted by TedW at 9:59 AM PST - 22 comments

In honor of the fifth annual Fluff festival (tomorrow afternoon in Union Square, Somerville, MA), I bear gifts: • Fluff Rum Sauce (and other recipes via the Online Yummy Book) • A Flufferettes jingle (.mp3, via that old dusty web-tome, History of Marshmallow Fluff, unfortunately not subtitled "The sticky path from Somerville to Lynn") • And a Fluffernutter. (complete with "radically extreme" 90's TV ad) [more inside]
posted by not_on_display at 9:48 AM PST - 23 comments

This morning comedian Stephen Colbert testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and Border Security, where he appeared as a witness on the issue of migrant farm work. He did so in character: "a fake blowhard before a panel of real pontificators. "It's unclear upon how many members of the committee the joke was lost." [Video | 05:19]. [more inside]
posted by ericb at 9:28 AM PST - 143 comments

Dog confused by Tube escalator (SLYT, kinda)
posted by mippy at 8:39 AM PST - 58 comments

A Dialogue With Sarah, Aged 3: In which it is shown that if your dad is a chemistry professor, asking "why" can be dangerous
posted by bayani at 8:24 AM PST - 77 comments

The Rise and Fall of Blockbuster. After filing for bankruptcy yesterday, many wonder what the future holds for the fallen video rental chain.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 8:19 AM PST - 105 comments

FlowTV (an academic media studies web journal) revisits the Canadian Conspiracy. [more inside]
posted by k8t at 8:11 AM PST - 16 comments

Women's Pro Tennis Turns 40. Women's professional tennis was launched by World Tennis magazine publisher Gladys Heldman 40 years ago on September 23, 1970, with a tournament that had nine entrants and $7,500 in prizes. The original nine were Billy Jean King and Rosemary Casals along with the lesser known Peaches Bartkowicz, Judy Dalton, Julie Heldman, Kerry Melville, Kristy Pigeon, Nancy Richey and Valerie Ziegenfuss. A year later, King became the first female athlete to earn six figures in her sport. In the '80s, Martina Navratilova became the first to earn $1 million. Today the WTA Tour is an $85 million-a-year sport. "We wanted to make sure that any young girl, if she was good enough and if she wanted to, would have the opportunity to make a living playing tennis," King said.
posted by rcade at 8:01 AM PST - 14 comments

If you were to ask me "What is the most artistic drum solo you've ever heard?", I'd say "You mean the one with the most exquisite sense of dynamics? One that doesn't bludgeon you over the head, but instead pulls you in with its subtlety and restraint? Where masterful technique is purely at the service of musicality? That best conveys a musical vision and a deep understanding of the interrelationships of percussive timbre and tone that make up that remarkable instrument we call the drum set?" You'd say "Yeah." I'd say this. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:29 AM PST - 48 comments

Beleaguered B&Bs on the blunt end of TripAdvisor reviews are threatening legal action. [more inside]
posted by londonmark at 7:26 AM PST - 40 comments

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.
posted by caddis at 7:15 AM PST - 144 comments

Is this just another version of the minstrel show? The Pendleton Round-up is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Part of its attraction is the performance of a "American Indian" dance pageant, whose participants are compensated traditionally. "A century later, the mill still provides blankets, and families are still paid to appear, $5 per person each day at the arena. Beef and vegetables are provided, as are tokens for other food. The winner of the “Best Dressed Indian Award” at the parade gets 50 silver dollars. The winner of the “Oldest Indian Couple Award” gets 100 silver dollars in a pouch."
posted by Xurando at 7:04 AM PST - 17 comments

Julianne Moore Loves to Cry (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:08 AM PST - 70 comments

Adolf Finds Out Bin 38 AngelGate. Originally used as a term to describe wealthy individuals who funded theater productions in great Britain, angel investors have become the go-to people when your start-up needs seed money, but not enough warrant a full fledged venture capitalist firm. Acquiring an angel investor can involve everything from full on formal proposals to an individual visiting your dorm room and writing a check... [more inside]
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 5:50 AM PST - 22 comments

Fizzboomski the Anarchist tries to blow upsk the Prime Minister-a-vitch.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:14 AM PST - 26 comments

The latest attempt to mitigate the impact of the Citizens United decision has failed, with an attempt to pass transparency rules for corporations funding political advertising failing to reach cloture. Obama comments on this vote in his most recent weekly address. Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010) held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment. [more inside]
posted by lucien_reeve at 3:40 AM PST - 42 comments

The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down (a SLYT 40 years in the making) showing one frame from every Warner Brothers theatrical cartoon made from 1930-1969 (thankfully at a rate of about 3 per second). See the evolution of animation! Porky Pig's successful diet in '37! Michigan J. Frog's memorable single appearance! And illegal alien Speedy Gonzalez replacing American toons in the '60s! (via M.E.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:36 PM PST - 78 comments

A chair that can diagnose depression and bipolar disorder and calibrate medication. Solar paint that turns every surface into solar power collection material. A infinitely variable geared transmission that never loses the sweet spot. A tool for microscopes that can detect bacteria quickly and cheaply using flashed light. And a power plant the size of a room that can turn out 10kw power from low grade heat. These five inventions were finalists in the Australian science show The New Inventors. And the winner is... [more inside]
posted by Kerasia at 4:37 PM PST - 37 comments

NASA has some new maps showing air pollution around the world. It shows PM_2.5, that is, Particulate Matter less than 2.5 micrometers in size, small enough to get past normal bodily defenses and cause health problems. [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 4:22 PM PST - 31 comments

Operation Ivy Bells was a joint US Navy/NSA effort to tap into a Soviet communications cable deep under water and bring back recordings of military communications traffic. [more inside]
posted by FishBike at 3:56 PM PST - 37 comments

i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer. Craig Fehrman traces the post-mortem dispersion of writers' personal libraries: in particular, David Markson's personal library and the way in which his fans are using Facebook to reconstruct the range of Markson's reading.
posted by catlet at 3:26 PM PST - 12 comments

Tao Lin on the cover of The Stranger. The Stranger gives us a parody of the Jonathan Franzen Time Magazine Cover featuring unadjectiveable novelist, Tao Lin. Then Tao Lin profiles himself.
posted by outlandishmarxist at 3:20 PM PST - 62 comments

Walter Breuning reminisces about his life in three centuries. As the oldest man in the world and in celebration of his 114th birthday on September 21, Mr. Breuning agreed to this exclusive interview. Questions were gleaned via the internet from individuals around the world.
posted by gman at 2:28 PM PST - 27 comments

Joanne loves science! And science books (yt). via Science Cheerleader. Or maybe vice versa.
posted by xowie at 2:12 PM PST - 4 comments

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming / Sayin' something about a queen... [more inside]
posted by ambulance blues at 1:40 PM PST - 46 comments

The Best American Science Writing has a diverse set of offerings for this year, including five articles already featured here on the blue. Starting off with Benedict Carey - Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk (The New York Times) [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:30 PM PST - 10 comments

DC just rolled out largest bike share program in US this week, Washington DC's and the Arlington (VA) County's bikesharing programs joined forces to create Capital Bikeshare with regional service of over 1,100 bikes and 114 stations throughout the area, with plans to include several other nearby Virginia and Maryland counties in the near future. [more inside]
posted by crunchland at 11:37 AM PST - 81 comments

This is all rooted in a vision I had, of William S. Burroughs as a CIA agent, and Philip K. Dick as his young henchman, going head-to-head with notorious gangster and pervert Adolf Hitler somewhere in Hamburg to find out where Hitler is shipping all the computers he can get his hands on. - In another world Charles Stross wrote this sprawling work of Alternate History instead of the Merchant Princes books. Fictional books are of course themselves a common them in Alternative History stories, from The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in The Man in the High Castle to Adolf Hitlers pulp novel Lord of the Swastika in The Iron Dream. Stanisław Lem was particularly enamoured with the idea of the fictional book, and wrote two volumes of reviews and introductions for them, lovingly described here by Bruce Sterling.
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM PST - 87 comments

Hipstamatic is one of the coolest camera apps for the the iPhone. Photojojo is one of the coolest photography blogs. World's collide: Photojojo's Ultimate Hipstamatic Guide in which pictures are taken with every possible hipstamatic film/lens/flash combination. [more inside]
posted by morganannie at 10:34 AM PST - 50 comments

"I don't believe we're going to have the ability to build asphalt roads in 50 years."
posted by kinnakeet at 10:26 AM PST - 121 comments

Ciudad de Mexico. A capital in motion.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 10:03 AM PST - 9 comments

8BITS is a short, very violent film about nostalgia for 8-bit video games. Well, maybe 'about' is a strong word.
posted by Fraxas at 9:28 AM PST - 28 comments

In "My Lie" author Meridith Maran reveals her own painful history with recovered memory: she accused her own father of molesting her, and years later learned that her recollections had been false. Interviewed today on NPR,Maran equates her journey through the recovered memory movement to the persistent political lie that President Obama is a Muslim. [more inside]
posted by pianomover at 9:21 AM PST - 64 comments

David Bazan was the lead singer for a band called Pedro the Lion, who were big on the Christian rock circuit. A few years ago, Bazan began questioning his faith, and ultimately left Christianity. He has found understanding from his fans.
posted by reenum at 8:41 AM PST - 51 comments

The dream of Icarus has been one shared by many throughout history. University of Toronto Engineering students made history this week when they successfully flew a human-powered aircraft with flapping wings continuously. The flight of the Snowbird is beautiful to watch. [more inside]
posted by smitt at 8:30 AM PST - 42 comments

Justin and Stephanie are travelling from Philadelphia to Auckland on the Cap Cleveland, a 220m long container ship. [more inside]
posted by jontyjago at 7:49 AM PST - 17 comments

Though George Lucas said Chewbacca was based on his dog, an intrepid fan tracked down a different origin story. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:28 AM PST - 34 comments

'Sesame Street' Pulls Katy Perry video from show. Sesame Workshop, which produces the long-running PBS children’s show “Sesame Street,” said on Thursday morning that it would not show a music video planned for the coming 41st season of the series that features the pop singer Katy Perry, citing in its decision the outcry of viewers who had seen the suggestive video online. The video features Ms. Perry singing a parody of her song “Hot ‘N Cold” accompanied by the “Sesame Street” character Elmo. Via NYTimes.com
posted by Fizz at 6:22 AM PST - 226 comments

When pop goes bad: novelty records The excruciatingly catchy novelty song was a hallmark of the 1980s. Is it back? And how do you write one? Dave Simpson talks to the experts [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:41 AM PST - 132 comments

It's Chili time in NM! This NYTimes story on hot peppers is full of good stuff(if Capsicum and heat are your thing). Some experts argue that we like chilies because they are good for us. They can help lower blood pressure, may have some , antimicrobial effects, and they increase salivation, which is good if you eat a boring diet based on one bland staple crop like corn or rice. The pain of chilies can even kill other pain, a concept supported by recent research. There is evidence that by 6,000 years ago domesticated Capsicums (hot peppers) were being used from the Bahamas to the Andes. [more inside]
posted by Blake at 4:39 AM PST - 37 comments

Continuous Chest Compression CPR is a hands-only CPR method that doubles a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest. It’s easy and does not require mouth-to-mouth contact, making it more likely bystanders will try to help, and it was developed at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. YT link for the video. The Mayo Clinic Presentation.
posted by nickyskye at 4:22 AM PST - 56 comments

"Tell me the worst night of your professional career." A sit-down story with Bill Hicks.
posted by Taft at 10:11 PM PST - 39 comments

Neutered feral cats, scuba dives and nightly repainting: What goes on in Disneyland after dark.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 9:16 PM PST - 58 comments

...[John] Adams’s Koran [Qur'an] had a strong New England pedigree. The first Koran published in the United States, it was printed in Springfield in 1806.
posted by orthogonality at 8:42 PM PST - 22 comments

The Sacrifice! Valve Software releases a 4-part comic that chronicles what happens to Francis, Louis, Zoey, and Bill at the end of the original Left 4 Dead. [more inside]
posted by kbanas at 8:40 PM PST - 15 comments

We make this pledge bearing true faith and allegiance to the people we represent, and we invite fellow citizens and patriots to join us in forming a new governing agenda for America. [more inside]
posted by Mister Fabulous at 5:59 PM PST - 445 comments

Everyday Cute: Is Cute Everyday.
posted by The Whelk at 5:27 PM PST - 12 comments

I don't know about you, but as a woman, I sure do like the moon, being curvy, dancing in groups (especially in groups of three), bright colors, embracing hope, looking like a prehistoric rock painting and/or sculpture, and becoming a tree. [URL possibly NSFW] (via)
posted by Countess Elena at 5:20 PM PST - 47 comments

In honour of Chinese jade hitting $3,000 an ounce, a quick context of what one ounce buys... $1300 $883 $350 $51.93 $20.08 $4.74
posted by nickrussell at 3:00 PM PST - 38 comments

Towering over New Hampshire at a height of 6,288 feet, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeastern United States. It has been ascended by countless hikers from all walks of life, including (for the first time ever) a paralyzed dog. [more inside]
posted by dhammond at 2:51 PM PST - 40 comments

The Humournet Collage Archive is an artifact of of the Old Web consisting of hundreds of .txt collages (422 to be exact) of jokes and anecdotes, originally issued as part of the HumourNet mailing list. Sometimes the moderator's opener is as funny as the content.
posted by griphus at 2:50 PM PST - 4 comments

For millions of addicts around the world, Alcoholics Anonymous's basic text - informally known as the Big Book - is the Bible. And as they're about to find out, the Bible was edited. After being hidden away for nearly 70 years and then auctioned twice, the original manuscript by AA co-founder Bill Wilson is about to become public for the first time next week, complete with edits by Wilson-picked commenters that reveal a profound debate in 1939 about how overtly to talk about God.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:53 PM PST - 76 comments

Dictaphone Parcel. Lauri Warsta put a tape recorder inside a box, set it recording, sealed up the box, sent it from London to Finland through the post, then animated the captured audio. Previously
posted by sleepcrime at 1:42 PM PST - 13 comments

Europe according to... is a project to map stereotypes of European countries according to other countries and groups of people. [more inside]
posted by desjardins at 1:05 PM PST - 55 comments

"And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they've been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours -- come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason."
posted by jefficator at 12:24 PM PST - 130 comments

David Bowie Standup. That is all.
posted by yellowbinder at 11:58 AM PST - 41 comments

Feign is a flash maze game by Ian Snyder with music by Brother Android. It is set in a kind of funky Escher-like space. (windows only bonus: Hazard: The Journey of Life by Alexander Bruce)
posted by juv3nal at 11:53 AM PST - 23 comments

Flying Swarming Robots
posted by rouftop at 11:44 AM PST - 7 comments

The Serbian folk tradition of weaving and shaping straws of wheat, by artists who call themselves straw-girls (slamarke divojke), is showcased in the trailer for Branko Istvancic's documentary film "From Grain To Painting" [more inside]
posted by various at 11:23 AM PST - 5 comments

BDBGS! Last time Christian Swinehart was on metafilter, it was for his gorgeous visualizations of the narrative pathways contained in the Choose Your Own Adventure books. His new interactive visualizations plot bedbug reports in New York City between 2004 and the present. [more inside]
posted by scarylarry at 10:50 AM PST - 18 comments

It's been an oxymoronic chemical curiosity since 1968, but "Dry Water" is getting some buzz of late, mainly because of newly discovered applications. Like its ability to absorb gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. How long before molecular gastronomists figure out something clever to do with it?
posted by cross_impact at 10:25 AM PST - 21 comments

Finalists for the first-ever Vimeo Awards, culled form over 6500 submissions, these are the 45 finalist films in 9 categories.
posted by crunchland at 10:16 AM PST - 10 comments

Assessing the Terrorist Threat -- Bruce Hoffman and Peter Bergen describe how Al Qaida has evolved since the attacks in 2001, including the development of domestic USA networks and the increasingly diverse and decentralized nature of terrorism. Homeland Security and local law enforcement are not keeping up with the changes. [more inside]
posted by warbaby at 9:32 AM PST - 33 comments

The making of Goodfellas. Twenty years after the movie came out, Scorsese and the cast and crew talk about making the movie -- what was scripted, what wasn't, who was originally considered for the cast -- and how many real wiseguys made it on screen.
posted by devinemissk at 7:47 AM PST - 116 comments

The Washboard Serenaders (or was it the Washboard Rhythm Kings?) had one of the best, if not the best, fake trumpet players who ever walked the earth. 'Course, their washboard player weren't no slouch, neither. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:34 AM PST - 5 comments

NYC's underground grilled cheese [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:00 AM PST - 66 comments

On August 23rd, the great Japanese stop-motion animator and president of the Japan Animation Association Kihachirō Kawamoto passed away at the age of 85. Here is a selection of his beautiful short films (available on DVD) __ Farce Anthropo - Cynique (1970) - The Demon (1972) [more inside]
posted by louche mustachio at 5:04 AM PST - 6 comments

When releasing the Mozilla source code, Netscape's lawyers insisted that the code first be sanitized. In particular, "any text containing vulgar or offensive words or expressions; any text that might be slanderous or libelous to individuals and/or institutions," had to be removed. Here is a sample of what it looked like before that occurred.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:57 AM PST - 46 comments

Cloture to force a vote on the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill has not been achieved. DADT will stand. Chances are not better in a possibly more Republican Senate post-November, and the bill is unlikely to pass before then. Republican voters against cloture: Every single senator; Democratic voters against cloture: Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor.
posted by jaduncan at 1:58 AM PST - 183 comments

Sometime its seems like you're living in a William Gibson novel. Was Stuxnet Built to Attack Iran's Nuclear Program?
posted by Long Way To Go at 12:06 AM PST - 50 comments

"With the midterm elections in the U.S. Senate just six weeks away, everyone is wondering how the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats will shake out after November 2." Wonder no more with Google's 2010 U.S. Election Ratings Map. Information can be filtered by state, type of race (senate, governor, house), and by source. A Google Maps blog entry has more detailed info for those who want to dig deeper into the application. [via TechCrunch]
posted by bayani at 10:27 PM PST - 20 comments

The .Doc File of J Alfred Prufrock "Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a laptop, put in sleep mode on a table..."
posted by magstheaxe at 9:23 PM PST - 32 comments

Earning $250,000 Does Not Make You Rich, Not in My Town. A controversial blog post from a University of Chicago Law professor makes its way around the web as the debates about president Obama's tax plan get louder. "Our combined income exceeds the $250,000 threshold for the super rich...The problem is, we can’t afford it. Here is why." [more inside]
posted by windbox at 9:18 PM PST - 359 comments

The Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names. Via.
posted by cashman at 7:32 PM PST - 32 comments

Never Say No To Panda [SLYT] .
posted by Fizz at 6:38 PM PST - 39 comments

Do you enjoy decks? Jean shorts? Odd and offensive monologues? Christian Poetry? [more inside]
posted by snapped at 6:37 PM PST - 28 comments

"He sits at a table and spins his yarn, his only requisites being a small stick, the so-called 'wakening-rod' xingmu (in Yangzhou storytelling called 'talking stopper' zhiyu), a handkerchief and a fan."

A comprehensive guide to the art and tradition of Chinese Storytelling — with photographs, text, audio and video clips illustrating elements of performance.
posted by unliteral at 6:20 PM PST - 3 comments

Recently uploaded airplane camera footage from 1945 Japan (slyt). Uploaded from the Romano Archives (previously).
posted by glaucon at 5:49 PM PST - 33 comments

Spiked milkshakes? Braised short-ribs for breakfast? Yes, please! [more inside]
posted by gman at 5:16 PM PST - 16 comments

Jabberwacky, A Free Comic Book about the Middle Ages (sort of) from Wide Awake Press (also available in pdf or cbz format) [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:33 PM PST - 4 comments

It gets better. Billy Lucas committed suicide September 9th. Hate messages have been left on his memorial page. Dan Savage was looking for a way to reach out to every gay kid in high school and tell them that they have something to live for, so he started another youtube channel, encouraging submissions from those who have gotten through it. Dan has a well known sex advice column and podcast. Previously
posted by poe at 3:09 PM PST - 79 comments

PopSci: Archive Gallery: From Chicago to Shanghai, 138 Visionary Years of World's Fairs [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:35 PM PST - 5 comments

When Gillian Hills was discovered in 1958 by Roger Vadim, she was touted as being the next Bridgett Bardot. She went on to star in such films as Antonioni's Blow Up and the British rock and roll film Beat Girl, and even had a small part as Sonietta, the girl with the lollypop in A Clockwork Orange. But it is her early '60s French pop records which fascinate me. Here with Qui a su, Rien n'est changé, Rentre Sans Moi, Look at Them and Tomorrow Is Another Day .
posted by puny human at 1:57 PM PST - 7 comments

The Vatican Bank is once again Under Investigation. In 1982 The Vatican Bank was involved in the Ambrosiano Scandal with its associations with Roberto Calvi, Gladius, Opus Dei and the P2 masonic lodge, all well documented.
The story was summarised in a 1982 Time article. The Vatican Bank is also known as the The Institute for Works of Religion and apparently holds 5 billion Euros in complete secrecy (pdf). For further reading there is the book Vatican exposed.
posted by adamvasco at 1:55 PM PST - 125 comments

Stan Lee has not yet been told about ... GRIT! FEATURING -- Dourdevil, the man without a sense of humor (different presentations of the same comic). The year was 1983, and Alan Moore was spoofing the style of Frank Miller (bibliography), towards the end of Frank Miller's run with Daredevil. Moore thought highly of Miller, if one believes what Moore wrote in "The Importance of Being Frank" (linked therein as a .cbz file), which was published in the same comics magazine run as Grit! [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:10 PM PST - 53 comments

What does four weeks, 124 takes, 12 trainers, two furniture movers, 12 dogs, one goat, 38 buckets and a bunch of furniture equal? OK Go's new video White Knuckles, all shot in one single take. A behind the scenes look at the video here.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 11:45 AM PST - 92 comments

Can you write a hack in 140 characters? Someone figured out how, and now Twitter is infested with them. They say they'll have a fix today. In the mean time, the twitter page belonging to the wife of the British PM has been hacked, making it redirect to a Japanese porn site.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:15 AM PST - 52 comments

Music Hack Day heads back to Boston October 16 and 17. Music Hack Day is a free-to-attend 24-hour convergence over two calendar days designed to throw together programmers, musicians, artists, conceptualizers, and, of course, marketers and promoters. "Music + software + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it's music related." Music Hack Day London just ended (September 4, 5). My favorite (and the MHD-London winner!) was Speakatron, which is WebCam + Software = Goofy Fun! (related, previously) [more inside]
posted by beelzbubba at 9:20 AM PST - 4 comments

Pokémon Apokélypse: The Live Action Trailer [SLYT]
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:25 AM PST - 33 comments

"Make-up is great. It is a powerful tool, a way to express yourself, your mood and interior life. But, when you can’t go without something, it loses its spark." We are two days into Rabbit Write's NO MAKE-UP WEEK.
posted by hermitosis at 8:23 AM PST - 223 comments

New York:

High Quality - $448.92/oz
Medium Quality - $341.42/oz
Low Quality - $183.36/oz
posted by swift at 8:02 AM PST - 158 comments

He showed that the Royal Mail will deliver things as small as a bee or as large as an elephant; he once posted himself home; and he invented the self-recirculating postcard - it had two sides, each with a different address. W Reginald Bray was a genius at mail art and the self-proclaimed autograph king. [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:51 AM PST - 13 comments

The new planet, currently under development and slated for launch next year, will be an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael’s music, his life and the global issues that concerned him.
posted by Joe Beese at 7:44 AM PST - 9 comments

When a thief stole a backpack and a GPS unit from Amanda Enayati's car, he picked the wrong target to mess with. [more inside]
posted by acb at 7:02 AM PST - 190 comments

Is Groupon worth it for businesses? Depends who you ask. Posies Cafe says no. [more inside]
posted by Windigo at 6:48 AM PST - 83 comments

Facing social pressures, families disguise girls as boys in Afghanistan. (slnyt)
posted by killdevil at 6:46 AM PST - 15 comments

Every day the same dream. Every day the same dream.
posted by tybeet at 5:23 AM PST - 14 comments

This new Australian tv quiz show is so awkward it's endearing , and Lily's good at maths! [more inside]
posted by compound eye at 2:14 AM PST - 41 comments

She read from notes, stumbling occasionally, and did not so much lean on her metaphors as wrestle them to the floor and grind them underfoot; but they loved it anyway - all 15 minutes of it. She attacked everyone from the president on down, demanded stricter standards for America's service personnel, espoused an aggressive red-meat constitutionalism, and proposed a new policy which she summed up as "if you don't like it - go home." The 2,000-strong crowd cheered wildly as she literally howled her frustration before leading them, fists pumping, in an anti-incumbent chant of "Go home!" A strange mix of patriotism and petulance, it was a rough kind of stump speech that hadn't been tested in a focus group or tried out on a campaign aide, and which was delivered with complete disregard for how it might play in the media. Witness the startling political debut of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, American citizen.
posted by anigbrowl at 11:19 PM PST - 110 comments

Beloved author Terry Pratchett was knighted in 2008. He has since decided that he needed a sword. [more inside]
posted by quin at 10:28 PM PST - 55 comments

Amid news of new extrasolar planet discoveries, including a system with a possible 7 planets, Greg Laughlin and Sam Arbesman have released a paper that will be published next month in the open-access journal PLoS One. "A Scientometric Prediction of the Discovery of the First Potentially Habitable Planet with a Mass Similar to Earth" (pdf of full paper) boldly predicts that: "the first potentially habitable planet will be discovered, in this case, as early as May 2011, and likely by the end of 2013." NASA's Kepler mission is set to release data on hundreds of candidate planets early next year. The mission has discovered 7 so far. (Pre-vio-usly)
posted by IvoShandor at 10:16 PM PST - 23 comments

Bollywood Radio, the classics l Top 40 Countdown, news, interviews, talk about the music scene in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam l Bonus links: Indian classical music on Radio Live365 and more.
posted by nickyskye at 10:00 PM PST - 8 comments

BBC puts cameras on some speedy raptors' backs.
posted by kickingtheground at 9:35 PM PST - 40 comments

Much like the Garfield Randomizer, Random Dick — the Dick Tracy Continuity Randomizer creates wonderfully surreal little comics (thanks to The Comics Curmudgeon)
posted by OverlappingElvis at 8:32 PM PST - 17 comments

The entire assemblage comprises 14,882 human skeletal fragments, as well as the mutilated remains of dogs and other animals killed at the massacre site -- Sacred Ridge, southwest of Durango, Colo. [....] when the violence took place, men, women and children were tortured, disemboweled, killed and often hacked to bits. In some cases, heads, hands and feet appear to have been removed as trophies for the killers. The attackers then removed belongings out of the structures and set the roofs on fire. [....] At least two other separate studies have come to similar conclusions, suggesting the genocide victims at Sacred Ridge belonged to an ethnic group that was different from that of other nearby populations.

posted by orthogonality at 7:37 PM PST - 44 comments

For those Internet gamers who have grown tired of the same old Flash games, Casual Girl Gamer has assembled a well-vetted list of the 30 best HTML5 games. And for those with a more artistic bent, HTML5 also has much to offer, such as this kaleidoscope project (which allows visitors to use their own Flickr photos) or this doll creator (which also allows users to create custom faces from their own photos). These pages -- or at least some of the links contained within them -- are all associated with Microsoft's Beauty of the Web event, which highlights websites taking advantage of HTML5 and other cutting edge Web technologies. [more inside]
posted by GnomeChompsky at 6:44 PM PST - 41 comments

Gymkhana THREE, Part 2; Ultimate Playground; l'Autodrome, France [more inside]
posted by bwg at 6:30 PM PST - 24 comments

It's time to smile. (SLYT)
posted by jbickers at 6:25 PM PST - 7 comments

When Humans Ruled the Earth. [SLV] An insight into the human machine and it's consumption addiction.
posted by Fizz at 6:24 PM PST - 12 comments

YouTube video (15:45) description says: "Mike Jarvi badassedly constructs his signature one-piece, the Jarvi Bench." Really?   r e a l l y .   More of Mike's badass work at mikejarvi.com.
posted by spock at 5:46 PM PST - 23 comments

AuroraMax will be providing live images of Canada's northern lights, courtesy of the Canadian Space Agency. It all begins tonight at about 11:30 EDT.
posted by Crane Shot at 5:20 PM PST - 10 comments

Located in a nuclear bomb shelter which was built during cold war under 30 meters of rock mountain, Bahnhof ISP is host to the Wikileaks servers. [more inside]
posted by gman at 4:46 PM PST - 41 comments

How segregated is your city? Eric Fischer maps the top 40 US cities by race, using 2000 census data. Each color-coded dot represents 25 people: Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, and Orange is Hispanic. The maps are oddly pretty, and revealing. Compare, for example, Detroit and San Antonio. via [more inside]
posted by CunningLinguist at 2:53 PM PST - 173 comments

Click "Write". Get a prompt. And a timer that will all too quickly hit 0:00. That's when you don't get to edit anymore. It's Six Minute Story, and it's among the most fun/frenetic (or perhaps fun/harrowing) 360 seconds you'll have today. [via mefi projects]
posted by davidjmcgee at 2:31 PM PST - 25 comments

When a movie one sheet not an ad for an upcoming film? Some talented graphic designers have taken to creating one sheets for already released films. These 'unsheets' as screenwriter John August calls them are often clever and subtle pieces that reference iconic scenes of the film such as Die Hard's infamous walk on broken glass scene for example. Previous discussion of re-imagined movie posters. and here.
posted by clockworkjoe at 1:40 PM PST - 27 comments

Former Cuil employees are saying that the search engine is down for good. [more inside]
posted by bayani at 1:37 PM PST - 55 comments

Every day, our world gets a little bit smaller and a lot more complex. So much so that even minor decisions can have major consequences. Not just for trees or frogs or polar bears, but for human lives, and livelihoods. At its core, sustainability is about people. The Living Principles for Design aim to guide purposeful action. It is a place to co-create, share and showcase best practices, tools, stories and ideas for enabling sustainable action across all design disciplines. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 1:20 PM PST - 9 comments

Family Matters Theme (Room 4 U Remix) [SLYT]
posted by defenestration at 1:06 PM PST - 34 comments

Map and streaming playlist of the best non-commercial college radio stations. [via mefi projects]
posted by KokuRyu at 1:04 PM PST - 56 comments

Fox News has taken a leaf off Scientology's book, and sued for copyright infringement a Democratic candidate who dared use Fox News footage in his campaign ad.
posted by Skeptic at 12:58 PM PST - 26 comments

Over the course of three years, designer Christien Meindertsma tracked the products that had been made from the remains of a single pig. In doing so, she discovered that the skin, bones, meat, organs, blood, fat, brains, hoofs, hair and tail of a single pig might be used in more than 180 very diverse products, from shampoo, medicine, tattoo ink, munitions, cardiac valves, matches, desserts and bubblegum, beer and lemonade, car paint and brake discs to pills and bread. TED Talk. TED Bio. Vimeo video: Reading through the pages of Pig 05049. Exhibition (in Dutch). Design Observer: Pig 05049. Amazon: Pig 05049 [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:56 PM PST - 24 comments

These Flickr collections document NASA's 2010 Desert Research and Technology Studies tests (Desert RATS!). [via]
posted by brundlefly at 12:52 PM PST - 7 comments

Ben’s 120lb Journey. “Christmas of that year, I realized I was unhappy with my life, and just being there being with [my grandmother], I realized it was the time to do something about it. So I started my blog, BenDoesLife, wrote the address on the card, and gave it to her as a Christmas gift. She got me a shirt, which was two sizes too small. I told her rather than take it back, I was going to work on fitting in it. And eventually I did.” Ben running in January 2009 and then at his second weigh-in. Recent Interview with Ben.
posted by yeti at 12:48 PM PST - 37 comments

Philippe Croizon swam the English Channel this weekend. Making this a notable feat: the 42 year old Frenchman has neither arms nor legs after having lost his limbs in an electrical accident.
posted by sonika at 12:47 PM PST - 13 comments

Gene Weingarten on the the most widely-read author you've probably never heard of: Leslie McFarlane, a.k.a. "Franklin W. Dixon," was the man behind the Hardy Boys. [more inside]
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:31 PM PST - 58 comments

In the mood for some homebrew remixing? Phoenix has put the complete multitracks to their album Wolfgang Amadeux Phoenix online for your downloading pleasure, for free. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 11:53 AM PST - 15 comments

What you get when you attach a 102-year old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat lens to a 5DmkII. And you're photographer Timur Civan.
posted by dobbs at 10:59 AM PST - 40 comments

"The Office of the Future" 40 Years Later - 40 years of Xerox Parc, the Palo Alto research group responsible for the desktop computer interface as we know it today.
posted by Artw at 10:43 AM PST - 24 comments

All the interviews from Paris Review (wikipedia) are now online! [more inside]
posted by mattn at 10:36 AM PST - 13 comments

Lydia Davis is blogging on translation during the lead-up to her forthcoming Madame Bovary. You can also read Davis discussing style, Beckett, Proust, and translation with The Believer here.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:13 AM PST - 14 comments

Top-performing nations recruit 100% of their new teachers from the top third. In the US, it's 23% - and 14% of high poverty schools. A new study by McKinsey and Company examines what Finland, Singapore and South Korea do to attract top graduates to teaching, including selective admissions to teacher training, competitive compensation, a more professionalized work environment, cultural respect and greater opportunities for advancement. Doing the same in the US would cost roughly $180 billion a year. [more inside]
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 10:07 AM PST - 84 comments

I go to park, and I feed the duck, and they call—I talking with the ducks... I said, "You remember the man who gave you the food? He is in a prison. Ask the God to help him." [more inside]
posted by notion at 9:41 AM PST - 39 comments

Just in time for Banned Books Week, the Bridwell Library at SMU presents "Heresy and Error": The Ecclesiastical Censorship of Books, 1400-1800.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:08 AM PST - 3 comments

Ron Fanelli was a poker player. Victoria Coren liked him. Then she learned that he had confessed to brutally killing 'bar girl' Wanphen Pienjai in Thailand. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:22 AM PST - 86 comments

Queering the Guinness Book of World Records: at 33 hours, Matty and Bobby have achieved the world's longest kiss.
posted by hermitosis at 7:52 AM PST - 61 comments

Can't get enough Kabbadi
posted by jindc at 6:52 AM PST - 19 comments

What is the USDA’s definition of organic?
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 6:20 AM PST - 50 comments

PuzzGrid is a lightweight, fast game of forming associations, which is, ahem, "based on" the BBC's Only Connect. Hundreds of grids to play and you can submit your own, too! (The BBC site has a few dozen more, in a fancier, louder flash app.)
posted by Wolfdog at 5:52 AM PST - 39 comments

The National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize shortlist for 2010 has been announced. Among the entries, and causing a small ripple of controversy, is Panayiotis Lamprou's Portrait of My British Wife, which is reopening up where mainstream sensibilities of the border between art of and voyeurism lie. The photo features Lamprou's wife Christina looking directly at the camera. Wearing no knickers. [Links are SFW. NSFW links appropriately flagged on the pages themselves] [more inside]
posted by MuffinMan at 5:41 AM PST - 72 comments

On the 19th of October, a Deutsche Bahn ICE3 train will travel from Germany to London through the Channel Tunnel. [more inside]
posted by acb at 4:30 AM PST - 60 comments

"Trespass: A History Of Uncommissioned Urban Art," a lovely looking guide to street art activations published by Taschen and soon to be released on the masses. [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata at 12:11 AM PST - 17 comments

Similar in concept to the ICU64 (Previously), Visual 6502 is a transistor-level simulation of the MOS 6502 chip (Wikipedia). Here's a Javascript implementation. Very processor intensive, doesn't work in IE. [more inside]
posted by griphus at 10:27 PM PST - 17 comments

Inspired by photographer T. Hayashida's book Take Ivy, a collection of images of (largely white) Ivy-league students of the 1960s, style bloggers Joshua Kissi and Travis Gumbs of Street Etiquette reimagine the book as The Black Ivy, where the race lines are flipped and the dapper dial is cranked up to 11.
posted by emilyd22222 at 10:13 PM PST - 21 comments

In Utah, the Deseret News -- which is owned by the Mormon Church -- has raised eyebrows with editorials supporting a more liberal embrace of illegal immigrants. [more inside]
posted by msalt at 9:07 PM PST - 54 comments

Einstürzende Neubauten is 30. The legendary German experimental band ("Collapsing New Buildings") is known for its use of homemade instruments assembled from found industrial materials. [more inside]
posted by mykescipark at 5:53 PM PST - 51 comments

A Review of Ocean Surf: The Ultimate in Relaxation
posted by empath at 5:48 PM PST - 12 comments

I Married a Mad Man. Mad Men's Don Draper was based on a real character, Draper Daniels. An interesting bio by his wife, Myra.
posted by John of Michigan at 5:27 PM PST - 45 comments

Ecto-1 A community dedicated to the discovery, creation and preservation of one of the most beloved movie cars of all time, Ghostbuster's (1984) Ecto-1. This site will be a useful tool for Ecto-1 Builders and collectors by providing rare photographic reference and knowledge from Ecto-1 Owners and builders.
posted by Fizz at 4:10 PM PST - 19 comments

A blind man uses a mobile phone to "see":

I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don’t really have a color, just light sources...I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon,” “Outer Space,” and many shades of blue and gray. I used color queues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house.

posted by nomadicink at 4:02 PM PST - 43 comments

Who Cork The Dance is a treasure trove of sound tapes - recordings of reggae sound systems and MCs live in session in dancehalls across Jamaica, the UK and the US, going back to the 1970s. [more inside]
posted by criticalbill at 12:32 PM PST - 16 comments

How Sharia law can be both good or bad for women (via a&l daily)
posted by jb at 12:16 PM PST - 44 comments

History and mystery wonderfully blended. Although doubtless well-known to UK Mefites, I was only recently directed to this marvelous and engaging TV series featuring Michael Kitchen as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle. It's a refreshing change from American fare, entirely adult, with crisp dialogue and meticulous attention to detail and historic accuracy. Speaking as a Yank weary of plasticity, it's also wonderful to see actors with real faces. The series can be seen on Youtube in pieces that can be viewed fairly seamlessly: Series One: The German Woman, The White Feather, Lesson in Murder, Eagle Day. Series Two: Fifty Ships, Among the Few, War Games, The Funk Hole. Series Three: The French Drop, Enemy Fire, They Fought in the Fields, War of Nerves. Series Four: Invasion, Bad Blood. Series Five: Bleak Midwinter, Casualties of War. Series Six: Plan of Attack, Broken Souls, All Clear. [more inside]
posted by kinnakeet at 12:13 PM PST - 25 comments

Vincent Lexington Harper compiled the world's largest collection of digitally restored pinups from the 1920s and 30s in the Old Orient Museum. [more inside]
posted by gman at 6:44 AM PST - 18 comments

"All you do is put it in the center here like this and then set a fire to it. And not always but most - uh oh." (Minecraft SLYT via Reddit)
posted by stringbean at 6:35 AM PST - 380 comments

"Everything's Better With Muppets" (Can't argue with that.) from Spray featuring Ricardo Autobahn (previously) who also gave props to another cultural icon with the also-true "DEVO Was Right About Everything" (DLYT)
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:28 AM PST - 6 comments

New evidence of religion's reproductive, cooperative, and personal benefits militates against the belief that religion is a "virus of the mind." [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:42 AM PST - 308 comments

Snakes of Avalon is a hallucinatory (windows only) point and click adventure game created using AGS by Igor Hardy and Alex vand der Wijst with soundtrack by Thomas Regin for the "one month, one room" MAGS competition. youtube trailer. [more inside]
posted by juv3nal at 4:31 AM PST - 7 comments

The strange face in the mirror illusion. Full Article.
posted by Brent Parker at 4:21 AM PST - 59 comments

Is Brazil, "the country of the future, and always will be", on the rise? Or does it need a dose of constructive paranoia? Two articles from The Miami Herald take a look during this election year.
posted by joetrip at 4:19 AM PST - 4 comments

Avast there! Ahoy, mateys! Tis the blessed day at last. Here be yer bible. Here be yer Web site. And here be yer Pirate Name Generator. Now get out there and celebrate, for tis Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arr!
posted by Lynsey at 12:40 AM PST - 72 comments

Photos: World's Biggest, Strongest Spider Webs Found: "Unlike most spiders, Darwin's bark spiders will sometimes wrap several insect corpses into a single cocoon, creating a snack pack for later consumption."
posted by bwg at 5:33 PM PST - 56 comments

Photographer Froggy Bottoms specializes in photographing celebrities with their biggest fans. Rick Springfield, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Patrick Stewart and many many more.
posted by Lord_Pall at 4:30 PM PST - 97 comments

In the spirit of Hamlet (Facebook Newsfeed Edition) (originally from McSweeney's Internet Tendencies, and then made graphic) and Austinbook (newsfeed of Pride and Prejudice), here are historical events as Facebook status posts (plus some Biblical events).
posted by filthy light thief at 4:15 PM PST - 11 comments

Manly Wade Wellman is probably best known for his eerie tales of Silver John, stories of a traveling balladeer and the weirdness he encountered in the southern Appalachians. Wellman was also an avid student of southern folklore and mountain music. His associations with Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Obray Ramsey served as inspirations for the Silver John character. In addition to his macabre tales of the American South, Wellman was an award-winning mystery author (beating William Faulkner for the prize) and ghost wrote Will Eisner's The Spirit while Eisner was in the army. [more inside]
posted by marxchivist at 4:04 PM PST - 24 comments

The Seil Bag: a bike backpack with turn signals! The Seil Bag consists of a printed circuit board with LED lights attached to a backpack. Equipped with a detachable wireless controller, riders can easily employ various signals such as directional arrows and emergency lights. South Korean Lee Myung Su won a 2010 red dot design award for her creation.
posted by Fizz at 3:23 PM PST - 45 comments

Where did that great song from Long-Haired Hare come from, anyway? [more inside]
posted by jtron at 2:07 PM PST - 12 comments

Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women. Cris Vangel's "78's and Other Music" YouTube Channel is full of old time vinyl goodies including a 1932 love song sung by a man, possibly to another man. Cat Scratchin' for Caturday. Bonus link: The Muppet version of Cigarettes and Whiskey with Peter Sellers singing.
posted by nickyskye at 1:34 PM PST - 12 comments

Continuing his track record [MeFi previously links] of using online distribution for his albums, Trent Reznor offers a five-song sampler of the soundtrack he created with Atticus Ross for The Social Network for free download online. (Well, really for the small "price" of your email address.) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:43 AM PST - 23 comments

The story of SST Records
posted by Joe Beese at 10:26 AM PST - 34 comments

Inceptionauts. SLYT worth your 2:21.
posted by FfejL at 9:31 AM PST - 22 comments

Spray-On Clothing
posted by empath at 9:21 AM PST - 58 comments

Perhaps it's best my grandmother didn't live to see this day: the Liberace Museum, located in the besequined showman's old stomping grounds of Las Vegas, is closing, and that would have saddened her. Maybe it's time for all of us to brush up on our early Liberace history. And let's hear the sparkling man, resplendent in gold, take Mack the Knife through some changes. Farewell, Liberace.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:39 AM PST - 66 comments

Caring about something is about taking the pain and the joy. The pain is hard. Taking the pain, facing it, dealing with it are the ways I think we can show we really care. That we know we care. --Bob, the story of a dog.
posted by Gator at 6:56 AM PST - 16 comments

Belleza sobrenatural (supernatural beauty) is a project from Elle Spain magazine featuring twelve (Spanish) beautiful women completely without makeup and without Photoshop enhancement; four of them appear on the covers. It's being picked up by other websites, but so far only in Spanish; I couldn't find any coverage in English. Meanwhile, the US version of Elle has the usual makeup/photoshop enhanced cover models. [more inside]
posted by math at 4:42 AM PST - 33 comments

The old lady always called me her boy... and she kept me in her room from the time that I was born until her death, then willed me to her son Samuel. When she was dying she called me to her bedside... Taking my hand in hers she told me to be a good boy and stay with Samuel. To Samuel she said, "Keep my boy as long as you live to remember me by." Larry Lapsley began life as someone else's property, but he managed to break free from his mistress' dying wish by way of a remarkable journey that would lead him to becoming the first black homesteader in Saline County, Kansas: When I came to Salina I was twenty-five years old and was without schooling. I had never gone to school a day in my life and I haven't any education yet but there is one thing I have, a good home and plenty of friends. [more inside]
posted by amyms at 12:02 AM PST - 22 comments

You like cats. You like Marvel characters. You like Marvel characters as cats.
posted by Artw at 8:28 PM PST - 30 comments

In 1977 the Dutch public broadcasting association VARA made a documentary called Wonderland, about then up-&-coming recording artists Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt & Jackson Browne. Here is that film. Warren Zevon at Griffith Observatory, Linda Ronstadt in studio “Tracks Of My Tears” alternative studio version, Linda Ronstadt outside her Malibu house, Warren Zevon at a burrito stand, Warren Zevon in concert “Carmelita”, Bonnie Raitt at Frederick’s, Bonnie Raitt in concert “Nothing Seems To Matter”, Linda Ronstadt in the bedroom of her Malibu house, Linda Ronstadt in studio “Lose Again” alternative studio version, Warren Zevon at Griffith Observatory, Warren Zevon in rehearsal “Frank And Jesse James”, Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Raitt in concert “Give It Up Or Let Me Go”, Jackson Browne, Jackson Browne in concert “Before The Deluge”.
posted by scalefree at 7:00 PM PST - 27 comments

Baby monkey riding on a pig. That is all.
posted by dersins at 4:34 PM PST - 58 comments

Defendant has willfully continued to offer food services from buildings with goats on the roof. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:55 PM PST - 43 comments

From Obesity Panacea, a blog is written by two obesity researchers: a 5-part series delving into the fascinating and seemingly paradoxical research on people who remain metabolically-healthy despite being obese: 1) Introduction: An Oxymoron? 2) Prospective Risk of Disease 3) Lower Risk of Mortality? 4) Is Weight Loss Detrimental? 5) Is Weight Loss Beneficial? [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco at 3:52 PM PST - 38 comments

Phyllis Greene, who is in hospice care in Ohio, talks about why she decided to start a blog at the age of 90 and how technology has brought a new dimension to her life.
posted by gman at 3:36 PM PST - 26 comments

iPad light painting - an ethereal stop-motion animation, using long exposures and a locationally-aware iPad [ photo stills | via ]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:23 PM PST - 24 comments

An Associated Press photo of last Wednesday's Middle East peace talks in Washington D. C. was enhanced for publication in Al-Ahram, Egypt's state-run and largest newspaper. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak was electronically moved to a more central position.
posted by Obscure Reference at 2:12 PM PST - 31 comments

High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is currently the most common form of digital transmission protection for high definition digital multimedia, requiring an unbroken chain of licensed products for content to play back for TV systems and computers. A possible "master key" was posted online earlier this week, and created quite a stir around the potential of this leak or reverse engineering. Intel, who developed the initial specification, has confirmed the validity of the "master key", but instead of coming up with a new protection scheme, will use "legal remedies, particularly under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)." In essence, the threat of legal action, rather than cryptography, is [Intel and the media companies] real tool against unapproved uses of digital content. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:41 PM PST - 82 comments

The 32.000 year old artifact was discovered in the form of hundreds of small fragments in a cave in Stadel im Hohlenstein in Germany on the 25th of August 1939. The fact that the fragments belonged to a figurine was discovered in 1969 by Prof. Dr. Joachim Hahn. He mentioned a similarity of several small peices and puzzled a first version of the figurine with nearly 200 fragments. Meet the Lion Man. [more inside]
posted by Substrata at 12:17 PM PST - 42 comments

An estimated 10,000 migratory birds whose flight path took them through Manhattan earlier this month became (temporarily) disoriented and trapped in the 88-searchlight glare of the 9/11 Tribute in Light memorial.
posted by oinopaponton at 11:45 AM PST - 44 comments

Pen and Pixel are well known for the outlandish covers they created for Southern rap labels Rap-A-Lot and No Limit. It's been about 12 years since their heyday, so people are now looking back at the artistry present under the surface of these covers. [more inside]
posted by reenum at 11:24 AM PST - 38 comments

Sept 18 marks the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's untimely death. In commemoration, the Experience Music Project (names so when Paul Allen could not secure the rights to the name "Jimi Hendrix Museum") is holding a two day event including screening of a new(ish) documentary which aired on Biography. (seems Jimi's been mentioned on the blue before)
posted by victors at 11:19 AM PST - 13 comments

The 9-mm-tall Dot fights her way through her tiny, tiny world. [more inside]
posted by peachfuzz at 11:12 AM PST - 10 comments

Geocentrism (previously, previously) is on the march. Via he who can not be named.
posted by unSane at 11:07 AM PST - 40 comments

In light of the storm that tore through the metropolitan New York City area, we now have Bro-nado. (YT)
posted by functionequalsform at 11:01 AM PST - 48 comments

As first reported on NPR back in April, Vision Media targets non-profits with promises of exposure on PBS stations around the country, but the promised spots (supposedly hosted by Hugh Downs) never actually air. Now, they seem to have resurfaced as World Progress Report, as reported by Public Citizen. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:20 AM PST - 7 comments

Tales of pet rescue [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 10:17 AM PST - 34 comments

The shady, predatory side of the modeling industry is the one former model Sara Ziff wanted to portray in her new film “Picture Me: A Model’s Diary”, which chronicles five years in the lives of a group of models, following them backstage and beneath the makeup." An interview with Ziff regarding her then-upcoming film appeared on MeFi in June, 2009. The documentary opens today in NYC. Official Site. Trailer. At New York Magazine's Website: Webisode 1 / Webisode 2. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:05 AM PST - 36 comments

Over at Slate magazine, Timothy Noah is doing a multi-part examination of America's growing income gap. The Great Divergence.
posted by Trochanter at 9:55 AM PST - 6 comments

This 30-min clip showing Henry Miller eating dinner in 1979, "regaling the camera with his powers as a raconteur," is probably NSFW, don't you know. Via Ubu.
posted by stbalbach at 9:17 AM PST - 9 comments

New Microscope Enables Real-Time 3-D Movies of Developing Embryos. "A European lab combines "light sheet" microscopy with an illumination process that subtracts the static caused by scattered photons to devise a way to clearly observe the inner workings of cells over a period of days. Using a revolutionary new microscope, scientists can now peer into embryos and watch, in one of the world's smallest 3-D movies, as brains, eyes and other organs form." Slide Show: New Microscope Enables Real-Time 3-D Movies of Developing Embryos. The video can be viewed at the bottom of the page.
posted by Fizz at 8:48 AM PST - 9 comments

Concerns for the safety of Russian lgbt activist Nikolai Alexeyev. "After passing passport control at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, Mr Alekseev’s boarding pass was cancelled and his luggage unloaded from the plane upon a request from Russian authorities. He was taken into custody around 19:00 MSD, and has not yet been released." Text messages stating that he was withdrawing his case before the ECHR and seeking asylum in Belarus are believed to be fake or coerced under torture.
posted by ts;dr at 8:12 AM PST - 14 comments

Late yesterday the much-hyped "privacy aware, personally controlled" Diaspora social network platform (discussed previously) published its open-source developer release. "Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it," the team urged, "but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable." The Register's initial report is less than rosy: Code for open-source Facebook littered with landmines
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 8:10 AM PST - 58 comments

Dark Patterns is a list of deliberately user-hostile web site design patterns typically intended to deceive or exploit unwary users. These range from the trivial and clumsy (interfaces designed to impair price comparisons) to slyer tricks such as sneaking add-ons into shopping baskets, making specific options deliberately hard to find and spamming all your friends, typically after getting permission on a false pretext. Among the offenders listed are the likes of Ryanair, CreditExpert, various travel and electronics shopping sites, and, of course, Facebook, which has its very own pattern.
posted by acb at 7:28 AM PST - 68 comments

Lady Gaga for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network for the repeal of DADT (SL TPM/GAGA/YT post)
posted by device55 at 7:21 AM PST - 33 comments

Niagara Falls... slowly I turned... step by step... inch by inch...
posted by .kobayashi. at 7:13 AM PST - 30 comments

Stephen Colbert is holding a rally: the March to Keep Fear Alive. [more inside]
posted by twirlypen at 3:17 AM PST - 438 comments

So how’s Blackwater Xe doing these days? You could say “Birds of a feather flock together”. Jeremy Scahill explains (via The Nation). Watch out for Total Intelligence. Is the circle between Big Business and the Military Industrial Complex now complete? (hat tip).
posted by adamvasco at 2:36 AM PST - 7 comments

The Anti-Porn Men Project [more inside]
posted by blue funk at 2:31 AM PST - 134 comments

The time I fought Matsuo Basho
posted by randomyahoo at 11:33 PM PST - 9 comments

Waterproof London is a mashup album by KMT.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:12 PM PST - 13 comments

All ducks are wearing dog masks.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:08 PM PST - 80 comments

Bear baiting is possibly the world's most savage blood sport. Bears are have their teeth and claws removed, are tethered to a post and set upon by dogs. It is illegal in every civilized country. Authorities turn a blind eye to bear baiting in two countries: Pakistan and the USA, where South Carolina Officials refuse to act. [more inside]
posted by Susurration at 7:27 PM PST - 72 comments

We are princesses in a land of machos. "They drink beer, they are part of local governement and they are symbol of good luck for their family: they are Muxes, homosexuals of the “pueblo oaxacaqueno de Juchitan”, more than 3000 homosexuals who enjoy respect and admiration in all the country... they walk proudly in the streets, dressed as women with huipiles and enaguas, typical dress of the Tehuantepec Isthmus." Photo essay by Nicola Okin Frioli. More at Flickr. [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 7:04 PM PST - 27 comments

Emory University has made more than 1,200 yellowback novels available as PDF downloads. Yellowbacks were inexpensive books marketed largely to railway travelers in 19th century Britain.
posted by maurice at 4:45 PM PST - 30 comments

Casey Affleck finally admits that "I'm Still Here," his recent film which follows Joaquin Phoenix's resignation from acting and following hip hop career, wasn't real. [more inside]
posted by hempgranola at 3:41 PM PST - 129 comments

National Geographic has digitized all of Jane Goodall's articles for the publication from the past five decades. They've also added a galley of photographs documenting her extraordinary work with chimps.
posted by gman at 3:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Meet Meet Eater, a plant that sustains itself through Facebook interaction. This project was created by designer and artist Bashkim Isai as a university project to explore the idea of "affectionate computing" and currently sits at digital hub The Edge in Brisbane, Australia. Meet Eater has a good sense of humour, but also perhaps a drinking problem.
posted by divabat at 3:14 PM PST - 8 comments

In a wonderful 15-minute video from 1969, a young Jim Henson shows you how to make puppets out of ordinary things. Yes, it's SLYT, but it's a really good SLYT, so I beg forgiveness.
posted by cerebus19 at 1:37 PM PST - 42 comments

Mado by Tomoyuki Sakaguchi. A series of portraits taken in Tokyo. The subjects are framed by subway doors.
posted by chunking express at 1:01 PM PST - 32 comments

A Dictionary of the Near Future: "The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would. New sensations require new terms; [here] are a few such terms to encapsulate our present moment." [more inside]
posted by bayani at 12:35 PM PST - 26 comments

Three years after the National Academies (US) report Rising Above the Gathering Storm outlined eroding science and technology "advantages," the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released today an outline for the development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education: Prepare and Inspire (executive report). [more inside]
posted by cgk at 12:28 PM PST - 14 comments

Arthur's Classic Novels has 4000 free ebooks, no registration, nicely organized by author and topics: great old Science Fiction magazines l plentiful online education with 650 books for doctors l a vast collection of famous novels l short stories l by women l Buddhist Scriptures, including The Buddhist Bible, a fave of Jack Kerouac l magazines online l stories by Robert Sheckley l The Autobiography of Charles Darwin l huge collection of fairy tales l philosophy l P. G. Wodehouse l vintage technology l Oscar Wilde l Mark Twain l Rudyard Kipling l George MacDonald l the Koran l a collection of eText resource links. About Arthur Wendover. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 12:16 PM PST - 33 comments

The HIV ancestor virus, SIV, has been around much longer than previously thought. The NY Times notes: "And that assumption in turn complicates a question that has bedeviled AIDS scientists for years: What happened in Africa in the early 20th century that let a mild monkey disease move into humans, mutate to become highly transmissible and then explode into one of history’s great killers, one that has claimed 25 million lives so far?" [more inside]
posted by questionsandanchors at 11:47 AM PST - 61 comments

ELLE drastically lightens Gabourey Sidibe's skin color (and crops out 75% of her body) for the cover of its October issue. This sort of thing happens fairly often. At least they didn't just put her head on Ann Margret's body.
posted by hermitosis at 11:39 AM PST - 104 comments

Few things are more American than t-shirts and pissing people off for no reason. Vice Magazine designed six wildly offensive t-shirts and managed to get all of them printed. (nsfw)
posted by The Devil Tesla at 11:34 AM PST - 60 comments

Nitsuh Abebe dissects a rather twee post on why it's great to date a writer. Bonus writer links: Why you should just punch yourself in the face instead of becoming a freelancer, and why it's good despite all the face punching.
posted by Artw at 11:28 AM PST - 18 comments

This week's issue of Forbes features a cover story by Dinesh D'Souza that argues that "the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s," along with an editorial featuring a picture of Obama's head photoshopped onto Joseph Stalin's body. [more inside]
posted by EarBucket at 11:01 AM PST - 128 comments

Is the United States becoming a third world country? Macleans thinks so. So does Arianna Huffington. Chris Hedges talked to Ralph Nader and they figured out who's to blame. Thank goodness Michael Kinsley has a solution to the problem.
posted by valkane at 10:02 AM PST - 100 comments

MODEL-MORPHOSIS A close-up of the makeup looks from this and past Fashion Weeks. A nifty slide bar lets you compare the face before and after.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:53 AM PST - 49 comments

Two galleries of fluid motion - one from the journal Physics of Fluids, and one from MIT. The MIT gallery shows some common everyday fluids in unexpected lights. The PoF gallery (which is quite extensive, check out the 85-09 archives) mostly concerns itself with more esoteric interests. Some of the results presented have a stark beauty and some are riotously colourful. I personally love the results that look at turbulence and transition. Also, some visualisations from the past ten or so years are presented as video! (PDFs, Quicktime)
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:38 AM PST - 9 comments

Don’t just touch Paul Bellini – tattoo him on your arm! That kooky writer from The Kids in the Hall, Paul Bellini (NSFW blog), developed cult infamy as a result of recurring appearances on that show wearing next to nothing but a bath towel. Who indeed can forget the subsequent Touch Paul Bellini contest, in which one Rebecca Klatka of St. Petersburg won the right to do just that? (Video proof. Inevitable Facebook group.) A decade and a half later, Eric Cedrone of Buffalo takes the prize for Most Dedicated Fan of Man in Towel with his arm tattoo of Bellini in said towel, voided area used to advantage.
posted by joeclark at 9:30 AM PST - 26 comments

The $10 Million X-Prize Competition for the best 100 MPG production-capable car has been announced, the winner is Edison 2 Very Light Car at 102.5 MPG.
posted by stbalbach at 9:01 AM PST - 41 comments

Low levels of oxygen lead to a river of dead fish stretching to the horizon, from shore to shore near Plaquemines, Louisiana
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:26 AM PST - 34 comments

Table For One.
posted by allkindsoftime at 7:43 AM PST - 189 comments

If you see someone walking towards you late at night, on a dark street, wearing a big NY on their cap, watch out. The New York times examines a link between Yankees clothing and criminal behavior. Mets fans say we told you so. Is there a link between Jay-Z, the Yankees and criminality? "Criminologists, sports marketing analysts, consumer psychologists and Yankees fans have developed their own theories, with some attributing the trend to the popularity of the caps among gangsta rappers and others wondering whether criminals are identifying with the team's aura of money, power and success."
posted by Xurando at 7:01 AM PST - 97 comments

iBackpack Canada. Do you like backpacking? Do you like Canada? How about backpacking across Canada? iBackpack Canada is an independent travel guide for backpackers interested in traveling Canada on a budget. All kinds of helpful info: Top 7 Must-Have Foods for Camping Trips, 10 Ways to Die in Canada, The Ultimate Packing list for Backpacking Across Canada Via: Packwhiz.com, Top 5 Rivers for White Water Rafting in Canada, Backpack Toronto: Things to See and Do, and so much more.
posted by Fizz at 6:52 AM PST - 31 comments

The Secret Lives of Big Pharma's 'Thought Leaders' An article in the Chronicle details the love affair between Big Pharma and the academic doctors anointed as "Key Opinion Leaders"--arguing it's not about the money. There's been some push back at Harvard, after a recent embarrassing episode.
posted by availablelight at 5:49 AM PST - 19 comments

Health Month is a game, currently in beta, that takes a "choose-your-own-adventure" approach to motivating you to improve your health. [more inside]
posted by Phire at 5:03 AM PST - 18 comments

The four most senior surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge have been formally indicted for genocide, and will stand trial next year. Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan had all previously surrendered to the government under amnesty deals. Senior goverment officials have refused to appear before the Cambodia Tribunal as witnesses, and the tribunals judges are split on whether they can be compelled.
posted by Ahab at 4:49 AM PST - 29 comments

Emily Lakdawalla has published the first 42 of 99 Voyager Mission Status Bulletins (thanks to space fan Tom Faber). Before the days of the internet, updates on space missions were distributed via newsletter. From 1977-1990 NASA published these Voyager newsletters to update scientists and enthusiasts. Both Voyager I and Voyager II are still out there, hurtling toward the stars. Voyager I and II weekly status updates from 1995-present are currently available online. Lakdawalla will be publishing the rest of the bulletins after she indexes them.
posted by IvoShandor at 11:43 PM PST - 15 comments

Flickr user katinthecupboard has scanned and posted nearly 2000 vintage illustrations, largely from children's books. Luckily they have been organized into collections and sets, and extensively tagged. There's so much in there that I hesitate to point out any individual images I especially like, but here's a few starters: A foppish Mercury, freezing child Jesus in modern city, children playing with sunbeam, boy with a bone-whistle, dancing fairies, bathing silhouettes and sailing ship and merman riding a sea creature.
posted by Kattullus at 11:41 PM PST - 17 comments

Behold Santra, the Yoga Bear.
posted by homunculus at 10:15 PM PST - 29 comments

"Hua Yang De Nian Hua, or "To those who we remember fondly", is a 2000 short film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai that was shown at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival. It consists of a 2m 28s montage of scenes from vintage Chinese films, most of which were considered lost until some nitrate prints were discovered in a California warehouse during the 1990s, set to a song from the soundtrack of Wong's In The Mood For Love, a golden oldie by Zhou Xuan."
posted by puny human at 7:43 PM PST - 13 comments

"When Herzog Rescued Phoenix", an animated short of Werner Herzog's account of rescuing Joaquin Phoenix from a car crash, from Sascha Ciezata, the creator of "When Lynch Met Lucas". (SLYT post, technically, but there's a true story behind that.)
posted by Doktor Zed at 6:33 PM PST - 21 comments

Once upon a time, cows were milked in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The city dairy provided a safe, affordable source of nutrition for children in 19th-century New York, and was an important bulwark against one of the city's most insidious killers: swill milk. The dairy and its cows have disappeared, but the story of the swill milk scandals lives on. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:10 PM PST - 28 comments

Statsis: A short film by Christian Swegal In the future, an Ex-Soldier is placed in virtual exercises to cure his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the simulations, he sees glimpses of a mysterious girl, presumably someone from his past. When a Stranger appears in his facility offering answers, the Soldier finds himself once again asked to kill, this time for her... [more inside]
posted by clockworkjoe at 4:36 PM PST - 16 comments

Rolf Potts will travel through 12 countries in 42 days, with his current location updated here. He intends to do all this with no luggage, no backpack, no man purse -- not even a fanny pack. [via mefi projects]
posted by gman at 3:18 PM PST - 51 comments

It's 1962, and for a few glorious months the world stands still and looks (down, down, down) to Atlantis for the World's Fair. Perhaps you also missed the 1924 El Dorado World's Fair? And of course reserve your tickets today for the 2040 Moon World's Fair. (Experiments in Typography on the Web, via Waxy Links.)
posted by MimeticHaHa at 3:15 PM PST - 14 comments

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez drops his fifth solo album of 2010, in Tychozorente, which is available to stream as well as purchase (for a minumum of $6.99) from the link. [more inside]
posted by opsin at 1:39 PM PST - 33 comments

In a five part series he wrote a few years ago, blogger J. Brad Hicks breaks down how, in the mid-1960s, the Republican party made a conscious decision to rebrand themselves as the party of Christians, and in doing so, how they had to shift the ideology of the churches to what he calls a "false gospel". [more inside]
posted by quin at 1:36 PM PST - 190 comments

Even as the Deepwater Horizon well nears the day when it will finally be sealed for good, and BP finds itself falling under continued criticism as it is discovered that oily sediment is coating the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, the US government has announced that 3,500 unused oil wells must be sealed by the companies which drilled them. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 1:28 PM PST - 28 comments

Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris, creator of the artwork announcing May 20, 2010 as Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, goes into hiding at the suggestion of the FBI, following the fatwa issued against her this summer. [more inside]
posted by eugenen at 1:18 PM PST - 220 comments

Dictionary.com has a blog! It explains, usually in fairly short articles, the etymology of different words, the reason September is the ninth month, and what an "Emmy" is, among others.
posted by lauratheexplorer at 12:59 PM PST - 7 comments

Eileen Nearne was found dead in her flat in Torquay on September 2, apparently alone and forgotten. But it turns out, she was neither.
posted by CheeseLouise at 12:27 PM PST - 17 comments

How many ways can you shuffle? Here are some to get you started (along with how to manipulate them): the Overhand Shuffle, the Riffle Shuffle, the Hindu Shuffle, the Faro Shuffle, the Pile Shuffle, and the Mongean Shuffle. If you can't master one of those, I suggest the Wash Shuffle, a shuffling machine, or the ever-popular 52-Card Pickup. [more inside]
posted by phunniemee at 12:00 PM PST - 43 comments

She’s an Iron Chef. The Executive Chef of Bon Appetit Magazine. The founder of Chefs for Humanity. A UNICEF spokesperson. The winner of a 'Hero Visibility Award' from the Human Rights Campaign. And now, celebrity chef Cat Cora is teaching the Muppets to cook. Two new video series have premiered online: "The Muppets Kitchen" and "Hasty Tasty Cooking Tips with Cat Cora and the Muppets." (Warning: autoplaying videos.) The series are "designed to inspire kids to get involved in the kitchen and to help moms prepare simple, nutritious and most importantly delicious dinners." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:58 AM PST - 35 comments

PC Gamer: Do you have a good sense of piracy rates with Steam games?
Gabe Newell: They’re low enough that we don’t really spend any time on it.
Gabe Newell on Steam, piracy and DRM, part of PC Gamer's Valve Week.
posted by Artw at 10:20 AM PST - 153 comments

Love to finger paint with pixels? Or do you prefer the stylus for your stylizing? Either way, the International Association of Mobile Digital Artists beckons (gestures?). It all started with a group of enthusiasts on Flickr (Flickr group).

Membership is free. So is registration for the Mobile Art Conference 2010 (NYC), but they're accepting donations. [more inside]
posted by circular at 10:16 AM PST - 4 comments

Producer Ken Davenport announces he will be "crowd-funding" an upcoming Broadway revival of the musical Godspell. [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:50 AM PST - 25 comments

Tea Party candidate and Sarah Palin endorsee Christine O'Donnell - a former chastity lobbyist - has defeated the longest-serving Congressman in Delaware's history by six percentage points to claim the Republican nomination for Vice President Biden's former Senate seat - despite Karl Rove's televised statements to Sean Hannity that she says "nutty things": It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, at the end of the day, while they may be conservative in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 8:31 AM PST - 430 comments

A Google engineer was recently fired for spying on several teens through their GTalk, Gmail, and Google Voice accounts.

He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back... In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.

Google statement confirming the shenanigans.
posted by swift at 8:13 AM PST - 90 comments

Are snails ravaging your vegetable garden? You don’t want to become a snail murderer so you gently put them in your neighbor’s garden or a nearby field, yet the snails seem to return. According to 69-year old amateur scientist (also the 2010 “So you want to be a scientist” winner), this is because snails have a homing mechanism, which she learned more about by using pails, snails, neighbors, and nail polish. So if you want to get rid of snails, move them beyond their home range of 100 meters (perhaps the garden of your neighbor’s neighbor? ) Other interesting experiments for this year’s contest included a crowd experiment at rock concerts; this amateur scientist (Sam O’kell) wore pressure sensing vests and stood at different locations during concerts. Other experiments (e.g. analyzing facebook profiles, etc.) from the competition.
posted by Wolfster at 7:59 AM PST - 30 comments

Grand Rapids-based Calvin College has canceled an upcoming concert by acclaimed rock band The New Pornographers because of concerns over the band's name. [more inside]
posted by 40 Watt at 7:17 AM PST - 110 comments

In October, 1868, Laura Jernegan, a 6 year old girl from Edgartown, Massachusetts set out on a three year whaling voyage with her father, mother, brother and the ship's crew. She kept a diary throughout the voyage, which can be viewed online.
posted by vrakatar at 7:03 AM PST - 31 comments

The 727 that Vanished. Interesting article that recounts a mystery still unsolved. Prev, from 2003.
posted by allkindsoftime at 6:53 AM PST - 32 comments

"What was lost in the realm of economic exchange is reclaimed in the realm of cultural/semiotic performance. Branding also identifies the product relative to the chain of signifiers constituting its brand “family,” in the same way that ranchers brand livestock with the sign of their ranch." [via]
posted by nickrussell at 6:42 AM PST - 11 comments

Touched By Your Presence, Dear: Ex-Blondie songwriter and bassist Gary Lachman (aka "Gary Valentine") blogs (and is interviewed) about his books on Jung, Steiner, Ouspensky, and Sixties mysticism, and his time spent toiling in the fields of Crowleyana and The Gurdjieff Work.
posted by darth_tedious at 10:51 PM PST - 19 comments

Advanced Style: 'Proof from the wise and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age.' Advanced Style is run by Ari Seth Cohen who in his own words: "Roams the streets looking for New York's most stylish and creative older folks. Respect your elders and let these ladies and gents teach you a thing or two about living life to the fullest." Debra Rapoport and Maayan Zilberman also collaborate on the site. Also worth checking out, Advanced Style Videos, a more in depth look into the lives of the wonderful people featured on the site. Made by Ari Seth Cohen and Lina Plioplyte these videos allow our wonderful friends to share their own voice and opinions about personal style: Tziporah Salamon, Thrifting with Debra, Going to the Movies with Debra, Debra's Hat, Design with Debra, Debra on the Importance of Colour, Hattitude!, Mary, Doris' Treasures.
posted by Fizz at 9:18 PM PST - 34 comments

Matthew Inman , creator of The Oatmeal, gives advice on successful viral marketing. via [more inside]
posted by joedan at 8:40 PM PST - 45 comments

The next level in outsourcing: "He has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date."
posted by d. z. wang at 7:14 PM PST - 92 comments

Technicians free climb 1768 ft to the top of a transmission tower to fix it. (SLYT)
posted by beepbeepboopboop at 5:30 PM PST - 284 comments

One of the hottest authors of the 1910s had been dead for over 200 years before she ever published a word. Patience Worth, as channeled through the ouija board of St. Louis housewife Pearl Curran, published several novels and scores of poems before the death of her link to the material world in 1937.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:38 PM PST - 16 comments

In the final pages of his book, drawing up the merits of programme writing, McGurl ultimately falls back on the one thing the programme really does teach: technique. Countering Eliot’s dictum that ‘art never improves,’ he proposes that literature might, rather, resemble technology or sport, in which ‘systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance.’ Hasn’t ‘the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool’ and its systematic training in the ‘self-conscious attention to craft’ resulted in ‘a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period’? It has. If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read.

Get a Real Degree by Elif Batuman is a critique of creative writing workshops and a review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Louis Menand wrote a review of the same in The New Yorker which was both more appreciative of the book and creative writing programs. It was discussed previously on MetaFilter.
posted by Kattullus at 4:35 PM PST - 28 comments

Night of the Living Trekkies. They have trailers for books now! (SLYT) Trekkies + Zombies = two great tastes that taste great together.
posted by crossoverman at 4:08 PM PST - 21 comments

Objects Through Time tells the story of immigration and the changing ethnic diversity of New South Wales, Australia through "movable heritage" - that is, artifacts and objects with historical resonance. While almost ignoring 50,000 years of aboriginal occupation, the site does a nice job of both familiar topics through a fresh lens (e.g., Captain Cook's "secret instructions"), but also takes pains to look at those lesser known topics which may be more accessible through material culture than through texts. [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 2:42 PM PST - 5 comments

The National Theatre teaches some valuable lessons about Twitter marketing.
posted by mikoroshi at 1:41 PM PST - 19 comments

Carrie: The Musical, is legendary for closing after 5 performances and being perhaps the biggest instant flop in Broadway history. It has also achieved cult status, with fans demanding the performance rights be released (they've been held back since its Broadway closing). [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 1:14 PM PST - 46 comments

Aviointeriors SPA, an Italian firm specializing in aircraft seats, has patented and is marketing the Skyrider, a new saddle-style design of seat that reduces the pitch (distance between rows) by some 28% from 81 cm to 58 cm (32 inches to 23 inches). Reaction has been mixed, to say the least.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:02 PM PST - 99 comments

Sorry I Haven't Posted: Inspiring Apologies From Today's World Wide Web. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 12:15 PM PST - 33 comments

Lookout Mountain Laboratories (Hollywood, CA) was originally built in 1941 as an air defense station. But after WWII, the US Air Force repurposed it into a secret film studio which operated for 22 years during the Cold War. The studio produced classified movies for all branches of the US Armed Forces, as well as the Atomic Energy Commission, until it was deactivated in 1969. During this time, cameramen, who referred to themselves as "atomic" cinematographers, were hired to shoot footage of atomic bomb tests in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and the South Pacific. Some of their films have been declassified and can be seen here. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:48 AM PST - 6 comments

Everything is a Remix (Part 1) by New York-based filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. [more inside]
posted by gman at 11:24 AM PST - 33 comments

Some lives of James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon/Racoona Sheldon (somewhat previously). [more inside]
posted by enn at 10:00 AM PST - 44 comments

The Gregory Brothers auto-tune Charlie Rangel, Anthony Weiner, Ron Paul, Tinky Winky, and the President to Weezer's Memories (SLYT)
posted by nj_subgenius at 9:51 AM PST - 34 comments

The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make corn syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns, and web sites, (Previously) promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient "corn sugar," arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer "confusion" about the product. (VIA)
posted by Blake at 9:38 AM PST - 172 comments

Civil Rights Photographer Unmasked as Informer. This week, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two year investigation that revealed that iconic Civil Rights photographer Ernest Withers was also a paid FBI informant. The timing of the report is awkward.
posted by availablelight at 9:38 AM PST - 53 comments

As reported on NPR's All Tech Considered ("Tech" and "Religion"?) on 9/13. "In a world where Google has put every bit of information at our fingertips, some people are now demanding less information when they surf the Internet" by using religion-based search engines. And folks are worried that Goohoo results might be biased? (SNPRL - Single Nat'l Public Radio Link) [more inside]
posted by Man with Lantern at 9:25 AM PST - 58 comments

"If the website you need doesn’t exist, let Primal Pages build it for you in seconds." Launching this week at the DEMO Conference, Primal addresses "a core problem with the Internet: our ability to create information has far exceeded our ability to easily manage and consume it." [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 9:13 AM PST - 18 comments

SHIT COMICS: A deep resource of comics/cartoon arcana, lore, links, history, news and more. Why not check out some Beibers, early 20th century cartoon tips, ULTIMO, A Voyage To The Moon, Never aired Dan Clowes Commercials, James Kochalka Number One , A Pekar Family Circus, and venturing vegetables. (Strange and occasionally NSFW)
posted by The Whelk at 8:48 AM PST - 10 comments

Taylor Swift to Kanye, one year later: "Your string of lights is still bright to me." (Original incident.)
posted by hermitosis at 8:04 AM PST - 148 comments

Which countries have the highest proportion of people living on $1/day? $2/day? $200/day? Which countries have the highest rates of book borrowing? Highest circulation of daily papers? If you just want to see the quick summary in youtube verion of a lot of this data, see the youtube Money video by N.A.S.A. [more inside]
posted by Wolfster at 7:43 AM PST - 20 comments

Not more then a few days ago, the reddit community started a campaign to call Stephen Colbert to hold a rally tentatively called Restoring Truthiness in counterpoint to the recent Glenn Beck "Restoring Honor" rally. Today redditors put their money where their keyboards are through direct action and broke the previous records and servers by donating $46,983 $92,004 to the school-teacher funding DonorsChoose.org in Operation Truthy Classroom obliterating records set by Hillary Clinton's donation campaign (which has been active since 2008) in less the eight hours. (Previously, and more previously.)
posted by loquacious at 5:24 AM PST - 116 comments

Before the Left Behind series, there was A Thief In The Night, a 70's B-Movie that scared countless young church-goers witless. [more inside]
posted by ukdanae at 5:22 AM PST - 162 comments

In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G.S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with papaverine to induce a penile erection... The way in which this information was first reported was completely unique and memorable (possibly NSFW) [more inside]
posted by Jakey at 3:04 AM PST - 54 comments

Not the commercials you'd expect for the 2010 Utah State Fair. Check out those hamhocks and don't for get to grab a corndog while you're there. The TV commercials have since been yanked by the fair's board. The director of the ads, Jared Hess of Napolean Dynamite fame, claims racism.
posted by maryr at 10:44 PM PST - 43 comments

The fate of 100 or so confiscated gnomes held at the Gillette Police Department is still unknown. Three teenage girls confessed to the crime, but this may extend past state lines... [more inside]
posted by hillabeans at 10:13 PM PST - 36 comments

The Trouble With The View From Above. James C. Scott at Cato Unbound has an interesting essay on what we gain - and what we lose - when we trade localized, vernacular categories for the uniform, official categories of a state. His ideas are fleshed out more in his book, Seeing Like A State. Economist Donald Boudreax responds. Brad DeLong and Timothy Lee have forthcoming responses.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:32 PM PST - 22 comments

Canter’s Deli font comes full circle. Graphic designer makes actual typeface family out of casual script seen on sign for classic L.A. deli, Canter’s. (Wins award!) Youngest, hippest member of the family that owns the diner later independently Googles "Canter's Deli" + font, locates type designer, then hires him to custom-design a Canter’s “gourmet food truck.” “[W]hat was interesting to me was that this whole scenario could not have happened without the magic of the Internet and search engines.”
posted by joeclark at 9:21 PM PST - 37 comments

Rude Food Names [more inside]
posted by turgid dahlia at 8:40 PM PST - 43 comments

Videos about people who love (and know) coffee, tea, soda, sake, absinthe, bread, pizza... It's Obsessives, by CHOW. Useful tips and fascinating personalities. (Some of these were linked previously on the Blue, but they work great together as an ensemble.)
posted by Baldons at 6:43 PM PST - 23 comments

Victoria (Australia) had moderate flooding last week, which journalists were keen to report. Perhaps too keen. Full story here.
posted by wilful at 6:31 PM PST - 27 comments

The Haystack application aims to use steganography to hide samizdat-type data within a larger stream of innocuous network traffic. Thus, civilians in Iran, for example, could more easily evade Iranian censors and provide the world with an unfiltered report on events within the country. Haystack earned its creator Austin Heap a great deal of positive coverage from the media during the 2009 Iranian election protests. The BBC described Heap as "on the front lines" of the protesters' "Twitter revolution", while The Guardian called him an Innovator of the Year. Despite the laudatory coverage, however, the media were never given a copy of the software to examine. Indeed, not much is known about the software or its inner workings. Specialists in network encryption security were not allowed to perform an independent evaluation of Haystack, despite its distribution to and use by a small number of Iranians, possibly at some risk. As interest in the project widens and criticisms of the media coverage and software continue to mount, Heap has currently asked users to cease using Haystack until a security review can be performed.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:46 PM PST - 30 comments

You'll come to crave the high lonesome sound of Obray Ramsey, whose vocals and banjo were as pure as a mountain stream, and as Whip-poor-will wild as the cold rain and snow. This is the old time Appalachian hillbilly blues.
posted by puny human at 4:13 PM PST - 41 comments

Scientists working for the Canadian government aren't allowed to talk to journalists without permission from Ottawa. And the restriction isn't limited politically sensitive topics like climate change and the Alberta oil sands -- the co-author of a recent Nature article about flooding at the end of the last ice age was told to "wait for clearance from the minister's office" before talking to reporters about his work. The policy has only been in effect at Natural Resources in Canada since March, but Environment Canada has had the same rules since 2008. (Previously.)
posted by twirlip at 4:12 PM PST - 44 comments

An amazing video compilation of narrow escapes from death (via)
posted by desjardins at 2:22 PM PST - 114 comments

September 13, 2010 marks the 25th anniversary of the original Japanese release of Super Mario Bros, featuring the return of everyone's favorite sailor, Popeye. That's not right, he's the Italian carpenter, Mario. Wait, now he's a plumber with a brother (named Luigi Mario), and they're not normal, they're super! And they're fighting to save Princess Peach Toadstool from an angry ox king, who became the stubborn but cute turtle Bowser. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:20 PM PST - 58 comments

The Awl interviews Josh Simpson, the man behind @BPglobalPR.
posted by Rory Marinich at 12:40 PM PST - 17 comments

I told Jimmy he was lucky too have that house with a monster in the front yard. What about the Loch Ness monster? Jimmy Page thinks it exists. I wondered if it could find enough to eat, and thought this unlikely–it’s not the improbability but the upkeep on monsters that worries me. Did Aleister Crowley have opinions on the subject? He apparently had not expressed himself. - William Burroughs attends a Led Zeppelin concert and has a chat with Jimmy Page (via Bruce Sterling)
posted by Artw at 12:20 PM PST - 59 comments

How to Train Your Robot (to Lie). "A military base has just fallen to enemy fighters. A robot containing top-secret information has to escape detection by the invading army. The robot is facing three corridors: right, center, and left. It could randomly pick a corridor and hope the enemy soldiers pick a different one. Or it could leave a false trail—assuming robots can be trained to lie. A new study using this scenario suggests that they can be. 'Those lying toasters.' click for picture (Georgia Tech's Decepticon) knows how to mislead pursuers to shake them off." Also, worth checking out is a video that can be viewed from the main link which demonstrates the robots in a game of hide-and-seek.
posted by Fizz at 11:46 AM PST - 23 comments

Why World of Warcraft is good for you. New research, about to be published in Current Biology, indicates that playing action video games trains people to make the right decisions faster . . . and not just while playing the games. Here is a Power Point style summary of some of the research (pdf format).
posted by bearwife at 11:41 AM PST - 68 comments

"Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture."
posted by jefficator at 11:21 AM PST - 38 comments

Mr. Takai doesn’t care much for ordinary crickets. He’s a connoisseur. For the last 20 years, he’s been raising “suzumushi,” bell crickets, so that in September his knife, scissors and hardware store will ring and sing with cricket song. The song of suzumushi. A primer on Meloimorpha japonica, the 'bell cricket.'
posted by grounded at 11:12 AM PST - 10 comments

Don't delay. Operators are standing by. For the next 30 hours or so you can still get in on the movement to free music. Musopen is a nonprofit organization raising money to record out-of-copyright classical music. They plan to post the results online for free. As of now, they plan to record the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky and for every additional $1000 donated they will record another set of compositions such as Mozart’s violin sonatas. They've done it before. Ain't it a gas?
posted by DaddyNewt at 11:06 AM PST - 33 comments

Rock Balancing Art by Peter Riedel. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 10:54 AM PST - 23 comments

Historically famous men and their use of pocket notebooks (spread over two pages).
posted by gman at 10:41 AM PST - 31 comments

“Immortality is for suckers. If even a few of my words outlive me by even one hour, then I have cheated death.” - F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
posted by brundlefly at 9:20 AM PST - 63 comments

This is an open letter written by Noman Benotman, a former commander in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and a former associate of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. In al Qaeda strategy meetings in Kandahar in 2000, Benotman warned the al-Qaeda leadership of ‘total failure' to realise their aims and called on bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to abandon violence. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, he distanced himself from al-Qaeda and later resigned from his own jihadist organisation. He has more recently been instrumental in negotiations with Libya's government to free former LIFG leaders, and in persuading these leaders to formally renounce terrorism. He also recently joined the London-based Quilliam Foundation as a Senior Analyst.
posted by bardophile at 8:04 AM PST - 20 comments

"Whenever filmmakers ask, “Hey, how can I get my first feature going?” I’m like, “Find two partners and get ready to flush four years down the toilet.” It can be done, but you’ve got to work."

A new interview with Bruce Campbell on the Evil Dead franchise.
posted by quin at 7:33 AM PST - 62 comments

You know which song the very first singing computer sang, right? Yup, just like you saw in the movies, only this one didn't slow down when he offered up his electronic rendition of the tune that was toppermost of the poppermost on both sides of the Atlantic back in 1892.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:21 AM PST - 15 comments

NOW WE CAN TRAVEL WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT was the advertising slogan used by the publisher of The Negro Motorist Green Book, a vital resource for African-American travelers in a period when sundown towns (previously) were still common. This slim volume was published annually until 1964 for the benefit of black motorists who needed to know where they could sleep, eat, or purchase fuel.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:40 AM PST - 37 comments

(From the NYT) Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits which has links to some interesting studies on, well, studying. Think you know the best ways to study? Think you have some kind of specific learning style? Maybe Not. Think it's best to focus on a single thing when studying? Probably Not. Think "teaching to the test" is a bad way to learn? Maybe Not So. It seems the best way to study can be summarized as: Alternate you study environment; Mix your content; Space out your study session; And self-test.
posted by Blake at 6:30 AM PST - 48 comments

Meet Elisany Silva [YouTube; Spanish with English subtitles], the Tallest Teen Girl in the World.
posted by bwg at 5:17 AM PST - 18 comments

A woman is convicted of neglect after becoming addicted to the online version of Small World. MMO addiction is well-documented - will the Facebook-fuelled popularity of casual gaming see a rise in similar stories? [more inside]
posted by mippy at 1:42 AM PST - 61 comments

A Short Film about Pringle of Scotland by David Shrigley (SLYT).
posted by misozaki at 12:43 AM PST - 22 comments

“A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible,” he said. “We realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.” With David Fincher's scathing film The Social Network set to hit theaters on October 1st, reticent Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is interviewed by Jose Antonio Vargas of The New Yorker.
posted by cmgonzalez at 11:08 PM PST - 67 comments

Designer James Gilpin has "started a project which turns the sugar-rich urine of elderly diabetics into a high-end single malt whisky."
posted by spiderskull at 9:10 PM PST - 74 comments

Behind the opening scenes of Blade Runner. “Doug and his Entertainment Effects Group team created thousands of acid-etched brass miniatures lit from below with hundreds of bundles of fiber-optic lights, shot in forced-perspective through layers of smoke to create layers of light refraction, creating depth.” The first of a three-part series on the making of Blade Runner’s unforgettable opening sequence.
posted by spitefulcrow at 7:16 PM PST - 79 comments

"He said somethin' about burning a Qur'an I was like 'dude, you have no Qur'an...'" [more inside]
posted by griphus at 5:50 PM PST - 152 comments

Ted Koppel: Nine years after 9/11, let's stop playing into bin Laden's hands
posted by blue_beetle at 4:59 PM PST - 43 comments

The San Luis Obispo County Sherrif's Department has an important warning for parents.
posted by empath at 4:39 PM PST - 76 comments

"Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price?" In 2007 David Foster Wallace invited readers to a series of thought experiments in a short piece. [more inside]
posted by fantodstic at 2:20 PM PST - 91 comments

Before they foreclose on your house why don't you get back at the bastards by stripping the place. There are consequences. "Lawyers who represent people facing foreclosure advise them that whatever's nailed down generally stays with the house."
posted by Xurando at 10:54 AM PST - 137 comments

Timothy Gray wants to be just like Tim Burton when he grows up.
posted by gman at 8:18 AM PST - 46 comments

Who owns that copy of AutoCad? A recent court ruling says that restrictive software licenses can forbid resale (and possibly other uses like rental and lending.) Wired has their take on it. [more inside]
posted by warbaby at 8:12 AM PST - 86 comments

“Star Wars: The Solo Adventures” (2D) Also: The Solo Adventures (3D). This is the winner of "Best Animation" from the Star Wars Fan Film Movie Challenge, sponsored by Lucasfilm. “Star Wars: The Solo Adventures” by Daniel L Smith tells the story of why Han Solo “Dropped his cargo at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser”.
posted by Fizz at 7:15 AM PST - 30 comments

Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent - Adding to its long-running series on corruption and abuse in post-Communist Russia, the New York Times has reported on Russian authorities using the pretext of software piracy to seize computers from journalists and political dissidents critical of current policies. In a surprising twist, lawyers representing Microsoft have been found working with Russian police, despite reporters and NGOs providing evidence of legitimate software purchases. An official response to the NYT piece suggests impostors claim to represent Microsoft in Russia, and notes the company's offer of free software licenses to these and similar groups.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:23 AM PST - 24 comments

We No Speak Americano, Hand Dance, Hand Dance Live, Alles Gute zum St Patriks Tag from Cleary & Harding AKA Up And Over It
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:24 AM PST - 10 comments

Originally a product of the simple tone and noise generators (and limited processing power) that shipped with video consoles and early computers, the 8-bit music (more properly, chiptunes) scene is now quite a bit more diverse. It covers Lady Gaga, Metallica, and Elvis Presley. It releases albums. And yes, it rickrolls. (mostly MLYT)
posted by d. z. wang at 12:13 AM PST - 26 comments

Why we don't have laser pistols.
posted by Artw at 11:33 PM PST - 61 comments

DowntimeTown is the boardgame review site of Scottish comedian Robert Florence, previously of Consolevania and Videogaiden [and previously on MetaFilter]. The heart of DowntimeTown are the wonderful video reviews, recommendations is a better word, where Florence explains why he likes the games under review so damn much, in an irreverent but loving fashion. There are plain ol' text reviews too, besides a whole host of other goodness. Links to individual videos below the cut. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus at 11:01 PM PST - 11 comments

It is simultaneously unlike, and above, every other record. ... Because perhaps it tells us what a trivial pursuit music really is, and at the same time how indispensable to a meaningful existence it in fact is. ... No one, least of all Carla Bley, has subsequently come even within an orbit’s distance of its achievements. ... It is, in the most literal of senses, untouchable. - Marcello Carlin
posted by Joe Beese at 3:48 PM PST - 42 comments

Harpo's Place A tribute to Harpo Marx, by his son Bill.
posted by Paragon at 3:31 PM PST - 48 comments

How the Bad Boy of Brit-Art Grew Rich at the Expense of His Investors From the Economist: IN 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. (The average auction price for a Hirst work in 2008 was $831,000. So far in 2010 it is down to $136,000, a sum that does not even take into account the many lots that failed to find buyers.)
posted by R. Mutt at 1:09 PM PST - 58 comments

The elegant and sophisticated paintings found in the north west Australia, are claimed to be the oldest figurative paintings in the world, known as the Bradshaws, or Gwion Gwion. The Bradshaw Foundation website has an awesome online collection of rock and cave art paintings with extensive information. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 12:59 PM PST - 6 comments

Kyle Wiens of iFixit talks to ArsTechnica about iFixit's history ("my iBook G3...It seemed crazy that I couldn't find any information online on how to get the thing back together"), his goals ("we realized that the world needed free, open source service manuals, and the manufacturers weren't stepping up"), planned obsolescence, the dirty tricks manufacturers pull to make it harder to repair your own stuff ("Torx has a patent...They're using lawyers to prevent people from making their computers last longer than 3-400 battery cycles"), who are the design kings of repair and servicing, who the villains are, and why recycling electronics isn't all you'd probably like it to be.
posted by rodgerd at 10:52 AM PST - 43 comments

On this day it's good to remember that Muslims are part of the fabric of New York. They live in downtown New York, they worked in the Twin Towers and were affected just like everyone else by the tragedy of 9/11.
posted by brookeb at 10:43 AM PST - 87 comments

The MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium was held October 12-13, 1995, at MIT, marking the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's seminal article "As We May Think" (wikipedia). The video archives from the lectures and panel discussions from that Symposium are now available online. (alternate video link)
posted by juv3nal at 9:21 AM PST - 9 comments

This  may just be the most peaceful, beautiful 5-1/2 minutes of your entire day: An audio slideshow look at some of the winning images, guided by one of the judges, of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich's 2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Interested in "giving it a go"? Here are some guides to photographing different aspects of the night sky.
posted by spock at 7:27 AM PST - 24 comments

Takashi "Hentai statue sold for $15m" Murakami has a new exhibition at the Palace of Versailles. The Guardian has photographs, and a short piece about the controversy sparked by the exhibition, which does not include Murakami's Lonesome Cowboy. A committee to defend the palace, made up of French monarchists aghast at the "triple scandal of art, money, and democracy", says "Non aux mangas!". (They didn't like Jeff Koons either.) Rue89 has an interview with the director of the palace. (Last few links in French. Previously.) [more inside]
posted by lapsangsouchong at 7:00 AM PST - 64 comments

Tentacles - 1977 Italian Film That Is a Rip-Off of Jaws. Sherilyn Connelly over at The Dark Room Theater’s Bad Movie Night shares this 1977 Italian Jaws rip-off, with the satisfyingly cephalopadic moniker of Tentacoli (Italian for Tentacles, which it was named in the US). The movie features a host of big stars, plus Sheriff Lobo plus an orca PLUS some very large arms. Yes, despite the film being called Tentacles, arms because the creature attached to them is an octopus, not a Giant Squid. Here’s a montage from Tentacoli, set to the original soundtrack. It’s… not good. There are cheerleaders though. Via: Laughing Squid
posted by Fizz at 6:35 AM PST - 14 comments

A series of three clips (plus a bonus) that detail how Detroit is morphing into the new hipster paradise. Highlights include a good description of Detroit's physical size, Knoxville's awe at the width of Telegraph, and a trip to Barry Gordy's house.
posted by Leta at 6:09 AM PST - 62 comments

"I HEREBY REQUEST that my body or any part thereof may be used for therapeutic purposes including corneal grafting and organ transplantation or for the purposes of medical education [...] with the exception of my skull, which shall be offered by the institution receiving my body to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical performance." [more inside]
posted by oulipian at 5:00 AM PST - 17 comments

The Man Who Makes Your iPhone - Bloomberg Businessweek profiles Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of Foxconn, the controversial manufacturer of consumer electronic devices for Apple, Sony, HP and Dell, among others.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:44 AM PST - 19 comments

Joaquin Phoenix is the man who ate himself [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 10:07 PM PST - 74 comments

How To Tie Your Shoes. A video in the spirit of How to Eat a Chicken Wing. Bonus - it's also pretty funny. [SLYT]
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:34 PM PST - 25 comments

The 2010 Small Press Expo - SPX to its friends - will be opening tomorrow in splendiforous Bethesda, MD. The festival, which benefits the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, is also home to the Ignatz Awards, which recognize excellence in small press/independent comics-making in a variety of categories. It is not known if winners are awarded with a brick tossed upside the head. [more inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 5:16 PM PST - 21 comments

A day after stand-up comic Louis C.K. posted a series of drunk tweets from an airplane, including a series of ribald tweets about Sarah Palin, he found himself sitting next to Palin's daughter Bristol on the Tonight Show. At a screening for his new comedy special "Hilarious", he talked about the experience and compared Palin to an early Hitler.
posted by Rory Marinich at 4:31 PM PST - 267 comments

I Am Detained by the Feds for Not Answering Questions.
posted by bwg at 4:29 PM PST - 275 comments

FarmVillains: Steal someone else's game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.
posted by brundlefly at 4:07 PM PST - 51 comments

How downloading music has literally saved my life: a lightly punctuated personal essay about obesity and compulsion.
posted by rollick at 3:51 PM PST - 26 comments

Bloglines.com is closing down. According to Ask.com, the owners of Bloglines, the world is very different now from the world in which Bloglines was launched.

"The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience."

posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:40 PM PST - 75 comments

An interactive map of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. You can zoom and pan, search for or center a location, and link to a particular area. Place names are labeled in both English and Elvish. [more inside]
posted by gman at 2:31 PM PST - 25 comments

I’m not advocating the abolition of grammar, but rather its justification. I’m not quite sure what that will entail in the end, but I’m starting out by pointing out grammar rules that just don’t make sense, don’t work, or don’t have any justification. All I want is for our rules of grammar to be well-motivated.
posted by Joe Beese at 2:23 PM PST - 83 comments

Retro video games have come back into the public consciousness. (See previously) [more inside]
posted by reenum at 2:18 PM PST - 18 comments

Message of Rien (nsfw mashup) [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:26 PM PST - 4 comments

Roger Ebert is returning to television: "'This is the rebirth of a dream,' said Ebert, who partnered in recent years with Richard Roeper before cancer robbed him of the ability to speak. He said he will act as co-producer and employ a computer voice to appear on every episode with segments titled Roger's Office devoted to classic, overlooked and new films." (Ebert, previously on MeFi.)
posted by jbickers at 12:42 PM PST - 22 comments

"In most cases, when a book that deals with potentially classified military information is due to be published, one of the United States's many government divisions inspect it, redact sensitive parts, and either let publication continue or stop it entirely. But a clash in opinion between the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency may lead to the DIA buying up all 10,000 copies of [a] new memoir's first printing -- and promptly pulping the books." "The publication of Operation Dark Heart, by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to security."* [more inside]
posted by ericb at 12:37 PM PST - 43 comments

Issue 54028: Tim's watch is broken [more inside]
posted by swift at 12:25 PM PST - 23 comments

Vanessa's Wedding Surprise. SYTP but worth it.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 11:55 AM PST - 60 comments

A Capella Inception Trailer. Exactly what it says on the tin. Based on this Inception trailer. Note that if you somehow haven't seen Inception yet, this is a pretty spoilery trailer.
posted by kmz at 11:54 AM PST - 35 comments

OK, sweetie, here's your pony. Love ya. I know this is not only a first post but a single link "news" post to a story with a video. But given the pony mystique, and the general level of hysteria we have attained, I thought I'd take the chance. vis FelixSalmon
posted by carping demon at 11:40 AM PST - 32 comments

On June 15th, 1920 in Duluth, Minnesota, three young, black circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Issac McGhie, were lynched. The Minnesota Historical Society has a great site devoted to the terrible event, Duluth Lynchings Online Resource. I'd especially like to point out the Oral Histories section, which has short interviews with African-Americans who lived through the event. In 2001 Minnesota Public Radio covered the story, inspired by a campaign to build a memorial to the three men, which was dedicated in October of 2003. The Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial has a fine website which is well worth visiting.
posted by Kattullus at 10:27 AM PST - 10 comments

Cache Rules Everything Around Me (vimeo)
Evan Roth encapsulates the internet while Girl Talk provides the soundtrack.
posted by boo_radley at 10:21 AM PST - 16 comments

You've seen the American Hipster now meet...The Shoreditch Twat (SLYT) Song's kinda catchy too.
posted by Senor Cardgage at 9:50 AM PST - 99 comments

'No Belgian church escaped sex abuse', finds investigation. It reveals that abuse was so extensive that it was going on in almost every diocese and at every Church-run boarding school: "We can say that no congregation escapes sexual abuse of minors by one or several of its members," the commission concluded." 'Hundreds of sex abuse victims have come forward in Belgium with harrowing accounts of molestation by Catholic clergy that reportedly led to at least 13 suicides and affected children as young as two, an independent Belgian commission said Friday.' 'Friday's report lists 507 witnesses who came forward with stories of molestation at the hands of clergy over the past decades. It says those abused included children who were two, four, five and six years old.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 9:33 AM PST - 133 comments

Spiegel has an interesting article on the ol' Nature Vs. Nuture battle. They focus on 2 recent studies. One, looks at socioeconmic status and IQ, and concludes: "A person's intelligence can only truly blossom if the environment gives the brain what it desires." That is, IQ of the poorest in the study appeared to be almost exclusively determined by their socioeconomic status. In the meantime psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists have developed a very different perspective. They now believe that the skill we term "intelligence" is not in the least fixed, but is actually remarkably variable. "The low IQs expected for children born to lower-class parents can be greatly increased if their environment is sufficiently rich cognitively,"
posted by Blake at 9:31 AM PST - 25 comments

TV encased in Mahogany? WE WANT IT! [more inside]
posted by generichuman at 8:06 AM PST - 53 comments

An online collection of texts from ancient Egypt. Most are available only as translations, but some include a transcription or an image of the original hieroglyphics. There are some very famous documents, like the treaty of Ramses II with the Hittites (the earliest known peace treaty), and a wide range of topics - gynaecology, court proceedings, contemplations of suicide, and apparently they beat Kipling to the just-so stories by a good few thousand years.
posted by Dim Siawns at 8:05 AM PST - 7 comments

Influential evolutionary biologist George C. Williams (1926-2010) has passed away. [more inside]
posted by AceRock at 7:38 AM PST - 10 comments

There hasn't been a death in the premiere class of Grand Prix motorcycle racing since 2003. Recently, there were 2 deaths in 8 days. While not strictly a MotoGP event, Peter Lenz was killed in a USGPRU race during the MotoGP weekend at Indianapolis. He was 13 years old. Accusations of poor parenting have been leveled. Others disagree. Then, in Italy, a promising 19 year old racer from Japan, Shoya Tomizawa was killed in a similar accident. Questions have been raised about the performance of the safety officials and decisions made. A BBC overview of the situation. A video of the Tomizawa crash. It may be unpleasant footage for some to watch.
posted by neat-o at 7:29 AM PST - 41 comments

Q&A with Duncan Jones, the director of the recent Hugo winner Moon plus Gavin Rothery - concept designer and VFX supervisor, Barrett Heathcote - visual effects editor and Hideki Arichi - art director (MLYT) (1,2,3,4,5)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:19 AM PST - 27 comments

Ever wondered how a bicycle tyre is made? Schwalbe tyres are constructed by Hung-A in Indonesia; this video follows the whole process from initial design to final testing. [more inside]
posted by SyntacticSugar at 6:58 AM PST - 22 comments

An excerpt from Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's new book The Grand Design.
posted by lauratheexplorer at 3:37 AM PST - 86 comments

A series of powerful, prescient and englightening essays from the author of 'The Great War for Civilisation' and award winning journalist Robert Fisk on so called 'Honour' killings from this weeks Indy. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Concluding Part 5.
posted by numberstation at 3:05 AM PST - 11 comments

Björk and Moomins
posted by Artw at 10:31 PM PST - 50 comments

The World Giving Index (scribd) (.pdf) by the Charity Aid Foundation¹ was just released. It lumps three different types of charitable behaviour – giving money, giving time and helping a stranger - and produces the “World Giving Index”. Australia and New Zealand came out on top. The study also found that being happy is more of an influence on giving money to charity than being wealthy. [more inside]
posted by wilful at 10:16 PM PST - 20 comments

Judge Rules "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Is Unconstitutional - Judge Virginia A. Phillips of Federal District Court struck down President Clinton's Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) policy in an opinion (Scribd) issued late Thursday, ruling on the constitutionality of a complaint brought by the Log Cabin Republicans (PDF). President Obama's Justice Department has until a September 23 deadline to submit objections to the court regarding Judge Phillips's permanent injunction, which is uncertain given Obama's previous support of his Department of Justice defending the legality of DADT, despite his opposition to DADT in principle.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:59 PM PST - 91 comments

50 Best Blogs for Geography Geeks. Among the picks are Geographicus- Rare & Antique Map Blog l Atlas Obscura l The Rural Blog l Geographic Travels l Climate Progress l Edible Geography l DIY Cartography and Geobabble with a list of some excellent geography sites that were not included.
posted by nickyskye at 9:55 PM PST - 13 comments

"Duel In The Somme" a webcomic collaboration of Ben Bova, Rob Balder and Bill Hollbrook, has just completed its 24-day, 24-page run. Storywise, imagine if Dilbert got to play Snoopy's WWI Flying Ace.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:48 PM PST - 19 comments

The Boy Scouts have garnered a lot of controversy for refusing to accept gay and atheist scouts. Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts have no official stance on sexuality, and while they officially pledge to "serve God," they have become more flexible on the policy. In addition, a Girl Scout council had endorsed Planned Parenthood as a source for information on sex education. These policies have earned the ire of Republican House Representative candidate Hans Zeiger, who declared the organization a "a pro-abortion, feminist training corps," and that "perhaps it will be time to look for our cookies elsewhere" in an online editorial. He has pulled down most of his writings, but most of them have been cached by Google.
posted by mccarty.tim at 6:46 PM PST - 154 comments

Ricken Patel, of Avaaz vs. Kory Teneycke, VP Development of Montreal-based Quebecor Media (15-second commercial before TV-debate). Quebecor's lawyer's are now threatening to sue Avaaz if they do not withdraw their online petition to keep Sun Media (owned by Quebecor) from getting a "must-carry" license for a proposed news channel being referred to as "Fox News North". [more inside]
posted by molecicco at 3:54 PM PST - 41 comments

Ikea ads switch from guerrillas to cats. Ikeafilter “Herding Cats” is an experiment by IKEA UK where they released 100 cats inside their Wembley store at night. The finished commercial.
posted by Fizz at 3:02 PM PST - 131 comments

Anastassia Elias makes some cool art, like these silhouettes made inside toilet paper rolls.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 2:28 PM PST - 9 comments

Phil Davison is a member of the city council in Minerva, OH. But what he'd really like to be is Stark County Treasurer. He'd really, really like that. [more inside]
posted by brozek at 2:28 PM PST - 76 comments

Stop-motion PAC-MAN is the 5th video performance of the GAME OVER Project from the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond. This giant game was played by 111 human pixels who moved from seat to seat over the span of 4 hours. (Previously)
posted by gman at 2:18 PM PST - 14 comments

Tom Lehrer’s “Elements Song” accompanying Google Instant Search [SLYT].
posted by Mitheral at 1:42 PM PST - 33 comments

A trip to The Museum of Soviet Arcade Games. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by griphus at 1:34 PM PST - 22 comments

How do you calculate Pi? Build a supercomputer. The Mountains of Pi, a New Yorker profile of the mathematician (sic) the Chudnovsky brothers. Warning: the article is from 1992, and internet is missing its definite article. (Previously)
posted by OmieWise at 1:28 PM PST - 31 comments

Neat, interactive visualization of Washington D.C. polling data
posted by unknowncommand at 1:16 PM PST - 17 comments

You are more likely to be killed by a pig than a shark. You run a greater risk of dying from an asteroid impact than a terrorist attack. You would have to fly an average of 38,000 years in commercial aviation before suffering a fatal crash. The fears parents have for their children have nothing in common to what will actually kill or hurt them. Our perception of risk has very little relation to threat: some helpful visual guides [PDF] and reasons why.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 1:09 PM PST - 124 comments

Stephen King's The Dark Tower is coming to the silver screen
posted by angrycat at 12:41 PM PST - 123 comments

The internet is full of answers, and some of them might even be true. For almost 20 years, the the Newton BBS has been a source of answers to science questions that may be accessed directly via the Web as well as through telnet (no public telnet access any more, sorry). The Newton BBS "Ask A Scientist" archive has answers from 15 science fields, from astronomy to zoology, for a total of more than 20,000 questions answered. This was covered previously, and the site is aimed at teachers and students from grades K-12, so io9's Ask a Physicist questions (with answers from Dr. Dave Goldberg) might be more engaging. See also: MIT's Ask An Engineer.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:27 PM PST - 4 comments

Fisherman versus killer whale [SLYT, some NSFW language]
posted by quin at 11:43 AM PST - 29 comments

The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg gets an opportunity to sit down with former Cuban President Fidel Castro. [more inside]
posted by g.i.r. at 10:56 AM PST - 39 comments

textsound is an online experimental sound journal. Some poetry, some music, all mp3s. Ten issues (so far).
posted by klangklangston at 10:41 AM PST - 6 comments

Give up, Robot! a flash game
posted by boo_radley at 10:15 AM PST - 20 comments

Apple has suddenly reversed their stance on 3rd-party tools for iOS development. (From the horses's mouth.) This means that programmers will be able to use Adobe Flash (and other tools) to make iPhone (iPad, etc.) apps. It does NOT mean that Flash apps (swfs) will be able to run in iPhone or iPad browsers. That is still verboten. It means that developers won't be stuck using just XCode (Apple's code editor/compiler) and the Objective-C language. Alternatively, programmers will be able to use Actionscript (Flash's language) or some other language. Apple will allow cross-compiled apps to be sold in their app store. Meanwhile, porn is still not allowed. Responses: 1, 2, 3.
posted by grumblebee at 9:54 AM PST - 278 comments

The National Mall in Washington DC is a site for many historic events. Starting today mall visitors have access to free unrestricted WiFi (even the blue) from 3rd to 14th streets. This is just the latest addition to DC's expansive public WiFi network.
posted by humanfont at 9:50 AM PST - 14 comments

Pavlovian reinforcement theory reinforced. (SLYT)
posted by Threeway Handshake at 9:41 AM PST - 16 comments

Last week, the New York Times magazine published an explosive article about the phone-hacking exploits at the Rupert Murdoch-owned British tabloid News Of The World under the then-editorship of Andy Coulson, now the the Government's chief of communications. Following the NYT's investigation, questions about the "unhealthy" relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the press (particularly Murdoch's News International, which also includes The Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times), and further claims that an independent inquiry was abandoned so as not to upset the Metropolitan Police, assistant Met Commissioner John Yates was questioned [video; 4 mins] on Tuesday by the Home Affairs select committee. Following an emergency debate in Parliament today, which concerned the fact that MPs of all parties may have had their phones hacked (and therefore had their Parliamentary Privilege breached), the Standards and Privileges Committee, the most powerful committee in Parliament, is to open an inquiry which will be able to compel witnesses to give evidence. Meanwhile, former News of the World reporters are coming out the woodwork, claiming that hacking at the paper was "rife", and the pressure is on Coulson to resign his £140,000 job at No. 10, with a poll [pdf] which says 52% of the public says he should go. [more inside]
posted by Len at 9:10 AM PST - 46 comments

Dive into the Photographic Fantasies of Maleonn. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 8:39 AM PST - 7 comments

A major study was just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine from Harvard. In approximately 85,000 women who were followed for 26 years and 45,000 men who were followed for 20 years, researchers found that all-cause mortality rates were increased in both men and women who were eating a low-carbohydrate Atkins diet based on animal protein. However, all-cause mortality rates as well as cardiovascular mortality rates were decreased in those eating a plant-based diet low in animal protein and low in refined carbohydrates. [Previously in MeFi]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:30 AM PST - 63 comments

Who is the Greatest Diva of the Last 25 Years? We Offer Scientific Proof! The Awl discusses divas.
posted by chunking express at 7:41 AM PST - 80 comments

39 years ago tToday, September 9, 1971, a riot started at Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York. Several days later almost 40 people were dead. Talking History has an extensive collection of resources on the riots including Videos and Photos. Elsewhere, Most of the Stories are sad and brutal, though some are Poetic and even Heroic (Attica is also home to Mark David Chapman, who was just denied parole again yesterday)
posted by Blake at 7:34 AM PST - 11 comments

What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan : Art Fag City considers /b/ as collaborative art.
posted by shakespeherian at 6:39 AM PST - 41 comments

“We strive for a future that we cannot touch, and memories of our life’s past leave traces that form a road behind us. When we stop, there are no traffic lights and no give way signs; only ourselves in the here and now.” -Here and Now: Sonia Yee [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation at 6:28 AM PST - 2 comments

The Guardian reports allegations that a group of US soldiers in Afghanistan killed civilians for sport and collected their fingers as trophies. [more inside]
posted by Zarkonnen at 6:20 AM PST - 87 comments

Music is Math (lots of different variations on the page. Watch this one in full screen and with headphones.)
posted by empath at 5:36 AM PST - 9 comments

Feeling nostalgic for all that old, broken "junk" you tossed out? "The wizards of obsolete" can help you to not make the same mistake again.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 5:24 AM PST - 28 comments

1894. [more inside]
posted by Minus215Cee at 4:52 AM PST - 16 comments

A snippet of the full interview between Soledad O'Brien and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is in charge of the Cordoba Initiative which plans to build a cultural center, including a mosque, two blocks from ground zero with accompanying article. Five surprises to come from the interview, post-interview debate on Anderson Cooper, and iReporter Kathi Cordsen reacts.
posted by lauratheexplorer at 3:34 AM PST - 83 comments

Queen's English 50c: A translation service for English-speaking 50cent fans.
posted by Dr Dracator at 10:58 PM PST - 61 comments

Here at Cereal Marshmallows Our Goal is to Deliver you the absolute best and Crunchiest marshmallows available and I believe that is just what we have. [more inside]
posted by phunniemee at 9:47 PM PST - 56 comments

"My brother says that some day two men in white coats will come and take me away. Someone said that if they are men, after looking at the shop, they will forget what they came for and I should remain free". A photo tour of the home workshop of Mr. Jacques Jodoin, including a video walkthrough.
posted by woodblock100 at 9:36 PM PST - 31 comments

"We infer that beyond about $75,000/y, there is no improvement whatever in any of the three measures of emotional well-being." Two social scientists at Princeton, Angus Deaton and Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, have a new paper in PNAS about money and the determinants of happiness. Increased income above $75,000 is not associated with higher subjective happiness, though it is associated with superior scores on measures of overall life satisfaction. Other tidbits: "Religion has a substantial influence on improving positive affect and reducing reports of stress, but no effect on reducing sadness or worry... The presence of children at home is associated with significant increases in stress, sadness, and worry."
posted by escabeche at 9:32 PM PST - 49 comments

The Digital Comic Museum, a site for downloading free public domain Golden Age Comics. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 6:58 PM PST - 17 comments

Emily Yoffe (a columnist for Slate) has a job that sends her on all manner of exciting adventures. Usually, they involve clothing, but not this time. For her most recent article, she shed her clothes -- all of them. Apparently, journalists enjoy visiting nudist resorts because Lonely Planet's Tamara Sheward recently did the same thing and has some advice for would-be copycats. (Complete with a gallery of the best nude events and beaches.) But sorry bachelors, apparently most nudist clubs only allow couples and single women. Eureka, in the UK, is an exception. (No links contain sexual content.)
posted by GnomeChompsky at 6:58 PM PST - 34 comments

An ABC Investigative Unit team hit the streets of western Sydney, where young people are struggling to break a vicious cycle of unemployment and family breakdown, to find out what's being done to stop them from falling through the cracks. In a great article by ABC reporters Eleanor Bell and Ed Giles, they found that the lack of resources, infrastructure and support for families in these communities is getting worse, not better but that despite this, many locals are still proud of their community.
posted by Effigy2000 at 6:46 PM PST - 18 comments

"You were the best Wolverine I've ever seen. We talked for a while, just standing in the crowd. I wish I could find a picture of us. Hopefully, I'll see you at another convention soon."
posted by nomadicink at 6:20 PM PST - 44 comments

Ever wish you could do something to defend yourself from the flood of information on Twitter? Tuesday Flash Fun detweet to the rescue! The more popular the phrase you choose, the more enemies spawn, thus the harder it gets!
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:26 PM PST - 14 comments

"Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh on making art about sex and politics in the Middle East..." and how they fled and what they're up to now. More images here.
posted by artof.mulata at 5:15 PM PST - 1 comment

Ganja yoga combines marijuana and meditation [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 4:43 PM PST - 35 comments

"Computers can search all possible outcomes of all possible moves in conventional chess and beat even top human players, so Akl wanted to make the computation more difficult." The result? Quantum chess! [via]
posted by brundlefly at 4:43 PM PST - 31 comments

If you loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, check out these gorgeous, high-resolution promotional photographs. The film's special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull invented numerous film techniques and effects to help Kubrick tell his story, and Trumbull is currently producing with film historian David Larson the documentary 2001: Beyond The Infinite - The Making of a Masterpiece (scroll down, click the link on the second video). This documentary aims to make use of the Kubrick Archives's well-preserved large-format Ektachrome photos taken of the film production, green screen techniques, surviving cast and production staff, and numerous interview transcripts to bring to life the story about the making of this classic.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:53 PM PST - 58 comments

Burn a Koran Day! A commercial for Terry Jones' upcoming "Christian" event. [SLYP]
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:51 PM PST - 168 comments

My Rat, My Banana-Huffing Landmine Detector: A lush, montage-ready photographic survey of the humble origin, training, and subsequent career of Tanzanian rats enlisted in the fight against landmines.
posted by darth_tedious at 2:28 PM PST - 17 comments

The brain speaks! Scientists decode words from brain signals. "In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, University of Utah researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain."
posted by Fizz at 2:26 PM PST - 31 comments

"On a particular night in October, you’ve got your nose ahead of J.M. Coetzee." Hilary Mantel writes about winning (and, previously, not winning) the Man Booker prize. Her victory has changed History Today's attitudes to historical fiction, it seems. But not Antony Beevor's.
posted by lapsangsouchong at 11:37 AM PST - 37 comments

Less than a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States detonated the fourth and fifth nuclear weapons under the name Operation Crossroads in July 1946. Beyond testing the capabilities of nuclear bombs, the Navy said it wanted the Bikini tests treated like "the story of the year, maybe of the decade, and possibly of a lifetime." Only two of the three bombs were detonated, and the project was shut down over the next months. To celebrate the efforts of Operation Crossroads, a cake in the shape of a mushroom cloud was featured at a publicized event on November 5, 1946. In response to this display, Reverend Arthur Powell Davies, the minister of the Unitarian All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., gave a sermon on the "utterly loathsome picture" and the message it sent to other nations. That sermon set off a flurry of replies and reactions, that extended around the world, including a connection formed between Reverend Davies' All Souls Unitarian Church and school children in Hiroshima. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:54 AM PST - 60 comments

Sarah Nicole Prickett, who, as an interesting fashion writer, is something of a rarity, reviews the covers of September fashion issues for Toronto’s Eye Weekly (Part 1; Part 2). It is, on the whole, a sorry lot. Just for instance: “The September issue of British Vogue stars Kate Moss, for no other reason than six months have passed and she is still not dead or, worse, fat.... The level of fail can’t be expressed even in Caps Lock.”
posted by joeclark at 10:54 AM PST - 14 comments

Felix Salmon formulates a theory regarding the interaction of cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians in New York City: "Cyclists get no respect as road users. Instead, tragically, they’re treated like pedestrians."
posted by mhum at 10:41 AM PST - 144 comments

28,000 people can't be wrong: McDonald's voted worst burger by Consumer Reports. Obama endorsed Five Guys Burgers came out top. Of course, everyone has their favorite and sometimes it's not a matter of what tastes best, but of what's most convenient.
posted by d1rge at 10:15 AM PST - 178 comments

‘We feel that the stories in this book are such that if your nerves are not of the strongest, then it is wise to read them in daylight.' For a certain time, in every second-hand bookshop in the UK you would always be able to find a musty and dog-eared copy of one or more of the Pan Books Of Horror Stories edited by the splendidly named Herbert Van Thal. Now the first is being re-printed. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:06 AM PST - 21 comments

Flying 101. Kulula Airlines is a South African airlines with a great sense of humor. Yeah, I thought it was a hoax, too. It's not.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:00 AM PST - 18 comments

The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like'
posted by cmoj at 9:24 AM PST - 219 comments

Domestic Conflict, Explained by Stock Photos
posted by Joe Beese at 8:59 AM PST - 24 comments

Microsoft Corp. and Xbox Live are apologizing to a 26-year old gamer for suspending his Xbox Live account because of information in his profile. The offending text? Fort Gay, the town he lives in. [more inside]
posted by xedrik at 8:42 AM PST - 56 comments

You can tell how strongly a man or woman yearns for freedom by counting the condiments in his or her refrigerator. - Tom Nealon's series on the secret history of condiments.
posted by nickrussell at 8:31 AM PST - 36 comments

On July 30, 2008, the Pacific Sun cruise liner, carrying 1732 passengers and 671 crew, was caught in a severe storm 400 miles off the coast of New Zealand, injuring 42 passengers as the ship was hit by 25ft waves and 50-knot winds. With some passengers now planning to sue P&O, internal CCTV footage has emerged which recorded what happened inside at the height of the storm.
posted by unSane at 7:41 AM PST - 109 comments

Gravitational wave detectors: the universe ripples, they listen. These detectors (LIGO, GE600, TAMA300, AIGO) are listening for the gravitation waves: black holes spinning and colliding, or neutron stars inspiralling to their final fates in a black hole. [more inside]
posted by Wolfster at 7:23 AM PST - 9 comments

Metafilter: It is not anticipated that there will be another one of those people who are not interested in them and they are nothing but another form of therapy. Autocomplete yourself with Google Scribe, a new Labs thingy.
posted by swift at 7:18 AM PST - 102 comments

iFixit is well known for posting teardowns and repair guides for modern hardware (like the new iPod Shuffle.) To celebrate the addition of game console guides to their site, they did teardowns of five classic and not-so-classic game consoles: Magnavox Odyssey 100, RCA Studio II, Atari 2600, Nintendo Famicom, Nintendo Virtual Boy. Marvel at the 1.78 MHz processors and the 128 bytes of RAM you got for $200.
posted by smackfu at 6:42 AM PST - 10 comments

How a watch works in the clear, precise 1949 informational style.
posted by DU at 4:57 AM PST - 20 comments

Nectarine Demoscene Radio streams Amiga demoscene music ("modules") 24-7. Registered users can queue up songs, comment and chat to each other with the "infamous oneliner". That's it.
posted by KMH at 4:51 AM PST - 12 comments

Ex MI5 / MI6 man John Le Carre talks to Radio4's Today program about his new book. He then goes on to talk about how the Muslim boogeyman is being used to erode democracy much more than the IRA ever was. [more inside]
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 1:31 AM PST - 43 comments

Hypercities, currently in beta, is a collaborative effort to enable users to travel forward and backward in time within major cities of the world, watching changes take place over both the short (political protests in Tehran) and long (history of the city of Rome) term. Locative technologies are pushing the same ability into smartphones: Walking Through Time (Android, iPhone) allows the user to overlay their current location with a map of the past. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 9:12 PM PST - 17 comments